Kardinal ZG
Senile Chomsky being a sanctimonious prick again....

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/02/02/noam-chomsky-super-bowl-reduces-joe-six-packs-capacity-to-think/

Gordon Lutze-Wallace
I actually agree with this.

John Thomas Casey
Guy is pretty annoying though I have no interest in watching....

Kardinal ZG
Yea well i do find sport event barbarous, but his main argument throughout his career was that people are stupid and america is imperialistic. Good job. Someone get him a chocolate medal.

jessica amber murray
chomsky has noticeably lost a step in the last two years or so. the first really clueless analysis i heard from him was around the beginning of the arab spring, when he seemed entirely unaware of the power politics circling around it. he hasn't really kept up since.

two things, though.

first, it wouldn't be obvious that america is an imperialist state if people like chomsky weren't pointing it out. coming out of world war two, that wasn't the dominant narrative. you sitting there and going "well, duh" is actually a consequence of his dissent (and the dissent of many others).

second, i think what he's actually expressing is a kind of muted optimism. i mean, he's a syndicalist. that's the exact opposite of the idea that people can't run their own lives. so, why don't people fight more for co-ops and collectives? worse, i think it's a huge error to reduce everything he's said to manufacturing consent (which he was the second author of), but, regardless, the book was really just applying gramsci's ideas of hegemony, which are pretty well accepted. it's a valid analysis. it's less about how people don't revolt because they are stupid (isn't that more what the french, say foucault, said?) and more that access to information is controlled in such a way to produce and enforce a narrative. the internet has maybe dulled it's effect, a little. i think we're due for a different analysis that draws on like huxley or something. but realizing that that's true (and still applies at least to television) is the first step in countering it. countering official narratives by citing facts is a much better way to characterize his writings in a statement. in a sense, anybody could do that. it's just a question of doing the research. but he's somebody that actually has, and has been read.

that makes him more of a historian than anything else.

the optimism is that if people weren't so controlled then they'd revolt, and that's in opposition to people who claim the proletariat is incapable of doing anything themselves.

personally, i think people are more distracted by labour and bills than media. what he's saying applies more to white collar workers than blue collar ones. it's a distraction, but more a distraction of the upper middle class. i don't know how much a super bowl ticket costs, but i doubt it's affordable to the average worker.

Kardinal ZG
Labour and bills for sure. But really, his work is super sloppy, he has no apparent methodology apart from mere finger pointing. His borderline conspiratorial position is really problematic too. What exactly is the 'they' that orchestrates all of this to keep us dumb with football? He confounds effect with efficient causality. Thats like a rookie mistake.

jessica amber murray
the director of the cia at one point (william casey) had a controlling interest in abc. there's massive overlap between government and media. but the "they" more abstractly is the capitalist class, and it's proxies in government. more specifically? i don't think it's meant to be thought of that way, although i'm sure chomsky could provide a handful of examples (which doesn't prove the existence of such a thing, but shows how it works). he's cited the cfr in the ford administration. there was the project for the new american century group in the 90s that's had a dominant influence on neo-conservatism. these kinds of bodies do exist. do they represent something bigger? i think it's just a model. i do agree, though, that personifying class is a pitfall, but it's a general problem on the left that goes way behond chosmky. half of marx' writing reads off like a conspiracy theory, referencing some abstract thing that only really existed in his head.

Giovanni Cristoforo Iacovella
and yet... there is to a certain extent a partial truth to his 'panem et circenses' observation...

without having to fall into delirious conspiracy theories...

jessica amber murray
i've actually argued this point fairly strenuously: if you start with whatever conspiracy theory and you strip out the supernatural or silly aspects (aliens, satan, lizard people, masons, illuminati, muslims - even communists during the red scare), you're always left with what is really little more than a marxist class analysis. take out lizard people, insert capital. instant marxism. two conclusions: first, is that if conspiracy theorists weren't so maddeningly frustrating to debate with, there would probably actually be a high probability of converting them into leftists. second, it kind of gets you wondering. it seems like they're all variations on the same theme, to create a ridiculous villain to hate on in place of capital. in the case of the illuminati conspiracy theory, and to the lesser extent the red scare, history actually corresponds fairly well with that idea of divide and conquer - which suggests that the real conspiracy is a conspiracy of capital.

but, yeah. leftists need to constantly be aware of this when they're talking about capital, or talking about class. it's an easy trap to fall into. i don't think that chomsky is particularly guilty of it, though.

Kardinal ZG
Not sure how many marxists adhere to this personified 'they' or that it reads like conspiracy work. For marx at least ideology happens idependently from any one specific human agency. The deeper problem might be that nobody is actually driving. As for the super bowl it seems more like a stupid cathartic social ritual (look we all have these) than an actual plot to make me stupid.

jessica amber murray
i've read a lot of marx that speaks of "the bourgeoisie" in terms of it being a monolithic thing, and gives off the impression that it's run by some kind of centralized body. in his case, that usually just meant a parliament, and he was usually just glossing over disagreements for the sake of brevity. sometimes, though, it kind of takes on it's own agency in a way that's kind of hard to swallow. i mean, i'm willing to interpret it as a model. it doesn't bother me much. but it's there.