In Conversation with Noam Chomsky 

Yes, war is peace, Chomsky has conscience, Americans are educated.

Those details are new to you, and that's fair enough, but they're not newly revealed details, at all.

I love hearing about his political education as a youth. Shows the importance of having things like news stands and anarchist bookstores. Chomsky has kept the tradition of emigres running them alive.

@@david80johnson I don't agree with Noam Chomsky on everything but I received a very nice long email from him in 2001 when I was relying on his research for my volunteer activist work at the University of Minnesota. I spent a couple years just studying and reading his books and the anarchist books he recommends - it was definitely an intense life-changing experience. He speaks from the heart and his emphasis on how Newton disconnected matter from mathematical models is a key point. Actually it was proven in the 1960s that Newton's law of gravity was directly inspired by Pythagorean music theory from Archytas. Math Professor Luigi Borzacchini, writing on the secret music origins of Western math, calls it the "deep pre-established disharmony." The last email I received from Professor Chomsky he responded that he wished he had time to study noncommutativity in relation to the origin of language. I was pointing out to him how he has considered music a viable explanation for the origin of human language and yet Alain Connes, the math professor, reveals the truth of music is noncommutativity (in his "Music of Shapes" lecture). For example Noam Chomsky gave a recent Sunrise Movement talk and the young interviewer mentioned a paper Noam had recommended - on the clicking language of the San Bushmen. The argument of that paper relied on a claim that the San Bushmen had split from the Yoruba about 120,000 years ago - but if you read the followup paper that cites that claim - it points out the genetic evidence now shows the San Bushmen are more closely tied to the Pygmies genetically. So also the Pygmies and San Bushmen have the same music culture as the central core - this is the emphasis of Professor Jerome Lewis on his music origins of language talks. Unfortunately our ecological crisis is much worse than even Professor Chomsky realizes. I wrote about Professor Noam Chomsky vis a vis "radical ecology" for my master's thesis in 2000. The science requires specializing in that subject - to realize the aerosol masking effect is twice as bad as previously thought - this means a 40% reduction of sulfur pollution from shutting down coal plants (and cleaning up diesel) actually heats up Earth another 1 degree Celsius! There's also a huge 500 gigaton pressurized methane research in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf - that is starting to accelerate release with an expected five gigaton methane burst doubling global warming soon. The ARctic ice is about to go ice free for the first time in three million years with the initial BOE or Blue Ocean Event expected this September as El Nino kicks in. So the megadroughts and famines will be much worse. All our Western science has been a great Faustian trade-off and now Mother Nature is taking revenge.

@@voidisyinyangvoidisyinyang885 Very interesting stuff, thanks for sharing. I think your experience describes well how he is keeping the tradition alive: of being available to so many people with an interest in the subjects he finds important (like the experience he describes with the owners of anarchist bookstores). There is so much wealth in the answers he gives to these questions. So important to learn from and keep alive ourselves! I remember an answer Prof Chomsky gave to the question "what is anarchism". Something along the lines that anarchism is basically a truism: ie., that any power, authority, must be justified. If it cannot be justified, it should not exist. Such a powerful idea, but somehow we rarely hear it considered! Much of political science turns around the quesion what type of authority is best (most stable, causing the least harm to "national interests") but rarely do we ask what forms of power are legitimate in the first place.

@@david80johnson yes also I recall Noam also stating that maybe parent's authority should not be questioned - something along those lines. I emphasized Professor Chomsky's researching Martin Buber via his father's teachings. I think, despite Noam claiming nothing exists after death, the "Creatio ex nihilo" is actually this "freedom" he is referring to in an existential sense. The anarchists had a myth that they were celibate in the religious sense but upon inspection, the truth revealed was they are so poor and starving that celibacy was the necessary choice. So this is the true existential sense of justice that is the tradition I think Noam Chomsky works from, in terms of his family background. In fact my dad was born around the same time as Chomsky - and born on a kitchen table - during the depression - in an "off grid" house. For example when Noam is asked about his first wife he says he can't talk about it since he gets too emotional. This is a rare side of Professor Chomsky - and so like I said maybe I don't agree with everything he argues for - I think the anarchist critique as libertarian socialism relies a lot on Wilhelm von Humboldt who was inspired by Vedic philosophy, along the lines of the mysticism of Martin Buber. The phrase I-language as "uncountable" discrete infinity and internal actually has a secret mystic meaning based on noncommutative math. Chomsky even referred to this in one of his books - I tried to find the quote again but I couldn't find it! Essentially he said that if humans didn't have I-language then they could have the other type of "extra" sensory perceptions that other animals have like ultrasound or infrared or ultraviolet vision, etc.

