Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Is President Biden losing his base? 92 year old activist icon Noam Chomsky has accused Biden of placing politics before climate action, though Chomsky appears to suggest Biden’s inaction is somewhat redeemed by Congress, thanks to Bernie Sanders and young activists.
Noam Chomsky: Ending Climate Change “Has to Come From Mass Popular Action,” Not Politicians
AN INTERVIEW WITH NOAM CHOMSKY
11.19.2021…
On Climate Change
BM
To change subjects: What do you see as the greatest obstacle in solving the climate crisis?
NC
There are two major obstacles. One is, of course, the fossil fuel companies. Second is the governments of the world, including Europe and the United States. We have just seen that very dramatically over the summer. On August 9, 2021, the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] issued its last analysis of the climate situation. It was a very dire warning — much more than before.
The message basically was, “We have two choices.” We can either start right now cutting back on fossil fuel use, [and] do it systematically every year, until we phase them out by mid-century. That’s one choice. The other choice is cataclysm. The end of organized human life on earth. Not immediately — we’ll just reach irreversible tipping points, and it goes on to disaster. Those are the options.
How did the great powers react? The day after the IPCC report, Joe Biden issued an appeal to the OPEC cartel [Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries] to increase production. Europe chimed in by calling on all producers, including Russia, to increase production. Increase production. This is a response to the IPPC warning that we have to start reducing right now.
That’s for political reasons, for profit for the oil companies. [The] political reason is that they want the price reduced. It’s better for them. [For] Joe Biden, if the gas prices are high, it harms his electoral prospects. [If] you read the major business press right now, [there’s] a big discussion going on: What’s the best way to increase production? Is it through the American shale oil — the fracking industry — or is it through OPEC? But how do we increase production best? That’s the business press. Turn to the petroleum journals. [They are] euphoric: “We just found new fields to exploit. Demand is going up. It’s great.”
Let’s go to the US Congress. The Biden program — under pressure from young activists, the Bernie Sanders movements, and so on — is actually a big improvement on any previous ones, on paper. It’s not wonderful, but it’s much better than anything else. Well, the [previous] negotiations in Congress over the “reconciliation bill,” initiated by Bernie Sanders, cut back very sharply from Sanders’s proposals. It’s a very valuable bill. It somewhat reverses the huge assault on the population during the neoliberal era.
…
Read more: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/11/noam-chomsky-climate-change-afghanistan-anarchism-china
Its a fascinating dynamic. Chomsky appears to prefer Bernie Sanders over Biden, but I’m sure Chomsky prefers Biden over a Republican President.
Yet Chomsky believes Biden has shown willingness to throw climate action under a bus as soon as it becomes politically painful.
Chomsky must be aware, there is no reason for Biden to change course, so long as he can count on the grudging support of iconic activists like Chomsky and his followers. Time will tell how long Chomsky and friends will tolerate what must be for them a very unsatisfactory compromise.
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Chomsky is an addle-brained, out-and-out nutcase.
If you’ve ever witnessed any of his demented rants, you know the only thing that’s missing are flecks of spittle flying out simultaneously with his gibberish.
Does Chomsky still deny that the Cambodian Killing Fields ever took place?
It became impossible for Chomsky to continue his denial of the Khmer Rouge atrocities after 20,000 mass graves were uncovered with at least 1 million people clearly having been killed. So what did Chomsky, the self-described “libertarian socialist” anarchist, do? He has moved on to the “Climate Crisis”.
Haven’t they all moved on to the “climate crisis”?
As a tool to leverage their ideological goals.
Excellent
+100
And where have you been since the cold war ended in the defeat of Gorbachev’s science advisor.
