Who knows? Who cares to find out? Chomsky is an ideological windvane.

He’s… fine when he’s criticizing the US empire but there are much better sources out there and Chomsky is only useful for his prominence but much like Richard Wolff he’s got some really trash takes (barely) below the surface.

Is it because he’s an op? Is he a reflection of the ideological hangover from the New Left era? Is he just an opportunist? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Chomsky is what zero materialism does to an MFer. Here he is, literally arguing for MLism in a completely different context:

I’m not in favor of people being in cages.

On the other hand I think people ought to be in cages if there’s a saber-toothed tiger wandering around outside and if they go out of the cage the saber-toothed tiger will kill them. So sometimes there’s a justification for cages. That doesn’t mean cages are good things.

State power is a good example of a necessary cage. There are saber-toothed tigers outside; they are called transnational corporations which are among the most tyrannical totalitarian institutions that human society has devised. And there is a cage, namely the state, which to some extent is under popular control. The cage is protecting people from predatory tyrannies so there is a temporary need to maintain the cage, and even to extend the cage.

🥴

Wait, Orwell like the guy who wrote about the horrible dystopian nature of the Soviet Union and how totalitarianism is propped up by state propaganda while he spent his time working for the irl British version of the Ministry of Truth and who snitched on socialists who were “anti-white” and “possible homosexuals” to the British government?

The same guy who explained that Europe was a powderkeg around the time of the Spanish Civil War and that the Catalonian armed forces had abysmal training and discipline but that Stalin was “inscrutable” for not wanting to continue throwing materiel at a situation that was openly hostile to the USSR version of socialism and for not wanting to escalate the Spanish Civil War into a regional European war or even a world war because the USSR was still rebuilding from a disastrous world war and an equally disastrous “civil” war/proxy war?

That George Orwell??

Went on a reporting spree a while back when there was yet-another Pinochet/helicopter meme video and all the comments were like “Better dead than red” and advocating for torture and expressing the desire to do this themselves and shit.

You can already guess that the admins couldn’t see any validity to the claims about inciting violence, can’t you?

Getting banned from Reddit is like receiving a restraining order from the local sewage processing facility.

Sucks to hear that you got banned without cause, especially given how cautious you were to avoid trouble, but take it as a good indication of how cynical Reddit admins are and how they will take any measures to ensure that the discourse on reddit will never be revolutionary.

Also to cash in on the high prices.

I’m no investment banker but it doesn’t take a genius to understand “buy low, sell high.”