When dung beetles roll dung, they benefit the whole ecosystem, not just...er...I dunno, the elephants? Whatever the equivalent of the Canadian billionaires would be.

IT'S DIFFERENT, is what I mean to say.

Jonathan: please stop torturing that analogy.

...And then there's a dog who agrees with the golden retriever and, uh, another dog who pretty much agrees with everything the golden retriever and the second dog say, but for some reason doesn't like it when the second dog uses a painfully long but (he's certain!) well worthwhile analogy, and the third dog complains, and then because of that the sun explodes and all the dogs die and dog civilization is obliterated just because of the third dog. The End.

Thanks a lot, third dog. Now with dog civilization obliterated the Catofascists will just roll right in and take over. Good job! Why do third dogs hate our freedom?

good grief. blair and clinton pretty much killed the credibility of the third dog analogy. what is the second dog smoking?

When I first saw her review a few months back I considered writing to her to explain that no, the point isn't that you're a liar, but that what you want to say is (in all important respects) what your employers want you to say, and if you were to decide to say certain other things that they don't want you to say you'd be made to understand that those things aren't welcome, and if you kept it up anyway, you'd be out of a job. I entertained that thought for about 10 seconds, and then it left in a huff.

Uhh...no, wait. I mean to say, there was this Australian cattle dog. And I, or I mean he, was going to write...uh, bark to her, and say, look, you're not a golden...chihuahua. No wait, brown. Right. You're NOT brown, you're a chihuahua. No, wait....

And then the very independent dog said, "I can has paycheck?"

Any journalist who believes they are really free to write whatever they want should try submitting a text celebrating the genius of Stalin (for example) to their editor. No? Well, I guess there are limits after all then.

I wonder how she thinks she got her job writing an opinion column in a newspaper. Does she think her employers were completely unaware of what her opinions tended to be, before they hired her?

Was the New York Times not aware of Bill Kristol's politics before they hired him? "Hmmm... seems like a nice young man, I'm sure he must have some interesting things to say, whatever they may be!"

And didn't we have this whole true believer v. liar discussion recently with regard to a certain Kenneth M. Pollack? Score one for "true believer", also known to some as "stupid."

What Ethan said. You beat me to it, you, you chihuahua!+
++

heh. and th'dogs are picked at the pound; domestication and hybridization are long past.

What Ethan said. You beat me to it, you . . . you. . . chihuahua!

I may be a chihuahua, but at least I'm a brown chihuahua.

That's why Diogenese didn't bother looking in the mirror.

I realize my worldview has been warped by years of biology, but I don't understand why this stuff is controversial in the first place. The "freedom" that Heartfield has to "write whatever she wants" is precisely the "freedom" that a particular jackrabbit has to stare down a particular coyote. Of course the jackrabbit could choose to stare down the coyote instead of running away! One might even speculate that the coyote would be fine with that. And yet, for some reason, you just don't see that very often.

It's not even as though the coyotes have to be "evil" or the jackrabbits have to be "cowards" for the system to work the way it does -- they just have to be jackrabbits and coyotes. I blame the decline of science education in the US, and apparently Canada as well...

I was, um, confused by the dog analogy--the real life point that Chomsky makes is easily understood, unless your job depends on not understanding it.

That coyote/jackrabbit analogy is pretty good, though.

Noam and I - a true story

Noam Chomsky and I go back a long way, although not a deep way. In my undergraduate days I took a course from him, and got an A (it was "Intellectuals and Social Change" - a large lecture course - everybody got A's).

On a more personal level, in the early 1970s he and I worked in Building 20 at MIT - it was built of wood during World War II, and was still there three decades later (it lasted until 1998, I've been informed, and has more than one web site dedicated to it). One coffee break time we were both standing in front of a vending machine in the basement, and he asked if I had two nickels for a dime. I did. He acted just like a regular person, not a world-famous celebrity.

He and I have not talked since, but I still consider myself an intellectual interested in social change, and part of the continuing struggle against the MICFiC* - *M ilitary I ndustrial C ongressional Fi nancial C orporate Media Complex, a conspiracy to use, abuse, and confuse the people, to "milk, shear, and slaughter the sheeple", figuratively speaking - except the slaughter is literal.

Donald,

Then there was a ninth dog, who criticized long, confusing analogies involving ants. That's because the ninth dog was a counterrevolutionary who was just begging for a good, long stint in the reeducation camp.

mistah charley,

Have you ever written at length about your MIT years? Between this and Michael Albert is seems like there's a lot to say.

CanWest--proud owners of The New Republic.

Jonathan--

If I understood you correctly, yikes. Or yipyipyip.

(That might have been funny if I knew a standard way to represent a dog's yelp. Grrr.)