Unsurprisingly, non-Americans take exception to American exceptionalism.<p>America is literally pulling a, "We're better than you so we can violate any of your laws - including <i>our own</i> - and then murder, torture & kidnap. We are sovereign over the entire world."<p>Few non-Americans think that's a swell idea, so it will only last as long as American power lasts.<p>If you agree with Chomsky or not or if you think American power will last or not, you at least have to be able to concede that <i>everybody else</i> in the world has a valid gripe about the benevolent bully who really likes his big stick. Chomsky is just an American who noticed that...
I've been a big fan of Noam Chomsky for years. I had to implement a recursive descent parser for a project recently and stumbled onto this:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy</a><p>He laid out the classes of formal grammars clear back in 1956. Every time you use a regular expression, compile code or run a script, you're applying concepts that he helped pioneer. I almost couldn't believe it.<p>I have a new appreciation for his work, and a better understanding of why his logical approach to ethics/civics/philosophy always resonated with me.
Chomsky is one of the greatest intellectuals of our time. The man has nothing to lose and nothing to gain by voicing his thoughts. Too bad he is getting up there in age but hopefully we will enjoy his presence for many more years.
Link to associated video:<p><a href="http://mondoweiss.net/2013/07/chomsky-says-snowden-should-be-honored-for-telling-americans-what-the-government-was-doing.html" rel="nofollow">http://mondoweiss.net/2013/07/chomsky-says-snowden-should-be...</a><p>The quoted segment starts at 1:21:25
(This has nothing to do with Snowden but Chomsky's main point.)<p>One thing I found troubling about all this is you can't expect the victims in other countries to decouple the intentions of the American gov't from American citizens.<p>Except (even more troubling) is that citizens seem to support drone warfare (<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/10/most-americans-approve-of-foreign-drone-strikes/" rel="nofollow">http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/10/m...</a>).
I like the attention Chomsky brings to the NSA surveillance problem, but I think he does Snowden a disservice by using him in any kind of comparison to the true terrorists he lists. In attempting to point out the unevenness of America's extradition requests, he inadvertently puts him in the same "moral high ground" as the terrorists, which doesn't help.
What's with the "nothing to hide" meme? Has there been any research on it? Is it a product of meritrocratic naïveté, Facebook signalling, consumerism, media or another combination? It seems like a great way to have a compliant, feeble populace dependent on others for protection.
Chomsky takes the anti-American, or anti-government side of any and all debates and writes whiny essays full of sarcastic jabs that preach to a choir of the faithful. He makes no attempt to consider the side of government(or whoever he as casting as the villain at the moment of his self righteous spiel). It's as much of a tragedy to take him seriously as it is to take radical right think tank garbage seriously.
Stop posting Chomsky stuff to HN. He is not an intellectual. He either cannot, or refuses to see both sides of the coin--either in his political writings or academic writings (e.g. there profound and valid empirical cracks in his universal grammar model that he's failed to acknowledge).<p>Down with Chomsky. Down vote me, I don't really care. I'd surely trade all my HN Karma for a reduction in Chomsky related posts to HN. It will make HN a better community.