Khalil: "It's not every day that a non-Googler gets to sit in a room full of people who work at Google, and are software engineers, and are advertising experts, and are you know market experts in different fields. Do you have anything that you'd like to ask us?"
As a context just before that NC was explaining how advertising leads to distortion in rational decision making which is the basis for all of the current economic free market system.
(Starts at 2:35, "and then a third thing happened..."; personally, I would suggest ignoring the various TV clips spliced in as that to me seems like the projections of the politics of the editor of the video and not necessarily the specific idea Chomsky himself intends to convey.)
To me this illustrates how those who actually "control" things in the US and the world have split those who should be allies into two camps. The perfect weapon in this strategy is the "proper" and well-intended anti-racist propaganda Westerners have been subject to for decades - combined with the dulling of the average Western mind to the point many are near incapable of critical thinking, the result is that perfectly common sense public discussions on incredibly important matters such as international trade and immigration can largely be stopped in their tracks by cries of "racism!"...and even better, the ones who are being most harmed, the younger generations of the (former) middle class, are the very ones who are stopping the dialogue that affects their future!
Human nature is really amazing if you step back and observe it critically.
It's a perfect example of the modern far-left and far-right convergence. Both have anti-globalist agenda, contempt for human rights and only slight disagreement over who exactly has to be eliminated for peoples' better life. Only now they were able to peacefully face off over the Internet and like each other's tweets.
> Chomsky explains his decision to focus on criticizing the U.S. over other countries as being because, during his lifetime, the country has militarily and economically dominated the world, and because its liberal democratic electoral system allows for the citizenry to exert an influence on government policy.
chomsky is incredibly smart and i love listening to what he has to say and agree with most of it, but this focus on criticizing US is definitely not one of them. i get the argument, but he's either blind to or doesn't care that his well intended criticism is more effective as a political tool in hands of enemies of the liberal democratic system which he supposedly wants to succeed.
not saying that US must not be criticized, it just feels very disproportionate compared to the amount of injustice and atrocities in other parts of the world. hell, on a majority of this planet's surface chomsky would have been disappeared long time ago for the kind of criticizm he directs at US - is that not a reason to begin your every speech with "keep in mind, matters are very much worse pretty much everywhere else but...".
20:00 has an interesting snippet where Chomsky relates the breakdown of working class cultural institutions and education then takes a stab at Google (one gets the sense the real audience response was edited heavily in post production).
"And they may not have gone to school. They certainly didn't go to Oxford, but the working class, the rising working class, had its own institutions of education and culture, which was significant. A lot of that has been destroyed in all kinds of ways. Google doesn't help."
Maybe there's some extra context in the minutes prior that gives this a different meaning but it sounds to me like he's saying that Google changed the way the middle class accesses information, which has destroyed the old ways. I did go back 20 or so seconds and he mentions that they read books, which I think backs this up somewhat (they used to go to libraries, now they don't need libraries, they have Google).
And the laughter doesn't sound edited to me, though there's clearly a cut there.
The world will lose one of the great modern-day thinkers when Chomsky is no longer with us. It's hard to fathom how he remains such a clear thinker at his age.
His contribution to linguistics is definitely great and no one can take that from him. But to call him a great modern-day thinker is a bit of a stretch.
Hey, if you haven't read any of his books, I would recommend it some time. He has a mind like a steel trap. His books are meticulously researched, and he has a sad dry humor.
But what you also get is hope. I've always felt that the reason he does what he does, is because we can point to openness, and draw a clear line between today and the past. Not recognizing what we do in the world leads to barbarism. The world has been rejecting barabarism consistently for centuries. Even a century ago, in america, the discrimination was horrendous. It is better because democracy allows us to question the implementation of government. And he asks the big questions.
Faurisson was sentenced to jail for "denying the Holocaust" as you put it. Chomsky believed Faurisson had the right of free speech "even if Faurisson were to be a rabid anti-Semite and fanatic pro-Nazi" as Chomsky's statement said. Chomsky said to use his statement as wished, and it was put as the preface of a Faurisson book.
When people ask him about this Chomsky says he has signed hundreds of free speech petitions and free speech should not be removed just because he disagrees with the person, citing Thomas Jefferson. Some people believe in free speech, some think people with certain critical views of Nazi era nationality policy towards Jews should be jailed. In the USA, the free speech view tends to win, and this is where Chomsky is from.
Hezbollah has 12 MPs in the Lebanese parliament. It represents the interests of a section of Shia in Lebanon, many of whom were driven from their homes in Palestine in 1948 by Jewish settlers, and are now barred from returning home (whereas a Jew from anywhere in the world is allowed to settle in the West Bank).
The PFLP is "terrorist", Hamas is "terrorist", Hezbollah is "terrorist", the PLO is "terrorist", the DFLP is "terrorist" - anyone who fights back against Zionist (or sometimes American) aggression is labeled a "terrorist".
