95! Fuck time flies. Sadly he’ll exit the world with it in a far worse state than when he was most active. I’m quite confident that the same will be true for all who read this, whenever that might be.
Sadly he’ll exit the world with it in a far worse state than when he was most active.
Although that’s pretty on-brand for Chomsky.
Care to elaborate? Always thought of him as a rather sane person but would be interested to understand better if I’m just not informed enough.
Chomsky was very good at accurately predicting how things would only get worse.
Sad noises
Yeah… He’s definitely been a lot less sane in the last couple decades. In the past he’s been pretty vocal about combating neoliberalism, but lately he’s actions and associations have been pretty center right. I think it’s mainly because he hasn’t really kept up with modern geopolitics, and is prone to adopting the boomer mentality that any amount of socialism/communism is always bad.
If we’re talking about philosophical criticisms, his main body of work is derived from an overly analytical breakdown of linguistical syntax. Which is important to a point, but it garnished a cult like following in political and law students for a long time.
These students didn’t utilize this information as a way to breakdown things like manufactured consent in an understandable way, or to further better linguistic comprehension for the general public. Instead they just added it as another tool to their arsenal of dissembly. A common criticism of Chomsky is that he is one of the reasons modern politics is so reliant on semantic reasoning and logical fallacies.
Imo in debate/philosophy he’s kinda like the guy who invented the machine gun. His original work was supposed to be used to halt the abuse of weaponized language, instead it just became a manual on how to do it better…and at some point I think he just rolled with it for the prestige and money.
95 is a hell of a run. Lived just enough to see Kissinger die.
Hmm does he have an alibi for the night in question? I am just asking questions. People are saying that the two men didn’t like each other, lots of people. It’s out there you know? I am definitely not saying that he did kill Kissinger I am saying people are questioning their relationship.
I know his name from my computer science uni days. We did a lot of language theory.
Sad to hear, I wish him and his family the best.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) — Linguist, activist and social critic Noam Chomsky is hospitalized in his wife’s native country of Brazil recovering from a massive stroke he had a year ago, she confirmed Tuesday.
Valeria Chomsky said via email that her 95-year-old husband is in a Sao Paulo hospital, where she took him on an ambulance jet with two nurses once he could more easily travel from the United States following the June 2023 stroke.
Valeria Chomsky told the newspaper that her husband follows the news and when he sees images of the war in Gaza, he raises his left arm in a gesture of lament and anger.
Noam Chomsky, seen by many around the world as a symbol of protest and independence, is an influential activist and critic who has frequently challenged U.S. policy on everything from the Middle East to Central America, as well as what he considers a compliant media.
In 2017 he joined the College of Social & Behavioral Sciences at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where he is currently listed as Laureate Professor of Linguistics, Agnese Helms Haury Chair.
He transformed the study of linguistics with his landmark 1957 book, “Syntactic Structures,” in which he wrote that humans do not simply learn language but are born with an innate ability that explains how they can formulate and understand sentences never seen or heard before.
The original article contains 338 words, the summary contains 229 words. Saved 32%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Just a few weeks ago this guys name was flying around in my head, and I didn’t know who he was. Weird.
I was hoping it was the stroke causing his deranged comments on Russia/Ukraine but alas the stroke was months later.
It’s unfortunate that he’s lived to be 95 and still hasn’t managed to swallow his ego and admit the Bosnian or Cambodian genocides happened. I guess the ideological blindness is just too strong.
He’s also been a bafflingly strong proponent of Ukraine “just letting it happen” vis a vis the Russians invading. His geopolitical worldview is disappointingly Kissinger-esque.
His geopolitical worldview is disappointingly Kissinger-esque.
That’s a surprising take for some one on Nixon’s list of political opponents
He subscribes to the “great power” doctrine. His geopolitical calculus is unfortunately ossified with regards to military action potentially escalating to nuclear confrontation. It’s a mindset he shares with a TON of older politicians on both sides of the aisle, and it’s a key reason why Putin’s saber rattling is so effective at making the rest of the world mostly not get in their way in Ukraine, and why most western leaders are still shitting their britches over every single threat Putin makes. And in point of fact, that’s the reason Putin uses the strategy in the first place. He’s playing for an audience, and the audience is 70-80ish year old western politicians who have strong memories of the worst of the old Soviet saber rattling.
Nixon really was scum. Mother fucker wins an election in a landslide. He is freaken potus and gets credit for landing on the moon and opening up China. Still not enough for him. It is literally not enough to be liked, powerful, and rich. He has to have revenge. Couldn’t just be nice.
The last time someone brought this up, it seemed to be disinfo:
The top comment on this thread contains a conversation (argument) about Chomsky’s view on the term “genocide,” as well as his verbiage discussing Serbian-run concentration camps.
I listened to Understanding Power fairly recently and it definitely changed my outlook and broke me out of the lull of neoliberal self-satisfaction, and helped introduce me to other leftist writers. So I’m a fan of Chomsky’s, but it doesn’t sound like he had that good of a take on the Bosnian genocide. He seems to only reserve the word genocide for the Holocaust so as to keep its significance, and despite supporting a UN fact-finding commission that did find Serbia was running concentration camps, he refers to said camps as “refugee camps,” instead, and seems to infer people had the freedom to stay or leave as they please (even if this was technically true, I doubt it was practically true).
So, not a good look for him, even though he had other viewpoints that I’ve been strongly influenced by.
