Chomsky hits a specific resonance for me. I'm disgusted with his activism for a similar reason related to arrogance vs humility.
I"ve always worked in speech and language, and I always respected Noam as a humble scientist. His pet theory is that the structure of language is a built-in part of our brains. This was always obviously correct, even with the knowledge available 100 years ago, and with recent MRI info it's even more obvious. Noam has fought off constant attacks from the tabula rasa behaviorists and meritocrats who insist that nothing is innate, everything can be shaped by the behaviorists. In these arguments Noam was always properly humble and objective, always ready to listen to opponents.
When he strayed outside his field, he became just plain STUPID. He defends the behaviorist side without seeming to realize it.
Interesting analogy, polistra. I had been a great admirer of Chomsky's up until the last few years. I have several of his books and he made some points, especially analyzing language used to deceive, that were eye-opening for me. For instance, pointing out there was only a definition of foreign terrorism (at that time) so the same actions couldn't lead to us being called terrorists. And I am, like you, a linguistics buff although not professionally.
His reaction of 'voluntary exile' of the unvaxxed shocked me. And then, when I analyzed this interview by Brand, all the other pieces were consistent, as you say, with that arrogance. I can't believe I didn't see it before. By the time he took money (and who knows what else) from Epstein, it didn't surprise me at all. Thanks for responding!
I'll reply to myself so it goes to Jonathan and Kathleen. It's an interesting question, isn't it? It feels very unlikely to me that he was always a puppet. As you say, Jonathan, his grasp of modern history was extraordinary. I remember wondering if it was linguistics that enabled him to keep so many damning details at his fingertips. His memory was prodigious!
And as you say, Kathleen, he had an incredible ability to analyze how propaganda worked. I know that he said he was only the spokesperson for the community of people who sent him facts. Was he like Malone, the funnel to gain credibility based on centralizing the work of others, only to poison it at the end?
His excuse for the payment in his bank account from Epstein was so feeble that we can't doubt he's a complicit agent now. But his views are also perfectly consistent with other liberal icons. I have a draft of an episode on Hersch and Thomas Frank called, "Listen, Liberal Icon" that makes that point. So maybe he's fooling himself too, and not just us. It would be a way of resolving his cognitive dissonance and manufacturing consent.
If they do have a control file on him - I suspect they do - it explains how the person who wrote Manufacturing Consent, ends up saying we "must literally starve the unvaxxed into submission." That is not a journey explained by intellectual evolution. That is a 180 degree, gun-to-your-head turn-about. I started to seriously doubt his independence when he dismissed 9/11 truthers.
Yes, I found his work on linguistics sensible (although I don't trust his motivation entirely); likewise his extensive and extraordinary grasp of modern history. It's limitation, (the latter) it seems to me, is that it seems to derive from study of newspapers, and while it benefits from not being susceptible to the usual "goldfish" memory span, he is limited by the belief that most of what is written is true - hence his orthodox view on 9/11 and the "pandemic".
Because of these 2 orthodox beliefs he is often regarded as having a "gatekeeper" role; but it seems equally likely to me that he simply does not understand limitation produced by the erroneous faith in his sources.
Iain McGilchrist mentions in The Matter with Things that language is not the primary matter of thinking, but movement (or imagined movement).
Chomsky could very well be correct about his own brain, which explains why he's so disconnected from reality as perhaps he primarily thinks in words (a defect in the right hemisphere leads to reliance on the left, which depends more on words and symbols)
"The cognitive deficits that accompany motor diseases may be an inalienable consequence of the close connexion between action and thought. I alluded in Chapter 12 to the well-known Hebbian formula in neuroscience that ‘what fires together wires together’ – that is to say, repeated use of a particular neuronal pathway causes structural changes which further facilitate its future use. Since we now have evidence that neurodegeneration may spread along the reinforced synaptic connexions created by this process, Bak has coined the phrase ‘what wires together dies together’.156
It seems clear, however, that the key difference is not a grammatical one – nouns versus verbs, as such – but an experiential one – in as much as nouns tend to suggest objects, and verbs tend to suggest action. The brain’s connexions between thought and motion are mediated through imagined experience, not through linguistic rules"
I’ve only scanned so far, but a book that blew my mind (I listened and did not read) is White Trash: the 400 year untold history of class in America. I recommend to everyone, not in a way to diminish racism, but to add to what we know about history and our society.
