Noam Chomsky

wolf pauli · Post by **wolf pauli** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 10:11 pm

While there's disagreement between Chomsky's followers and detractors about the exact status and quality of his contributions to the development of linguistics and cognitive science, few would quibble over what those contributions are, and even fewer would deny that Chomsky, more than any other thinker, set the stage for the major current debates in those disciplines. In this respect, Chris Knight's essay adds pretty much nothing to the usual understanding of the matter, apart from a tendentious insistence that Chomsky is a shill for military-industrial paymasters. Had he been more concerned with veracity than pinning the tail on the donkey, Knight -- who doesn't hesitate to represent Chomsky's program for linguistics as an abject failure -- might have noticed that Chomsky served his 'paymasters' very poorly indeed. What exactly did Chomsky contribute to the development of military command and control systems (or Carnivore for that matter, as insinuated on another thread)? In a word, Nothing -- a fact that shouldn't have been lost on a writer who regards Chomskyan linguistics as unworkably wrong. Had he taken the point of his own (albeit thoroughly unoriginal) polemic, Knight might have gone on to ask: What did Chomsky expect to contribute to the military when he took their grant money? As any student of Chomsky's could have told Knight, the answer, again, is Nothing. I won't be shedding a tear any time soon for the poor, duped, military, which got taken for a ride by a guy who had more constructive uses for their money (our money, if you think about it) than bolstering command and control systems with an automated method of natural language translation -- something Chomsky believed from the start to be impossible. And if Colonel Edmund P. Gaines thought he got a return on his investment, then the more fool him. FWIW, to anyone with a basic background in mathematical logic who's interested in the problems facing any linguistic theory, not just Chomsky's, that assumes natural languages to be recursively enumerable collections of sentences, I'd strongly recommend D. Terrence Langendoen and Paul M. Postal's book The Vastness of Natural Language (Basil Blackwell, 1984). And to anyone with a basic background in cognitive neuroscience who's interested in the problems facing any linguistic theory, not just Chomsky's, that assumes linguistic competence to be grounded in a unitary language instinct, I'd strongly recommend Philip Lieberman's Human Language and Our Reptilian Brain: the Subcortical Bases of Speech, Syntax, and Thought (Harvard, 2000): <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/LIEHUM.html">www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/LIEHUM.html</a> Reviewed by Geoffrey Sampson: <a href="http://www.grsampson.net/Vlie.html">www.grsampson.net/Vlie.html</a> Finally, I'd advise those interested in accusations about sources of funding to remember that money is fungible, and to look into who pays Chris Knight's salary at the University of East London. (Too bad Ward "Little Eichmann" Churchill didn't pause to consider who pays his salary at the University of Colorado.) Failing that, one might want to acquire a new hobby, such as figuring out the difference between anarcho-socialism and anarcho-capitalism -- worth doing before equating 'anarchism' with Adam Smith and accusing Chomsky of being a Smith devotee, as happened on the 'Edumacate me on Leftgatekeepers' thread.

proldic · Post by **proldic** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 10:20 pm

Guess you forgot to tell him. Chomsky was on Pacifica just last week talking about the debt all anarchists owe to Adam Smith. I'll get the link for ya.

robertdreed · Post by **robertdreed** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 10:22 pm

I invite anyone lurking to visit the thread recently started by timboucher, pertaining to conspiracy. Read my remarks in question, found there in their original context. I hope that you'll find that proldic has completely misapprehended what I was attempting to say. By a mile. As a snippet of thought, the remark in question isn't easily evaluated outside of its full context. And I can conceivably be criticized for using an awkward, Burroughs-like rhetorical construction to attempt to make my point. To clarify my intended point: I've gotten sick of people telling me that ending the Federal drug prohibition is "impossible". No half-measure will do in its place. That accounts for my "so long, suckers" tag. It's a bitter comment. But it wasn't addressed to anyone based on their race or ethnicity. It was meant as a joust against the Crackpot Realism that demands that drug legalization be held beyond the realm of serious consideration- a view which in my opinion simply allows "school reformers", especially in communities riddled with the effects of the Underground Economy, to go back to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, so to speak. How proldic took my comments as damning proof of my "racism", I'll leave the lurkers to figure out. Edited by: <A HREF=http://p097.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=robertdreed>robertdreed</A> at: 7/28/05 10:16 pm

wolf pauli · Post by **wolf pauli** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 10:28 pm