Answer plainly, or return to your place in line at the left end of the bottom line of the Bell curve
Not unlike many of his early texts. What he was good at is playing on multiple statements that, while they are individually plausible, just don’t add up to a coherent whole. Each assertion has a sufficiently low probability of truth that the chain quickly regresses to nothing. The notion that he’s done seminal work in cognitive science can be easily dismissed if you try and align his work with the work of Alan Newell
For my sins I did a course on training to be a teacher. Chomsky featured on the reading list on something to do with language and child development. I found his papers to be totally unreadable gibberish. Was this my academic incompetence or a manifestation of my common sense. Of course in climate matters he is as sane and wise as any of the other coots like mann oreskes and others in the gibberish league
I am a linguist. I will say nothing about his political posts, save that I disagree strongly with them. But as for his linguistics, he makes great sense. There are linguists who disagree with him on some details (as I do, FWIW), but his major points are right on. If you find his linguistic writings to be gibberish, then I can only say that you know nothing about linguistics.
The importance placed on Chomsky’s writings despite their being not only counter-factual and counter-intuitive but, when taken seriously, making any further development in the field like we have seen it since the 18th century impossible, caused me to turn away from the study of linguistics and from academia as a whole in the mid-1990s. My further career as an audio engineer and archivist only marginally and occasionally touches on linguistic matters, but whenever it happens to do, Chomsky’s theories certainly won’t help, ever. But older, more commonsensical and pragmatic teachings which he makes every effort to ridicule and debunk in his toxic work (like old-style “prescriptive” grammars and dictionaries that allow one to actually fathom the gist of some sentence in an unfamiliar language very quickly and reliably with minimal superfluous effort) usually do. Chomsky’s whole work seems to be one big campaign to undermine and destroy scientific thinking, scientific methods, and traditional pedagogy, with the aim of making higher education crumble and replace it by an irrational and anti-logical belief system that teaches nothing useful. It doesn’t surprise me in the least that academics who have weakened and deformed their natural brain function by forcing themselves to swallow Chomsky’s teachings are now seen supporting the equally absurd, unnatural, illogical and openly anti-cultural and anti-societal doings of the Ecofascists and “climate activists”. Even Nazi and Soviet science were for the most part less contorted and dishonest….
I see nothing counter-factual or counter-intuitive about generative (Chomskian) linguistics. And I’ve authored or helped author a dozen descriptive grammars, and more dictionaries. Trying to compare that with generative linguistics (which I’ve also done) is not useful; each addresses different questions, and both have their place.
What descriptive grammars and dictionaries try to do is to describe the grammar and vocabulary to your average reader.
What generative grammar tries to do is to explain how virtually every child–even some retarded ones–picks up the grammar of the language they’re exposed to *without explicit teaching* in a matter of a few years. Try that with algebra or any other area of math beyond first grade, and see how fast children pick it up without explicit instruction–and even then many fail math.
As far as Chomsky’s *linguistic* writing (I emphasize again that I’m not talking about his political writing), it is not undermining scientific thinking or methods, nor is it aimed at pedagogy.
The two-word phrase “climate crisis” is gibberish in the real world, or just baby-talk. I’ll pass on learning this libtard linguistics bollox, thanks.
I don’t blame you for skipping linguistics; it takes considerable intelligence to understand it. Which I’m guessing you don’t have.
Guess again. I got a PhD in Chemistry when I was 23 and have 200+ peer-reviewed publications, with at least 10 Nobel (real ones) prizewinners and hundreds of globally issued patents.
I wasn’t getting on your case. He was the one discussing the juvenile term “climate crisis”, which has as much linguistic connection with the real world as “strontium sausages” and “wibble wibble”.
“I wasn’t getting on your case” Then I apologize for my reply!
So, Phil, do you have an Erdos number? 🙂
I have generally found that when someone, or some organization, is wrong 90% of the time, I don’t know enough about the remaining 10% to know recognize right or wrong. It may be the equivalent of where the sun rises, or it may be the equivalent of which direction the Earth rotates to make it look like the sun is rising; I cannot tell.
So, Noam is twice as smart as Justin, but only half as capable in making something coherent. Noam’s only advantage is having a cool name. Did I say this right, Noam?
When he was on about teaching chimps to talk, we called him Noam Chimpsky
I always thought his academic reputation was based on a good grasp of how to manipulate the media – short on substance and long on talk. Have been listening to a bunch of seminars on human language while sewing. None has yet cited Chomsky on anything.
