Aswad
Posts: 9374
Joined: 4/4/2007 Status: offline
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Nice of you to bring it up, kalikshama, although I think the book and attendant model should have been brought up in the initial post to save everyone some time. General reply to the thread: Let's get one thing out of the way. Regardless of what view one has of Chomsky as a person, and his political stance, his achievements and contributions to the state of human knowledge can only be doubted or disrespected by those who have partaken of neither knowledge, nor achievement, in their lifetime. Period. He is as influential and important as the other great minds throughout human history, and I doubt many of his serious detractors would rank him below the top dozen of this age in that regard. Apart from the most rigorously tested work in the social sciences, perhaps rivalled by Rind et al, his efforts have netted a revolution in several fields, including linguistics, psychology and so forth. The vigor of his contribution to the world, and the amount of insight applied to these contributions, pegs him as one of the most important people alive today, and it will be the end of an era the day he succumbs to his advancing years. Dismissing him is the sort of thing best avoided in public, as it looks as good as a spreading brown stain on one's pants. Paraphrasing Paul Graham: in life, you either pick your battles, or you become Noam Chomsky. That quality, of fighting every battle, bespeaks a stamina anyone can admire without necessarily agreeing with his point of view. Even his opponents and detractors should pause to acknowledge that this man is the Chuck Norris of smarts, and that contesting his actual (academic, not so simplistic, and hence not as readily attacked) work is reminescent of trying to take Fairbairn in a knife duel, except Chomsky "occasionally" evidences a certain sadistic glee in toying with people. (That, I would speculate, is a part of what gives him the energy to keep going, and as kinksters, we might find ourselves with a quirky smile the next time we see him doing that.) As such, it would seem a wise choice to do what InvisibleBlack has done: focus on the question he discusses in the video, rather than flaunting the aforementioned brown stain that has become so popular to flaunt recently. Since I am really just a simplistic moron, I'm going to make my comment on the video this: well, duh, you won't get a bias that's not in the filter, regardless of the feedback. Health, al-Aswad.
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"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind. From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way. We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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