This is a tough one for me. I've known about his connection to Epstein for a while, but didn't have the stomach to look into it. He had a tremendous influence on my view and understanding of the...
This is a tough one for me. I've known about his connection to Epstein for a while, but didn't have the stomach to look into it. He had a tremendous influence on my view and understanding of the world and American politics.
I was cleaning out some old storage a few weeks ago and came across the first book of his that I ever read, "Perilous Power: The Middle East and US Foreign Policy." One of my professors assigned it during my freshman year, back in the waning days of the second Bush Administration. I remember thumbing through it when I got home from the bookstore and getting so sucked in that I read it in one sitting. I wasn't a patriot, but pretty much everything else I'd heard in my life up to that point was rah rah America, so this simple ~250 page book blew my mind. I think there's something highlighted on every page. I mentioned it to my dad about a week later and he sent me "Manufacturing Consent" and a few other books. I've been annoying friends, family, coworkers, and strangers on the internet with half-baked takes and poorly regurgitated arguments ever since. Thanks, Noam.
It just sucks that this going to hang over his legacy and contributions. But, as the oft-repeated Chomsky quote goes, "We shouldn't be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas."
I would file this under: left and right are for the little people, and in the halls of power, where people are (or believe themselves to be) above society's rule of law, those distinctions fall away.
I would file this under: left and right are for the little people, and in the halls of power, where people are (or believe themselves to be) above society's rule of law, those distinctions fall away.
It certainly looks bad in retrospect, but how much anyone knew about Epstein at the time probably depends a lot on circumstances that aren’t revealed in the article.
It certainly looks bad in retrospect, but how much anyone knew about Epstein at the time probably depends a lot on circumstances that aren’t revealed in the article.
He was convicted of soliciting a child for prostitution in 2008 and the emails were from 2017ish. We could assume that people who are otherwise considered very intelligent, educated and informed...
Exemplary
It certainly looks bad in retrospect, but how much anyone knew about Epstein at the time probably depends a lot on circumstances that aren’t revealed in the article.
He was convicted of soliciting a child for prostitution in 2008 and the emails were from 2017ish. We could assume that people who are otherwise considered very intelligent, educated and informed were oblivious... or that they chose to overlook sexual violence or coercion the way they have in basically every single other case among the wealthy.
Of course we could just take his own words and not assume at all:
“Like all of those in Cambridge who met and knew him, we knew that he had been convicted and served his time, which means that he re-enters society under prevailing norms — which, it is true, are rejected by the far right in the US and sometimes by unscrupulous employers,” Chomsky wrote. “I’ve had no pause about close friends who spent many years in prison, and were released. That's quite normal in free societies.”
The article does state that The article also notes that Chomsky wrote a letter of support for Epstein in 2017, so it seems unlikely that he was totally unaware of Epstein’s activities given that...
The article does state that
A WBUR review of the emails shows despite Epstein’s 2008 conviction for procuring a child for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute, Chomsky stayed in close contact with Epstein into at least 2017.
The article also notes that Chomsky wrote a letter of support for Epstein in 2017, so it seems unlikely that he was totally unaware of Epstein’s activities given that the first conviction occurred almost a decade earlier.
I'm not American and even I have heard of Chomsky as a kind of leftist prophet figure. Looking at his Wikipedia entry, it seems he is a linguist? Does anyone with subject matter knowledge know how...
I'm not American and even I have heard of Chomsky as a kind of leftist prophet figure.
Looking at his Wikipedia entry, it seems he is a linguist?
Does anyone with subject matter knowledge know how someone in a very specialised field became a well-known generalised 'genius'? I have tried Googling it but the results are gummed up with Epstein-adjascent AI-written articles, and I would rather cut off a limb that ask an LLM.
I don’t have any particular knowledge in the field of linguistics, but essentially he used his prominence in his area of expertise as a way to make his political opinions heard. There really isn’t...
I don’t have any particular knowledge in the field of linguistics, but essentially he used his prominence in his area of expertise as a way to make his political opinions heard. There really isn’t much more to it than that, although of course at a certain point he became “famous for being famous”.
It's slightly more complicated than that. His work as a linguist kind of inheritely bled into politics. He developed a lot of theories and research about how the human mind inheritely shaped the...