Here’s a link to a dandy conversation between John McWhorter and Steven Pinker. Among other things, they do mention how Chomsky shut down B.F. Skinner’s b.s. theory of language acquisition.
Having said the above, it looks to me like Chomsky’s own theories have been a dead end.
Jordan Peterson points out that it’s hard for psychologists to avoid quoting Freud even when they’re not aware they’re quoting Freud. I have no idea if the same applies to Chomsky because I am not a linguist. 🙂
I am a card-carrying linguist. Lots of linguists ignore Chomsky (or rather, he’s the linguist they love to hate), and he mostly reciprocates. As for whether his theories have been a dead end: I would disagree. Much of what he has said forms the basis for other theories of syntax (you could start with GPSG, HPSG, and LFG which while not transformational, share a lot of commonality and fundamental assumptions).
Linguistics also covers a wide range of topics; Chomsky has really only talked about syntax, apart from a brief foray with Morris Halle into phonology, which marked a turning point in that field. But if you look at psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, computational linguistics (apart from the Chomsky Hierarchy, which I’ll leave you to research), morphology, phonology (apart from the aforementioned work), and so forth, Chomsky had little or nothing to say, and people who work in those sub-fields have little to say about him.
Thanks for that.
From my perspective, Chomsky’s realization and demonstration that language is largely innate is his big contribution. I would say that he is more correct than Piaget in that regard.
As far as I can tell, Piaget inspired bad ideas have infested education since the middle of the 20th century. It would have been nice if Chomsky could have knocked him down a couple of more pegs.
And then there’s the Chomskybot. Published under a pseudonym, probably able to bamboozle the arbitrary academic intellectual into reverent belief.
Stop chiming like a chump.
About his name: for laughs, you might try a web search for Gnome Chomsky.
Now, that is funny, but not as hilarious as this:
Sit of the UK’s government that, we are so told, is leading the world in the CO2 cuts (I would say that is gasligting statement) is located in the City of Westminster which still uses gaslight for its street lighting ! !
“Plan to change Westminster’s gas street lights to LEDs sparks anger”
Chris Sugg, a descendent of William Sugg, whose eponymous company installed gas street lights in London and elsewhere from 1837, said his great-great-grandfather would be “turning in his grave” at the proposal.
Typo: Seat.
You could have said the same about Newton.
On the other hand, Chomsky is right about Biden. Thank goodness. As far as I can tell, Biden is indeed more driven by politics than ideology. Chomsky thinks that’s a problem, and in that he’s wrong.
There’s the thing. Folks are always right about some stuff and wrong about some stuff.
We’re all appalled when the left knee-jerk opposes anything Trump ever said. They would rather cause great damage than admit that Trump was right about anything.
The fact that many people pay attention to Chomsky makes him dangerous. Somehow, I can’t see name calling as the correct response to that. Just ask Hilary whether she thinks it was a good idea to call Trump supporters a basket of deplorables.
“Just ask Hilary whether she thinks it was a good idea to call Trump supporters a basket of deplorables.”
I suspect she still doesn’t get why it was a bad idea. It was all Sexism, misogyny, Russia, Comey, Media coverage, etc. that was the problem.
As the saying goes, there’s no fool like an old fool.
Right on, John. I’ve investigated Chomsky’s work across 35 years, going right back to his sources. Starting with his 1967 ironically titled, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals.” He tells the truth when it suits him and lies when it doesn’t.
His lies consist of truncated quotes or falsely juxtaposed statements, to make people say things they didn’t intend. All to make mostly American figures seem callous, racist, and contempt-driven. He’s a master of character assassination and has garnered fame and accolades doing it.
See Paul Bogdanor’s The Chomsky Hoax for many examples.
The other choice is cataclysm. The end of organized human life on earth.
__________________________________
Chicken Little,
The Emperor’s New Clothes,
The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf.
A few tenths of a degree will end civilization?
Totally delusional.
