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

independent.co.uk

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

#141

Post by hughesjj »

roenxi wrote: post #114
hughesjj wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His thoughts on Serbia/Kosovo, Russia/Ukraine, likely Russia/ Georgia etc have all been problematic too. Chomsky was illuminating in my personal character development. I grew up in a pretty conservative area, and his name carried a lot of hate like Hillary/Clinton did, but i didn't know why. Later, I saw some of his writings on American interventionism, and I found myself nodding my head in agreement over the mistake…

> 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…

I was thinking more about February 2022, where he tries to blame the Ukrainian invasion on nato expansion or something

https://chomsky.info/20220204/

Oh also his georgian take https://chomsky.info/200809__2/

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

#142

Post by nsingh2 »

ilikehurdles wrote: post #124
Jean-Papoulos wrote: post #116

Here's your monthly reminder that despite the large place he occupies in the "sciency" cultural landscape, a lot of his work has been debunked and he has not gone back on his genocide-denying claims about Serbia. His anti US imperialism views blind him.

[flagged]

I've been following this post for a while. Most of the flagged comments were inflammatory or in some instances even celebrating.

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

#143

Post by lajosbacs »

bantunes wrote: post #140
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.

What would then be a good example of socialism?

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

#145

Post by bbor »

lz400 wrote: post #118

Chomsky was doing so many podcasts up to the moment he disappeared from the radar presumably due to medical issues. I've seen him going for 2 hours with some nobody with 5K followers, being asked juvenile and stupid questions and answering with the patient of a Saint. He looked quite diminished physically, elderly and frail but mentally he's always sharp and his recall and memory is scary. I feel that in his later ye…

I’ve spent so much time watching this kind of content (plus the older lectures that are available) over almost a year of chores, lunches, and walks that it’s honestly bordering on parasocial. I of course don’t regret a minute; if you check these recent videos out it’s clear that he reiterates the same points over and over, but it never quite gets tiresome. Rather it gives the impression of someone who has truly glimpsed the structure of the universe, and thus is consistently going back to those same principles.

Of course, I would recommend choosing “one half of his brain” (his terms) and not mixing the politics interviews with the cognitive science / philosophy ones lol. I haven’t looked for many linguistics talks of his from recent years, but I had the impression he was working on seriously technical stuff there right up until he couldn’t, too.

I don’t know how I hope to sleep after this comment… I guess I’ll do him the honor of trying to rationalize my emotional/ethical interests, and care less about the passing of a world-renowned twice-(happily-)married scholar than the passing of children from war and famine.

I hope he believes in us to finish his life’s work, answering the most fundamental question: “What kind of creatures are we?” He was never able to see his theories in the recent LLM breakthroughs, but we’re in the early stages of the Chomskian era of AI, philosophy, and human endeavors writ large, I think… the ChatGPT outage from earlier this year couldn’t have supported him any better without having said “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” outright!

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

#146

Post by glimshe »

bantunes wrote: post #140
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.

Is there a good example of socialism?

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

#147

Post by roenxi »

hughesjj wrote: post #141
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…

I was thinking more about February 2022, where he tries to blame the Ukrainian invasion on nato expansion or something https://chomsky.info/20220204/ Oh also his georgian take https://chomsky.info/200809__2/

What do you expect him to believe? If you go in with an anti-imperialist anti-war bias, then NATO expansion is a bit of a beacon when asking questions like "why is their an active land war in Eastern Europe?". I don't actually remember if there is a serious counter-proposal; most people tend to rely on the theory that Putin suddenly went unhinged - which is obviously not the belief a thoughtful leftist would come to.

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

#148

Post by skissane »

woodruffw wrote: post #22
zdw wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally unrelated to the original topic, but looking at the linked article, is the name of the store "B&H Photo" a reference not only to the initials of the founders names but also tangentially to this concept?

That's funny, I'd never made that connection before. The B&H owners are Szatmars (who tend to be pretty stringent in their practices), so I don't think they'd make this exact reference -- ה substitutes for HaShem which (very) roughly equates to taking god's name in vain. (They'd maybe write the בס״ד variant, so "B&D".)

> The B&H owners are Szatmars

This is getting very tangential, but I've never seen someone spell it in English Szatmar before as opposed to Satmar. (From what I understand, Szatmar is the Hungarian-derived spelling, whereas Satmar is the Yiddish-derived one.)

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

#149

Post by cm2187 »

feedforward wrote: post #38
turndown wrote: post #29

Intellectual giant whose shadow will be cast deep into the future. I don't need to review any of his work wrt to CS or linguistics to tell you that his legacy will be massive. I think Manufacturing Consent should go down as one of the most important books ever written in our culture. He was right about much, but wrong about much also. His beliefs on Cambodia strain credulity and I still have trouble separating that C…

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…

1979 was after the genocide and after Pol Pot was pushed out of power. Implying the US had something to do with the killing fields defies common sense. The khmer rouges were primarily China and North Vietnam backed.

Now the US did support some incompetent and corrupt militia in Cambodia to oppose the Khmer rouges, and those did their fair share of misdeeds, to the frustration of local US officers. But given the crimes the khmer rouges ended up committing, it is hard to argue that not opposing them was the morally superior position, even with hindsight.

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

#150

Post by KptMarchewa »

roenxi wrote: post #114
hughesjj wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His thoughts on Serbia/Kosovo, Russia/Ukraine, likely Russia/ Georgia etc have all been problematic too. Chomsky was illuminating in my personal character development. I grew up in a pretty conservative area, and his name carried a lot of hate like Hillary/Clinton did, but i didn't know why. Later, I saw some of his writings on American interventionism, and I found myself nodding my head in agreement over the mistake…

> 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…

All the "anti-imperialist left" support is someone else's empire.
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