Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'

independent.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 500 posts

Re: Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'

#131

Post by Eisenstein »

ngcazz wrote: post #119
vasco wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you believe this would work? Specifically any form of anarchism? Have you seen groups of people operate for large periods of time successfully like this? Anything I've looked into shows me human nature would make any anarcho-anything system fail due to infighting.

What makes you believe anything would work? Things take people wanting them.

Grand ideas about structuring a society based on a premise or an ideology or ideal end up being disasters when attempts are made to put them into practice.

It should be pretty simple to understand why: no one person or group of people can predict all eventualities or contingencies and it is not possible to design a system based on rigid ideals that can fail gracefully.

Re: Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'

#132

Post by logicchains »

jjeaff wrote: post #110
serial_dev wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Regardless of whether you think vaccines should be required or not, the mRNA COVID vaccines have objectively proven to be both safe and effective. Though not as effective as everyone would have liked at reducing spread, it certainly reduced severity of cases.

>Regardless of whether you think vaccines should be required or not, the mRNA COVID vaccines have objectively proven to be both safe and effective.

By all existing measures of safety they're by far the least safe vaccines on the market, and even their apparent effectiveness may have just been the result of their immune suppressive effect: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/immunology/articles/10.... .

>In support of this hypothesis, Dr. Netea’s group reported dampened transcriptional reactivity of the immune cells and decreased type I interferon responses in vaccinated individuals to secondary viral stimulation (97), while our group described inhibition of adaptive immune responses and alteration in innate immune fitness in mice with this platform (99). The immune-tolerant environment induced by these vaccines is further supported by recent studies that have discovered a correlation between an increased number of prior mRNA vaccine doses and a higher risk of catching COVID-19 (100–102). Thus, these data suggest that these vaccines’ efficacy in decreasing disease severity and death might lie with their previously undiscovered immune suppressive characteristics.

Re: Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'

#133

Post by sitkack »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #120
sitkack wrote: post #71

I love Noam Chomsky so much. To me he is epitome of what a rational caring intellectual should be. Number one, he strives for the truth and while can have intellectual blind spots, isn't afraid of calling them out. We had him has a guest speaker for an internal presentation at Google and of course we had some hyper-rational libertarian eastern block swe kid who was going to take him down and Noam was super respectful…

> We had him has a guest speaker for an internal presentation at Google Would have loved to be a fly on the wall had he been able to do a guest spot at Google recently. I'm willing to bet he would've gone off-script and given Google hell for their engagements with Israel and treatment of their own employees who protested.

Noam wouldn't be allowed to speak at NeuGoogle.

Re: Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'

#135

Post by Aloisius »

andrepd wrote: post #105
Aloisius wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chomsky wrote that "The 'slaughter' by the Khmer Rouge is a Moss-New York Times creation." I'm unsure as to how that would be anything but genocide denial.

He wrote that before the truth was known, while the genocide was ongoing and the only thing we had was scattered reports of atrocities. This was the 70s, we did not exactly have telegram livestream channels from the frontlines. It was a mistake and he recanted those views in the later stages of the regime and afterwards, when the evidence became overwhelming.

Before the truth was known? No. Before he accepted the truth after it became untenable for him to continue to reject it.

Chomsky simply rejected all the earlier evidence pointing to a genocide as an American imperialist lie.

For goodness sake, he characterized Barron and Paul's Murder of a Gentle Land as being sourced from "informal briefings from specialists at the State and Defense Departments" despite it clearly sourcing testimony of hundreds of Cambodian refugees and Khmer Rouge radio broadcasts. His characterization of it was so intellectually dishonest that it is difficult to believe it was either an intentional lie or willful ignorance.

He searched for any counter-evidence that would confirm his belief that the US was evil (and its adversaries were good or just misunderstood), no matter how questionable - a pattern he continued his entire life.

Re: Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'

#136

Post by lajosbacs »

To contrast a bit with other comments, he is very much disliked in eastern Europe. He was always pushing his multipolar worldview and not respecting that the Poles, Czechs etc. do not want to live under the Soviet/Russian 'pole'.

My personal opinion is that he 1) hates the US 2) hates eastern Europe because it defeated socialism.

I'd love to be proven wrong, but I do not think I will be.

Re: Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'

#137

Post by nayaketo »

LunaSea wrote: post #123
roenxi wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know why chomsky's beliefs and supported causes are so inconsistent with the morals he pushes The obvious resolution to that paradox is either you don't understand Chomsky's morals or have mistaken what his beliefs are. Judging by some random interview from 2022 [0] it looks like he has a position on Russia/Ukraine that is easy to defend. He describes it as a "principled, internationalist, anti-imperialist…

Chomsky defends imperialism as long as it's not coming from western countries.

This is the truth. He is only moral when it suits his hatred for his own country.

Re: Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'

#138

Post by Eisenstein »

ein0p wrote: post #66
caycep wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did actually see him talk at a rally in Boston Common, around '04 or so. While his written stuff may well be better, what struck me was the gist was basically self promotion about how he know "secret" things from "secret" sources, but never really bothered to elaborate, only that the "US Govt is lying to you". Well yes but...I would say if one had such information, it is not well served by presenting oneself as a c…

Yes, US Govt is routinely lying to you. That is not controversial at all at this point. Read the book. It’s a difficult read though. Might ruffle some patriotic feathers. Think of how difficult it is today to get even remotely truthful news. And then think about how this horseshit will be written up by government funded historians once all the political scores are settled and winners are determined

I don't think the solution to having been taught one biased view is to turn around and embrace the oppositely biased view. Countering one form of extreme with another does not make truth, it makes people who hate each other who refuse to find common ground or compromise.

Re: Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'

#139

Post by verticalscaler »

ein0p wrote: post #39
feedforward wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US began arming the "Khmer Rouge" (whatever that means) in 1979 as well as protecting them in the UN, so the equivalence seems pretty valid to me. Not to mention the US 1970 invasion of Cambodia and concurrent CIA-backed overthrow of the Cambodian government, which including shooting dead US students who protested against it at Kent State and Jackson State, or the US carpet bombing of Cambodia during and after Op…

I recall vehemently disagreeing with Chomsky on many things when I was much younger, but then I somehow stumbled upon Howard Zinn’s “People’s history of the United States” and realized the version of history I knew was basically concentrated propaganda I was brainwashed into believing. That opened the door to understanding Chomsky. “Manufacturing consent” explains our present state of affairs really well.

If you reread what you wrote carefully an amazing irony falls out.

You might consider your consent has simply been manufactured in another direction. Lots of Chomsky acolytes never quite reach that epiphany.

They simply follow in his footsteps of being oh so traumatized by the sudden realization that governments lie and propaganda is a thing that you could get them to opt in to an even deeper set of absurdities and half truths quite easily. To the great delight of the enemies of the US.

This is how you get college students to chant "Death to America".

Re: Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'

#140

Post by bantunes »

lajosbacs wrote: post #136

To contrast a bit with other comments, he is very much disliked in eastern Europe. He was always pushing his multipolar worldview and not respecting that the Poles, Czechs etc. do not want to live under the Soviet/Russian 'pole'. My personal opinion is that he 1) hates the US 2) hates eastern Europe because it defeated socialism. I'd love to be proven wrong, but I do not think I will be.

> My personal opinion is that he 1) hates the US 2) hates eastern Europe because it defeated socialism.

He doesn't hate the US. He hates that the US has been captured by warmongering elites and hates its poor. And he'd probably school you on the USSR's state authoritarian capitalism not being a good example of socialism.

Post reply on HN