[HN Gopher] Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical...
___________________________________________________________________
Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'
Author : rudolfwinestock
Score : 328 points
Date : 2024-06-11 01:39 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.independent.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.independent.co.uk)
| azinman2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Nah, we need more Thomas Sowells.
| cbanek wrote:
| 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.
| nomilk wrote:
| Documentary of the same title for anyone curious:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li2m3rvsO0I
| cbanek wrote:
| I honestly think the documentary is shorter and better than
| the book, thanks for the link.
| me_me_me wrote:
| The book is very much still relevant
| graphe wrote:
| When did you ask him? I hope it was recently.
| cbanek wrote:
| September 2022
| llmblockchain wrote:
| 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!
| benbreen wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > I've never been close to intellectual elite circles
|
| That is very humble
| exe34 wrote:
| is this sarcasm? I read it as "I'm not welcome to parties
| because I don't toe the line"
| bn-l wrote:
| No, no sarcasm and that's how I read it too.
| vasco wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Chomsky has very controversial opinions on some subjects
| and I suspect that precludes him being invited to many
| parties.
| DSingularity wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| i think it's the opposite of humble, it's saying that he
| knows something that these intellectuals don't.
| Scarblac wrote:
| I don't understand how you can get any information from
| that line about the reasons why he wasn't close to them.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| 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.
| cbanek wrote:
| 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.
| vasco wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What makes you believe _anything_ would work? Things take
| people wanting them.
| vasco wrote:
| 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.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| pydry wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| orwin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| serf wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What did he recommended?
| xnx wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Valentino Rossi and Noam Chomsky together against the world
| really is a pairing I didn't expect!
| hi-v-rocknroll wrote:
| 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
| turndown wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Zinn's reputation among historians: not all that great.
| ein0p wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| 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.
| caycep wrote:
| 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)
| tptacek wrote:
| OK, but to be clear: his reputation among leftist
| historians, of which there are many: not all that great!
| yareal wrote:
| "People who I am critical of don't like me" is not
| particularly surprising, to be honest.
| hi-v-rocknroll wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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!
| verticalscaler wrote:
| 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".
| corimaith wrote:
| Second option bias comes to mind here, funnily enough the
| alt-right utilizes the same tactics.
| verticalscaler wrote:
| 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.
| ein0p wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Can't tell if this is primo satire or a complete lack of
| self awareness. :P
| ein0p wrote:
| The reason you can't tell is one comment up in the
| thread.
| turndown wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Yes, the accusation that he denied the Cambodian genocide
| is false, and a tactical smear.
| Aloisius wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| cm2187 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It's like saying the war in Iraq has no effect on the
| current situation there.
| cm2187 wrote:
| You mean like saying the US is the cause of the Shia-
| Sunni hatred?
| feedforward wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| _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%9319
| 93
| hughesjj wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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/
| LunaSea wrote:
| Chomsky defends imperialism as long as it's not coming from
| western countries.
| nayaketo wrote:
| This is the truth. He is only moral when it suits his
| hatred for his own country.
| hughesjj wrote:
| I was thinking more about February 2022, where he tries to
| blame the Ukrainian invasion on nato expansion or something
|
| https://chomsky.info/20220204/
|
| Oh also his georgian take https://chomsky.info/200809__2/
| roenxi wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| > 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.
| phatfish wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| pydry wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| 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?
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| Agreed, Kosovo is the only actual NATO intervention of
| that sort. And agreed that it was neither unjustified nor
| 'aggressive'.
| pydry wrote:
| Kosovo, Libya and Afghanistan.
|
| In each case it was an aggressive imperialist power play.
|
| Putin's war was also a "humanitarian intervention" and
| his supporters mirror the exact same propaganda line
| uncritically.
|
| If NATO gave two shits about humanitarian interventions
| they would send troops to defend Gazans from a genocide.
|
| The people who think they do are little different to
| Putin supporters.
| _djo_ wrote:
| See my other reply. In any case, that you can refer to
| these as 'aggressive imperialist power plays' shows
| you're both not to be taken seriously and are not willing
| to engage in a good faith and informed discussion.