Hezbollah was formed because Israel invaded Lebanon and began killing Shia there (or letting their helpers do so in Sabra and Shatila). Hezbollah arose to defend the Shia from this foreign invasion.
The section on Hezbollah in this comment contains a ton of factual errors.
>Hezbollah has 12 MPs in the Lebanese parliament. It represents the interests of a section of
Shia in Lebanon,
So far so good
>many of whom were driven from their homes in Palestine in 1948 by Jewish settlers, and are now barred from returning home (whereas a Jew from anywhere in the world is allowed to settle in the West Bank).
Nope, you're confusing Palestinians and Shia Lebanese. Not a single Shia was driven from their home by the creation of Israel in 1948. Hezbollah does not represent Palestinians in Lebanon (who were driven out in 1948) because they are not citizens of Lebanon, despite being born there at this point.
>The PFLP is "terrorist", Hamas is "terrorist", Hezbollah is "terrorist", the PLO is "terrorist", the DFLP is "terrorist" - anyone who fights back against Zionist (or sometimes American) aggression is labeled a "terrorist".
Right, "terrorist" is a pretty relative term.
Organizations calling for genocide of the Jewish people, descendants of those who tried, or allies of such.
That's a mouthful but much more fitting.
This is the type of example scenario where I think 'AI' could come in handy - or really posting bots - as to insert at minimum a link to when certain phrases or statements are detected on public or semi-public forums and the like. A lot of misinformation can quickly get shared, generally one side or the other using as propaganda.
> The scandal largely dealt with the inclusion of an essay by American linguist Noam Chomsky, entitled "Some Elementary Comments on the Rights of Freedom of Expression", as an introduction to Faurisson's book, without Chomsky's knowledge or approval.
Since we are talking about it, here[0] is Chomsky's writing in question.
I'll just leave the paragraph from wikipedia here:
>Chomsky granted permission for the essay to be used for any purpose. Serge Thion and Pierre Guillaume then used it as a preface when publishing a book by Faurisson, without Chomsky's knowledge.[9] Later Chomsky requested that the essay not be used in this manner, since he believed the French intellectual community was so incapable of understanding freedom of speech that it would only confuse them further, but his request came too late for the book to be changed.[9] Chomsky subsequently said that asking for the preface to be removed is his one regret in the matter.[9]
Because it is not up to the State to legislate what constitute the historical truth.
Moreover, this whole mess gave Robert Faurisson airtime on national TV, and made him look like a martyr. This is the last thing you want from such person. Let holocaust deniers and KKK member distribute pamphlet at intersection or self publish their book, that going to be the biggest audience they'll ever have. By going after them, you encourage them in their quest and prove their conspiracy theory right.
Same goes with provocateur ala Milo whose only success is based on thin skinned SJW.
Another problem is his position/denial of the Cambodian genocide by Khmer Rouge.
What does Chomsky nowadays say on this matter? Does he acknowledge that his judgement was wrong? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial
Nowadays Chomsky points out something you can read in the December 23rd, 1985 edition of the New York Times - that six years after the hue and cry all over the US about "Cambodian genocide", the US began sending millions to Cambodia in order to arm Pol Pot.
Of course at this time the US was using its power at the UN to keep the Cambodian UN seat in the hands of the political coalition that the Cambodian communists belonged to.
He also points out the mass murder the US air force carried out in Cambodia, bombing rural peasant villages. That the US media ignored a genocide in East Timor that was happening at the time of the communists taking power in Cambodia.
Insofar as "denial of the Cambodian genocide" by Chomsky - could you give an example of a statement he made about Cambodia which was not true? If you are unable to do that, it is just mud-throwing - in some other thread he's said to be denying Nazi genocide in Europe because he was opposed to the jailing of a French professor accused of being a holocaust denier.
> could you give an example of a statement he made about Cambodia which was not true? If you are unable to do that, it is just mud-throwing
Mud-throwing? I am just siting a wikipedia article, please care to follow the link. Even Chomsky sort of acknowledged that he was wrong on the subject, but you still can't do that.
