return to table of content

Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'

sitkack
83 replies
1d12h

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.

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
71 replies
1d7h

I love Noam Chomsky so much.

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...

slantedview
44 replies
21h35m

Chomsky, for some weird reason, chose to take Russia's side.

This is a mischaracterization. He explained Russia's stated motivation for invading Ukraine, that it felt threatened by NATO's continual eastward encroachment and breaking of promises not to do so. That's different than endorsing the invasion, which he did not.

crazygringo
42 replies
21h13m

The problem is that's a false narrative.

There were never any promises, and Putin barely even cared that it resulted in Finland and Sweden joining NATO.

Because Russia's stated motivation for invading Ukraine was never Putin's actual reason, which is basically an emotional desire for historical greatness by reclaiming Russia's lost empire, combined with war always being an excellent mechanism for staying in power and distracting from domestic problems.

So it's sad to see anyone falling for Putin's lies so easily. (See also Mearshimer.)

xg15
26 replies
20h54m

But how do you know so clearly that the one thing is a lie and the other is the truth?

Even if you reject the "encroaching NATO" narrative, what makes "Putin just woke up one day and decided that remaking the Soviet Union and/or the zarist Russian Empire would be a great thing to do in the 21th century" the more plausible hypothesis?

What information do you have that Mearsheimer doesn't?

CamperBob2
16 replies
18h50m

Russia is a nuclear-armed state. They have nothing to fear from NATO. They can never be invaded or conquered again, by anyone, ever.

Except from within.

Disagree? Answer my questions below, and explain exactly how you would go about attacking Russia.

hollerith
15 replies
18h47m

They can never be invaded or conquered again, by anyone, ever.

Why does thinking about nuclear weapons cause most people to think in absolutist terms like this?

Maybe Russia was counting on getting a 15-minute warning of ICBMs approaching, but if a hostile military can station missile right on their southwestern border (523 miles from the center of Moscow) their plan goes out the window.

corimaith
6 replies
15h21m

It wouldn't, because their SSBNs and their hidden silos would ensure the counter strike afterwards.

USA isn't counting on a 15 minute warning either, MAD is ensured via second strike capability AFTER the first strike, if you are counting for the first strike you've already lost.

YeGoblynQueenne
4 replies
7h46m

Well it seems to be well-established MAD orthodoxy that if your enemy has nukes right at your border, and you don't have nukes right at their border, your deterrence ability is diminished.

See: the Cuban Missile Crisis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis

In any case, even in a MAD setting every side will be constantly trying to manoeuver to a position of advantage. That's what military people do when they're not actually fighting, kind of how computer nerds play video games when they're not coding, eh?

corimaith
2 replies
1h50m

Where are you getting your sources from here? The Cuban Missile Crisis occurred in the context of the early 1960s whereby bombers were the primary method of delivery. Since the late 1960s, the ICBM is the bedrock of the MAD strategy, and the need of a second-strike capability via SSBNs and hidden silos after absorbing a nuclear attack.

In any case, even in a MAD setting every side will be constantly trying to manoeuver to a position of advantage.

There is no real "advantage" over having an extra few minutes or not. Russia is also building some sort of nuclear tsunami weapon, the US does not care. Because the strategy remains unchanged from threat of ICBMs. Frankly speaking, if you want to talk about what actually is a disadvantage for Russia right now, it's this war. If NATO actually invaded, they'd caught with their pants down. Hell, the US might even successfully ensure a first strike given they moved their air defences away.

The fact that Putin started this war even when knowing this should tell you that he dosen't actually view NATO as a threat. And they're not, from the Houthis, to Iran to Hamas, everbody can tell the US has no stomach for a war. This is not the result of US aggression, it is the result of US unassertiveness

woooooo
0 replies
1h28m

We just funded and managed two 20 year wars across the planet from our borders, one in a landlocked country. Russia couldn't move a tank column down a highway at the beginning of this war.

Putin is definitely crushing us at manly and assertive displays, though.

YeGoblynQueenne
0 replies
24m

> If NATO actually invaded, they'd caught with their pants down.

The problem with that is that NATO is next door to Russia now. Nuclear deterrence doesn't work that well when it means nuking your foot.

Seen another way, Russia doesn't need ICBMs to reach London, Paris, Berlin...

But, really, try to think more carefully of what you're discussing: nuclear war. The threat to the existence of human civilisation from that is too big for macho politics and "we're stronger than them" braggadocio. As Chomsky pointed out once, and as aggravating as this is, that means letting assholes get away with murder on the international scene; which means not just Russia, but also the US, Israel, China, and who knows who else, in time.

CamperBob2
0 replies
2h5m

Cuba was more of a sovereignty/sphere-of-influence problem than a nuclear-warfare problem. That ship has long since sailed with regard to Russia's borders. Moscow is half-surrounded on the west, as well it should be given its history of combining expansionist behavior with atrocities like communism and the Holodomor.

The Russians have had more than ample opportunity to join the civilized world and stop acting like dicks, but that's apparently not what they want to do. So, containment it is.

And if they feared NATO encroachment on their borders, trying to take over Ukraine was a really stupid way to discourage that. Nukes are scary enough, but nukes in the hands of stupid people are downright terrifying. Personally I doubt any of theirs still work, but that's all too easy to say.

hollerith
0 replies
15h11m

Russian SSBNs stay pretty close to base. They don't range over the world's oceans like US ones do, and ISTR an expert opining that the US can probably track them.

But on second thought, I concede that the shortened warning time relative to ICBMs is probably not a major cause of Russia's anxiety about Ukraine.

CamperBob2
4 replies
18h44m

Why does thinking about nuclear weapons cause most people to think in absolutist terms like this?

I don't understand the question. Can you elaborate?

How would you go about invading Russia, as a senior NATO commander? Russia's stated policy is to deploy nuclear arms against any invading force.

As for a hypothetical sneak attack on Moscow, are you familiar with the concept of the strategic defense triad?

hollerith
3 replies
18h1m

How would you go about invading Russia, as a senior NATO commander?

NATO would have to nuke Russia, then invade. Tank crew are protected from fallout radiation. If they have filtered air, I think they can enter "fallout plumes" right away. Soldiers not protected by tanks will be able to enter in about 3 weeks: weapons fallout is very different in character from the contamination from, e.g., Chernobyl or Fukushima. It dissipates much more rapidly. In fact, since the fallout plumes will cover only about half of the land area or less, the tanks can map out the locations of the plumes, after which the infantry might be able to enter the parts of the country missed by the fallout plumes well before 3 weeks after the end of the nuclear attack. (The fallout stays in one place after it has fallen out of the sky and has hit the ground -- or more precisely the fallout that does end up being blown around by the wind after it has hit the ground is small enough in particle size to not be deadly, though it will mess up your mucus membranes via beta radiation, hence my words above about filtering the air for the tanks.)

When Jens Stoltenberg says that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought, his "cannot be won" is not literally true. He is saying it to emphasize that NATO would never even consider starting a nuclear war. And in fact I don't think the US or NATO ever would choose to start an intercontinental nuclear war, but it is very hard for the Kremlin to come to understand the US well enough to be as confident of that as I am (having lived in the US for over 60 years). Also, the people who run Russia and who will run Russia after Putin is dead are professional spies. They are evaluated by how seriously they take national security. Also, Russia has been invaded about 50 times in its recorded history: by the French, the Germans, a Polish-Lithuanian confederation, Sweden, the Turks many times, various groups (other than the Turks) looking to get slaves, Central Asian peoples and many kinds of steppe nomads (mostly notably the Mongols, Tatars and Cossacks). The whole country takes national security very seriously.

Of course NATO would want to evacuate its cities before it begins its attack. If it does, more than half of its population will survive the inevitable Russian response -- probably much more than half. (It's been a while since I saw the relevant papers.) Also, the US has spent many tens of billions on research into missile defense, and Russia cannot know with any certainly whether that research has born enough fruit so that the US can shoot down most of Russia ICBMs in a big war. Also, the Kremlin has expressed concern that the US Aegis system can shoot down Russian ICBMs, and now that Ukraine is good buddies with NATO, Russia has to consider the possibility of NATO's stationing many Aegis systems in Eastern Ukraine in addition to the Aegis systems already on US destroyers in the Baltic Sea.

In 1951 or so, China sent an army of about a million men against a large number of soldiers of the US Army. This Chinese army had the usual instructions from its political masters, namely, to kill as many US soldiers as possible and to destroy their equipment. They did this even though they would only get their first nuke in the 1960s whereas in 1951 the US had hundreds of nukes. Although the events I just described are a far cry from China's invading the US homeland, it does go against the notion that nukes are somehow a magical shield against conventional military attacks if even a non-nuclear military will contemplate attacking a nuclear power.

By the way, consider the motive of Beijing in 1951: the reason they risked getting nuked was to avoid having a regime (namely, the regime in Seoul) friendly to the US on their border. They preferred having a buffer state, namely, North Korea between them and any country friendly enough with the US to maybe agree to host US troops. They preferred it so much that they sent a million men and risked getting nuked. That is one of the data points that led Mearsheimer, Kissinger, Merkel, Sarkozy and many other security experts to criticize the plan of adding Ukraine to NATO. (Merkel and Sarkozy stopped their criticism because Paris and Berlin depend on Washington to guarantee their security, which gives Washington the last word on Paris and Berlin's security policy, so they went along with the plan even though that thought they still thought it was dumb.)

pineaux
1 replies
17h13m

I think this doesnt really add up. Cause as soon as the US would invaded Russia, not only would Russia nuke the invading armies. They would very probably also start nuking command infrastructure. Which might or might not trigger the MADs doctrine.

hollerith
0 replies
16h42m

Let me try again. The US has about 1400 nuclear weapons or more precisely it has "intercontinental delivery systems" to deliver that many warheads to targets in Russia. (If it is cheating on its obligations under the New START treaty, it could have more.) The US would use most or all of those 1400 warheads on Russia before it starts its invasion. It makes no sense to start an invasion of Russia (e.g., with tanks and trucks) without first thoroughly nuking it (hitting cities, infrastructure and military bases).

(And it makes no sense to nuke Russia without first evacuating US cities and advising Americans to make fallout shelters, which would mostly consist of trenches dug into the ground covered by logs or plywood covered by a plastic sheet to keep out the rain covered by 18 inches of dirt.)

CamperBob2
0 replies
16h0m

And because that whole Tom Clancy scenario hinges critically on whether the initial NATO missile attack is launched from 523 miles away or 1500, Ukraine should run the white flag up the pole, accept Putin's terms, and get over themselves, already.

Got it.

HatchedLake721
1 replies
15h45m

There's no difference in distance between Latvia/Estonia (NATO members) and Ukraine.

NATO threat to Russia is internal fear-mongering propaganda and I have no idea why Mearsheimer and others talk about it with a serious face. We're not in the middle of 20th century anymore.

On one hand we have EU/US/NATO intelligence saying Kiev will fall in 72 hours to the 2nd best army in the world.

And then on the other hand we must believe Mearsheimer that Putin really fears that EU/US/NATO would start a war out of the blue with a country that has 45% of world's nuclear arsenal in the middle of Europe?

Give me a break.

No one sane in Europe is interested to start a war with Russia.

Europe and especially Merkel have spent the last few decades turning Russia into an important trading partner and tying them heavily into the European market. This worked well for them with the economic union post World War 2 (that turned into the European Union) which stopped wars in Europe for almost a century.

Similar approach was taken with Russia, but sadly it didn't work.

Russia has every right to fear NATO and make plans around it. But to say Russia invaded Ukraine because of NATO (or nazis) is nonsense.

