What I refer to in the example of super-wealthy foundations supporting leftwing causes, I mean that this illustrates how the MOST wealthy actually LIKE to support political trends that reinforce the status quo and lock potential future competitors out of their markets. Hernando Desoto coined the term, “The Glass Bell Jar”, to refer to the phenomenon of less-well-off people being unable to break through expensive regulatory regimes to start or to expand a business, for example. I doubt that James Wattie and many of our pioneering “rags-to-riches” businessmen could have even got off the ground had today’s regulatory environment applied in THEIR day.

But do you agree with the principle that the State actually has a monopoly on force, and that wealthy interests that collude with this are parasites on the fabric of Statism, rather than true “Capitalists”?

Are you under the impression these discoveries were the results of the reconstituted weapons programmes Saddam allegedly had? Or were they leftovers from UNSCOM’s clean-up in the ’90s?

“All aspects of corruption and abuse of office connected to the Bush-Cheney White House needs to be investigated including the Cheney Energy Task Force, White House involvement in the California electric price-gouging scandal, lying about WMD’s in Iraq, torture, secret prisons, wiretapping of American citizens without court orders, election manipulation, gutting civil rights enforcement, no-bid contracting and more. If needed, we should impeach federal judges whose rulings condone illegal behaviors or grant un-Constitutional powers to officeholders. America cannot tolerate corruption on steroids by any public officials!”

Can’t find anything there that I’d disagree with myself!

(1) I was responding to your misreading — you said “Jafapete, the key word is “believe”, when the lie did not say anything about “believing”.

(2) The lying statement (once again, sigh) is “He has weapons of mass destruction”. In addition to not being able to read two lines (see (1) above), you cannot tell the difference between the plural and the singular form of the word “weapons”

No wonder you are so easily duped.

Could you give a reference for that? I’m interested.

Do you realize on what a flimsy hinge you are hanging your argument? If you are going to be so anal about it, he only needs ONE missile for that statement to be accurate and not a lie.

And whoops … as Democratic Talk Radio (And a number of other sites indicate) yes, he did have them. Including Sarin and Mustard gas. Go do a bit of research.

You’re referring to “corporate welfare”? Yes, that does occur.

You say that all force that prevents people from bettering their own lot is wrong. I suspect most Western liberals (in the technical sense) would agree with you. However, if I try to better my own lot by taking your car, presumably force that prevents me from doing that is right. What if it’s a car you haven’t used in years, and it’s one of 20 you own? Presumably force that prevents me from doing that is still right. Why? Because what counts as right and wrong is intimately tied up in what counts as “yours” and “mine” – notions that are not physical laws of nature, but are treated as such because we seldom imagine any alternatives.

So while everyone likely agrees that “all force that prevents people from bettering their own lot is wrong”, they do not necessarily agree on what is an acceptable form of bettering your own lot.

I don’t identify with Chomsky enough to feel a need to defend anything he’s said that I disagree with. I’d have to see the “ultra-right in many respects” quote in context, and the only mention of it I can find on the Internet is Horowitz quoting it without context in a piece called “The Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky”. Apparently I’d have to go buy a book called The Common Good in order to read it in context and discover in which respects he considered Leninism to be ultra-right.

One could consider the broader context of Chomsky as an MIT professor who’s not actually stupid, and assume that he could explain the statement if asked, rather than assuming he’s said something patently contradictory.

Your references to “sinister forces” and the like suggest to me that you read Chomsky and Herman very differently to how I read them, and certainly your interpretation of their ideas is very different to what I am saying. Calling the inevitable subjectivity and bias of journalists “sinister” is like calling a widespread urban legend “sinister”. It’s not evil; it’s just a social phenomenon.

It’s a useful tool for explaining why, for example, the upcoming MMP general election in New Zealand is treated by the media as being a competition between Labour and National. No one plans that in dimly lit back rooms. Nor is there an evil Two Party Spirit floating around New Zealand. It’s just the interplay of journalists who work for editors who need to sell advertising and so need readers whose attitudes inform journalists.

Certainly there are some conscious manipulations of the public by spin doctors and the like. Orwellian events like renaming the War Department to the Department of Defence are obviously done with the public perception of the Government in mind. But even then it’s not sinister. It’s just people doing their jobs, responding to focus groups and polling, someone comes up with an idea, it goes through channels and is implemented, and everyone gets paid and goes home to their families and has dinner.

