Man, I wish I could finish watching this as I also find this to be an extremely interesting discussion. I just can not get past Bucky Fuller's total smug self-satisfaction or his dramamine voice that sends me in to a coma. Still...a very good sift.

I've seen the whole debate several times, and came away with the opposite impression. But I'm curious: when, according to your account, did Chomsky become a "looney?" He's been wrong occasionally, but he realizes his claims strike the average citizen as outlandish, and accordingly goes out of his way to try to provide shitloads of good evidence (thus the oft repeated accusation that he is longwinded). Even when he fails--and I'll say again that I think he sometimes does--he does his best to meet his own high standards of rigor.

What's more, the man is a giant in the field of linguistics. I'm much more familiar with philosophy and economics than I am with that particular area of study, but the impression I get is that much of the work done even today in academic linguistics departments is but a footnote to Chomsky's work from 40 years ago.

Outside the field of linguistics he has, in recent years, provided intelligent criticisms of the underpinnings Evolutionary Psychology, and spoken out forcefully against 9/11 conspiracy theories.

So, he doesn't seem much like a lunatic to me.

violator99, was that a play on names??..you know who Bucky Fuller is right???

I'm an academic, and I have utmost respect for Chomsky as a psycholinguist. It is only his political views that make me class him as a loonie--and really only his manner of presentation of these views. Chomsky himself insists that there is no connection between his work as a scientist or linguist and his political views. He self identifies as a libertarian socialist who sympathizes with anarcho-syndicalism. Someone supporting Chomsky's political views might point out that he does manage to piss off just about everyone. He has a particular talent to piss off the people who might be perceived to be on his own side: from jews who think he is anti-semitic, to intellectuals who see him as anti-intellectual, to anti-war activists who hasten to assure folks that they are not in chomsky's camp (for instance, he was against the vietnam war, but thinks the war was a success from the US point of view). I, for example, sympathize with many of his views, but find his presentation of these views, and the placement of all these views in proximity, don't lead me to want him arguing my case. There is an entire wikipedia article on criticisms of chomsky.

I'm only halfway through and I have some points so far:

My God the guy on the left sounds like a pretentious prick! I won't hold it against his argument, but daaauumm.

I like that Chomsky cuts through the mist of rhetoric with exploratory questions on history and "they" and stuff like that. This is stuff that someone like O'reilly would get away with because no one says anything against him.

Otherwise good debate by very competent debaters.

In my opinion Chomsky wins that argument hands-down.

Leave Buckley alone! He invented the geodesic dome!

Buckley is just a ego-driven thesauruses, Chomsky says it like it is.

IMO Buckley continuously fell back on wordplay, digression and semantics to defend (or escape) his stance. He actually backpeddles so hard that he resorts to calling Chomsky out for "start(ing) your line of discussion at a moment that is historically useful for you". I do believe the whole point of a debate is to present your argument and to back it with facts which support that point. If the facts don't match your argument... well...

Its not as if he was able to refute Chomsky's history. His half hearted attempt to one up Chomsky in that line of discussion ended with Buckley backed into a corner with nowhere to. Instead he resorted to attacking Chomsky for having a well researched argument.

Damn those unfortunate facts.


........



Buckley: "there are people who do believe that america... inherited the responsibility for trying to abort international holocaust..."





Who did we inherit this responsibility from, and what crystal ball are we using to determine what will be a supposed "international holocaust"?

I've never seen more than brief clips of this debate before. I find myself transfixed, wondering what kind of country this used to be if they televised stuff like this...and people actually tuned in.

We really have declined as a civilization.

Still, while I'm no historical scholar, and when they ventured away from WWII and Vietnam, I was lost for what allegorical point they were trying to make at times, the whole thing appeared to boil down to the precursor of this:

http://www.videosift.com/video/Bill-OReilly-cuts-mic-of-retired-Army-Colonel-Ann-Wright

Buckley interrupts, generalizes, minimizes all attempts by Chomsky to categorize different types of intervention as being qualitatively different in terms of their morality (with Buckley even contending that military aid isn't substantially different from economic aid) by calling them "differences in nomenclature".

