I figured-out tonight why I don't like Noam Chomsky: He's full of shit
Offline ...Perhaps this wasn't always the case, but his recent ('recent' stretching back a couple of decades now) claims are just... repellent to me. I've been very careful to read his work without simply dismissing what amounts to his very offensive rhetoric out of hand, examining the veracity of what was being said from a logical standpoint (I'm not an academic, so I'm hardly in a real position to check the accuracy of his facts) even if I don't happen to like the words on the paper.
Frankly, I don't understand how it is he's recognized as a leading intellectual.
Some of his facts are certainly wrong (...The IDF is not somehow 'American owned'. The Israelis developed their own tanks, and purchase weaponry and aircraft from a number of sources, including the United States. Saying that an Apache Gunship firing on Hessbollah (sp?) terrorists is an act of American aggression because the helicopter was made in America is like saying that anything I write has American authorship because my word processor was developed in America), and his grand premise of America being an imperial empire is based on (of all things) a No True Scotsman fallacy (America doesn't practice TRUE Democracy!).
His stance on capitalism is strange (...I'm, again, not an academic; whether of not political science actually confirms what he claims I don't know) and rather obnoxious. Apparently the social hierarchy is bad, and unions are golden. But how the Hell does one get away from a hierarchy? It's impossible, realistically. The notion that unions are any less corruptable than the businesses they aim to shackle is absurd (See: Britain).
Perhaps this is all just stemming from the fact I'm a layman, and some of his topics are over my head (...though I'm a little dubious).
Thoughts?
"Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full."
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
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yeah, deludedgod, but aren't they kind of the same thing? i mean, regardless of whether or not the 'scientific community' wakes up every morning and says "time for another big day of suppressing Intelligent Design", what science does every day is suppress Intelligent Design a little more. regardless of the intent, it is the result.
and so, because science is destroying what the IDers hold dear, it is the enemy and is evil to them.
anyway. the problem with conspiracy theories is that they're ridiculously exaggerated to the point that they can't possibly be true. i for one believe that there are media conspiracies, not one huge one, but many many little ones, on a case by case basis, and of course not every member of the media is directly involved (that's why they're called pawns), and often times the media is more of a tool of conspiracy, by sending out a sensational press release to deprioritize a story one might not want so much attention paid to, yada yada yada.
same with 9/11. computer graphics and demolitions? hired terrorists? empty planes and such? it's all way too fallible to work. conspiracies work best when a small group gets together to coordinate the actions of their pawns. my take on 9/11 has always been that it was allowed to happen. how many people does it take to allow something like that to happen? not many. all it would have taken was for a dozen or so high-ranking folks to sit in a closed room and simply agree to do nothing that morning, and there you go. instant, justifiable military access to the entire middle east.
anyways, yeah. i think i made a point there....sort of...
Fear is the mindkiller.
it makes me wonder about your critique,it reminds me of the way that religious people attack the "Atheist messenger" because they don't want to hear the Truth.And my inability to construct a sentence to your likin,is an error on my part (sorry about that).Also I don't travel , due to a physical disability,but that doesn't have an effect on common sense.And my critique about Israel concerning the treatment of Arabs,has nothing to do with the Jewish civilians,I think that most Jewish people are some of the "kindness,caring and compassionate" people in the human family tree. but I don't understand how the Jewish government can treat another group of people so disdainfully,especially after being victims themselves.I agree with Jimmy Carter also with his book~ Palestine:Peace not Apartheid.and also Mordechai Vanunu~en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordechai_Vanunu prisoner of conscience in Israel.
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The caring Dr Fear and Ken G, make make xlint points .... thanks ... and yank my chain anytime !
I think we are using very different meanings of the word suppress. In the context you are referring to, "suppress" means the wide acknowledgment that ID is complete nonsense and is therefore ignored. This isn't suppression, this is just normal academic backbiting. However, when they, the ID lobby, use the term "suppress", they mean that the evil scientific community is involved in some sort of massive conspiracy including hiding evidence for ID and so forth. Of course, most of these people wouldn't be able to tell a polynucleotide from a Golgi apparatus and so their opinions don't really carry any weight.
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
Intelligent design is not being supressed. It is being laughed at and ridiculed. Imagine if a bunch of people starting insisting that chemisty and physics are full of shit and that they have theory of an alternative theory of matter that sounds exactly like Aristotle's four element theory except they name the four elements "Jesus", "The Father", "The Holy Ghost", and "The Virgin Mary". Wait, did I just start the next crock of shit...
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Remember how you figured out there is no Santa? Well, their god is just like Santa. They just haven’t figured out he’s not real yet.
oh, believe me, i realize that, but either way, it's being suppressed, and that, to quote our dear friend Martha Stewart, is a good thing.....
Fear is the mindkiller.
You said nothing about church attendance. You wrote:
"TomJ wrote that we Atheist would be outlawed by the majority .,and we would have to move to Canada.~WRONG~ alot of the Atheist countries also have a Direct Democracy just look at the Scandinavian countries that were at one time Christian countries.But through a participatory democratic process,churches are seen as "The Old Way To Control People",so they were more or less Abandoned."
Countries with official state churches have "abandoned" them? And they did this through Direct Democracy (a term you do not appear to understand)?
One hardly needs the ADL to level that charge. Also, the issue is not that Chomsky is a "Leftist," but the quality of his scholarship and historical analysis. One can be an honest and perceptive Leftist, Rightist or whatever.
Where does this 30,000 pages figure come from?
Great horny toads... you summon the likes of a left-wing, Israel-bashing 'blog, Pappe and Finkelstein to defend Chomsky? Are you kidding me? Hey, I hear Michael Savage has pretty good things to say about Ann Coulter.
Unbelievable.
Boards don't hit back. (Bruce Lee)
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