PhilBest,

Well, it depends on what you mean by equality. My desire is not for exact equality of wealth, and so my problem with capitalism is not that it leads to inequality per se. (That’s not to say that I’m not critical of the degree of inequality that capitalism gives rise to, globally.)

But while you say that equality is not possible without force (and I agree, assuming you mean a kind of communistic exact distribution of wealth), I would add that the degrees of inequality in the world at the moment are also not possible without force.

“yelling at eachother”

yeah, more like yelling at [an] echotheatre, but, i’m curious about NZ, which for me has been kind of off the map so far, 1/10th the size of say, Israel, in my imagination.

Odd place…oddly familiar…

And strangely fascinating.

Viva third parties!

Frankly I differentiate between even libertarian socialists and Noam Chomsky – so keep that in mind with the following response – which actually has the added benefit of still being on the thread topic. Also the Hurricanes have just lost to bloody Crusaders, as expected, and it’s Friday night……so….Chomsky (groans).

There are no people sitting around in dark rooms deciding what will or will not be in mainstream media.

Alice, just this once I’ll jump down the rabbit hole.

You must have missed it above, so I’ll repeat it for you:

Right back at ya!

It was as if the press in America, for all its vaunted independence, were a great colonial animal, an animal made up of countless clustered organisms responding to a single nervous system.

From which you should take away the idea that I do not think the media treatment is a conspiracy. More like a case of group think, but more on that in a second……..

Chomsky’s point is that this is not the result of a conspiracy, but the natural organic development of context, bias and thought in general.

Organic? Like “countless clustered organisms respondng to a single nervous system”? Well, there could be something there in terms of what social scientists call a cascade:

We like to think that people improve their judgment by putting their minds together, and sometimes they do. The studio audience at “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” usually votes for the right answer. But suppose, instead of the audience members voting silently in unison, they voted out loud one after another. And suppose the first person gets it wrong.

If the second person isn’t sure of the answer, he’s liable to go along with the first person’s guess. By then, even if the third person suspects another answer is right, she’s more liable to go along just because she assumes the first two together know more than she does. Thus begins an “informational cascade” as one person after another assumes that the rest can’t all be wrong.

Because of this effect, groups are surprisingly prone to reach mistaken conclusions even when most of the people started out knowing better, according to the economists Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer and Ivo Welch. If, say, 60 percent of a group’s members have been given information pointing them to the right answer (while the rest have information pointing to the wrong answer), there is still about a one-in-three chance that the group will cascade to a mistaken consensus.

Cascades are especially common in medicine as doctors take their cues from others, leading them to overdiagnose some faddish ailments (called bandwagon diseases) and overprescribe certain treatments (like the tonsillectomies once popular for children). Unable to keep up with the volume of research, doctors look for guidance from an expert — or at least someone who sounds confident.

But somehow I don’t think cascade theory was what Chomsky and Herman were on about in 1980, although they were certainly confident, and god knows there are any number of people who look to them for guidance.

Well, no, it doesn’t turn into a conspiracy theory – that’s precisely Chomsky and Herman’s point.

Not for nothing is Chomsky a professor of linguistics with 70 years of debating experience. He knows that to be labeled as a conspiracy theorist is toxic to any argument put forward, as one is thrown into the world of the Grassy Knoll and the more recent ‘Truthers’. And when you’re running a theory about how the media ‘manufactures’ consent it’s a knife edge debating existence.

Which is why we get all that faux (!) stuff about …..natural organic development….. It’s his standard approach; dress up in professorial language, what are actually very old, very crude theories about why one’s idealogy has failed to make headway with the masses.

But while the theory and it’s langauge steer that fine line it actually does turn into a conspiracy theory when one tries to apply it in the everyday world. I demonstrated part of the conspiracy theory aspect with my example of how it could apply to the media treatment of Obama:

……if that is the view taken then even if the fabulous Mr Obama is elected President nothing will really change – which then explains why those US editors whose political leanings are towards a conservative/corporate bias have been so willing to allow all those journalists to genuflect in his direction in so many articles over the last couple of years.

