William F. Buckley Passes Away & Debate With Noam Chomsky
February 27th, 2008
Today conservative thinker and commentator William F. Buckley passed away in his study at the age of 82.
As a tribute, Andrew Sullivan in addition to writing about the author, posted some YouTube videos of the rightest thinker Buckley taking on the leftist thinker Noam Chomsky. When you spend time studying in a liberal arts focused college learning about media as I did, you spend far more time on the thoughts of those like Chomsky than you do William F. Buckley Jr. With that said my post-college years have afforded me more time to study conservative thought and though I don’t have much experiencing consuming his work first hand, his influence spreads far and wide and ideas have much of what I have read.
So joining Sullivan, here are some moments from YouTube.
Posted in In Other Political News | 2 Comments »
February 29th, 2008 at 1:38 am
Buckley was a windbag who was wrong about everything. Vietnam was indeed evil, even though the chickenhawks were all for it.
February 29th, 2008 at 6:40 am
As influential as good a writer as he no doubt was, many of his intellectual arguments were seriously lacking. Just watching his debate with Chomsky brought that home. What you see in the debate is the debating style of Buckley, not the susbtance. While Chomksy provides direct answers stating clearly why he asserts a certain thing, Buckley is hard to pin down, rambles for long periods without answering anything clearly etc etc. In that one debate you learn almost all you need to know about Buckley. Great on paper but when asked to provide concrete, intellectual and logical reasons for his positions, he was greatly lacking. Although I dont have teh time to get into it here, I would day a large majority of his predictions and assertions can now be seen to be seriously lacking. Influential yes, but that isnt necessarily a good thing!