The Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky

FrontPage Magazine ^ | David Horowitz

[beckett]

And Ayers is married to another radical, Bernadine Dohrn, who is on the law faculty at Northwestern. (Guess I shouldn't be surprised.)

I also recently read somewhere, perhaps it was at FrontPage, that Dohrn now holds an influential post at the American Bar Association.

[Aggressive Calvinist]

Once a totalitarian socialist, always a totalitarian socialist.

Chomsky is the godfather of American de-constructionism.

I only wish he would de-construct himself! (That would be logical consistency).

[Egregious Philbin]

This is, after all, a conservative discussion website. Apologists for leftists aren't generally tolerated and don't usually last too long. But we enjoy the hell out of debating those who take the time to understand us.

Once again, HB, you are astute. And once again, we've hijacked the thread. As I did earlier with the McCarthy stuff, I will look into your suggestion to read Thomas Sowell.

As an aside - it is a pleasure debating here, the diversity of opinion on FR is impressive, and all-American! I was kicked off lucianne.com for debating unpopular views, so I appreciate the relative tolerance for baiting and devil's advocacy here, and the unmoderated free flow of discussion. (The admin at lucianne.com is power hungry!) I would also suggest to FR posters to try out liberal discussion groups and sites. You might find that they challenge some of your opinions, and strengthen some of your arguments. They are also, some might find surprisingly, a great deal more homogenous in opinion than FR is.

[Mahone]

I felt compelled to respond. The good news is, I got a number of supportive e-mails from colleagues. The bad news is, none of them had wanted to themselves confront the leftist groupthink that is ruining our universities.

Thank you for doing so. Today a distant relative (not distant enough it seems) included me on her list of people she sent a bunch of similar Chomskyeske drivel to. She is of course a professor at a Colorado college. I'd bet by the response I sent her and all on her list, that I won't get any more e-mails!

We HAVE to be as vocal as they are and stand up and tell them what a bunch of bilge they are spewing. Who knows? At least one person might be really glad we did, it can really shock them that we don't "feel" like they do.

[gjenkins]

"he upsets people with facts"

I would have to disagree, although the line you mentioned is a big cop out. To debate Chomsky, one would have to stop the conversation on every sentence and say "that fact is true, but it happenned because these other things were going on". In addition he has been proven to spout facts that turn out not be so. The facts he does use, he pulls them from their context and wraps them in his ideological context ... the USA is an empire in the making, and everything it does is for the purpose of building that empire and is therefore evil.

I agree that he sometimes hits the mark in his critique of what the modern USA stands for.

[gjenkins]

Is deconstructionism a subset of post modernism ... or visa-versa? I don't agree with him precisely because he deconstructs everything to the mere perceptions. The USA is powerful, so when it acts, it acts to increase or hold on to its power. Easy to understand, but sometimes it is right and somtimes it is wrong.

[Harrison Bergeron]

Never been to lucianne.com. A fair number of FReepers visit democraticunderground.com (DU) and bring back intelligence reports in the form of verbatim articles posted. My enemy of choice is EdEquity.com, where the socialism is raw and unrefined in the posts of feminist school administrators and teachers - I consider the war against boys as a pivotal conflict for Western culture, and consider myself a soldier for the defending forces.

Crosstalk is a hallmark of FR's brand of discussion, as long as it stays somewhat on topic.

[Dan Day]

Prof. Chomsky's arguments on my campus are often trotted out by those who are as leftist as he but aren't capable of making the argument themselves because they aren't as smart as he is.

I don't think that's the primary reason...

One thing I noticed during my several years of heavy participation in talk.politics.guns is that the left has almost cornered the market on the fallacy of argumentum ad verecundium, the "Appeal to Authority".

They don't quote Chomsky et al because the quotes make a point particularly well (which is how the right usually employs quotes), instead they quote "authorities" under the belief that simply doing so trumps anything that their debate partners have to say.

It's not "Chomsky says this better than I could", it's "how can you possibly claim to be right when you disagree with an authority like Chomsky?"

It's not even "Chomsky already analyzed this so I don't have to". It's almost as if they don't even know how to begin to analyze an issue themselves, so they just choose which "authority" to believe.

One thing that struck me repeatedly when I was on talk.politics.guns was how often the anti-gunners smugly quoted an "authority", and how often they were unable to deal with any sort of reasoned rebuttal to what the "authority" had to say.

It's almost as if the anti-gunners believe that the proper way to formulate opinions is to decide whose bandwagon to follow, rather than rationally examine and understand the available facts and work out one's own reasoned conclusions. They were clearly blind followers, not independent thinkers.

Here's what I wrote back then:

On Thu, 11 Jun 1998 15:53:59 GMT, julia.cochrane@iint.com wrote:
>thinks that working for Emory and publishing in big name medical
>journals makes him "respectable"----and by that attitude she reduces
>science to the level of theologians in the middle ages debating from
>the scriptures how many teeth a horse had.
[snip]
>questions, but the person I spoke to, like others in her profession,
>had the mistaken belief that science was about credentials rather than
>rigorous application of a method for finding out about the world.

