Tuesday, March 30, 2004

Tribulation Force

Kerim Friedman has an interesting post about English teachers in Asia as economic immigrants that I was going to write about (and may still). Through this blogpost, I followed a chain of hyperlinks to the following words.

[A]ll events are now presumed to happen deliberately; cause and effect has been anthropomorphized. In other words, not only is their cause and effect, but also good and bad, with the accompanying praise and blame....[Y]ou also have organizations and interlinking systems that can be penetrated and analyzed, assisted or preempted. You have the whole-hog invention of conspiracies that foment good or evil....I heard this worldview bandied about endlessly in Belfast as a child and was immediately struck by it on reading the conspiracy theories that constitute the bread and butter of Karl Marx. It is this same point of view that Professor Chomsky has at heart. He is a lover and a hater, a pious despiser of the iniquitous, a righteous champion of the noble and the downtrodden....2500 years ago, the more enlightened of the Greek Athenians...realized that events happened for reasons that were often beyond the human capacity for understanding; that events often, if not always, took place due to an internal logic not amenable to such nomenclature as noble or evil. They understood that shit happens. This is a concept too advanced for Mr. Chomsky.

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