Good lord, these people are living in mortal fear of holocaust at the hands of the Republicans.

Surely we can exploit that fear.

Who cares what he thinks.

Sooooo,the left have been trying to get the 'righties' turfed from talk radio,shut down Fox news etc...tonite Keith Olbermann GONE from MessNBC!Announced it on his show..and the twitter chat is too funny!see: http://twitter.com/search?q=%23p2
I wonder tho,if it's another publicity stunt? see story at Newsbusters

Perhaps he had bad eggs for breakfast...

Sammy - Keith is gone but surely not forgotten. First he was fired from the football broadcast and now, it appears, he is gassed from MSNBC.

Keith has been fired again because, unlike the part of the human body known as the asshole, he won't shut up by himself.

Good fricken riddence.

Hopefully we will not be assaulted by his presence anytime soon.

Noam Chomsky -- isn't he the one who gets rich selling books and tickets to lectures complaining about how he's being censored?

And pray tell what exactly is a "professor of linguistics"? Fancy word for speech therapist maybe? Oh wait,speech therapists acually serve a purpose.

the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives and gains in the U.S. Senate may spell doom for the human race.

It's the End of the World as We Know It.
(and I feel fine)

http://tinyurl.com/6ond4c

The sad thing, MONSTER, is that (as I understand it) the Chomsk is a brilliant linguistic theorist. He came up with an idea to do with the mind being hardwired to deal with language in a certain way (i.e. no tabula rasa), and then somehow he managed to twist that around into the notion that American Imperialism TM was destroying peoples' ability to evolve intellectually in their own natural manner, through, you know, Maoist social engineering or something.

All Palin's fault.

No word yet on what he had for breakfast the next morning.

Crow.

Black Mamba.. And yet through our Imperialism English is the Languge of choice in aviation, business and darn near any other endevor that requires communication between differnt cultures.

Fear mongering: tales told by idiots.

Please read the previous post about the necessity to endlessly mock people like Chomsky. Shunning is another option.

As Black Mamba noted, Chomsky is indeed a brilliant linguist and, for those liberals intelligent enough to understand him, a key player in demolishing part of the human "blank slate" delusion. When it comes to linguistics, I'll assume that Chomsky is right. OTOH, when it comes to climatology I'll give Chomsky's opinion the same weight as that of a cab driver taking me to the airport who has developed his own theory of predicing weather.

It's a sad commentary on the state of the MSM that they give so much publicity to Chomsky's rantings on a subject that he likely has no competence in. It's the assumption that because he's a cunning linguist, he must be equally proficient in any topic he choses to pontificate on. Unlike Dr. Fruitfly, Chomsky has made a real contribution to science although both are equally deluded about the field of climatology.

I guess that's why most people get important news from blogs these days.

Morano doesn't give much but links [& a cute sidebar with numerous contradictory disproofs of AGW --
Here's a bit more. I'd guess most around here would agree with the first part --

“There’s other factors like the anger, and the fear and hostility in the country about everything carries over to this,” Chomsky said. “So if you look at polls, everyone hates Congress. They hate the Democrats. They hate the Republicans even more. They hate big business. They hate banks and they distrust scientists. So why should we believe what these pointy-head elitist are telling? We don’t trust anything else. We don’t trust them.”

He explained those feelings led to November’s election results, and would have serious repercussions for civilization.
“All of this combines the latest election a couple of days ago,” he continued. “You could almost interpret it a kind of a death knell for the species. There was an article in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, you know – not a radical rag exactly. They’re running through the new Republicans coming to Congress and they’re worried about them.”

The problem? The new members of Congress aren’t on board with the theory of anthropogenic global warming.
“One of the reasons is because they’re global warming deniers,” he said. “Almost all – that means the powerful House committees, like science and technology and so on, are in hands of people who think there’s nothing to it – or at least claim that they think that, but what they actually think is another story.”

He pointed toward the United States’ stature in the world as to why it means the entire downfall of humanity.
“If this was happening in some small country, in you know maybe Monaco or something, it wouldn’t matter much, but when it’s happening in the richest, most powerful country in the world – it’s a danger to the survival of the species,” Chomsky said. “Nobody else is going to do much if the United States doesn’t do a lot, not just some but take the lead. So we’re essentially saying let’s kiss each other goodbye.”