But quite rational if climate scare carries a 75% discount off ad placements for village idiots. Act now and receive 4 for 1 at your local fireworks stand.
we should chip in and send him to the 5,000 year old tree emerging from the feet of a retreating glacier.
wonder what he would say?
If Noam Chomsky approves of something, I can be assured it is a terrible idea.
Yes, but also, Chumpsky was never important. Another famous for being famous.
Chumpsky is the posterchild of left crazyness,ignorance,arrogance and total lack of integrity.He is living proof that,no matter how smart or educated they are they will blindly follow their crazy zealotry even if they themselves have decoded the mechanics of propaganda.
He was the guy who wrote a book called ” manufacturing consent “analysing and describing the mechanisms behind the politicalcurtain and propaganda and manipulation by billionaire controlled MSM to force their opinions onto us and to trick us into wars etc.,
yet he is so full of shit that he totally supports the manufactured AGW nonsense though the propagandists openly admit that global warming is a CONSENSE. (and consense is no science,it’s antiscience)
And not just that: He completely ignores the existence of the old CONSENSE = global cooling of the 70ies
or the fact that all bold AGW predictions totally failed.
And while he believes in the nonexistent climate apocalypse he denied the real apocalypse of the killing fields: After all the tens millions of commie victims in China,Russia and everywhere else it was impossible for him to get to the obvious conclusion that the Red Khmer simply did what communist usually do.
Leftie logic :” Save us from the nonexisting apocalypse,but the real apocalypse in Cambodia never happened”
And it gets even worse: Chomsky is the on crying for the removal of unvaccinated from society.(classless 2class communism with camps for unbelievers)
Once again not only manufactured but forced consent and erosion of democracy for the sake of the pharmalobby.
And what does Chomsky?He wants to protect the protected vaccinated from the unprotected unvaccinated.
Then Trump: A masterpiece of manufactured consent.
A guy who was 40 years a sunnyboy and everyones darling and the white person who is mentioned(in a positive way) more often in rap songs than anyone else.
All of a sudden they claim he is Superevil.
Isn’t this super illogical?
What did Chomsky?Did he question the crazy out of control propaganda and 24/7 bashing or the Russian Collusion lie which turned out to be a conspiracy(= manufactured ).
No – Chomsky says ” Trump is worse than H!.tler” .
Such a comment from a Jewish person about the first US president in dacades who hasn’t started new wars.
Chomskyt has no hard science background. He is way out of his league on climate change, covid or most anything else current. Just go away and rest on your decaying laurels, please.
What laurels?
Left on Left violence?
What was Norm saying last month about the Un-Vaxed? Something about throwing them into a ghetto and refusing to allow them access to base level human needs?
Or am I remembering this wrong?
Norm is a typical Marxist. Safe with his little group of self important people that know after they have taken control none of them will be ever asked to make sure their factory hits production quota. None of them really work, and none of them have ever invested their lives in building anything that might be taken away from them. So it is all a game to them. If they win? They get to be on the committees defining the Better to Build Back towards. If they lose? Oh well, back to writing essays and giving talks to ‘open minded’ uni students about how evil Capitalism is.
They want to fight each other? Do expect me to step in and try and stop them.
And since they’re not killing each other, yet, they live for as long as humanly possible to inflict the greatest amount of jibberish on the rest of us.
Just like his father figure, old Karl himself. The L. Ron Hubbard of philosophy.
Only with the left an idiot like Chomsky could be rated as “intellectual”.
To progressives, an intellectual is someone who has never done anything useful.
I get really sick of these utter numpties…
“Ending Climate Change “Has to Come From Mass Popular Action,” Not Politicians”
Ending climate change?
What an utter leftie moron.
It was started by politicians and Al Gore in particular. The goal is to always have solutions tantalizingly out of reach to keep the votes flowing. Their hope is that “saving the planet” will be more important than “saving your job” or at least make you feel better about the loss.
Exactly. It is so much easier to deal with fantasy problems than real problems. Yet again we are living through another situation in BC where a structural water control problem was identified decades ago but the politicians reacted slowly to not at all. The dikes failed on cue and now we have to suffer through endless pontifications on global warming catastrophe change. Existential crises are the refuge of the useless.
