Since it may be difficult to see the connection between my earlier point -- that Kowal's grossly mischaracterizes the liberal justification for unions -- and Kowal's general point about process vs. outcomes, I'll lay it out more directly, without getting into public sector unions specifically (in short, I think the liberal support of public sector unions, while partly principled, is largely pragmatic -- with the erosion of private sector unions, it's really the last remaining salient occupied by powerful labor).
Unions are meant to be a merger of outcome and process, but by misrepresenting the justification and purpose of unions, Kowal misses this. Unions are not about a single outcome (the "minimum level" in Kowal's characterization), but about fairness. The way unions are supposed to operate -- and I think many if not most liberals would admit that they don't always work this way -- is by setting the compensation of workers relative to the value of the product they are producing. When the value of the product, or the company, goes up, their fair share goes up, and when the value goes down, their fair share goes down. This is why labor unions, when they're functioning well, make concessions in rough economic times (or just rough times for their particular market), for example.
I find it interesting that there's a lot of talk of the compensation of public vs. private employees. This is largely dependent on the industry, of course, and public employees generally work for the back end (pensions and retirement benefits), while private employees generally work for the front end, so in some ways we end up comparing apples to oranges. But you'd be hard pressed to find a supporter of unionization who won't point out a simple fact to you: a large part of why private employees have been basically getting screwed for the last couple decades, whereas public employees, where they're allowed to collectively bargain, have not, is that private unions have all but dropped off the face of the Earth in this country. While there may be other reasons (related to the source of public employees' compensation) for being against public unions, the fact that private employees are getting screwed, by and large, is a pretty crappy anti-public union argument, from either a process or outcome perspective. Wherever labor is able to share power with capital, or management, labor will do better than in sectors where it is unable to.
Oh, I think there's a very, very big difference. Implying that a minimum standard of living and a fair or equable wage. A minimum standard of living, again, is what the welfare state is supposed to provide. We can quibble about what this entails, but it will differ very much from an equitable or fair standard of living in all but the direst of economic climates. A fair or equitable standard of living for workers is going to vary with the economy/market, and in good times, will be well above the minimum standard of living. The idea of unions is not to make sure employees eat, but to make sure they’re not exploited by people living high on the hog as a result of their labor. Unions are there to insure that labor gets its fair share of the pie. Of course, if workers aren’t making enough to eat or clothe themselves, or put a roof over their heads, unions are going to have something to say about that, but unions came into being because the balance of power between capital and labor changed in favor of capital with industrialization, and unions were supposed to balance things out a bit. That’s just not what you’re saying, or really all that close to it.
As a matter of first principles, all Americans are entitled to a minimum standard of living.
As a matter of observed fact, impersonal market forces sometimes do not result in compensation that comports with that preconceived standard of living.
Therefore, the market is an unsatisfactory mechanism for assigning economic values to labor.
This is a strange argument for the existence of labor unions, today or ever. I’ve never heard it before. I wonder where you’ve seen it, or something like it.
To me, it looks like you’ve produced some positions that the left definitely adheres to, connected them (in the case of 1 and 2 connecting to 3, connected them very loosely), left out the premises behind both these positions and the support for labor unions that are doing all the work, and sold it as an argument of your ideological opponents. Instead, you’d do well to start from the actual position(s) that the left starts from, if you want to do this sort of analysis.As Adam Smith put it:
"It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labor as to be themselves tolerable well fed, clothed and lodged."
You’ll notice the difference between your position and this one. You’re arguing that the left starts from the position that all people are entitled to a minimum standard of living. Smith, and like him labor for most of the last 2 centuries, was starting from the premise that as an integral part of the production process, labor deserves a fair, or equitable (not minimum!) share of the profits – enough that they can live quality lives. This is not to say that the left doesn’t believe in a minimum standard of living – this is what the welfare state is for, though, not labor unions.
As stated, this is a strange argument for the existence of unions, and certainly not one I've ever heard. At the very least, it leaves out a bunch of connecting premises that are actually doing the bulk of the work.
The idea behind unions was quite simple: not that people simply deserve a minimum living standard, but that those who produce the goods and services that produce profit deserve their fair share of that profit.
Tom, that's patent nonsense. Just because Chomsky doesn't have a PhD in political science, or philosophy, doesn't mean he can't be an expert in it those areas. And the fact that he's been writing and doing extensive research on politics and society for more than four decades, and that his writings and research in that area have been widely studied and very influential, certainly suggests that he is, in fact, an expert in those areas. You may disagree with him, I know that I do most of the time, but that doesn't mean he's no more qualified than you or I to talk about these things.
