Naomi Klein smackdown (of, not by)

[yesno]

I love a good smackdown.  This one's not as funny as the Friedman one, but it's thorough.

http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=69067f1c-d089-474b-a8a0-945d1deb420b

[Oogie]

Fuck TNR.

[yesno]

Fuck TNR.

Maybe.  But pseudo-thought like Klein, as dogmatic as it is ignorant, is worse than reflexive liberal contrarianism or center-leftism or third way-ism or whatever TNR thinks they are.

[Oogie]

Fuck TNR.

Maybe.  But pseudo-thought like Klein, as dogmatic as it is ignorant, is worse than reflexive liberal contrarianism or center-leftism or third way-ism or whatever TNR thinks they are.

How about arrogant neo-con shill-ery?

[Bryan]

I haven't read Klein's book, just read reviews and seen the short film. But from what I know of it, her ideas ring more true than the TNR review's ideas.

May well be that my pinko prejudices are clouding my reading of this, though.

[yesno]

How about arrogant neo-con shill-ery?

Arrogant, yes, but do you really think that TNR is "conservative"? They were dead wrong on the Iraq war, but they're still pretty left of center.  Plenty of people to the right of me are still "liberal."

Brandishing them with a disreputable ideological label just seems to me like a convenient way to justify not paying attention to them.  Meanwhile, articles like the one I linked to are a necessary corrective to smug totalizing pseudo-intellectuals like Klein.

[yesno]

I haven't read Klein's book, just read reviews and seen the short film. But from what I know of it, her ideas ring more true than the TNR review's ideas.

May well be that my pinko prejudices are clouding my reading of this, though.

What kills Klein for me is mostly the same kinds of things the reviewer points out.

Conservatives (of the non kooky religious type) with whom I disagree are not evil.  They're just wrong.  Maybe they have the same values as me and they're wrong about how to fulfill them.  Maybe they just have different values.  But smart and good-hearted people can have disagreements without demonizing each other.

Plus, whoppers like calling the Cato Institute "neoconservative" just show she doesn't have the basic knowledge of the political scene that you'd expect from someone, you know, writing a book.  The Reason magazine libertarian types did a better job of opposing the Iraq war than, say, Hillary Clinton.

[buffcoat]

I'm a liberal in plenty of other places on the Internet, but I always wonder if I'm not the most conservative regular FOT poster.

[yesno]

I'm a liberal in plenty of other places on the Internet, but I always wonder if I'm not the most conservative regular FOT poster.

Not if Tom counts.

I'm politically eclectic in that I've been accused of being both a Stalinist and a Rockefeller republican.  A dogmatic pragmatist.

I actually know and work with with plenty of Republicans, which is why naive bashing of them as if they're just some monolithic force of evil bugs me.  I try to know people from a wide variety of walks of life.  I don't think your average Daily Kos poster really thinks that's valuable.  Trust me, the naivety of most of those on the right of the subtlety and diversity of liberal thought is staggering, but if liberals are going to parade about as if they're the smart ones I think it's not unfair to expect better of them. 

And here is a pretty good left wing takedown of right wing know-nothings (the kind that think that socialism=Stalinism, basically):

http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=992

It's not as humorously written, though.

[SJK]

Fuck TNR.

Maybe.  But pseudo-thought like Klein, as dogmatic as it is ignorant, is worse than reflexive liberal contrarianism or center-leftism or third way-ism or whatever TNR thinks they are.

Funny, I would never think of Naomi Klien as not genuine...in any topic that she might like to investigate. Fences and Windows, No Logo and various articles for print seem extremely well done. I have Shock Doctrine sitting on my coffee table back home. Look forward to reading it. It will be interesting to reference the notes from the article you linked when I get around to reading the book.

I think she's brilliant, we need more people like her!

[yesno]

I think her reportage is great.  I enjoyed No Logo when it came out.

I just think she is unwilling to examine her assumptions about what makes her opponents tick. The fact that she can't even keep straight who believes in what is just the most obvious symptom.  Plus, she's an ideologue, which is dangerous.

Maybe stuff like Shock Doctrine serves some kind of purpose in the grand scheme of things.  That doesn't mean it's not tendentious hornswaggle.

[Shaggy 2 Grote]

I've been staying out of this thread, because I haven't read Shock Doctrine yet and I glazed over at that TNR article almost instantly.  I actually like that Franklin Foer guy who is (I think) the new editor in chief, but I pretty much agree with Grimcock - TNR is all about finding intellectual justifications of power for me.

Klein has sounded pretty credible in interviews on the book.  If she's actually saying that there's some kind of conscious conspiracy between Milton Friedman-style neoliberal economics, the CIA, and clueless 50s mental health professionals, well, she's probably wrong, but I don't get the impression that that's what she's saying.  And honestly, a lot of neoliberal economics (like in Chile) has clearly been evil by any objective measure, regardless of the personal morality of the people behind it.

[yesno]

It comes down to this, JG:  she doesn't bother to see a difference between the neoliberal economics of the Chicago School and Friedman and Cato, and the very un-neo-liberal neocon crowd.  If you oppose the wanton use of military force, you should talk to and form strategic alliances with those folks, not treat them as though they're something they're not, or come up with some fancy intellectual dance as to why being opposed to war is really being in favor of war when you are otherwise pro-business. 

To me, this is just a factual error of a most basic kind which tells me she's not terribly interested in seriously understanding the opponents she is writing a freaking book about.

The other point she makes in the book-- that people take advantage of terrible circumstances to rush through political change-- is correct, but hardly a new phenomenon or limited to one group.

She imputes bad faith to her opponents, not a conspiracy.  That just bugs me.

[yesno]

I guess I should clarify that I *also* impute bad faith the many on the right who saw it as justified to lie or bend the facts in order to achieve an outcome they thought was desirable.

I just think it's odd that she doesn't see a difference between that crew and the economics guys.  Particularly when, it can't be stressed enough, those guys oppose the use of military force to achieve political ends.

I also see a difference between liberal interventionists and neocons.  There's a lot of crossover when it comes to the use of military force and foreign policy, but I still see them as distinct.  The fact that TNR finds "intellectual justifications for power" doesn't make them neoconservative.  By that standard, the Clintons would be, too.

[buffcoat]

Oh, dear, why am I wading into this?

I equate Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein (and Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon) with Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell (and David Horowitz and Michelle Malkin).

Boil it, boil it, boil it and every one of them has the same argument: things are bad for you because of THEM.  You aren't happy because of THEM.  THEY are bad, and THEY prevent you from being good.  THEY are morally bankrupt and out to get you.

The only difference is who THEM is.  It's the reason that so many people on the extremes of so many positions used to be at the EXACT OPPOSITE extreme.  They're addicted to blame; who is getting blamed is almost an afterthought.