Noam Chomsky: Plagarist

Subject: Noam Chomsky: Plagarist
From: GUEST,Mr. Peabody
Date: 26 Jan 02 - 01:11 PM

I've several of Noam Chomsky's recent articles on terrorism and the Middle East and it seems to me that he is a plagarist. His writings are nothing but paraphrasings of Mudcat postings by McGrath of Harlow.

Subject: RE: Noam Chomsky: Plagarist
From: Blackcatter
Date: 26 Jan 02 - 02:15 PM

ha, ha, ha, ha!

Love it....

Gotta figure with a name like Noam that he shouldn't be taken seriously.

Subject: RE: Noam Chomsky: Plagarist
From: Dicho (Frank Staplin)
Date: 26 Jan 02 - 02:16 PM

Mcgrath I have heard of, but who is Noam Chomsky?

Subject: RE: Noam Chomsky: Plagarist
From: Bill D
Date: 26 Jan 02 - 02:55 PM

*LOL*..Noam is a 'linguist/philosopher/activist/essayist...etc' who can get two strangers arguing over whether the sun rose this morning!..His profession is having controversial opinions!

Why the comparison to McGrath?...*shrug*

Subject: RE: Noam Chomsky: Plagarist
From: Mark Cohen
Date: 26 Jan 02 - 03:02 PM

Well, it's just his colorless green ideas sleeping furiously, after all.

Aloha,
Mark

Subject: RE: Noam Chomsky: Plagarist
From: John MacKenzie
Date: 26 Jan 02 - 03:17 PM

"Who deserves the credit, and who deserves the blame? Nikolai Ivanovitch Lobachevsky is his name"
The unequalled Tom Lehrer,in his song called "Plagiarise" Giok

Subject: RE: Noam Chomsky: Plagarist
From: Lonesome EJ
Date: 26 Jan 02 - 03:21 PM

colorless green ideas sleeping furiously????

Subject: RE: Noam Chomsky: Plagarist
From: GUEST,Sherman
Date: 26 Jan 02 - 04:22 PM

"Why the comparison to McGrath? asks BillD.

I do believe that Mr. Peabody was being sarcastic. If you read McGrath's commentaries on the Middle East, you'll see that it's all recycled Chomsky.

Subject: RE: Noam Chomsky: Plagarist
From: toadfrog
Date: 26 Jan 02 - 04:55 PM

Can't be. I usually agree with McGrath, and as far as I am concerned, Chomsky is just plain crazy.

Subject: RE: Noam Chomsky: Plagarist
From: Snuffy
Date: 26 Jan 02 - 05:52 PM

"colorless green ideas sleeping furiously"

At first I thought it was an anagram, but then I remembered Chomsky's work in the 60's on the deep structure of language, which explained how sentences can be gramatically correct and yet not make sense. Perhaps CGISF was an example he used. Is that it, Mark?

WassaiL! V

Subject: RE: Noam Chomsky: Plagarist
From: GUEST,Souter
Date: 26 Jan 02 - 06:38 PM

Yeah, it was, Snuffy.

Subject: RE: Noam Chomsky: Plagarist
From: Haruo
Date: 26 Jan 02 - 06:50 PM

Syntactic Structures, 1957, I think.

Liland

Who took Intro Linguistics from a Chomsky protégé in 1973 and was not hugely impressed

Subject: RE: Noam Chomsky: Plagarist
From: Blackcatter
Date: 26 Jan 02 - 06:56 PM

ahhh - but was that the fault of the protege, or of Chomsky...

Subject: RE: Noam Chomsky: Plagarist
From: Paul from Hull
Date: 26 Jan 02 - 07:13 PM

Well hang on, Blackcatter... Mr. Peabody (or one of his...'associates'...or maybe even somebody TOTALLY UNCONNECTED with him) might be along in a minute to tell us its all Mr. McGrath's fault....

Subject: RE: Noam Chomsky: Plagarist
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 27 Jan 02 - 02:57 PM

This looks fun

Subject: RE: Noam Chomsky: Plagarist
From: pavane
Date: 27 Jan 02 - 03:34 PM

Chomsky was (is?) a serious researcher into the structure of languages. Don't know whether that carries over into politics. Other eminent scientists have floundered when outside their own areas of expertise, who knows?

