Hey, I appreciate your enthusiasm, but maybe I can come back another time when I can respond properly? I already compared Chomsky’s response to right-wing responses, and I feel like parts of my response are getting ignored and the claims being made are getting a bit out of hand given the context. At this point it feels like communication isn’t happening between us, and usually that’s a sign that this isn’t going anywhere helpful, for either of us.

I want our time together to be mutually useful. I’m not here to defend Chomsky, I don’t even agree with Chomsky on many points, as I’ve already tried to communicate. I just can’t spend the time unpacking claims that he’s a tankie, an enlightened centrist, committing “both-sides” errors, etc. I feel like I mentioned casually that I’m a leftist and a libertarian socialist and now we’ve gone down this rabbit-hole about how Chomsky is actually maybe kinda like a tankie or like Trump or Tucker Carlson because he criticizes the U.S. and NATO handling of the situation with Russia (and maybe worse things than that, to be charitable to your view).

I hear what you’re saying, and I’m not really saying you’re wrong, I just don’t want either of us to keep wasting our time on communication that is not working.

At this point I can’t tell how you are trying to relate to me or what you think my position is in all of this.

EDIT: I’m saying this because I assume you and I have no major disagreement, just want to make sure you’re not feeling hostility towards me and that we’re good.

Yes, I agree the heart of what it means to be a tankie is to be authoritarian socialist of some stripe; I think that’s precisely why I don’t find the label fitting to Chomsky, given the whole of his work and the kind of political advocacy he has engaged in.

Thank you for the link to the response to his talking points.

As I have said, previous to this discussion I have not known anything about Chomsky’s view on Ukraine.

I did find this, from April 2022, Noam Chomsky: A Left Response to the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

Whatever the explanation for the Russian invasion, an important, crucial question, the invasion itself was a criminal act, a criminal act of aggression, a supreme international crime on par with other such horrific violations of international law and fundamental human rights like the US invasion of Iraq, the Hitler-Stalin invasion of Poland, and all too many other examples.

From this I get the broad sense that Chomsky does not side with Putin nor does he support the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

This is hardly saying much, since seething reactionaries like Jordan Peterson have said similar things, decrying the invasion of Ukraine while defending and rationalizing Russian interests.

This has long been a problem with the Left since the main geopolitical opposition to the U.S. and Western Imperialist countries have been problematic Marxist-Leninist authoritarian countries like the USSR, China, Cuba, Venezuela, etc.

Though ironically Chomsky was also decried is an Imperialist and liberal for supporting U.S. intervention in Syria to support the Kurdish movement in Rojava, so he has committed sins in both directions (against Russian interests, and for, apparently).

From the May 2022 Open Letter responding to Chomsky’s position there are many claims of positions Chomsky takes in his interviews, but the only quote they provide is about Crimea. Sure, maybe he is wrong about the people of Crimea supporting Russian annexation considering the claims made by the Ukrainians that dispute the Crimean referendum that Chomsky may have been alluding to by his comment. Hard to say, but I at least understand why people might bristle when Chomsky says “Crimeans apparently do like [being off the table].”

It seems to me there is a lot of work to do to sort through all the claims and counter-claims and evaluate evidence and so on.

I can suspect Chomsky is not likely to come out of that entirely clean, and I can understand to a Ukrainian that anything less than full, uncritical support is betrayal enough. War creates a stark psychological reality for the victims; it is for Ukrainians an issue of survival and all this hemming and hawing about larger geopolitical issues and Leftist ideological commitments will just come across as hypocritical to supposed Leftist values, and compromising to the pragmatic goals of resisting the Russian invasion which is pressing, immediate, and traumatizing. It reminds me of Che Guevera who summarily executed a suspected traitor, and was surprised when people were shaken by this. His reality had adjusted to war-time, and he had become so pragmatic he had stopped caring about due process or rights. This is the reality the Ukrainains are in, and we should understand this and be sympathetic to the on-going genocide.

I don’t have the time or space to educate myself on this issue, and I am sorry for that. It may be that Chomsky is like other famous leftists who have taken compromising positions in the past.

Coming to mind for me is Howard Zinn who was so bent on criticizing the U.S. that he amplified Nazi propaganda about the Dresden fire-bombings. I don’t think that made Zinn a Nazi or a Nazi collaborator, nor do I think it undermines his humanistic principles or overall project as a historian. I do think it is unfortunate, that it weakened him as a figure, and so on. I see Chomsky similarly. In his attempt to attack the U.S. he can come too close to defending authoritarian regimes. (I don’t know whether that’s true with Ukraine, it’s just sounding like it from what you are telling me; I’ve had the thought previously about his support of China.) Still, I think in the context of his ideological commitments those compromises make sense even if they are flawed, problematic, or simply built on lies that are convenient to authoritarians. The politics are messy and none of the sides are morally righteous even though that’s not how it feels.

