Back during the Cold War, the left was always speaking up against censorship, but that was no doubt because they wanted to make sure they were able to speak out both politically and socially in order to go on promoting their extreme beliefs.
Today their speech isn't at all being threatened, and they don't mind threatening the speech of others. They feel they should be able to force their views on others without a choice, or that a Christian college, for instance, should be forced to promote anti-Biblical and secular humanist views.
In the article Chomsky also discusses his anti-Zionist views.
Teaching my children ? Well, I will have something to say about that.
But that's me.
“...the nature of his views is, plainly, completely irrelevant to the issue of his right to express them, a truism among civil libertarians that those of a Stalinist-fascist persuasion find quite shocking...
“...THOSE OF A STALINIST-FASCIST PERSUASION...”
I think of all the times I’ve come across the left denying and ridiculing the possibility that they can be fascist.
Leftists are ideologues who actually believe in something. Chomsky believes in free speech even to the point of supporting the right to free speech for a hideous person that denies the Holocaust.
Liberals, like moderate conservatives, have no strong beliefs. They just have tendencies. They like to believe they are being 'pragmatic'. That is why they can create laws that violate the principle of free speech. That is why moderate conservatives can continue to support a War on Drugs that violates our 4th Amendment rights.
Ideologues have their own vices. Chomsky is a perfect case of someone so devoted to his ideals that he often supports horrendous governments because he believes they are heading in some utopian direction that he approves of.
But moderates can be the most evil of all because they are quite willing to sacrifice the future for the present. They are all about security over liberty. Protect my babies says the soccer mom. Look through my email, keep track of all the places I web surf, track every movement of my car, etc. so long as I know that my poor little defenseless lambs won't get blown up when we go to the mall.
Russell Kirk had it just about right. Ideology? No. Strong principles? Yes.
What we seem to have now, even on FR, is the false choice between conservative ideology and unprincipled conservative pragmatism.
We have all been infected by the cancer of bad thought.
Noam Chomsky is by far the most racist that perhaps the world has ever seen. With his “whole language” English instruction, he reduced black Americans from being almost on a literacy par with whites in the 1950s, to near illiteracy just two decades later. This guaranteed failure in the rest of their education, as well as future poverty and misery.
And Chomsky’s followers, despite half a century of evidence, still religiously believe that whole language is better than phonics.
Noam Chumpsky ping.
Chomsky is on my airport list.
L