3,837 karma · joined January 13, 2022
If anything, the 90s were the one era where that thinking had receded more than at any other time. Then 9/11 brought it roaring back.
Considering the nuanced nature of the claim - a conclusion as to his sympathies borne of deep familiarly with his work - there's no reason for me to think you wouldn't find additional reasons to quibble over any specific citations and passages. I have no evidence that you're a good faith interlocutor, so I really see no reason to expend that effort. If you're actually interested, I do encourage you to read the original works. (If it wakes you up to Chomsky's sympathies and immunises you against some of his bad politics, perhaps not a total waste of time.)
Expecting a FOSS project to go track down all of its (millions of?) users seems like a very unreasonable expectation, and is well outside of their scope of responsibility.
People have gotten so used to the Github flavour of free-labour, social-network-style FOSS that they've forgotten what all those LICENSE files actually say, which is to make it explicitly clear that the devs are not responsible to you for your issues, up to and including the software setting your house on fire. If you don't like it, you don't have to use it.
Thus far we have your claim v. mine. Not sure why an absence of evidence would somehow make you right and me wrong, nor am I sure why I bear any burden of proof when you're the one who's shown up out of nowhere to bandy around accusations of bad faith and demand to be disproven.
For what it's worth, I don't consider your factually-deficient posts to be "misinformation"; I just think you're making a good faith error out of an unfamiliarity with the sum of Chomsky's work. You could read more of him if you think that would be of merit, though I don't consider a lot of the time I spent reading his political works time well spent, so make of that what you will. :)
Read his linguistics works instead! This would be a much better world if all the people who read Chomsky's politics had read his linguistics instead.
Really? I suggest re-reading the exchange.
> Of the two of us, only you have resorted to personal attacks
That's a little rich, given all of your posts above are absolutely steeped in schoolyard insults. Do personal attacks somehow not count if they're directed at a third party? Is CF not a person to you?
> Every accusation is a confession
Wow, criminal prosecutors must commit a lot of murders then. This is the problem with your posts in a nutshell: all rhetorical flourishes, no substance. Nothing hangs together as a coherent argument, because it's not meant to, it's just meant to sound bombastic online.
Chomsky was about as pro-Khmer Rouge as Tucker Carlson is pro-Russia; he's not out there waving flags and singing patriotic songs for them, but he's sure as hell doing a lot of very useful work "just asking questions" about biolabs in Ukraine / the extent to which the US may have "provoked" the Khmer Rouge to do what it did. If someone wrote equivalent things about the atrocities in Nazi Germany, we would not be mincing words about that person's sympathies. Chomsky ought to be treated with the same intellectual honesty.
Chomsky was a useful idiot for murderous tyrants. And a truly wonderful linguist. Ah, the duality of man.
I suppose shall have to make do without 101-level instruction in Chomskyian anti-Imperialism, woven through with whataboutism and international conspiracies.
> whereas my claim is that governments (democracies or not) that run afoul of their local hegemon tend to have a short shelf life. this is not unique to US hegemony.
Wow, big if true. Someone let Iran know.
How many trillions of dollars and gallons of blood did the US expend to make Afghanistan non-Taliban, or Vietnam non-Communist? And who rules Afghanistan and Vietnam today? You mention the Brezhnev doctrine, and yet literally not one of these countries is Russian-aligned today. The Russian invasion of Afghanistan failed just as hard as the British and American ones, all at the height of those respective countries' powers. Not very powerful, these alleged hegemons.
My overall point is that the Middle East (and Latin America, etc) has many local issues (e.g. corruption, misgovernance, sectarianism, organised crime), and an unhelpful habit of blaming some ill-defined global hegemony for misfortunes that are readily explicable as the consequences of these local phenomena. The US is no innocent lamb, but it does no service to the people of any of these regions to pretend that another hundred years of anti-Imperialist rhetoric will somehow bring benefits that the previous hundred years did not.
In these countries, this brand of tired anti-Imperialism is a figleaf for authoritarians. In the West, it is masturbatory politics for a certain type of narcissistic Westerner with a saviour complex, who fundamentally believes only Westerners have agency in the world, and everyone else are just motes of dust floating in the West's shadow. It's this confluence that results in absolute travesties like Chomsky supporting the Khmer Rouge, a far greater evil than all the worst allegations against America stacked together.