Yes! I talk about that book in one of these, How Whites Were Trashed, I think. That was an excellent book, I still have it on my shelf. Along with What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia: a retort to Hillbilly Elegy: https://www.amazon.com/What-Getting-Wrong-About-Appalachia/dp/0998904147. And Deer Hunting with Jesus, one of my all-time favs. I tried to get Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn to put it in their queue of books to review. It's great.
First discovered Joe Bageant on his blog around 2009, not too long before he died...a pure treasure of a human, and Deer Hunting and Rainbow Pie were something else.
For your musical database, here are a couple renditions of a 50+ y/o song that might make an anthem for some of us these days. The fade-with-strings at the end of the first doesn't work for me, but for someone who does't go much for pop arrangements, everything else on it does work...and the second one just plain works all the way through. How many requesting subscribers would we need to organize in order to get our esteemed sax duo to do a brass version? Would a Diva deign to overdub a vocal track?
Loved the second Darkness Darkness and the trippy B&W spazzy 60's video. Cumberland Blues is some blazing fast fretwork. Interesting use of a violin as a ?
Quite the contrast between cute barefoot girls in shorts and Joan Jett on Summertime Blues.
Oh and the alley behind my house is PawPaw Alley. Jus' sayin'.
Thanks for posting the Joe Bageant site. I had to stop and read this one on Lynndie England, remember her?: https://www.joebageant.org/2004/06/11/mash_note_for_t/. I knew at the time she came from near my hometown, although Joe calls Cumberland upscale because it has a Martin's grocery. Joe sums up the flag-waving class well as "Their families got here first and stole early. Their daddies stole land from farmers during the Depression and they made millions later selling it to Wal-Mart, the new medical center, and all those low wage non-union factories."
And Joe always manages to slip in some statistics with his quips.
I think it would be more kind to Chomsky to think his ideology is from dementia, although I don't dismiss that possibility. I have found, with others whose research was a turning point for me, that their views ossified over time. At one point they could be revolutionary but then they became fixed in that stance, so they became merely reactionary.
Was Chomsky set up by Epstein and others to take positions that would discredit his earlier work? That would indicate, to me, that there was something important in that early work that needed to be made impotent. Or maybe he reached the end of his cognitive ability to assimilate new information on his own, with all the adulation going to his head. I wonder.
If I were a target of the globalists I would feign senility. Look at Joe Biden! He is doing a terrific job of abstaining responsibility by appearing to be defective!
I could be mistaken, but I think Tim came to my DIY space in Chicago once, during a debate event. I had a conversation about guns with someone I'm pretty sure was him. This was early 2016, I don't think he was podcasting back then. But if it was him, although he struck me as a contrarian, he was pretty left leaning. And mentioned 'systemic racism' a few times during our conversation. This was Chicago and I was pretty left leaning myself. Of course, I now know that all the political two party framing is complete BS.
Thanks for expanding a bit on the 'balkanization' implication. It does feel like language can be interpreted in a reductionist way and this short hand vernacular leaves not so perfect impressions. It's all about perspective and framing. You ask anyone around those parts and they'll tell you the balkanization of Yugoslavia is the best thing that could have happened to that region. Too bad it took war to get there.
I love how many books you have and how you keep finding new nooks and corners in your lovely home to be your backdrop. I'm stealing that idea if I ever start filming monologues. I will have to clean and feng shui those areas before filming tho, so maybe not. As the kids say, #goals
The messaging around getting the jabs feels so insidious, especially in retrospect, because we now know how unsafe and ineffective they were. They weaponized people's empathy and rewarded their virtue signaling with digital likes.