| pydry wrote:
| Yes... in your other reply you said it was a humanitarian
| intervention to stop a genocide in Kosovo.
|
| Exactly like a Putin supporter would say about Ukraine.
|
| Except there was no genocide in Kosovo (Kosovo is not
| Bosnia) and there is no genocide in Ukraine.
|
| There is one in Gaza though and it is backed by NATO, the
| same people you called humanitarians.
|
| A Putin supporter also wouldnt be bothered about the
| murderous hypocrisy, but Chomsky was. Thats what set him
| apart.
| _djo_ wrote:
| The Serbian campaign was ethnic cleansing on a massive
| scale, forcefully and methodically expelling over a
| million Kosovar Albanians from the area by the time they
| were stopped by NATO's intervention. That does, arguably,
| rise to the level of genocide under the standard
| definitions.
|
| Just because someone can _claim_ something doesn't mean
| it's right. That determination is up to independent
| observers, experts, and courts, and tribunals.
|
| Russia tried to claim at the ICJ that it was invading
| Ukraine under the Genocide Convention. The court ruled
| that it had to end to the invasion immediately, which
| Russia ignored.
| jcranmer wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| > * 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 wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| In what sense was it not self defence under international
| law?
| pydry wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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?
| foobarqux wrote:
| 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.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| All the "anti-imperialist left" support is someone else's
| empire.
| racional wrote:
| _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.
| foobarqux wrote:
| All these claims of "problematic" views fall apart as soon as
| you try to support them with citations/evidence.
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| There is unfortunately a staggering amount of evidence of
| genocide in Ukraine committed by russia. To suggest
| otherwise, or to suggest that russia is "acting with
| restraint and moderation" as Chomsky said, is tantamount to
| Holocaust denial.
|
| https://www.newstatesman.com/the-weekend-
| interview/2023/04/n...
| foobarqux wrote:
| Regarding whether Russia were less destructive than the
| US in Iraq (or the other case he cites Israel in Lebanon)
| is a factual question. He cites the much lower UN
| casualty figures and points out that Russia did not
| target (initially, now they are) major essential civilian
| infrastructure like power plants. When people are
| confronted with this fact they typically turn to the
| argument that our team are pure-of-heart so their killing
| doesn't count.
|
| (By the way I can't find Chomsky saying the phrase you
| put in quotes in the transcript).
|
| I don't remember where or if he talked about the claim of
| genocide in Ukraine but there is not a "staggering amount
| of evidence" unless your definition of genocide is so
| broad as to include a large proportion of armed
| conflicts. In fact the only piece of evidence I know of
| is the displacement of children which was portrayed as
| kidnapping but I don't think there is any evidence
| supporting this compared to the more rational explanation
| that they evacuated civilians. The latest article I read
| on the topic gave instances of these kidnapped children
| now living with their families in Germany and elsewhere.
|
| Like I said these criticisms fall apart almost
| immediately when you start discussing the facts.
| gcbirzan wrote:
| > points out that Russia did not target (initially, now
| they are) essential civilian infrastructure like power
| plants
|
| Oh, right, they were targeting shopping malls and
| residential buildings... Or, you know, nuclear power
| plants.
|
| > When people are confronted with this fact they
| typically turn to the argument that our team are pure-of-
| heart so their killing doesn't count.
|
| Yes, your side is the only one that has rational
| individuals.
|
| > I don't remember where or if he talked about the claim
| of genocide in Ukraine but there is not a "staggering
| amount of evidence" unless your definition of genocide is
| so broad as to include a large proportion of armed
| conflicts
|
| So, Mariupol, Bucha... Bucha was just a massacre, there's
| no justification there, but let's say you want to compare
| Mariupol with... Fallujah? Do you have a worse US
| massacre in recent history? Well, yeah, the US killed
| people, and they should be blamed for it, but the scale
| doesn't even compare. Even if you take the Russian number
| of casualties, it's way higher in Mariupol.
|
| >Like I said these criticisms fall apart almost
| immediately when you start discussing the facts.
|
| What facts?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Russia did not target (initially, now they are) major
| essential civilian infrastructure like power plants.