I don't believe you'll even find any Russian opposition/anti-government journalist/scientist/economist or politician talk the "NATO threat" reasoning seriously. They know what Putin has been doing to their country for the last 20+ years, and it has nothing to do with NATO.

YeGoblynQueenne
0 replies
7h40m

> No one sane in Europe is interested to start a war with Russia.

Sane, no, but Macron for instance suggested the West should send boots on the ground in Ukraine, and while he's clearly unhinged he was until recently the President of the second most powerful EU country and an important nuclear Nato member (although French people I've met were dismissive about the French nuclear deterrent; "it can bleach corals", I was told).

And don't forget that the far right (to put it politely) is rising in Europe, including in France and in Germany were they are the second most powerful political power and possibly soon the first in France. Do you know what happened last time the far right was rising in Europe?

When we're talking about nuclear war as a possible future I don't think it hurts to hedge al the bets ever.

attentive
0 replies
14h16m

this argument is nonsense. There is 365miles from Moscow center to border with Latvia, NATO member.

crazygringo
4 replies
20h26m

There are plenty of articles by respected international relations and Russia experts you can find that explains it quite clearly.

The IR community does not share Mearsheimer's take. He is very much known to be the exception. Which is why he's the only one we're referring to by name here, because his analysis is so contrary to the overwhelming consensus of experts.

xg15
3 replies
19h38m

Could you share some of those? I'd be interested.

(Having both "pro-russian" and "pro-western" family members, so I'm engaged in lots of discussions currently and would be glad for new information, no matter which side)

I think it's important which countries the experts are coming from. That our own IR/Russia experts are sharing this view doesn't seem very surprising to me - it's a war situation after all. I just notice that a lot of non-Western countries seem to be at least undecided which narrative to follow, e.g. Brazil, India, Turkey, many African countries. (Ignoring China which is obviously allied with Russia and therefore also has a clear bias).

Also, BRICS membership seems to be in demand, what I wouldn't expect if it was generally believed to be dominated by an insane, warmongering megalomaniac.

Mearsheimer is not alone though (even though it's definitely a minority position here). Jeffrey Sax, Ulrike Guerot and, well, Noam Chomsky come to mind, or also organisations such as fair.org with well-documented sources.

ImPostingOnHN
2 replies
15h25m

> I think it's important which countries the experts are coming from.

I don't think it's important to engage in prejudice based on national origin.

> I just notice that a lot of non-Western countries seem to be at least undecided which narrative to follow

141 countries decided that Russia's aggression is deserving of condemnation and must stop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_General_Assembl...

Additionally, the court with relevant jurisdiction (composed of impartial judges from western and non-western countries) has decided that Putin should be arrested and tried for his crimes: https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/situation-ukraine-icc-judges-is...

Doesn't seem too undecided.

darby_nine
1 replies
15h15m

This doesn't seem to contradict Chomsky's take, who doesn't seem to endorse any kind of war or violence at all. Hence his take seems to be a critique on western behavior that seems fair and warranted.

ImPostingOnHN
0 replies
13h49m

You are correct, I was replying to our shared colleague xg15, not Chomsky. We were discussing the decisions of different countries around the world.

My post did not cover Chomsky's takes on the matter because, honestly, I have not read them. Not for lack of desire, just personal time and priority.

dinglestepup
2 replies
20h36m

One of Putin's stated goals when he came to power was joining NATO. He did not feel threatened by it until he needed to justify his imperialistic behavior.

xg15
1 replies
18h36m

Or until the European stance changed, under the influence of the US, from one of including Russia to excluding. At least that's what Ulrike Guerot claims to have experienced.

I have no idea if this is true. I also don't want to say that Russia always tells the whole truth without lies and propaganda. But I'm finding it rather that our own side doesn't behave in the Ukraine conflict as we behave in other conflicts between third countries. We also engage in a lot of propaganda and biased reporting, especially on the topic of Ukraine and Israel (as shown by fair.org), so I've become careful too quickly deciding what the truth is.

(I do disagree in at least one point with all the russia apologists though: Whatever may have happened in Ukraine before the war and whatever the larger context is, what is happening right now there is driven by Russia and is absolutely devastating for Ukrainians. That Ukrainians hate Russia is absolutely understandable. So I think we should continue to support Ukraine. Nevertheless, if there was some hidden context in the lead-up of the war, it would be in our best interests to expose this.)

cc81
0 replies
2h5m

Europe was happily buying more and more gas from Russia and wanted to increase trading until the directional change from Putin.

racional
0 replies
17h47m

Mearsheimer "has" all the information; it just doesn't fit his preferred narrative ("The U.S needs to stop picking on Russia so they can team up together against China"), so he discards the parts get in the way of that narrative. Such as the long and deep history of Russia's colonial attitude toward Ukraine, for example.

As to a more realistic narrative -- it's a bit more nuanced than the formulation you suggest, but even so -- is pretty much obvious once we look at the things Putin and key people around him have been saying, along with the last 350 years of so of Russia's history vis-a-vis its neighbors and Belarus and Ukraine in particular.

The links in the short comment tree below (which answered essentially the same question from just a few weeks ago) might be useful here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40455815

YeGoblynQueenne
11 replies
8h4m

> So it's sad to see anyone falling for Putin's lies so easily. (See also Mearshimer.)

Mearsheimer can be a bit too convincing for his own good, surely. What he has argued that is certainly convincing is that Russia was ready to negotiate a peace at the start of the war, when Russians and Ukrainians met in Belarus and then in Istanbul. If Putin wanted to recreate Imperial Russia, or the Soviet Union, then why would he negotiate for peace?

That's Mearsh's argument, which he articulates, e.g. here in Lex Friedman's show (sorry, I couldn't find a better source):

https://youtube.com/watch?v=r4wLXNydzeY&t=2684

Full transcript here:

https://lexfridman.com/john-mearsheimer-transcript/

throwawayqqq11
3 replies
5h18m

If Putin wanted to recreate Imperial Russia, or the Soviet Union, then why would he negotiate for peace?

To distract western military support.

To distract offensive\defensive ukrainian plans.

To construct a peaceful narrative at home or the war mongering west.

To strengthen or pet allies, who mediate.

To gain intelligence about the willingness of territorial sacrifice.

Would Putin ever publicly admit his grand soviet plan? If no, then how would he behave instead? Consider georgia, chechenia, belarus, etc.

rtaylorgarlock
1 replies
4h44m

Exactly. Both 1st + 2nd order thinking are needed when evaluating the PR efforts of leaders, particularly when their messages go against their actions.

Obscurity4340
0 replies
32m

Can you expand on that a bit more? Sorta get what you're saying but I think I might not have a super coherent sense of what that is

YeGoblynQueenne
0 replies
29m

I don't know, maybe? All those sound plausible but then you have to try and justify each of them with some kind of evidence of some sort, otherwise you're just playing the guessing game.

Now, I don't like guessing. When Russia entered negotiations the war was clearly not going its way, so the obvious explanation is that Putin wanted to disentangle from it with the least damage to his image as possible.

The question is why the negotiations failed, if they were really as advanced as suggested in the articles I linked above. Since the name of Boris Johnson has been brought up (in the context of being one of the Western representatives that told Zelenskiy to drop the deal) I tend to believe that a peace deal failed because at least one side in the negotiations was incompetent fools who should have never made it in power. That the other side is probably the same makes no difference.

YeGoblynQueenne
3 replies
7h53m

Some more background on all that.

That Russia and Ukraine were negotiating an end to the war, early on, and that their representatives met in Istanbul and hammered out a deal is not in dispute, you can find information about those talks all over the 'net, e.g. here by the BBC:

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-europe-60890199

And here by Reuters:

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/turkey-says-russia-ukra...

From what I can find online, the negotiations advanced to the point where there was a comprehensive deal on the table that detailed security guarantees for Ukraine and a neutrality commitment on their side, but the deal was abandoned. Mearsheimer has claimed that it was because the US and the UK told the Ukrainians to drop the deal because they could win the war with the continued support of the West (and we saw how well that turned out). I obviously don't know enough to tell for sure whether that claim makes sense. There may well have been more than one reason that the deal fell apart.

Details here:

https://archive.ph/ajonZ

And a longer discussion here, were a speaker claims that Putin's plan was a US-style change of government, like the Americans did in Baghdad, (and we all saw how well that one turned out):

https://www.nprillinois.org/2024-05-06/the-story-behind-2022...

I don't know who those people are though in the panel, so I have no idea about their credibility etc.

Now, whatever the reason for the negotiations, I think it's indisputable at this point that Russia did come to the negotiating table and proposed terms to end the conflict. A sensible thing to do given that their "special operation" was, at the time, going to the dogs.

foldr
2 replies
7h3m

security guarantees for Ukraine

This is laughable. Russia cannot give any credible security guarantee to a country that it has just invaded! The war has shown precisely that Russia still believes that it has the right to control Ukraine and that any negotiated peace is nothing more than a temporary pause in hostilities in anticipation of a more opportune moment for Russia. Putin is a cypher and no-one really knows exactly why he wants to invade and conquer Ukraine, but as it is enormously plain at this point that he does want to do so, this entails that there is no really workable negotiated settlement.

YeGoblynQueenne
1 replies
41m

> Russia cannot give any credible security guarantee to a country that it has just invaded!

Security guarantees would be provided by Western countries, not only Russia.

foldr
0 replies
24m

Ukraine is in no need of further security guarantees from Western countries save the one guarantee that Russia will never accept: NATO membership. Without that – and the associated obligation to offer a direct military response to Russian aggression – it's difficult to see how any security guarantee could possibly extend beyond what Western countries are already providing.

Russia's key conditions for the supposed "deal" that you refer to were that (i) the size of the Ukrainian army would be heavily constrained and that (ii) Russia would have a veto on any response to future aggression against Ukraine. Ukraine rejected the deal because it would have been worthless.

racional
2 replies
3h0m

If Putin wanted to recreate Imperial Russia, or the Soviet Union, then why would he negotiate for peace?

Because as he keeps saying over and over -- the only "peace" he will accept is one in which his claims to sovereignty on the territories he is currently sitting are recognized by Western powers. This was his core demand during the Istanbul talks, and it's his current demand now (though he's upped it a bit recently to include regime change in Kyiv).

For a serial territorial aggressor like the modern Russian state, "peace" is simply another mechanism for arriving that same the desired end state.

It's also useful as a propaganda tool, to mollify the opposition to what he's doing ("See, Putin just wants peace -- he even says so!"), get people to start talking about how costly the war is, how the West is the real aggresor and so forth. That's where Mearsheimer et al come in.

YeGoblynQueenne
1 replies
38m

That's probably because the wars started by "the West" (US and allies) are significantly more than the wars started by Russia or the USSR. See: vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan. Not that Russia is some big supporter of peace, but the US and its allies are the current global bully. And you don't need Mearsheimer to tell you that.

racional
0 replies
1m

So if Russia wants to get to play the top bully too, for a while -- well, we should just cut them some slack and let them have their way for a while? Because fair is fair, right?

That seems to be the essence of your argument here.

softsound
2 replies
14h33m

There are many many reasons for war, not just because Putin wrote a fancy paper long ago about his aspirin, or because the drought in Crimea was costing Russia tons of money since they took over and had their water cut off or the falling population and economy that purposely did not reinvest properly to keep Putin in power.

Giving a simple answer is not wrong if the long one takes much longer to explain. Multiple factors can be true, I'm sure Russia was uneasy that Siberia wanted to leave and with Ukraine gone they would have no direct access to water there. And the threat of China slowing taking over Russian land *with Russian permission of course*. Russia has attempted to do something even if extremely poorly miscalculated. That's kinda what Russia is known for, doing something and very often failing at it.