Your kids are funny! Interesting about Tim. It was my impression that he flipflops. I remember watching a video of their huge mansion in the woods, where they could shoot deer and build skateboard ramps and have whole decks of video games. I don't know if it was at Deep Creek Lake but it's DC money that builds those fortresses. That was before I did any research on the Pedo-Sadist Cults but the woman who testified before Congress that she'd been groomed as a child sex slave there just haunted me.
Thanks for the kudos on moving around my house. It will give me the incentive to keep roaming, which is a good instigation to feng shui. Although you can hide a lot out of frame ;-)
And yes, it's been interesting to go back and watch those videos from 21-22. It feels important to remember how things were and how they felt. Thank you for watching this!
I was doing research on DID for a play and came across some interviews with adults who claim they had been groomed to split personalities and act as sex slaves and bait for elites. It made my skin crawl and there’s no way to chalk it off to them acting. Really quite chilling.
Absolutely true. In Appalachian Rage, I tell the story of running into my West Coast neighbors who happened to be riding the bike trail through my Appalachian town. It was during the 2016 election and they (academics both) scorned the Trump signs they saw everywhere as signs of hateful racists. They recounted how another academic from the neighboring college town called my hometown 'Scumberland' for Cumberland. But calling an entire town 'scum' didn't strike them as at all racist. Imagine that!
Trump at least pretends to like these people, unlike the shunner of deplorables. He saved his scorn for shithole counties. But I think that's another divisionary tactic.
Yes! The Gap Trail, I think it's called. It's a block away from my childhood home, which I've now completely revamped (unearthing many 'surprises' in that 100 yr old house) and turned into an AirBnB. It gave me a way of being close to my mom after my dad passed, and now gives me an excuse to go back. It is beautiful!
I live in a left-leaning CT town, where most pay attention to the never-ending ways one might offend someone else's feelings, 'sensitivity' to diversity is very much paid attention to (without of course asking some key questions about why and how all these things became a thing seemingly overnight) with the ONE exception of rural town white people. (particularly from the south) where it's just assumed they are uneducated, Trump supporters, bible readers. Here no 'sensitivity' about diversity - this group (as if its monolithic) is discussed with a roll of the eyes or a shake of the head. The hypocrisy is stunning. (Pointing that out doesn't make one popular.)
Chomsky hits a specific resonance for me. I'm disgusted with his activism for a similar reason related to arrogance vs humility.
I"ve always worked in speech and language, and I always respected Noam as a humble scientist. His pet theory is that the structure of language is a built-in part of our brains. This was always obviously correct, even with the knowledge available 100 years ago, and with recent MRI info it's even more obvious. Noam has fought off constant attacks from the tabula rasa behaviorists and meritocrats who insist that nothing is innate, everything can be shaped by the behaviorists. In these arguments Noam was always properly humble and objective, always ready to listen to opponents.
When he strayed outside his field, he became just plain STUPID. He defends the behaviorist side without seeming to realize it.
Interesting analogy, polistra. I had been a great admirer of Chomsky's up until the last few years. I have several of his books and he made some points, especially analyzing language used to deceive, that were eye-opening for me. For instance, pointing out there was only a definition of foreign terrorism (at that time) so the same actions couldn't lead to us being called terrorists. And I am, like you, a linguistics buff although not professionally.
His reaction of 'voluntary exile' of the unvaxxed shocked me. And then, when I analyzed this interview by Brand, all the other pieces were consistent, as you say, with that arrogance. I can't believe I didn't see it before. By the time he took money (and who knows what else) from Epstein, it didn't surprise me at all. Thanks for responding!
I'll reply to myself so it goes to Jonathan and Kathleen. It's an interesting question, isn't it? It feels very unlikely to me that he was always a puppet. As you say, Jonathan, his grasp of modern history was extraordinary. I remember wondering if it was linguistics that enabled him to keep so many damning details at his fingertips. His memory was prodigious!
And as you say, Kathleen, he had an incredible ability to analyze how propaganda worked. I know that he said he was only the spokesperson for the community of people who sent him facts. Was he like Malone, the funnel to gain credibility based on centralizing the work of others, only to poison it at the end?