It's slightly more complicated than that. His work as a linguist kind of inheritely bled into politics. He developed a lot of theories and research about how the human mind inheritely shaped the development of language based on its biological structure, and vice versa, how language shapes human perception. There's significant bleed over into politics there by default. He then wrote manufacturing consent, which introduces the propaganda model. That book posits that most democracy under capitalism is mostly just a way to get people to be ok by being ruled by corporate interests who use language to shape people's perceptions. A lot of his work since then has concerned those ideas surrounding mass media.
I think he'd be more accurately described as a political philosopher and cognitive scientist rather than just a linguist, especially towards the latter part of his career. After manufacturing consent, he's just "famous leftist guy" to most people though.
This is a tough one for me. I've known about his connection to Epstein for a while, but didn't have the stomach to look into it. He had a tremendous influence on my view and understanding of the world and American politics.
I was cleaning out some old storage a few weeks ago and came across the first book of his that I ever read, "Perilous Power: The Middle East and US Foreign Policy." One of my professors assigned it during my freshman year, back in the waning days of the second Bush Administration. I remember thumbing through it when I got home from the bookstore and getting so sucked in that I read it in one sitting. I wasn't a patriot, but pretty much everything else I'd heard in my life up to that point was rah rah America, so this simple ~250 page book blew my mind. I think there's something highlighted on every page. I mentioned it to my dad about a week later and he sent me "Manufacturing Consent" and a few other books. I've been annoying friends, family, coworkers, and strangers on the internet with half-baked takes and poorly regurgitated arguments ever since. Thanks, Noam.
It just sucks that this going to hang over his legacy and contributions. But, as the oft-repeated Chomsky quote goes, "We shouldn't be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas."
An unrelated picture from Mastodon of Chomsky chumming around with Steve Bannon at Epstein's
https://files.mastodon.social/cache/media_attachments/files/115/712/558/190/342/693/original/714bc6eaad028372.png
I would file this under: left and right are for the little people, and in the halls of power, where people are (or believe themselves to be) above society's rule of law, those distinctions fall away.
Ironically, I think Chomsky would say the same thing.
It certainly looks bad in retrospect, but how much anyone knew about Epstein at the time probably depends a lot on circumstances that aren’t revealed in the article.
He was convicted of soliciting a child for prostitution in 2008 and the emails were from 2017ish. We could assume that people who are otherwise considered very intelligent, educated and informed were oblivious... or that they chose to overlook sexual violence or coercion the way they have in basically every single other case among the wealthy.
Of course we could just take his own words and not assume at all:
Jeffrey Epstein Met With Harvard Professor Martin Nowak and Noam Chomsky in 2015 in Harvard Office | News | The Harvard Crimson
He was also charged in 2006 with the same crime with charges dropped, charged in 2019 with sex trafficking and Chomsky 's statements are from 2023.
This information was commonly and publicly known among people who were meeting him, traveling with him, and accepting his money.
Thanks, that article has a lot more detail.
The article does state that
The article also notes that Chomsky wrote a letter of support for Epstein in 2017, so it seems unlikely that he was totally unaware of Epstein’s activities given that the first conviction occurred almost a decade earlier.
I'm not American and even I have heard of Chomsky as a kind of leftist prophet figure.
Looking at his Wikipedia entry, it seems he is a linguist?
Does anyone with subject matter knowledge know how someone in a very specialised field became a well-known generalised 'genius'? I have tried Googling it but the results are gummed up with Epstein-adjascent AI-written articles, and I would rather cut off a limb that ask an LLM.
I don’t have any particular knowledge in the field of linguistics, but essentially he used his prominence in his area of expertise as a way to make his political opinions heard. There really isn’t much more to it than that, although of course at a certain point he became “famous for being famous”.
It's slightly more complicated than that. His work as a linguist kind of inheritely bled into politics. He developed a lot of theories and research about how the human mind inheritely shaped the development of language based on its biological structure, and vice versa, how language shapes human perception. There's significant bleed over into politics there by default. He then wrote manufacturing consent, which introduces the propaganda model. That book posits that most democracy under capitalism is mostly just a way to get people to be ok by being ruled by corporate interests who use language to shape people's perceptions. A lot of his work since then has concerned those ideas surrounding mass media.
I think he'd be more accurately described as a political philosopher and cognitive scientist rather than just a linguist, especially towards the latter part of his career. After manufacturing consent, he's just "famous leftist guy" to most people though.
His work bled into computer science too: https://history.computer.org/pioneers/chomsky.html
Man I have heard of Manufacturing Consent and had no idea Chomsky was behind it. Thanks for the info.