Top Intellectuals

[Orwell]

Well, it is true that Chomsky has a heavy anti-american bias, particularly when it comes to US foreign policy and US media. But you have an anti-Chomsky bias that makes you interpret what he says in the worst possible way.

Here is Chomsky infamous article on Cambodia. It was written in 1977 and he reviews various books on Cambodia. Basically he says that the books that (accurately) report millions of deaths are biased. The reality is that his anti-American bias prevented him from seeing the truth:
http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/chombookrev.htm
I cannot find his after-the-starvation defense of the emptying of Phnom Penh as necessary to prevent famine. It reality Pol Pot sent everyone from the city without their possession to farm without knowledge or tools to do so which led to mass starvation. Pol Pot also emptied hospitals which killed hundreds immediately.

I hate having to defend Chomsky, but lets be fair: in 1977, all Kkmer rouge atrocities were "alleged atrocities". How many people died in Cambodia? Would you agree that if the number of people who died in Cambodia was exaggerated by those books, then those books have a bias? Would you also agree that any book that downplays american responsibility (after all, the US did heavily bomb Cambodia) is biased? As far as I know, Chomsky doesn't deny that atrocities took place in Cambodia. What he does bitch about incessantly is the double standard present in US media when it comes to atrocities i.e. western media made the already terrible Khmer Rouge atrocities sound even worse, while comparable atrocities elsewhere (like Timor) got downplayed, since the people responsible were US allies.

Here are two offhand comments where he compares Israel and the anti-Russian Afghani's to Pol Pot and decides that they are worse:

http://www.chomsky.info/books/fateful01.htm


http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199312--.htm

CBL

Criticizing double standards doesn't imply that the person who criticizes the double standard is defending the point of view that got the bad (or worse) treatment. Chomsky isn't comparing Israel and the anti-Russian Afghanis to Pol Pot. He is comparing the media coverage given to Israel and the anti-Russian Afghanis to the media coverage of Pol Pot. Nuance. I suggest you read those articles in that optic, I'm sure they won't sound as bad as you are making them.

 

[CBL4]

Originally posted by Orwell
Chomsky isn't comparing Israel and the anti-Russian Afghanis to Pol Pot. He is comparing the media coverage given to Israel and the anti-Russian Afghanis to the media coverage of Pol Pot. Nuance. I suggest you read those articles in that optic, I'm sure they won't sound as bad as you are making them.

Re-read my post. Chomsky explicitly compares Hekmatyar to Pol Pot and implies that Hekmatyar is worse.

There would, for example, be little utility in focusing on the exploits of the CIA favorite Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the world's most extreme Islamic fundamentalist fanatics, who bears primary responsibility for 30,000 deaths in the capital city of Kabul alone according to the London Economist, surpassing Pol Pot in Phnom Penh, it appears.

Actually Chomsky is correct in the most misleading way as possible - fewer people died during the "evacuation"

At Phnom Penh, two million inhabitants were evacuated on foot into the countryside at gunpoint. As many as 20,000 died along the way

http://www.unitedhumanrights.org/Genocide/pol_pot.htm
but this ignores the fact that 300,000 to 500,000 of the "evacuees" died later. (Estimated figures for deaths are 1 in 7 to 1 in 4 Cambodians.)

Why does Chomsky ignore these later deaths? Why does he ignore the million or two deaths from other Cambodians?

And the most important question:
Why would anybody listen to an author with such a bias that he can ignore the death of millions in order to make a point?

CBL

 

[Orwell]

CBL, you're concentrating on a couple of single statements (one that you find questionable) taken out from a couple of lengthy articles. Chomsky is comparing the media coverage for two similar situations: the evacuation of Kabul and the evacuation of Phnom Pen. What happened after (or before) is important, but not directly relevant to the comparison between media treatments. Now, I don't know if his point of view on this subject is accurate or not, and I really don't care. I'm pretty sure that Chomsky's present day opinion on Pol Pot is pretty much similar to my own and yours (i.e. Pol Pot was a monster). I mean, Chomsky can be accused of being many things, but he's no idiot.

I mean, a lot of what Chomsky says can be argued and questioned. But I think it must be argued and questioned without any dismissive name calling and dumb accusations, without demonizing.

 

[Skeptic]

CBL, you're concentrating on a couple of single statements (one that you find questionable) taken out from a couple of lengthy articles

"It's only a few sentences out of a lenghty article" can be said in "defense" of absolutely any undefensible statement. When David Irving, for example, was caught writing a blatantly racist limmerick to his little daughter ("I am a baby Aryan / not jewish or sectarian / I have no plans to marry / an ape or Rastafarian") that, too, he claimed, was "only a few sentences" out of a "large body of writing".

