Your link to http://flag.blackened.net/liberty/chomsky.html piqued my curiosity. I have followed Chomsky's work for some time, but I have never really tried to nail the guy down where his personal political philosophy is concerned. I first came into contact with him through his work on transformational grammar, his theories of language acquisition and his theories of mind. It was only later that I read his work in politics and media.

When commenters on this blog use terms like socialism, libertarianism, social democracy, anarchy, capitalism and the like, I try to take the time to understand precisely what they mean. Too many times, I have witnessed heated arguments between two or more people over the meaning of some word or idea, only to realize that they were using different terms to describe similar things, or similar terms to describe entirely different things. After a certain level of frustration is reached, even the nicest people can end up saying bad things about each other's mother.

I went to this link:

http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2007/05/86787.html

and found a fairly interesting discussion of Chomsky's political leanings in the context of anarchism, libertarian socialism and anarcho-syndicalism.

I have to mull this over.

This much I do think. The libertarianism of Lew Rockwell is not the libertarianism of Antiwar.com. No way. And the ideas of social democracy and libertarian socialism have a similar distance between them.

Anarchy as an individual act means one thing. Anarchy as a form of social organization means something entirely different.

And individualism as a synonym for libertarianism is much further away from libertarian socialism than libertarian socialism is from social democracy.

Maybe we need another blog for these discussions in the same way several commenters proposed a new blog for issues related to grammar and punctuation.

Of course, I'm not going to do it. I can barely keep up with this blog.

If there is already one out there, let me know and I'll go lurk.

Conservatives seem to be asking themselves and others the question, "What is a liberal? Am I a liberal? Are you a liberal?" Rather than construct a list of attributes, I would like to offer a short list of familiar names of individuals who are unquestionably liberals:

Franklin D. Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Teddy Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Gloria Steinem, Jimmy Carter, Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King, Virginia Woolf, Joan Baez, Woody Guthrie, Oprah Winfrey, Allen Ginsberg, Susan Sontag, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Hunter Thompson, Gore Vidal, Annie Sprinkle, Andy Warhol

So, if you are currently conservative and wonder if maybe you were actually a liberal all along, compare yourself to these people and if you still think you're a liberal, well maybe you are.

Also, Jesus was a liberal. So was Buddha.

I wasn't responding directly to your post. I was responding to what I perceive as a not so subtle move on the part of a number of disenfranchised conservatives to acquire the term liberal for not so liberal purposes (sort of like what the neocons did when the visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads blew up in the 60s). Those neocon dreams have certainly born some strange fruits, haven't they?

I have always thought that there are two kinds of people in the world. Those who insist that there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don't. I would prefer to think of myself as one of the latter. (I actually think there are about six billion types of people in the world.)

I read the link to Chomsky that you provided. I agree with pretty much everything he says, yet I don't think of myself as an anarchist. I agree with Zinn on almost everything he says as well. I never bothered to ask myself what Zinn's political persuasion is. And I've given up trying to find a name for my own politics beyond the term "liberal".

You shall know them by their fruits. Billy Holiday's rendition of Strange Fruit says it all:

Southern trees bear strange fruit,

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,

Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,

Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,

Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,

For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,

Here is a strange and bitter crop.

That's the kind of thing that forces me to think in terms of there being two kinds of people. I don't want anything to do with the kind of people who would do these kinds of things to another human beings. I want to be completely excluded from their numbers or their names. So, I'll call myself a liberal.

1) Moses was a conservative.

2) After the old Irish saying, "Is this fight personal, or can anyone join in?" I'm with L.W.M. He's passionate, but he never argues just to win. He thinks he's an anarchist. (I think he's a liberal.)

I've been gone all day. I come back and find about a hundred new posts since I left, many of them fiercely debating the gerontology of various age-old political systems. I'm only on page 32 (see Bach's Goldberg Variations) of 42 (see Hitchhiker's Guide) pages of comments, but I wanted to share this before I forgot:

Did you know that this is not only the 50th anniversary of "On the Road" by Kerouac but it is also the 50th anniversary of "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand. At least I think it is. Does this somehow explain the fevered discussions taking place?