They have been lucky, sometimes clever but often terrible truly terrible at long term long planning. Ask their unpatriotic AI what it thinks, they will get mad about it too.

YeGoblynQueenne
1 replies
7h19m

> Putin wrote a fancy paper long ago about his aspirin

Explain?

gruturo
0 replies
6h24m

Aspiration + autocorrect?

graphe
0 replies
21h26m

Many people also hate mearsheimer if he talks about what he predicts will happen vs what he'd like to happen (Ukraine or Israel).

jcranmer
6 replies
1d6h

Chomsky, for some weird reason, chose to take Russia's side.

Chomsky's foreign policy views can somewhat accurately be reduced to "everything is either American imperialism or reactions against it," to a degree that he ignores the imperialist tendencies (and other unpleasantries) of countries that aren't the US because they're against the US. For example, his denial of the Cambodian genocide essentially boiled down to "well, the US doesn't like the Khmer Rouge, so therefore everybody criticizing the Khmer Rouge was overselling the criticism, how was anyone at the time to know what they were doing?"

spdgg
2 replies
19h24m

While not fresh on the specifics of this controversy, my implicit understanding through Manufacturing Consent was that the Cambodian genocide was more likely a consequence of the United States bombing Cambodia's arable farmland into a booby trapped hellscape, which caused many people to flee to the capital. After some geopolitical games the US played, a psychopath became head of state for Cambodia, and one of those initiatives was ordering those starving people to suddenly leave the capital and go farm, and another was to unalive people at death camps. I don't think he denied the genocide. It makes a lot of sense that many people died of famine as a direct consequence of US destruction of arable farmland, and that the US would create a narrative to hide that and did not let the tragedy of Pol Pot "go to waste".

tim333
1 replies
18h15m

It makes a lot of sense that many people died of famine as a direct consequence of US destruction of arable farmland

I don't think that makes sense - they only bombed a small percentage of Cambodia but no doubt the turmoil helped Pol Pot get into power.

spdgg
0 replies
15h23m

Assuming that small percentage were most of the arable farmland in Cambodia, would it make more sense? That is to say, if you were misled to believe the impact was smaller than reality would it make you think differently? Small being a relative term. IIRC, IT WAS 25% of Cambodia's landmass and most of its good farmland.

charlesfries
2 replies
19h22m

Christopher Hitchens on Chomsky and 9/11:

"...it would be a credulous fool who swallowed the (unsupported) word of Osama Bin Laden that his group was the one responsible. An attempt to kidnap or murder an ex-president of the United States (and presumably, by extension, the sitting one) would be as legally justified as the hit on Abbottabad. And America is an incarnation of the Third Reich that doesn’t even conceal its genocidal methods and aspirations. This is the sum total of what has been learned, by the guru of the left, in the last decade."

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2011/05/noam-chomsky-on-...

matteoraso
0 replies
17h50m

This is a serious mischaracterization of what Chomsky said. He didn't argue that Osama bin Laden didn't do 9/11, he argued that the American government denied him the right to be innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

Cacti
0 replies
18h23m

Hitchens supported the war and voted for Bush. Of course he hates Chomsky.

objektif
5 replies
21h3m

Rather he chose to understand the point of view from their side. It is extremely difficult to do so and only a few public facing individuals is able to do ( Jeffrey Sachs etc. )

tim333
2 replies
18h12m

That's kind of the problem. He should have been trying to understand it from the Ukrainians side more than seeing the thing as US vs Russia.

It seems a bit of a historical change - in the 19th century view it would be ok for the Russians to get pissed off with the US trying to steal their Ukrainian peasants and associated property. These days you're supposed to let sovereign democracies do their own thing even if they have smaller armies.

objektif
0 replies
16h51m

Is that how it works? How about letting your ally wipe out a sovereign nation in the ME? Does that count as these days? Or casually kill 2+ mln civilians in Iraq.

“These days” also apply to us and our allies and it is an unfortunate part of how things run.

YeGoblynQueenne
0 replies
7h29m

> These days you're supposed to let sovereign democracies do their own thing even if they have smaller armies.

Yes, until they make the mistake of democratically electing someone you don't like, at which point you send in the secret services to instigate violent regime change.

There's an entire wikipedia article dedicated to the US doing that all over the place:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

They sort of did that to my own country (Greece) where they supported a ridiculous military dictatorship (Junta), although I don't think they actively helped it to power. If you find my comments coloured by a certain antipathy towards US external policy, that may be one reason.

wruza
0 replies
14h25m

If he watched this narrative for two decades, he’d know the dynamics. What he understood instead is the official media position of the day, in which the bad guy is the main actor. That is still impressive for a foreigner, but of no use. Even a half brained dog can see through it here if lived long enough. Sadly our population is heavily handicapped in this regard because it was never exposed to rational argument, which itself is (IMO) the root of all our evils. All our opposition always sucked at politics and literally died out. Good politicians don’t die.

epistasis
0 replies
18h57m

This is much like trying to understand the US invasion of Iraq from the neoconservative point of view, and parroting it uncredulously. This necessitates dehumanizing the invaded population.

alecco
3 replies
1d6h

Just Russia?

Noam Chomsky had some financial money transfers and a series of meetings arranged by Jeffrey Epstein. At least one meeting with Ehud Barak (former PM of Israel). And he refused to explain himself.

This got quickly swept under the rug. But it's there even on mainstream media if you bother to search for it.

hdbenne
1 replies
1d5h

If I recall, he did explain himself… it boiled down to it being none of your or my business. I despise Epstein, but as he was heavily involved in finance, I am sure many people had dealings with him that were not sexual in nature.

You can find many things that Noam missed the mark on. To err is human. But this is conspiratorial and not fair. If you were judged by all the people you had financial or social dealings with I’d imagine you would share a similar sentiment.

jasonvorhe
0 replies
1d3h

Jeffrey Epstein was sus ever since he appeared because of the way he suddenly rose up in ranks, got handed billions of dollars without having done any significant deals himself. His connections to Mossad and US elites should've raised red flags for someone like Chomsky. I see no reason to give anyone dealing with Epstein the benefit of the doubt.

addicted
0 replies
1d6h

Considering he’s significantly anti-Israel I’m curious even if there were nefarious purposes behind his meeting with Barak what direction do you think it swayed him in?

In addition a LOT of academics met with Epstein. The whole point of Epstein was that he clawed himself up the social ladder by schmoozing with money people and raising funds for academic work. It would be entirely shocking if Epstein raised all this money for academia and didn’t even try and meet probably the only famous academic in the world.

jesterson
1 replies
11h42m

But not Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Chomsky, for some weird reason, chose to take Russia's side.

Taking sides is a sign of emotional, not intellectual approach. And Russia/Ukraine conflict is way far from good fighting evil simplified construct.

I don't like leftists in general and Chomsky in particlar, but I give him huge respect for intellectual and independent position, which will cause him losing appreciation from people like you.

tim333
0 replies
5h38m

There's a 2023 interveiw with him here on Ukraine https://truthout.org/articles/chomsky-a-stronger-nato-is-the...

I'd say rather than emotional he has the usual academic thing of being up in one specialist area - in this case US imperialism and not up on another speciality like Russia's history of invasion, expansion and the like.

codr7
1 replies
21h31m

Wow.

The guy has a different opinion.

It's going to happen a lot so maybe better to get used to it?

throwawayq3423
0 replies
18h32m

They guy built a brand (rightfully) opposing US imperialist wars only to side with a Russian imperialist war.

It matters.

xg15
0 replies
21h1m

I think matters of geopolitics and war especially must be up for debate.

martin82
0 replies
15h39m

Russia's action are absolutely up for debate.

johnisgood
0 replies
8h19m

It is probably needless to say, but you do not have to agree with someone on everything, especially to admire someone's knowledge or contributions in specific fields.

darby_nine
0 replies
21h13m

"Taking russia's side" seems like a wild mischaracterization of the situation.

adastra22
0 replies
10h21m

Chomsky regularly and rigorously defends genocidal regimes. Look up "Cambodian genocide denial" on wikipedia and you'll find an entire section devoted to Chomsky. This isn't anything new, and I'm surprised how much sympathetic support he's getting in this thread.

me_me_me
2 replies
1d1h

oh wow, its the same dead horse being beaten again and again and again.

The whole thing is more semantical argument than ideological.

Chomsky is not 100% right on everything and his world views are more black and white than the world they describe.

But he is an excellent linchpin to validate your own views against.

People who hate him always attack him based on few things from the past, while following/praising people who are spineless.

panick21_
1 replies
8h35m

Its like people always go after Nazi and right wingers about the same kind of stuff. Like let it go people.

me_me_me
0 replies
6h27m

equivalent example?

shrimp_emoji
1 replies
1d

To me he is epitome of what a rational caring intellectual should be.

America bad, everything bad = America

What a frighteningly distorted view of "rational" and "intellectual".

tacocataco
0 replies
1h26m

America is perfect? No bad to be found here? I find this hard to believe.

pcthrowaway
1 replies
1d11h

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.

sitkack
0 replies
1d10h

Noam wouldn't be allowed to speak at NeuGoogle.

bobvanluijt
1 replies
21h12m

I love Noam Chomsky so much

+1

isntbilly
0 replies
9h20m

I love Noam Chomsky so much

±1

lokar
0 replies
20h49m

ISTR he was there on a book tour? Ready to talk politics. Got a bunch of linguistics questions.

turndown
73 replies
1d13h

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.

feedforward
37 replies
1d13h

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.

ein0p
20 replies
1d13h

I recall vehemently disagreeing with Chomsky on many things when I was much younger, but then I somehow stumbled upon Howard Zinn’s “People’s history of the United States” and realized the version of history I knew was basically concentrated propaganda I was brainwashed into believing. That opened the door to understanding Chomsky. “Manufacturing consent” explains our present state of affairs really well.

tptacek
9 replies
1d13h

Zinn's reputation among historians: not all that great.

ein0p
7 replies
1d13h

Reputation of historians according to Zinn: not all that great either. Read him as a counterpoint, and food for critical thought, not as the sole source of truth. He doesn’t hide that he has an agenda.

caycep
5 replies
1d12h

I did actually see him talk at a rally in Boston Common, around '04 or so. While his written stuff may well be better, what struck me was the gist was basically self promotion about how he know "secret" things from "secret" sources, but never really bothered to elaborate, only that the "US Govt is lying to you". Well yes but...I would say if one had such information, it is not well served by presenting oneself as a conspiratorial crank....

ein0p
4 replies
1d12h

Yes, US Govt is routinely lying to you. That is not controversial at all at this point. Read the book. It’s a difficult read though. Might ruffle some patriotic feathers.

Think of how difficult it is today to get even remotely truthful news. And then think about how this horseshit will be written up by government funded historians once all the political scores are settled and winners are determined

vasco
1 replies
1d11h

I mean if you want another perspective you can simple Wikipedia "American Empire". It'll be simple enough for another view of current state of affairs without going into politically motivated alternative history, either from communists or from milton friedman fans.

It annoys me to no end that both right wingers and left wingers like so much to tell history how it's convenient to them and always hard to get something unbiased. Even numbers of deaths can't be trusted before you check who you are reading.

ein0p
0 replies
1d3h

But Wikipedia is also full of lies and omissions, though. You're going to have to work to synthesize some plausible version of the past from the politically motivated sources either way.

caycep
0 replies
22h19m

Yes, but why should I even bother with Zinn especially when his talk was basically to take him at his word/narrative, over other, better sourced accounts of how the US Govt is lying to me?

