Oh I heard about this Chomsky guy on Veeky Forums

he's smart and has a lot of knowledge, but got fooled somewhere along the way and i wouldn't even necessarily call him a troll - more like he's just a misguided contrarian. but since he holds views many others WANT to hold, and because of his intelligence (he's a particularly good debater), he has many fans. i haven't seen the movie, but i'll say that he's getting old now, so the things that were impressive about him are fading quickly and his contrarianism is more glaring.

I heard he battled Zizek once. Would be interesting to watch.

>used to love Chomsky
>the realised hoiw disingenuous he is when he comes to quotes
>he will literally quote the first part of a quote, but ignore the latter part because it outrtoght contradicts him

>>reddit tier muh inequality 1 puhcent, evil corporations in their racis corporation buildings slave philosophy

If that's all you got from him then I feel sorry for you

What did you even watch which talked about "muh slaves"? Thts the first I've ever heard him talk.about it.

He has an interesting perspective on American imperialism, he's been talking about this shit even in Vietnam days.

I wouldn't say it is positive or negative. Linguistics is very diverse, Chomsky has no impact whatsoever on historical linguistics for example. Although, Chomsky is definitely an important figure in formal language and cognitive linguistics. He is one of the main figures who is responsible for "cognitive revolution" against behaviourism in different fields. Plus, today's academic linguistics which is almost completely synchronic (against historical linguistics) is almost completely influenced by him.

I watched the entire film. Nothing particularly deep, new or interesting. He thinks unions are good for the people, but vaguely blames banks for all financial woes. Typical victim "class" pandering.

One of my least favorite parts was when he was describing how mean it was that corporations are "people" cuz muh 14th amendment, but the hard working illegal immigrants aren't and it's really not fair. It's all so dishonest.

He's a card carrying anarcho-syndicalist. Of course he thinks unions are good.

>he will literally quote the first part of a quote, but ignore the latter part because it outrtoght contradicts him
I seriously hope you don't mean "necessary illusions" or something like that.

Yeah, that's a sure sign of delusion. Take a trip to St. Louis. Banks didn't destroy the city. It was once a rich manufacturing haven and tourist town, that is until all the corporations left town. Now it basically looks like fucking Hiroshima 1946, but hey at least the unions control all industries and force Union dues, right Noam?

> Le "Unions did it" meme
I've seen this argument so many times now. It's bullshit tho. Unionisation just becomes more prominent as things don't go so good and the big guys start to step more on the little guys.

Call it a meme if you want but you don't understand what it's like to be forced into a union. They are private entities that make millions in profit while donating countless worker dollars to cronie political causes.

Union crews are expensive, whiney, lawsuit-happy. Also they are generally unskilled when compared to non-Union city workers because they "specialize" in advanced jobs like "shoveler" or "bus driver"... as if these jobs couldn't be learned by any random person off the street in 5 minutes.

You don't understand unions until you work with them and can compare them to regular companies.

Pistol or swords?

>Also they are generally unskilled when compared to non-Union city workers
I don't know everything about your unions across the pond but I do know they require a high level of skill for welds. And often there's education requirements as well: New York electricians for example don't have to train under a master electrician for is it 10 years? If they do a masters in EE as part of their training.

What's stopping you employing non union anyway?

>Probably would be best to read some of his work
Manufacturing Consent is his greatest work.

Everything else is handwringing for 40 years over Chile and South Vietnam.

If you are interested in this stuff from someone who was there, read confessions of an economic hitman.

The NYRB just savaged his most recent book because of this exact same shit. He will outright ignore points that refute his statements.

There is a difference between shit unions like teachers, dockworkers, and teamsters, and groups like the IBEW which its members hold above God itself.

In my experience, becoming a union worker requires only a trip to the union hall and payment. I haven't seen any sort of stringent education/training requirements in any industry. The unions don't always set these standards, it's often the company employing the union. It's super convoluted. However, some unions are different. I don't profess to know them all.

St. Louis is not a "right-to-work" city, so non-union workers cannot work on union crews. And seeing as how unions control literally every industry in the city from electrical to construction to broadcasting, etc... you can't get any work if you're non-Union. I guess you could just move away. That's always an option. That's pretty much what every worker and business has been doing one by one for the past 40 years.