"Cambodia scholar Bruce Sharp criticized Chomsky and Herman's Nation article, as well as their subsequent work After the Cataclysm (1979), saying that while Chomsky and Herman added disclaimers about knowing the truth of the matter, and about the nature of the regimes in Indochina, they nevertheless expressed a set of views by their comments and their use of various sources. For instance, Chomsky portrayed Porter and Hildebrand's book as "a carefully documented study of the destructive American impact on Cambodia and the success of the Cambodian revolutionaries in overcoming it, giving a very favorable picture of their programs and policies, based on a wide range of sources." Sharp, however, found that 33 out of 50 citations in one chapter of Porter and Hildebrand's book derived from the Khmer Rouge government and six from China, the Khmer Rouge's principal supporter.[8]
Veteran Cambodia correspondent Nate Thayer said of Chomsky and Herman's Nation article that they "denied the credibility of information leaking out of Cambodia of a bloodbath underway and viciously attacked the authors of reportage suggesting many were suffering under the Khmer Rouge."[18]
Journalist Andrew Anthony in the London Observer, said later that the Porter and Hildebrand's book "cravenly rehashed the Khmer Rouge's most outlandish lies to produce a picture of a kind of radical bucolic idyll."[19] Chomsky, he said, questioned "refugee testimony" believing that "their stories were exaggerations or fabrications, designed for a western media involved in a 'vast and unprecedented propaganda campaign' against the Khmer Rouge government, 'including systematic distortion of the truth.'"
Beachler cited reports that Chomsky's attempts to counter charges of Khmer Rouge atrocities also consisted of writing letters to editors and publications. He said: "Examining materials in the Documentation Center of Cambodia archives, American commentator Peter Maguire found that Chomsky wrote to publishers such as Robert Silver of the New York Review of Books to urge discounting atrocity stories. Maguire reports that some of these letters were as long as twenty pages, and that they were even sharper in tone than Chomsky’s published words."[20] Journalist Fred Barnes also mentioned that Chomsky had written "a letter or two" to the New York Review of Books. Barnes discussed the Khmer Rouge with Chomsky and "the thrust of what he [Chomsky] said was that there was no evidence of mass murder" in Cambodia. Chomsky, according to Barnes, believed that "tales of holocaust in Cambodia were so much propaganda."[21]
Journalist Christopher Hitchens defended Chomsky and Herman. They "were engaged in the admittedly touchy business of distinguishing evidence from interpretations."[22] Chomsky and Herman have continued to argue that their analysis of the situation in Cambodia was reasonable based on the information available to them at the time, and a legitimate critique of the disparities in reporting atrocities committed by communist regimes relative to the atrocities committed by the U.S. and its allies. Nonetheless, in 1993, Chomsky acknowledged the massive scale of the Cambodian genocide in the documentary film Manufacturing Consent. He said, "I mean the great act of genocide in the modern period is Pol Pot, 1975 through 1978 - that atrocity - I think it would be hard to find any example of a comparable outrage and outpouring of fury."[8]
We do not pretend to know where the truth lies amidst these sharply conflicting assessments; rather, we again want to emphasize some crucial points. What filters through to the American public is a seriously distorted version of the evidence available, emphasizing alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities and downplaying or ignoring the crucial U.S. role, direct and indirect, in the torment that Cambodia has suffered
If you were trying to assess claims of an extraordinary and unprecedented mechanised genocide by Nazi Germany in 1943 or early 1944, when it wasn't obvious what was actually going on, and when all people had to go on were reports from a handful of escapees and refugees, then yes, being careful with the evidence would be the appropriate response to the Holocaust claims available at the time, just as being careful with Cambodian refugee reports would have been appropriate in 1977 or 1978.
Quite contrary, it was fairly well reported. The reason Chomsky grudgingly accepted the fact of genocide was the Third Indochina War, when coincidentally in 1978 the communist Vietnam moved in to displace Pol Pot. Were it not Vietnamese but say Americans, he'd deny the genocide to the day.
Right now he denies that chemical attacks by Assad govt have happened in Syria, so the old man is still in the same denial business - OPCW reports be damned.
Chomsky is by no means a saint, but in the wikipedia article you cited, I could not locate any direct "denial" of genocide done by Khmer Rouge. He seems to have questioned the credibility of certain accounts, which seems a necessary role of any reasonable intellect. It was 1970s, so information from the other side of the globe was harder to confirm. To me, it seems quite understandable for someone to raise questions around any information that outrageously deviates from the norm, which is the case for the activity done by Khmer Rouge.
>Chomsky and Herman have continued to argue that their analysis of the situation in Cambodia was reasonable based on the information available to them at the time, and a legitimate critique of the disparities in reporting atrocities committed by communist regimes relative to the atrocities committed by the U.S. and its allies. Nonetheless, in 1993, Chomsky acknowledged the massive scale of the Cambodian genocide in the documentary film Manufacturing Consent. He said, "I mean the great act of genocide in the modern period is Pol Pot, 1975 through 1978 - that atrocity - I think it would be hard to find any example of a comparable outrage and outpouring of fury."[8]
Khalil: "It's not every day that a non-Googler gets to sit in a room full of people who work at Google, and are software engineers, and are advertising experts, and are you know market experts in different fields. Do you have anything that you'd like to ask us?"
Chomsky: "Why not do some of the serious things?"
:)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2C-zWrhFqpM&t=59m21s