Or watch the video

Chomsky. This is what stands for intelligence from the the left? They revere this over edumacated nitwit and defender of the Khmer Rouge. They must all be suffering from a mental disorder that allows them to accept this nonsense while forgetting all the other, "We're doomed in ten year unless ..." statements from their putative leaders and brightest lights.

Really, Chomsky is a brilliant linguist. That's his basic work.

He came up with the notion of 'transformational grammar', a theory that, as Black Mamba points out, meant that humans have an innate capacity to learn language and that language is not simply a collection of words but a logical system not a random collection of words.

So, the child doesn't learn to speak by being an 'empty bucket' and simply collecting names for things. The child is hard-wired to develop language as a logical structure of relations (nouns and verbs).

This 'deep structure', that logical format, was deemed common to all our species. So, all languages have the capacity to express the same things. This view countered the now discredited old view of 'sociolinguistics' which deemed languages to be that 'bucket of words' and concluded that some languages were inadequate to explain complex thoughts (they didn't have the words!).

Chomsky's analysis of the basic infrastructure of language is a foundation of modern linguistics and language-learning (and even, of course, moves into artificial languages and computers).

Chomsky's non-academic move into politics and social issues - that's another issue. I can't explain his views and can only conclude that they are personal and ahh...illogical.

Chomsky's clearly not embracing that whole "tone down the rhetoric" thing.

As "loki" observed, Chomsky was one of the great scholars of linguistics in his day; I well recall studying his transformational grammar theories during my university days.

At the same time, his politics have always been those of an outright crank. I've no doubt that if he were commenting from the right of the political spectrum, he'd have been dismissed as a wingnut years ago.

That said, Chomsky did come up with one enduring line that I consider a "keeper":

"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all."

I studied Chomsky when I was in University

Was unimpressed (or in my generations slang)

underwhelmed

d

Don't underestimate the positives that the understanding of linguistics give.

After all, without Larry Wall being a linguist you wouldn't be reading this blog.

"No word yet on what he had for breakfast the next morning."

Prunes, I would think, given his propensity to vacillate between verbal diarrhea and the consequences of being AR.

"Chomsky's analysis of the basic infrastructure of language is a foundation of modern linguistics and language-learning (and even, of course, moves into artificial languages and computers)."

I guess that explains why the kids (and their parents) can't read, write, or express themselves in logical coherent structures in most any language. There is a saying, "you can be literate in one language, or illiterate in many".

skip - the cognitive infrastructure of language - and literacy - have nothing to do with each other.

Literacy is the ability to read/write your language. Chomsky's transformational grammar was an analysis of the cognitive infrastructure of language; how it is a set of logical relations and that our brain is genetically 'hardwired' to learn such a logical symbolic system. Again, absolutely nothing to do with literacy.

And again, it was a great and important analysis of language. His political and social views - well, that's another issue.

"Perhaps he had bad eggs for breakfast..."

I doubt it, given that they're on his face

When I was young and naive I spent several years doing post-graduate work in Chomskian theory before leaving to get my PhD in another, more useful discipline. In the 1950s Chomsky caught the zeitgeist and reframed a few old ideas in a pseudo-scientific way. On the surface his philosophy is reasonable. He holds that by studying spoken language we can determine what sort of hardware children bring to the job of learning language: we can find the underlying principles by which the brain operates. This idea is not new and is not unique to Chomsky. What is really interesting about Chomsky is the top-down approach by which he operates: Chomsky and his chosen few are the people who determine the framework of principles and parameters by which the brain is said to function. The job of linguists outside the inner circle is to find evidence to support Chomskian theory. Every ten years Chomsky ascends a mountain, comes down with a new framework, the past ten years of research are discarded and the cycle starts again. The linguistic principles Chomsky comes up with -- the framework -- are rubbish. Most modern linguists have no scientific training -- no instruction in data collection, statistical analyses, neurochemistry, nothing -- and can't count past ten without pulling off their socks. The whole thing is something of a 1950s pyramid scheme kept alive through force of will. I have no idea what will happen to the field once Chomsky retires.

fridgelogic - I think your outline is empty. Chomsky's transformative grammar was and remains, an important component of modern linguistic research - including work in context-free grammars, and generative linguistics.