Frankly, I find it a bit odd, coming from someone who's so down on the academy, that you would treat academic credentials as the one and only sign of expertise.
Chomsky, and most linguists (though not all) are not looking for the Universal Language, but the universal building blocks of language. They're nativists; they think that these building blocks are part of our makeup, part of what is it is to be human. If you read Chomsky's limited work on the evolution of language (the work is limited, and his contribution to it even more limited still), you'll get an idea of what he's all about. Or read Pinker's The Language Instinct, which lays out the program in much less technical terms than Chomsky ever has or will or is capable of, even if Pinker disagrees with Chomsky on where language came from.
No, functionalism is a type of computationalism. It essentially says that a mental state is its function, not its constituents. This means, among other things, that the same mental state can be realized in multiple mediums, which is why strong AI is possible, to a functionalist.
Well, Chomsky rarely concerns himself with semantics, and in fact frequently reminds us that he’s not talking about semantics. What’s more, when he does talk about semantics, and uses the word, he means something very different from what we, and even from what other linguists, usually mean by semantics (to be honest, I’m still not quite sure what the hell he means by it, but I’m not a linguist, so in the end I don’t have to care). He would readily admit that there are untranslatable words in different languages, or at least I assume he would, since it’s neither here nor there for the focus of his work. I’m quite certain he’d read Word and Object by the time he did the bulk of his post-dissertation research, anyway. He simply (haha, “simply” is funny in this sentence) argues that the structure of language is, at a certain level, universal (what that level is for him has changed over time), and that this universality is necessary because if it weren’t universal and innate, then computationally the syntactic structure of language, the rules that govern its organization, would be impossible to learn given the input available. Nothing about untranslatable words, or even the indeterminacy of translation, affects that argument.
Christopher, do you mean his speech acts stuff? If so, I find it interesting and useful from a psychological and representational perspective. On his critiques of Dennett and functionalism, I’m not sure what you mean specifically. His critiques of functionalism and computationalism stemming from his Chinese Room paper are important but antiquated, given advances in cognitive science over the last 30 years. As for Dennett, I can’t stand him, and I think that in most of their debates Searle got the better of him.
Interesting. I admit to not being a fan of connectionism, because spatial models of representation are so early 1980s, and connectionist models are just spatial models, but even by most pro-connectionist standards, connectionist models of language have tended to be pretty bad. At least I was right about the empiricist bit, though (not too hard, as it’s really the only alternative… heh).
By the way, I didn’t know there were any structuralists around anymore, particularly after Chomsky’s early work. At least not in “synchronic” linguistics. Though interestingly, your discussion of the commonalities between languages is pretty much exactly in line with what Chomsky says.
I will not defend Chomsky on his estimates of casualties, nor will I defend his linguistics. I come from a very different school of linguistics.
This is certainly not on topic, and probably of interest to no one but me, but what school of linguistics is that? Since you say “very different,” I assume you mean empiricist, but that just makes me curious about which “school” of empiricist linguistics you come from. Also, since your professed background is in computers and programming, I find it interesting that you’re not a Chomskyan, as I’ve always found that the built-in computationalism of his linguistics appeals to computer folk, especially programmers.
But Chomsky does propose a political economy, or at least the outlines of one. If I remember correctly (and it’s been some time since I watched the Chomsky-Foucault debate), he does so right there, after all the talk of human nature and creativity and the like. If he doesn’t there, he certainly does in his works on anarchism. But it’s there that we see the superficiality of both his critique and his proposal. His proposal, as I believe he admits frequently, is without a great deal of detail. His critique is simply that political structures, coercive ones at least, must be justified, and they aren’t, so they don’t have a reason for existing except to enforce existing power relationships (I don’t think he’d put this last bit quite that way, but it’s what he means anyway). With this I both agree, and ask, now what? What comes after this for Chomsky? In practice, what comes after this is East Timor, Kosovo is NATO’s fault, and the Cambodian civil war would never have resulted in the deaths that it did if we hadn’t bombed Cambodia, and the Khmer Rouge wasn’t as bad as people say they were. There’s just not much else there (I disagree with his essentialism, which is where I think Foucault wins that debate; that, and much of what Chomsky ends up saying in the discussion of politics is, if I remember correctly, of the form of, ‘Yes, you are correct, and if we accept my essentialism then we can create a just society’).
