NOAM CHOMSKY DECAPITATED...
...by an enraged David Horowitz. Well, not literally... Here's the latest in the now venerable genre of Chomsky-debunking, a joint effort by the genre's co-founders David Horowitz and Ron Radosh. This mother of all bashings is richly deserved as always, but I have to confess I have a hard time sustaining a high degree of worry and outrage about a guy whose arguments are so easily punctured (though I enjoy the puncturing-- I'm only human.)
Chomsky's train-wrecked syllogisms (in Christopher Hitchens's memorable phrase) indeed seem to have a certain mysterious power over considerable herds of university students, but the spell is usually broken just as mysteriously when they reach age 24. Such flirtation with the Demagogue Scholar is like flirtation with Charles/Marilyn Manson, or Aleister Crowley, or Communism, or Ming the Merciless, or the Dark Lord Sauron, or any other "counter-culture" figure or phenomenon whose appeal is primarily shock value. And doesn't harping so sententiously and stridently on The Evil only encourage them to postpone their growing out of it? Maybe we need some reverse psychology here...
Posted by Dr. Frank at December 21, 2001 06:28 AM | TrackBack