Wasn’t the carbon tax the solution to ending climate change in BC?
Fires in the summer and now heavy rain…apparently the tax was ineffective.
I wonder what amount of tax would have prevented these conditions? (sarc)
I often ask econazis like Chomsky what the climate will be like once climate change has ended.
Crickets.
Chomsky, long ago, reached his tipping point…
Chomsky is not ‘iconic’. He is a lower than dog dirt apologist for mass murder!
I think the same people who call Chomsky “iconic” also refer to Paul Ehrlich as “distinguished”.
Well, he certainly has distinguished himself from rationality.
Why does anyone care what this uneducated communist fossil thinks? The left’s obsession with him really boggles the mind. He’s not smart. He’s a broken Marxist record who just rotates talking points.
What a silly thing to say, He left out space travel to settle other planets. Numbskull.
I have a real problem with the term “ irreversible tipping points. I am a geologist who has focused on palo geology and the events of glaciation and tectonics. Obviously there have been no “irreversible” tipping points that worked to the detriment of the human race in the long run . As man is an adjuster to climate changes, the earth is far from being fragile. I believe climate change is natural and cyclical . This is the only hypothesis with clear evidence, and that evidence points to a self adjusting, a self balancing earth
“man is an adjuster “
Was an adjuster, but no more. That’s been indoctrinated out. 70 years ago we had 20 year old kids flying Lancasters over Germany
Today’s 20 year olds are worried about the weather, their pronouns and their social media profiles. And being offended.
1951 Who knew?
But yeah, your point is very relevant.
I had a patient in the 80’s who flew 36 bombing missions over the Romanian oil fields. Pat did talk about how he was lucky having seen many in his squadron go down. You are right youth has regressed.
80 years ago, but we get the point
Seventy years ago 20 year olds were flying B29s over North Korea. The bombing of Germany was 82-74 years ago. 20 year olds were killing each other (and others) in very large numbers around 105 years ago (WW1), 80 years ago (WW2), 70 years (Korea), 50 years ago (Vietnam), and over the last 30 years (Iraq, Afghanistan), not to mention any number of little wars in between.
Maybe it’s a positive that today’s 20 year olds are just worrying about the weather, pronouns and social media profiles rather than killing each other en masse.
Better kill your enemy than sit around whining and encouraging the enemy to kill you!
Thankfully nuclear weapons put an end to large scale conflict.
Iraq and Afghanistan didn’t see any killing in large numbers, unless you mean what their regimes were doing before the U.S. invaded.
Nice to see you Mr. Danhoff, I agree that Humans have been shown abundant adaptability where we can live in diverse regions and climates of the world from icebox Alaska to the steaming hot jungles of Brazil.
It will be interesting to see how we adapt to the coming ice age. Fortunately, I am old enough that I doubt I will live to see it.
Peter,
I, too, am old enough that I doubt I will live to see the next glacial onset; but that doesn’t keep me from asking people why they aren’t preparing for it, and berating them if they are worried about a nonexistent “possible” catastrophe! There is NO benefit to the survival of the human race in the CAGW agenda!
The idea that a few more molecules of CO2 will have any effect on the long term return to glacial conditions is one of the most moronic hoaxes in human history; you have to be an idiot to believe in it, and a crook to try and benefit from it!
Despite being an “intellectual” he has no problem using the logical fallacy of a “false choice”; ” We can either start right now cutting back on fossil fuel use, [and] do it systematically every year, until we phase them out by mid-century. That’s one choice. The other choice is cataclysm.”
First, there is no scientific evidence, that a tipping point exists and thus justifies “cataclysm”.
Secondly, given no proof of tipping point, there are many adaptive measures that can be taken.
I think Mr. Chomsky needs to read more widely about geology and its stupendous developments since they discovered that the world is some 5 BILLION years old.
Part of the shortsightedness problem is that he is apparently unaware of history, and geology’s contribution of numerous changes between warm and cold in earths history- as seen in the rock formations and really old glaciers growing and retreating over centuries in response to earth’s changes in temperature.
