In an interview broadcast on The Nation’s website Professor Chomsky has stated that democratic elections and the election of sceptical representative posed “a danger to the survival of the species”.
The latest democratic elections were a disaster, according to Chomsky, because the stupid, irresponsible masses had elected Republicans who were sceptical of global warming. For this, the media had to share some of the blame, as they sometimes allowed dissenting voices to be heard, which the professor obviously thinks is a terrible crime. It only confuses people when they hear two sides to a story.
He pointed, in particular, to an article by the New York Times which covered the fact that most meteorologists didn’t believe in the theory of man-made global warming. This is meaningless, according to Chomsky, because meteorologists were just “pretty faces that present the weather forecast” and didn’t know anything about climate (it wasn’t clear if he included meteorologists such as Michael Mann and Kevin Trenberth in that sweeping condemnation).
But he was sure that letting the people choose their own representatives had been a catastrophe in this instance, saying:
“You can almost interpret it as a kind of death knell for the species”
Quoting Bloomberg, Chomsky said the new Republicans “were almost all global warming deniers” who,
“Claim that there’s nothing to it [AGW], or claim that they think that. What they actually think is another story.”
He claimed that if this were taking place in some other, smaller and poorer nation, it wouldn’t be such a concern, but in the world’s richest country, such an election presented
“a danger to the survival of the species . . . we’re essentially saying, ‘Let’s kiss each other goodbye'”.
Chomsky’s thoughts on the uselessness of democracy were echoed by warmist activist and author, Dmitry Orlov who said that energy interests had:
“a stranglehold on political power in this country by an elite that divides itself into two camps, Republican and Democrat . . . it’s almost a question of them at some point being wheeled out of their offices, along with the office furniture . . . I see that as quite similar to what the old communists went through”
Quite. We won’t be needing any of the trappings of democracy then, I suppose?
You can watch the interview (if you really want) here:
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UPDATE: Chomsky admits : “I went too far”
In a follow up interview, Chomsky has admitted that his anti-democracy crack was a step too far, but still defended the substance of what he was saying:
If I said the elections are a death knell, I went too far. But I think it’s fair to say that they do threaten that outcome. Even the business press is concerned. Bloomberg Business Week reported that the elections brought into office dozens of climate change deniers, swelling support for Senator James Inhofe, who has declared global warming to be the “greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the American people” and feels “vindicated” by the election.
The People’s Voice. Downsize or Modify? A Conversation with Noam Chomsky.
hauntingthelibrary 
“…For this, the media had to share some of the blame, as they sometimes allowed dissenting voices to be heard…. It only confuses people when they hear two sides to a story”
Sometimes?? Try almost never. This ‘unfair balance / confuses public’ thing is a pair of talking points straight out of anti-skeptic book author Ross Gelbspan’s 1997 The Heat is On book. As for the idea skeptic scientists receive too much equal time, I quantified how often they appeared on the PBS NewsHour from 1996 to last July: how about only once, when Pat Michaels was on to briefly discuss ClimateGate four months after the story broke, but not to say anything about the underlying science.
From my 7/29/10 article “The Left and Its Talking Points” http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/07/the_left_and_its_talking_point.html , an excerpt: “IPCC scientists Michael Oppenheimer, Stephen Schneider, and Kevin Trenberth spoke unopposed a great length about man-caused global warming seven, four, and two times, respectively. No skeptic scientists ever had an opportunity to present the myriad faults in the idea of man-caused global warming.”
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Chomsky is an idiot. Fair, plain, and simple.
I admire your keen and accurate brevity!
Indeed. The Kamikaze left can’t abide any sort of democracy, even a constitutional representative republic like ours, designed to be safe from people like them. They hate it’s checks and balances.
Let them leave and go back to where they would be most happy
the Soviet UnionI think the majority of the world’s population, in developed and developing countries, would like to kiss Naom Chomsky goodbye. ASAP. He is a caricature who reinforces the universal stereotypes of the ivory tower, elitist professor.
think the majority of the world’s population, in developed and developing countries, would like to kiss Naom Chomsky goodbye. ASAP
Unfortunately, that’s not entirely accurate. I’d agree that a large number of people detect a degree of intellectual bullshit in ALL academics but I don’t think that Chomsky stands out from the crowd. The plain fact is that for most people his writings are impenetrable gobbledygook. Unfortunately Chomsky remains highly regarded by a certain class of people who leave university and enter public life.
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2005/11/forandagainstchomsky/
Chomsky is a linguist. What special insight into climate science does one gain by studying linguistics?
It is simply advocacy of a means to an end. Having risen to a higher echelon, while working and promoting within a democratic system, they find themselves somewhat ‘limited’ in further advancement. In order to achieve that advancement they must reject the ‘old’ system that they benefited from and replace it with a ‘new’system more to their liking… what is always forgotten is that this ‘new’ system would never have allowed them to rise above in the first place.
New to the site, really like it, will be back! All the best… Jeff
About a decade ago I believed what I was being told about AGW. Then I decided to check for myself. Among the many sites that I went to for information was the green-agenda.com. Below is the first thing I read there.
“The common enemy of humanity is man.
In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up
with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming,
water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these
dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through
changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome.
The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”
– Club of Rome,
premier environmental think-tank,
consultants to the United Nations
There are many more quotes from vested interests there. All with the same tenor.