I do not expect figures like Chomsky to be right about everything. We could be having a similar discussion right now about how Kropotkin is a whatever-disparaging-term-you-wish because he supported Western entry into World War I.

Some figures might be more compromised by others, but I don’t think Chomsky or Kropotkin are compromised to the point of figures like Lenin, Trotsky, or Stalin who each proclaimed ideals of communism and did much more to destroy those ideals.

Still, I am sympathetic to criticizing Chomsky where he is wrong, I just don’t have the time to figure out exactly what sins he has committed with regards to Ukraine, as plentiful as those sins may be.

Sorry, I haven’t heard about this; do you have a source where I could follow-up?

Generally I think of “tankie” as a pejorative for those supporting the Soviet Union in their authoritarianism (literally supporting the Soviet tanks that crushed the 1956 Hungarian Revolution). “Authoritarian” Marxism is rather broad, so maybe I would feel a Maoist, Leninist, or Trotskyist could be a tankie depending on how they relate to those views.

It is strange to me that tankies stan for Putin, considering Russia is no longer even pretending to be Marxist.

I have seen Chomsky provide some pretty bad arguments on various issues, and I don’t entirely agree with him on everything. I have noticed Chomsky consistently takes an antagonistic position against the U.S. and the West that I broadly agree with, and it’s a complicated position to take because in global conflict there is a notion that there are two sides and one of them is good and the other bad. To go against the U.S. is often to appear to be supporting the “wrong” side. In some interviews during the pandemic Chomsky condemned the U.S. and the West for hoarding vaccines and praised China for working to provide vaccines for the countries in the Periphery.

There is something to be said about Putin responding to U.S. violations of previous agreements and needless antagonizing of Russia that doesn’t require we agree fully with Putin’s narrative. This isn’t just a tankie position, as it is a position I have heard articulated in peace conferences by professional philosophers who were clearly critical of the Ukraine invasion but still wished to contextualize the conflict in the broader post Cold War world where the U.S. had a chance to sustain peace but choose needless provocation anyway. It seems unfair to not to call out the U.S. for those provocations, and the predictable resulting conflicts, but that’s not the same as saying Putin is justified or that his narrative is worth supporting.

I also admit I just have not done the kind of reading on the situation to be able to properly evaluate or defend these kinds of claims, so I apologize for not being able to speak with any real substance on the issue. I know it’s an important conflict, but a lot has been going on with me personally and there is only so much space I can dedicate to education, especially education on difficult topics such as war.

Either way, when I say Chomsky is an influence, I mean this broadly and not specifically that I endorse all of his viewpoints.

Chomsky has spoken against the gay rights movement as creating too much division among the working class, for example, while my life personally has been deeply impacted by the gay rights movement and I think his evaluation might be a bit off. I can be sympathetic to the point he makes, but I think he is too quick to dismiss the significance of these social movements.

I am an ethical vegan and Chomsky has responded to questions about ethical veganism with fallacious whataboutism reasoning, essentially arguing it’s not a cause worth engaging in critical consumerism and boycotts over because there are larger and more pressing issues. I used to be caught in that whataboutism thinking myself, but what I eventually realized is that being a vegan for me did not take away from any other cause or purpose, and was in most cases not even an inconvenience, and is something that increases enjoyment and health in my life as well as being a minimally better choice ethically. Maybe it’s not that way for everyone, since I already cooked most of my meals, but I can say being a vegan seemed most impossible right before becoming a vegan. After a month or two I realized veganism wasn’t much of a sacrifice at all, but to the contrary resulted in a kind of renaissance in my cooking (translating to more enjoyable meals, and much better health).

Yes, I’m also a “left of liberal” person, and also not a tankie (not a “Marxist-Leninist”, Maoist, etc.).

Generally I like labels like “libertarian socialist”, or what Lenin would have pejoratively called “left communist”. I find inspiration in Chomsky, Bookchin, Kropotkin, Proudhon, etc.

In the U.S. I get the sense that most vegans are liberals (in the American sense of generic social liberalism, rather than the broader global sense of seething reactionary capitalist, though they are often more similar than not), but it’s not uncommon to find a consistent radical niche among vegans in the U.S. (sorta like in the punk subculture, though less so with vegans).

Yeah, the Left is dead in America. Most people here don’t understand basics about politics or history, and the language almost feels intentionally manipulated to prevent understanding. “Liberal” only means “the left” to most people, and the idea that liberal could mean anything else is suspicious and considered wrong. The idea that “conservatives” are also under the banner of liberalism is also not commonly understood here.

Anyway, interesting. Thanks for the articles!

There’s a growing rift between the Lemmy developers and the team at lemmy.world. The developers, whose political views differ significantly from many in the Western tech sphere, run lemmy.ml with a distinct set of principles. The arrival of a large number of new users, many with different viewpoints, led to tensions and even bans.