|
| Initially, Russia was planning a decapitation strike and
| to take Ukraine relatively whole afterwards, either by
| annexation or installation of a puppet regime or a mix of
| the two.
|
| They started heavily hitting civilian concentration with
| no military value as a terror tactic pretty quickly when
| the swift decapitation strike bogged down, and then
| started hitting civilian infrastructure where the
| combination of attacks on military targets and terror
| civilian attacks didn't produce a collapse that left them
| in control.
| cageface wrote:
| 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.
| hi-v-rocknroll wrote:
| 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
| nashashmi wrote:
| 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.
| pydry wrote:
| >And even verbally supported Hamas best I can remember.
|
| Did he say something controversial like "Gaza has a right to
| defend itself?"
| LunaSea wrote:
| Seems like the right to defend one-selves is a one-way
| street.
| grumple wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| SomeoneFromCA wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| codeflo wrote:
| We don't learn language from textbooks though.
| nsingh2 wrote:
| 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.
| foobarqux wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Unrelated to what I said, with all due respect.
| sitkack wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| materielle wrote:
| 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.
| codeflo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| tgv wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| graphe wrote:
| 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.
| alexnewman wrote:
| 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.
| sitkack wrote:
| 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
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Noam wouldn't be allowed to speak at NeuGoogle.
| credit_guy wrote:
| > 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...
| alecco wrote:
| 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.
| addicted wrote:
| 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.
| hdbenne wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > 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?"
| slantedview wrote:
| > 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.
| RIMR wrote:
| But this is the Internet. If you don't share my exact point
| of view, you must have the opposite point of view.
| EthanHeilman wrote:
| If you repeat false claims used to justify a war of
| conquest, you can't complain if people see you as
| aligning yourself with support of that war.
|
| I wish Chomsky a speedy recovery, but he has had a number
| bad political takes over the years.
| graphe wrote:
| Many people also hate mearsheimer if he talks about what he
| predicts will happen vs what he'd like to happen (Ukraine
| or Israel).
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| dinglestepup wrote:
| 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.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| codr7 wrote:
| Wow.
|
| The guy has a different opinion.
|
| It's going to happen a lot so maybe better to get used to it?
| darby_nine wrote:
| "Taking russia's side" seems like a wild mischaracterization
| of the situation.
| objektif wrote:
| 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.
| )
| xg15 wrote:
| I think matters of geopolitics and war _especially_ must be
| up for debate.
| collyw wrote:
| Especially when he said that the unvaccinated should be
| excluded from society. Nothing nice about him at all.
| lawlessone wrote:
| The unvaccinated exclude themselves from society.
| sickofparadox wrote:
| He is such a terrible person he has his own section on the
| Wikipedia page for "Cambodian Genocide Denial"[1] and is
| heavily featured in the page for "Bosnian Genocide Denial"[2].
| Chomsky is a disgusting hack who runs cover for any genocidal
| freak that pays lip service to the hammer and sickle.
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chom
| ... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_genocide_denial#Re
| visi...
| me_me_me wrote:
| 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.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| >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".
| ChumpGPT wrote:
| After Kissinger, he was in my number 1 spot. the world will be
| a better place without him. I can't imagine what anyone could
| see as good in that person. Thank goodness he can't talk
| anymore....
|
| Junk away....
| nemothekid wrote:
| 1. An immensely powerful career politician who had engineered
| several coups across Asia that led to the needless
| destruction of untold lives
|
| 2. A libleft college professor who was not taken seriously by
| anyone with any modicum of power.
|
| Who's number 3? A coughing baby?
| jacoblambda wrote:
| "That dude greg 2 blocks down who doesn't bring his trash
| bins in until THE DAY AFTER trash day"
| objektif wrote:
| What an absurd comment. How do you even hold a war criminal
| and talking head equal?
| bobvanluijt wrote:
| > I love Noam Chomsky so much
|
| +1
| lokar wrote:
| ISTR he was there on a book tour? Ready to talk politics. Got a
| bunch of linguistics questions.
| UberFly wrote:
| Noam Chomsky always stuck me as the "don't be so open minded that
| your brain falls out" type of individual. His support for such
| causes as the holocaust denial movement (among others) always
| made me wonder why he has such a following.
