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Notes -
An Epstein files dump earlier this week revealed a picture of Noam Chomsky and Steve Bannon together chumming it up. Chomsky had his arm wrapped around Bannon and they seemed pretty jovial.
I'm struck by this. On one hand it's great that these guys can put aside their differences and shoot the shit. Listening to the other side is an important tool for converging on the actual truth. +1 open mindedness.
On the other hand what liars. Is politics actually just Kabuki theater to the elites?
Yes
But I don't think the shock at this case is based in a good model of who Bannon and Chomsky are. Bannon has always been, or had pretensions of being, a real serious intellectual, who reads widely within academic texts, which means reading a lot of leftists any time since, what, Aquinas? Steve Bannon has definitely read and admires Noam Chomsky's work. Bannon has expressed his admiration and desire to imitate Lenin, you think he'd draw the line at Chomsky?
Chomsky and Bannon share a lot of analytical agreements about the nature of the political establishment, and about American foreign policy over the past hundred years. Their disagreements are actually a lot more minor than the disagreements between either and other Epstein buddies like Larry Summers or Bill Gates. If the guest list at that party was Bannon, Chomsky, Summers, Gates, Clinton, and Epstein; it's pretty obvious that Chomsky and Bannon would get along better together than with anyone else at the party.
Rather I think twitter turbolibs who are surprised about Chomsky and Bannon getting along are shocked because they haven't read Chomsky and just think of him as a harmless mascot of the generic academic left, not the hardened anti-establishment freak that he is; and they haven't read Bannon and assume he's just a MTG or Boebert style airhead, not the hardened anti-establishment freak that he is.
I've found often that two people can sometimes agree strongly on, to use a turn of phrase, the diagnosis while differing quite a bit on the course of treatment, as it were. It can be refreshing to be around someone that sees the world the same way you do, even if their idea of what should be done about it is questionable.
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