Chomsky was doing so many podcasts up to the moment he disappeared from the radar presumably due to medical issues. I've seen him going for 2 hours with some nobody with 5K followers, being asked juvenile and stupid questions and answering with the patient of a Saint. He looked quite diminished physically, elderly and frail but mentally he's always sharp and his recall and memory is scary.
I feel that in his later years he made a conscious effort to talk to young people and made them aware of the history and depth of the problems the world is facing, and he used very modern avenues to do so, like podcast interviews. I will always have the highest degree of respect for this man and an admiration for his integrity, sensitivity and scholarship.
I’ve spent so much time watching this kind of content (plus the older lectures that are available) over almost a year of chores, lunches, and walks that it’s honestly bordering on parasocial. I of course don’t regret a minute; if you check these recent videos out it’s clear that he reiterates the same points over and over, but it never quite gets tiresome. Rather it gives the impression of someone who has truly glimpsed the structure of the universe, and thus is consistently going back to those same principles.
Of course, I would recommend choosing “one half of his brain” (his terms) and not mixing the politics interviews with the cognitive science / philosophy ones lol. I haven’t looked for many linguistics talks of his from recent years, but I had the impression he was working on seriously technical stuff there right up until he couldn’t, too.
I don’t know how I hope to sleep after this comment… I guess I’ll do him the honor of trying to rationalize my emotional/ethical interests, and care less about the passing of a world-renowned twice-(happily-)married scholar than the passing of children from war and famine.
I hope he believes in us to finish his life’s work, answering the most fundamental question: “What kind of creatures are we?” He was never able to see his theories in the recent LLM breakthroughs, but we’re in the early stages of the Chomskian era of AI, philosophy, and human endeavors writ large, I think… the ChatGPT outage from earlier this year couldn’t have supported him any better without having said “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” outright!
I love Noam Chomsky so much. To me he is epitome of what a rational caring intellectual should be. Number one, he strives for the truth and while can have intellectual blind spots, isn't afraid of calling them out.
We had him has a guest speaker for an internal presentation at Google and of course we had some hyper-rational libertarian eastern block swe kid who was going to take him down and Noam was super respectful, spared with the kid for awhile and then changed the subject slightly while destroying the libertarian kid's entire argument.
I don't. There are some things out there that are up for debate. But not Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Chomsky, for some weird reason, chose to take Russia's side.
Edit: To be sure, I wish him full recovery and many more happy years.
> We had him has a guest speaker for an internal presentation at Google
Would have loved to be a fly on the wall had he been able to do a guest spot at Google recently.
I'm willing to bet he would've gone off-script and given Google hell for their engagements with Israel and treatment of their own employees who protested.
He is such a terrible person he has his own section on the Wikipedia page for "Cambodian Genocide Denial"[1] and is heavily featured in the page for "Bosnian Genocide Denial"[2]. Chomsky is a disgusting hack who runs cover for any genocidal freak that pays lip service to the hammer and sickle.
He is a genocide supporting cancer. The only thing that he cares is to be against US, so he supports Serbia and Putin. He has no problem to lie and deceive.
I actually emailed Noam Chomsky asking questions about Manufacturing Consent and actually got a reply. I always thought he was really cool for being so accessible to those who just had honest questions. I really hope he gets well soon.
When I was young I emailed him with a question something like "I am too young to have witnessed the events of the Vietnam War, can you please recommend me some reading material or push me in the right direction?"
That question turned into 5 or 6 (long) emails back and fourth that i'll always cherish that delved into his unique perspective on what the war was like as a protestor from the West, which papers got released that actually had some truth in them, among a lot of other valuable insights into the time period I had no access to myself.
At the end of our conversation he advocated finding a group that needs volunteers and effort. He didn't care what group that might be, he only cared that individual political concern of individuals be empowered by the necessary groups and collective effort.
I think that kind unequivocal support of 'being political' is something that is truly special.
