I'm relatively new here...

He's decent as far as famous leftist figures go, has some good analysis of cultural hegemony and imperialism. But as far as his theory goes, it's lacking. He's been obsolete in the field of language since the 1970s and I find his once-contemporary Michel Foucault to be a more interesting leftist theorist. There's also the fact that he represents the worst sentiments of Anglo-American academic philosophy.

youtube.com/watch?v=3wfNl2L0Gf8

All that being said, I'd sooner fight along his side than any of the inane liberals in American academia and the media.

Ive watched the video before. I disdain Foucault siting the video as evidence as to why you think he is wrong about human nature does not help me. Not to mention the fact we dont even know what human nature is, if it even exists and that anyone who says they know is probably full of shit.

Chomsky claims that there is a human nature and that we already understand it.
That's why he's wrong.

I'm not a big fan of Foucault either, especially post-structuralism.

You are shit tbh fam
Read Zizek

It's up to advocates of a 'human nature' to provide reasoning for their claim of it existing, let alone any features that we might ascribe to it. Foucault outright says that the idea of human nature is a recent, Renaissance-Enlightenment invention that developed alongside the rise of capitalism and the industrialization. We don't see any conceptions of it before that period in feudal or slave societies. It's a lot easier to justify capitalism when ideologists can just say that greed is a part of 'human nature' and that there's nothing we can do to change it.

I personally trust a groundbreaking psycholinguist to understand humans more than a bald French hipster.

I think Chomsky blames the current "idPol" and weakness of the left to post-structuralists like Foucault. There's a video, somewhere on yt, in which he says that the left intellectualism of now is useless in abolishing capitalism. I somewhat agree - but don't know enough.

Thank you, that's better.

I'd say that's an over-exaggeration from stereotype. All fields are stereotyped in having to do with leftist thought, it's always been that way since the cold war. There just happen to be less philosophers questioning the status quo currently, so it's easier to point at people making claims at the time to compare them. I don't know if that isn't biased.

I don't think disregarding everything Foucault said is exactly the way to go about this, it does feel somewhat biased. Much of what he said is valuable.

Chomsky is a shit who panders to contemporary wannabe hippies.
There was somebody (I forget who) who made the joke that there's the 6 degrees of Noam Chomsky, which is that every problem in the world can be traced back to being caused primarily by US foreign policy.

In a world dominated by United States foreign policy, I don't think that's too far off.

which is not wrong

That's not to far off to be honest

Foucault is my dick with glasses.

Prove it

his politics are shit. He supported various fringe "anti-imperialists" out of his weird fetish for anti-imperialism, such as Pol Pot and Slobodan Milosevic. He also said people should vote for Hillary.

Funny how, in spite of his widespread appearance all over the media, he still can't seem to recognize he's within that spectrum. Or just as likely by now he's too far up his own ass to care. Like most anarchists his socialist beliefs are largely a formality. That's not to say he doesn't have them, but they take a backseat to other "progressive" issues. Issues he really never presents any real solutions for. Chomsky is just another liberal pawn of the plutocracy. He can cry about US foreign policy all day but they media isn't going to shun him so long as his politics remain no more radical than begging people to vote democrat.

That's what leftypol thinks.

People still believe this?

Saying he supported Pol Pot is disingenuous, but you're right he has supported various groups in the name of "anti-imperialism" and pushes support for the democrats as the lesser evil. All around his politics are retarded.

...

I've always thought to myself that the best way to get socialism more to the public eye is to make sure that all leftists are shunned by the media. That will surely help.

kek

He did though.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chomsky_and_Herman

yeeee he got his ass handed by Foucault

If it weren't for Chomsky, I'd never had revised my history from high school, which was literally: "gommunism's bad because animal farm"

TRUUUUUUUUUU

You have to realize that none of this amounts to an endorsement which is what is suggested in the phrase "he supported Pol Pot".

Right. It's kind of silly that the "radical" personality mentioned instead of Chomsky is Zizek. Someone who manages to have even more of a media presence and gets published more often. So Chomsky isn't shunned because he's the equivalent of "begging people to vote democrat"; but Zizek isn't shunned because he's a true radical? I'll pretend like this makes sense.

He was tentatively supportive because no one really knew what was going on there.

Later it turned out that the Western powers basically supported him because he "wasn't as bad", so I think Chomsky gets a pass here.

Yes, Chomsky is very much in the bullshit Anglo-American analytic empiricism camp. But give the man some credit.

He was one of the very few american intellectuals who not only did not collaborate with the US Government but actively opposed its agenda in the period after the second world war. His books are still some of the best sources on what was being done in Vietnam. The gulf of tonkin, the bombing of the rice paddies, the phoenix program, the systematic destruction of south Vietnamese villages, the fradulent elections. US imperialism is very real, and continues to be the source of death, mayhem, genocide and slavery across the world. Focault is a brilliant and educated guy but you notice he didn't have a lot to say about what the French did in Algeria.

Are you sure that the feudalists and those who supported the monarchy in France didn't appeal to this argument of "human nature" in the face of the left-wing?

We can go back further. I'm pretty sure it was Socrates who said that humans naturally prefer good to evil and that no one willingly does evil.

Pretty sure Aquinas and Augustine argued that it was human nature to pursue happiness.

I honestly can't tell if Yui if accurately stating Foucault's views or if he's talking out of his ass again.

Then what is Yui talking about?

Reading the guys that you're talking about like Burke, I'm not getting that vibe. Conservatives like him referred more to Hobbesian arguments than humanist ones, where the problem wasn't so much with human nature rather than the scarcity of resources and the conflict of differing interests being resolved under the state.

Plato's argument for morality is more about a desire for truth than a preference to do good. For him, good just happens to be the most efficient way to access the truth of civil society. Never read Aquinas or Augustine though, so I couldn't tell ya about them.

I'm stating his views to the best extent that I understand them. One of his earlier works, The Order of Things, is basically him trying to understand the entire origins of modernity, and how concepts like 'human nature' came to be. After all, Foucault lived in an era where humanists enjoyed enormous popularity both in the philosophic realm and the public eye, so this would be an immediate subject to analyze.

Stop pretending to be me, goddammit. Quit trying to ruin our budding asexual friendship, you retarded faggot.

Chomsky the political commentator is good. He's probably everyone's 101 in leftist critique; namely, criticizing imperialism and the media.

Recommended collections: Manufacturing Consent, Media Control, Anarchism, Profit Over People

Just read Chomsky and decide for yourself.

Let me debunk some of this shit:

Because he didn't know what was actually going on in Cambodia at the time. he admitted he was wrong later.

Debatable, and this was decades ago anyway. And it only concerns the "human nature" debate which is kind of pointless to be honest.

He hates Hillary and Dems. You're an idiot if you don't get this. He said that in extreme cases, in specific scenarios, that it could theoretically be beneficial for some people to vote Dem (for a given scenario).

This, pretty much. Chomsky opposes insurrection/revolution, and I'm pretty sure he's anti-gun. He might like to talk about socialism and anarchism, but, in practice, he's little more than a socialdemocrat.

I watched that debate. Iirc he basically said that it's probable that humans have a nature and that we could observe it and deduce conclusions about it. I don't remeber him saying anything in particular about what human nature was.

He wasn't even wrong about the death figures being fictitious.

He's basically an overrated hack who's jealous of Zizek.

He proves you can be both a rationalist and a leftist.

Yep. His longstanding success before Zizek even published his first book, or ran as president as a liberal, or started making awful shit jokes are clearly signs that he was jealous.

It's the other way around