'Owing a debt' doesn't make one a 'devotee', e.g., I owe a debt to Adam Smith (strangely insightful on the land question, quite miserable on a lot of other things) as well as to Chomsky, but I'm a devotee of neither. I also owe a debt to the IRS but that's another story.

sunny · Post by **sunny** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 11:12 pm

Excellent, excellent, excellent! One of the most comprehensive articles I've read on the subject. Not much I can add to it, except to comment upon this: JFK's enemies in the CIA, the Pentagon, and elsewhere fixed on his refusal to provide air coverage for the Bay of Pigs, his unwillingness to go into Indochina with massive ground forces, his no-invasion guarantee to Krushchev on Cuba, his overtures for a rapprochement with Castro and professed willingness to tolerate countries with different economic systems in the Western hemisphere, his atmospheric-test-ban treaty with Moscow, his American University speech calling for reexamination of U.S. cold war attitudes toward the Soviet Union, his antitrust suit against General Electric, his curtailing of the oil-depletion allowance, his fight with U.S. Steel over price increases, his challenge to the Federal Reserve Board's multibillion-dollar monopoly control of the nation's currency,3 his warm reception at labor conventions, and his call for racial equality. These things may not have been enough for some on the Left but they were far too much for many on the Right. The hatred of Kennedy by left critics has always enraged me; WTF else did they want him to do at that time and place in history? Declare us the United Socialist States of America and seize all private businesses for the State? The initiatives enumerated above prove Kennedy to be a highly enlightened individual, not afraid of bold action. From my studies of his presidency, it is clear to me that he was growing more and more aware, and had every intention of forcing the country to live up to it's founding principles- if only he had had the time.

heath7 · Post by **heath7** » Fri Jul 29, 2005 12:02 am

proldic, where's the beef?

Project Willow · Post by **Project Willow** » Fri Jul 29, 2005 3:55 am

<blockquote>Quote:<hr>As I pointed out in published exchanges with Cockburn and Chomsky (neither of whom responded to the argument), conspiracy and structure are not mutually exclusive dynamics. A structural analysis that a priori rules out conspiracy runs the risk of not looking at the whole picture. <hr></blockquote> Thanks for this! As I watched Manufacturing Consent again with a friend lately, I was screaming out much along these lines, (though obviously not so well studied or stated). It's common sense for chrissakes. <blockquote>Quote:<hr>"Anyhow, if I have a point to this rant, on the list of assholes who deserve to be brought in shackles before the masses Chomsky is like number 8020! I mean, if we can find room to critize Chomsky (heralded as one of the great philosophers of our time)...ya think we can get a few threads in here about what a colossal asshole W/Cheney is?! Like Chomsky is a threat to our way of life."<hr></blockquote> The reaction is akin to abuse survivors' feelings towards a non-offending parent, particularly if it's the mother. Perps are expected to be assholes, but the betrayal of those who are perceived as failing in their role to protect or respond is often felt more keenly. These left activists put themselves out as champions of the oppressed. Well, they shouldn't, because it's always a pick and choose game. PW