Subject: RE: Noam Chomsky: Plagarist
From: GUEST,cigilteach
Date: 27 Jan 02 - 06:13 PM

Excuse me for intruding as I am not a member but a frequent reader of this forum...

In response to Chomsky's being "just plain crazy"...

I've always been an admirer of his but I just this afternoon watched a talk he gave on his "9-11" and still feel he is one of the most SANE and grounded guys around.

He speaks the truth and often states the obvious, and for that he's crazy? Perhaps he makes some uncomfortable but I am glad he is around or I might become "just plain crazy" myself.

Subject: RE: Noam Chomsky: Plagarist
From: Bill D
Date: 27 Jan 02 - 07:25 PM

I'm quite sure Chomsky IS sure he speaks the 'truth'...but he does tend to apply his opinions to the world pretty liberally. He stirs up debate in many areas....I have not heard him 'live' in many years, but I see occasional references to his promulgations, and he certainly is a genuine thinker, even though it is hard to apply 'right' and 'wrong' to socio-political/linguistic debates....

Subject: RE: Noam Chomsky: Plagarist
From: GUEST,Reader
Date: 27 Jan 02 - 07:38 PM

Chomsky Maybe you won't see it in the papers, but they can't keep it off the Internet, yet.

Subject: RE: Noam Chomsky: Plagarist
From: John Hindsill
Date: 27 Jan 02 - 09:06 PM

My son is working on a PhD in Linguistics and Logic. I told him that I hoped he would not become another Noam Chomsky. He replied that he disagreed with some of Chomsky's linguistic theories, but was sympathetic to his politics. Oh the dagger in this conservative heart!!!!

Subject: RE: Noam Chomsky: Plagarist
From: Haruo
Date: 27 Jan 02 - 11:21 PM

I was more like John's son; my problems with the protégé resulted from his similarity to Chomsky in certain linguistic regards, not in politics. I'm a polyglot; I don't think one should claim to be a linguist without knowing at least one language besides one's own. Chomsky has made something of a fetish of his monoglottal anglophonicity (actually, I'm sure he grossly exaggerates it). The protégé in question told us at our first class session that he had "just published a monograph on imperative and command forms in modern Persian, yet [he] could not order a cup of coffee in Farsi if my life depended on it" or words to that effect. I was hypoimpressed.

Liland
who was reasonably fluent at that time in Japanese, Russian and Esperanto

Subject: RE: Noam Chomsky: Plagarist
From: Bill D
Date: 28 Jan 02 - 12:05 AM

well, as 'Reader' says....it sure IS on the net!...(and I don't think anyone here is worried!)

But a casual browse of the intro page sure shows what I alluded to...Ol' Noam is the center of intellctual strom wherever he goes.

Subject: RE: Noam Chomsky: Plagarist
From: GUEST,BOAB
Date: 28 Jan 02 - 03:06 AM

There sure is a mixture of thought and opinion on this forum which has highly explosive potential. One, apparently, of the "minority", I think Chomsky is one of the straightest thinkers putting ideas on the public domain today. That he very often [mostly?] goes against the accepted mores of those in power--in his own country along with others---attracts the hostility of rightists and my-country-right-or-wrong patriots. It is a great pity that, like the singing of Paul Robeson [one of the greatest], anyone who wants to hear more is obliged to go search for it.

Subject: RE: Noam Chomsky: Plagarist
From: GUEST
Date: 28 Jan 02 - 04:35 AM

plagarist is good. Noam would love it!!

Subject: RE: Noam Chomsky: Plagarist
From: Haruo
Date: 28 Jan 02 - 04:37 AM

That's plagarist with the g as in margiarine, ¿no?

Liland

Subject: RE: Noam Chomsky: Plagarist
From: Ebbie
Date: 28 Jan 02 - 02:39 PM

True, Liland- the soft g. However, everybody is misspelling it- it's plagiarist, OK?

I read Chomsky in Zen Magazine. Some things I agree with, others I don't. On the other hand, there's a whole lot I don't know.

Subject: RE: Noam Chomsky: Plagarist
From: Don Firth
Date: 28 Jan 02 - 04:10 PM

Plague? What plague? Oh, yeah! The Powers That Be tend to regard Chomsky as a plague. He must be doing something right.

Don Firth

Subject: RE: Noam Chomsky: Plagarist
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 28 Jan 02 - 04:47 PM

A word people don't use much is "plagiary" - means the same as plagiarism, but a bit more swagger about it as a word.