I am not a scientist. You don’t need to be a scientist to understand the agenda. I am not a conspiracy theorist. You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to understand the agenda. It is all out there for all to see. Increasing numbers of us do see.
It seems that people like Hansen and Chomsky et al, no longer even care to keep their agenda for the abolition of democracy and the furtherance of global government hidden.
However, I do think their outpourings can only help the (slow) progress of the realists cause. They are throwing caution to the wind and revealing their true colours. This is the result of desperation.
The more these watermelons rant on, the better. Let them split themselves down the middle.
This is the same Noam Chomsky who once admirably declared: “If you don’t believe in free speech for those you despise, you don’t believe in it all.”
How disappointing.
Hard to believe this is the same man who co-authored ‘Manufacturing Consent’ (which ought to be required reading for skeptics). He has to be willfully blind not to see that AGW is the biggest example of mnufactured consent in a generation (at the very least). For all his famed intelligence, I am shocked at the intellectual laziness on display here. To dismiss meteorlogists as pretty faces on TV would be the equivalent of saying linguists are just people who can speak a couple of languages.
Personnaly, as a skeptic I’m glad to see what the limits of Chomsky’s tolerance are. For the man who has spoken up for neo-Nazis, holocaust deniers, has argued that the Khmer Rouge have been misrepresented and attacked the anti-Serbian bias of the Western media, we as skeptics are beyond the pale.
As someone else who read ‘Manufacturing Consent’ I totally agree with you, it is hard to believe that Chomsky has become so reactionary and sclerotic in his thinking.
I think his problem is that politically he is left-wing in a doctrinaire kind of way – he believes in, and subscribes to systemic explanations for events and systemic remedies for any ill. Are there blizzards in America this year? Then it must global warming, caused by capitalist over-consumption, it couldn’t possibly be, y’know, random weather, as it has been for as long as the earth has been spinning. Sheesh!
I would say the other thing about Chomsky is that, try as he might, he cannot help but fall into the world-view of the elitist intellectual, surveying the lumpen masses from his ivory tower. To be fair, you can see in his interview that he wants to still talk of “people” rather than “the masses” but he makes comments to the effect that the media is wrong to present both sides to the argument, because this will just confuse people – as though they are incapable of sifting information themselves and have to be served up little niblets of pre-packaged truth.
A perfect example of a clever guy entangled in the systematic, doctrinaire thinking of Marxism. The people are wrong, therefore they must be ignored.
Donna, I agree, it is distressing to see someone of Chomsky’s stature taken in by an ideology which shares so much with the ideologies he has spent a lifetime combatting. Chomsky is not a doctrinaire Marxist. He is a libertarian. He spoke up for the rights of a University Professor not to be sacked for his political views. He spoke up against the exaggeration of Khmer Rouge and Serbian crimes. He is a savage critic of the imperialist tendencies of the American liberal élite. His political views, however eccentric, have always been backed up by carefully referenced research. He really has no excuse for this outburst.
geoffchambers says at 9:05 am:
“Donna, I agree, it is distressing to see someone of Chomsky’s stature taken in …. He spoke up against the exaggeration of Khmer Rouge and Serbian crimes. ”
As one who lived and worked in Phnom Penh and SE Asia, and spent a lot of time and effort trying to understand what happened there, I must inform you that your statement about “exaggeration of Khmer Rouge crimes” and your sympathy for Chomsky’s views on that topic are both unspeakably grotesque and horrifyingly ignorant.
Let us never forget that the KR founders and leaders were all Paris-educated Khmer communists, who cultivated their genocidal progrom under the tutelage of the Communist Party Of Indochina, which happened to have been created and was run by Ho Chi Minh. It has been speculated that Pol Pot and his sick demented cronies also were striving to “out-Mao Mao” by one-upping the Cultural Revolution with their own “Year Zero” (that was the actual KR term).
To ascribe the autogenocide and savagery of the Khmer Rouge to **anything** other than the lengthy, 30-year cultivation of Communist totalitarian ideology and practice by Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, Khieu Sampan, Ta Mok, and the rest of these degenerate “intellectuals” and is just sick, sick, sick.
And frankly, that’s how anything said by the esteemed Professor Chomsky should be viewed. His contemporary evasiveness and defense of the KR tags him forever in history as man who was and remains an evil and immoral degenerate, effectively a defender of genocide and mass murder.
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TDK says:
“The plain fact is that for most people his writings are impenetrable gobbledygook.”
No need to actually subject yourself to his writings — there exists a good simulation, the “Chomskybot” ( http://www.rubberducky.org/cgi-bin/chomsky.pl)
Chomsky, define Human. In, or out, of the context you placed it in.
You’re a cunning linguist so that shouldn’t be too tricky.
The kissing bit, for me however, is a non-starter.
As much as I admire your tonsil-tangling abilities, your intellectual halitosis being, at least, in direct proportion to your disabling senility is a sufficient deterrent to my participation.
Noam maybe just enjoys the discussion he generates. He gets to have a personal laugh (as in he has a warped sense of humor – look how I can get people upset). More likely he is a “true believer” and that is a high better than any pill he could take; it means, to him at least, I know better and those other silly things that walk this planet are clearly beneath me. Figure he could have at least refined the message after 40 years of predictions have failed to even come close. The great opiate of all religions such as his – I am above the fools – very good for the ego.
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