re: #194 William Barnett-Lewis

It’s sad when Chomsky is the better of the two - at least he’s always been the same kind of idiot rather than changing with the wind to make more money.

Chomsky, in contrast to Greenwald, is terribly clever in the way he constructs his arguments. Obviously the starting point for his opinions are the same as GG’s, namely that the US and its foreign policy in particular are the source of most of the ills that afflict the world. But Chomsky justifies his lack of criticism for regimes like Russia’s, Venezuela’s and Iran’s by saying his sphere of attention is the West whereas those other countries must rely on homegrown dissidents.
The problem with this is that if you can’t bring yourself to heap scorn on all state players, if indeed your problem is with the abuses committed by government, even if only for the sake of intellectual consistency, you’re naturally ignoring the broader context of international relationships and varying mitigating circumstances.
In the case of the NSA, the argument that the US shouldn’t compile communication metadata for national security reasons only makes sense if we insist that America has an unopposed global hegemony. Clearly, any domestic surveillance program must be balanced and have adequate oversight, but given the methods used by actors like Russia to actively suppress dissent in their own countries, the argument against the US rings a little hollow.
The only conclusion one can reach from this is one many here have arrived at already. The positions people like Chomsky and GG hold sometimes have merit, but the obsessive focus on activities in the US, while ignoring entirely developments elsewhere reveal their actual motives.
At least Chomsky has been consistently blame-America-first.
GG is a fucking windsock.