I hope the best for him -- I view him as one of the only 'truly accessible' academics in this world; just as happy to slowly and carefully explain his thoughts to 'the rabble' as he would be while explaining the same thoughts to high academia and the press.
Same. I emailed him about whether he'd ever met Margaret Mead, John C. Lilly, or Gregory Bateson in the 1960s while researching my book. I got this reply within hours:
"Afraid I never met any of those you mention, though I’ve followed their work for many years.
I’ve never been close to intellectual elite circles, including people I very much admire."
The time stamp for my email was Tuesday, Nov 26, 2019 at 2:19 PM. It was answered by chomsky@mit.edu at Tuesday, Nov 26, 2019 at 9:29 PM. Pretty remarkable.
I emailed him in ~2012 and got a response as well. Keep in mind, I was not a student at his university and I emailed him out of the blue. Incredible guy!
Same! I emailed him asking for his thoughts on robotics and anarcho-communism and he replied pretty promptly. He said it was an important subject and that he was moving offices (this was his move to Arizona), but I could ask again another time. I never quite had the time to prepare for what I would have asked for, some kind of discussion I could record, which he was doing a lot at the time, but I was very happy just to have gotten a supportive reply the first time.
For anyone curious, here is Chomsky in 1976 discussing the relevance of automation and anarcho syndicalism to modern productive economies:
https://youtu.be/h_x0Y3FqkEI
I truly believe we can build a world where everyone benefits from automation, getting the freedom and time to do what we will that every person deserves. The reason I develop open source farming robots is to explore concepts of community ownership of the means of production and community oriented engineering. Noam Chomsky’s work heavily inspired the thinking that got me where I am today.
The full obituaries and reflections will come later, but the volume alone of papers, essays, books, articles, and interviews he's generated over his 95 year life is staggering.
The man writes faster than I can realistically read, but I still have a full shelf that I have dipped into over the last 32 years. Linguistics to Gaza, one of my proudest moments was once having some wingnut include me on a public list of enemies alongside Chomsky.
Sad news. I do not agree with him on everything, but I found his work and arguments he made a good counterbalance to those who are followers of Edward Bernays and his "The Engineering of Consent".
Speaking of non-political side of him: was not he wrong about "innate grammar" necessary to understand langage? LLM do not have such circuitry, yet they somehow work well...
There have been many attempts to model and emulate human syntactic acquisition and processing, but the general consensus is that it cannot be done without presupposing some mechanism that enables hierarchical structure. The number of tokens a child needs to learn syntax is the tiniest fraction of the amount of tokens an LLM is trained on.
Humans can also lose parts of their language processing capabilities, without losing others (start at e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_disorder), which is highly suggestive of modular language development. The only question on which there isn't much consensus concerns the origin of that modularity. And humans can lose knowledge while still being able to speak and understand, or lose language while retaining knowledge.
LLMs don't have that at all: they predict the next token.
I don't think LLMs have all that much to do with "innate grammar".
"Innate grammar" are essentially the meta-rules that govern why the rules are what they are. For instance, an English phrase can be recognized as valid or invalid by other native speakers according to the rules of the language. But why are the rules what they are?
This is especially puzzling due to the dazzling variety of human languages. And the fact that, after a period of immersion, humans seem to have the natural capacity to learn all of them.
How do LLMs fit into this? Well, I think it would be interesting if we left a group of LLM to talk to each other for 1000 years. Then see if 1) they developed a new language branch 2) that could be relearned by humans through immersion alone.
It's true that LLMs have learned (have they? I suppose that's a loaded word) human languages like English. But it's unclear if they are governed by the same meta-rules that both constrains and drives the evolution of humanities thousands of distinct languages.
No. Innate grammar has always been about how humans aquire language, not how any possible system which understands human language must posses that innate grammar.
Compared to an LLM, how many hundreds of gigabytes of text do humans need to acquire a language? And isn’t that disparity already proof that some sort of innate structure must be going on?
The approach is relatively straightforward. The team began by using a computer program to recreate the network that mushroom bodies rely on — a number of projection neurons feeding data to about 2,000 Kenyon cells. The team then trained the network to recognize the correlations between words in the text.