| defrost wrote:
| Context: Chomsky had long publicly criticized
| Nazism, and totalitarianism more generally, but his commitment
| to freedom of speech led him to defend the right of French
| historian Robert Faurisson to advocate a position widely
| characterized as Holocaust denial. Without
| Chomsky's knowledge, his plea for Faurisson's freedom of speech
| was published as the preface to the latter's 1980 book Memoire
| en defense contre ceux qui m'accusent de falsifier l'histoire.
| Chomsky was widely condemned for defending Faurisson, and
| France's mainstream press accused Chomsky of being a Holocaust
| denier himself, refusing to publish his rebuttals to their
| accusations.
|
| - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky
| raverbashing wrote:
| This is a good reminder why everything should have
| boundaries, and everything should have a "surrounding frame"
|
| In theory this sounds like "intellectual courage", in
| practice it's just apology and bootlicking
|
| Camps and war and tanks were all too real. But of course you
| can waste time and space in your cushy western university
| seat
| andrepd wrote:
| And how do you know they are real? Because historians have
| been free to dig around and publish arguments and rebuttals
| and evidence. Not because anyone by decree or force
| declared it to be so.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Some people (usually the too self-centered ones) only
| discover it when it's too late.
| tines wrote:
| And the ACLU "supported" the Nazi movement in Skokie. Do you
| have any evidence that Chomsky himself denies the holocaust, or
| are you just slinging shit?
| Mikushi wrote:
| Just slinging, Chomsky only supported freedom of speech.
| UberFly wrote:
| Who's the bigger problem, the idiot yelling fire in the
| crowded movie theater, or the morally superior intellectual
| supporting their right to do so? I'm not so sure.
| tines wrote:
| If this guy was yelling fire then so are we all.
| gklitz wrote:
| Independent of what people believe of him or his defense of
| Faurisson's freedom of speech one thing is clear, they have
| both been the target of extremely aggressive smearing campaigns
| by Israel.
|
| I would defend the right to freedom of speech of people who
| believe the earth is flat, that does not mean "I support the
| flat-earth movement"
| GolfPopper wrote:
| Ultimately that leads to Popper's Paradox of Tolerance.[1] Do
| you defend the absolute freedoms of those whose goal is to
| destroy that freedom, along with you and many others with it?
| If yes, how do you stop them from accomplishing their goals?
| If no, where do you draw the line? (To be clear, I consider
| these critical but ultimately rhetorical questions with no
| obvious good answers.)
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
| froh wrote:
| he didn't support that cause. he radically supported free
| speech.
|
| if someone has him discuss the paradox of (in)tolerance I'd
| appreciate links or pointers
|
| ps: I come from a country with limits ob the freedom of speech
| and I defend those limits. I'm just saying Chomsky in contrast
| held freedom of speech as an absolute, even for anger and hate
| inciting lies.
| aborsy wrote:
| Sad news. He was remarkably sharp even in old age.
| serial_dev wrote:
| I'm not sure he was. Just 2 years ago, he wanted to remove
| everyone from the community who was refusing to get the
| vaccine, and emphasizing that how they get food is "actually
| their problem".
|
| https://youtu.be/Cc_neyVp-rI&t=508
|
| For a man who wrote on manipulation, he went full on
| authoritarian wanting to force a vaccine that was neither safe,
| nor effective (and 2 years ago that was clear, it wasn't "fog
| of war"). Me and my family all got the vaccine, and we all got
| COVID afterwards, and two of us now have heart problems at the
| age of 30.
|
| He believed every lie that big pharma presented him and hated
| everyone who thought differently to a point where he was ready
| to treat people who didn't get the vaxx as people in jail.
| jjeaff wrote:
| Regardless of whether you think vaccines should be required
| or not, the mRNA COVID vaccines have objectively proven to be
| both safe and effective. Though not as effective as everyone
| would have liked at reducing spread, it certainly reduced
| severity of cases.
| logicchains wrote:
| >Regardless of whether you think vaccines should be
| required or not, the mRNA COVID vaccines have objectively
| proven to be both safe and effective.
