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A language is not just words. It's a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It's all embodied in a language.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
Anthropologist
Computer Scientist
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Human Rights Activist
Linguist
Media Critic
Opinion Journalist
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East Oak Lane
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Avram Noam Chomsky
A. Noam Chomsky
Chomsky
Tradition
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Education is not just you learn how a mosquito flies in the rain, but you learn how to be creative and why it's exciting to learn things and create things and make up new things.
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Our current prison state has the dual effect of getting rid of a superfluous population of basically unskilled workers (with a close race-class correlation), and also demonizing them... The drug war is basically for this - It has nothing to do with drugs, but it has plenty to do with criminalizing an unwanted population and scaring everybody else.
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It's roughly the case that if systems become too complex to study in sufficient depth, physics hands them over to chemistry, then to biology, then experimental psychology, and finally on to history. Roughly. These are tendencies, and they tend to distinguish roughly between hard and soft sciences.
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There are questions as to whether it should even exist. Who should corporations be responsive to, the management of a corporation? Theoretically they are responsive to the shareholders, but I why not to the so - called stakeholders, the work force and the community? Nothing in economic theory opposes that. Those are social and political decisions.
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It is one thing for the institution to offer space for serious engagement, in thought and action, and to encourage free and independent use of such opportunities it is something else for the university to become engaged as an institution, beyond a fairly narrow range where true consensus exists, and even that raises questions.
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The Iraq War is the first war in history, in which there were huge demonstrations before the war was launched, not beginning five years later and then being broken up. All of these are changes, and the people who are writing in journals today lived through these changes.
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They [unions] used straight Marxist rhetoric [in 1930s] - just the values were changed.
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You have to love that government, but hate the government that might work in your interest and that you could control. That's an interesting propaganda task, but it's been carried out very well.
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When you read about the end of the Soviet Union, it's always about the death of socialism. They never say the death of democracy. But it makes about the same sense.
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Governments don't control people like they used to.
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You can go into the Library of Congress and find information on just about anything, but that doesn't do you much good unless you know what you are looking for.
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U.S. has no feudal background, so institutions that remained in place in Europe did not remain in place here.
Noam Chomsky
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It's perfectly obvious that there is some genetic factor that distinguishes humans from other animals and that it is language-specific. The theory of that genetic component, whatever it turns out to be, is what is called universal grammar.
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It makes sense for societies to make education compulsory for children. Children are vulnerable. They can't make decisions. But the decisions can't all be left in the hands of the parents. They can be irresponsible too.
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The actual consequences of Plan Colombia are to devastate peasant communities, which have been driven to drug production. These peasants have no particular desire to grow coca, but their other means of livelihood have been wiped out.
Noam Chomsky
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The threat is that the public will know what the government is up to. Any system of power is going to want to keep free from public surveillance, that's natural. Its shouldn't be but, its very natural.
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The similarity is that concentration of capital influences virtually everything that goes on. It influences the way the media functions, it very powerfully influences how the government works and it of course influences corporate sector elements, like say how Google or Amazon present materials that reach the public.
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I haven't seen any claim that Piraha lacks recursion, that is, that there are a finite number of sentences or sentence frames. If that's so, it would mean that the speakers of this language aren't making use of a capacity that they surely have, a normal situation plenty of people throughout history would drown if they fall into water.
Noam Chomsky
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Technology can also be used so that private individuals will have access to the way centralized decisions are being made.
Noam Chomsky
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It's very hard to look in the mirror. We all know this. It's much easier to have illusions about yourself. And in particular, when you think, well, I'm going to believe what I like, but I'll say what the powerful want, you do that over time, and you believe what you say.
Noam Chomsky