The task is based on the idea that a word can be characterized by it its context, or the other words that usually appear near it. The idea is to start with a corpus of text and then, for each word, to analyze those words that appear before and after it.
Somehow the transformer architecture does pretty well at this task, and other architectures do not. You could say a transformer has "innate grammar", while other architectures do not.
That an LLM does well at grammar doesn't prove or disprove this possibility. A more poignant criticism of "innate grammar" would be that it's not a hypothesis that can be disproven, and as such not really a scientific statement.
I think the popular perception is that his theory is extremely important, as far as I know the academic consensus is that while hugely influential it is long obsolete.
Intellectual giant whose shadow will be cast deep into the future. I don't need to review any of his work wrt to CS or linguistics to tell you that his legacy will be massive.
I think Manufacturing Consent should go down as one of the most important books ever written in our culture. He was right about much, but wrong about much also.
His beliefs on Cambodia strain credulity and I still have trouble separating that Chomsky, so bent on drawing an equivalence(however valid) between American actions and the Khmer Rouge that he missed the point entirely, and Chomsky the visionary philosopher who I admire deeply.
His thoughts on Serbia/Kosovo, Russia/Ukraine, likely Russia/
Georgia etc have all been problematic too.
Chomsky was illuminating in my personal character development. I grew up in a pretty conservative area, and his name carried a lot of hate like Hillary/Clinton did, but i didn't know why. Later, I saw some of his writings on American interventionism, and I found myself nodding my head in agreement over the mistakes my country/we have made. Later yet, I'm in college going for the math+cs degrees and his stuff on formal languages was probably the peak of my admiration for him... but with the admiration comes research, and perhaps the most important thing chomsky illustrated to me was that you can be a genius, but that doesn't mean you can't be blind, myopic, wrong, an asshole, or ... non-credible.
I don't know why chomsky's beliefs and supported causes are so inconsistent with the morals he pushes, but it's been an exemplar for me regardless -- good and bad, functional and broken.
I grew up taking Chomsky's perspectives on the Vietnam war as gospel. After actually living there for 8 years and talking to many people about it I realized it was a lot less black and white then he paints it.
The US began arming the "Khmer Rouge" (whatever that means) in 1979 as well as protecting them in the UN, so the equivalence seems pretty valid to me.
Not to mention the US 1970 invasion of Cambodia and concurrent CIA-backed overthrow of the Cambodian government, which including shooting dead US students who protested against it at Kent State and Jackson State, or the US carpet bombing of Cambodia during and after Operation Freedom Deal.
All that had to be said, was said. All that had to be said about saying, has been said. If the language of of said, is to be taken as a context free gramar defined by a tuple Y and the ruleset X, then the pumping lema for cf languages applies. Sayer said sad. [Mic Drop]
I still love his debate with Foucault from ages ago. Chomsky speaking English, Foucault speaking French! The subject didn't matter much to me, but the ease they were debating each other is something else.
I watched some of the documentaries such as the ine about manufacturing consent.
What I don’t understand is this: the news agencies don’t report to the government. Then why would they work together with the government to mislead the people? Does anyone know?
Noam is so amazingly smart, he is probably one a billion. Sometimes I am not sure he is right but can’t really formulate why or what is it that I don’t agree.
I disagree with about everything this guy wrote politically. I totally disagree with this guys perspective, it drives me up a wall frankly. But I have always have had incredible respect and think he played an important role in the dialogue. I read everything he wrote, and generally enjoy his writing. The very definition of the constant loyal opposition. Always getting people to think about things differently and with incredible moral courage. I wrote and argued with him and he always responded. We are all better off because of Chomsky.
To contrast a bit with other comments, he is very much disliked in eastern Europe. He was always pushing his multipolar worldview and not respecting that the Poles, Czechs etc. do not want to live under the Soviet/Russian 'pole'.
My personal opinion is that he 1) hates the US 2) hates eastern Europe because it defeated socialism.
