I don’t know that much about Chomsky’s political writings. I don’t like his linguistics that much. I haven’t really read much of his political stuff; what I did read more or less made sense but I didn’t consider myself competent to judge it.
A little while back I followed a link somewhere to an interview with Chomsky which made him look like kind of an ass. I thought, “huh. Guess he’s kind of an ass.” Didn’t think that much more of it. Turns out that the interview was a total hatchet job, and the interviewer downright lied about a lot of what she said in the interview — including lying about things she claimed Chomsky had written.
So says this article anyway. I thought it was interesting mainly because I had read, and believed, the original interview, so it was personal.
Found both on Reddit.
Update: The Guardian apologizes & admits the interview completely misrepresented Chomsky.
Update 2: This is apparently in response to an open letter to the Guardian by Chomsky pointing out countless misrepresentations and inaccuracies in the article, and making a good case that it was intended as a hatchet job.
Hi Ed, this isn’t quite on-topic, but I couldn’t find any other way to get in touch with you. I was wondering how to get at the post you refer to in your comment at:
http://www.veen.com/jeff/archives/000461.html
The archives in this blog only go back to Oct 2004, it seems, so can you point me to the post you wrote? Thanks.
(via* http://store.yahoo.com/paulgraham/quo.html)
Kartik, I am afraid that entry perished in a bout of moodiness and dissatisfaction with my blog, which resulted in its being down for a while and later brought back, but starting fresh.
As best I can remember, it seemed as if the “taboos” Paul was talking about were virtually all taboos of the left, “political correctness,” and that the forbidden thoughts would correspondingly tend to be forbidden doctrines of the right — racist, sexist, elitist, that kind of thing. But it’s been a long time. I don’t think there was anything in the post that was so insightful it justified showing up on Paul Graham’s quote board. It was probably fairly cranky, and one reason I blew away the blog and started over is that I wanted to get out of the fairly snarky, negative place I was in with it.
I think Chomsky is pretty kickass as an activist. His writing is kind of academic and intense, but he’s great in a distilled format. Find some clips of him speaking, or track down “Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media” on DVD.