If you want to help the Middle East, get involved in civil society building efforts that help bridge the gap between sectarian communities; support charitable and poverty relief efforts that are not affiliated to the Muslim Brotherhood; get involved in civil rights advocacy on behalf of the oppressed in the Middle East (women, LGBT communities, religious and ethnic minorities, the list goes on); partake in initiatives aimed at tackling corruption, organised crime, etc. Or at the very least encourage and support the people who do these things, rather than regurgitating half-remembered anti-Imperialist tropes from your polsci 101 class, as though that were a contribution of any value whatsoever.
The one thing that will absolutely not help them, at all, is more meandering, false narratives about how they have no agency in the face of shadowy global hegemons, and how should just lie down and wait impassively for some sort of new, more just world to be given to them by their Western betters.
> resistance to the US-led order magically seems to invite instability
Or perhaps 'resistance' is an awfully popular rallying cry for demagogues who bring instability, and the US is just the hegemon du jour. "It's the US' fault your crops are wilting! And international capital! And immigrants! And, oh, I don't know, the gays, why not. Rise up for El Generalissimo! Enlist your sons in the blood struggle, that will definitely improve things!" /s
Much sexier to be a revolutionary fighting shadowy foreign forces than to actually fix any of your own problems. No, no, tomorrow's problems will be America's fault too.
Not everyone who fare evades is unstable, obviously, but the article suggested that a high proportion of the unstable were fare evaders, so their reduction was an unexpected corollary benefit of the new gates. (I assume this would conceptually clash with the effort to make public transport free.)
Curious to hear from anyone with recent NY subway experience with thoughts to share on this.
I think the broader point is that a democracy is unstable when the electorate just votes for their favourite warlord / cleric, who promptly ends / rigs any further elections.
In the Middle East, there appears to be a pattern of electorates voting for / staging a revolution in favour of Islamists, which either leads to a terrible Islamist regime, or leads to an elite coup, which of course destroys the democracy in the process. Worst case scenario all of this happens at once in different places, and you get a terrible civil war.
Democracy is great, but it requires an electorate that actually wants to sustain and retain a democracy. Those appear to be few and far in between.
That's just it, you don't, when your arguments are poor and your tone hostile. The only people who support you are people who already agreed with you; everyone else (the passerby moderate) is automatically repelled.
> Vote Democrat. Leftists, MAGA, conservatives, libertarians, they all want to strip your rights in service of their weirdo ideology. Simple as that. Or, decide we're too rude and shamble into the gulag. Whatever I guess.
It was very recently that Bill Clinton was signing in "welfare reform" and the Defence of Marriage Act, and minorities were told to shut up, it would be even worse under the other guys. It's pretty obvious when someone sees minorities as an adornment to their politics, and considers their actual needs and interests an irritant.
Consider what kind of messed up version of left wing politics would talk that way to the people it ostensibly exists to represent.
Nah, dude. Politics is lifestyle brand to you, and online toxicity is your form of cathartic self-expression. The actual messy needs of the underprivileged are an inconvenience to your "right side of history" posturing. There's nothing noble about this. The MAGA crowd are just the red flavour of people like you.
The facts: Apple put a warning in macOS 15.5 that AFP support might be dropped in the future.
The claim: AFP support will be dropped in macOS 27.
I just do not see how you get from the facts to the claim. This is just complete speculation.
Friedersdorf has expressed his thoughts on drug laws elsewhere, and they are consistent with his other beliefs, in that he thinks drug laws as a form of regulation do not really work. This is hardly an uncommon stance - the general public views the war on drugs as having failed. This is a false application of a reductio ad absurdum, and the insult adds nothing.
> Addressed: not an equal protection concern as it applies to vendors, not buyers, and "birth date" isn't a protected class. This is the kind of lazy "dunk" the right loves ("oh I thought you haaaaaated discrimination, what hypocrites!"), albeit in cozy-writer-sweater Atlantic form. Friedersdorf is the one lowering our discourse here, not I.
Addressed earlier in my posts, this argument is fallacious. A law that forces the general public to discriminate against a specific group is still discriminatory to a specific group. Protected classes do not exist in Europe, and yet where specific characteristics are enumerated, 'age' is one of them. The insult is again unnecessary and adds nothing.