What are the different viewpoints, or if you don’t want to say, is there somewhere that these differences are explained? Just curious.

I’ve subscribed to the new community on the new instance - thanks for the heads up!

exactly; there will always be piracy as long as piracy is needed, a post-piracy world is a utopia, even in the worst dystopia people find ways to “pirate”

yesss, it was so good; I made the dough with freshly milled wheat berries, with sourdough, and with beer instead of water. It was delicious and nourishing on its own tbh.

haha, I can confirm it was delicious; however, it was maybe too rich with the fried tofu, I might try a different chkn substitute next time. I would also use less dressing or use more lettuce (too much dressing contributed to excessive richness as well).

I think the tl;dr is along the lines that low-effort demands for a recipe are annoying and shows a disrespectful attitude of entitlement.

I think this is talking about people who just drop a single word “recipe?” and expect OP to provide a recipe on the spot.

This is especially a problem when OP is sharing pics from informal home-cooking where they may not have a recipe, and in that context the “recipe guy” is acting as though they are entitled to a recipe, and that means entitled to OP’s labor to produce a recipe where there isn’t one already.

It’s a bit like how you expected someone else to provide a tl;dr for you instead of reading the relatively short article yourself or using a tl;dr tool to summarize it for you. You are not putting in much of the work here, putting the work on someone else (usually OP feels the greatest responsibility to these kinds of requests, and over time the interactions can create a pressure to just not share because they don’t want to disappoint people).

I thought this was interesting, from just below your quote:

When he did put up the odd pescetarian dish, he felt uncomfortable promoting it. “I do believe that people eat way too many animal products. I want to get more people to just eat less animals.”

omg 🤦‍♀️

Thank you! Is there a reason Dale Earnhardt is in these memes? Is he a leftist Nascar driver? (Maybe your video will answer my questions, but I don’t have the time to watch an hour long video essay right now, though I’m quite interested and hope to in the future, thanks for the link!)

I see he died in 2001, so all the reasons I could think of as to why he’s in two memes representing the Left are falling short …

I’m out of the loop - who is the person with the “Plus” hat? Maybe the same person as in this meme?

Yes! I do think it’s usually physical books, and books I have grown overly attached to reading, where I can’t bring myself to finish them.

Asimov’s Foundation trilogy comes to mind, I had a physical copy that had the whole trilogy as one book, and just as the third book was coming to a climax I quit reading it and shelved it. It’s been so long I barely remember the plot now, lol.

All good points! I have the same tendency to pick up and drop books based on mood and what’s going on in my life. I recently just picked back up Sapolsky’s A Primate’s Memoir which I had abandoned years ago after reading roughly the first half. Picking it back up, I enjoyed it so thoroughly I became a bit avid in my reading and finished the rest of the book in a week or so (which is rather fast paced for me).

I like the metaphor of reading being like listening to the radio. I often feel guilty for dropping books or not powering through (there are many, many books I have read the first quarter or so of and shelved with the intention to finish another time). Probably healthier to have a more free and less “driven” mindset towards reading books.

Sometimes I drop a book because I enjoy it so much I don’t want it to end, I want it to always be there and to relish it later. This is a bit silly - there are always other books, but I also will forget the plot over time and eventually the book will be enough like new that I can enjoy re-reading it.

Thanks so much! I can confirm, it was delicious.

That seems like a wholesome perspective, thanks for sharing it!

People lie because they want people to think they are smart.

I remember when I was a kid, I was amazed by my grandmother who could finish a whole novel in a few sittings across a day or two when she would come and stay with us. I once mustered up the courage to ask her how she learned to read so quickly, and she explained that she doesn’t actually read every word, but just scans for major plot points. I felt silly, and unsure how to respond - it seemed to me she wasn’t reading, but I didn’t want to imply that. lol

She wasn’t trying to appear smart, I think she just didn’t want to suffer the boring parts, so she scanned ahead to the juicy bits. That’s such an interesting and different way of approaching reading than I have, I’ve only recently started to skip an introduction or preface if it didn’t seem crucial to the book, something I would have previously considered antisocial or rougish, haha.

I’m using an ancient Nexus tablet with the Android app “MoonReader” (one of the only apps I have paid for); I would prefer a different setup, to use a FOSS app or not use a tablet, but most physical ereaders seem to have issues with PDFs, no?

I would want something I can just load files on (no walled garden); I currently use syncthing to transfer books to my tablet.

That’s an interesting perspective, as I have always felt insecure for being a slow reader. I feel like people in my world see it as a sign of being less intelligent, and while I would like to think slower reading helps with my comprehension, I also just feel like it’s not much of a choice for me (I mean, the alternative to slow reading for me would be something other than reading, like scanning; it seems people who can read faster than me are somehow also more competent or intelligent).