MB Civic

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 16th, 2008 at 6:24 PM and filed under Articles, Economics, Energy, Foreign Affairs, Media. Follow comments here with the RSS 2.0 feed. Skip to the end and leave a response. Trackbacks are closed.

One Response to “We Own The World”

1. ben stagg said:

   Chomsky is an infuriating writer. He covers a myriad of subjects in what are exhaustingly long peices. This tends to cover up the points that he is trying to make as well as those half thoughts which he is so fond of.
   An example of half-thinking is Noam’s statement, “So it is reasonable that when British sailors were captured in the Gulf by Iranian forces, there was debate, “Were they in Iranian borders or in Iraqi borders? Actually there is no answer to this because there is no territorial boundary,” Uhh, Noam, they are at sea. Of course there is no territorial boundary. There are, however Iraq waters and Iranian waters, or else the Iranians would not have been able to claim that the British were in their space. This was subsequently disproved by Satelite measurements, which the Iranians had no answer to.
   In the course of chasing his tail around his theme of the US ‘owning the world’, Noam does stumble upon but not directly address a major issue of our times. That is, is it Democratic for a government, once elected to take a course of action that less than 50% of the electorate are in favour of? The Polls that Noam refers to are of course suspect as we have no idea of which strata of socity was asked the questions or how the questions were phrased. It is easy to get what you want out of such Polls. Chomskey’s view is because the majority of popular opinion, (according to these Polls) is not for the government’s action, then society is undemocratic, even though the government has been democratically elected. So rule by popular opinion, not by government is what Chomsky is espousing.
   As I said. This is a big question, but Chomsky’s side-swipe at it is as haphazard as the rest of his diatribe.
   Cool down, Noam. Say just one thing in a properly considered fashion and I will be very intersted in what you have to say. As it is, you are just a dog, barking at the Moon.

   Posted on 17-Mar-08 at 3:02 am | Permalink