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
In much of the world the U.S. is regarded as a leading terrorist state.
There are many terrorist states in the world, but the United States is unusual in that it is officially committed to international terrorism.
Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.
The government of Israel doesn't like the kinds of things I say, which puts them into the same category as every other government in the world.
In the academic world, most of the work that is done is clerical. A lot of the work done by professors is routine.
The United States invaded Iraq to gain control of one of the major sources of the world's energy.
It makes sense to work towards a better world, but it doesn't make any sense to have illusions about what the real world is.
The U.S. has the most dysfunctional healthcare system in the industrial world, has about twice the per capita costs, and some of the worst outcomes. It's also the only privatized system.
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.'
So yes in theory there is a kind of a formal democracy and in many ways these were achievements and an improvement over the feudal system and more advanced than anything else in the world, but nothing that we ought to call democracy.
We can, for example, be fairly confident that either there will be a world without war or there won't be a world - at least, a world inhabited by creatures other than bacteria and beetles, with some scattering of others.
There's a very committed effort to convert the US into something resembling a Third World society, where a few people have enormous wealth and a lot of others have no security.
[According to the rigid dogma] we have to believe the United States would have so-called liberated Iraq even if its main products were lettuce and pickles and the main energy resource of the world were in central Africa.
The world is a very puzzling place. If you're not willing to be puzzled, you just become a replica of someone else's mind.