Agreed. Not all unions are the same. Some are far more worthless, unnatural, violent and dangerous than others.

Can you elaborate or provide a link?
Sounds interesting

He's not wrong about the american dream tho. Your social mobility is near 3rd world tier.

>work for EMS Union
>expensive
>shitty communication with members
>reps were slimeballs
>saw no benefit, neither did the other 300 people in my company
>voted them out

6 months later
>health insurance cut by 50%, price increased by 100%
>half of staff fired
>mandatory work hours increased by 4 across board

nybooks.com/articles/2016/06/09/a-case-against-america/
this is the article mentioned above, its criticism is pretty tepid but you see what user is talking about.

The demographics for blacks and poor whites in the south skew the situation as always

t. blue collar workers son in the north who is doing fine

"dude the American dream is dead man *hits blunt*" has got to be the most juvenile 'woke' statement to ever exist

Which means your social mobility is shit.

>confessions of an economic hitman
Wasn't that a con?

America is not a monolith like other countries. My states schools are paid for with local taxes, so depending on where you live you can get a 10/10 education with 25% Ivy placement or a 1/10 where teachers spend all their time corralling heroin addicts children based purely on property taxesor a -10/10 if you live in a black area. Don't assume.

Sounds like you worked for a shit company, man. Good luck getting a new gig. Hopefully you have marketable skills.

That shit was 10 years ago, it has convinced me of the value of unions in private companies though.

Free education, healthcare, welfare, stamps, literally millions of jobs available in government/military. There are an infinite amount of safety nets. It's easy for any decent worker to move up classes if he studies and does his job over a long period of time.

>There are an infinite amount of safety nets.
US education everyone

I don't know your specific experience. For me, I get paid less in my hometown to do the same exact job I do for freelance wages in other cities. That's because everyone on my crew makes the same money, regardless of skill, difficulty of position, education, etc. They've basically killed off all true value in the city with artificial wages.

Not an argument.

Either a troll or a europoor trying to make himself feel better.

Boomers are retiring everywhere, so many jobs for anyone with a tiny bit of education. If you are talking about becoming moneyed wealth (.01%), ok I guess you are right, but that is the case everywhere.

> yeah like needing education before was just a trick or something for those baby boomer, they'll let me do the same job now with nothing!
The hb visa influx is no joke user

True story, my mother graduated from state teaching college with a 1.6 GPA in the early 70s and got the first municipal teaching job she applied for (at 22) which she still has, making a tenured 75k a year with summers off.

The women competing for her job now have perfect GPAs and Masters degrees from Jesuit universities and big state university at like 28-30.

I have a similar story about my mother. Although the people that have come in actually seem retarded, I've seen some of their MS word shit and my god it's ugly as sin.

I'm a fan of Chomsky, but it wasn't a particularly good movie. He has more depth in his books and lectures.

You don't like to challenge your own views, though. It's fine, or at least overwhelmingly normal. Most people don't, and for understandable reasons. It can be a painful experience. When you entertain the possibility that maybe you were wrong, you entertain the possibility that in all those arguments you had, maybe on the internet, maybe in real life, where you were so smug and confident in yourself that you just laughed off certain viewpoints, you, after all, were the wrong one.

Don't delude yourself. It's comforting to think you have an open mind, but the part of your post where you addressed your problems with Chomsky's view was all memes. Like for instance, you spelled one percent to sound like Bernie Sanders. What point are you trying to make? That it isn't true that the wealthiest 1% of Americans own 40% of all new wealth, and and the bottom 80% own 7%? I'd be interested in your proof in this. Or is it that it doesn't matter?
It makes sense why to the bottom 80%, of which there is a 80% chance that you are a member, it matters.

It looks like you've forced your mind away from thinking about basic facts like that with memes. That's not wanting to challenge your views.

>That it isn't true that the wealthiest 1% of Americans own 40% of all new wealth, and and the bottom 80% own 7%?
Your statistic is common and ignores the fact that the bottom 40 percent of workers in America have negative income. It also ignores taxation of course.

>I'd be interested in your proof in this. Or is it that it doesn't matter?
I'd be interested in your alternatives to the current system. More wealth redistribution?

