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Comment by __jal | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, I don't think I could have an email dialogue with Sam Harris without oozing contempt and becoming uncivil.

Civility is overrated. It is also the usually first complaint at hand to dismiss people, rather than their arguments.

Have you read Sam Harris's post on the dialogue? With Chomsky's permission he posted both sides, and Chomsky does come across as overly rabid:

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-limits-of-discourse

Chomsky has spent most of his life debating so his aggressiveness in this case seems to stem from how other people view the discourse (or how he agrees or disagrees with Sam) initially.

I would put that to an 87 year old academic who's vast library jammed in his head makes discourse with Sam (who I've listened to his podcast and doesn't typically source arguments and occasionally comes across as an ideologue) a little frustrating. Or maybe he's just old and crotchety.

"Comes across as..." is, of course, subjective; to my eye, Chomsky comes across as justifiably skeptical at the outset, and reasonably irritated as the exchange continues. Doesn't, to me, seem anything like "rabid" (much less "overly rabid" -- a description that is quite odd, as it seems to suggest that there is an appropriate degree of "rabid"; when you've chosen "rabid" as your metaphor, you've kind of ruled out "overly" being a useful modifier.)

Thanks for posting this, just read the whole exchange. Wow, Chomsky is certainly in an entirely different league here. I don't think Harris even understood what Chomsky was trying to emphasize.

It is no wonder that Chomsky didn't treat him as an equal, given that Sam Harris is really in no position to discuss anything with him...

>>Civility is overrated. <<

Its always interesting to learn something new from the "tolerance" brigade.

Chomsky has never been a part of the "tolerance brigade," his left-libertarian syndicalist views notwithstanding. In fact, he has always been brutally critical of postmodernism.

Who said anything about being tolerant?

If anything, that "civility is overrated" is exactly what you'd hear from the NON tolerance brigade (which I'm all in favor of).

Have you never heard of a "tone argument" before.

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