A few points about, translations & interpretations of, & arguments with a standard exemplar of the stenchful & emetic.
- Para 1: On Weaponised ‘Good Faith’. ‘Many US policymakers … genuinely felt … was a noble thing …’ &c. i) No evidence is adduced to support this contention. ii) The countercontention here - that many US policymakers genuinely did not give a genuine rolling fuck about nobility or any such genuine horseshit but genuinely considered this genuinely mass-murderous action to be in their interests & thus, genuinely, desirable - would surely seem at the very least equally plausible. iii) If the original contention has any truth, given the extreme & obvious facility of human animals at self-justification, it is irrelevant. Depredations are no less depraved if their perpetrators persuade themselves to genuinely believe their own anything.
- Para 2: Dissidence Is a Bolt-On. ‘Chomsky took up a sideline in political writing in opposition to the Vietnam war’. The casual sniggering baiting viciousness of this traducing of a lifetime’s rage & contumely-attracting bravery does not, though it aspires to swagger, rise above the pettily vile.
- Para 3: He Knows What He Likes. ‘[F]avourite Chomskyan themes’. Analysis & critique is driven by personal predilection, not by anything worth analysing or criticising.
- Para 6: Turn Your Frown Upside-Down. ‘It is a cripplingly bleak philosophy.’ That this, for chest-hollowingly vast numbers, cripplingly bleak world deserves a few smilier thinky-thinks is implied; but is not, & could hardly be, argued.
- Para 7: Analysand Be Damned. ‘[T]he irony that he owes his considerable success to the system he despises. Does it bother him, perhaps, that he has lived the American dream?’ The eyebrow-raised faux-cleverness of the final sentence, its case that this lifetime’s radical oeuvre is an Oedipal hissy fit, relies for any effect on readers not pausing over the truly epically idiotic - if calculated - preceding sentence.
