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I find it very entertaining to watch people who I disagree with win arguments with other smart people. My opinion is that Buckley wins this hands down (and I am much more philosophically in line with Chomsky). Buckley has a killer wink.
I fear this has a small audience on the sift, but I will submit it anyway, because it fascinates me.
I fear this has a small audience on the sift, but I will submit it anyway, because it fascinates me.
What's more, the man is a giant in the field of linguistics. I'm much more familiar with philosophy and economics than I am with that particular area of study, but the impression I get is that much of the work done even today in academic linguistics departments is but a footnote to Chomsky's work from 40 years ago.
Outside the field of linguistics he has, in recent years, provided intelligent criticisms of the underpinnings Evolutionary Psychology, and spoken out forcefully against 9/11 conspiracy theories.
So, he doesn't seem much like a lunatic to me.
My God the guy on the left sounds like a pretentious prick! I won't hold it against his argument, but daaauumm.
I like that Chomsky cuts through the mist of rhetoric with exploratory questions on history and "they" and stuff like that. This is stuff that someone like O'reilly would get away with because no one says anything against him.
Otherwise good debate by very competent debaters.
Its not as if he was able to refute Chomsky's history. His half hearted attempt to one up Chomsky in that line of discussion ended with Buckley backed into a corner with nowhere to. Instead he resorted to attacking Chomsky for having a well researched argument.
Damn those unfortunate facts.
........
Buckley: "there are people who do believe that america... inherited the responsibility for trying to abort international holocaust..."
Who did we inherit this responsibility from, and what crystal ball are we using to determine what will be a supposed "international holocaust"?
We really have declined as a civilization.
Still, while I'm no historical scholar, and when they ventured away from WWII and Vietnam, I was lost for what allegorical point they were trying to make at times, the whole thing appeared to boil down to the precursor of this:
http://www.videosift.com/video/Bill-OReilly-cuts-mic-of-retired-Army-Colonel-Ann-Wright
Buckley interrupts, generalizes, minimizes all attempts by Chomsky to categorize different types of intervention as being qualitatively different in terms of their morality (with Buckley even contending that military aid isn't substantially different from economic aid) by calling them "differences in nomenclature".
Buckley has been to school, and his demeanor and vocabulary show it, but his reasoning is just as dogmatic as BillO's.
As far as who won the argument, I think it ended about as conclusively as the video of BillO cutting a mic. If Buckley won, it was simply because he filibustered Chomsky from getting a chance to fully make his point without having to field silly assertions every 30 seconds.
Kinda scary that the country is getting to have this debate again almost 40 years later. You'd have thought we learned our lessons from Vietnam.
I guess they did in a sense. From the point of view of someone who came out of Vietnam thinking it was a good thing until all those damned hippies ruined it by protesting, they've corrected many of their mistakes from Vietnam. A target country with lots of strategic and economic benefits to us. No draft. Big media campaign to build fear of the enemy, and to frame all dissent as "un-American". Censorship of protests. Censorship of footage of carnage from Iraq. Censorship of the funerals. The unloading of the coffins. Message-force-multipliers.
They learned a lot of lessons. Too bad they didn't learn that the war itself won't work.
The France WWII example that Buckley brings up was a total red herring. Chomsky is absolutely correct that it's a different situation entirely to what they were discussing. Fighting an enemy you are openly at war with wherever they have troops is blatantly different from providing covert assistance to an insurgency against a third power who you aren't at open war with (Afghanistan in the 80s for instance), but Buckley tries to pass it off as the same thing.
I think what's scariest about this video is Buckley's apparent conviction that it is right to intervene militarily in another country's affairs if you are concerned about some "future threat." It just echoes Bush's doctrine and reasons for invading Iraq a little too closely...
In this debate it is Buckley who uses stylistic tricks (dominating the talking time, calling something 'semantical', using big words when little ones would suffice, using run on sentences etc...) to control the tempo and subject. In a later debate between Dershowitz and an old Chomsky, it is Chomsky who keeps dipping into the bag of tricks -- repeating his talking points, ignoring direct contradictions, waving dismissively at his opponent, continually pointing to obscure references. But that is just the subtleties of debate. At the core, he is a pure theorist. Does he believe that a nation-state has the right to go to war ever? I suspect he does, and if we were to have an administration that believed it was inappropriate to go to war ever, Chomsky would attack that position and make very good arguments for war. He attacks whatever the status quo is. It's a service, but it doesn't lead to startling consistency or even popularity with those on "your side." If you are curious about that sort of thing, look up Chomsky's positions having to do with anything associated with World War 2 justifications and the Holocaust--including Holocaust deniers.