(* some of which comes from other parts of the US Govt meant to keep tabs on certain other parts of the US Govt) (*granted, also this assumes the US Govt is one monolithic entity when it is anything but)

Eisenstein
0 replies
1d10h

I don't think the solution to having been taught one biased view is to turn around and embrace the oppositely biased view. Countering one form of extreme with another does not make truth, it makes people who hate each other who refuse to find common ground or compromise.

tptacek
0 replies
1d12h

OK, but to be clear: his reputation among leftist historians, of which there are many: not all that great!

yareal
0 replies
1d12h

"People who I am critical of don't like me" is not particularly surprising, to be honest.

verticalscaler
6 replies
1d10h

If you reread what you wrote carefully an amazing irony falls out.

You might consider your consent has simply been manufactured in another direction. Lots of Chomsky acolytes never quite reach that epiphany.

They simply follow in his footsteps of being oh so traumatized by the sudden realization that governments lie and propaganda is a thing that you could get them to opt in to an even deeper set of absurdities and half truths quite easily. To the great delight of the enemies of the US.

This is how you get college students to chant "Death to America".

ein0p
3 replies
22h55m

Actually that’s only true if you uncritically accept everything either side says and reject the other side. That’s low IQ, don’t do that.

verticalscaler
2 replies
21h50m

Can’t tell if this is primo satire or a complete lack of self awareness. :P

ein0p
1 replies
20h42m

The reason you can’t tell is one comment up in the thread.

verticalscaler
0 replies
7h5m

For posterity, in case a teenager finds this thread in a googlestorm: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Essay:Second-option_bias

Some dudes given "secret suppressed knowledge" that is contrarian to a mainstream they feel alienated from will immediately buy in hook line and sinker and become fanatics.

Don't be a smooth brain.

corimaith
1 replies
1d8h

Second option bias comes to mind here, funnily enough the alt-right utilizes the same tactics.

verticalscaler
0 replies
1d8h

Indeed. Alt-right/left/whatever. Very potent tactics as you can tell even from reading this thread.

You would think people who come to these bitter realizations would know better but many inevitably land on "the ends justifies the means" or the less sophisticated "only our scum enemies lie!" and round and round we go.

hi-v-rocknroll
2 replies
1d12h

I was more-or-less a free-market, atheist libertarian until about age 16 because I didn't know any better and it seemed so righteous and freedom flag-waving. Then, I learned a few things decades since then (but kept the atheism), especially about the dark origins of libertarianism. The truth is that America is a neocolonial power that flirts authoritarianism where one can live an easy life if they're moderately rich, but on the backs of a massive, struggling underclass that has it much worse than most countries in Europe. "Socialism" is a taboo word in America that it needs much more of, but the problem is that most people have too much faith in strongmen, corruption of campaign financing, and giving corporations more money, more power, and favorable regulations including regulatory capture.

ein0p
1 replies
1d12h

I’m starting to waver on atheism also. I’m not likely to start believing in god this far in my life, of course, but I now see why a lot of people feel the need to believe, and I no longer judge them for it. I do however judge religious organizations for shamelessly exploiting that need.

karmakurtisaani
0 replies
1d2h

Perhaps I could sell you the idea of ignosticism: one cannot prove anything about any supernatural beings, so the whole question of existence of gods is meaningless, and can be therefore happily be ignored. Thus, all religious questions are resolved.

Even atheism is a strong stance and asserts a belief that you cannot test!

turndown
10 replies
1d13h

I worded that part poorly, and did not bring up what really bothers me about it, that he tried to deny that there was a genocide in Cambodia. I agree with what you said. The idea that the US is innocent in Cambodia or really anything going on in that part of the world at that time is beyond false.

lamontcg
9 replies
1d12h

His point was always that the most inflated estimates of deaths in Cambodia were uncritically accepted by Western media and widely broadcast, while atrocities committed by friendly nations always leaned towards the very low estimates and the stories were buried.

vintermann
8 replies
1d12h

Yes, the accusation that he denied the Cambodian genocide is false, and a tactical smear.

Aloisius
7 replies
1d11h

Chomsky wrote that "The 'slaughter' by the Khmer Rouge is a Moss-New York Times creation."

I'm unsure as to how that would be anything but genocide denial.

andrepd
6 replies
1d11h

He wrote that before the truth was known, while the genocide was ongoing and the only thing we had was scattered reports of atrocities. This was the 70s, we did not exactly have telegram livestream channels from the frontlines. It was a mistake and he recanted those views in the later stages of the regime and afterwards, when the evidence became overwhelming.

Aloisius
5 replies
1d10h

Before the truth was known? No. Before he accepted the truth after it became untenable for him to continue to reject it.

Chomsky simply rejected all the earlier evidence pointing to a genocide as an American imperialist lie.

For goodness sake, he characterized Barron and Paul's Murder of a Gentle Land as being sourced from "informal briefings from specialists at the State and Defense Departments" despite it clearly sourcing testimony of hundreds of Cambodian refugees and Khmer Rouge radio broadcasts. His characterization of it was so intellectually dishonest that it is difficult to believe it was either an intentional lie or willful ignorance.

He searched for any counter-evidence that would confirm his belief that the US was evil (and its adversaries were good or just misunderstood), no matter how questionable - a pattern he continued his entire life.

foobarqux
4 replies
1d9h

This is just false. The main piece of evidence -- the death figures published by La Couture -- which was being widely cited, had to be retracted after Chomsky fact-checked it. The author himself said in the retraction something to the effect of "it doesn't matter what the numbers are".

As for "Gentle Land" he supports his claim that "[their] scholarship collapses under the barest scrutiny". He writes: "To cite a few cases, they state that among those evacuated from Phnom Penh, “virtually everybody saw the consequences of [summary executions] in the form of the corpses of men, women and children rapidly bloating and rotting in the hot sun,” citing, among others, J.J. Cazaux, who wrote, in fact, that “not a single corpse was seen along our evacuation route,” and that early reports of massacres proved fallacious (The Washington Post, May 9, 1975). They also cite The New York Times, May 9, 1975, where Sydney Shanberg wrote that “there have been unconfirmed reports of executions of senior military and civilian officials … But none of this will apparently bear any resemblance to the mass executions that had been predicted by Westerners,” and that “Here and there were bodies, but it was difficult to tell if they were people who had succumbed to the hardships of the march or simply civilians and soldiers killed in the last battles.” They do not mention the Swedish journalist, Olle Tolgraven, or Richard Boyle of Pacific News Service, the last newsman to leave Cambodia, who denied the existence of wholesale executions; nor do they cite the testimony of Father Jacques Engelmann, a priest with nearly two decades of experience in Cambodia, who was evacuated at the same time and reported that evacuated priests “were not witness to any cruelties” and that there were deaths, but “not thousands, as certain newspapers have written” (cited by Hildebrand and Porter)."

Elsewhere he cites official CIA figures which also did not support the claim.

But none of this was even the point of his article, he explicitly writes "We do not pretend to know where the truth lies amidst these sharply conflicting assessments". The point is that the evidence is distorted to smear enemies and make ourselves look good. He writes in the penultimate paragraph:

"What filters through to the American public is a seriously distorted version of the evidence available, emphasizing alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities and downplaying or ignoring the crucial U.S. role, direct and indirect, in the torment that Cambodia has suffered. Evidence that focuses on the American role, like the Hildebrand and Porter volume, is ignored, not on the basis of truthfulness or scholarship but because the message is unpalatable."

That is the simple message that Chomsky has been conveying his entire political life and, as exemplified by current events, people continue to ignore it.

Aloisius
3 replies
23h44m

Chomsky's entire shtick was to start from the belief that the US is evil and that any evidence that might be favorable to US positions is suspect, then searching for contrary evidence, no matter how questionable, to show this was the case - even if it means manufacturing or distorting it.

Olle Tolgraven? He said the Khmer Rouge were shooting people during the ordered mass evacuation, something Chomsky left out. He also left out the other accounts from the same article which describe Phnom Penh as being littered with decomposing bodies.

He pointed to Hildebrand and Porter and called it "based on a wide range of sources" when in reality, everything documented after the Khmer Rouge took charge came from one source: official Khmer Rouge propaganda.

In order to refute claim Barron and Paul that "virtually everybody saw the consequences" he invented citations to J.J. Cazaux and Schanberg so he could use carefully cherry-picked quotes from them against it.

Chomsky claimed publications like the Economist have "analyses by highly qualified specialists who have studied the full range of evidence available, and who concluded that executions have numbered at most in the thousands." Notably, the Economist did write an article that hundreds of thousands had been executed. The claim the number was in the thousands came not from the Economist's highly qualified specialists, but rather a letter from a reader in response to that article.

It goes on and on and on and on. If Chomsky was held to the standard he held others, we would dismiss him as not credible for even a fraction of the half-truths and lies he peddled.

foobarqux
2 replies
21h2m

Chomsky's entire shtick was to start from the belief that the US is evil and that any evidence that might be favorable to US positions is suspect

His position is that 1. people distort facts to exaggerate crimes of their enemies and minimize their own crimes and 2. we are primarily responsible for our own actions not the actions of others. Both of these things are very easy to understand in any other context.

If you follow those precepts then you would focus on your own sides' lies and crimes which might naively be viewed as "anti-US" bias.

Olle Tolgraven? [...]

Chomsky never argues that there wasn't any evidence of killings and seems to accurately describe Tolgraven's account: "A Swedish journalist, Olle Tolgraven of Swedish Broadcasting, said he did not believe there had been wholesale executions. But he said there was evidence the Khmer Rouge had shot people who refused to leave their homes in a mass evacuation ordered the first day of the takeover. " (Los Angeles Times, May 9, 1975). (c.f. Chomsky: "who denied the existence of wholesale executions").

He pointed to Hildebrand and Porter [...]

I will have to read the book myself but looking at the references it does look like it has a "wide range of sources".

he invented citations to J.J. Cazaux and Schanberg

Just to be clear: You are saying that he fabricated citations? Can you tell me the specific ones?

Chomsky claimed publications like the Economist have "analyses by highly ... but rather a letter from a reader in response to that article.

He writes "have provided analyses by highly qualified specialists". I assume he's referring to the letter he describes himself in the subsequent paragraph from, "an economist and statistician for the Cambodian Government until March 1975" who "visited refugee camps in Thailand and kept in touch with Khmers" and who relayed conversations from a "European friend who cycled around Phnom Penh for many days after its fall" and who you misleadingly describe as merely "a reader". Perhaps you could object to the phrase "provided analyses" if he hadn't described the analyses himself in detail in the very next paragraph.

---

I would re-iterate the point that the La Couture numbers were fabricated and had to be retracted; and the CIAs own numbers did not support allegations of genocide. Despite this the La Couture numbers were widely cited (and the CIA numbers were not). That alone proves the point that Chomsky was making and which I described at the beginning. When claims suits our foreign policy elite no evidence is required, when they don't no evidence is possible.

Aloisius
1 replies
17h48m

Chomsky never argues that there wasn't any evidence of killings and seems to accurately describe Tolgraven's account

Yes it was an example of one of Chomsky's half-truths.

I will have to read the book myself but looking at the references it does look like it has a "wide range of sources".

This was an example Chomsky lying by omission. There were, indeed, plenty of other sources for information in the book - for events prior to the Khmer Rouge coming to power.

Just to be clear: You are saying that he fabricated citations? Can you tell me the specific ones?