wolf pauli · Post by **wolf pauli** » Fri Jul 29, 2005 2:09 pm

As I pointed out in published exchanges with Cockburn and Chomsky (neither of whom responded to the argument), conspiracy and structure are not mutually exclusive dynamics. A structural analysis that a priori rules out conspiracy runs the risk of not looking at the whole picture. An excellent point, also made by Peter Dale Scott -- another person who owes, and readily acknowledges, his debt to Chomsky, yet goes his own way: "Those who have spent years trying to assess the role of the Kennedy assassination in US history are accustomed to the debate between structuralists and conspiratorialists. In the first camp are those who argue, in the spirit of Marx and Weber, that the history of a major power is determined by large social forces; thus the accident of an assassination, even if conspiratorial, is of little historical import. (On this point Noam Chomsky and Alex Cockburn agree with the mainstream US media they normally criticize.) "At the other end of the spectrum are those who talk of an Invisible Government or Secret Team, who believe that surface events and institutions are continuously manipulated by unseen forces. For these people the assassination exemplifies the operation of fundamental historical forces, not a disruption of them. "For years I have attempted to formulate a third or middle position. To do so I have relied on distinctions formulated partly in neologisms or invented terms. (I apologize for this: neologisms, like conspiracies, are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.) Thirty years ago I postulated that our overt political processes were at times seriously contaminated by manipulative covert politics or parapolitics, which I then defined as "a system or practice of politics in which accountability is consciously diminished."[1] In Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, I moved towards a less conspiratorial middle alternative. I discussed instead the interactions of what I called deep political processes, emanating from plural power sources and all only occasionally visible, all usually repressed rather than recognized. In contrast to parapolitical processes, those of deep politics are open-ended, not securely within anyone's power or intentions. "In 1995 I brought out Deep Politics II, which I thought of at the time as a case study in deep politics: how secret U.S. government reports on Oswald in Mexico became a reason to cover up the facts about the assassination of JFK. But it was also a specialized study, since in this case most of the repressed records of events, now declassified, occurred within the workings of the CIA, FBI, military intelligence, or their zones of influence. It was hence largely a study in parapolitics. It verged into deep politics only near the end, when it described how a collaborating Mexican agency, the DFS (Direcciòn Federal de Seguridad) was deeply involved in the international drug traffic. Deep Politics, in contrast, looked continuously at the interaction between government and other social forces, such as the drug traffic. "Both books represented an alternative kind of history, or what we may perhaps call parahistory. ..." Deep Politics III OVERVIEW: THE CIA, THE DRUG TRAFFIC, AND OSWALD IN MEXICO <a href="http://www.history-matters.com/pds/DP3_Overview.htm">www.history-matters.com/p...erview.htm</a> The entire Overview -- the entire book for that matter -- is well worth reading.

proldic · Post by **proldic** » Fri Jul 29, 2005 2:37 pm

"That's an internet theory and it's hopelessly implausible. Hopelessly implausible. So hopelessly implausible I don't see any point in talking about it." - Noam Chomsky, at a FAIR event at New York's Town Hall, 22 January 2002, in response to a question from the audience about US government foreknowledge of 9/11.

heath7 · Post by **heath7** » Fri Jul 29, 2005 5:42 pm

Gee, he coulda threw one more 'hopelessly implausible' in their for good measure. Its Chomsky's stature, and ridiculous statements like that that make him at the very least a misguidance asset to the motives of intelligencia. Given Chomsky's intelligence, it seems hopelessly implausible that he believes his own statement, therefore making it a lie. For what motive I'll decline to speculate further.

robertdreed · Post by **robertdreed** » Fri Jul 29, 2005 6:04 pm

I still haven't received any response from you to my post about 5 comments above, posted in defense against your allegation of my "racism", which you originally made in another discussion, and have since repeated in at least two additional pages on this board. I don't like badgering people, or dragging matters off-topic in order to settle personal scores. But I didn't start this. And slanders and libels have bearing on the tone of the wider discussion, particularly when unanswered. So I've learned that the best policy is to answer such accusations promptly. How about a reply? Personally, I think I'm entitled to an apology, or a simple retraction- or if you care to continue to dispute the matter, a reply to my comment, at minimum. I'd care about it less if you were some drive-by poster. But you're obviously interested in sticking around, and having a high profile on this board. After all, as of this moment you're responsible for beginning around 1/4 of the last 50 new topic pages- 13 out of 50, by my count. And you've only been here around a week. Edited by: <A HREF=http://p097.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=robertdreed>robertdreed</A> at: 7/29/05 7:22 pm

