At first I thought he said interesting things But with time, I also realized he is a linguist, not an historian or political scientist. He is controversial.
I often find controversial to correlate with interesting.
Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'
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Re: Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'
#212I 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…
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Re: Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'
#213Sad to lose such an intellectual juggernaut’s voice. The world needs more Chomsky’s of all persuasions, and a culture that will elevate them.
Nah, we need more Thomas Sowells.
Re: Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
No, the alternative liberal internationalist view is that the preservation of imperial-like spheres of influence and ironclad regional hegemonies is unfair, u democratic, and at odds with the rules-based trade-oriented order we’d like to see the world continue to adopt. No country was forced to join NATO. In fact, it took years and years of lobbying from Eastern European countries before the first new members were al…
I don't disagree with any of that. But you didn't deal with the "why is their an active land war in Eastern Europe?" question; which is what Chomsky was picking at to get to the NATO expansion point.
> Ironically, returning to a might-makes-right global order as envisioned by Russia would mean the United States could behave far worse in future
The US could act much worse in the present if it wanted. Only China is really in a position to stop them and even there only in a geographically limited area of Asia. The reason the US often doesn't bother with a might-makes-right response is because it isn't effective, not because they're purposefully holding themselves back from useful options. It is more effective to have the rule based order where, famously, the US makes the rules and gives the orders.
Re: Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'
#215I can't speak to his opinions on other topics, but since the full-scale Russian invasion started a few years ago, his frequent opinion pieces on world politics started popping up a lot. They were some of the most batshit insane, genocide-apologist takes on the situation that I've ever read.
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Re: Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'
#216Speaking of non-political side of him: was not he wrong about "innate grammar" necessary to understand langage? LLM do not have such circuitry, yet they somehow work well...
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/fruit-fly-brai... He mentioned a structure and scientists hacked a fruit fly Kenyon organ to process language which it does pretty well, also at MIT.
The approach is relatively straightforward. The team began by using a computer program to recreate the network that mushroom bodies rely on — a number of projection neurons feeding data to about 2,000 Kenyon cells. The team then trained the network to recognize the correlations between words in the text.
The task is based on the idea that a word can be characterized by it its context, or the other words that usually appear near it. The idea is to start with a corpus of text and then, for each word, to analyze those words that appear before and after it.
Re: Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
He was entirely right about that too. NATO is an aggressive alliance that has exclusively invaded three countries in the last 20 years, zero of whom were threat to it. The worst one was probably Libya, because NATO pretended to engage in a humanitarian mission to gain approval from the security council and then left the country utterly destroyed state afterwards. The country was shredded . It's a tool of western impe…
The invasion of Libya was fully authorised by the UNSC, and it was not conducted or approved solely by NATO. Libya was also already in a highly destructive civil war before the intervention, which is why it happened, so it’s not like they went in and destabilised a stable country. Gaddafi had built Libya’s security around himself in a cult of personality, things were always going to fall apart once his power waned. W…
NATO's intervention in Kosovo is the one that routinely cited.
That wasn't defensive by any means, but that also doesn't make it unjustified nor should it really be called "aggressive".
Chomsky, naturally, denied that ethnic cleansing was happening there because it wasn't the US or "western" countries doing it.
Re: Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
He was entirely right about that too. NATO is an aggressive alliance that has exclusively invaded three countries in the last 20 years, zero of whom were threat to it. The worst one was probably Libya, because NATO pretended to engage in a humanitarian mission to gain approval from the security council and then left the country utterly destroyed state afterwards. The country was shredded . It's a tool of western impe…
The invasion of Libya was fully authorised by the UNSC, and it was not conducted or approved solely by NATO. Libya was also already in a highly destructive civil war before the intervention, which is why it happened, so it’s not like they went in and destabilised a stable country. Gaddafi had built Libya’s security around himself in a cult of personality, things were always going to fall apart once his power waned. W…
The other NATO interventions:
* Intervention in the violent breakup of Yugoslavia, invited to do so by the UN in response to the genocide going on there.
* Invasion of Afghanistan, following the invocation of Article 5 after an attack on a NATO country (i.e., 9/11).
Re: Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
My family is from pretty close to there (on the modern Ukrainian side not Romanian, but Hungarian and Eastern Yiddish speaking), so I’ve always seen it spelled “Szatmar.”
But yeah, looks like “Satmar” is much more common in English and there’s no ז in the Yiddish spellings either.
Re: Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'
#220I 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…
He is such a terrible person he has his own section on the Wikipedia page for "Cambodian Genocide Denial"[1] and is heavily featured in the page for "Bosnian Genocide Denial"[2]. Chomsky is a disgusting hack who runs cover for any genocidal freak that pays lip service to the hammer and sickle.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chom... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_genocide_denial#Revisi...