Michael J Totten interviews the author Benjamin Kerstein. He begins with the question, “What possessed you to spend three years writing about Noam Chomsky?”

To which Kerstein answers,

Chomsky is an absolutely shameless liar. A master of the argument in bad faith. He will say anything in order to get people to believe him. Even worse, he will say anything in order to shut people up who disagree with him. And I’m not necessarily talking about his public critics. If you’ve ever seen how he acts with ordinary students who question what he says, it’s quite horrifying. He simply abuses them in a manner I can only describe as sadistic. That is, he clearly enjoys doing it.

A little elaboration follows:

He is essentially the last totalitarian. Despite his claims otherwise, he’s more or less the last survivor of a group of intellectuals who thought systemic political violence and totalitarian control were essentially good things. He babbles about human rights all the time, but when you look at the regimes and groups he’s supported, it’s a very bloody list indeed.

And,

He makes people stupid. In this sense, he’s more like a cult leader or a New Age guru than an intellectual… Since he portrays everyone who disagrees with him as evil, if you do agree with him you must be on the side of good and right… I think people come to Chomsky and essentially worship him for precisely that reason. He allows them to feel justified in their refusal to think… His tone is very intellectual, in that he speaks in a very quiet, measured style most of the time. But the content is clearly driven by what can only be called a species of hysteria… He seems to be at heart an extremely angry man, and I would guess that his anger is driven by something that is ultimately not political.

From then on in it gets rather critical.

See also this, by the late Christopher Hitchens. And of course this.

Update, via the comments:

It’s been a while since we’ve had a classic sentence to add to our collection. So here’s one – actually two – from the Observer’s ersatz class warrior Barbara Ellen:

Mocking the posh and smirking about silver spoons rammed into gobs is a comic artform honed by the masses as a response to centuries of oppression. Unlike chav-baiting, which was pure bullying, posh-bashing is part of an instinctive protest against inequality that lies at the very core of sociopolitical emancipation.

Actually, it seems to me the word chav, like scrote, is a favoured working class term, typically used to denote the kinds of thoughtless and antisocial people you wouldn’t want housed next door, or next door to your elderly parents, however modest your means. Which is to say, the kinds of people Guardianistas want us to believe don’t in fact exist. Perhaps Ms Ellen, like Ms Toynbee, feels that people who live in the rougher parts of town shouldn’t have a word to describe those whose behaviour, not their income, lowers the tone or makes their lives a misery.

Update:

In the comments, Min notes that while any use of the term chav is denounced by Ms Ellen as bullying, “posh-bashing” is considered protest and an artform. This is given the hashtag Guardianlogic. Well, it’s also the logic of identity politics, according to which, you must always treat people as social categories, as examples of some put-upon victim group, or conversely, some notional oppressor group. To which, various contradictory and patronising assumptions must be applied regardless of the particulars in any given instance. By this reckoning, when opportunist oiks at my old comprehensive school picked on a new arrival who was well-spoken, polite and somewhat studious, the people doing the bullying were righteous, entitled and “responding to oppression.” Their shoving and sneering was apparently “an instinctive protest against inequality.” But my calling them oiks for doing so is practically a hate-crime. You see how it works?

Oh, and here’s a third contender:

Which would they prefer – the current culture of mild piss-taking or a full-on bloody revolution, at least a full-on socioeconomic overhaul?

Yes, my prole comrades, my brothers and sisters-in-arms, bitching about Benedict Cumberbatch is the next best thing to full-on socialism – and it too will set you free. Because class prejudice is a good prejudice whenever we say it is. However, one mustn’t aim that self-same bitching at one’s Guardianista colleagues, whose own affairs are not to be discussed and any mention of which will tend to get deleted.

Via Simen, Daniel Greenfield talks us through the Victim Value Index:

Historical suffering transmuted into guilt is the gold standard of liberalism, but suffering is relative. In our wonderful multi-everything society, there are so many groups with so many claims to pain. Everyone agrees that the Heteronormative Caucasian Patriarchy of Doom is to blame for all of it, but that still leaves the question of dividing up the spoils of the system and all the privileges to be gained from denouncing privilege. A caste system doesn’t work without priority, and calculating the priority of privilege claims by the perpetually underprivileged is complicated. Without the Victim Value Index, understanding how these priorities work can be confusing, even for liberals. It’s particularly confusing for conservatives and libertarians who don’t understand the system and dismiss it as liberal insanity. It is insane, the way all cultural taboos are, but there is a method to the madness.

A. Barton Hinkle on Obama, pencils and who deserves what: 

A complex society is necessary for the creation of business, but it is not sufficient. Countless people made modern computing and the internet possible. But Elon Musk, not anybody else, made PayPal happen. And even if that were not so – even if Musk’s contribution to the creation of PayPal were no greater than the contribution from Phil, the goateed baristo at Starbucks with the Occupy Everything sticker on his car – Obama’s approach leaves a crucial question unanswered: Why should Phil, rather than Elon, enjoy the proceeds from PayPal’s success? Suppose you sell me a pencil. You didn’t make that. Still, I freely gave my dollar to you. How much right do you have to that dollar? That’s hard to say, but this is not: You have far more right to keep it than any third party has to take it away.