By this "method" of analysis, nobody is ever "really" a Communist, or racist, or antisemite, or anything bad; because even Stalin or Mao, when you count the words in what they wrote, only explicitly said "I am a Communist" or "death to the USA" very rarely, and usually while discussing some other problem.

 

[Orwell]

CBL, you're concentrating on a couple of single statements (one that you find questionable) taken out from a couple of lengthy articles

"It's only a few sentences out of a lenghty article" can be said in "defense" of absolutely any undefensible statement. When David Irving, for example, was caught writing a blatantly racist limmerick to his little daughter ("I am a baby Aryan / not jewish or sectarian / I have no plans to marry / an ape or Rastafarian") that, too, he claimed, was "only a few sentences" out of a "large body of writing".

By this "method" of analysis, nobody is ever "really" a Communist, or racist, or antisemite, or anything bad; because even Stalin or Mao, when you count the words in what they wrote, only explicitly said "I am a Communist" or "death to the USA" very rarely, and usually while discussing some other problem.

Now you're doing the other "discrediting trick": taking a comment out of its context. "Only a few sentences out of a lengthy article" was not the only thing I said on this subject. But I know, I know, you hate Chomsky with a passion, so anything goes... Why don't you try to actually discuss the things that Chomsky really says, instead of just going out of your way to tag him with some evil label? Would that be too much work? I guess it must be so much easier to just go "Chomsky eeeeviiiillll (crosses himself)"...

 

[CBL4]

Orwell,

Chomsky was raked over the coals in the 70s for downplaying Pol Pot's genocide. He did not apologize or admit mistakes. In the 90s, he twice downplayed Pol Pot's genocide again. (Twice that I found in 10 minutes which presumably means a lot more.)

If this is accidental, he is an idiot. If it is intentional, he is an idiot. You can choose.

CBL

 

[Beerina]

Orwell,

Chomsky was raked over the coals in the 70s for downplaying Pol Pot's genocide. He did not apologize or admit mistakes. In the 90s, he twice downplayed Pol Pot's genocide again. (Twice that I found in 10 minutes which presumably means a lot more.)

If this is accidental, he is an idiot. If it is intentional, he is an idiot. You can choose.

CBL

Evidently he has yet to realize what a number of us around Skepticville have -- how emotional investment in something compounds until you defend it beyond all reason.

Politics is in the same boat as religion -- both "know" how best everybody should live for some greater ideal, and both are so damned sure of it they're ready to force it on everybody.

We've learned to let people be free for religion. Letting people be free in politics is a tougher nut to crack.

 

[CBL4]

Originally posted by Beerina
Evidently he has yet to realize what a number of us around Skepticville have -- how emotional investment in something compounds until you defend it beyond all reason.

Yes, True Believers are immune to logic and facts regardless of what they believe in or their intellect in other fields. As you mention, politics and religion attract the most True Believers.

Chomsky is as rabidly anti-American as you can possibly find in the US (at MIT if I am not mistaken.) This True Belief immunizes him from logic and admitting errors. His supporters confuse his eminence in linguistic with eminence (or even compentence) in politic in the same way that racists point to Shockley for support of their views. (His anti-American bigotry is comparable to Shockley bigotry.)

CBL

 

[epepke]

No. But Chomsky wasn't the issue here. American was shoving Chomsky together with "american liberals", which is the most anti-natural classification you can come up with. Chomsky has nothing but contempt for "american liberals" in general and the democratic party in particular. He usually doesn't even bother to distinguish democrats from republicans.

Good. This is something that you and I can completely agree upon.

 

[Manny]

Chomsky is as rabidly anti-American as you can possibly find in the US (at MIT if I am not mistaken.)

Oh, I dunno. He seems to like our tax laws.

 

[epepke]

Well yes, I simplified quite a bit. Chomsky's views on linguistics are rather notable in of themselves. But that said, most people who know Chomsky don't give a damn about linguistics, and I wouldn't be surprised if there was a signifigant number of people who weren't fully aware what his day job was.

I know more about linguistics than I do about Chomsky's political views, and I knew about linguistics long before I knew anything about Chomsky's political views.

He made some pretty decent contributions to linguistics back in the 1950's. Some of them, like the phrase structure grammar (which was a modest improvement on the older "sentence-parsing") has provided the foundation for most developments in computer languages since then. And so has his work on regular expressions. Good on him.

