Influence has nothing to do with it. Philosophy and science are both influential but they’re two different things.
I’m not sure I understand what point you’re trying to express.
Getting back to the OP, I know very little about his linguistics, but people I trust say he’s made a contribution, so I believe them. But since you’re interested in politics, I’ll comment on that.
I think he’s an arrogant fool who has no ability to see the forest for the trees. He has tons of criticism for the democracies of the world, especially the US and Israel, but almost nothing bad to say about tyrannies like North Korea or Syria.
As for evidence, I haven’t seen it. Perhaps you can cite somewhere that he shows convincingly that Saudi Arabia is better on human rights than Israel or that Russia is better than the US. Please, no cherry picking, something that Chomsky is great at.
To be honest, all I really know about his politics is that they are very far left. I’m mainly familiar with his name through my undergraduate degree in computer engineering. His study of formal grammars certainly gave him a place among the list of “Who’s Who” in computer science, and forms a fairly important part of any CS undegrad’s introduction to formal language theory.
(That’s not to say his politics never came up in CS classes – one of my professors once pulled a hilarious visual pun in a data structures class by using a photograph of Chomsky to illustrate the concept of a Leftist Heap… :D)
It would be something of a hijack to open up a debate on the long-standing issue of to what degree are the “soft sciences” like linguistics and sociology the same as the more traditional sciences like chemistry or physics.
I wouldn’t call anyone a “douche bag” simply because I’ve taken one linguistics class. I have a masters degree in linguistics and I can still appreciate Chomsky’s contributions to the field.
But I agree with you that humans aren’t inherently (that is to say, physiologically) predisposed to certain grammatical structures.
I’m not really a Chomsky fan - my opinion of his political writing largely mirrors Richard Parker, i.e. he’s a smart guy who cherry picks and slants his arguments too much to be fully credible. However unless he is praising North Korea or Syria relative to countries like Israel, I don’t get your objections above.
No one should be required to give equal time to all the ugly nations in the world, just in order to be taken seriously in their criticisms of the less ugly, but still potentially flawed. Or to put it another way, responding to criticisms like “the United States has engaged in too much torture of captives” with “yeah, but look at how much worse things are in Russia”, is a shitty way to argue. The conditions in some authoritarian hellhole are largely irrelevant to such a discussion. Saudi Arabia could be ( pretty much is ) 20x worse than Israel in terms of human rights abuse - doesn’t mean Israel is above criticism or that SA should be a reference point in anyway at all. The issue is presumably whether Israel or whoever has any human rights problems that could be corrected, not whether their neighbors have more.
I can agree to a certain extant. But if your goal is to address the problem, rather than to choose particular targets for your disapproval, then at some point you should acknowledge where the problem exists in its totality - even if you choose to focus your efforts on addressing the problem locally where you can have the most impact.
If you say “Torture is bad in the United States and torture is bad in China and torture is bad in Iran and torture is bad in North Korea and torture is bad in Nigeria” then you can legitimately claim that torture is the issue you’re addressing. But if you say “Torture is bad in the United States and prison conditions are bad in the United States and poverty is bad in the United States and homelessness is bad in the United States and lack of health care is bad in the United States” then it can be questioned if your real issue is with torture, prison conditions, poverty, homelessness, and lack of health care when it appears you’re just looking for reasons to say the United States is bad.
Or just that the US has a lot of problems that need to be addressed, should be addressed and can be addressed. Meanwhile Burma is a bit beyond the horizon for most.
I certainly have little time for habitual bashers just looking for an excuse to piss on their favorite target(s) ( and I’d agree that Chomsky sometimes qualifies as such ). But I see these shifting the goalpost arguments used too often in debates as an obfuscatory tactic and they irritate me. There are times where it is legitimate to point out hypocrisy or milder forms of error by making such comparisons. But more often they seem to me they are used as a blunt instrument to try to discredit real criticisms.
In addition to that, there’s the fact that North Korea doesn’t care what you think. By their nature, democracies have to be at least partially concerned with how their citizens (and to a lesser degree, citizens of other countries) feel about their policies. Dictatorships, on the other hand, do not give a shit. Saudi Arabia isn’t going to change anything because some American linguist whined about it. But if that same linguist can get enough people pissed off about an American policy, the government is going to have to react in some way.
So do the unibomber’s. In fact I’m far more of a fan of Kachinzky (spelling?) than Chomsky.
Also, Chomsky is a triabalist.
Actually, if I had the opportunity I would punch him, hard. An absolute twat of the first order.
I understand that his work in linguistics and grammar is important though, if not quite paridigm-shift level…
I love Chomsky. He tells Americans uncomfortable truths ,which pisses off a lot of them. He is extremely smart and what he says is almost always the simple truth.