I wonder if he is even aware of the research that has identified specific genetic changes in the Human Tree where specific changes in the larynx(it dropped down the throat ~40mm.) The changes gave people exponentially more able to communicate by speech.
Following small changes allowed people to sing, instead of grunt.The change allowed huge changes in the mind that their also allowed people to sing very complex melodies and make tremendously more sounds if desired, to communicate ideas that were simply not possible centuries previous.
Wake Up Mr. Chomsky. (And all the other blind people who refuse to admit to the vast changes earth and the universe have undergone and how their petty ambitions to become rich and famous in politics will, in the end, do them very little good.
Only someone who knows nothing about anything, would talk about “irreversible tipping points”.
Eric:
The truth of Noam Chomsky is more nuanced than you imply. He has a long-standing distrust of government and the media and the class of elites that end up running both. He dislikes capitalism and was a supporter of the Occupy movement.
One of his books is “Manufacturing Consent“, together with Edward S. Herman, about the ways media and government collude to promote propaganda and exclude dissenting views. Sound familiar?
Unfortunately for Chomsky, when you look for examples of “mass popular action” he advocates, they all seem to turn into riots and mindless destruction.
Even assuming CO2 emissions are an imminent threat to the planetary ecosystem, “mass popular action” will not yield a solution. And none of the “solutions” advanced by either politicians or activists pass even the most cursory tests of engineering and economic feasibility.
So the activist class has convinced itself that a massive problem must be solved on an impossible timescale. Having no understanding of what they are demanding, they turn on anyone who tries to tell them otherwise as the “enemy” who must be brought down by any means necessary.
This leads to the implicit belief that saving the planet requires dismantling industrial civilization. The amount of delusion necessary to harbor such a belief is truly staggering, and apparently lost on Chomsky.
This leads to the implicit belief that saving the planet requires dismantling industrial civilization.
_________________________________
There are plenty of quotes from these people that demonstrate that dismantling industrial civilization is the goal, not the cure.
He has a longstanding distrust of non-Marxist government and an uncontrolled media. Fixed it.
Paradoxical it is…. that the folks who made up this Fake Climate Crisis that Noam has bought into (it has the Chomsky “Fear Factor”)…are Billionaire Globalists…the Powerful people Chomsky claims to hate.
The Marxists claim to hate billionaires. But in reality, they love them and want to be them. What they really want is for everyone not in their clique to be dirt poor. What they really want is for wealth is to be in the hands of a few, with them part of the few.
He has a distrust of any government that doesn’t call itself communist.
The Hidden Hand of Misdirection. “The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves.” ~ Vladimir Lenin.
Merkel was member of a fake stasi opposition party in east Germany.
And in the USA people like her are called RINOs.
When is Chomsky going to have the good grace to discorporate?
A short Google search on “discorporate” does not turn up “suicide” or “die“ as a definition. So you deserve to be awarded a gold star for the usage.
I vaguely remember seeing “discorporate” used in a Sci-Fi story. The context was that humans have a spirit essence (soul) which is freed when the body dies. Thus, people were not “killed”; they were “dicorporated”.
I can’t recall the name or author of the story.
Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein. Very few other authors have matched his ability to imagine believable futures.
Did Heinlein anticipate that scientists advocate blowing up pipelines as Suzuki has https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/11/eco-warrior-david-suzuki-says-pipelines-will-blown-leaders-dont-act-climate-change-video/
At 91 he looks fairly robust, alas.
The frightening part of Chomsky is that a cabal of extreme, leftist ACADEMIA AND THINK TANKS are in cahoots with his nut-case views.
And they run the city of Cambridge, here in MA. A silly example, but- if you want to remove a tree in YOUR front yard, you have to get a permit- and you have to have a certified arborist document that the tree is dead or near dead. Otherwise, you can’t remove it. Because, of course, that tree will help save the climate.
