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Comment by pegasus | Hacker News Reader

Names like Chomsky, Assange, Snowden pop first to my mind. Or someone like Navalny in Russia or Mandela in South Africa. Scientists like Dyson or Bohr could go under that rubric as well. And of course, many artists are bona fide cognitive dissidents. The list goes on...

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>cognitive dissidents

Heh, I love the term, and am surprised on how little it's used based on Google searches for the term. Also, how many people misuse dissidents instead of dissonance mistakenly.

Chomsky is a tenured professor in the Ivory Tower -- how on -earth- does he classify as a dissident? If anything, Chomsky represents the dominant ideology in academia in America. Maybe he was a dissident sixty years ago, when he was relevant?

And as with all of these things they ebb and flow. I would challenge you on the point that he represents a dominant ideology any longer, he may have once and he may still have adherents but he is not as instrumental as he once was. So perhaps he started a dissident and will end as one too, but for different reasons.

A good hint your ideology is not “dominant” is you spend a great deal of time decrying what the government does and it carries on while ignoring or ridiculing your criticisms. For that matter, how can he both represent a dominant strain of thought and also be irrelevant?

Because this “strain of thought” only disagrees with the government on non-issues. They align pretty well on the questions of property, rights, freedom, etc.

Perhaps people living in countries who have been the subject of U.S. interventions might not see them as nonissues.

I guess Navalny is a dissident but, man, seeing his name next to Mandela is jarring considering his views.

Navalny has some pretty ugly views, but I guess Mandela just never got the chance to implement Marxism or his version of socialism. That also has a habit of turning ugly as soon as it comes in contact with reality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Mandela#Socialism_and_M...

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