What Chomsky does is impeccable scholarship, but then he inevitably seems (to me!) to overreach on the conclusions. I don't know if it's blind spots or not. As

What Chomsky does is impeccable scholarship, but then he inevitably seems (to me!) to overreach on the conclusions. I don't know if it's blind spots or not. As an example, I do not hold that any colonialist explanation for US involvement in Vietnam is necessary. There's an awful lot of ... circumstantial evidence to suggest that, but I don't know for a fact that anyone in the US explicitly wanted to do it for that reason - it's much more likely that simple anticommunism suffices. After all, weren't the Chinese, in very complex ways, just wanting to "colonize" Vietnam through Ho Chi Minh? But behind that is the message that power corrupts, and on that point, Chomsky is spot on. But I happen to think it's more about the powerful being constrained by circumstance and resources than by them simply being arbitrary. We have ample evidence of this from LBJ's White House tapes. But that is perhaps my bias and blind spot, and maybe he's right. Climate change is different in that cheap energy props up people who struggle economically in the US. So that's why I don't like carbon taxes as well as a solution.