I long ago noticed this same dynamic.  A surprisingly large portion of
anti-gunners, and practically all of the rabid ones, seem to get
flustered if you try a logical argument on them, or ask them to
supply one.  I've lost count of the number of times I've asked
(or insisted) that they make a case for their assertions, or provide
any sort of supporting evidence, only to have them change the subject,
get huffy, or launch into a hate-filled rant against us "gun loons".
Instead of logic, they seem to rely on "argument from authority"
(*their* "authorities") and "argument ad hominem" (against any
opposing person or source).  It all seems to be about blind faith
in one set of folks and unceasing denigration of another set of folks.

And:

# There's also a lot of "argument by authority", which is one of the
# ten or so classic logical fallacies.  It's the one where someone says,
# explicitly or implicitly, "this is true because so-and-so says so",
# where "so-and-so" is some prominent person or organization.  The
# old "it's true because *I* say so" is another form of this.
#
# You'll note a lot of this in the anti-gun posts here.  They'll wave
# around the words of some dead Supreme Court justice, or court decision,
# or "study", or anti-gun luminary, and when the idea is then challenged
# on any sort of logical grounds, they'll huff and puff about how dare
# we peons question such Words of Absolute Truth.  This is also the case
# when they say "I said it was so, what do you *mean* I need to support it?"
#
# This pattern is also why anti-gunners are so likely to try to slur
# a pro-gun source, or a pro-gun poster -- to that sort of anti-gunner,
# everything's a matter of who says so, and what their reputation is or
# isn't.  Heaven forbid anyone should actually apply *thought* and *data*
# to resolve issues, rather than "my expert can beat up your expert"
# (or "I'm brilliant and you're just a loon.")
#
# Thus their common attempt to "refute" the words of, say, Jefferson by
# denouncing him as a dead slave-owning white guy, rather than taking the
# time to deal with his words and ideas on their own merits.

It seems that the left's leadership understands this as well, which is why they rely so much on sloganeering to rally their followers, even when the content of the sloganeering wouldn't stand up to one minute of critical examination (e.g. "social security cuts", "tax cut for the rich", etc.) They know their followers have already decided whom to believe, and no amount of counterargument or disproof by the right will be able to put a dent in the sloganeering of the left's leadership.

[gcruse]

 no longer can we throw $$ at dictatorships
when we should be funding their opposition...

Uhmm...their opposition was usually
communist, which got its funding
from the USSR.  Do you think we
should be funding the commies now
that the Soviets can't?

[ChiefsMan]

Thanks for making a stand. Too bad there aren't more like you out there.

When my brother graduated from college, (small East Coast private college) Noam was at the graduation ceremony to collect an honorary degree. You should have seen the Pres. of the college puckering up to that old coot's backside.

I told my family how awful I thought it was that this A-hole was getting a degree. They barely knew who he was, as did most of the famies there I would guess.

Given the amount of schmundo that parents spend on higer education, you wonder why they don't invest a little more time and effort to find out what their kids are actually learning.

[beckett]

. The truth is that this author would have difficulty comprehending a book by Chomsky, much less critcizing it.

Ridiculous. Horowitz has more than enough intellectual candlepower to "comprehend" Chomsky, as do most of the participants in this thread. Chomsky's work, even his "contributions" to linguistics, are not difficult to understand at all. It's just a matter of digging in and doing the work.

You may have a small point in charging that Horowitz "copped-out" by not doing the work, but you haven't a leg to stand on if you think Chomsky is some kind of genius above the comprehension of the average person.

Also Chomsky is not a stickler for facts, as you and some others in this thread have said. He distorts them mercilessly, and sometimes manufactures them, all with the goal of furthering the construction of his particular castle in the sky.

[ilgipper]

A professor of mine gave us extra credit for attending a speech by this numb-nut about 8 years ago. It was a painful experience.

For some reason the same professor did not provide the same extra credit opportunities when Buckley and Bork came to campus.

[Nogbad]

Chomsky's work, even his "contributions" to linguistics, are not difficult to understand at all

Not difficult, but boring, boring, boring.

I read a book of his once, never again!!!

[texasbluebell]

I also recently read somewhere, perhaps it was at FrontPage, that Dohrn now holds an influential post at the American Bar Association.

Makes sense to me! The 60s culture lives on!

[xlib]

I would also suggest to FR posters to try out liberal discussion groups and sites...[T]hey are also, some might find surprisingly, a great deal more homogenous in opinion than FR is.

I don't find that at all surprising.
As to Chomsky and facts, there was quite a stir some years back about his denial of the Killing Fields in Cambodia long after he should have acknowledged the reality. I seem to have lost the links, I'll try to find them.

(BTW if there are awards for clever screen names you get my vote.)

[general_re]

That thesis may be true, but neither you nor the author have done anything to demonstrate it. Perhaps it would be a wonderful subject of another post. In a Chomsky-esque style, you could take one of his articles, present your thesis that Noam is distorting facts to fit a certain agenda, then present the littany of mistruths that he employs. I don't doubt this can be done. But until somebody does it, I don't want to hear about it.

Ask and ye shall receive. I commend to thee Sophal Ear's excellent thesis regarding the academic treatment of the Camobodian genocide of the 1970's. Pay particular attention to the third chapter, where Ear quite thoroughly wrecks Chomsky ;)