Chomsky is one of those Americans whose name should stop in their tracks anyone who is tempted to make anti-American generalisations. One of the handful of "just men" (male or female) any place needs if God's going to put up with it, if you read your Bible.

Noam Chomsky, Pete Seeger, Garrison Keiller... Could make up the numbers from the Mudcat I imagine. (And I don't just mean lefties,)

Subject: RE: Noam Chomsky: Plagarist
From: GUEST
Date: 28 Jan 02 - 04:54 PM

How in God's name could anyone mutter the dilettante Garrison Keillor's name in a sentence with Chomsky's?

Subject: RE: Noam Chomsky: Plagarist
From: GUEST,I'm Not Chomsky
Date: 28 Jan 02 - 06:28 PM

Along with his hero Chomsky, McGrath of Harlow invokes Pete Seeger's name in saint-like fashion.

Now, I'll agree that Pete Seeger has been an important folksinger over many decades. But he's no saint. For far too many decades, Seeger unquestioningly toed the Communist Party line.

When genocidal Nazi mass murderer Adolf Hitler was pacted up with genocidal Communist mass murderer Josef Stalin, Seeger was at the front of the movement keeping the USA out of World War II. The American delay in entering the war cost millions of innocent people their lives.

Then, when Hitler turned on Stalin, Seeger was, suddenly, pro-war. "Round and round Hitler's grave," he sang as he went off to enlist in the army.

Somewhere, recently, I read the lie that Seeger has been "a lifelong pacifist." He wasn't a pacifist during the Spanish Civil War when he supported the Communist fight against the fascists. He wasn't a pacifist when the Communist Party finally broke their pact with the Nazis.

Wittingly or unwittingly, Seeger was a tool of Stalin at the same time that Stalin was murdering 20 million of his own people.

A great folksinger, yes. The saint that McGrath of Harlow makes him out to be, no!

Subject: RE: Noam Chomsky: Plagarist
From: GUEST,cigilteach
Date: 28 Jan 02 - 09:27 PM

Do you mean Z Magazine?

Subject: RE: Noam Chomsky: Plagarist
From: GUEST,Guest
Date: 28 Jan 02 - 11:27 PM

Noam may not be a plagiarist, but he is a plague.

Subject: Noam, Walter, Herman, gossip
From: Haruo
Date: 30 Jan 02 - 03:15 AM

For what it's worth, the following came in the email yesterday from Ishmail, the Melville mailing list:

Earlier today, John Gretchko asked me to comment on the rumor, reported in my book Hunting Captain Ahab, p. 595, note 52, regarding Melville's supposed imagining that John C. Hoadley had fathered some of his children. I have been wondering if there is anything more to say than simply, Murray was unwilling to disclose his source for that tantalizing morsel, and when sources are not disclosed, a responsible scholar or journalist has to wonder about fantasies and even hallucinations, if not outright destructive propaganda. At the same time, one notes that only one manuscript letter from Melville to his brother-in-law survives, and that one ends with the postscript, "N.B. I ain't crazy." What might this mean? That family rumors to the contrary, HM is an accurate reporter of family relations, his experience, etc. as related in various books that critics labeled "crazy"? Or could it refer to a belief of his own that Hoadley and Lizzie were carrying on, although that is almost too funny to contemplate today.

As I write these words, the Pacifica Foundation (which holds the licenses of five listener-supported FM radio stations, and where I was a Program Director and program producer at KPFK, Los Angeles) is in a nationally publicized state of turmoil and possible transition; the culture wars rage on; literary theorists and scientists continue their pregnant debates over the status of objective knowledge and expertise; and I am engaged in an attempt to get to the bottom of Noam Chomsky's fixation on Walter Lippmann, particular with respect to Chomsky's constantly repeated accusation that Lippmann was an advocate of mind-management, or "the manufacture of consent." This is a ludicrous claim, as any reader of Lippmann's early books will discover. While re-reading WL's landmark book of 1922, Public Opinion, I came upon some paragraphs that I had previously read on the radio in 1995, for they summed up for me a situation that still obtains: the impossible expectations that we put upon the press, and by extension, all mass media (including "alternative" or "independent" media), and even the universities. I will take the time to copy these paragraphs out for you, with only this introduction: WL is rethinking orthodox democratic theory in the light of the tremendous power of the press to mislead readers who have no access to direct experience (unlike earlier inhabitants of self-contained villages), hence are driven by "the pictures in our heads" or the stereotypes implanted by interested parties who are hiding, or are ignorant of, crucial facts.