Yes. He wrote, "Their scholarship collapses under the barest scrutiny. To cite a few cases, they state that among those evacuated from Phnom Penh, “virtually everybody saw the consequences of [summary executions] in the form of the corpses of men, women and children rapidly bloating and rotting in the hot sun,” citing, among others, J.J. Cazaux, who wrote, [...]. They also cite The New York Times, May 9, 1975, where Sydney Shanberg wrote [...]"

Neither Cazaux nor Shanberg were cited as evidence for the passage quoted. The book certainly cited Shanberg elsewhere, though in reference to early favorable views of the Khmer Rouge.

I assume he's referring to the letter he describes himself in the subsequent paragraph from, "an economist and statistician for the Cambodian Government until March 1975" who "visited refugee camps in Thailand and kept in touch with Khmers" and who relayed conversations from a "European friend who cycled around Phnom Penh for many days after its fall" and who you misleadingly describe as merely "a reader".

This was an example of Chomsky dishonest borrowing of authority. The Economist does provide analysis "by highly qualified specialists who have studied the full range of evidence available."

This letter to the editor authored by a UN employee (mischaracterized by Chomsky as someone who worked for the Cambodian government) offered his "first impression" of an Economist article and contained personal estimates of civilian war deaths seemingly based on what he "felt" and some anecdotes.

That certainly wasn't written by one of the Economist's stable of highly qualified specialists who have studied the full range of evidence available - unlike the article the letter was responding to - an article that stated (correctly) that there were a million civilian deaths.

In an alternative reality where the Khmer Rouge were capitalists and an anti-Chomsky had written Distortions at Fourth Hand, there is little doubt that real Chomsky would have ripped it apart as American Imperialist propaganda. Sadly, neither he nor his apologists hold his writings to the standards he held others.

foobarqux
0 replies
4h11m

Yes it was an example of one of Chomsky's half-truths.

Except he himself explicitly says that there were killings multiple times.

Neither Cazaux nor Shanberg were cited as evidence for the passage quoted.

I don't understand what you are trying to say. Chomsky claims Cazaux wrote that '“not a single corpse was seen along our evacuation route,” and that early reports of massacres proved fallacious', that seems to provide a conflicting account of the "passage quoted" (i.e. "virtually everybody saw...").

This was an example of Chomsky dishonest borrowing of authority

As I said maybe you could argue that if he didn't explicitly describe the evidence and the source at length in the very next paragraph.

an article that stated (correctly) that there were a million civilian deaths.

What we are arguing about is whether there was a basis for those figures. I can't find the Economist article online at the moment but as far as I know the only source of those high figures at the time was Lacouture which Chomsky showed to be fabricated. I assume if you knew of another source you would have cited it already.

----

I will re-iterate that the key issue is not any of the above but that the most important piece of evidence, the Lacouture number, was fabricated and would have failed the most basic fact-checking, yet was loudly promoted. In contrast the US government's own numbers, which conflicted with La Couture, were ignored. These hard figures were the most important pieces of evidence and the fact they were treated as they were is what proves Chomsky's point about distortion of information, the Cambodia case being only one example.

cm2187
4 replies
1d10h

1979 was after the genocide and after Pol Pot was pushed out of power. Implying the US had something to do with the killing fields defies common sense. The khmer rouges were primarily China and North Vietnam backed.

Now the US did support some incompetent and corrupt militia in Cambodia to oppose the Khmer rouges, and those did their fair share of misdeeds, to the frustration of local US officers. But given the crimes the khmer rouges ended up committing, it is hard to argue that not opposing them was the morally superior position, even with hindsight.

foobarqux
1 replies
1d9h

It's like saying the war in Iraq has no effect on the current situation there.

cm2187
0 replies
1d9h

You mean like saying the US is the cause of the Shia-Sunni hatred?

feedforward
1 replies
1d2h

The khmer rouges were primarily China and North Vietnam backed.

Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1979 and China invaded Vietnam in 1979. What are you talking about?

cm2187
0 replies
1d

In April 1975, the Khmer Rouge seized power in Cambodia, and in January 1976, Democratic Kampuchea was established. During the Cambodian genocide, the CCP was the main international patron of the Khmer Rouge, supplying "more than 15,000 military advisers" and most of its external aid.[82] It is estimated that at least 90% of the foreign aid to Khmer Rouge came from China, with 1975 alone seeing US$1 billion in interest-free economic and military aid and US$20 million gift, which was "the biggest aid ever given to any one country by China"

And if you read the article, north vietnam was their main backer before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge#1975%E2%80%931993

hughesjj
33 replies
1d12h

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.

roenxi
32 replies
1d11h

I don't know why chomsky's beliefs and supported causes are so inconsistent with the morals he pushes

The obvious resolution to that paradox is either you don't understand Chomsky's morals or have mistaken what his beliefs are.

Judging by some random interview from 2022 [0] it looks like he has a position on Russia/Ukraine that is easy to defend. He describes it as a "principled, internationalist, anti-imperialist left response" and that seems like a fair assessment from what I'm reading. Looks like pretty standard fare for anyone who doesn't like war and propaganda.

[0] https://chomsky.info/20220408/

pydry
11 replies
1d10h

He was entirely right about that too.

NATO is an aggressive alliance that has exclusively invaded three countries in the last 20 years, zero of whom were threat to it.

The worst one was probably Libya, because NATO pretended to engage in a humanitarian mission to gain approval from the security council and then left the country utterly destroyed state afterwards. The country was shredded.

It's a tool of western imperialism that dangles the false promise of protection. In this respect it operates with the same logic as a gang recruiting teenagers before using them as cannon fodder.

Of course you can't say these things in polite company just as I couldn't say that WMDs were a complete load of bullshit in 2003 without being verbally attacked.

In 20 years time it will be seen as obvious, however.

_djo_
10 replies
1d5h

The invasion of Libya was fully authorised by the UNSC, and it was not conducted or approved solely by NATO. Libya was also already in a highly destructive civil war before the intervention, which is why it happened, so it’s not like they went in and destabilised a stable country. Gaddafi had built Libya’s security around himself in a cult of personality, things were always going to fall apart once his power waned.

Which other countries did NATO invade?

jcranmer
6 replies
1d4h

The other NATO interventions:

* Intervention in the violent breakup of Yugoslavia, invited to do so by the UN in response to the genocide going on there.

* Invasion of Afghanistan, following the invocation of Article 5 after an attack on a NATO country (i.e., 9/11).

_djo_
5 replies
1d3h

* Intervention in the violent breakup of Yugoslavia, invited to do so by the UN in response to the genocide going on there.

Indeed. So not an aggressive invasion but a humanitarian intervention.

* Invasion of Afghanistan, following the invocation of Article 5 after an attack on a NATO country (i.e., 9/11).

Not quite. Technically speaking, neither of the official NATO missions in Afghanistan, ISAF and Resolute Support, were Article 5 missions.

When the US triggered Article 5 in October 2001 it explicitly did not request a full NATO response, but initially only for support such as NATO AWACS aircraft in US airspace. When it invaded Afghanistan, which was entirely justified in international law as an act of self defence, a handful of NATO countries opted to send support contingents, like SOF, as a way of showing solidarity. But it was not a NATO mission under NATO command: Operation Enduring Freedom was American-led and commanded from the beginning. At best you can say several NATO allies invaded. Later, NATO launched ISAF and Resolute Support and became more involved as an organisation deploying forces, but that was post-invasion.

pydry
4 replies
1d1h

The invasion of Afghanistan was as much self defence as the invasion of Ukraine. Probably less, actually.

The idea that it was any kind of self defence is kind of pathetic, and mirrors Putinesque propaganda. It was occupation pure and simple.

America really wanted to set up military bases there. It was a black spot in the world which it lacked imperial force projection and it was right between 3 major rivals (Russia, China and Iran).

_djo_
3 replies
1d1h

In what sense was it not self defence under international law?

pydry
2 replies
1d1h

Afghanistan did not knock down the twin towers. It actually offered to hand over bin Laden if the US provided evidence of his involvement and tried him in a neutral country.

That wasn't good enough for the US, who were itching for a military invasion anyway, and were keen to build some military bases in a spot where they didnt yet have any.

The idea that the US follows international law is a sick joke. The idea that the country that created the Hague invasion act has nonzero respect for international law is laughable.

_djo_
1 replies
1d1h

You can’t seriously believe that.

First, the Taliban ‘offer’ was so full of caveats as to be worthless and, most importantly, they refused to do anything about the rest of the Al-Qaeda organisation that they hosted and shared power with and which attacked the US. Putting Bin Laden on trial in some supposed neutral third country would’ve done nothing to remove the clear and present threat to the US that Al-Qaeda at the time presented. So, yes, the US’s actions were legal under international law.

None of the major powers outside Europe have acceded to the ICC. Neither the US, nor India, nor China, nor Russia.

pydry
0 replies
10h55m

The caveats were exactly as I described and were entirely reasonable, but the US had a hard on for a military invasion and was not about to be stopped by such a trivial thing as due process.

Your idea that he should be handed over without question for trial does not follow any legal logic but is simply the logic of an imperialist.

The same logic is what led to the Hague invasion act, Guantanamo bay, the imperialist invasion of Iraq and, of course, the various attempts to push NATO further and further up against the more vulnerable parts of the Russian border.

As I said before, a Putin supporter would have broadly similar views to you - in reverse.

M2Ys4U
1 replies
1d4h

NATO's intervention in Kosovo is the one that routinely cited.

That wasn't defensive by any means, but that also doesn't make it unjustified nor should it really be called "aggressive".

Chomsky, naturally, denied that ethnic cleansing was happening there because it wasn't the US or "western" countries doing it.

_djo_
0 replies
1d3h

Agreed, Kosovo is the only actual NATO intervention of that sort. And agreed that it was neither unjustified nor ‘aggressive’.

pydry
0 replies
1d2h

The invasion of Libya was fully authorised by the UNSC,

Yes as I pointed out.

As I pointed out that made it worse because they lied to the security. They simply wanted to take sides in a civil war.

Did you read what I wrote at all?

roenxi
8 replies
1d10h

What do you expect him to believe? If you go in with an anti-imperialist anti-war bias, then NATO expansion is a bit of a beacon when asking questions like "why is their an active land war in Eastern Europe?". I don't actually remember if there is a serious counter-proposal; most people tend to rely on the theory that Putin suddenly went unhinged - which is obviously not the belief a thoughtful leftist would come to.

_djo_
7 replies
1d5h

No, the alternative liberal internationalist view is that the preservation of imperial-like spheres of influence and ironclad regional hegemonies is unfair, u democratic, and at odds with the rules-based trade-oriented order we’d like to see the world continue to adopt.

No country was forced to join NATO. In fact, it took years and years of lobbying from Eastern European countries before the first new members were allowed to join in 1999. Even then, plenty of care was taken to signal to Russia that it was strictly seen as a defensive measure, from allowing the Russian government in as an observer at all levels, to limiting the military capacity of the Baltics and putting a very low cap on the number and type of NATO assets that could be deployed in countries bordering Russia.

The intellectual mistake that Chomsky and many who share his ideas make is to believe that just because Russia might reasonably feel aggrieved at no longer being able to politically and economically dominate the countries around it through the use of military force as it could as the USSR, that it somehow has a right to have that situation reversed and is therefore justified at launching an unprovoked attack on a neighbouring democratic country to gain back that power. There should be no such right in the modern era, and believing in it is a betrayal of traditional left-wing ideals.

