I consider Understanding Power an essential read, but really soured on Chomsky as a person when he defended his ~~going to Epstein's island~~ meetings with Epstein. I still think people should read him but not glorify him.
Edit: there is no evidence, as far as I'm aware, Chomsky went to Epstein's Island. I misremembered.
defended his going to Epstein's island.
Wait a second, are you just going to drop that without any further elaboration or source?
As far as I was aware, he knew him and he met with him a couple of times. His reaction to getting asked about it wasn't that great, but him "going to Epstein island" is a bit on another level, no?
No actually you are totally right and I've made a big mistake. I thought I remembered him going to the island, but he just met with him a couple times. His reaction was pretty poor, but I don't think there's evidence he went to his island. I'll edit my comment. Thanks for pointing that out.
Chomsky is frustrating. Some of his ideas are so good that not only did they break into popular culture, the right adopted them (fake news). But he also had some galaxy level bad takes.
My frustration with him began when I watched a Youtube video called "Chomsky eviscerates post-modernism" or something like that. I expected him to defend structuralism or Marxism, but instead it was just a bunch of fallacy laden personal attacks and nonsense of the kind you would expect of Ben Shapiro.
Funny enough, that was my first major negative encounter with Chomsky as well. "I understand many complex things but I can't understand postmodernism; therefore, postmodernism is fake" level thinking.
Citations needed.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1738&context=gsp
This does not cover his current apologia for Russia's genocide in Ukraine.
Always someone else’s wrong doing, in the land of brave, isn’t it ? Never america, defenders of freedom?
Yet here you are, Making political memes with no more than a child’s knowledge of the world.
I’ll leave you to your shallow water.
Seeing anybody praise Chomsky online immediately puts me into a defensive anti-Tankie posture.
Same. It's sad, considering that he does have legitimate contributions - if sometimes overstated in importance or novelty - to political theory.
Here we are in 2025, with Americans finally getting a glimpse of the what the worlds has long known, and this is your best shot ?
A dig at a mute, bed bound 96 year who hasn’t spoke for a year?
Way to go tough guy .
A dig at a mute, bed bound 96 year who hasn’t spoke for a year?
Yep, just trying to get under ol' Chomsky's skin. I'm sure he's a Fediverse regular. Definitely not because people still use him to run cover for ongoing genocides, like in Ukraine.
We can have the oil back once the yankees go home and Ukraine drop NATO.
Russia will drop hostilities like a stone to get that flowing again and we can go back to how things were.
The USA interference in the region over the last 10 year maybe 20, cannot be overstated in terms of creating instability .
Oh, you're one of those.
How juvenile.
It's so funny I mostly know Chomsky through computer science as his (computer science - unrelated) research lead to major breakthroughs in it.
Has he said anything about Trump allying with Putin yet? Will Moscow finally be in his bad books for getting into bed with Mickey Mouse, or has the US seen the light and joined the revolution, with the epicentre of capitalist-imperialist evil moving to Brussels or somewhere?
My bet is on the latter, unfortunately, especially considering his opinions on the PRC.
That being said, I'd be glad to see him take the opposite tack.
Like any word, use it too often for political efficacy and you will inevitably get arguments. It's all too stupid. It takes the act of killing one person for any reason and conflates it into a competition as to who has suffered the most. Words are unimportant. Actions speak.
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