|
| By all existing measures of safety they're by far the least
| safe vaccines on the market, and even their apparent
| effectiveness may have just been the result of their immune
| suppressive effect: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/im
| munology/articles/10.... .
|
| >In support of this hypothesis, Dr. Netea's group reported
| dampened transcriptional reactivity of the immune cells and
| decreased type I interferon responses in vaccinated
| individuals to secondary viral stimulation (97), while our
| group described inhibition of adaptive immune responses and
| alteration in innate immune fitness in mice with this
| platform (99). The immune-tolerant environment induced by
| these vaccines is further supported by recent studies that
| have discovered a correlation between an increased number
| of prior mRNA vaccine doses and a higher risk of catching
| COVID-19 (100-102). Thus, these data suggest that these
| vaccines' efficacy in decreasing disease severity and death
| might lie with their previously undiscovered immune
| suppressive characteristics.
| foobarqux wrote:
| The general idea that it is "authoritarian" to force people
| into isolation to prevent them from harming others is
| obviously absurd (imagine an airborne disease with Ebola-like
| mortality).
|
| You could probably make an argument that it wasn't justified
| in this case using information known at the time but you have
| to actually make that case, not resort to appeals to
| "freedom" or information we know now.
| Zanfa wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You should try reading more then
| collyw wrote:
| "The unvaccinated should be excluded from society".
|
| Amazing the he wrote manufacturing consent yet fell for the
| COVID propaganda so hard.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| We're quite fortunate the internet wasn't a thing when
| polio was still around.
| beaeglebeachedd wrote:
| Polio measures did not focus on sacrificing the children
| for the elderly. COVID school and social/learning
| activity shutdowns did.
| Izkata wrote:
| 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.
| surfingdino wrote:
| 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".
| aszantu wrote:
| 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.
| escapecharacter wrote:
| Does this change his opinion on Sapir-Whorf? Is that even
| knowable?
| Jean-Papoulos wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Universal grammar has not been "debunked", despite evidence-
| free claims otherwise.
| lz400 wrote:
| 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.
| bbor wrote:
| 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!
| lajosbacs wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| lajosbacs wrote:
| What would then be a good example of socialism?
| Malcolmlisk wrote:
| The DDR
| IsTom wrote:
| It was so good that to this day there is an economic rift
| between former west and east Germany.
| iamawacko wrote:
| 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. Jorg Steinbach,
| economy minister of Brandenburg, is quoted as saying
| "Some 70 per cent of East German industry disappeared".
| codr7 wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| Democracy and socialism aren't categories of a kind.
| codr7 wrote:
| 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.
| glimshe wrote:
| Is there a good example of socialism?
| rswskg wrote:
| lol, no.
| Malcolmlisk wrote:
| The DDR.
| dgrin91 wrote:
| 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.
| lajosbacs wrote:
| * actually deleted my reply, a non-troll cannot say this
| jbaber wrote:
| Is this ironic?
| glimshe wrote:
| True, the Stasi was indeed pretty good at what they did.
| imtringued wrote:
| I'm not sure it falls under socialism, but I always enjoy
| reading about the "Miracle of Worgl" and Worgl's mayor
| Unterguggenberger. There is even a movie about it!
|
| https://unterguggenberger.org/the-free-economy-experiment-
| of...
| Heliodex wrote:
| 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
| ronhav3 wrote:
| He has denied his last genocide.
|
| Cambodians,Bosnians,Cosovars and Ukranians breathe a sigh of
| relief.
| ImAnAmateur wrote:
| 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.
| alexarnesen wrote:
| 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
| jcul wrote:
| I love this old interview.
|
| If you skip to the very last question at 26:50, it is a little
| bit poignant, considering this news.
|
| https://youtu.be/hdUbIlwHRkY?si=cRpz8f9m7YDh_6G-
| jokoon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I think you mean that he is _mainly_ a linguist.
| rand846633 wrote:
| I often find controversial to correlate with interesting.
| pvaldes wrote:
| By the description provided, I assume that "medical event" here
| is a synonym of ictus
| Garvi wrote:
| 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.
| martythemaniak wrote:
| > 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.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-06-11 23:01 UTC)