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Comment by weirdstuff | Hacker News Reader

After a long and respected career at MIT he’s no joke.

Did he really support the Chavez regime? That’s something I’d like to know.

He even met with Chavez in Venezuela.

Edit: to whoever downvoted, here's Chavez next to Chomsky, "one of the intellectuals who fights the imperial hegemony of the elite that rules the United States": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7p3kvvZfdpE

He isn't some foreign affairs expert. He made the decision to support Chavez based on the information he (and we) had access to at that time, much of which painted Chavez favorably.

We, of course, came to know later that the house was rotting on the inside. But that's just hindsight

What makes you think he has better information this time?

I'd say that there isn't as big a language barrier in understanding Indian politics. The English language media landscape in the country is thriving and there is a massive, vibrant internet presence.

India's democratic roots also mean that information is far more transparent.

Except he ignored the opinion of every single venezuelan.

He just sat on his couch, read some leftie newspapers he likes and decided about an entire foreign country.

Just another talking head clown having opinions with no basis in actual research or reality.

To be fair, it's generally much easier to find someone who understands what one particular form of injustice looks like than it is to find someone who knows what actual justice looks like.

Well, to be fair, many American right-wing politicians have supported worse, including Saddam Hussein and Saudi royalties. If we discredit political pundits based on who they sided with, the only people remaining would be total misanthropes. Or those who never said anything so far. Maybe that's for the better...

Maybe just discredit them when they say they support freedom from oppression when they actually support comically transparent dictators?

I assume the Saudi reference is in relation to recent NYT articles. That's fair. But since you bring up Saddam, it is more correct to say that he enjoyed majority left wing support, not right.

There's plenty of offenders in American politics, regardless of party. Coloring your comment that way makes it seem less valid.

A long and respected career at MIT in linguistics does not make him an expert on international events. (He may still be one, but linguistics at MIT is not qualification for that.)

I’ll give Chomsky credit for successfully pivoting from linguist to polemicist before his so-called deep grammar was thoroughly debunked. If he’s actually an expert at anything, it’s only self-publicity.

He is not a joke in his field. He is highly intelligent. He has carte blanche to publish commentary on any topic he chooses, and some pundits will pick it up and say see, this well respected and smart guys says this, listen to him!

He's not a joke in our field either unless you're coding in like FLOW-MATIC or assembly.

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