By the way, I don’t remember Foucault being at all jargonny, or full of Marxist terms, in that debate, even if his perspective is, ultimately, heavily influenced by Marxist critique (his Marxism, it’s worth remembering, came via Althusser and M-P, not Sartre and the doctrinaire communists). If I remember correctly, the only difference in terminology is largely one of depth and breadth. Chomsky, for example, uses creativity to mean something like what we find in generative linguistics: that is, humans are creative beings in the sense that they add something to the input they receive from the world, whereas Foucault argues a.) that this conception of human nature is a recent one, made possible by certain creative acts on the part of human beings since the late 18th century, and b.) it’s much deeper than just giving structure to linguistic input, or any other sort of thing you might get from Chomskyan nativism. Furthermore, if I remember correctly, it’s Chomsky who uses “creativity” as jargon, and completely misunderstands what Foucault means by creativity largely because Chomsky’s jargony use of the term is so limited. The same when they discuss justice. Chomsky’s justice is a simple, idealistic notion from which it’s impossible not to ultimately confirm one’s own biases, while for Foucault there’s something deeper at play (power relations, will to power, whatever). In every case, Chomsky looks at things shallowly, and Foucault takes it at least a little bit deeper. And in every case, I at least think Chomsky comes out looking the worse. I suppose one could disagree, but that’s definitely my impression. And like I said, on at least some of the basics, Chomsky and I are on the same page (as are Foucault and I).
To be fair, Chomsky's estimates of the death toll under the Khmer Rouge and during the civil war were around 500,000 (in each), not 20,000. And it's during the civil war, not during the Khmer Rouge's rule, that he thinks the U.S. did a bunch of killing... which of course we did, but not on the scale that Chomsky likes to claim.
Chomsky still has a small, loyal group of followers within a segment of the left, but by the time he started saying that nothing happened in Kosovo until NATO got there, he'd lost the bulk of his following. Manufacturing Consent is still pretty interesting, though.
In some ways, I see Chomsky as the Rand of the left. He's shallow, he's arrogant, he's so convinced he's right that he thinks only people who agree with him are thinking rationally (rather than being manipulated), and he's a terrible writer. What's more, his fans tend to be young, white males of privilege. The only real difference is that Chomsky's accomplishments in linguistics in the 50s, 60s, and 70s (and to some extent, the 80s) were--are--very important. His review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior will remain a classic in the history of psychology for a long, long time, whatever the fate of generative linguistics. It's not clear Rand made a lasting contribution to any intellectual field.
Foucault does kick Chomsky's arse, largely because it's clear Chomsky has no clue what Foucault's saying, and not because, as some would have you believe, Foucault's generally incomprehensible. It doesn't help that Chomsky's politics are fairly superficial (which is why he's so inconsistent -- there's no real underlying principle behind any of it).
This tendency towards the superficial and overly simplified is also what got us the Minimalist Program. X-bar + change!
Yeah, he led a bunch of post-structuralist radical Marxists, at an institute created as a result of 1968. He wasn't, however, very red-faced. It's almost strange to hear someone suggest so.
Hmm… I wonder if you’ve read any Foucault in a while, if you think his view of madness has the sorts of implications that you are… implying it does, much less that it’s contrasted with Reason. What’s more, seeing Foucault as soicante-huitard is kinda funny, and not only because he wasn’t even in Paris in May, 1968. He did, after 1968, become an activist of sorts, particularly in the area of prison reform, and he certainly surrounded himself with radical Marxist intellectuals (and got heat for it, a lot of it, with real consequences), but he then spent the rest of his life (after he got his chair at the College de France) being as tame as he was before his prisoners’ rights activism of the early ‘70s. He was, in many ways, quite un-red faced. That’s probably because, as anyone who’s engaged his more overtly political works (e.g., those on power) knows, those works make political action highly problematic. Of course, his early, Kantian stuff was distinctly non-red faced. Maybe you’re mistaking some of the more fervent Foucauldians on the left, particularly in the 80s and early 90s, with Foucault himself?
Breastfeeding your baby is going to make it grow up to be less obese? That seems like a hard claim to substantiate through controlled testing. Diet, exercise, and genetics strike me as much more likely candidates to be significant factors in obesity.