Chomsky didn't add anything to human civilization other than white noise and bullshit. ;-)

​@@lepidoptera9337 Ah, you're a "bro science dude", studying out of Joe Rogan's meathead gymnasium. Chomsky has some seriously credentialed critics obviously.

as long as the tractor is kept repaired. I agree with your analogy though. Just saying some farmers have their tractors sitting around.

Yes, he is like a driverless tractor... going all over the place but never in the right direction. ;-)

@@lepidoptera9337 From: Noam Chomsky Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2001 15:56:25 -0500 To: Drew W Hempel (by way of Noam Chomsky Subject: Re: Minnesota Dear Drew Hempel, God save us from our friends -- not for the first time. I'm a little surprised that Brokaw would credit a source like that. Surely he wouldn't in the case of anyone who falls within approved doctrinal bounds. You're quite right about activists not being willing to read. I get a good measure of it when publishers send sales records or in the signing frenzies after I give talks. In both cases it's overwhelmingly the small pamphlets with interviews, etc.; easy reads, and short. But it's not just activists. Same with academic scholars. It's very rare for them to go beyond the limits of the guild, a practice far more pronounced in the social sciences, history, etc., than in the sciences, something I've observed from a lot of first-hand experience in the last 1/2-century. It's too bad about Guerin-Rocker, and in fact all of the rich literature on anarchism. Contemporary anarchists -- at least those who use the name -- seem to divide, mostly, between people who don't want to read and those who are immersed in often arcane scholarship. There are exceptions, of course, but the tendencies are noticeable. It was quite different in the days when workers education was a normal part of everyday life for great numbers of people, and labor-based media were common fare. No plans for reissue of At War with Asia or For Reasons of State, much to my regret. In fact, they were scarcely looked at in the first place. Wrong story. Even left academics don't want to hear such things, and it went -- and goes -- beyond the interests of most activists. How far the anti-war movement was from understanding anything that was going on was revealed pretty dramatically by the reception of McNamara's awful memoirs -- actually welcomed by leading figures as a vindication of their stand. Few could comprehend what an incredible display of apologetics it was. Wrote a few things about it, which I noticed could not be understood even by left academics, for the most part. The Party Line is much more influential than many think. Thanks for sending along the excerpt from what you've been writing. Interesting, and well done I think -- but then, I would. I've read some of what Zerzan has written, under various names. Occasionally, out of curiosity, I've written brief letters asking if he could supply some of the sources for particular quotes, which I know he has invented (though I didn't say so). I'm constantly promised that they'll be coming. They won't, of course. This is just a silly game, in my opinion, defaming the good name of anarchism -- not for the first time; there's a rich history of that. Noam"

@@voidisyinyangvoidisyinyang885 Yes, all of that was bullshit. ;-)

@@lepidoptera9337 Not according to the University - I got a $1.5 million divestment from Total Oil but the treasurer who pushed it threw, she got fired. Also the University finally joined the Workers Rights Consortium against slave-wage conditions for the sports apparel manufacturing. Then I wrote a 1998 paper based on Noam Chomsky - arguing the U.S. would attack Iraq again and that the sanctions were genocidal. My instructor said the paper was "too aggressive." When it all came true five years later - he said, "that's graduate school!" Hilarious.

As was stated in his introduction he’s credited with creating modern linguistics, and cognitive science. His theories have also contributed hugely to computer science and Artificial Intelligence.

@@blacki183...and teaching a most fundamental critical thinking that has been feeding countless thousands of students all over the world for generations.

Linguists have stopped taking Chomsky seriously in linguistics a long time ago. ;-)

@@lepidoptera9337 Even better then!

@@anthonycostello3457 Chomsky is pretty much down to a very small group of eternal fanboys and fangirls. You can find idiots like that surrounding every bullshitter on the planet.

Please give it a rest. If you don't want to take him seriously, do not. You clearly do not since you haven't bothered to read the works the alleged content of which you're criticizing.

​@@lepidoptera9337The heck they have. Any linguist who doesn't take Chomsky seriously is a fraud.