However, since about 1975, Chomsky has been a big brake on structural linguistics. The big problem is the transformational grammar, which basically does not work. Better approaches, such as HPSG, are now gaining momentum, but they were held back far too long by the self-projected Cult of Chomsky.

 

[Orwell]

Orwell,

Chomsky was raked over the coals in the 70s for downplaying Pol Pot's genocide. He did not apologize or admit mistakes. In the 90s, he twice downplayed Pol Pot's genocide again. (Twice that I found in 10 minutes which presumably means a lot more.)

If this is accidental, he is an idiot. If it is intentional, he is an idiot. You can choose.

CBL

Are you quite sure that he was "downplaying"? 'Cause, you know, exposing perceived double-standards can appear like "downplaying", particularly to those who disagree with there being a double-standard.

As I said before, about the Afghani-Cambodia comparison:

Criticizing double standards doesn't imply that the person who criticizes the double standard is defending the point of view that got the bad (or worse) treatment. Chomsky isn't comparing Israel and the anti-Russian Afghanis to Pol Pot. He is comparing the media coverage given to Israel and the anti-Russian Afghanis to the media coverage of Pol Pot. Nuance.

All I'm saying is that it is easy to interpret negatively controversial things said by someone we don't like. I do it, and I'm pretty sure you do it too. I think there's a good chance that you're doing it with Chomsky.

I'm just playing devil's advocate here...

 

[CBL4]

Originally posted by Orwell
Are you quite sure that he was "downplaying"? 'Cause, you know, exposing perceived double-standards can appear like "downplaying", particularly to those who disagree with there being a double-standard.

Yes. The implication is that Hekmatyar is worth than Pol Pot. That is downplaying Pol Pot's evilness. It was a comment without any need. The article in question has nothing to do with Cambodia. It is simply an anti-American diatribe and Chomsky has an obsessive need to exagerate the real flaws of the US into woo-woo land.

If you think I was out of context, here are the paragraph before and after the Pol Pot nonsense:

What of the "global threat" to the "market democracies" we were defending in Latin America? Take Brazil, where US intelligence could find no hint of Soviet intrusion, even if that were imaginable. In fact, in "our little region" there have been no Russians in sight, unless we virtually invited them in. It is perfectly true that targets of US attack sought help from somewhere, and since they were not going to get it from the subordinates of the Enforcer, they ultimately turned to the Russians, who were sometimes willing to help, for their own cynical reasons, in which case the US victims became tentacles of the Evil Empire, whom we must destroy in self-defense.

By similar logic, a Soviet Anthony Lake could have argued that the USSR was defending freedom and democracy in Afghanistan from the "global threat" of American imperialism and its terrorist forces -- who, since liberation from Soviet rule, have been destroying and massacring with great zeal and success, another "inconvenient fact" that merits little notice. There would, for example, be little utility in focusing on the exploits of the CIA favorite Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the world's most extreme Islamic fundamentalist fanatics, who bears primary responsibility for 30,000 deaths in the capital city of Kabul alone according to the London Economist, surpassing Pol Pot in Phnom Penh, it appears.

Perhaps the "global threat" refers to indigenous Communists. Here there is much to say, including some reflections on the familiar doctrine that democracy requires exclusion of "Communists" from the political system, by violence if necessary. Thus when the US-backed terror regime was doing its work in Iran after the 1953 CIA-MI6 coup that overthrew the conservative parliamentary government, the New York Times praised the US clients for their "long record of success in defeating subversion without suppressing democracy," noting with pleasure the suppression of the "pro-Soviet Tudeh party," formerly "a real menace" but "considered now to have been completely liquidated," and the "extreme nationalists" who had been almost as subversive as the Communists -- all liquidated without suppressing "democracy." The practice is, again, standard, and passes with little comment, given the prevailing concept of "democracy."

He is a idiot when it comes to politics. But his anti-American cult laps it up.

CBL

 

[Batman Jr.]

I don't know that all of these people could legitimately be considered intellectuals. It's funny, I saw S. Rushdie and Ben Affleck on Bill Mahrs TV show the other day and I was struck by the impression that Ben Affleck was far more articulate than Rushdie was. I have always just assumed that Ben was just an idiot. He is far brighter than I ever imagined and able to express himself far more clearly than most politicians.