Ironically, returning to a might-makes-right global order as envisioned by Russia would mean the United States could behave far worse in future, pulling off the same kinds of annexations and similar as it did as a young power, and when it was far less powerful than it is now.

roenxi
6 replies
1d4h

I don't disagree with any of that. But you didn't deal with the "why is their an active land war in Eastern Europe?" question; which is what Chomsky was picking at to get to the NATO expansion point.

Ironically, returning to a might-makes-right global order as envisioned by Russia would mean the United States could behave far worse in future

The US could act much worse in the present if it wanted. Only China is really in a position to stop them and even there only in a geographically limited area of Asia. The reason the US often doesn't bother with a might-makes-right response is because it isn't effective, not because they're purposefully holding themselves back from useful options. It is more effective to have the rule based order where, famously, the US makes the rules and gives the orders.

_djo_
5 replies
1d1h

I don't disagree with any of that. But you didn't deal with the "why is there an active land war in Eastern Europe?" question; which is what Chomsky was picking at to get to the NATO expansion point.

Fair enough. To answer that, I’d say the actual trigger wasn’t NATO but the EU, and Ukraine wanting to join it and move out of Russia’s sphere of influence. This was coupled to a wave of new leadership who wanted a more western and central European alignment. That’s what the Maidan was all about, when Yanukovych unilaterally refused to sign the European Union–Ukraine Association Agreement and brutally cracked down on the resulting protests.

That desire for closer ties with western and central Europe played out economically too, with the Ukrainian tech sector in particular being promoted as an outsourcing hub for European companies and holding conferences like Devoxx.

Russia invaded because it knew it either subjugated Ukraine now, while it was still relatively weak but growing fast, or it lost the opportunity altogether. And in Russian strategic thought the idea of not being able to control Ukraine, which they see as an integral part of Russia, is anathema.

The reason the US often doesn't bother with a might-makes-right response is because it isn't effective, not because they're purposefully holding themselves back from useful options. It is more effective to have the rule based order where, famously, the US makes the rules and gives the orders.

On some level, sure, but as China’s rise has shown the rules based order does not prevent competitors from rising up and eventually eclipsing US power. While the rules based order allows the US to use economic coercion, it also allows China to do the same.

A might-makes-right approach can be effective, but it can also lead to world wars which are immensely destructive and which the US wants to avoid.

It’s not just the US though, the EU is similarly in favour of substituting diplomacy and trade for military power.

roenxi
4 replies
17h29m

Well, point 1 is NATO and the EU are almost the same entity. Difference of sets and there are only a couple of countries left. The non-EU NATO countries are generally involved in the war (maybe not Turkey? I don't keep an eye on the Turks).

Point 2 is more an observation. Russia is currently taking significant casualties - we don't really know how many - from Ukrainian forces armed with NATO weapons, NATO ammo, NATO intelligence, NATO training in some cases. These NATO activities are being done in service of NATO strategic concerns and appear to be coordinated through NATO headquarters. The CIA - most certainly not an EU institution - has 12 bases in Ukraine [0]. Biden is the person who turns out to have the authority to green light strikes on Russian soil [1]. It would appear superficially that Ukraine is going to join NATO [2].

If the trigger was EU expansion then the Russians made a pretty basic mistake and should have hired Chomsky as a military advisor to warn them about the rather obvious threat to Russian interests posed by NATO and its expansion. Putin obviously figured out that mistake fairly quickly because I'm pretty sure I've read about him talking about NATO in a couple of speech transcripts. The threat to them is NATO #1, EU #several - taking its spot in the queue with China, Russian winters, and coups and whatever other problems might materialise for them in a decade's time.

A might-makes-right approach can be effective, but it can also lead to world wars which are immensely destructive

That doesn't sound effective. Effective is getting what you want with minimum fuss.

[0] https://www.yahoo.com/news/cia-maintains-12-secret-bases-212...

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/30/politics/biden-ukraine-li...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-secretary-state-blin...

_djo_
2 replies
9h51m

NATO isn’t the only supplier to Ukraine, and NATO has no command authority over Ukraine and its forces. The idea that this is a ‘NATO’ proxy war is ridiculous and denies the agency of a democratic nation.

The US could only green light strikes on Russian territory with American-made weapons like ATACMs, it had no authority over those supplied by others or produced by Ukraine. This is clearly shown by the fact that Ukraine was hitting Russian territory using its own domestically produced drones long before the US gave the green light to do the same (albeit only in Belgorod) using US weapons.

This isn’t unique to the US: Countries routinely place limitations and restrictions on the uses of their weapons as a condition of sale, especially Western countries. For instance when Switzerland sold Pilatus trainers to South Africa it required a legal commitment from South Africa to never arm them and use them in combat missions. Countries also usually forbid retransfer or resale without their permission. These are often stipulated in the End User Certificate.

Putin and other Russian officials have made many claims to many audiences, often contradicting each other. But when you analyse the most consistent and those that align most consistently to codified doctrine you’ll find that it’s all about Russian hegemony over the former USSR territories, and its revanchist aims to regain lost power. Once again, former empires have no right to their former colonies, and that includes Russia regarding Ukraine.

Ukraine was not anywhere near close to joining NATO in January/February 2022, its request for admission was stalled and key NATO countries had made it clear that it wasn’t going to go anywhere. Ironically, it’s Russia’s invasion that provided the impetus for the Ukrainian accession to NATO to move forward, even though it’s still a long way away.

Joining the EU was much more likely and was a key foreign policy goal of the Ukrainian government before Russia invaded. It remains one now.

As for the US, its economic and political power is declining much faster than its military power. If it really was such an imperialist state it would seek to use that military power to restore its economic and political power, aiming for full hegemony rather than just influence. It doesn’t because American society would not support that kind of approach, having moved past the age of annexation by force.

roenxi
1 replies
8h35m

Alright. So just jumping back to "why is there an active land war in Eastern Europe?"; is it fair to characterise your position with these 3 points?

1) Russia was worried about EU expansion into Ukraine [0].

2) They've invaded Ukraine and are encountering heavy resistance from the EU.

3) The US is barely involved in either of the other 2 points.

Because it doesn't look like an EU war effort to me. It looks like a NATO effort. Russia seem to be talking about the NATO-ish aspects of the struggle when they try to justify themselves and the bulk of the materiel seems to be being directed by the US if the stats are to be believed. The US aren't bit players in this one [1].

I'm not seeing a strong counter to my basic understanding of the situation (which is pretty close to what Chomsky seems to have come to). It looks like a "Russia were worried about NATO expansion in Ukraine and discovered their worst fears being realised when they tried to resist said expansion militarily" situation. I'm not seeing a strong argument here for why Chomsky should have come to a different opinion, it seems to rely on the EU having an independent military presence that they just don't have.

NATO isn’t the only supplier to Ukraine, and NATO has no command authority over Ukraine and its forces. The idea that this is a ‘NATO’ proxy war is ridiculous and denies the agency of a democratic nation.

Why would Ukraine's form of government have anything to do whether this is a proxy war? They are democratic, they have agency, and this is still a NATO proxy war. If NATO wasn't involved Ukraine would have folded in the first month and the conflict would have ceased years ago.

[0] Although I am still a bit confused about why this is supposed to be a misread by Chomsky or myself; the only major difference I see between the EU and NATO is whether the US is involved. And I obviously think the US is involved.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62002218 - BBC thinks the US supplied 5x the amount of stuff as the next biggest supporter of Ukraine, for example.

_djo_
0 replies
1h59m

No, that's not an accurate characterisation. You're confusing the cause and the response. That the support to Ukraine has been predominantly US-led, in no small part because it had stockpiles that Europe does not, does not tell us anything about Russia's motivations for invading a sovereign neighbour. It's also possible for countries to support what they consider an ally without it being a 'proxy' war. For it to be a proxy war would require that NATO caused the war, but all the historical evidence shows that NATO countries like the US, France, the UK, Germany, and others spent months in advance of Russia's invasion trying to convince Putin not to invade. There's even a video of one of Macron's phone calls to Putin where he begs him to agree to a diplomatic summit that could find an alternative to war.

Chomsky's view, and I'm guessing yours too, is that NATO should never have expanded, that NATO's expansion was a move intended only to provoke Russia, that Russia had the right to not have NATO on its borders, and therefore that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is justified and understandable.

Yet none of those are accurate, as I've shown, but I'll address them again in brief below:

1) NATO was expanded only with initial great reluctance and the constant lobbying of Eastern European and Baltic nations in particular, who had good reason to want to be part of a defensive security alliance. However, and most importantly, Ukraine was nowhere near joining NATO and certainly was not moving closer to it in January/February 2022. There was, in fact, no activity being undertaken by Ukraine that could possibly be considered a clear and imminent threat to Russia in any form.

2) The expansion was conducted cautiously, with strict limits placed on what forces could be forward-deployed near Russia, adding Russia as a Partnership for Peace member, creating the NATO-Russia Founding Act and with it the permanent NATO-Russia Council, and creating additional official liaison offices to provide the Russians with visibility into and reassurance about NATO's operations and intentions.

3) Sovereign countries are free to join whatever security alliance they want to, it is a fundamental concept of sovereignty that countries should have their own foreign policies. Therefore Russia has no right to prevent its neighbours from joining either the EU or NATO. To grant Russia a veto over that would be to accept an undemocratic imperial hegemony of the type that existed decades ago. Of course, Russia is free to use its own foreign policy instruments in response, by isolating, sanctioning, demarching, etc a neighbour that does something it doesn't like, but that's as far as it can go.

4) Obviously, given all the above it's ludicrous to claim that Russia had any kind of justification in invading Ukraine, or that its decision to do so can be viewed as an understandable or reasonable one.

But sure, if you still want to argue that it was 'because of NATO', then you have to accept that Russia chose to invade Ukraine not because it was about to imminently join the alliance in the next few months (because it was years and years away under the absolute best case scenario) but to avoid the mere possibility of it joining NATO some point in the future. That's no less unacceptable and illegal, and it doesn't make it more understandable.

Would you accept the US invading Venezuela because it was concerned about that country's close alliance with Russia and substantial re-armament using Russian weapons?

htfu
0 replies
9h1m

The issue with what you write is that it's most all nonsense. Your core thesis doesn't pass the smell test at all.

Because you utterly ignore Finland. It's less that it's not NATO and more that it literally can't be. Why would Putin drive them into NATO if having NATO neighbors (which, besides, was already a fact anyways) is such a threat?

He views it as his rightful property, and that's that.

phatfish
4 replies
1d10h

He is still annoyed communism failed so epically. In his mind the Soviet satellites were to blame for wanting independence. It can been seen again with Ukraine, it's not that the Ukrainians are standing up for their independence, it is somehow NATOs fault.

He has made some good points about western politics from time to time. Even a stopped clock is correct twice a day.

slantedview
3 replies
21h19m

it is somehow NATOs fault.

NATO continued to expand right up to Russia's doorstep despite repeated promises not to, and refused to rule out expanding to Ukraine. Russia clearly called this out as a problem for years. Whether or not this is "NATOs fault", it's clear that the Ukraine invasion was motivated, in part, by NATO expansion.

EthanHeilman
2 replies
20h21m

it's clear that the Ukraine invasion was motivated, in part, by NATO expansion.

Unless you mean, the only way to have prevented the Russian invasion of Ukraine would have been to accept Ukraine into NATO, I strongly disagree with you here.

Russia invaded Ukraine not because Russia is fearful of NATO but because Russia wished to recreate the Soviet empire. It's just plain old imperialism.

hindsightbias
1 replies
15h2m

Years Ukraine not admitted to NATO: 1992-2022

But it was going to happen any minute now. I wonder if these sme people think Turkey is going to be admitted to the EU…

There’s a sucker born every minute.

