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Kill your idols (lemmy.sdf.org)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/flippanarchy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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Sorry if it sucks but I'm seeing red and I just had to say something before I blew a fucking gasket ๐Ÿ˜  ๐Ÿ˜  ๐Ÿ˜  ๐Ÿ˜  ๐Ÿ˜  ๐Ÿ˜  ๐Ÿ˜  ๐Ÿ˜  ๐Ÿ˜  ๐Ÿ˜  ๐Ÿ˜  ๐Ÿ˜  ๐Ÿ˜  ๐Ÿ˜  ๐Ÿ˜  ๐Ÿ˜  ๐Ÿ˜ 

Picture of Steve Bannon with Noam Chomsky smiling together with caption "Don't make heros, kill your idols"
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[โ€“] [S] 8 points 11 months ago (8 children)

I listened to a lot of Chomskys talks on YouTube, which have always been very critical of capitalism and the elite.

Yeah if Chomsky is to be taken at his word, he was an anarcho-syndicalist. Too bad he betrayed his principles, if he ever really held them in the first place ๐Ÿ˜ฎโ€๐Ÿ’จ.

Is the dude just too old to give a shit now?

One of my critiques of Chomsky even before this Epstein shit is that he's too tolerant of monsters. For example, he defended freedom of speech, which okay cool, but even for fascists. I always chalked it up to the fact that he has been cancelled various times throughout his career for his anti-war stances and probably found the experience unenlightening, and the fact that he's a bit of a liberal. And honestly, I can agree to disagree with others to some extent about who is worth talking to, especially since some of those people are more likely to listen to Chomsky based on his background and signals of privilege. And personally, I do lie closer to "I'm willing to talk it out" than "We should to beat up people with bad ideas".

But this...this is beyond reasonable disagreement. Even if he ends up being cleared of Epstein-related crimes (which I gotta be real with you, I fully believe at this point that he knew what was going on), he is clearly in bed with the monsters destroying our world. Steve Bannon is not going to listen to a loony """leftist""" like Chomsky, and Chomsky is not gonna get anything from Bannon that he couldn't have figured out by watching the news.

Like even if Chomsky didn't want to tell the guy off, he could have declined the invitation or left the room. And it's Noam fucking Chomsky. No shot he didn't know who Bannon was! And it would be an abdication of duty for a so-called leftist so-called academic to not know the names in his field. I.e. even if this was an accident on his part, it should seriously damage his credibility.

All this to say, Chomsky became what he wanted to destroy.

Idolize no one, unless they die a hero.

IMO we can pick and choose parts of a person to admire without idolizing them.

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  • [โ€“] 2 points 11 months ago (6 children)

    Freedom of speech just can't be applied selectively, tho. One day you restrict someone's speech, the next day they are in power and restrict yours. However, it doesn't mean you have to listen to someone, but instead can easily tell 'em to go preach to other brain dead casualties of inbreeding in whatever shithole they currently occupy.

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  • [โ€“] [S] 7 points 11 months ago* (5 children)

    Freedom of speech just can't be applied selectively, tho.

    I mean, for freedom of speech with respect to the State, yeah I'm with you. But if I remember correctly, Chomsky was arguing against antifascists deplatforming fascists, using freedom of speech to justify that opinion, which I think is a weak argument because the whole point of deplatforming fascists is to allow the maximal subset of people to speak.

    One day you restrict someone's speech, the next day they are in power and restrict yours.

    IMO deplatforming oppressive groups should be considered the maximalist position for freedom of speech. Letting them speak is equivalent to letting them win, which results in a net loss of free speech averaged over the whole community (e.g., LGBTQ people feel less likely to speak freely when homophobes are allowed to freely express LGBTQ-phobic views).

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  • [โ€“] -1 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    Fair, arguing against deplatforming is indeed retarded

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  • [โ€“] [S] 2 points 11 months ago* (3 children)

    I mean it would be nice if you could say that without throwing disabled people under the bus with that r slur. Which I'm sure you can, so I'm not sure why you're choosing not to, especially since we're an anarchist community and ableism is a hierarchical structure of domination.

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  • [โ€“] 1 point 11 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

    Nah, no ofence to developmentally disabled dudes intended. As for the use of the word, I'd say it's mostly due to my personal deeply negative outlook on language cleansings and some cultural differences. The former is about feds trying to enforce what we can and cannot say, so it's not terribly relevant in this case, but the latter is more interesting: for example, in russian we have words "ะฟะตะดะตั€ะฐัั‚"*/"ะฟะธะดะพั€", which without context are more or less equivalent to english "faggot"/"fag", and would indeed be considered derogatory when applied to gay fellas; however, most often they're used to either jokingly or not call sb a bad person and don't imply anything about their sexual preferences. Even closer examples are "ะดะฐัƒะฝ" (a short for a person with the Down syndrome, which is a currently used diagnosis, but hella rude when applied to them; use the full phrase if you ever want to speak about the disorder in russian) and "ะพะปะธะณะพั„ั€ะตะฝ" (pretty much "the r-word", as you call it; also an old name for a medical diagnosis; quite rarely used nowadays since it doesn't really roll of the tongue, but is actually somewhat acceptable in public if you want to call sb. out for their monumental stupidity). So, to me it's quite unusual to somehow associate ppl currently living with a disorder with their historic negative image attached to a word that is no longer commonly used to refer to them; ppl live on their own, and so does that bunch of characteristics they back in the stone age were supposed to possess.

    *technically, it's derived from greek, and means "pedophile", and was even used this way, I think, in the late USSR. Don't really remember exactly, since it's been a while since I went into that etymological rabbithole. So, yeah, even the image changes from time to time

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