The movement away from the 'empty bucket' sociolinguistic theory of language into a cognitive structure was important.

I certainly disagree with your view of a 'top-down approach' to Chomskyian research and your personal view that his analysis of language is 'rubbish'. Equally, your description of modern linguists is bereft of evidence and begins and ends solely as your opinion.

Hello ET,

Certainly, what I posted is my own opinion. But I have a lot of company.

I call his approach "top down" because that's the best word for it. As someone who has been through the process of conducting linguistic research in a Chomskian department I do have knowledge of the way the system operates. This is also the way the system has been described to me by people who did finish their PhDs in this field. "The Linguistics Wars" is dated but a fun read -- it gives good insight into the academic culture surrounding Chomsky.

I don't know why everyone is so hung up on the "deep structure" idea. It is very, very dated -- I think Chomsky killed it off himself sometime during the mid-nineties after one of his regularly scheduled epiphanies. I have mercifully forgotten when, but I think it was around the time that the “Minimalist Program” came out.

When I was studying linguistics I was often dismayed at the amount of money and time being wasted on such useless, insubstantial work. After a while I decided I had the wrong attitude. Instead, it was a good thing that all the idiots in university were kept safely corralled in the linguistics department where they couldn't possible do any harm. I was very dismayed to learn that they had multiplied and taken over the climate science department as well.

Wow, and I thought Engineering was hard to understand.This Linguistics "science" is way beyond me. Oh I hope someone will explain the math of it to me. It does use math to prove the conclusions, right?

It is my understanding that Fridge Logic is essentially correct. Chomsky "jumped the shark" (as the kids say) quite some time ago, and no one takes him seriously these days except for a bunch of clapped-out media wannabes and blog authors & commenters, people about whom Valery noted that: "An attitude of permanent indignation signifies great mental poverty. Politics compels its votaries to take that line and you can see their minds growing more impoverished every day, from one burst of righteous indignation to the next."

Nevertheless, it would I think be a mistake to conclude that there is nothing new in linguistics; it's just that it doesn't come from the linguistics old-guard any more: nowadays breaking results in linguistics come from the computing- (not computer-) science and neurology departments. The really interesting things in life are those being studied by folks like Daniel Kahneman, Eric Kandel, Dan Gilbert, Stephen Wolfram, Gregory Chaitin, and their students & labs, which makes sense once one realizes that all that really exists, in the metaphysical sense, is information.

One minor disagreement with Lance, if I may: it is my opinion that if Larry hadn't done what he did (and what I've been working with & on since before 1989, when Larry and I exchanged our first of many email messages on these matters), we could still do this just as well in Scheme ;-)

fridge - yes, I know the deep structure era was phased out and the minimalist moved in..and so on. That's not the point. What Chomsky moved linguistic research into was an understanding that cognition and its expressor, language, is logical and symbolic. Not just symbolic - the old bucket theory, the sociolinguistic and semiological approach; but logical, transformative, multileveled and symbolic.

Of course, I completely agree with Vitruvius that all that exists - not even in the metaphysical but also the physical -sense, is information. But this information emerges, exists, transforms and operates within logical interactions.

Chomsky: the most over rated mind of our time.

Yet not only logical, ET, otherwise the seminal works of Whitehead,
Hilbert, Gödel, Church, and Turing would not have been so important.

ET -- There are patterns in language structure, but the patterns themselves do not necessarily indicate deep logic.

Whether language is transformative depends on to what extent and whom you talk to. I don't agree that language is transformative in the Chomskian sense.

MONSTER -- no math -- it's "politics all the way down."

That's only partially correct, Fridge Logic. There may be no mathematics
in Chomskian linguistics ~ the modern linguistics department may be all
politics and so like the modern blogosphere essentially nonsense ~ yet
it remains the case that logic and mathematics are very important to our
emerging understanding of linguistics, they're just not, as I mentioned
to ET, complete and consistent and decidable simultaneously.

Vitruvius -- I am very interested in studies using mathematical and statistical models to explain linguistic phenomena and agree that the future of linguistics lies in this area (which I understand to be your position). I was using the term "deep logic" in the Chomskian sense.