And then there’s this:

It’s unconscious self-censorship ……..

Nice to see libertarian socialism still tipping its hat to classic Marxist analysis with the old ‘unconscious’ bit. I’ve lost count of the number of dreary tracts I’ve read whose main thrust is that we’re all moronic “puppets of a sinister force” – save for the heroes who write this stuff of course. Somehow, through feats of great willpower and enormous intellectual resources, they have managed to avoid becoming puppets, while the rest of us poor dumb bastards wallow in our ignorance, yada, yada, yada,

There’s even one example of it in this thread and I’d like to think that you skipped over that with as much distaste as I did. But how different is it really from Chomsky’s theory that the ‘sinister force’ actually exists inside each one of the journalists or all of us, and that we’re not conscious of it.

…….and the nature of market media…….TV One’s 6pm news doesn’t sit down and decide to dumb down New Zealand and distract them from serious issues by playing a full overseas piece on Britney Spears. It’s just that people like watching that stuff, so they’re unlikely to turn the channel to TV3 while it’s on…………They do it because their job is to give people stories they’ll expect and want to watch.

You mean that the media markets consist of people who want stuff and there are other people who try to figure out what they want and give it to them.8O Man, that is one powerful ideology – I wouldn’t like to go up against it.

Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity are great theories but even they break down in the first few microseconds of the Big Bang. The theory of Manufacturing Consent does not even rise to that level – it creates a Gordian knot right at the start where we cannot disentangle the why and how of people who want stuff from the why and how of people who try to figure out what they want so that it can be delivered to them.

Tough problem – especially since people apparently don’t want to have libertarian socialist theories put up to them 24/7 – or even once a year, or once a decade. Which leaves us with two possible explanations. Perhaps some ‘ruling elite’ are manipulating it all behind the scenes? But even though Chomsky and Herman firmly believe in ruling elites that angle would be so obviously a piece of traditional conspiracy theory that it would merely result in much laughter.
So instead we get …unconscious self-censorship…. and natural organic development of context, bias and thought in general having to be applied to all the participants in the market to make sense of this horror.

The point is not to “deflect criticism of Far-Left lunacy”, but rather to point out that there is no real criticism while any opinions outside of that spectrum are unreflectively dismissed out of hand as being “far-right” or “far-left”

Is that so? Well one of the things I have enjoyed about debating with laissez-faire advocates is that, despite their ideas being usually unreflectively dismissed out of hand, their most intellectual proponents have not developed any thing like MC theory. They’ll bitch about liberal journalists not giving them the time of day and about Joe Public being sufficiently contented with socialist health care and education, with a bit of free market stuff taking care of the plasma TV, to not give a shit about their theories. But that does not even come close to the stuff pumped out by Noam and co over the years to explain why their fabulous societal proposals have also failed to take hold in the minds of the people.

MC theory arose directly out of the wreckage of the late 1970’s battles over the various media reports about the Khmer Rouge. In particular the complaints of the defenders of that particular revolution (Porter, Hildebrand, Caldwell, Summers, et al) that the media – especially the Western media, but also including those notorious right-wingers in Hanoi and Moscow, had been against it from the start and determined to endulge in a systematic process of mythmaking to destroy it.

Chomsky joined in as well, but those complaints were all ad hoc. What Chomsky and Herman tried to do later with MC was to put some Grand Unifying Theory around all the complaints. As such it most certainly was designed to “deflect criticism of Far-Left lunacy”.

Even setting aside those rather shaky roots MC theory must surely be under revision now that the Web has emerged to allow the Great Man’s thoughts to be accessed by millions of the toiling masses and thereby set the revolution in motion.

Therefore, both socialist views and laissez-faire views don’t get even considered. That’s why I referred above only to all political parties currently in Parliament – there is a communist party (I think?) and there are the Libertarianz, but neither have anything more than a “fringe” existence.

And when we apply more Chomskian theory to this what do we find…

……What’s called the left includes Leninism [i.e., Communism], which I consider ultra-right in many respects…….

Damn! So even the ‘socialist views’ – the communist party, that is not currently in Parliament – is right-wing. So while you have two wings that are excluded, Noam actually sees only one wing – his wing, his slice of the compass, the real socialists, the true keepers of the pure flame – that is excluded. You do see how perfectly circular this is do you not? Meantime I’m going to get in contact with Rick from The Young Ones as I’m sure he was a member of an Anarchist Party. I used to consider that just a lovely piece of humour but now I’m not so sure…….

