re: #552 Gus 802

I only disagree with Noam Chomsky on the Palestine-Israel issue. Otherwise, he’s usually presents a very compelling and sometimes accurate description on others. He’s not anti-Semitic. His views on Palestine-Israel even though I don’t rightly agree doesn’t make him so. He’s Jewish and there are plenty of people in Israel that agree with him. Life isn’t always black and white. He’s certainly not a racist.

Yeah, but that “only” is a pretty big only. Incidentally, there’s an interesting debate on Israel between Chomsky and Alan Dershowitz on youtube.

I’ve had my first real contact with Chomsky’s ideas as a Cognitive Science undergrad. He is a god in the field, and not just in Psycholinguistics — his academic work is really extraordinary.

As to his political opinions: he can be a very good, albeit quite ruthless, critic of U.S. domestic and foreign policy, and there’s something to be said about his Propaganda Model. But he really is too harsh and rigid on some stuff. And not just Israel. For instance, he is still a staunch defender of a pretty radical left-libertarianism, which is a political philosophy that has arguably been tried and failed… in Israel (in some kibbutzim). And his political opinions colors his view of every political issue he writes about.