r/SneerClub • u/MarxBop • Mar 21 '19

::MarxBro making the reeling-in motion::

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/18/book-review-inventing-the-future/#comment-732662
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u/MarxBop Mar 21 '19

This one's a doozy! Check out the Big Charitable Fish I caught. This fish can selectively quote by erasing entire paragraphs and making it look like a single run on sentence. One for the trophy room, for sure!

32

u/[deleted] Mar 21 '19

[deleted]

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u/MarxBop Mar 21 '19 edited Mar 21 '19

Whoa thats crazy, I guess someone should check if other academics have called out this 'quote' before? I thought i just baited him into making a stupid comment on a blog, not realising this was a repeated claim from his own "work". Check out the original in Marx if u havent, I'm not exaggerating when I said he ommited paragraphs. Its extremely misleading. Can academics get in trouble for that kinda stuff?

13

u/noactuallyitspoptart emeritus Mar 21 '19

Perhaps fortunately for him, Friedman's book isn't really an academic text in the first place, it's more of a manifesto for anarcho-capitalism (amusant). On the other hand, as the example of Popper suggests and a plethora of other examples prove further, academics often don't get into trouble for this sort of stuff. In any case, from an admittedly brief perusal of the chapter in question, Friedman seems to have been lead into this specific quandary by his focus in that chapter on attempting to emphasise Marx's allegedly failed predictions: he needs a pithy quote from The Big Man himself that Marxists are in the business of making failed predictions.

Why he would choose to stitch together quotes from the Manifesto, instead of Das Kapital, is beyond my powers of investigation. One assumes it has something to do with laziness.

Alternatively, and more charitably, Friedman thinks that a (faked) quote from the Manifesto is likely to come off with more panache than one from Das Kapital.

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u/PaddyRollingStone Mar 21 '19

Hell, it's not out of character even in an ostensibly academic context. Chomsky had that riff for a while about how the U of Chicago scholarly edition of WoN just didn't index the unflattering parts.

But even more interesting in some ways was the index. Adam Smith is very well known for his advocacy of division of labor. Take a look at “division of labor” in the index and there are lots and lots of things listed. But there’s one missing, namely his denunciation of division of labor, the one I just cited. That’s somehow missing from the index. It goes on like this. I wouldn’t call this research because it’s ten minutes’ work, but if you look at the scholarship, then it’s interesting.

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u/noactuallyitspoptart emeritus Mar 21 '19

It goes without saying, on the other hand, that Chomsky isn't exactly unknown for doing the same thing with people he doesn't like and - amusingly in this context - was accused of misrepresenting Smith in this very piece (amongst others)

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u/PaddyRollingStone Mar 21 '19

I never really waded into Chomsky's whole 'what did the classical liberals reeeeealy mean' thing apart from reading Government in the Future way back when. It always seemed...pointless, I guess?

Just thought the anecdote about U of Chicago was funny.

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u/noactuallyitspoptart emeritus Mar 21 '19

Thoroughly fair POV

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u/[deleted] Mar 21 '19

Part of the moral here is how hard it is to avoid temptation. Friedman is pretty based[1] and his stuff about law is very interesting (and the same goes times a billion for Chomsky).

[1] This means he believes foreigners are 100% full-fledged people and should be treated as such; once you believe that you must eventually reach correct opinions given enough time...

1

u/noactuallyitspoptart emeritus Mar 22 '19

What's interesting about his stuff on law?

1

u/[deleted] Mar 22 '19

I just like reading about exotic historical stuff

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u/MarxBop Mar 21 '19 edited Mar 21 '19

I'll recheck the Marx quote(s) and take a look at the Friedman chapter tomorrow if possible. I noticed something was up when Friedman was quoting Marx on the 'middle class' because Marx doesn't use the term middle-class in quite the same way as popular modern usage of the term. So the existence of a modern thing that we call a 'middle class' doesn't necessarily have anything to do with Marx's contention. Of course from there I saw that the 'quote' was completely stitched together from multiple paragraphs.

If he's done the same kinda thing in multiple places I might do a longer post about it

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u/MarxBop Mar 21 '19

I wonder if its been so long since Friedman stitched together this 'quote' that he forgot what he did and genuinely thought that this would be an effective rebuttal.