Personally, I worry more about Benjamin Lee Whorf taking over.
fucking brilliant, that!
I totally Let’s go to the quarry and throw stuff down there’d!
I see you post this phrase a lot. What the hell does it mean? I googled it, and all I found was that it was a line used on a popular sitcom a bunch of years ago.
A good thing; if his politics stunk as bad as his linguistics, he’d be completely sunk.
(For the uninitiated: Chomsky’s linguistic theories are based around the idea of a ‘Universal Grammar’, or the idea that everyone has innate within them a grammar that allows them to learn language as fast as humans tend to. The problem is that he has no evidence of this beyond a handwave like “Humans learn language too quickly and from too little input! I must be right!” and in particular he cannot explain the huge, vast diversity we observe in the grammars of different languages. Basically, it’s crap because there is nothing we could do or discover to get Chomsky to change his mind about it; every new piece of evidence that goes against it in its current form is met with more ad hoc modifications to the theory and handwaving. It’s unscientific.)
You don’t know much about linguistics, do you?
I thought the “is Curtis really a kid?” thing was like asking about Cecil. Possible? Yes. Do some Dopers come up with all sorts of rational and p tlausiblehe he really eaxist? Are some others unconvinced?
But bottom line: whatever. His posts are bland and lack any insight and so are wholly skippable (unless you’re interested in stock right-wing glurge).
It means that Snowboarder Bo is a numbskull. In one of the threads Lamar Mundane linked to, he states that he’s so excited by it that he’ll post it anywhere appropriate. Instead, he’s just posting it anywhere.
Whaddya mean we, kemo sabe? You’ve got somebody in your pocket?
I suppose you could be a linguistics professor who has published at the same level as Chomsky. Are you?
After Qin Shi Huangdi, who?
Cool story, brah.
Good lord, this is a weak pitting.
So the kid knows about one of the right’s most persistent boogeymen, that’s hardly surprising. What you need to understand is that Chomsky is to rightist politics what Michael Moore is to rightist propaganda.
I think he should have switched his username to Buck Turgidson myself.
As for Chomsky, he must be ancient, because he wasn’t all that young when he was making speeches when I was at MIT during the Cambodian invasion large mumble years ago.
I’m an FB friend of Qin. Believe me, he is a High Schooler. And I don’t mean that disparagingly. It’s just that he has enough discussions of high school matters with his friends.
I’m sure it will surprise no one that when I say that I see some resemblances between him & my High School self. In fact, he has a bit more on the ball, not being dragged down with Rapturism.
I suspect he chose the name more because LeMay killed a lot of Japanese in WW2, and not so much for his Cold War activities.
If you pick up any of Chomsky’s political books, like say Deterring Democracy, you’ll see they are fairly routine liberal screeds that hideously overuse scare quotes. If you’re a conservative it’s a logical conclusion that he’d “ruin the country” or whatever.
That being said, Chomsky is about as proportionally relevant to politics as Saul Alinsky, and thus anybody who identifies him as a liberal bête noire is a seriously clueless wingnut.
Just like most of Curtis’ posts.
I believe that he is a high schooler, but I can only get my impression of him from his postings here. He comes across as an alien trying to fit into American Society, but whose guidebook is 30 years out of date and heavily influenced by the Republicans of that era.
All I know is what I read at the college level.
This is exactly why I’m fully prepared to believe he is a teenager. He thinks like a teenager. He *is *bright, but bright when you’re a teenager without fully developed frontal lobes means you can memorize and regurgitate events and biographies from history books quite well. Insightful may (or may not) come with time and physical, mental and emotional maturity. And getting your heart stomped on a few times.
My young cousin is the teenage libertarian counterpoint to Quin. Our Christmas dinner was charmingly full of talk about how the country’s going to heck, politicians are so bizarrely set against gay people and he’s the head of his school’s gay straight alliance and amendments against gay marriage are wrong headed an unconstitutional and the second he’s out of the Navy (he’s entering in a couple of months), he’s moving to Canada and never, ever coming back to the USA, man.
…I mean, most of that, I actually agree with. But these were not the insightful musings of thoughtful person. They were passionate diatribes memorized and regurgitated by a very, very bright young man whose biggest struggle in life so far is choosing between Red Bull and Monster.
My cousin and Quin are both bright. Time will tell whether or not they become wise.