I'd love to be proven wrong, but I do not think I will be.
> My personal opinion is that he 1) hates the US 2) hates eastern Europe because it defeated socialism.
He doesn't hate the US. He hates that the US has been captured by warmongering elites and hates its poor. And he'd probably school you on the USSR's state authoritarian capitalism not being a good example of socialism.
I am a huge fan both of his technical contributions, healthy AI skepticism, and also a good friend earned her PhD with Chomsky. I hope he is comfortable and surrounded by people who love him.
EDIT: and, of course, he had an accurate view of the world geopolitically, media manipulation, etc.
I can't speak to his opinions on other topics, but since the full-scale Russian invasion started a few years ago, his frequent opinion pieces on world politics started popping up a lot. They were some of the most batshit insane, genocide-apologist takes on the situation that I've ever read.
Here's your monthly reminder that despite the large place he occupies in the "sciency" cultural landscape, a lot of his work has been debunked and he has not gone back on his genocide-denying claims about Serbia.
Last time i heard him in an Interview he was already sluring and taking long times bevore he answered. I think there's metabolic problems and that he hasnt got much time left - sadly. I learned a lot from his lectures.
> The Russia-Ukraine crisis continues unabated as the United States ignores all of Russian President Vladmir Putin’s security demands and spreads a frenzy of fear by claiming that a Russian invasion of Ukraine is imminent.
Questions of human conflict are incredibly complex, but occasionally life gives you a freebie. Occasionally, things actually are black and white, there are good guys and bad guys and you should not support the bad guys. If you had trouble getting this one absolutely dead simple case right, maybe you should not bother having an opinion on these matters at all.
Damn, this topic got downvoted onto the 3rd page by the HN hive mind in no time. Right after:
SQLSync – collaborative offline-first wrapper around SQLite, 16 points, 20 hours old
Independent of what people believe of him or his defense of Faurisson's freedom of speech one thing is clear, they have both been the target of extremely aggressive smearing campaigns by Israel.
I would defend the right to freedom of speech of people who believe the earth is flat, that does not mean “I support the flat-earth movement”
Chomsky had long publicly criticized Nazism, and totalitarianism more generally, but his commitment to freedom of speech led him to defend the right of French historian Robert Faurisson to advocate a position widely characterized as Holocaust denial.
Without Chomsky's knowledge, his plea for Faurisson's freedom of speech was published as the preface to the latter's 1980 book Mémoire en défense contre ceux qui m'accusent de falsifier l'histoire.
Chomsky was widely condemned for defending Faurisson, and France's mainstream press accused Chomsky of being a Holocaust denier himself, refusing to publish his rebuttals to their accusations.
he didn't support that cause. he radically supported free speech.
if someone has him discuss the paradox of (in)tolerance I'd appreciate links or pointers
ps: I come from a country with limits ob the freedom of speech and I defend those limits. I'm just saying Chomsky in contrast held freedom of speech as an absolute, even for anger and hate inciting lies.
And the ACLU "supported" the Nazi movement in Skokie. Do you have any evidence that Chomsky himself denies the holocaust, or are you just slinging shit?
Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.
lz400|1 year ago
I feel that in his later years he made a conscious effort to talk to young people and made them aware of the history and depth of the problems the world is facing, and he used very modern avenues to do so, like podcast interviews. I will always have the highest degree of respect for this man and an admiration for his integrity, sensitivity and scholarship.
bbor|1 year ago
Of course, I would recommend choosing “one half of his brain” (his terms) and not mixing the politics interviews with the cognitive science / philosophy ones lol. I haven’t looked for many linguistics talks of his from recent years, but I had the impression he was working on seriously technical stuff there right up until he couldn’t, too.
I don’t know how I hope to sleep after this comment… I guess I’ll do him the honor of trying to rationalize my emotional/ethical interests, and care less about the passing of a world-renowned twice-(happily-)married scholar than the passing of children from war and famine.
