/lit/ - Literature

Deterring Democracy is a solid book. Ready it and, yes, decide for yourself.

You should think for yourself!

'You should think for yourself!'

>implying anyone comes to conclusions on the subject of politics without at the very least consulting the opinions of others, or having been previously influenced by others to even have a fucking so-called 'opinion'.

The only thing I've read my Chomsky is a quotation about how censorship works not by controlling what people say but by controlling what people talk about. I still think its relevant and quite insightful. I should probably read the entirety of one of his works before I go around dropping his name, though.

>>435509
Can we maybe avoid using the implying meme to make serious comments? Mostly, it's hard to take anything seriously when it's printed in green.

>>435514

...

I wish I was friends with Noam Chomsky. That would be so awesome. I'd probably have to tell him to cool it on the e-mails, though.

>>435462
Chomsky can't write history. /At war with Asia/ is shit, and involves basic academic dishonesty.

His left politics are trite and simplistic; and, he caters to bourgeois anarchists and yuppy liberals.

I have no opinion on his linguistics.

>>His left politics are trite and simplistic

I didn't know he wore HOPE t-shirts and loudly exhorted people to vote Democrat

Historically extremely important in linguistics, complete fucking batshit insane when it comes to anything else.

'Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.'

this to me is one of Chomsky's best chestnuts - to stress the danger of assuming that only dictatorships repress people, and accrue power for its own sake

>>435919
>>His left politics are trite and simplistic
>I didn't know he wore HOPE t-shirts and loudly exhorted people to vote Democrat
(polite sage)
Triteness and the US Democratic party may intersect as sets, but neither exhausts the other.

>>435931
I'd love to hear some specific criticisms of Chomsky. I am guessing you don't have any.

>>435944
He didn't understand Derrida. (That's all I got.)

>>435944
Chomsky treats the politics of work like a joke. He's fixated on state structures as if they're in the least significant at a point in time where the working class is incapable of asserting the most basic forms of power at work. This is what I mean by his trite politics. Chomsky has no positive theory of power other than a wishy washy support of councilist forms, and his work does not speak towards making workers powerful. He's effectively presenting a liberal critique of state power, much like the majority of other "New Left" washouts, and as such he's directly blocking real discussions of workers self-activity.

He's academically dishonest for his gross and sustained abuse of appropriate methodology in books like /At war with Asia/. This tars the theses he advances with the blackness of his own methodological failures, and generally discredits far more competent left intellectuals through guilt by association.

>>435949
harsh... but funny in its precision

>>435509

In what content did he say:

You need to think for yourself instead of allowing the masses to think for you!'

Haven't seen or heard any of his work so fare, but are looking into it- as we speak

>>435951

Uh... I... You win, I simply can't understand your intent, sorry.

>>435956

I think they >>435951 were meant to say "in which context..."

>>435956 < Fuck you

His linguistic work is groundbreaking, hugely influential and he's basically the father of the subject. His political work is interesting, but idealistic and less important.

>>435956

Well the first thing that came to mind when i read that sentence, had nothing to do with politics.

>>435959

Maan i didn't even see that, before now..

So much fail.. I apologize deeply, and post' tit

The last part were for >>435956 ofc

>>435959

>"fare", "but are trying"

Seriously? Thanks for making his intent oh-so-clear on the word 'context', but even if that word_was_spelled correctly, and even if the appropriate words had been used correctly, I still couldn't have possibly made out his intent without knowing who "he" is.

Not everyone is some asshole who honestly cares about the spelling of every single word or simple grammar mistakes (I'm certainly not one). The intent of the post is fundamentally flawed.

>>435974

Who i am? Bitch im anon

Seriously.. Anon whit caps on the a, or normal... Im in doubt.

>>435978

Cool story, bro.

>>435974

Ohh. And to your critique. A smart looking guy - human rights in the background, and the frist few sections of wiki read, gives me plenty of knowledge - combined with the things, that people have been saying on this subject - TO KNOW that it couldn't be that way he chose to describe what >>435509 sayed...

If in any case thats the case, then it's a middle clase way to describe it, and he fails in the history book as a great scoller(...)

>>435960 His linguistic work is groundbreaking, hugely influential and he's basically the father of the subject.

His linguistic work was ground breaking, but it's slowly being overwritten in important ways by current neurological research.

Over the last few decades while he's been playing at being a leftist radical, Chomsky hasn't done much work with his own theories. His various acolytes have turned his theories into almost a baroque structure forcing a "pruning" of sorts and a return to first principles, all of which has been done with little or no input from Chomsky himself.

>>435989

This was painful to read... (And someone honestly said I was trying misunderstand his intent?!)

>>435996

Bitch be trolling

>>435960

>Chomsky
>Father of linguistics

lol no. Wittgenstein, motherfucker.

Noam Chomsky's work is pretty good. But I don't agree with everything he writes about, and his support for anarchism, I dunno about that, I guess he sees something different about it. I personally don't think that it would work, but yeah.

Also, his views on US foreign policy are spot-on.

>>435949
That's all well and good, but he's also one of the few people who's completely honest about Latin American politics.

He's the most boring inexpressive public speaker ever.

I know he's not meant to be, I just find it hard to listen to him for so long because I'm a fucking moron with a short attention span.

>>436698
Despite searching, I'm not seeing the necessary attacks on the:
.EZLN for failing to generalise their struggle
.FMNL for having been in part fucked up bourgeois adventurists
.Allende for not arming the workers

Nor taking the next step and attacking the organised Latin American working class for their collective habit of supporting populist military figures in state coups (And Cuba's workers, I am looking at you: in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China and Vietnam workers have repeatedly risen up to replace a system of bosses with their own system.)

So no, I don't really think Chomsky says anything particularly interesting about Latin American politics, and if I want to have that conversation I'd rather have it with an FMNL activist who was there.

(polite sage)