Rememeber, when someone asks about your relationship with a known pedo-trafficker, the best response is to say “it’s none of your business.” Very reassuring.
EDIT: Source
Somehow Chomsky thinks that because the dinner is with Woody Allen that makes it better. Oh Noam.
"how dare you accuse me of associating with pedophiles. i associate with academy award winning pedophiles"
"I was simply having a succulent Chinese meal with Jimmy Saville!" :chomsky-yes-honey:
It's super easy to be an armchair not child abuser when hindsight is 20/20, don't be so judgmental
A lot of people seem to think that by tooling around in the upper circles they are somehow fighting from the inside instead of being consumed and coopted by the swamp. Has happened over and over again for centuries.
Apparently the hardest thing is for rich and influential people to do is not hang out around child traffickers.
It probably is quite hard for them, tbf. Every other rich person is a nonce of some description, and the upper classes do insist upon only mixing with their own.
Lmao, it's a better response than Dershowitz saying he kept his underwear on.
When Dersh is in private with like-minded individuals - this never fails to get a laugh...
"So - my underwear was on... On my head!"
Woody Allen
great artist
Noam confirmed to be whatever the boomer version of middlebrow is
To give you an idea of how old Noam is, he was already a fully fledged adult by the time the very first infants of the Boomer generation were being born.
The most charitable, generous excuse here is that Noam heard rumors about Epstein but never confronted him about it because it would limit his access to...dinners with Woody Allen. This is polite liberal society manifested.
There is a 0% chance he never heard any rumors about Epstein or got weird vibes. Anyone you know well enough to privately fly you from Boston to NYC for dinner with celebrities is someone you can ask about those rumors. "Hey man people are saying this stuff about you, what's up with that?" Maybe actually look into it a bit more, ask questions. You are a renowned intellectual after all.
But nope. Can't do that because he might get offended and not let me talk about Annie Hall over scallops for the 300th time. And that's the option where we assume Noam isn't totally down with what Epstein was doing. The boundaries of your ethics are defined by "I don't want to have an awkward conversation with the monster who bought me a $400 dinner"
The man was 86 at the time and frequently fails to have coherent views of anything in recent decades. I think the most generous and also probable excuse is that he's just senile.
I've met plenty of senile 86 year olds and they don't want to take a plane to see Woody Allen; they want to watch Bonanza reruns with a TV tray full of mashed potatoes and gravy until they fall asleep in their chair.
That is almost as bad as when Chomsky unironically called U.S.A. the greatest country on Earth!
honestly, one of the reasons I think Chomsky was not censured was not only his anti-communism, but also at every lecture he'd get asked "ok what do we do about all this," and after an hour or two of detailed accounts of this system lying, cheating, murdering, invading, slaughtering and all the rest of it, he'd just be like "it's still a pretty free place, you can do anything you want, just do whatever." Meanwhile all the people who really tried to do something are a molderin' in the grave, as they say.
almost as bad as the time he called the USSR the most anti-socialist empire of the last century
Mr. Chomsky told the Journal that at the time of his meetings “what was known about Jeffrey Epstein was that he had been convicted of a crime and had served his sentence. According to U.S. laws and norms, that yields a clean slate.”
That is his defense actually.
I don't understand how one can criticize the US so much but then also defer their entire sense of morality to the US justice system. "Ah yes my morality is entirely based on what the US justice system decides and if they decide he is clean then he is clean."
I can see many people saying that, but not an "anarchist".
He doesn't have any real excuse and this is the first thing he can come up with, blame someone else. I don't think he actualy believes this, imo he is not that stupid, but given the situation this is really the best defense he can come up with.
I actually think he feels entitled to be friends with anyone but he is so old this is the best rhetoric he got. He could easily avoid most of the backslash by just admitting it was a mistake etc etc.
"If there was a flight, which i doubt ..."
how tf do you forget having dinner with Jeffrey fucking Epstein of all people? was chomsky swimming in those circles so much that he can't tell individual dinner dates with the various swine apart in his memory?
Did Epstein fly me to dinner with Woody Allen on his private jet? Gee, I really can't remember every detail. I go on private jets with international pedophiles all the time.
“If there was a flight”
There was a flight
Unless Chomsky is flying private all the time which I doubt, 0% chance of forgetting that