I hope he believes in us to finish his life’s work, answering the most fundamental question: “What kind of creatures are we?” He was never able to see his theories in the recent LLM breakthroughs, but we’re in the early stages of the Chomskian era of AI, philosophy, and human endeavors writ large, I think… the ChatGPT outage from earlier this year couldn’t have supported him any better without having said “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” outright!
rulalala|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
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StefanBatory|1 year ago
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TiredOfLife|1 year ago
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sitkack|1 year ago
We had him has a guest speaker for an internal presentation at Google and of course we had some hyper-rational libertarian eastern block swe kid who was going to take him down and Noam was super respectful, spared with the kid for awhile and then changed the subject slightly while destroying the libertarian kid's entire argument.
You don't just debate Noam Chomsky.
https://nerocam.com/DrFun/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200304/df20030409.jp...
Noam Chomsky vs. Michel Foucault - Dictatorship of the Proletariat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpoLLAJ1t74
credit_guy|1 year ago
I don't. There are some things out there that are up for debate. But not Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Chomsky, for some weird reason, chose to take Russia's side.
Edit: To be sure, I wish him full recovery and many more happy years.
https://www.e-flux.com/notes/470005/open-letter-to-noam-chom...
pcthrowaway|1 year ago
Would have loved to be a fly on the wall had he been able to do a guest spot at Google recently.
I'm willing to bet he would've gone off-script and given Google hell for their engagements with Israel and treatment of their own employees who protested.
shrimp_emoji|1 year ago
>America bad, everything bad = America
What a frighteningly distorted view of "rational" and "intellectual".
sickofparadox|1 year ago
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chom... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_genocide_denial#Revisi...
lokar|1 year ago
throwaway8877|1 year ago
TiredOfLife|1 year ago
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collyw|1 year ago
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ChumpGPT|1 year ago
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bobvanluijt|1 year ago
+1
cbanek|1 year ago
serf|1 year ago
When I was young I emailed him with a question something like "I am too young to have witnessed the events of the Vietnam War, can you please recommend me some reading material or push me in the right direction?"
That question turned into 5 or 6 (long) emails back and fourth that i'll always cherish that delved into his unique perspective on what the war was like as a protestor from the West, which papers got released that actually had some truth in them, among a lot of other valuable insights into the time period I had no access to myself.
At the end of our conversation he advocated finding a group that needs volunteers and effort. He didn't care what group that might be, he only cared that individual political concern of individuals be empowered by the necessary groups and collective effort.
I think that kind unequivocal support of 'being political' is something that is truly special.
I hope the best for him -- I view him as one of the only 'truly accessible' academics in this world; just as happy to slowly and carefully explain his thoughts to 'the rabble' as he would be while explaining the same thoughts to high academia and the press.
A great man.
benbreen|1 year ago
"Afraid I never met any of those you mention, though I’ve followed their work for many years.
I’ve never been close to intellectual elite circles, including people I very much admire."
The time stamp for my email was Tuesday, Nov 26, 2019 at 2:19 PM. It was answered by chomsky@mit.edu at Tuesday, Nov 26, 2019 at 9:29 PM. Pretty remarkable.
nomilk|1 year ago
llmblockchain|1 year ago
SequoiaHope|1 year ago
For anyone curious, here is Chomsky in 1976 discussing the relevance of automation and anarcho syndicalism to modern productive economies: https://youtu.be/h_x0Y3FqkEI
I truly believe we can build a world where everyone benefits from automation, getting the freedom and time to do what we will that every person deserves. The reason I develop open source farming robots is to explore concepts of community ownership of the means of production and community oriented engineering. Noam Chomsky’s work heavily inspired the thinking that got me where I am today.