Science doesn’t matter to these nut cases. They formed opinions and incorporated them into their self-image. They are immune to scientific evidence. This is true for almost all the climate activists. Show them the latest science
“… the root cause for the positive TOA net flux and, hence, for a further accumulation of energy during the last two decades was a declining outgoing shortwave flux and not a retained LW flux. ” – Hans-Rolf Dübal and Fritz Vahrenholt, October 2021, journal Atmosphere, Radiative Energy Flux Variation from 2001–2020.
It demonstrates that greenhouse gases have had no effect on the climate. This will not change their opinions in any way. They weren’t convinced by science so they won’t be swayed by science. They will simply repeat all the current lies and move on.
OT, if you, like myself never heard of it before now you don’t have an excuse any longer.
“The mayor of the island of Vulcano, in Sicily’s Aeolian archipelago, has ordered the evacuation of about 150 people and banned tourists due to increased volcanic activity and gases in the area”
I watched some philosophical Chomsky stuff…went back to Dilbert….
Scott Adams is a much deeper thinker and philosopher than Chomsky will ever be! If he could only get beyond his regular marijuana use he would be even funnier, and more formidable!
Noam Chomsky confuses what he thinks with what people actually need and want. People need and want abundant, affordable and reliable energy no matter the source.
Chomsky and his buddies want to rule by fiat. They hate that unreliable democracy. They hate it that politicians have to respond to voters angry about energy shortages and price increases.
I’ve said it for some time now: The green schemes will only last until voters feel the pain directly. Current political responses by U.S. politicians to voter concerns (begging for more oil, Connecticut and Massachusetts leaving regional climate pact & etc.) are just the beginning of a tidal wave of political response to voter discontent.
Dave,
They REALLY hate the middle class AND the proletariat! Having never worked in a REAL job or run a REAL business, Chomsky and his friends want their inferiors to shut up and obey; much like the puppet masters hiding behind the curtains in the White House!
Fitting that
https://www.jacobinmag.com/author/Noam%20Chomsky
publishes Chomsky.
Will he support Jacobins to fight climate?
He along with 100 academics signed Extinction Rebellions petition, and his book Internationalism or Extinction
would suggest the affirmative….
“The message basically was, “We have two choices.” We can either start right now cutting back on fossil fuel use, [and] do it systematically every year, until we phase them out by mid-century. That’s one choice. The other choice is cataclysm. The end of organized human life on earth. Not immediately — we’ll just reach irreversible tipping points, and it goes on to disaster. Those are the options.”
It’s quite hard to believe that the guy who made the statement above is also quoted has having said….
“Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.”
Sounds like two different people. Maybe the second quote above is a fake. I don’t know.
He’s just getting old. He used to be pretty cool, but in the last 20 years the intellect has gone but the ego remains. Sad really.
He was never cool, it’s just that he used to be able to string together enough BS to impress some.
I have a difficult time deciding who has done more damage to the US and our education system; Noam Chomsky, or Marxist agitprop “historian” Howard Zinn!
Chomsky has gotten by for years by using an impressive vocabulary to baffle his critics and students with BS! He’s like a walking, talking, writing example of cognitive dissonance!
Zinn, on the other hand, wrote a history book consisting of every Marxist slur against the US he could dig up or create. If even half of what he wrote were true it is doubtful that so much of the world’s population would be actively trying to move here!
Perhaps the greatest service any academic could perform for Mankind is to spend some time doing an in-depth critique of these two ideologues! It wouldn’t be of much use to the academic world, but maybe it could help to deprogram some of the weak minded followers of these two Marxist cult leaders!
Resisting climate change is like buying two umbrellas to fight a rainstorm. The dinosaurs didn’t succeed.
Banish All Joys
Banish Senile Philosophers
His and his followers argument basically went like this. Still does.
We know how learning works. Given the way it works, it is impossible for a child to learn language. Therefore language, or much of it, must be innate.
A more rational approach would be, we know children learn language. Therefore learning must be something which allows that. We are wrong to think it does not. This means we don’t understand learning.
Lets figure it out.
Some similarities to backwards reasoning in Climate matters.
