Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomskyis an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, logician, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes described as "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy, and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He has spent more than half a century at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is Institute Professor Emeritus, and is the author of over 100 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, and...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTeacher
Date of Birth7 December 1928
CityPhiladelphia, PA
CountryUnited States of America
There have been repeated cases when nuclear war came ominously close, often a result of malfunctioning of early-warning systems and other accidents, sometimes [as a result of] highly adventurist acts of political leaders.
I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom.
It is important to bear in mind that political campaigns are designed by the same people who sell toothpaste and cars.
Anarchists try to identify power structures. They urge those exercising power to justify themselves. This justification does not succeed most of the time.
Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.
We still name our military helicopter gunships after victims of genocide. Nobody bats an eyelash about that: Blackhawk. Apache. And Comanche. If the Luftwaffe named its military helicopters Jew and Gypsy, I suppose people would notice.
For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.
I am thinking of actual cases of adolescents, lets say, who think they have five hundred friends, because there are five hundred people on their Facebook account. But these are the kind of friends whose relation to you is that if you say 'I bought a sandwich'; they say 'did it taste good?' You know, that's a kind of interaction, but very different to having a real friend, somebody who you can actually talk to.
The death penalty can be tolerated only by extreme statist reactionaries who demand a state that is so powerful that it has the right to kill.
That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met.
The United States in many ways resembles a Third World country - far more elevated, but it has many of those structural characteristics: the extreme inequality of wealth, the deterioration of infrastructure because it only serves poor people, predatory operations, huge corruption, and so on.
The escalation to attack undefended civilian targets is just a classic illustration of terrorism.
Its true that contemporary technology permits decentralization, it also permits centralization. It depends on how you use the technology.
Our ignorance can be divided into problems and mysteries. When we face a problem, we may not know its solution, but we have insight, increasing knowledge, and an inkling of what we are looking for. When we face a mystery, however, we can only stare in wonder and bewilderment, not knowing what an explanation would even look like.