Noam Chomsky and the end of "America bad" | Hacker News Reader

Noam Chomsky and the end of "America bad"

noahpinion.blog

23 pointsobiefernandez22 comments

I never took Chomsky’s foreign policy views that seriously or knew them to be taken that seriously. He just had at most a refreshingly contrarian perspective that didn’t normalize the American Imperialism so many take for granted.

Chomsky is a great example of what happens when you take contrarianism to "the left" extreme. Another, oddly parallel example from "the right" might be Thiel.

Both exemplars prove to me that as attractive as straight contrarianism is, it has inevitable dead ends.

Chomsky, along with Morris Halle, founded the modern field of linguistics at MIT. He’s a towering intellect whose theory of Universal Grammar places him alongside Einstein in the 20th century pantheon of science. He is a case study of how a person’s brilliance in one field does not transfer to another.

Thank you for this comment. This is the type of nuance that makes me enjoy the HN community, where as on other forums it would be a very polarized and boring thread.

Haha, I can’t tell if you are mocking me for taking a back-handed swipe at Chomsky’s politics.

I was being genuine regarding your comment.

As far as my feelings towards Chomsky... I credit him with teaching me important things, and I also despise a lot of his positions. I feel the same way about Elon Musk.

I understand your trepidation though, short monotone internet comments are not very compatible with nuance. We should use way more emojis here (:

I meant emoticons, darn it.

Einstein's theories have experimental confirmation. Chomsky's Universal Grammar, if I understand correctly, does not.

Einstein’s theories of Special and General Relativity and his explanation of the photoelectric effect are well grounded in experimental science. At this point, they count as proven as far as we can call anything true. Chomsky’s UG doesn’t rise to quite that level, but is very well-grounded in experimental science. The field of linguistics has an extraordinarily high degree of rigor, both in theory and experiment, and Chomsky’s theories have tons of experimental data backing them up.

I thought there was evidence against Universal Grammar.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evidence-rebuts-c...

> A key flaw in Chomsky’s theories is that when applied to language learning, they stipulate that young children come equipped with the capacity to form sentences using abstract grammatical rules. (The precise ones depend on which version of the theory is invoked.) Yet much research now shows that language acquisition does not take place this way. Instead young children begin by learning simple grammatical patterns; then, gradually, they intuit the rules behind them bit by bit.

Chomsky's work is important, but the main part of it doesn't seem to be holding up under prolonged study. (Don't take my word for it, though, I know very little about the formal study of linguistics.)

I’ll show the article to my linguistics friends and see what they say. From the beginning, there has always been a vocal minority in the field opposed to Chomsky; I don’t know rhetorical merits of the Scientific American article and if it represents anything new. The professional linguists I associate with haven’t brought anything earth-shatteringly new to my attention that seriously challenges UG. Thanks though.

Chomsky's position has never been "America bad". This article is atrocious. His position has always been that it doesn't matter who did it, it only matters what was in fact done. For some reason this is very difficult for most people to accept. This sentence is telling:

"And yet when Chomsky discusses the Gulf War, he dismisses the notion that American foreign policy became more idealistic after the Soviet threat receded"

It's a better question why the author is considering that argument. It might be true, it might not, but is there any proof?

But with all that said, I don't understand why this was flagged. I feel like people flag articles a lot more than they used to, just because they don't like it. Maybe people that flag should be forced to write a comment why they flagged it or at least that everyone sees they did.

> His position has always been that it doesn't matter who did it, it only matters what was in fact done.

I still give Chomsky a lot of credit for his past contributions, but his opinions on the Russian imperialist invasion of the sovereign state of Ukraine made me not believe that he was as objective as I had once hoped. Maybe it was advanced age leading to a decline of neuroplasticity, but he is entirely wrong on that count.

There is considerable proof in the public record for just such a belief.

"The logic of humanitarian military intervention gained force in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union, “the unipolar moment” of American dominance, and after the Sept. 11 attacks, when it became increasingly common among conservatives to tie national security to democracy promotion abroad."*

*https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/20/opinion/biden-afghanistan...

Is that proof or just an opinion? My opinion is that it's just different rhetoric to justify military action as the Boogeyman of communism was no longer there. Again, an opinion.

When I read the ideas in his book "Manufacturing Consent" during the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, I elevated him to hero status in my mind. This was exactly what I was seeing happening all around me, and he nailed it.

In more recent years, it became obvious to me that the man was a "tankie." He was somehow able to convince himself that only the USA could have been guilty of imperial ambitions, while the CCP, Moscow, and others could never be accused of such malfeasance, clear evidence to the contrary be damned.

I still have great respect for Chomsky due to his contributions, even though we disagree on so much. I have met a few people online who have had personal/professional relationships with him, and this seems to be a somewhat common refrain.

This was yet another lesson in the pitfalls of hero worship for me. Since then, I have fallen into the hero worship trap a couple more times, as if I had learned nothing.

It's "campism". It simplify how you think, and while it's uncomfortable if you _really_ think about it, as long as you don't its easy.

I hate Trotsky and what he did in Ukraine and Kronstadt, but Trotkysts (anti-staline Marxists) had the correct vision on this since 1935: the enemy of your enemy isn't your friend.

While you first have to defend against the biggest inequality, the one with the greatest urgency (in the case of Chomsky, Russian imperialism/aggression) while knowing that you will have to fight against your former ally once this is won (censorship and factory work laws passed in Ukraine during the war are anti-worker, and will have to be discarded). You can apply the same idea everywhere.

> It's "campism".

Thank you very much for teaching me this term. It is much more appropriate than my clumsy use of the term "tankie."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campism

He became popular for his foreign policy views at a time or era when the mainstream media acted as a giant funnel to a credulous public , as well as students and academics. This meant it was hard to debate or refute his ideas outside of televised debates or by other academics. How does one go about debating Chomsky or refuting him in the 90s unless you are already well-connected in academia, in which it's too late and the lie has already circled the earth many times? The barriers to refuting propaganda or bad ideas in academia was much higher back then compared to now, in which anyone can do so with a Substack post or a tweet that goes viral. It was like this for all public intellectuals at the time, not just him or for the left-wing. These people used the media and academia as pulpits to the public and policy-makers and dissent was minimal and belated. It was good work if you could get it. You went on national TV to field softballs, did campus 'debates' in which the audience asked pre-screened questions, signed books, etc.

Are you saying Chomsky was propaganda? I think he was an important voice against propaganda. Not a perfect voice, but he was definitely an archetype against the mainstream narrative. Your statements about him being hard to argue with I think apply even more to the narratives he was fighting against. Not saying is perfect, but his message was important during his prime years.

Chomsky is certainly an articulate debater. (per DrFun)

https://web.archive.org/web/20230205003951if_/https://neroca...

It's worth listening to the Knowledge Fight podcast episode about the episode of Info Wars where Jones talks with Chomsky

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