Chomsky is voted world's top public intellectual

The Guardian ^ | Tuesday October 18, 2005 | Duncan Campbell

[highlander_UW]

"I don't pay a lot of attention to them," said Chomsky of the poll last night. "It was probably padded by some friends of mine."

Well, at least he isn't an idiot...he knows a bogus poll when he sees one as well.

[binkdeville]

I had to study Chomsky to get a teaching degree. Half of it was complete crap.His designer teaching theories ruined a generation of students.

[sphinx]

It's a very white list, too. No Blacks, no Asians, no Hispanics, no Native Americans.

Ward Churchill missed the cut? Hard to imagine how that happened....

[durasell]

There are many, many great "thinkers" who fall to the right. Joseph Campbell, for instance, had politics that leaned right.

[jjm2111]

I've flipped through Chomsky in the bookstore and found it to be the most dense mish-mash. I really believe that the only reason why people think he's such a genius is that they cannot read (or understand) what he writes.

[Sir Francis Dashwood]

Chomsky is voted world's top public intellectual

[kentj]

"beat off challenges from Umberto Eco, Richard Dawkins, Vaclav Havel and Christopher Hitchens to win the Prospect/Foreign Policy poll."

I guess he is pretty smart - he figured out that he could win by beating "off" the challengers.

Is that legal - oh wait, what does "is" mean when considering the beating off of challengers?

You have to admire him for getting out the vote that is a lot of palm pressing if you know what I mean.

[durasell]

His stuff on linguistics isn't bad. In fact its fascinating, though I don't know enough about the field to judge it accurately.

But note -- it's the curse of our times that many people believe that there is a simple "common sense" answer to all problems. Of all the sins that can be attributed to mass media, instilling this notion in people is the most egregious.

[bvw]

Umberto Eco the prolific borrower, almost bordering on plagerism? He lifted Barbara Tuchman's work, A Distant Mirror, for his Name of the Rose. And Focault's Pendulum was borrowed from a number of sources -- Born in Blood, perhaps one. What he did was okay -- just NOT the top fruit on the tree of intellect.

[WideGlide]

Chomsky, who was underwhelmed by the honour, beat off..

Like most of the wanking lunatic left Komrade Chomsky is a glutton for attention and an exhibitionist, with "beat off" being the operative description.

[Brilliant]

In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.

[siunevada]

Chomsky, who was underwhelmed by the honour

At least he retains a shred of normal perspective.

[Sisku Hanne]

UK's crack squirrels are dissed for their less cogent chum, Chomsky chipmunk.

[sergeantdave]

Chomsky and his connections to neo-Nazis and anti-Semitic Holocaust deniers -

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17899

[Gay State Conservative]

I did a search of Massachusetts public records yesterday and found that this anarchist/Maoist owns real estate with a combined assessed value of about $2 million.

This clown's been rewarded very handsomely by this country and for the visceral contempt he's shown for it.

[pissant]

And to listen to the man lecture, he sounds like a more ignorant version of Ward Churchill.

[Burf]

"Chomsky? Isn't he the mentor for the "smartest woman in the world" -- Hillary?"

I think Chomsky in a Tibetian dialect means "Hillary". Or maybe it's "One With Fat Ankles". Sorry, I lost my translation dictionary.

[BadAndy]

"Who are the younger equivalents to [Jürgen] Habermas, Chomsky and Havel?


Ward Churchill, Helen Thomas, and Maureen Dowd?

[BadAndy]

"1 Noam Chomsky linguistics expert and critic of US foreign policy

2 Umberto Eco writer and academic

3 Richard Dawkins Oxford professor of public understanding of science

4 Vaclav Havel playwright and leader of Czech velvet revolution

5 Christopher Hitchens journalist, author, pro-Iraq war polemicist"

Interesting how they describe Chomsky as a war "critic", but Hitchens is a pro war "polemicist"

[SmoothTalker]

He should have stuck to linguistics. Some of his work there is brilliant and some of the most widely accepted in the field. Just goes to show that because you are good at one thing and know it really well, you don't necessarily know crap about something else. His political ideology is simplistic, idiotic, and wrong.