Communicator (communicator) wrote,
Communicator
communicator

On 'Chompsky'

I was reading comments on the NASA guy who got the sack (for instance watervole correctly pointing out that 'It's so much easier to rubbish things you know nothing about') and I was reminded of some comments about Noam Chomsky on a right wing blog , including:

Noam Chompsky (sic) is an intellectually incompetent failure academically and a failure as a decent human being.

This seems to me to be quite typical of comments dismissing 'difficult ideas'. Now, heaven knows, people are allowed to hate Chomsky. They don't even have to have heard of Chomsky, as far as I am concerned. Right wing commentators could make remarks like 'Chomsky was a big noise in linguistics once, but his theories on deep structure are as useless as his anarchist ideals', or 'I don't know anything about Chomsky's linguistics theories, and if they are as ill-conceived as his politics I don't want to know'. I'd think those comments were mistaken but they wouldn't be f**cking stupid.

But to misspell the name of the greatest living theorist in his field, and to describe him as utterly incompetent and an academic failure is moronic. It's like saying 'I don't know what I'm talking about but I'm too stupid to realise it'.
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