> Addressed: Friedersdorf fails to address similar arguments against drugs, requiring seat belt laws, etc. In this case, it would be "the state has a vested interest in its people being healthy", which the UK discovered when they had practically no healthy men in the wake of WW2 and birthed the NHS. This is the kind of historical ignorance we've learned to expect from the right.
This is the same point as your first one. For the third time, the insults add nothing.
> Addressed: there is no dignity in suffering/dying from what tobacco and vapes do to you.
Agreed (for my part). I suspect CF sees dignity in letting others decide in what confers meaning in their lives.
> Addressed: Friedersdorf fails to address similar arguments against drugs. In this case, all drugs aren't created equal, i.e. tobacco isn't comparable to alcohol. Alcohol contributes to ~178k deaths/yr in the US. Tobacco contributes to over 490k/yr, 2.75x. Secondhand smoke exposure causes 1.2 million premature deaths annually worldwide. In 2021 alone, exposure to second-hand smoke was linked to nearly 8.45m years of healthy life lost in children worldwide due to respiratory infections and tuberculosis. Why should children suffer the consequences of their parents' decisions here?
Isn't this again the same point as your first one? Drugs are significantly more destructive than tobacco and CF favours their legalisation too (along with a focus away from legislating and towards treatment).
> Addressed: Friedersdorf fails to address similar arguments against drug laws. In this case, it's a slippery slope fallacy. Actually, this article is something of a menagerie of fallacies.
The menagerie of fallacies appears to all be the same one point you repeat over and over again, together with schoolboy-level insults.
You're claiming a lot of world-weary familiarity with libertarian talking points, and yet you seem unaware that libertarians do generally support drug legalisation, or any of their arguments in favour of that stance (they tend to believe people will consume drugs no matter what, and it doesn't help anything to also put them in prison).
> Maybe you think I'm rude, dismissive, arrogant, privileged even. Maybe I am. But that's nothing against a guy wielding his vast influence to try and addict, sicken, and kill untold numbers of people. I am 1000% over conservatives/MAGA/libertarians fucking literally everything up with their idiotic takes and hot trash ideologies. Take my example. Save your ire for people doing actual bad things.
I think you've decided that CF has bad intent, and this utterly blinds you to the possibility that he actually genuinely wants what's best, and he thinks over-regulation does more harm than good. I don't necessarily agree with him on tobacco, but it's a perfectly valid stance for someone to take without wanting to murder puppies.
I think you take this worst-case, worst-intentioned version of CF and then give yourself license to just absolutely spit venom back. The problem is, this is a style of politics that absolutely does not work, and in fact really turns people away from what you're arguing for. There is not a person on Earth who's ever been convinced to turn their politics around by being called a moron over and over again.
I think overall this is indicative of the fact that you treat politics as a game, as a little fun sport to win or lose at, which - yes - smacks of privilege. As someone in a vulnerable minority group I do not have the luxury of spitting venom at the other side and just being sort of fine no matter who wins. It is much more significant to me that political argumentation is effective, because I want to turn moderates towards my politics and build a lasting coalition to secure my rights. Nothing repels moderates more than this kind of partisan bombast. From my perspective, you're the person doing the 'actual bad things', because the more of you there are, the more repellent left of centre politics becomes, and the less secure my rights get. You're actively working against my existential political interests, so by your logic, shouldn't I be absolutely spitting venom back at you? Would you find this persuasive? (And if not, why do you do it then?)
TLDR: An effective politics requires a willingness to understand other viewpoints. Spitting bile at everyone else may feel very cathartic for you - so if personal catharsis is the goal of your politics, well done! - but it's politically ineffective. It convinces no-one and achieves nothing. I respectfully suggest that you consider the possibility that others actually mean well, even when their actions seem inexplicable to you, and that if you try to understand them, you may actually be able to reach them. A much bigger win than some petty online sniping, no?
I can think of two nationally-significant archaeological sites in Central Europe - both were partially excavated about fifty years ago, to varying but fairly limited degrees, and then gently reburied, because there wasn't enough money to keep things going.
The site of one has a poorly-trafficked tourist centre today, the other is a clearing with nothing more than a tourist plaque. Both are likely candidates for previous capital cities, so they are obviously significant, but the money just isn't there to do anything about them. I seem to recall reading somewhere that over 90% of one of the sites remains unexcavated.