proldic · Post by **proldic** » Fri Jul 29, 2005 6:19 pm

"I might perhaps add that all of this reminds me of a 1998 DOD report on declassification decisions. Among other things, it suggested that information about the JFK assassination should be released now and then as a "diversion," as "distraction material," which could keep people busy on wild goose chases so they wouldn't investigate the serious questions. A smart decision on the part of US intelligence. You can find the details in an excellent book by British political scientist Richard Aldrich, The Hidden Hand (p. 7), the best study by far of British intelligence (with a lot about US intelligence too, for one reason, because the British were of course spying on the Americans, just as conversely). [Comment pasted in by Noam Chomsky from an e-mail response to a query:] There's by now a small industry on the thesis that the administration had something to do with 9-11. I've looked at some of it, and have often been asked. There's a weak thesis that is possible though extremely unlikely in my opinion, and a strong thesis that is close to inconceivable. The weak thesis is that they knew about it and didn't try to stop it. The strong thesis is that they were actually involved. The evidence for either thesis is, in my opinion, based on a failure to understand properly what evidence is. Even in controlled scientific experiments one finds all sorts of unexplained phenomena, strange coincidences, loose ends, apparent contradictions, etc. Read the letters in technical science journals and you'll find plenty of samples. In real world situations, chaos is overwhelming, and these will mount to the sky. That aside, they'd have had to be quite mad to try anything like that. It would have had to involve a large number of people, something would be very likely to leak, pretty quickly, they'd all be lined up before firing squads and the Republican Party would be dead forever. That would have happened whether the plan succeeded or not, and success was at best a long shot; it would have been extremely hard to predict what would happen."

jimmy maxwell · Post by **jimmy maxwell** » Fri Jul 29, 2005 9:56 pm

robert, a wee bit of education while our proletarian dictator naps: <a href="http://p097.ezboard.com/frigorousintuitionfrm7.showMessage?topicID=711.topic">p097.ezboard.com/frigorou...=711.topic</a>

jenz · Post by **jenz** » Sat Jul 30, 2005 9:50 am

This may be seen as off piste - in which case, sorry. Yet PW makes a subtle and interesting point. Because the protective parent is unaware of what he/she has to protect the child from, is duped and entangled in a web which in part she herself spun, thinking all the time it was a nest she was making. The child is dealing with behaviour which is way past the last stop. (worse than shooting presidents by a mile, because it strikes at our humanity itself) Most people, most of the time, have no comprehension of evil undercurrents, make the assumption that their experience, including their own emotional and psychological structure, is a model to comprehend that of all others who live on the planet. I was once asked by a survivor if I thought there was more evil now than when I was young. How could I answer, when I had been so blind, for so long? Its not impossible, in fact its quite likely, that a person who has done insightful work in one sphere, may be incompetent, blinded or duped in another. (They could also be, conceivably, working for 2 sides at the same time. The acid test is usually, money and power.) We have to take what's good, and integrate it into our world view. We are not 'the child', have not had thought processes interfered with, with repeated doses of stress induced adrenochrome, and need no emotional crutches. Chris Knight has written some interesting things about the origins of culture, which I read before I understood about RA, and re-read with more close attention afterwards.

rigorousintuition.ca

Noam Chomsky

Re: Noam Chomsky

Chomsky not a smith devotee?

pleez...

Re: Chomsky not a smith devotee?

Re: But conspiracy phobia from folks who "like Icke&quo

Re: If it walks like a duck...

Re: Noam Chomsky

Re: Noam Chomsky

Chomsky On 9/11

Re: Chomsky On 9/11

proldic

Chomsky says JFK declassification decision CIA Plot

Re: proldic

protective parents