EthanHeilman
0 replies
5h10m

Yep. The US told Ukraine it was never going to happen. Originally Ukraine had wanted neutrality but Russia kept making territorial claims on Ukraine land pushing Ukraine to seek protection from Russian imperialist ambitions.

If Ukraine eventually gets NATO membership it will be because of Russian's invasion.

foobarqux
0 replies
1d9h

The same view that is held by a plethora of senior western officials such as Obama, William Burns (Former ambassador to Russia), Gates (Former Secretary of Defence), Angela Merkle, etc.

LunaSea
1 replies
1d11h

Chomsky defends imperialism as long as it's not coming from western countries.

nayaketo
0 replies
1d10h

This is the truth. He is only moral when it suits his hatred for his own country.

racional
0 replies
1d6h

He describes it as a "principled, internationalist, anti-imperialist left response" and that seems like a fair assessment from what I'm reading.

It's also a complete mindfuck of a piece, with obvious cognitive distortions and major factual evasions flying from every paragraph.

But because it's expressed in that calm, authoritative, rational (sounding) voice -- and it's coming from Saint Chomsky after all -- "principled, internationalist" lefties eat it up like candy.

I admire Chomsky for other things he's done. But he's got a split personality also, and in some cases his "morals" are very deeply flawed.

KptMarchewa
0 replies
1d10h

All the "anti-imperialist left" support is someone else's empire.

cageface
0 replies
1d12h

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.

cbanek
35 replies
1d14h

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.

TaylorAlexander
14 replies
1d11h

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.

vasco
11 replies
1d11h

What makes you believe this would work? Specifically any form of anarchism? Have you seen groups of people operate for large periods of time successfully like this? Anything I've looked into shows me human nature would make any anarcho-anything system fail due to infighting.

ngcazz
3 replies
1d11h

What makes you believe anything would work? Things take people wanting them.

Eisenstein
1 replies
1d10h

Grand ideas about structuring a society based on a premise or an ideology or ideal end up being disasters when attempts are made to put them into practice.

It should be pretty simple to understand why: no one person or group of people can predict all eventualities or contingencies and it is not possible to design a system based on rigid ideals that can fail gracefully.

clarity20
0 replies
20h28m

Grand ideas about structuring society often have an egotism problem. The ego behind the ideas turns its critical lens outward without looking inward. Naturally it ends up telling the world what to do.

vasco
0 replies
1d10h

There's many years of evidence of other systems and how they work and their trade-offs, so you can read about them. I haven't read about a successful anarchistic system so I asked for more info in case they had it.

TaylorAlexander
2 replies
1d8h

Have you seen what the current system of bourgeoisie corporate rule is doing to us?

Is that system “working”?

In June 1888 Peter Kropotkin wrote “Are we good enough?” on the subject of human nature and anarchism. It’s well worth a listen: https://youtu.be/jytf-5St8WU

vasco
0 replies
1d5h

Thanks for sharing. I don't need to think we have a great system to have questions about something else not working, I'm just curious if it has because when I read about most anarcho-* philosophies I seem to see gaps in them. It doesn’t mean I'm right, just trying to learn more. There's already two good shares to read up later :)

edit: thanks again, your linked video is perfect, I have held this exact view that "we're not good enough" for communism/anarchy, so this is the perfect challenge to my current beliefs!

em-bee
0 replies
1d

peter kropotkin was right about the then state of things, but he missed the true solution. if i understand it correctly he is saying that in light of us not being good enough, a communist system is better than a capitalist one. and yet, communist systems largely failed.

the real solution is to fix the "are we good enough" problem and change education such that we actually become good enough. this requires moral education to a degree that is not happening anywhere yet. the reality is that as peter says in the beginning, if we were good enough, then the system would not matter. and has history has shown, as long as we are not good enough, any system remains exploitable. communism brought a temporary relief but ended up failing because we still were not good enough.

so lets forget this arguing about which system is better. it does not matter. what matters is that we learn to become good enough. that should be our goal. that's the only way to eliminate all problems.

pydry
1 replies
1d9h

Spain, the Paris Commune...

The problem with anarchism is never infighting it just wasnt good at defending itself from external military threats.

Stalinism on the other hand, was a perfectly crafted machine for dealing with external military threats, but wasn't very nice to live under.

Anthony-G
0 replies
1d3h

Historically, there have been a few examples of radical egalitarianism in revolutionary movements but like the Paris Commune they generally are short-lived – or never even become the dominant force, e.g., the Levellers during the English Civil Wars. It was the accomplishments of the CNT/FAI in organising one million members in 1930’s Spain that inspired me to become a libertarian socialist. However, since then I’ve come to the conclusion that the more egalitarian and democratic a society is, the more vulnerable it is to external and other threats.

orwin
0 replies
1d7h

Lip's history. My father knew Neuschwander, so maybe i'm biased, but Lip was truly an example of what anarcho-syndicalism can and should be, and survived 5 years despite fighting both a government and all the industry leaders, because it couldn't be allowed to work.

I think US historians wrote books on it, but often fail to mention that after (or really, a bit before) Neuschwander took control, the metal and steel industry that sold them metal gave them structurally deficient steel, poor quality copper and were largely inconsistent in their metal delivery, being late for months, then giving them all the late commands at the same time, stretching or overflowing their storage. The luxury store and industry wasn't any better (one more reason to hate LVMH and never support them as a French), leaving their products in inventory and not in display, rejecting previously accepted commands, and limiting foreign exports to less than the number of exported goods than when Lip watches had to be smuggled. The courts and police didn't help and (according to what i heard: this is a biased account) refused to take any declaration.

EthanHeilman
0 replies
20h51m

A lot of the US government would be called anarchist if it was a proposal from a radical rather than the current state of affairs:

1. Criminal trials via random lottery of jury with the charged being viewed as innocent until proven guilty.

2. Checks and balances, where governmental power is intentionally limited and weakened.

3. A system of federated governments that elect representations, with a design favoring minority members of that federation.

Anarchism is always a balancing act between legitimate power and limitations on that power. Most forms of Anarchism do not reject all forms of power as illegitimate but rather place a heavy burden of proof on the claim that legitimate of the use of power.

I disagree with a lot of what Chomsky has said but I do think his definition of anarchism was very well stated:

"Well, anarchism is, in my view, basically a kind of tendency in human thought which shows up in different forms in different circumstances, and has some leading characteristics. Primarily it is a tendency that is suspicious and skeptical of domination, authority, and hierarchy. It seeks structures of hierarchy and domination in human life over the whole range, extending from, say, patriarchal families to, say, imperial systems, and it asks whether those systems are justified. It assumes that the burden of proof for anyone in a position of power and authority lies on them. Their authority is not self-justifying. They have to give a reason for it, a justification. And if they can’t justify that authority and power and control, which is the usual case, then the authority ought to be dismantled and replaced by something more free and just." - Noam Chomsky

cbanek
0 replies
1d11h

That's definitely a big question. I asked a pretty open ended question about how he thinks the internet (and filter bubbles in specific) might have changed some of his thoughts in manufacturing consent as the main media went from TV / newspapers (broadcast) to internet (personalized). He said that basically the big companies own it all anyway.

YeGoblynQueenne
0 replies
7h11m

That sounds great but how do you deal with the fact that robots require mass-produced electronics and the infrastructure for those is currently in the hands of, well, let's say not anarcho-communists?

How about the environmental costs of all that automation?

Is there a realistic path for getting to what you propose from where we are now?

[Edit: realistic in the sense that e.g. the Alcubierre drive is possible but requires exotic matter, therefore "not realistic").

benbreen
10 replies
1d13h

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.

bn-l
9 replies
1d13h

I’ve never been close to intellectual elite circles

That is very humble

exe34
8 replies
1d13h

is this sarcasm? I read it as "I'm not welcome to parties because I don't toe the line"

bn-l
6 replies
1d12h

No, no sarcasm and that's how I read it too.

vasco
5 replies
1d11h

So how is it humble? He is just saying he didn't hobnob with known intellectuals - isn't that just a statement of fact?

dotancohen
3 replies
1d11h

Chomsky has very controversial opinions on some subjects and I suspect that precludes him being invited to many parties.

DSingularity
2 replies
21h12m

Probably precludes him from accepting the invitations.

You cant be anti-imperialist and accept a dinner invitation where you will inevitably be forced to smile at and rub elbows with the same men you critique as war-criminals. The man is principled.

I hope he recovers. He would be sorely missed.

exe34
0 replies
10h31m

you will inevitably be forced to smile at and rub elbows with the same men you critique as war-criminals

I'm autistic, so I would smile and tell them exactly what I think of them. but fortunately I don't get invited to parties.

dotancohen
0 replies
2h57m

Why not? He's supposedly anti-imperislist yet had no problem living in their society.

exe34
0 replies
23h41m

i think it's the opposite of humble, it's saying that he knows something that these intellectuals don't.

Scarblac
0 replies
1d11h

I don't understand how you can get any information from that line about the reasons why he wasn't close to them.

cbanek
1 replies
1d14h

I honestly think the documentary is shorter and better than the book, thanks for the link.

me_me_me
0 replies
1d1h

The book is very much still relevant

serf
1 replies
1d9h

Same.

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.

graphe
0 replies
21h24m

What did he recommended?

graphe
1 replies
1d14h

When did you ask him? I hope it was recently.

cbanek
0 replies
1d14h

September 2022

llmblockchain
0 replies
1d14h

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!

YeGoblynQueenne
0 replies
7h17m

I also wrote to Chomsky and got a reply, once. It seems he really replied to anyone who emailed him. It's amazing how he could do that.

But, look here. He's 95 years old and just had a stroke. He's not going to get well soon, or at all.

SomeoneFromCA
21 replies
1d12h

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...

gizmo686
7 replies
1d12h

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.

SomeoneFromCA
5 replies
1d12h

But that has never been proven that this is how indeed human acquire language; it is essentially a hypothesis. We may as well do it the way LLMs do - some undifferentiated networks acquires the grammar by unknown means.

nsingh2
3 replies
1d12h

LLMs are universal approximators and can pick up patterns in sequences that are very different from Human languages. Sure, they don't have many inductive biases and can understand language, but as a consequence require a tremendous amount of data to work. Humans don't, which implies a certain bias towards Human language built into our heads. A bias is also implied by the similarities across Human languages, though what structure(s) in the brain are responsible is not exactly clear.

SomeoneFromCA
2 replies
1d12h

It still does not proof anything, as claiming that "there is certain bias for Human Language built into our heads" is quite different thing that saying there is some universal grammar in the brain structures, as much we do not have innate abilities to comprehend calculus or play chess, yet we still able to learn it, with a lot less training information than LLMs. In fact 2 books will suffice for the both.

nsingh2
0 replies
1d12h

My comment was more of a response to

We may as well do it the way LLMs do

We almost certainly don't learn the way LLMs do, it's just too data inefficient.

And I don't see what current LLMs can say about a universal grammar in the Human brain, unless there is proof that a LLM-style attention mechanism exists in the brain, and that it is somehow related to language understanding.

codeflo
0 replies
1d12h

We don’t learn language from textbooks though.

foobarqux
0 replies
1d8h

Chomsky has explicitly answered this: Moro has shown in experiments that humans do not appear to be able to learn arbitrary grammatical structures in the same way as human-like (hierarchical) languages. Non-human like languages take longer to interpret and use non-language parts of the brain.

