America s Dumbest Intellectual (Anarchist Noam Chomsky)

City Journal ^ | Summer, 2002 | Stefan Kanfer

[Black Agnes]

Noam Chomsky bump!

[ohioman]

We will all be better off when this worhthless SOB is food for worms. (That is, unless your are a neo-commie/socialist.)

[dead]

observes Wired magazine, “Chomsky is somewhere between Kerouac and Nietzsche—carrying around one of his books is automatic countercultural cachet.”

Oh come on!

Kerouac stopped being “countercultural cool” about the same time people stopped calling Jim Morrison “a poet.”

[firebrand]

John McWhorter, linguist-turned-conservative-pundit, cancels him out.

[LisaFab]

Great read. Thanks.

[Sigurd]

It fascinates me that Chomsky continues to get coverage. Certainly it is because he serves to cover the real identity & position of those who perpetuate his coverage. He also serves the left in defining their mode and method of both political discourse and comment. Slander (thanks, Ann Coulter) and unsubstantiated stereotype and simple name calling gets the claps and thanks from those who wish to promote idiocy in this country (and the selection of poor leaders). I'm happy to see his words out there so that it hopefully shows to all the foolishness of all of the left's ideas, though they may be toned down.

[eclectic]

Nim Chimpsky bump!

[r9etb]

True to form, in one of the interviews, Chomsky calls the United States “a leading terrorist state” and equates President Clinton’s 1998 bombing of the Al-Shifa plant in Sudan with the horrors of September 11. In every way, Chomsky’s comparison is obscene. The bombing was in response to attacks on two U.S. embassies that had resulted in the deaths and injuries of thousands. The U.S. made sure it took place at night, when the target was empty of civilians. U.S. intelligence, mistaken though it may have been, indicated that the pharmaceutical factory was producing weapons of mass destruction.

In point of fact, Bill Clinton did a very good job of lending legitimacy to Chomsky's claims. Clinton's high-handed and often inexplicable adventures -- which seem too often to have been motivated by some personal goal -- can and do qualify as a sort of terrorism.

The ugly reality is that the timing of the strike on the aspirin factory was far too convenient -- and even if Clinton's motives were (for him) pure, his egregious behavior was enough to drive just about everybody to the uncharitable conclusion.

Yet another reason to elect men of character.

[Snowy]

Ha! I read the title and thought, "I bet it's about Chomsky". :)

[r9etb]

It fascinates me that Chomsky continues to get coverage.

Chomsky gets coverage for precisely the same reason that the TV shows of your (well, my) youth keep getting made into Hollywood movies.

[Cincinatus]

I read the title and thought, "I bet it's about Chomsky". :)

But why? The list is so long...

Susan Sontag

John Kenneth Gailbraith

Robert MacNamara

That "ethicist" nitwit who advocates infanticide from Princeton whose name escapes me for the moment...

Best and brighest all...

[zarf]

I still refer to Chomsky's liguistic writings quite often. His talk on language and thought is a an eye opener.

Too bad he's such a putz outside of the liguistics field.

[henbane]

[Noam Chomsky argues that]The World Trade Towers were a symbol of America’s gluttony and power. In effect, we were asking for it and are now unjustly using it as a casus belli. More U.S. oppression is about to take place all over the globe. If you didn’t know better, you could be reading one of bin Ladin’s diatribes. Chomsky’s response to September 11 outraged even leftist Christopher Hitchens, a former admirer of the MIT professor who now attacked him for abandoning “every standard that makes moral and intellectual discrimination possible.”

[irv]

Anti-Americanism for Dummies

By NO, I really AM an intellectual (that's WHY the ideas are so stupid), Chomsky.

[FairWitness]

- - - he (Chomsky) wrote the introduction to a book by French Holocaust-denier Robert Faurisson. Memoire en Defense maintains that Hitler’s death camps and gas chambers, even Anne Frank’s diary, are fictions, created to serve the cause of American Zionists. That was too much for Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who challenged fellow leftist Chomsky to a debate. In the debate, Dershowitz keyed in on the fact that Chomsky had described Faurisson’s conclusions as “findings,” and claimed that they grew out of “extensive historical research.” But as numerous scholars had shown, Faurisson was not a serious scholar at all, but rather a sophist who simply ignored the mountain of documents, speeches, testimony, and other historical evidence that conflicted with his “argument.” Dershowitz noted that Chomsky also wrote the following: “I see no anti-Semitic implication in the denial of the existence of gas chambers or even in the denial of the Holocaust.”

This alone should have destroyed Chomsky's credibility and reputation!

[untenured]

Chomsky is basically sort of a left-wing conspiracist with idiot-savant tendencies. He has a remarkable ability to connect dots that to a non-gullible person are completely unrelated, and thus deduce that any randomly chosen act of 20th-century evil was part of some sinister design by the American government.

What is most distressing to me is that academics, especially those whose opinions about world affairs are the farthest distance beyond their knowledge about same, love him. They take his bizarre analysis as authoritative gospel, and use it to (with a straight face) rebut claims made on behalf of the propriety of America or its government. They cite Chomsky out of laziness instead of doing the hard work of getting up to speed on history themselves. When it is pointed out (by me, frequently) that the Chomsky interpretation of the data is typically the most bizarre out of numerous ones available, they usually just get angry.

[steve-b]

Chomsky calls the United States "a leading terrorist state" and equates President Clinton’s 1998 bombing of the Al-Shifa plant in Sudan with the horrors of September 11.

Why do I have a hunch that Chomsky does not mention the fact that this attack was timed to drive The Bent One's perjury and misuse of office to obtain sexual favors off the front pages?

[TenthAmendmentChampion]

My guess is all these kids do is carry the book, but never get around to reading it. It has to be incoherent and unreadable anyway.

[dead]

That "ethicist" nitwit who advocates infanticide from Princeton whose name escapes me for the moment...

Peter Singer.