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
It is a privilege to join the campaign to support Bradley Manning for his courage and integrity in serving his country by helping make the government accountable to its citizens, and to inform the world of what its people should know.
Right after 9-11, as far as I know, one newspaper in the United States had the integrity to investigate opinion in the Muslim world: the 'Wall Street Journal.'
There is a noticeable general difference between the sciences and mathematics on the one hand, and the humanities and social sciences on the other. It's a first approximation, but one that is real. In the former, the factors of integrity tend to dominate more over the factors of ideology. It's not that scientists are more honest people. It's just that nature is a harsh taskmaster. You can lie or distort the story of the French Revolution as long as you like, and nothing will happen. Propose a false theory in chemistry, and it'll be refuted tomorrow.
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.
Terrorists regard themselves as a vanguard. They're trying to mobilize others to their cause. I mean, every specialist on terrorism knows that.
My speculation is that the U.S. does not want to establish the principle that it has to defer to some higher authority before carrying out the use of violence.