>Don't delude yourself
Back at you.

>reddit tier muh inequality 1 puhcent, evil corporations in their racis corporation buildings slave philosophy

>They say he's a savage leftist intellectual
Nobody on Veeky Forums has ever said that

who cares about chomsky

unite behind hillary

>be on welfare
>do job well
>get a raise
>i now make too much to qualify for welfare
>i don't make enough to recomp what i lost in welfare
>back in the hole
"YouRe just not working hard enough"

You aren't. Perhaps consider learning a more valuable skill.

> you need to buy more training
If you think that's a good attitude kindly get back to me when you get conned by some pay for skills program

>watches a documentary rather than reading chomsky himself
>gets reddit tier interpretation of chomsky
>complains
Veeky Forums ladies and gentleman

I didn't claim to know, I don't claim to know, and my own views on wealth inequality have very little relevance to my post.

not him but in my country, Sweden, over half the workforce is academically overqualified

You're literally bitching at the people who payed your welfare. Stop being so self-entitled

Didn't he lie and/or play dumb when it came to the deaths/crimes under Pol Pot or some shit?

If your attitude wasn't such shit you'd be doing better

top notch discourse, kek

His linguistic work was largely debunked due to the "discovery" of Amazonian and Pacific peoples whose languages didn't operate upon his allegedly universal norms.

He's most notable these days as an advocate and public intellectual, comparable to Cornell West or Zizek. Brilliant guy, mostly relevant due to his own self-promotion.

He pointed out that the media were in uproar over Cambodia while the Timoran genocide was ignored.

He also thought at the time the numbers for Cambodia might have been exaggerated this this turned out to be wrong. That's about it tho.

He's been the most consistently relevant
left-libertarian in American politics for the past forty years. His commentary can't really be called Reddit-tier, because it laid the framework for the kind of quasi-Marxism which emerged since Occupy Wall Street

>debunked
Why use that word?

Triggered, Noam?

I like how shitposters imagine others as famous people to make their waste of time seem more worthwhile

...

So who are you imagining me as? Charles Barkley?

1. You can learn for free. Ever hear of the library or Internet, or making friends with someone willing to teach you?
2. It's your own fault for investing your money in a useless trade, or falling for a con. Freedom means you're free to fail as well as succeed.

That's mostly due to saturation in that field. The standards get unnecessarily high because there are so many potential workers. Instead, focus on innovating. Bring something crazy unique and useful, not just a ton of years at school that everyone else has too.

...

>That's mostly due to saturation in that field.
it's virtually every field
>The standards get unnecessarily high because there are so many potential workers.
thats my point
>Instead, focus on innovating. Bring something crazy unique and useful,
to achieve a sustainable life one must produce _crazy_ unique and useful innovations

you are _crazy_ stupid, kill yourself

Your career failure resentment is showing, NEET.

Nah, I think I'll continue to produce work that allows me to sustain myself instead.

>can't argue with these two big bombs, you win by intellectual superiority

jesus christ m8

Not literature-related. Saged and Reported.

its not just that he talks about the issues op so tritely dismisses, but in his books at least, when he talks about policy, he is not giving his opinion like some talking head pundit, he cites and references everything. So and so said this, agreed to this, signed off on this. Thus he reveals how the powers that be have been screwing the lower classes in real time.

On top of this, he is modest, affable, gentle, and smarter than a whole academic wing combined. But anyone who speaks the truth will be hated and dismissed.

He's a notorious quote-miner though, lad.

It's not like he's wrong the United States, as a state, condemned the Soviet Union for massive genocide during its foundation; when the foundation of America relied on even more bodies.

Yeah, because the settlers intentionally brought all of those diseases with them.

Assuming you know that smallpox/etc were uch more responsible for the 'genocides' than any of the killing.

he's hated because he holds america to the same standards we hold others to.

its more than diseases. the american govt had a policy of systematic eradication and stealing land from the natives for the first 200 years of our history.

I've never understood this "but X did it 200 years ago as well" type of argument. So what? Times have changed, the people who did that shit are not even alive anymore.

"You're still benefiting from it tho senpai" or something...

Yeah, and the benefit that we gained from doing that saved the entire world in the Second Great War.

