@yianiris you are a troll. I, me personally, was not expecting that behaviour on Fediverse

@yianiris we are a collective of anthropologists. Look at our profile, what's your problem? I put I when it's what I think, and we if the whole bunch would say it.

@strypey perhaps you might read the article. It is not so much an attack on Chomsky's morals -- apart from the gaping hole of gender consciousness which isn't there with NC. It's an anthropological analysis of the complete paradox of a guy who could have lunch with the designer of the daisycutters dropped on Vietnam by B52s while going to campaign against the Vietnam invasion and the draft in the evening. That is one very extreme example of how capitalism and imperialism splits people into parts.

Knight has very little time for Chomsky's supposed 'science'. But NC had a woeful effect across the entirety of cognitive science for the whole of the second half of the 20th.C. It suited the US military-industrial machine to a) keep tabs on him by keeping him at work, and let him become this voice and b) fuck up materialist thinking.

Yes NC always insisted on free speech for eg Holocaust deniers. And a blank slate for child rapists once they'd served their time.

We are anthropologists with highly egalitarian hunter-gatherers and the issues are always about inequality and power. It's pretty astonishing that NC could behave as if he'd forgotten that.

@yianiris but the difference is Chomsky's supposed 'science' is actually up the wall. He was a huge but absolutely dire influence on cognitive science for the whole second half of the 20th.C. which had a bad bad impact, above all for materialists (we are marxist materialist anthros). Science stands up because it is collective not because it's guided by severe vested interest.

He was the first one to invent 'modularity' with a language module. He opened the gates for rubbish evolutionary psychology. We oppose that by understanding science in a social world. Chomsky completely rejected any social aspect in the investigation of language.

@LaNaehForaday I am very sorry to hear what happened to you (I have some serious family dysfunction too).

Of course, we do not justify it.

@MarciaW yes, that's very true. There is now very limited support on Universal Grammar, but NC was far more political than scientific in debate

@pvonhellermannn yes absolutely. Chris was entirely baffled by the question, why was Chomsky's linguistics effective mumbo-jumbo. There had to be an underlying reason.

Chris writes: 'Some... blamed his behaviour on a blindness... to gender issues and.. problems of sexual violence' referring to the horrible email on 'the hysteria that has developed about abuse of women'. And we remember the peculiar historic association, from the classical Greek, of women's wombs with the word 'hysteria'.

Chomsky's politics always lacked a sex/gender component and so does his thinking on the emergence of language. His Cartesian 2nd Cognitive Revolution in linguistics celebrated Mind over matter, with the body completely subsumed.

#sex #gender #violence #Chomsky #Epstein

Chris had to write this to work out what connected his science and his politics in complete contradiction. Only then could he start on his latest work on 'The Revolutionary Origins of Language' (Yale UP, due late 2026, with Jerome Lewis)

Here's a free download of Chris' excellent book:

https://z-lib.gl/book/4999344/4bdcce/decoding-chomsky-science-and-revolutionary-politics.html

@ArchaeoIain more and more contradictions

@ArchaeoIain interesting. The idea of a sybaritic Chomsky seems improbable, but perhaps he had a glimpse of it late in life thanks to 2nd wife Valeria?! He certainly got used to rubbing shoulders with those in power knowing they were war criminals.

Chomsky has had towering impact since the 50s on the cognitive revolution across the human sciences, far beyond linguistics, matching his extraordinary prominence as virtually the conscience of America. In 'Decoding Chomsky', Chris tried to work out what connected his science and his politics, with the Two Chomskys apparently 'not on speaking terms'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoding_Chomsky

Two or more generations of left activists have grown up reading Noam #Chomsky's fearless exposure of the US imperium. Many now feel shattered, duped, and bewildered by the revelations of the extent of his relationship with #Epstein. Chris Knight explains what lies behind this extraordinary paradox, the Two Chomskys

https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/02/06/the-chomsky-epstein-puzzle/