It's not easy, to be sure, but several studies (I can link you to some lit reviews if you'd like) have shown a connection between breast feeding and risk of obesity, controlling for a wide variety of potentially relevant factors.
"By your own standards, your only enemies are your fellow countrymen."
Obviously you didn't read anything I said if you heard that. My point is that you should criticize your own country first and loudest, because you're a part of it, and morally responsible for its actions, and what's more, you can make a difference. I didn't say you should only criticize your own country. In fact, I said something quite like the opposite of that.
You are interpreting me the way you are because of your knee jerk reaction in the opposite direction: never criticize the U.S., except in those few instances where liberals screw things up.
T0m, since I gave you reasons for doing it, and you have yet to even address those reasons, calling it getting off seems like even worse than a cop-out. But OK, like I said, if that's inversion, then I'm damned proud to be inverted. It's precisely this sort of inversion that allows democracy to function.
Wait, so it’s moral inversion to concentrate on a.) that for which I am more directly morally responsible, and b.) that for which I might be able to make a difference? If that’s moral inversion, consider me completely inverted.
I see nothing wrong with being harsher and more vocal in the criticisms of one's own country than in criticisms of other countries, even if the policies and actions of other countries are, in some cases, much worse than those of one's own. The reason is quite simple: we live here, we're participants in the democratic process, and as a result we are, in part, morally responsible for the actions of our democratically elected governments. What's more, because we're parts of the process, change is much more likely to come of our criticizing our own country than from criticizing countries in which we're not part of the democratic (or undemocratic) process. In fact, the best way to affect the behavior of other nations is to affect the behavior of our own nation towards them, so that even when we want to change the behavior of other nations, the best route is often to criticize our own country (e.g., in the case of South Africa in the 1980s).
Sometimes it's almost like you and Heidegger are trying to outdo each other in some sort of parody-off. I wish a part of me didn't believe that you two really believe this stuff.
On “Labor Roundtable: The Labor Movement, Redistributive Justice, and Procedural Fairness”
Since it may be difficult to see the connection between my earlier point -- that Kowal's grossly mischaracterizes the liberal justification for unions -- and Kowal's general point about process vs. outcomes, I'll lay it out more directly, without getting into public sector unions specifically (in short, I think the liberal support of public sector unions, while partly principled, is largely pragmatic -- with the erosion of private sector unions, it's really the last remaining salient occupied by powerful labor).
Unions are meant to be a merger of outcome and process, but by misrepresenting the justification and purpose of unions, Kowal misses this. Unions are not about a single outcome (the "minimum level" in Kowal's characterization), but about fairness. The way unions are supposed to operate -- and I think many if not most liberals would admit that they don't always work this way -- is by setting the compensation of workers relative to the value of the product they are producing. When the value of the product, or the company, goes up, their fair share goes up, and when the value goes down, their fair share goes down. This is why labor unions, when they're functioning well, make concessions in rough economic times (or just rough times for their particular market), for example.
I find it interesting that there's a lot of talk of the compensation of public vs. private employees. This is largely dependent on the industry, of course, and public employees generally work for the back end (pensions and retirement benefits), while private employees generally work for the front end, so in some ways we end up comparing apples to oranges. But you'd be hard pressed to find a supporter of unionization who won't point out a simple fact to you: a large part of why private employees have been basically getting screwed for the last couple decades, whereas public employees, where they're allowed to collectively bargain, have not, is that private unions have all but dropped off the face of the Earth in this country. While there may be other reasons (related to the source of public employees' compensation) for being against public unions, the fact that private employees are getting screwed, by and large, is a pretty crappy anti-public union argument, from either a process or outcome perspective. Wherever labor is able to share power with capital, or management, labor will do better than in sectors where it is unable to.
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Oh, I think there's a very, very big difference. Implying that a minimum standard of living and a fair or equable wage. A minimum standard of living, again, is what the welfare state is supposed to provide. We can quibble about what this entails, but it will differ very much from an equitable or fair standard of living in all but the direst of economic climates. A fair or equitable standard of living for workers is going to vary with the economy/market, and in good times, will be well above the minimum standard of living. The idea of unions is not to make sure employees eat, but to make sure they’re not exploited by people living high on the hog as a result of their labor. Unions are there to insure that labor gets its fair share of the pie. Of course, if workers aren’t making enough to eat or clothe themselves, or put a roof over their heads, unions are going to have something to say about that, but unions came into being because the balance of power between capital and labor changed in favor of capital with industrialization, and unions were supposed to balance things out a bit. That’s just not what you’re saying, or really all that close to it.
