For the record, on reflection, I think it really is the sort of random thing someone still in school would latch onto, and not a good indicator for Qin being a troll.
It just seemed so out of the blue in the other thread.
The typical teenager is literate, and able to read about things that happened in the past. And Chomsky is still alive and writing, and as John Mace has shown, still active in contemporary political life. Plus, we pretty much know where Qin got the reference from, someone mentioned Noam becoming Prez in an earlier thread.
I had a friend like Qin in HS. His parents were hardcore conservatives and he was fairly bookish, so he spent a lot of time reading about political theory and such and trying to get us to debate the Regan Presidency (which had ended more then ten years earlier) with him.
So I don’t really have any trouble believing Qin’s a teenager. I think its a not unusual ‘type’, sort of the conservative mirror of the overly earnest teen that wants to debate America’s oppression of Latin America or whatever and knows who Kissinger and Howard Zinn are.
Right. I didn’t even know who Curtis LeMay and Qin Shi Huangdi were before he took those names, but I have certainly heard of Chomsky in passing, both as a linguist and as a liberal thinker who shows up when people want a liberal thinker.
It just seemed weird that out of all the historical figures Qin has heard of, Chomsky is the threat he named.
Ah. Well, I used to half-think that his name was Curtis, and before he out of the blue decided to use a Chinese conqueror’s name he was referenced in other threads as Curtis. I was trying to indicate, through allusion to the historical record of old posts, the identity of* this guy, this guy who uses other guys’ names.*
'Cause you know the kid will Sean Combs his name again.
Quizzle my Shizzle, Huangdizzle.
Exactly. If he’s not a bookish socially awkward teen who’s into right-wing politics, he’s doing a damn good imitation.
He always pings my “Oh good, someone got into Rand in junior high” radar.
So were mine, when I was that age. I read a lot of MAD Magazine trade paperbacks as a kid, picking up political and cultural references from decades earlier. I had at best vague knowledge of the so-called cultural touchstones of my generation… Culture Club and Cyndi Lauper, I guess… I never watched or was interested in watching the then-nascent Canadian equivalent of MTV, and I’d never heard of Kurt Cobain (supposedly the “minstrel of [my] generation”) until his suicide hit the news.
So like Curtis, I was also an out-of-time teenager. Fortunately for me, I wasn’t also an idiot, nor was I spoon-fed with whatever cartoonish religious fundamentalism his parents forced on him.
I always picture him as a little kid in a suit that the republicans have dressed up and taught to recite talking points and then fawned over him.
I suspect he is seeking the approval of his father.
Liberal.
Reading “Qin Shi Huangdi” and trying to figure out how to pronounce it is annoying. I just mentally skip over that mess and replace it with “Curtis”. Name switchers can eat a dick anyway.
Anyone who can crack jokes about Trotskyists is over my head.
Well, you might have heard of Chomsky, but you clearly don’t know very much about him.
There is, in terms of modern American political discourse, almost no area in which Chomsky could reasonably be described as a liberal. In fact, Chomsky spends almost as much of his time criticizing mainstream liberal and Democratic positions as he does criticizing conservatives and Republicans. He has, on many occasions over the past four decades, made clear that liberal ideology is a central cause of many of America’s most problematic policies and political developments. He would explicitly reject any assertion that he’s a liberal, and his politics place him firmly on the fairly radical left of American politics.
Also, he very rarely “shows up when people want a liberal thinker.” He is almost never interviewed by mainstream current affairs shows, news programs, newspapers, and other media outlets. Most of Chomsky’s political essays appear in explicitly alternative, progressive, or leftist publications, and most of his public speaking engagements are to community-organized groups in places like churches and halls, or university campuses.
Ah. Despite being a linguist’s kid, I fear my longest encounter with Chomsky was probably watching the movie Lake of Fire, wherein he took what I recall as a liberal position on that issue. I will accept that he is an enemy of classical and mainstream liberalisms, fair enough.
Libertarian Socialist, apparently.
Chin Shee Wong D, I believe. Also, I think you meant to say name switchers can fuck their moms, no?
You can eat a dick also. Plenty of dicks to go around.
Well a Berraism actually is a koan, when you think about it.
After all, he was a yogi…
I don’t really buy that someone is “fake” just because they’re under the age of 18 and know things that happened in the past. I consider myself extremely well informed about WWII and I wasn’t alive during that time.
When I was a teenager I read about history almost obsessively. At that age I latched on to certain historical figures as well. Especially some of the “bad guys/conqueror” types of history (Napoleon, Hitler, Genghis Khan…and some other egregious figures like Nero and etc.) I think that’s really pretty common for a teenage boy, you read about a person who basically conquered all of Europe in a few years time and it’s hard with a boy’s mind to not be fascinated by that. As you get older I think that fascination goes away and you start to focus a lot more on the failures of these historical figures and then eventually you evolve to a point where you recognize that any great figure of history is a collection of disparate recollections, successes and failures and that there are no “supermen” figures just men who achieved a lot through a combination of luck and aptitude.
When I was in Jr. High I thought Hitler was basically an “evil genius” who was supremely gifted at running a country and waging war but obviously a bad guy. As I got older I learned that Hitler was good at seizing and maintaining political power, but much of Germany’s military success had nothing to do with Hitler and in fact many of Hitler’s decisions were key in Germany’s downfall. As for running the country, that was a combination of alliances with big industrialists and later good management by figures such as Speer, but it was all sort of an illusion built on a foundation of shaky financing that even if not for the military defeats would have lead to massive government financial collapse.
As someone who disagrees with Chomsky on pretty much everything and thinks he engages in some really shameful rhetorical sleight-of-hand in his political writings, I will give him credit for absolutely living up to his pledge to keep his work in linguistics and his political commentary separate. So it’s easy to miss one if you only focus on the other.
You just had to go and Godwinize the thread, didn’t you. :rolleyes: Now what more can the rest of us say? 