Buckley has been to school, and his demeanor and vocabulary show it, but his reasoning is just as dogmatic as BillO's.

As far as who won the argument, I think it ended about as conclusively as the video of BillO cutting a mic. If Buckley won, it was simply because he filibustered Chomsky from getting a chance to fully make his point without having to field silly assertions every 30 seconds.

Kinda scary that the country is getting to have this debate again almost 40 years later. You'd have thought we learned our lessons from Vietnam.

I guess they did in a sense. From the point of view of someone who came out of Vietnam thinking it was a good thing until all those damned hippies ruined it by protesting, they've corrected many of their mistakes from Vietnam. A target country with lots of strategic and economic benefits to us. No draft. Big media campaign to build fear of the enemy, and to frame all dissent as "un-American". Censorship of protests. Censorship of footage of carnage from Iraq. Censorship of the funerals. The unloading of the coffins. Message-force-multipliers.

They learned a lot of lessons. Too bad they didn't learn that the war itself won't work.

I agree with the OP that the smarmy Buckley won this one. When Buckley states that Chomsky is being evasive I think he hit it on the nose. Chomsky kept digressing into areas he knew his opponent didn't know and thus the discussion kept trailing away from the original discussion which was has America ever interfered with a country for purely altruistic reasons. Chomsky says that has never been the case but Buckley gets him by pointing out that US and its allies invaded France. Chomsky tries to say it is different than the involvement in the Greek Civil War but Buckley points out that it really isn't. Chomsky is willing to say that the Vichy France (German controlled French puppet government) government was unlawful and should of been removed so the rightful French government can be reinstated. This is very similar to the US helping the anti-communists remove the Russian backed communist insurgents. Both instances have an invading foreign force trying to overthrow the government, and succeeded in the case of France, and the US comes in and helps the sovereign government remove the invaders. The problem is that Chomsky made a blanket statement which is always a bad idea when it comes to anything.

I agree with Netrunner, Buckley was just being facetious most of this debate. I don't believe he actually thought that there isn't a difference between economic support for a country and sending in armed forces; he seemed to just bring it up to sideline the debate.

The France WWII example that Buckley brings up was a total red herring. Chomsky is absolutely correct that it's a different situation entirely to what they were discussing. Fighting an enemy you are openly at war with wherever they have troops is blatantly different from providing covert assistance to an insurgency against a third power who you aren't at open war with (Afghanistan in the 80s for instance), but Buckley tries to pass it off as the same thing.

I think what's scariest about this video is Buckley's apparent conviction that it is right to intervene militarily in another country's affairs if you are concerned about some "future threat." It just echoes Bush's doctrine and reasons for invading Iraq a little too closely...

You all seem to be saying Chomsky won the debate because you agree with him. Well, I agree with Chomsky (here) too, and I still think Buckley, who I find a fascinating worm of a human, won the debate.

In this debate it is Buckley who uses stylistic tricks (dominating the talking time, calling something 'semantical', using big words when little ones would suffice, using run on sentences etc...) to control the tempo and subject. In a later debate between Dershowitz and an old Chomsky, it is Chomsky who keeps dipping into the bag of tricks -- repeating his talking points, ignoring direct contradictions, waving dismissively at his opponent, continually pointing to obscure references. But that is just the subtleties of debate. At the core, he is a pure theorist. Does he believe that a nation-state has the right to go to war ever? I suspect he does, and if we were to have an administration that believed it was inappropriate to go to war ever, Chomsky would attack that position and make very good arguments for war. He attacks whatever the status quo is. It's a service, but it doesn't lead to startling consistency or even popularity with those on "your side." If you are curious about that sort of thing, look up Chomsky's positions having to do with anything associated with World War 2 justifications and the Holocaust--including Holocaust deniers.