And Glenn Reynolds on two ways to pitch a campaign and Obama’s track record:   

The Obama administration sold its near trillion dollar “stimulus” plan by claiming that without it, unemployment would reach 9% while with it, unemployment would stay below 8%. Despite the bill, unemployment hit 10% and has, in fact, remained more than 8% for the past 42 months. The “stimulus” money, meanwhile, seems to have vanished into a welter of crony-capitalism deals of which the Solyndra debacle is only the most famous. And all that “hope and change” from the administration has turned to “attack and blame” as Obama and his surrogates launch one assault after another in an effort to turn the conversation to anything besides the economy. So much for the promised Bright New Day. With trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see, and the exploding national debt (which Obama called unconscionable when it was about half as big as it has become under his stewardship), it seems time for a Back To Basics approach. And that’s clearly the direction favoured by Romney, the turnaround artist who specialised in taking mismanaged entities and making them work. His choice of Ryan simply takes it to a new level. As Internet humourist IowaHawk tweeted on Saturday: “Paul Ryan represents Obama’s most horrifying nightmare: Math.”

Yes, it’s often fun to watch bluster collide with maths. 

Feel free to add your own links and snippets in the comments.

For newcomers, three more items from the archives.

Crotch Funk as Art.

Belgian performance artists nail some culture into us.

Sweat is a performance piece by Peter De Cupere, choreographed by Jan Fabre, in which five narcissists spend fourteen minutes rolling about and jumping up and down – naked, obviously – while attempting to fill their transparent plastic overalls with all manner of body odour. “The intention,” we’re told, “is to catch the sweat from the dancers and to distil it. The concrete of the sweat is sprayed on a wall of the dance lab and protected by a glass box. In the glass is a small hole where visitors can smell the sweat.” Yes, you can smell the sweat. If that’s not a good night out, I don’t know what is.

Just Thwarted Sperm. 

When being callous and vindictive is a badge of feminist virtue.

Male readers should note that – according to Amanda, her admirers and the ladies at Feministing – you have, and can have, no legitimate feelings on the subject of abortion, even if the images above were of something – or someone – you helped create. Except, that is, for the nasty, misogynist, controlling feelings that Amanda and her peers will assign to you, based solely on your gender. 

Techno, Annotated. 

Goa/psytrance is being repressed!

Dr St John’s more recent and even more ambitious project is Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture. For the heathens among you who don’t already subscribe, and for whom the terms noisecore and bloghouse are just strange and scary words, the Dancecult journal is “a platform for interdisciplinary scholarship on the shifting terrain of electronic dance music cultures (EDMCs) worldwide.” Its concerns are of course numerous and deep. Current gems include Media Studies lecturer Dr Hillegonda Rietveld’s Disco’s Revenge: House Music’s Nomadic Memory, an article rendered lofty by obligatory references to Deleuze, Guattari and de Sade, and which “addresses the role of house music as a nomadic archival institution,” one that is “keeping disco alive through a rhizomic assemblage of its affective memory in the third record of the DJ mix.” Some of you will, I’m sure, feel a strong urge to contribute, thereby helping to expand the boundaries of human knowledge on matters of great and pressing import.

Now pour yourself a stiff one and explore the greatest hits.

Then we get the hubris: 

Psychologists Yoel Inbar and Joris Lammers, based at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, surveyed a roughly representative sample of academics and scholars in social psychology and found that “In decisions ranging from paper reviews to hiring, many social and personality psychologists admit that they would discriminate against openly conservative colleagues.” This finding surprised the researchers. The survey questions “were so blatant that I thought we’d get a much lower rate of agreement,” Mr Inbar said. “Usually you have to be pretty tricky to get people to say they’d discriminate against minorities.”

One question, according to the researchers, “asked whether, in choosing between two equally qualified job candidates for one job opening, they would be inclined to vote for the more liberal candidate (i.e., over the conservative).” More than a third of the respondents said they would discriminate against the conservative candidate. One respondent wrote in that if department members “could figure out who was a conservative, they would be sure not to hire them.” […] Generally speaking, the more liberal the respondent, the more willingness to discriminate and, paradoxically, the higher the assumption that conservatives do not face a hostile climate in the academy.

The incongruity of the term liberal needs no further comment. They’re doing it for the children, obviously.

And speaking of hubris, KC Johnson finds another leftwing academic taking liberties: 

In the winter 2012 semester, [Professor Shorter] taught a course called “Tribal Worldviews”; the course homepage contained a link called “Boycotting Israel.” The course resources page, meanwhile, featured links to the Goldstone Report, to a site on “US Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel,” and (with two different links) to an “Open Letter to Bono Re: Palestinian Rights.” While the Goldstone Report, as vile as it was, at least is an official document, it’s hard to see the course-related relevance of links to an open letter to Bono. And the links to boycott-Israel sites would seem to constitute a clear violation of California regents’ policies that prohibit professors from misusing their courses to engage in “political advocacy.” […] To reiterate: these links appeared on a course webpage for “Tribal Worldviews,” taught by a professor whose academic specialty is a Native American tribe from Arizona.

However, when two dozen current and retired University of California professors enquired as to the propriety of Professor Shorter’s classroom Israel-bashing, they discovered that political activism on the public dime is, for some, perfectly okay. Provided of course it’s activism of a certain political stripe: 

In magisterial terms, the [UCLA Committee on Academic Freedom] proclaimed that “faculty members should be free of such scrutiny and should not have to answer to interest groups outside the university.” UCLA is a public university, supported in part by tax dollars paid by people “outside the university.”

What’s the word I’m looking for? Oh, yes. Fiefdom. As noted previously, more than once, some academics and administrators don’t seem inclined to follow their own stated rules of classroom probity.

In case you’re interested, Professor Shorter received a PhD in the “history of consciousness,” is the author of We Will Dance Our Truth, and is employed by the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance. His faculty page tells us, 

My undergraduate teaching fields include Native American film and video, myths, rituals, symbols, tribal worldviews, ethnographic fieldwork and perhaps my favourite, Aliens, Psychics, and Ghosts.