YeGoblynQueenne|1 year ago
But, look here. He's 95 years old and just had a stroke. He's not going to get well soon, or at all.
graphe|1 year ago
xnx|1 year ago
vr46|1 year ago
hi-v-rocknroll|1 year ago
* Today is in more-or-less the same predicament as 40 years ago
Ralph Nader is also still out there at 90 producing content regularly.
https://www.youtube.com/@RalphNaderRadioHour
azinman2|1 year ago
throw__away7391|1 year ago
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preisschild|1 year ago
collyw|1 year ago
surfingdino|1 year ago
SomeoneFromCA|1 year ago
tgv|1 year ago
Humans can also lose parts of their language processing capabilities, without losing others (start at e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_disorder), which is highly suggestive of modular language development. The only question on which there isn't much consensus concerns the origin of that modularity. And humans can lose knowledge while still being able to speak and understand, or lose language while retaining knowledge.
LLMs don't have that at all: they predict the next token.
materielle|1 year ago
"Innate grammar" are essentially the meta-rules that govern why the rules are what they are. For instance, an English phrase can be recognized as valid or invalid by other native speakers according to the rules of the language. But why are the rules what they are?
This is especially puzzling due to the dazzling variety of human languages. And the fact that, after a period of immersion, humans seem to have the natural capacity to learn all of them.
How do LLMs fit into this? Well, I think it would be interesting if we left a group of LLM to talk to each other for 1000 years. Then see if 1) they developed a new language branch 2) that could be relearned by humans through immersion alone.
It's true that LLMs have learned (have they? I suppose that's a loaded word) human languages like English. But it's unclear if they are governed by the same meta-rules that both constrains and drives the evolution of humanities thousands of distinct languages.
gizmo686|1 year ago
codeflo|1 year ago
yareal|1 year ago
graphe|1 year ago
The approach is relatively straightforward. The team began by using a computer program to recreate the network that mushroom bodies rely on — a number of projection neurons feeding data to about 2,000 Kenyon cells. The team then trained the network to recognize the correlations between words in the text.
The task is based on the idea that a word can be characterized by it its context, or the other words that usually appear near it. The idea is to start with a corpus of text and then, for each word, to analyze those words that appear before and after it.
bux93|1 year ago
That an LLM does well at grammar doesn't prove or disprove this possibility. A more poignant criticism of "innate grammar" would be that it's not a hypothesis that can be disproven, and as such not really a scientific statement.
randomcarbloke|1 year ago
hi-v-rocknroll|1 year ago
Will miss his interviews on various forums often posted on YT and appearances on Democracy Now.
Classic: Yanis Varoufakis with Professor Noam Chomsky at NYPL, April 16, 2016 | DiEM25
https://youtu.be/szIGZVrSAyc
jokoon|1 year ago
But with time, I also realized he is a linguist, not an historian or political scientist.
He is controversial.
rand846633|1 year ago
akaij|1 year ago
turndown|1 year ago
I think Manufacturing Consent should go down as one of the most important books ever written in our culture. He was right about much, but wrong about much also.
His beliefs on Cambodia strain credulity and I still have trouble separating that Chomsky, so bent on drawing an equivalence(however valid) between American actions and the Khmer Rouge that he missed the point entirely, and Chomsky the visionary philosopher who I admire deeply.
hughesjj|1 year ago
Chomsky was illuminating in my personal character development. I grew up in a pretty conservative area, and his name carried a lot of hate like Hillary/Clinton did, but i didn't know why. Later, I saw some of his writings on American interventionism, and I found myself nodding my head in agreement over the mistakes my country/we have made. Later yet, I'm in college going for the math+cs degrees and his stuff on formal languages was probably the peak of my admiration for him... but with the admiration comes research, and perhaps the most important thing chomsky illustrated to me was that you can be a genius, but that doesn't mean you can't be blind, myopic, wrong, an asshole, or ... non-credible.
I don't know why chomsky's beliefs and supported causes are so inconsistent with the morals he pushes, but it's been an exemplar for me regardless -- good and bad, functional and broken.
cageface|1 year ago
feedforward|1 year ago
Not to mention the US 1970 invasion of Cambodia and concurrent CIA-backed overthrow of the Cambodian government, which including shooting dead US students who protested against it at Kent State and Jackson State, or the US carpet bombing of Cambodia during and after Operation Freedom Deal.
