Noam Chomsky has been voted the world's top intellectual. I really don't understand why. It is partly the halo effect of the high reputation of his work in linguistics and the fact that his linguistics work is virtually indecipherible. But when it comes to politics, Chomsky frequently takes indefensible positions and arrogantly never admits to a mistake. He has denied a genecide (Cambodia), proclaimed a Holocaust denier a "non-political liberal," and declared genocides that never took place (post-Taliban Afghanistan). Then, arrogantly, he denied ever making such remarks.
There are a number of critiques of Chomsky which can be found on the internet without too much trouble. The lastest (in PDF format) is Paul Bagdanor's "The Top 100 Chomsky Lies?"
I might not agree with every one of Bagdanor's points. He's a right winger, but a very high portion of the lies he identifies will be ones that deserve condemnation by honest people on the democratic left.
Saturday, April 15, 2006
100 Top Lies of Chomksy
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2 comments:
I haven't read everything Chomsky's ever written, and I'm rather pissed at his latest writings regarding the Srebrencia massacre, among other things. But why should I take this right-winger who regards Allende as an authoritarian at all seriously? Why should I assume that he's not taking every Chomsky quote out of context? Stuart, really, you should be looking for left-wing critiques of Chomsky (they're out there) instead of relying on this trash.
Am I the only one who finds it very strange that the author of "The Top 100 Chomsky Lies" manages to be so blatantly illogical in his counterarguments? Right at the beginning, in the very first two arguments, he attempts to rebut Chomsky's unmistakable COMPARISON arguments by merely providing evidence from ONE SIDE of the comparison! I couldn't believe it when I saw it. How moronic must you be to think that you can rebut the statement A>B by claiming "nuh uh, B is freakin huge." This incredibly simplistic logical fallacy is mindnumbingly weird, at least to me.
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