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As a matter of first principles, all Americans are entitled to a minimum standard of living.
As a matter of observed fact, impersonal market forces sometimes do not result in compensation that comports with that preconceived standard of living.
Therefore, the market is an unsatisfactory mechanism for assigning economic values to labor.
This is a strange argument for the existence of labor unions, today or ever. I’ve never heard it before. I wonder where you’ve seen it, or something like it.
To me, it looks like you’ve produced some positions that the left definitely adheres to, connected them (in the case of 1 and 2 connecting to 3, connected them very loosely), left out the premises behind both these positions and the support for labor unions that are doing all the work, and sold it as an argument of your ideological opponents. Instead, you’d do well to start from the actual position(s) that the left starts from, if you want to do this sort of analysis.As Adam Smith put it:
"It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labor as to be themselves tolerable well fed, clothed and lodged."
You’ll notice the difference between your position and this one. You’re arguing that the left starts from the position that all people are entitled to a minimum standard of living. Smith, and like him labor for most of the last 2 centuries, was starting from the premise that as an integral part of the production process, labor deserves a fair, or equitable (not minimum!) share of the profits – enough that they can live quality lives. This is not to say that the left doesn’t believe in a minimum standard of living – this is what the welfare state is for, though, not labor unions.
As stated, this is a strange argument for the existence of unions, and certainly not one I've ever heard. At the very least, it leaves out a bunch of connecting premises that are actually doing the bulk of the work.
The idea behind unions was quite simple: not that people simply deserve a minimum living standard, but that those who produce the goods and services that produce profit deserve their fair share of that profit.
On “On Civil Society”
Tom, that's patent nonsense. Just because Chomsky doesn't have a PhD in political science, or philosophy, doesn't mean he can't be an expert in it those areas. And the fact that he's been writing and doing extensive research on politics and society for more than four decades, and that his writings and research in that area have been widely studied and very influential, certainly suggests that he is, in fact, an expert in those areas. You may disagree with him, I know that I do most of the time, but that doesn't mean he's no more qualified than you or I to talk about these things.
Frankly, I find it a bit odd, coming from someone who's so down on the academy, that you would treat academic credentials as the one and only sign of expertise.
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Blaise, I can't say that I have ever heard of Daniel Pinker, but it's good to know that you've corresponded with him.
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Chomsky, and most linguists (though not all) are not looking for the Universal Language, but the universal building blocks of language. They're nativists; they think that these building blocks are part of our makeup, part of what is it is to be human. If you read Chomsky's limited work on the evolution of language (the work is limited, and his contribution to it even more limited still), you'll get an idea of what he's all about. Or read Pinker's The Language Instinct, which lays out the program in much less technical terms than Chomsky ever has or will or is capable of, even if Pinker disagrees with Chomsky on where language came from.
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Big C communists were, at least in practice, all about the State.
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No, functionalism is a type of computationalism. It essentially says that a mental state is its function, not its constituents. This means, among other things, that the same mental state can be realized in multiple mediums, which is why strong AI is possible, to a functionalist.
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Well, Chomsky rarely concerns himself with semantics, and in fact frequently reminds us that he’s not talking about semantics. What’s more, when he does talk about semantics, and uses the word, he means something very different from what we, and even from what other linguists, usually mean by semantics (to be honest, I’m still not quite sure what the hell he means by it, but I’m not a linguist, so in the end I don’t have to care). He would readily admit that there are untranslatable words in different languages, or at least I assume he would, since it’s neither here nor there for the focus of his work. I’m quite certain he’d read Word and Object by the time he did the bulk of his post-dissertation research, anyway. He simply (haha, “simply” is funny in this sentence) argues that the structure of language is, at a certain level, universal (what that level is for him has changed over time), and that this universality is necessary because if it weren’t universal and innate, then computationally the syntactic structure of language, the rules that govern its organization, would be impossible to learn given the input available. Nothing about untranslatable words, or even the indeterminacy of translation, affects that argument.
Christopher, do you mean his speech acts stuff? If so, I find it interesting and useful from a psychological and representational perspective. On his critiques of Dennett and functionalism, I’m not sure what you mean specifically. His critiques of functionalism and computationalism stemming from his Chinese Room paper are important but antiquated, given advances in cognitive science over the last 30 years. As for Dennett, I can’t stand him, and I think that in most of their debates Searle got the better of him.