What we have here is less a case of two competing wings of ideaology than a variation on the famous ‘blue pill’ scene in The Matrix – except here there are a bunch of guys yelling at eachother that they’ve all taken the blue pill.

And on that note I see that the 1985 version of myself has appeared in the simulcrum with a message:
“Climb out of Alice’s rabbit hole NOW. Resist urge to return and argue with Chomsky worshippers as you did for five fruitless years”

Not possible to be all of those at the same time.

Also fair enough. Now knowing that, I can easily accept that you don’t think that all capitalists are identical. Similarly, I know very well that there are significant theoretical differences between your ideaology and that of other members of the left.

As you say, the spectrum does not end……..

However, it’s one thing to not “think that and quite another to actually step up and object, particularly when the destruction of low-tax capitalists was long seen as merely one stepping stone towards the classless society.

On the other side, while I admit that I’ve been indifferent to anarchists being excluded and isolated at the hands of communists over the years, it has not been because I rejoiced at the destruction of a group standing in the way of my dream of capitalist domination (I happen to think that we’re trucking along in the direction pretty well, Gramsci not withstanding). No, when that has happened I’ve been concerned because it’s usually a sign that things are going to turn really bad!

Classic case would be Philu’s booting from the Greens. As with you I would disagree with almost everything he puts forward – but the fact that guys like him got booted via the machinations of ex-Maoist Bradford, ex-USSR-slave Loch, and ex-whateverist Norman – that I find very scary.

You are an interesting guy to debate. I think people tend to accept soft-mindedness on Communism because the idea that people could be made equal is a plausible one to unexercised minds. I have constantly argued that equality is impossible without force, and that people cannot sensibly take the ground that they oppose inequality but abhor the abuses of humanity committed over and over again in the name of equality. What do you say?

Those “Bush sucks!” conversations aren’t my thing. It doesn’t particularly bother me either way if Bush explicitly lied about anything. As Tom points out, it’s a luxury of being ideologically outside of the standard spectrum enough to not feel sentimentally attached to the variety of perspectives within the spectrum. Pro-Bush, anti-Bush… They’re brands of a product I don’t feel inclined to purchase, if you see what I mean.

“Capitalism in fetters”, certainly. I’ve similarly called it “being fucked in the arse with lube”. Either way, the capitalism/fucking and the fetters/lube are both so taken for granted that people don’t even realise they’ve agreed to those assumptions. And that includes your concerns about notions of Bush, yes. There is an acceptable way to think about Bush, and it’s usually with laughter.

Kiwi in America, and the others who point out that “Bush Lied” IS the lie, well done. A lot of work there on the background, but does JafaPete and Philu get it? Nah, Bush Lied, Bush Lied, Bush Lied. That’s their intellectual level. Childish chants. Like, Don’t wanna! Don’t wanna! Don’t wanna! Waaaaah!!!!

But more sadly, that is the tactic of the whole b. Left, and more sadly still, it works. All those hits on Google. All those Kiwis with no Fox News or National Review to tell them the truth. John pinko Campbell.

Ryan Sproull, I agree that a broad “capitalist” framework is established in most of the western world. Schumpeter called it “Capitalism in fetters”. But you haven’t commented on the “Bush Lied” issue. Do you see the point that this is typical of the Leftwing stranglehold on the media, especially in NZ, that so many people have ended up believing that simple one-line slogan? Don’t you think this is a dangerous sign, akin to the tactics of Goebbels? We THINK we’re in a nice free, balanced society, but there are straight-out lies that emanate from the Left, that end up getting established in the face of the truth that is known only to a small minority. It’s not just the media, it is teachers and universities as well. You’re an intellectual sort of guy. Do YOU hold with philu and jafapete in claiming victory for “Bush Lied”, after considering the arguments above?

Perhaps, I guess. They’re doing a shitty job of it, if that’s the case. And most politicians do personally pretty sweetly out of capitalist property rights. I find it pretty unlikely that our Minister of Drinks and Nibbles is trying to undermine class privilege.