Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomskyis an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, logician, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes described as "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy, and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He has spent more than half a century at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is Institute Professor Emeritus, and is the author of over 100 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, and...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTeacher
Date of Birth7 December 1928
CityPhiladelphia, PA
CountryUnited States of America
A dramatic, evocative, thoughtful and very accessible account of one of the most important stories of the century - and one of the most ominous, unless citizens are aroused to action to rein in abusive state power.
The people who were really important are the ones whose names are forgotten. And that's true of every movement that ever existed.
Everyone engaged in research must have had the experience of working with feverish and prolonged intensity to write a paper which no one else will read or to solve a problem which no one else thinks important and which will bring no conceivable reward - which may only confirm a general opinion that the researcher is wasting his time on irrelevancies.
Anything that you are achieving that undermines and threatens systems of power will meet with oppression. Systems of power don't say 'thank you.' What's important is not to focus all your efforts on the oppression, but to continue the constructive work.
To summarize, draft resistance can make use of the inegalitarian nature of American society as a technique for increasing the cost of American aggression, and it threatens values that are important to those in a decision-making position.
It is pretty ironic that the so-called 'least advanced' people are the ones taking the lead in trying to protect all of us, while the richest and most powerful among us are the ones who are trying to drive the society to destruction.
Language is one component of the human cognitive capacity which happens to be fairly amenable to enquiry. So we know a good deal about that.
Pakistan will never be able to match the Indian militarily, and the effort to do so is taking an immense toll on the society.
Over the years, there have been a series of concepts developed to justify the use of force in international affairs for a long period. It was possible to justify it on the pretext, which usually turned out to have very little substance, that the U.S. was defending itself against the communist menace. By the 1980s, that was wearing pretty thin.
Rendition is just sending people abroad to be tortured.
Remember, weapons of mass destruction don't mean missiles.
There are still thousands of people dying every year in Laos, mostly children and farmers, from unexploded anti-personnel ordnance that the U.S. simply saturated much of the land with, especially in the Plain of Jars. There actually is a British engineering team trying to remove some of these things, which are much worse than land mines.
It cannot be too often stressed that Israel had no credible pretext for its 2008-9 attack on Gaza, with full U.S. support and illegally using U.S. weapons.
Meteorologists are pretty faces reading scripts telling you whether it's going to rain tomorrow.