God Bless America and Roll fuckin' Tide.

Who are you quoting?

but also the numbers of our eradication don't stand close in comparison to Stalin, Mao, Hitler, or even smaller (nameless to most of us) east Asian dictators.

It's that it'd be hypocritical to make propaganda of the soviet union, or any genocide really, like "Remember everyone who died in the holodomor! ;_;7"

when. America is founded on slavery and genocide. We got to this point because of it, and ignoring it is pointless. America is a country that's founded on drinking blood, it always has been.

We also didn't commit genocide like modernity has. We wanted land; we killed for land. It doesn't matter who had the land, if we were militaristically superior, we were going to take the land. That's not genocide. And slavery? Slavery was worldwide. We just had the land to make it effective.

Stalin systematically starved out or carved out millions of his own citizens by choice. No necessity, but by inefficiency in design, trying to feed an ego's war, and pure paranoia.

To compare the two is a ridiculously leftist thing to do; that is to say, to shortsell one's own identity looking to pull others up to their standing.

>And slavery? Slavery was worldwide

The last first world nation to abolish slavery was us. Colonialism with liberal excuses always existed, sure.

To try and establish language on what is or is not genocide in mass death is pointless.

Mass death? We killed tens of thousands. Stalin killed more than one hundred times that, systematically and for no use.

Why would you even suggest that's pointless? There's a pretty big difference between our firebombing of Japan and Hitler's rounding up for 7 million innocents to gas, now isn't there?

We've killed more than tens of thousands. The market crash of 2008 alone allowed five million more people who could have afforded chemotherapy or cancer treatment, to die of cancer. Mothers, fathers, sons, daughters. The effects of our base selfishness in ideology run a red vein through history.

>His linguistic work was largely debunked due to the "discovery" of Amazonian and Pacific peoples whose languages didn't operate upon his allegedly universal norms.
Source?

former Chomsky fan here. agree with everything you said.

>The NYRB just savaged his most recent book because of this exact same shit. He will outright ignore points that refute his statements.
link?

>implying Chomsky's books aren't reddit tier

So now a very, very complicated market crash is entirely our fault? Let me guess, you watching The Big Short and think you have a grasp on what happened? There were maybe six people in the know, none of whom knew what kind of bubble they created.

If we're going to include economic killings and non-treatment of the sick, than this world we've lived in has killed more than 10 billion people, which is more people than currently live on this planet, mind you.

China still starves farmers out. East Asia is still undeveloped enough to have people die of illness every fucking day bc their elite sell the masses out to slavery in factories. Russia still has a complex against us and for world power. The Middle East and all the African genocides have been fueled by weapons from Soviet-Bloc countries.

There's really not much argument to be made about the legitimacy of US vs the U.S.S.R. or China.

And don't say it was us who influenced all this--it was modernity at large.

>Not literature-related. Saged and Reported.
He's written many books, some of which have received considerable attention.

>So now a very, very complicated market crash is entirely our fault?

Who is "our". It is the fault of the people you allow to control you, yes. If you get cancer, and you're put in the same position, you have the entirety of yourself to blame if you only blame yourself pathetically, and not the other endless numbers in control.

It's your duty as an American, since your country judges others under the same regard. They do that, because they know it feels good. It's convoluted sure. But if you can't separate that from your nation in what it stands for, what does America even stand for or promise?

>Let me guess, you watching The Big Short and think you have a grasp on what happened?

No not at all.

>There were maybe six people in the know, none of whom knew what kind of bubble they created.

More than six. It was Bush policy that allowed it to happen, policy we defend viciously to this day.

>If we're going to include economic killings and non-treatment of the sick, than this world we've lived in has killed more than 10 billion people

Yes.

>China still starves farmers out.

I never denied they did. They very much did. Death is death.

>East Asia is still undeveloped enough to have people die of illness every fucking day bc their elite sell the masses out to slavery in factories.

Factories to make your niece her toys, and your cousin equipment.

Countries the western world has enough to help but never will. It's my money, my power, and my toys, the world can't have any of it.

>There's really not much argument to be made about the legitimacy of US vs the U.S.S.R. or China.

There is plenty to be made, we just don't judge ourselves on our own standards.