I've heard Affleck speak on political issues and he's clearly an articulate and very bright guy, but simply because Rushdie doesn't speak as fleetly and breathlessly as Affleck does doesn't mean he's dumber. Have you ever heard Kent Hovind talk? That dude is a motor mouth!! He could probably win the JREF prize based on the paranormal speed of his locution, but what he says, after it's all deconstructed and digested, doesn't make much sense. If you listen to the content of Rushdie's speech, you realize what a contemplative and insightful person he is. You don't have to speak at an immoderately fast pace in order to be a genius and people who speak quickly aren't always geniuses either.

Noam Chomsky is acknowledged as an intellectual because of his prominence in the field of linguistics, end of story. Calling him stupid because of some of his political stances amounts to an ad-hominem attack on the veracity of his entire body of work. I don't know many people who would concur with Richard Wagner's proto-Nazism, but it was undeniable that he was a genius in his field, and it would be foolish to condemn the quality of his music on the basis of the quality of his character.

 

[Freakshow]

Noam Chomsky is acknowledged as an intellectual because of his prominence in the field of linguistics, end of story.

Not necessarily. The OP was referring to a survey of magazine readers. We have no way of knowing what each responder was thinking when they voted. They very well may have been thinking of Chomsky as an intellectual solely due to this political writings. Or maybe not. We just don't know.

 

[Batman Jr.]

Not necessarily. The OP was referring to a survey of magazine readers. We have no way of knowing what each responder was thinking when they voted. They very well may have been thinking of Chomsky as an intellectual solely due to this political writings. Or maybe not. We just don't know.

I was responding specifically to CBL4 calling Noam Chomsky an "idiot." This is unjustified given the totality of his contributions to the world.

 

[Freakshow]

I was responding specifically to CBL4 calling Noam Chomsky an "idiot." This is unjustified given the totality of his contributions to the world.

Understood. Thanks for the clarification.

It is possible to be very smart in some areas, and not so smart in others. Considering Chomsky to be brilliant in the area of politics and foreign policy, simply because of his expertise in linguistics, is the fallacy of appeal to authority. He very well may have had great ideas in the field on linguistics, but that has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not his ideas on politics have any more merit than the ideas of anyone else.

 

[Batman Jr.]

Understood. Thanks for the clarification.

It is possible to be very smart in some areas, and not so smart in others. Considering Chomsky to be brilliant in the area of politics and foreign policy, simply because of his expertise in linguistics, is the fallacy of appeal to authority. He very well may have had great ideas in the field on linguistics, but that has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not his ideas on politics have any more merit than the ideas of anyone else.

The "appeal to authority" fallacy occurs when something is concluded to have been proven by reason of someone to whom you defer having said it to be true. This is quite different from being interested in the opinions of persons you consider to be generally bright but not taking those opinions as unassailable fact. It's perfectly fine to have preference for the opinions of people you admire so long as you also judge those opinions on their own merits. Many are interested in what Chomsky has to say because his work in the field of linguistics demonstrates his intelligence, and intelligence usually also serves a person well in political ruminations. This can't be confused with taking his views as being written in blood. You couldn't even do that in regard to his linguistic work, his affirmed area of expertise.

 

[Freakshow]

...and intelligence usually also serves a person well in political ruminations.

I am not convinced of this statement. There are exceptionally intelligent people on all sides of the political spectrum. What makes you give some deference to one person's political views, because of his intelligence, but not give the same deference to an equally intelligent person who has very different political views?

I don't think most political opinions are a matter of intelligence. They are personal opinions based on the desires of the person expressing the opinions. They can be backed up with facts and research. But as I referred to before, you will find such backing for various views from a wide range of political perspectives.

 

[Batman Jr.]

I am not convinced of this statement. There are exceptionally intelligent people on all sides of the political spectrum. What makes you give some deference to one person's political views, because of his intelligence, but not give the same deference to an equally intelligent person who has very different political views?

Well, being interested in Chomsky doesn't preclude a person from being interested in his equally cerebral opposition.

I don't think most political opinions are a matter of intelligence. They are personal opinions based on the desires of the person expressing the opinions. They can be backed up with facts and research. But as I referred to before, you will find such backing for various views from a wide range of political perspectives.

Intelligence is important because it helps a person to uncover the fallaciousness of the conclusions reached from some of the analyses of a given body of research. I would suggest that most differences in political opinion have to do with an inability in most to dismantle the bad information and find the good. There are "facts" which seem to show why intelligent design would be more reasonable than evolution. This doesn't mean that the two ideas are equally legitimate, and it would take someone sufficiently smart to realize this.