Dear Platt,
I followed the link you provided 13/11 11:19 -0500
(www.frontpagemag.com/guestcolumnists/chomsky10-10-01.htm) that
supposedly exposed "Chomsky's lies and half-truths". Even though
I don't like the style of this Frontpage Magazine (a header like
"The Chomsky Menace" is clearly one-sided), I dived into the
first debate, that of Hitchens vs. Chomsky in The Nation. In my
experience the quality of that debate was very low, especially on
the part of Hitchens, and the issue was not the factual basis of
Chomsky's opinions, but the moral comparability of USA atrocities
(which both agree on) and the 11/9 terrorist attacks.
The introduction to the second link promised an "attempt to
expose the Neo-Nazi connections of self-styled 'leftist'
intellectual Noam Chomsky", which (being an ad hominem argument)
isn't relevant to exposition of possible lies and half-truths
either.
After that, I didn't expect a lot of the other links on this
webpage to other (less recent) criticisms of Chomsky.
If you don't mind that I put your opinion of Chomsky away as
unfounded (as yet), I am happy to proceed to discussing Pirsig.
I am glad that I can safely confess to be a left-wing radical,
without being ignored by you.
The issue, from a MoQ point of view, is -I think- not so much
whether
"1) America is responsible for the root causes of the attack on
the Trade Center, and
2) America has done worse to others."
(I doubt whether Chomsky recognizes this as the general drift of
his article, but let's not get bogged down in that issue.)
The issue should be whether both the atrocities the USA is
responsible for and the attack on the World Trade Center (however
one compared them on a scale of relative immorality) are elements
in the same static pattern of values (e.g. the pattern of might
makes right, as Chomsky suggests) and whether we should try to
break free from that static pattern of values (e.g. by not
escalating violence, as Chomsky suggests).
Now DON'T quote Pirsig on criminals being biologic and intellect
having to side with society against biology again, PLEASE, but
try to think along with me
1) what static patterns of value we can identify on the relevant
(global) scale,
2) whether both types of atrocities might or might not be
elements in each of these and
3) what change in such a pattern (if we can identify one) would
be Dynamic Quality.
With friendly greetings,
Wim
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
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