Infantile Chomsky cannot hear that children learn language from ADULTS – it was created by adults!
Machine-man Chomsky says adults cannot create something which only happens in kids. So he ends up with computer programming. He is a true Artificial Intelligence.
Poetry – he does not even go there – is impossible with his machine linguistics.
Problem he is not the only one. Banks put their policies under AI, and look at the last crash.
Then of course climate – models which Chomsky find innately correct precisely because no creative intelligence interferes.
We have an information society – and Facebook cashes in, smirking, knowing full well the swindle with people behaving like Artificial Intelligences.
So Chomsky is a symptom of pandemic – the information society.
What on earth makes you think that Chomsky doesn’t think children learn a lot of their language from adults? He never said any such thing. Although in fact children learn a lot of their first language from other kids, which is one reason language changes over generations. What does not happen is that adults (or anyone else) teach children the grammar of their first language.
As for language having been created by adults, that’s debatable. We obviously can’t decide that for languages like English, that have been around for centuries with no inventor in sight (and their predecessor languages for millennia before that). But actually, there’s some evidence that when there’s no language around to learn, children create it themselves–look up Nicaraguan Sign Language, for example. So no, adults do not create languages, they just use them.
As for computer programming and machine linguistics, Chomsky has nothing to do with computer programming or “machine linguistics” (by which I assume you mean computational linguistics); he doesn’t even like it. (He did invent the Chomsky Hierarchy of complexity, which is fundamental to an abstract understanding of programming languages, but he was interested in how it applied to human languages, not computer languages.)
So I’m afraid you fundamentally misunderstand Chomsky and languages. (I won’t say anything about Chomsky and politics, because that’s an entirely different topic.)
Both things could be right–much of language could be innate, and learning must allow languages to be learned. In fact the former is at least a partial explanation for the latter, although I will (following Chomsky here) suggest that language learning is not learning in the same sense that we learn things in school.
So let’s talk about learning. It is clear that we do not learn math, or physics, or chemistry, in the same way we learn language. We learn math, physics and chemistry by explicit instruction (either from a teacher, or from a textbook, or both). And only smart people learn these subjects well, and they can usually explain what they know.
Language, on the other hand, is learned by young children without explicit instruction–people in every one of the thousands of languages learned their language without having to go to school. They may later learn more vocabulary in school, or by reading books. (I picked up a lot of English vocab when I was a kid by reading Jules Verne–translated, to be sure, but still with a lot of vocabulary that you wouldn’t hear much elsewhere.) And in school, children may have been told that the grammar they learned as children is “wrong” (don’t use the word “ain’t!”). But the grammar and basic vocabulary they learned, they learned without their parents teaching it, for the obvious reason that most parents couldn’t teach it if they tried–and most don’t try.
Second, our “knowledge” of language is something hardly any of us can explain. Unless you’ve studied linguistics, you probably don’t know that you have two kinds of ‘p’ sounds (one in words like ‘spin’, the other in words like ‘pin’), nor do you probably know how the three forms of the regular plural suffix are pronounced (in words like ‘dogs’, ‘books’, or ‘bushes’), nor do you know how the grammar decides whether you need a word like ‘that’ before an embedded clause (why you can say either “I think that it’s raining” or “I think it’s raining”, and you can say “I murmured that it’s raining”, but “I murmured it’s raining” probably sounds odd). In other words, grammatical knowledge is largely implicit. There are even truths about English grammar that every speaker of English “knows”, but which no one explicitly wrote down or even (as far as anyone knows) noticed until the 1960s or 1970s.
In sum, when we learn a first language as a child, we learn it more or less automatically, without explicit teaching. And yet we can’t explain how it works without a great deal of study. Both of these facts are very much unlike our learning of most other things, especially school learning. And THAT is what Chomsky noticed, and why he came up with his linguistic theories. And for the record, he says that language acquisition is not learning in the usual sense (for many of the reasons I sketched above). So if we understood better how we learn things like math and science, that might not enlighten us at all about how we “learn” a first language–except maybe to throw light on how wrong we were to think that we *learn* our first language.