As Goebbels knew so well, and as Orwell exposed so completely, the totalitarian system requires a "new" totalitarian man, one who is unable to even frame in his own mind a disenting thought.
The Soviets were adept at this, and it shows with the careful grooming of words by the Left(example? how about the neat trick of replacing the word NAZI everywhere with the word FASCIST. Why? Obvious! NAZI stands for National Socialist - by replacing with FASCIST you hide the evidence that Hitler was a rabid SOCIALIST, and in NO WAY a capitalist. If Hitler and Stalin were both SOCIALISTS, gives the movement a bit of bad odor, sort of like everything French, n'est ce pas?).
The EXACT SAME PRINCIPAL is at work with Politically Correct speech. The goal of PC is to make it impossible to even say something that goes against the PC agenda, since the words and concepts themselves no longer even exist. A scary example of the totalitarian attack on freedom of thought...
Kudos for posting this article. It provides a succinct and powerful counter to Chomsky, and was great food for (free) thought...
The antidote to liberal ideology is not conservative idiology [sic]. It is rational debate. If you had even passing familiarity with several rather unrelated languages you would also be struck by the similarities in structure between them. For instance, we and the Arabs use prepositions in similar fashion? Why is that? I guess because of fundamental features of human cognition, which is what a "universal" grammar is expressive of. I am curious about the explanation for these things. I presume that you are not. That is fine - but don't count yourself a member of the republic of ideas, even conservative ones.
If one were to believe the great Alan Bloom, the language of the Marxists is a kind of educated German that uses enormously long words that none of the rest of us understand. So, that is the grammar that Noam Chomsky would be trying to impose on us, I suppose. Personally, I have seen no evidence of that.
In a way this is true, but it could only serve some political purpose if you think the entire foundation of sythetic languages, computabilty, Turing machines, etc. is not universal and equivalent and interchangable.
As it is, there is no alternative to the way Chomsky imposed a framework on what had been a branch of philosophy - there is no other consistent symbolic system for describing linguistics, and there are good reasons to think there can't be.
You're a Chomskyphobe ;-)