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Comment by cess11 | Hacker News Reader

What do you mean by "edgy opinions"? His takedown of Skinner, or perhaps that he for a while refused to pay taxes as a protest against war?

I'm not sure of the timeline but I'd guess he got to start the linguistics department at MIT because he was already The Linguist in english and computational/mathematical linguistics methodology. That position alone makes it reasonable to bring him to the BBC to talk about language.

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> What do you mean by "edgy opinions"?

His take on the Khmer Rouge back in the day was rather edgy (and ultimately spectacularly wrong).

chomsky is invented not just for linguistic. Simply because linguistic doesn't interest the wider audience that much. That seems pretty trivial.

Chomsky published his political analyses in parallel with and as early as his career as the most influential and important general linguist of the 20th Century, but they caught on much later than his work in linguistics. He was already a famous syntactician when he got on people's radar for his political views, and he was frequently interviewed as a linguist for his views on how general language facilities are built into our brain long before he was interviewed on politics.

Yes, i don't think that's a contradiction to what i said. i'm well aware chomsky's initial fame is due to its academic achievements.

Chomsky has always taken the anti-American side on any conflict America has been involved in. That is why he's "edgy". He's an American living in America always blaming America for everything.

Isn't that a popular, trendy way to think/act now in the US?

No.

if you think that Chomsky's opinions are the popular/trendy opinions of the US as a whole then might I suggest you do a bit more research.

US pessimism might be on the rise -- but almost never about foreign policy. Almost always about tax-rates/individual liberties/opportunities/children . things that affect people here and now, not the people from distant lands with ways unlike our own.

Maybe we're discussing different things, but endless Americans talk about failed foreign policy, how this and that was a mistake, how even if the US gets attacked in some way, it's somehow always the US's fault.

I mean, its because for the last 80 years America has been the belligerent aggressive party in every conflict. Are you going to bat for Iraq? Vietnam? Korea?

>>last 80 years

Good job in picking your sample size.

Think about this for a second, when was Noam Chomsky born, and and what age can you start having substantiated opinions?

Noam Chomsky is 96 years old, so 80 years ago he was 16. I don't think choosing a time span which is his adult life is unreasonable.

yeah I purposely picked a sample size to include the modern order established after ww2 because its largely so different than what came before it and includes basically all of chomsky's lifespan.

I'm not sure you can put 9/11 in that category, even if you do choose that time period.

In every conflict ? Or just in a lot of them

Korea?!

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