A clash of world views
Chomsky is erudite, articulate, and unflappable, but Buckley transcends. It is intellectual dialogue unseen on TV today and well worth watching. My 25 year old son was fascinated, people his age now see little of this kind of debate/interview. Interviewers on the major networks today lack the brainpower to even attempt to really explore ideas, and pro and con panel debates degenerate into shouted sound bites, with no one able to moderate the discussion.
A forgotten art
My thread title is in reference to the forgotten art of earnest, intellectual, vitriol free discussion, where-in you always walk away rubbing your chin, not fulminating at the cheap shots or vapid rhetoric which is all that's available today it appears. Susskind, Cabot, Buckley they are gone and are not coming back sadly.
Firing Line cds/dvds were here to fore available through a laborious ordering system at Stanford, the Hoover institute, I am very happy to see them here, there are many others not yet transcribed, and can be found at Hoover as well.
I won't remark on the segment itself, except to say it is very illuminating in that it sketches one of the chasms' neatly the pathos ala conservatism and neo liberalism/progressivism. Enjoy.
A young Chomsky versus the last of the American Intellectual Conservatives
Engrossing. By illustrating the faults of the Truman Doctrine, and the folly of American interventionism, Chomsky shows us just how much of a box the right was in during the 40's, 50's, and 60's. Instead of embracing a Burkean conservatism, and calling for the end of foreign wars, the right in America instead, took up the mantle of furthering the foreign policies of what then was the American left, and then actually extending them to a kind of absurdity. This paradoxical position, was one that Buckley would argue from till the bitter end, and it still resonates today in the neo-conservative movement. Although I believe Chomsky to be a somewhat failed utopian, with his ideas of anarcho-syndicalism, he is probably the worlds foremost intellectual, and whether or not you agree with all his positions, his brilliance is inarguable. The most important thing that this debate illustrates though, is the bankruptcy of the American Right and Left. I miss Bill Buckley. His show allowed for a type...
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