I’ve often thought that to e a good investor, it helps to have above average intelligence but not too far above average. If intelligence translates to seeing farther than the crowd, you want to be able to see a little farther than the rest of the crowd, but not so far that you lose your shirt while the rest of the crowd stampedes around.
Isn’t Chomsky considered a left wing nutjob in the States?
Pretty much. People on the left may actually agree with many of his points but its not at all clear what one can do about them.
That’s certainly true in poker.
Really surprising that people like Noam Chomsky, Oliver Stone and Howard Zinn are still alive in U$A!
I think he’d say awareness of how things really work or events that aren’t well reported is the first step to getting them changed. For example, I don’t think many people consider how a Chinese drone strike on American soil would impact how we feel about China. That’s a very actionable area if you decide that we shouldn’t be sending drones all over the world. But I don’t think that discourse really happens on Fox News – they are too busy yelling at each other about Obama’s birth certificate.
More fuel for the fire:
“Members of the U.S. Senate do not respond equally to the views of all their constituents, according to research to be published in Political Research Quarterly next month. Senators overall represent their wealthiest constituents, while those on bottom of the economic rung are neglected.”
More of an “intellectual”. I’d save the moniker “nutjob” for Michael Moore.
And Howard Zinn’s dead. RIP–but I never liked him either.
If I may paraphrase, “Senators overall represent the constuents who are most capable of donating to their re-election campaign, while those who do not donate are sht.”
And what do you think of Oliver Stone, Greenman72?
I liked Platoon.
Born on the 4th of July was okay.
That’s about all I know, honestly.
I think of Chomsky as an intellectual as well, but he’s pretty far out there on the left. I don’t think of him as a nutjob, because there is a logic to what he says that holds together and is fairly internally consistent, but can understand why others would, because his way of looking at things isn’t the only way one can look at things and it can take a while to start to realize at some of the things that sound crazy at first actually aren’t that crazy once you get more perspective and think about it carefully. For most people, that’s too much effort, so it just seems nutty. I myself recall thinking some of his stuff was nutty when I first encountered it, and then starting to think “you know, he’s kinda got a point there” as I watched more and more stuff happen.
He’s kind of the US standard bearer for Foucault’s view of power and how it gets exercised. I find it useful to remember that this point of view is not obviously wrong, but it works better as criticism worth keeping in mind than as a map for how to change things for the better. It’s certainly way farther to the left than I’d ever want to tread.
^Respect
Allow me to introduce some of the lefty works from Oliver Stone
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comandante
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking_for_Fidel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_of_the_Border_(film
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Untold_History_of_the_United_States
^ This thread is getting boring. Left wing, right wing, OK. Although respect for bchad’s knowledge.
I wonder if Chomsky’s editor tells him “I am going to correct your grammar, heh heh.” (Lame CS joke.)
Or how MSNBC, huffpo, moveon.org, etc… rarely talk about the merits of US drone strikes? It certainly needs to be questioned and monitored, but I often find the main thrust is simply because they’re killing people and it makes us look bad. Well who are we targeting? People who are pretty much hellbent on the destruction of the US and if they could have it their way, anyone that doesn’t agree with their mindset. Additionally, what is a realistic alternative to addressing this? Do we send in a full scale army? We know exactly how well that worked out (see Iraq, Afghanistan, etc…). It’s a much cheaper way of dealing with the enemy and it probably saves many more lives.
So the China vs. the US isn’t really comparable. We aren’t hellbent on the destruction of China and it would be a really stupid idea on their part so why would they do that? I get the point that we all need to remember we are targeting real people, but the argument that drones should be stopped/banned/etc… is a non-starter.
^I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again.
If the drones/NSA/IRS stuff had happened while W was still POTUS, then MSNBC/HuffPo/Moveon would be having a field day.
Not saying that any of the above is necessarily good or bad, but the difference in how the media treats it would be comical if it weren’t so sad.
I agree that MSNBC is onesided, but the liberal side has to have something to counter the Fox BS, and in my view, that’s what MSNBC’s function is.
The problem with always trying to look at all sides in a balnced manner is that it means that the center of gravity in the debate gets pulled to wherever the extremists want to go, so the left has to march out their extremists (which actually aren’t that extreme if you compare it to other countries) just so that the center of debate can remain somewhere vaguely sensible.
^ I disagree. When the extemists are trotted out, the population turns into a bimodal distribution. You are either a liberal or a conservative, and the law of the excluded middle says that a balanced person gets no voice at all.
At first glance, I thought that the left has more extemism than the right. But then I started thinking.
The only left-wing nutjob I could really think of was Michael Moore.
But the right has Rush, Michael Savage, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, Lynn Wooley, Brent Bozell, and many more that I’m sure I’m missing.
Maybe left-wing extremism just tends to be more “intellectual” in nature, like Zinn, Chomsky, Bertrand Russell, Karl Marx, Keynes, Krugman, and Hitchens all come to mind. (I’m not sure that I would classify Hitchens as “left”)
EDIT - by the way, it shold be noted that three of the above were never American at all, and five of them are dead. I probably should have come up with a better list.
Krugman is definitely left, but he doesn’t strike me as “extremist.” Nor does Stiglitz.