LLMs on the other hand can easily learn these non-human grammatical structures which means that they are not the way humans do it.

teruakohatu
0 replies
1d12h

Trying to put his in an uncontroversial way: the human brain (or a brain plus paper and a pencil) can be turning complete/equivalent. Therefor a human sitting down with a pen and pencil could, in a painstakingly long time, compute the backwards and forward passes of a transformer network.

Therefor a human with no understanding of grammar/language, and using no innate biological circuits, could process grammar and respond with language.

The flaw in this argument would be how to teach a human to do this without grammar ...

yareal
3 replies
1d12h

LLMs are an approximation of all the human media they consume. An LLM cannot exist with out human circuitry. It's at best an ersatz language user.

SomeoneFromCA
2 replies
1d12h

Unrelated to what I said, with all due respect.

sitkack
0 replies
1d12h

It isn't tho, if you look at the bulk of tokens needed to train gen1 over LLMs and what is possible with better data and smaller models.

The fact that LLMs trained on dumptrucks full of data cannot achieve what a middle schooler begrudgingly achieves using existence and snide remarks.

flaminHotSpeedo
0 replies
1d12h

I'd consider it related, for two reasons:

First and foremost (and what I think the parent comment is getting at) whether you could truly say an LLM "understands" language

As a secondary quibble in the context of the parent post, though big overall, I would argue that the whole argument is moot since a human couldn't possibly learn the way an LLM does in a single lifetime

tgv
2 replies
1d12h

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.

renonce
1 replies
1d11h

LLMs does have that, or at least it’s very likely that we will eventually be able to manipulate LLMs in a modular way (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40429540). One point remains: humans learn language with much fewer tokens than LLMs need, which suggests presence of a priori knowledge about the world. The LLM metaphor is finetuning, so babies are born with a base model and then finetuned with environment data, but it’s still within LLM scope.

tgv
0 replies
1d9h

presence of a priori knowledge about the world

1. A certain architecture (e.g. a module that enables syntactic processing) is not knowledge about the world.

2. We model the world according to our capabilities.

3. Modular language models have been tried, but did not meet with success.

4. The link you include is about the conceptual space, which is not (directly) related to human syntactic processing.

5. The question is not about metaphors, but about reality.

6. Babies aren't born with a base model and fine-tuned. They learn. This is the metaphor NNs are actually based on.

codeflo
1 replies
1d12h

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?

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK
0 replies
1d11h

Or that llm learning algos should be further improved, which will happen at some point. I remember Kasparov's tirades to the tune of I have an eternal soul therefore computers can never beat me in chess.

randomcarbloke
0 replies
9h24m

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.

materielle
0 replies
1d12h

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.

graphe
0 replies
1d4h

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/fruit-fly-brai... He mentioned a structure and scientists hacked a fruit fly Kenyon organ to process language which it does pretty well, also at MIT.

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
0 replies
8h19m

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.

lajosbacs
20 replies
1d10h

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.

bantunes
19 replies
1d10h

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.

glimshe
11 replies
1d10h

Is there a good example of socialism?

Malcolmlisk
4 replies
1d8h

The DDR.

lajosbacs
0 replies
1d8h

* actually deleted my reply, a non-troll cannot say this

jbaber
0 replies
1d8h

Is this ironic?

glimshe
0 replies
1d7h

True, the Stasi was indeed pretty good at what they did.

dgrin91
0 replies
1d8h

East Germany? Why do you call that a good example of socialism? Post-wall coming down it was mostly East Germans coming to West Germany, less of the reverse. Even today the eastern half of Germany is typically socioeconomically lower on most stats, and a lot of that stems from decades of decisions made in DDR.

Heliodex
1 replies
19h44m

I'm unsure as well but either way this is fascinating; I've only ever heard the term 'scrip' used with negative connotations so this seems like a very refreshing change. The way the currency value was kept stable also looks to me like a great benefit. Welp, now I gotta write a blockchain that tries to match this experiment as closely as possible

adastra22
0 replies
10h9m

That would be Freicoin. One of the earliest altcoins, btw.

FactKnower69
1 replies
18h27m

Look up "largest economies by purchasing power", then write me a long reply hemming and hawing about how that's not real socialism

adastra22
0 replies
10h10m

The 'socialism' that Chomsky is defending is Soviet, not Scandinavian.

rswskg
0 replies
1d9h

lol, no.

lajosbacs
6 replies
1d10h

What would then be a good example of socialism?

codr7
2 replies
21h18m

Given that it's just another -ism, brain farted by some random french aristocrat in the eighteenhundreds-something if I remember correctly, and like all other -isms designed to control the population and steal the profit. All of them?

The core ideas are awesome, but then the same could be said of Democracy; any idea force fed from the top is going to have the same kind of shit sandwich quality, the rainbow madness is just the latest example.

dpig_
1 replies
20h59m

Democracy and socialism aren't categories of a kind.

codr7
0 replies
20h42m

They are examples of ideas force fed from the top with the aim of controlling the population, which is sort of a category.

Applying mathematical reasoning to history isn't going to work very well, but knock yourself out.

Malcolmlisk
2 replies
1d8h

The DDR

IsTom
1 replies
1d5h

It was so good that to this day there is an economic rift between former west and east Germany.

iamawacko
0 replies
20h19m

That economic rift is not the fault of the DDR.

1. The West of Germany, particularly the Rhine, had large amounts of natural resources and much industrial capacity. This was true long before Germany was split. Take the steel production of Germany in 1944, for example. 59% of Steel production was in the West, 18% was in the East, and 16% was in the areas outside of Germany. This is not only more production, but more production per capita.

2. Like most of the former Easter bloc, the privatization of state companies resulted in economic downturn in that region. Especially since many of these state industries were simply closed and cashed out on. Jörg Steinbach, economy minister of Brandenburg, is quoted as saying "Some 70 per cent of East German industry disappeared".

Zanfa
8 replies
1d8h

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.

1equalsequals1
7 replies
1d5h

You should try reading more then

collyw
6 replies
1d4h

"The unvaccinated should be excluded from society".

Amazing the he wrote manufacturing consent yet fell for the COVID propaganda so hard.

chipotle_coyote
5 replies
1d3h

If you believe that "vaccinations protect us against disease" is propaganda, I have very bad news about whatever information sources you've been following.

karmakurtisaani
2 replies
1d1h

We're quite fortunate the internet wasn't a thing when polio was still around.

collyw
0 replies
2h41m

Polio got reclassifed and the vaccines claimed a success. But keep the faith.

beaeglebeachedd
0 replies
23h51m

Polio measures did not focus on sacrificing the children for the elderly. COVID school and social/learning activity shutdowns did.

collyw
0 replies
2h43m

Just like the covid "vaccine"?

Izkata
0 replies
1d1h

He was talking about the covid vaccines when he said that, which never prevented infection or spread. That belief started from a misunderstanding of the press releases.

He either didn't know what he was talking about or was making it a moral thing without regard to effectiveness.

nashashmi
6 replies
1d13h

He is more than ever important today in light of Israel’s war. He was an open and ardent critic of Israel and a blatant supporter of Palestine. And even verbally supported Hamas best I can remember.

grumple
3 replies
1d8h

He’s a tankie and anti-western. He is not to be admired for his views on politics. He favor Hamas purely because they are anti-western.

Terrorists who intentionally target innocents and desire the ethnic cleansing of Jews, like Hamas, are the bad guys. This has been the dominant Palestinian position for the past 100 years, from Al-Qassam to today, and it was preceded by 1300 years of genocide, sex slavery, and oppression of Jews by Muslim colonizers in the very same area.

nashashmi
2 replies
1d1h

Glad someone said it. Hamas is not a terrorist because they terrorize. Hamas is a terrorist because they are a threat to western govt and world order. Similarly south africa post apartheid was a threat to western world order.

teytra
1 replies
4h43m

How is Hamas a threat to western governments?

And S-A's apartheid government was actually boikotted by western governments. How do you explain that?

nashashmi
0 replies
36m

UN passed a boycott in 1980 (A/35/PV.98 16 Dec. 1980). 10 objections. 22 abstentions. US was the country that objected. [1]. This was not boycotted by western government. The division was between first world and second world.

US proceeds to list Africa National Congress as terrorist.

Hamas does not belong to the western world, the first world, or second world, or communist world. But the western world is opposed to Hamas. And id's it as a threat.

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=EGRGAAAAIBAJ&pg=PA5&dq=sou...

pydry
1 replies
1d12h

And even verbally supported Hamas best I can remember.

Did he say something controversial like "Gaza has a right to defend itself?"

LunaSea
0 replies
1d9h

Seems like the right to defend one-selves is a one-way street.

xnx
4 replies
1d14h

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.

vr46
2 replies
1d13h

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.

vasco
1 replies
1d11h

Valentino Rossi and Noam Chomsky together against the world really is a pairing I didn't expect!

fransje26
0 replies
5h43m

What they have in common is speed.

hi-v-rocknroll
0 replies
1d13h

Without a doubt. Manufacturing Consent and The Fateful Triangle* should be assigned reading to US high school students.

* 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

lz400
3 replies
1d11h

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.

rulalala
1 replies
7h23m

Please do you have in mind a sample of this content oriented for younger generations? Thanks for your time and consideration.

bbor
0 replies
1d10h

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!

jokoon
3 replies
1d9h

At first I thought he said interesting things

But with time, I also realized he is a linguist, not an historian or political scientist.

He is controversial.

akaij
1 replies
1d7h

I think you mean that he is mainly a linguist.

adastra22
0 replies
10h12m

I think he's saying that he should stick to his lane.

rand846633
0 replies
1d5h

I often find controversial to correlate with interesting.

ImAnAmateur
3 replies
1d9h

Could anyone recommend a Noam Chomsky talk about language? I'm curious about his work but have never read or listened to anything from the man.

throwaway81523
0 replies
14h54m

Look for "Language and problems of knowledge : the Managua lectures" which are about Plato's problem. It's reasonably introductory and accessible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_problem

alexarnesen
0 replies
1d5h

The ghost in the machine and the limits of understanding . A bit wider than linguistics but a great talk and intro to his style of prose

azinman2
1 replies
1d14h

Sad to lose such an intellectual juggernaut’s voice. The world needs more Chomsky’s of all persuasions, and a culture that will elevate them.

collyw
0 replies
1d4h

Nah, we need more Thomas Sowells.

Jean-Papoulos
1 replies
1d11h

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.

His anti US imperialism views blind him.

foobarqux
0 replies
1d8h

Universal grammar has not been "debunked", despite evidence-free claims otherwise.

surfingdino
0 replies
1d11h

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".

pvaldes
0 replies
1d8h

By the description provided, I assume that "medical event" here is a synonym of ictus

plasticeagle
0 replies
8h51m

A legendary man.

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.

martythemaniak
0 replies
20h53m

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.

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.

mark_l_watson
0 replies
2h21m

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.

isntbilly
0 replies
9h21m

Can't think of anyone I regard higher. Stick in there Noam

hi-v-rocknroll
0 replies
1d13h

Nooooooooooooooo...... How will colorless green ideas sleep furiously? :'[

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

escapecharacter
0 replies
1d11h

Does this change his opinion on Sapir-Whorf? Is that even knowable?

carabiner
0 replies
18h59m

Calling chatgpt "plagiarism software" was an incredibly succinct quip.

beryilma
0 replies
19h6m

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.

aszantu
0 replies
1d11h

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.

alexnewman
0 replies
1d12h

First of all he's a hell of a linguist theorist.

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.

aborsy
0 replies
1d12h

Sad news. He was remarkably sharp even in old age.

Log_out_
0 replies
12h55m

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]

Garvi
0 replies
1d3h

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

..must have a hell of a lot of downvotes.