[Lippmann, pp.362-365] [The press] is too frail to carry the whole burden of popular sovereignty, to supply spontaneously the truth which democrats hoped was inborn. And when we expect it to supply such a body of truth we employ a misleading standard of judgment. We misunderstand the limited nature of news, the illimitable complexity of society; we overestimate our own endurance, public spirit, and all-round competence. We suppose an appetite for uninteresting truths which is not discovered by any honest analysis of our own tastes.

If the newspapers, then, are to be charged with the duty of translating the whole of public life of mankind, so that every adult can arrive at an opinion on every moot topic, they fail, they are bound to fail, in any future one can conceive they will continue to fail. It is not possible to assume that a world, carried on by division of labor and distribution of authority, can be governed by universal opinions in the whole population. Unconsciously the theory sets up the single reader as theoretically omnicompetent, and puts upon the press the burden of accomplishing whatever representative government, industrial organization, and diplomacy have failed to accomplish. Acting upon everybody for thirty minutes in twenty-four hours, the press is asked to create a mystical force called Public Opinion that will take up the slack in public institutions. The press has often mistakenly pretended that it could do just that. It has at great moral cost to itself, encouraged a democracy, still bound to its original premises, to expect newspapers to supply spontaneously for every organ of government, for every social problem, the machinery of information which these do not normally supply themselves. Institutions, having failed to furnish themselves with instruments of knowledge, have become a bundle of "problems," which the population as a whole, reading the press as a whole, is supposed to solve.

The press, in other words, has come to be regarded as an organ of direct democracy, charged on a much wider scale, and from day to day, with the function often attributed to the initiative, referendum, and recall. The Court of Public Opinion, open day and night, is to lay down the law for everything all the time. It is not workable. And when you consider the nature of news, it is not even thinkable. For the news, as we have seen, is precise in proportion to the precision with which the event is recorded. Unless the event is capable of being named, measured, given shape, made specific, it either fails to take on the character of news, or it is subject to the accidents and prejudices of observation.

Therefore, on the whole, the quality of the news about modern society is an index of its social organization. The better the institutions, the more all interests concerned are formally represented, the more issues are disentangled, the more objective criteria are introduced, the more perfectly an affair can be presented as news. At its best the press is a servant and guardian of institutions; at its worst it is a means by which a few exploit social disorganization to their own ends. In the degree to which institutions fail to function, the unscrupulous journalist can fish in troubled waters, and the conscientious one must gamble with uncertainties. [my emphasis, C.S.]

The press is no substitute for institutions. It is like the beam of a searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one episode and then another out of darkness into vision. Men cannot do the work of the world by this light alone. They cannot govern society by episodes, incidents, and eruptions. It is only when they work by a steady light of their own, that the press, when it is turned upon them, reveals a situation intelligible enough for a popular decision. The trouble lies deeper than the press, and so does the remedy. It lies in social organization based on a system of analysis and record, and all the corollaries of that principle; in the abandonment of the theory of the omnicompetent citizen, in the decentralization of decision, in the coordination of decision by comparable record and analysis. If at the centers of management there is a running audit, which makes work intelligible to those who do it, and those who superintend it, issues when they arise are not the mere collisions of the blind. Then, too, the news is uncovered for the press by a system of intelligence that is also a check upon the press.

That is the radical way. For the troubles of the press, like the troubles of representative government, be it territorial or functional, like the troubles of industry, be it capitalist, cooperative, or communist, go back to a common source: to the failure of self-governing people to transcend their casual experience and their prejudice, by inventing, creating, and organizing a machinery of knowledge. It is because they are compelled to act without a reliable picture of the world, that governments, schools, newspapers and churches make such small headway against the more obvious failings of democracy, against violent prejudice, apathy, preference for the curious trivial as against the dull important, and the hunger for sideshows and three legged calves. This is the primary defect of popular government, a defect inherent in its traditions, and all its other defects can, I believe, be traced to this one. [End of Lippmann, Chapter 24, Harcourt, Brace edition, 1922).

Clare Spark

Liland
who posted it because of its different angle on Chomsky