Tim Blair

"The ends justify the means?"

Cool. I believe even Chomsky has said that Saddam was a bad man. I guess he thinks the war was justified.

In fact, I think it would be good to have Chomsky's (and Peter Singer's) ridiculous ideas defeated. So he would agree that it's okay to...

I assume the philosopher's name was Bruce.

Ah yes, Bruce -- He's particularly missed,
A lovely little thinker,
But a bugger when he's pissed.

The first joke I ever heard from anyone I ever met at MIT (through the MIT Science Fiction Society) was "Noam Chomsky is a cunning linguist." I am embarasssed to admit that I did not immediately get the pun.
Chompsky was and is at MIT, but MIT is only a mile or so down the street from Harvard (two MBTA subway stops in fact)and I suspect he fought lots of his battles there too.

"Oh Kent, statistics can be used to prove anything...seventy-five percent of people know that."

Homer Simpson

So let me get this straight. Some random person on a random weblog writes that he had dinner with an anonymous australian philosopher, who said (over beers) that back in the sixties at Harvard (even though he was at MIT) Chomsky used to make up whatever facts he required.

Uh-huh.

I agree, Steve. This would be much more believable if it had been written by a nationally-known journalist at a major metropolitan newspaper.

someone once told me that chomsky also likes to dress as a woman in private. i dont know if it's true or not but you heard it here first...

> someone once told me that chomsky also likes to dress as a woman in private.

I heard that Chomskey dressed as a woman pirate.

If you want evidence Chomsky's a liar, simple go to Brad DeLong's website for a set of links

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/

Chomsky: 'In the early 1990s, primarily for cynical great power reasons, the U.S. selected Bosnian Muslims as their Balkan clients'.

What a loon.

If you want evidence Chomsky's a liar, simple go to Brad DeLong's website for a set of links

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Politics/chomsky.html

Chomsky: 'In the early 1990s, primarily for cynical great power reasons, the U.S. selected Bosnian Muslims as their Balkan clients'.

What a loon.

I heard that Chomsky dresses up as a woman's privates...

Actually, Chomsky dresses up as woman corporals.

This is hardly a secret. In the hardcover edition of "American Powe and the New Mandarins" he uses a speech by Truman to show, if I recall correctly, that Truman had publicly stated that the primary foreign policy concern of the U.S. had to be business expansion.

Robert James Maddox devoted a chapter to Chomsky in "The New Left and the Origins of the Cold war." He showed that Truman in fact had made a speech on the day Chomsky cited him, but had in fact said precisely the opposite. I don't recall if the paperback edition corrected the quotation or simply dropped it.

This didn't harm Chomsky's reputation. I guess proving that Old Joe Stalin was really put upon by the nasty Truman was more important that such bourgeois concerns as "facts" and "accuracy."