I am with FridgeLogic ALL THE WAY!- He has nailed Chomsky and his minions right on the money!-
His gobbledy gook got funding ,just like the global warmists did , with a bunch of hooey and gobbledy gook that 'sounded' intelligent and ground breaking but was and is nothing more than the ability to use 'language' to pull the wool over the eyes of those who love anything the 'elitists' have to say, whether they understand it or not. Everybody else knew it immediately for exactly what it was and is: Flimflammery.
It is established fact that very young children have the ability and propensity to learn language at an advanced pace and many of them all at the same time and are not overwhelmed with the process. Aparently, the older we get, the less we are willing to undertake that exercise.
However, we are all capable of it.

Chomsky and Ward Churchill have something in common: They are both frauds.

Roger that, Fridge Logic. Yet logic is an important epistemological
tool too, just as the guts (if you'll pardon the visceral metaphor) of
it all are neurological, the how of it all is informatic, and the why of
it all is irrelevant.

Chomsky is a guy who had a good idea once and parlayed it into a whole career. Today's sour grapes announcement signifies that career is pretty much over.

It will be interesting to see what comes out of the neurology of speech. I suspect it will end up being a -lot- more flexible than some of the neuro-linguistic types have been giving it credit for.

Well Vit, we could be doing this if the backend was in Scheme. I personally wouldn't recommend it though as we would all have to translate. Everyone would be writing with a Lisp.

The neurology of speech acknowledges that language is a logical framework of basic patterns and relations.

As Vitruvius pointed out - logic and mathematics are important in linguistics; and after all, logic and mathematics are entwined. Which is 'first' or most basic - that's been a constant question.

And, as Vitruvius also pointed out - the how is informatic and the why..is irrelevant. Great point.

As for the fiefdoms that emerge in academia - that's basic to the field. What happens is that a professor will come up with a basic theory..then, graduate students come to work with him. Then, the financial and political powers step in.

The govt and university administration set the department up as a 'Funded Research Centre'. This means that the faculty in that department, and the students, are funded if and only if, they are studying in that Research Centre. Lose the students - and you lose your research funds, your offices, your staff..the centre..everything.

What happens then, is decay, fights between fiefdoms..no new ideas can emerge as the funding is jealously held by only one department and there's not enough to set up another Research Centre with a different focus.

Happens in every university..

Not just universities, ET: fiefdoms are a dime a dozen in every field (one need only look at the blogosphere to see endless examples of the phenomenon); your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to avoid them (and this tape will self-destruct in 10 seconds ;-)

While I'm here, I should like to also note that I think that you're pre-judging it, Lance. I wrote hundreds of thousands of lines of Scheme in the early '90s, and compared to Perl: well, each has its strengths and its weaknesses. Perl 5 still can't do continuations & probably never will (though thank god it does closures).

That said, we are I think getting a little off topic, and I've said what I wanted to, so I wish y'all a fond adieu. Thanks Kate, as always, for this opportunity, and g'night, folks, it has been, as always, a slice.

Don't be so defensive, Vit. I wasn't slagging or pre-judging anything. I was making a pun on the history of Scheme and the current focus of the conversation...a linguist.

I've played the OS wars, the language wars, the editor wars, they bore me. I've had to learn way too many different things that I once swore were useless compared to 'x' that I've learned for each job there is a proper tool. The trick is to figure out what tool.

Sorry I came across as so defensive, Lance. I couldn't be in a jollier space than I am right now. It was rather my intent to support both the expressiveness of the linguistic Wall-ian sigil approach and the structural soliditude of the classic Church-ian lambda approach, which I first referred to in my 6:31 above. Again, sorry I wasn't more clear 'bout that.

My head hurts now from trying to keep up with this discusion. Can we talk about tractors now?

I have one question. Why is that there are so many Jewish elitists, professors, directors, producers, etc. that are leftist, commies, etc.... I spoke with an elderly Jewishman on a bus in Las Vegas and we talked about Israel, Muslims, etc. and all the hate and violence the Israeli have directed towards them. He was an ex-soldier and we ended our conversation that when the day comes, I for one will be standing with the Israelis.....but I sure as hell won,t be standing with the likes of Chomsky, Speilberg,etc.