Well said, thanks for saving me the time and doing a better job than I would have
I’m a Salvadorean-American that fled the civil war in El Salvador in the 80’s. Chomsky got my attention when he appeared as one of the few voices in academia criticizing the actions of the USA regarding El Salvador.
Of notice was a debate Chomsky made with John Robert Silber, then the President of Boston University and a member of the Kissinger Commission that diagnosed a security threat in Central America.
http://www.chomsky.info/debates/1986----.htm
On a later article, Chomsky reports that he got the name of the newspaper wrong, it was La Cronica, not that the El Independiente got it better:
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/198801--.htm
As I only can speak for what he is saying regarding El Salvador, it is enough to say that I can confirm that Chomsky was telling the truth.
I learned then that in the USA people that tell inconvenient truths can be vilified so much that it becomes a “fact” that they are not reliable while their critics, at least on this instance, that lie with impunity on national television, can remain respectable and retire rich with the help of people that willfully and forever continue to deny the truth.
John Silber continued to be an asshole against anything that smelled leftist at Boston university and in May 10, 2006 it was reported that he got a golden parachute of a compensation package, that was worth $6.1 million in 2005. AFAIK none on the mainstream press ever took him to task for defending the sorry regimes of El Salvador in the 70’s and 80’s.
IIRC Even in* Manufacturing Consent* that point is made by mentioning (and showing with images) how Hitler was evil with the killing of the Jews, that acknowledgment was mentioned as reply to a critic that was saying to Chomsky after a lecture (Paraphrasing here) that “you only condemn Jews in Israel! what about the evil things others are doing to them like Hitler? Why you never talk about it?”
Of course he mentioned that in the Q&A after the lecture (But this acknowledgment was shown in the documentary) and in other occasions, but of course the mentioning of that totality is usually forgotten by many critics.
I had to post again because I need to mention a bit that enhanced the good opinion I have on Chomsky. (I would have to acknowledge that he is lost when he has to summarize his points)
It is his now great bitch slapping of the 911 conspiracy theorists (even to the ones on the left):
Part one:
Part two:
This bit is notorious for pointing out that 9/11 allowed the Bush administration to justify the heavy handed war against terror and things like the Patriot act, but Chomsky also mentions that authoritarian governments and dictatorships like Russia, China, Indonesia loved the war as they then ramped up their efforts to repress and eliminate their oppositions and the US could not protest much because those governments just said “Hey, we also have to defend against the terrorists!”
But Chomsky then **defends **the Bush administration by rejecting in very strong terms the madness of the conspiracy theorists that blame Bush for 9/11.
Politically, he’s got one and only idea: American capitalism and foreign policy are bad. He personifies the adage that when the only tool one has is a hammer, all problems look like nails.
American society? Needs “denazification.”
The Holocaust? The US deliberately delayed the liberation of the death camps.
9/11? Not as bad as the 1998 US bombing of a chemical plant in Sudan.
The war in Afghanistan? The US deliberately intended to cause famine that would kill millions in “silent genocide.”
The UK? A US “client state.”
Jews? “Privileged people [who] want to make sure they have total control, not just 98% control.”
From what I’ve read, he doesn’t really respond to criticism. He attacks critics’ motives and honesty, spins his own remarks to dodge their implications (e.g., “I see no anti-semitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even denial of the Holocaust”), and misquotes others (Moynihan, Huntington). Arthur Schlesinger J.r called him an “intellectual crook” and an “intellectual phoney,” and accused him of “scholarly fakery.”
It’s not so much that he doesn’t give equal time to criticism of other nations. It’s that he says supportive things about other nations that are committing serious crimes. His writings excusing the Khmer Rouge are well-known. Shortly after Syria began assassinating prominent Lebanese public figures ia few years ago, Chomsky said that Syria was facing international pressure because it was “not following U.S. orders.” He’s dismissive of the human-rights implications of the Chinese takeover in Tibet. He’s minimized the Srebenica massacre.
Can one find some bits of truth in his work? Sure. But those grains of wheat are buried in a lot of chaff.
chomsky.info : The Noam Chomsky Website From his website. Actually read what he has to say. He tells truths that make some uncomfortable.
I don’t want to start a new thread, but I hope enough people watch this 7 minute clip, this is Chomsky describing the US political system in the states, which he argues is not a democracy but a Polyarchy:
Opinions please.
He isn’t saying much that I hadn’t thought already, and the idea that there is little if anything different between the Democrats and the Republicans should be blatantly obvious. What is happening in the US is simulated here in the UK, where the two leading parties are merely two sides of the same coin, and whichever side lands, the public are no better off than when they started.