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Interesting. I admit to not being a fan of connectionism, because spatial models of representation are so early 1980s, and connectionist models are just spatial models, but even by most pro-connectionist standards, connectionist models of language have tended to be pretty bad. At least I was right about the empiricist bit, though (not too hard, as it’s really the only alternative… heh).
By the way, I didn’t know there were any structuralists around anymore, particularly after Chomsky’s early work. At least not in “synchronic” linguistics. Though interestingly, your discussion of the commonalities between languages is pretty much exactly in line with what Chomsky says.
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I will not defend Chomsky on his estimates of casualties, nor will I defend his linguistics. I come from a very different school of linguistics.
This is certainly not on topic, and probably of interest to no one but me, but what school of linguistics is that? Since you say “very different,” I assume you mean empiricist, but that just makes me curious about which “school” of empiricist linguistics you come from. Also, since your professed background is in computers and programming, I find it interesting that you’re not a Chomskyan, as I’ve always found that the built-in computationalism of his linguistics appeals to computer folk, especially programmers.
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But Chomsky does propose a political economy, or at least the outlines of one. If I remember correctly (and it’s been some time since I watched the Chomsky-Foucault debate), he does so right there, after all the talk of human nature and creativity and the like. If he doesn’t there, he certainly does in his works on anarchism. But it’s there that we see the superficiality of both his critique and his proposal. His proposal, as I believe he admits frequently, is without a great deal of detail. His critique is simply that political structures, coercive ones at least, must be justified, and they aren’t, so they don’t have a reason for existing except to enforce existing power relationships (I don’t think he’d put this last bit quite that way, but it’s what he means anyway). With this I both agree, and ask, now what? What comes after this for Chomsky? In practice, what comes after this is East Timor, Kosovo is NATO’s fault, and the Cambodian civil war would never have resulted in the deaths that it did if we hadn’t bombed Cambodia, and the Khmer Rouge wasn’t as bad as people say they were. There’s just not much else there (I disagree with his essentialism, which is where I think Foucault wins that debate; that, and much of what Chomsky ends up saying in the discussion of politics is, if I remember correctly, of the form of, ‘Yes, you are correct, and if we accept my essentialism then we can create a just society’).
By the way, I don’t remember Foucault being at all jargonny, or full of Marxist terms, in that debate, even if his perspective is, ultimately, heavily influenced by Marxist critique (his Marxism, it’s worth remembering, came via Althusser and M-P, not Sartre and the doctrinaire communists). If I remember correctly, the only difference in terminology is largely one of depth and breadth. Chomsky, for example, uses creativity to mean something like what we find in generative linguistics: that is, humans are creative beings in the sense that they add something to the input they receive from the world, whereas Foucault argues a.) that this conception of human nature is a recent one, made possible by certain creative acts on the part of human beings since the late 18th century, and b.) it’s much deeper than just giving structure to linguistic input, or any other sort of thing you might get from Chomskyan nativism. Furthermore, if I remember correctly, it’s Chomsky who uses “creativity” as jargon, and completely misunderstands what Foucault means by creativity largely because Chomsky’s jargony use of the term is so limited. The same when they discuss justice. Chomsky’s justice is a simple, idealistic notion from which it’s impossible not to ultimately confirm one’s own biases, while for Foucault there’s something deeper at play (power relations, will to power, whatever). In every case, Chomsky looks at things shallowly, and Foucault takes it at least a little bit deeper. And in every case, I at least think Chomsky comes out looking the worse. I suppose one could disagree, but that’s definitely my impression. And like I said, on at least some of the basics, Chomsky and I are on the same page (as are Foucault and I).
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To be fair, Chomsky's estimates of the death toll under the Khmer Rouge and during the civil war were around 500,000 (in each), not 20,000. And it's during the civil war, not during the Khmer Rouge's rule, that he thinks the U.S. did a bunch of killing... which of course we did, but not on the scale that Chomsky likes to claim.
Chomsky still has a small, loyal group of followers within a segment of the left, but by the time he started saying that nothing happened in Kosovo until NATO got there, he'd lost the bulk of his following. Manufacturing Consent is still pretty interesting, though.