Log_out_|1 year ago
aborsy|1 year ago
serial_dev|1 year ago
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beryilma|1 year ago
hi41|1 year ago
What I don’t understand is this: the news agencies don’t report to the government. Then why would they work together with the government to mislead the people? Does anyone know?
Noam is so amazingly smart, he is probably one a billion. Sometimes I am not sure he is right but can’t really formulate why or what is it that I don’t agree.
plasticeagle|1 year ago
A friend of mine has a low-power FM radio station, that I wrote the software for, that endlessly downloads and replays Noam Chomsky's podcasts.
alexnewman|1 year ago
I disagree with about everything this guy wrote politically. I totally disagree with this guys perspective, it drives me up a wall frankly. But I have always have had incredible respect and think he played an important role in the dialogue. I read everything he wrote, and generally enjoy his writing. The very definition of the constant loyal opposition. Always getting people to think about things differently and with incredible moral courage. I wrote and argued with him and he always responded. We are all better off because of Chomsky.
ImAnAmateur|1 year ago
alexarnesen|1 year ago
throwaway81523|1 year ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_problem
jcul|1 year ago
If you skip to the very last question at 26:50, it is a little bit poignant, considering this news.
https://youtu.be/hdUbIlwHRkY?si=cRpz8f9m7YDh_6G-
lajosbacs|1 year ago
My personal opinion is that he 1) hates the US 2) hates eastern Europe because it defeated socialism.
I'd love to be proven wrong, but I do not think I will be.
bantunes|1 year ago
He doesn't hate the US. He hates that the US has been captured by warmongering elites and hates its poor. And he'd probably school you on the USSR's state authoritarian capitalism not being a good example of socialism.
mmaniac|1 year ago
The funniest part is that everyone has a different reason to think that.
YeGoblynQueenne|1 year ago
pvaldes|1 year ago
carabiner|1 year ago
mark_l_watson|1 year ago
EDIT: and, of course, he had an accurate view of the world geopolitically, media manipulation, etc.
isntbilly|1 year ago
johnea|1 year ago
I was amazed when he replied to my email, asking a polical history question, with a thoughtful and personal reply.
The only other person I could think of even being close to his stature is Howard Zinn.
It may be a long shot, but I'm still hoping for his recovery.
This man has done more for humanity than a billion billionaire-bills could ever aquire...
Zanfa|1 year ago
_aaed|1 year ago
Jean-Papoulos|1 year ago
His anti US imperialism views blind him.
foobarqux|1 year ago
ilikehurdles|1 year ago
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unknown|1 year ago
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martythemaniak|1 year ago
> February 4, 2022
https://chomsky.info/20220204/
Questions of human conflict are incredibly complex, but occasionally life gives you a freebie. Occasionally, things actually are black and white, there are good guys and bad guys and you should not support the bad guys. If you had trouble getting this one absolutely dead simple case right, maybe you should not bother having an opinion on these matters at all.
Garvi|1 year ago
..must have a hell of a lot of downvotes.
aaron695|1 year ago
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gklitz|1 year ago
I would defend the right to freedom of speech of people who believe the earth is flat, that does not mean “I support the flat-earth movement”
defrost|1 year ago
froh|1 year ago
if someone has him discuss the paradox of (in)tolerance I'd appreciate links or pointers
ps: I come from a country with limits ob the freedom of speech and I defend those limits. I'm just saying Chomsky in contrast held freedom of speech as an absolute, even for anger and hate inciting lies.
tines|1 year ago
OfficeChad|1 year ago
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EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK|1 year ago
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burrish|1 year ago
nashashmi|1 year ago
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pydry|1 year ago
Did he say something controversial like "Gaza has a right to defend itself?"
grumple|1 year ago
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fortran77|1 year ago
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biimugan|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
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rexpop|1 year ago
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llmblockchain|1 year ago
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drekk|1 year ago
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oefrha|1 year ago
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ignoramous|1 year ago
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escapecharacter|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
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