These are land sites, so relatively inexpensive compared to sea sites. If this is how willing we are to fund nationally-significant land digs, I imagine sea archaeology would be comparatively even more impossible to fund.
The thing is, I still don't see how any of that matters. This is a pointless nationalist dick measuring contest that leads nowhere. You're not going to convince anyone of the superiority of Sweden, nor are you likely to be convinced of the superiority of other places, so what is the point of the discussion?
The only one taking things to such extremes is you. You've largely ignored the content of the article, countered with barely coherent counter-arguments that you're awkwardly couching in Twitter-circa-2014-style "dunks", and ultimately you're the only one walking away with a feeling of hyperpartisanship, because it is what you've arrived with, and what you're projecting onto the world around you.
> ignorant HN posters
> eat that one too
> craven and pathetic
You imagine everyone else as being at the bottom, and so you race to the bottom yourself to meet them. Except they were never there, that was just your hyperpartisanship blinding you to the nuance and good faith of others. And in the end, the only one who ends up on the bottom - lashing out in bad faith and trying to drag everyone else down with them - is you.
I note that the US concept of "protected class" has absolutely no relevance to the UK; the British parliament is sovereign and not bound to care at all about whichever random characteristics are enumerated among America's "protected classes". (The roughest European equivalent is the ECHR, which prohibits discrimination "on any ground", making the idea of protected classes even more redundant in this conversation. The British Equality Act explicitly does mention age. Of course, none of this is really relevant. The British parliament has the power to make its laws as discriminatory as it wants, unlike in the US, under the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty.)
A law that imposes a general obligation to discriminate against a specific group is obviously discriminatory, and no amount of juvenile word games makes it not so. The question isn't whether this is or is not discriminatory - it clearly is - the question is whether this discrimination is justified.
In thirty years, if this law stands as is, we'll have forty-seven year old men and women who cannot legally buy a product, and forty-eight year old men and women who can. We've not really had many laws like this before, so it's worth considering whether this discrimination is justified (or even workable). It's a good question, and one I don't have an answer for. It is also the question engaged in by CF in TFA, and a much more interesting question than the relatively much less sophisticated arguments you've very bombastically put forward.
> united against the soul-eating bland vomit of AI compositions
This seems like a total non sequitur to me. AI exists, so you don't have to comment in good faith? AI exists, therefore you get to couch bad arguments in overheated rhetoric? AI exists, therefore you get to deepen the partisan divide by lazily dismissing CF as a 'token conservative', when he's not even talking about a left-right issue?
This is a terrible argument. Imagine a law that prohibited ALL vendors, regardless of age, race, sex, etc from selling to people of a certain race. Would you claim that such a law is not discriminatory, because it affects vendors of all races equally?
> particularly lazy article
> just a bunch of trying to troll the libs
> Here's something else that's argument-destroying
> Claims destroyed, nice try token conservative at liberal outlet
> Just, chilling detachment from humanity
I don't agree with CF on many things, including this smoking ban, but I'd point out these kinds of flourishes do nothing but weaken your overall point.
It's surprisingly difficult to add a new YouTube feed to an RSS reader when it returns a 404 or 500 for most of the day. NetNewsWire just refuses to add it, for example. I would appreciate some kind of 'trust me bro' override, but it's sad that such a thing should even be necessary.
An easier solution might be to just run a local RSS mirror, to catch the YouTube feed in the sporadic windows when it does work. Easier still might be just to stop my remaining vestigial use of YouTube.
I tried to drag left to get to Asia / Oceania, and got stuck on the International Date Line. Would be neater if it wrapped around, and didn't put Samoa and Australia on the opposite ends of the Earth. :)
What better way to stand up to Sam Altman than doing exactly what he did?
>> Simple, reliable, UNIX-native fundamentals — no feature bloat, just solid engineering.
This isn't the author's summary. This is AI's.
I was enjoying the article, but when a little AI shibboleth like this shows up, I just cease to trust what I'm reading.
Edit: many more AI writing give-aways later in the article. What a shame.
I think "M series chips are no better than ten year old Intel chips" is a take that would be somewhat difficult to sustain, given the data.