In some ways, I see Chomsky as the Rand of the left. He's shallow, he's arrogant, he's so convinced he's right that he thinks only people who agree with him are thinking rationally (rather than being manipulated), and he's a terrible writer. What's more, his fans tend to be young, white males of privilege. The only real difference is that Chomsky's accomplishments in linguistics in the 50s, 60s, and 70s (and to some extent, the 80s) were--are--very important. His review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior will remain a classic in the history of psychology for a long, long time, whatever the fate of generative linguistics. It's not clear Rand made a lasting contribution to any intellectual field.
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Foucault does kick Chomsky's arse, largely because it's clear Chomsky has no clue what Foucault's saying, and not because, as some would have you believe, Foucault's generally incomprehensible. It doesn't help that Chomsky's politics are fairly superficial (which is why he's so inconsistent -- there's no real underlying principle behind any of it).
This tendency towards the superficial and overly simplified is also what got us the Minimalist Program. X-bar + change!
On “liberal scholarship (a digression)”
Yeah, he led a bunch of post-structuralist radical Marxists, at an institute created as a result of 1968. He wasn't, however, very red-faced. It's almost strange to hear someone suggest so.
He did look like Uncle Fester, though.
Have you watched his "debate" with Chomsky?
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Hmm… I wonder if you’ve read any Foucault in a while, if you think his view of madness has the sorts of implications that you are… implying it does, much less that it’s contrasted with Reason. What’s more, seeing Foucault as soicante-huitard is kinda funny, and not only because he wasn’t even in Paris in May, 1968. He did, after 1968, become an activist of sorts, particularly in the area of prison reform, and he certainly surrounded himself with radical Marxist intellectuals (and got heat for it, a lot of it, with real consequences), but he then spent the rest of his life (after he got his chair at the College de France) being as tame as he was before his prisoners’ rights activism of the early ‘70s. He was, in many ways, quite un-red faced. That’s probably because, as anyone who’s engaged his more overtly political works (e.g., those on power) knows, those works make political action highly problematic. Of course, his early, Kantian stuff was distinctly non-red faced. Maybe you’re mistaking some of the more fervent Foucauldians on the left, particularly in the 80s and early 90s, with Foucault himself?
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Bob,
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-topics/
I'm sure you can find something.
On “Bachmann, Obama and lactation hysteria”
Breastfeeding your baby is going to make it grow up to be less obese? That seems like a hard claim to substantiate through controlled testing. Diet, exercise, and genetics strike me as much more likely candidates to be significant factors in obesity.
It's not easy, to be sure, but several studies (I can link you to some lit reviews if you'd like) have shown a connection between breast feeding and risk of obesity, controlling for a wide variety of potentially relevant factors.
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Hahaha... good one.
On “US Intervention in Libya”
"By your own standards, your only enemies are your fellow countrymen."
Obviously you didn't read anything I said if you heard that. My point is that you should criticize your own country first and loudest, because you're a part of it, and morally responsible for its actions, and what's more, you can make a difference. I didn't say you should only criticize your own country. In fact, I said something quite like the opposite of that.
You are interpreting me the way you are because of your knee jerk reaction in the opposite direction: never criticize the U.S., except in those few instances where liberals screw things up.
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T0m, since I gave you reasons for doing it, and you have yet to even address those reasons, calling it getting off seems like even worse than a cop-out. But OK, like I said, if that's inversion, then I'm damned proud to be inverted. It's precisely this sort of inversion that allows democracy to function.
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Wait, so it’s moral inversion to concentrate on a.) that for which I am more directly morally responsible, and b.) that for which I might be able to make a difference? If that’s moral inversion, consider me completely inverted.
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I see nothing wrong with being harsher and more vocal in the criticisms of one's own country than in criticisms of other countries, even if the policies and actions of other countries are, in some cases, much worse than those of one's own. The reason is quite simple: we live here, we're participants in the democratic process, and as a result we are, in part, morally responsible for the actions of our democratically elected governments. What's more, because we're parts of the process, change is much more likely to come of our criticizing our own country than from criticizing countries in which we're not part of the democratic (or undemocratic) process. In fact, the best way to affect the behavior of other nations is to affect the behavior of our own nation towards them, so that even when we want to change the behavior of other nations, the best route is often to criticize our own country (e.g., in the case of South Africa in the 1980s).
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Sometimes it's almost like you and Heidegger are trying to outdo each other in some sort of parody-off. I wish a part of me didn't believe that you two really believe this stuff.
On “Science, Non-Scientists, and the Mind-Killer”
Tom, if you think he's my Sam Harris, then your biases are showing.
Bob, follow the link on my name.
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