I know it's fun to make fun of Sam Harris here and he is wrong about a lot of things, but can we at least give him credit for putting Chomsky in his place and showing the public what an establishment charlatan hack he is?
>>7987389
I hear Harris seriously misunderstood and didn't read Chomsky and assumed what he was saying. The whole thing made Harris look ridiculous.
>>7987409
I was about to say exactly this. When I read their exchange I got the very strong impression that Harris had absolutely no idea what he was talking about, that this wasn't even his field and he had no worthwhile knowledge on the subject.
I feel like Chomsky could have said as much to him, but since ol' Noam is a pretty nice dude he let him down gently.
This actually makes me want to see Sam Harris engage Zizek. That would be a spectacular shitshow.
>>7987417
I don't think we'd learn anything, but it would hilarious to watch those guys clash.
>>7987417
Chomsky couldn't have said that because he was speaking out of his field too. Chomsky is a professor in linguistics and his views on any other subject matters should be disregarded.
>>7987389
No, because most commentators agreed that Harris embarassed himself by not having read most of Chomsky's relevant work. Regardless of who you think was right in that exchange, he definitely didn't publically embarass Chomsky.
>>7987431
Pretty sure he could have gotten a professorship in, e.g., an IR or polisci department if he wanted to, given his numerous books on the subjects and his obviously thorough knowledge of those fields. Manufacturing Consent alone has been cited thousands more times than all the citations put together of most specialists.
Of course, neither of these is his main field, which is linguistics. But that's irrelevant, since he knows as much about them as most people whose main fields they are. The same cannot be said of Harris, clearly.
"xD" - Sam Harris