His excuse for the payment in his bank account from Epstein was so feeble that we can't doubt he's a complicit agent now. But his views are also perfectly consistent with other liberal icons. I have a draft of an episode on Hersch and Thomas Frank called, "Listen, Liberal Icon" that makes that point. So maybe he's fooling himself too, and not just us. It would be a way of resolving his cognitive dissonance and manufacturing consent.
If they do have a control file on him - I suspect they do - it explains how the person who wrote Manufacturing Consent, ends up saying we "must literally starve the unvaxxed into submission." That is not a journey explained by intellectual evolution. That is a 180 degree, gun-to-your-head turn-about. I started to seriously doubt his independence when he dismissed 9/11 truthers.
Yes, I found his work on linguistics sensible (although I don't trust his motivation entirely); likewise his extensive and extraordinary grasp of modern history. It's limitation, (the latter) it seems to me, is that it seems to derive from study of newspapers, and while it benefits from not being susceptible to the usual "goldfish" memory span, he is limited by the belief that most of what is written is true - hence his orthodox view on 9/11 and the "pandemic".
Because of these 2 orthodox beliefs he is often regarded as having a "gatekeeper" role; but it seems equally likely to me that he simply does not understand limitation produced by the erroneous faith in his sources.
But WhatDoINo?! ;-)
Iain McGilchrist mentions in The Matter with Things that language is not the primary matter of thinking, but movement (or imagined movement).
Chomsky could very well be correct about his own brain, which explains why he's so disconnected from reality as perhaps he primarily thinks in words (a defect in the right hemisphere leads to reliance on the left, which depends more on words and symbols)
"The cognitive deficits that accompany motor diseases may be an inalienable consequence of the close connexion between action and thought. I alluded in Chapter 12 to the well-known Hebbian formula in neuroscience that ‘what fires together wires together’ – that is to say, repeated use of a particular neuronal pathway causes structural changes which further facilitate its future use. Since we now have evidence that neurodegeneration may spread along the reinforced synaptic connexions created by this process, Bak has coined the phrase ‘what wires together dies together’.156
It seems clear, however, that the key difference is not a grammatical one – nouns versus verbs, as such – but an experiential one – in as much as nouns tend to suggest objects, and verbs tend to suggest action. The brain’s connexions between thought and motion are mediated through imagined experience, not through linguistic rules"
I’ve only scanned so far, but a book that blew my mind (I listened and did not read) is White Trash: the 400 year untold history of class in America. I recommend to everyone, not in a way to diminish racism, but to add to what we know about history and our society.
Yes! I talk about that book in one of these, How Whites Were Trashed, I think. That was an excellent book, I still have it on my shelf. Along with What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia: a retort to Hillbilly Elegy: https://www.amazon.com/What-Getting-Wrong-About-Appalachia/dp/0998904147. And Deer Hunting with Jesus, one of my all-time favs. I tried to get Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn to put it in their queue of books to review. It's great.
First discovered Joe Bageant on his blog around 2009, not too long before he died...a pure treasure of a human, and Deer Hunting and Rainbow Pie were something else.
Lots of his writing is still online at joebageant.org
.
For your musical database, here are a couple renditions of a 50+ y/o song that might make an anthem for some of us these days. The fade-with-strings at the end of the first doesn't work for me, but for someone who does't go much for pop arrangements, everything else on it does work...and the second one just plain works all the way through. How many requesting subscribers would we need to organize in order to get our esteemed sax duo to do a brass version? Would a Diva deign to overdub a vocal track?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRKv-3_bfVo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Fr9_moc-1M
.
Hometown blues for you: (I looked, but Della Mae doesn't cover this one...yet)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5kVrsXKVBs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1bx3Rvhc5I&t=1788s (audio only...cue to 28:37)
.
Optional covers for the gals raisin' a fuss up in the holler:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPu7LSABsbk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFcNF8W97nI
.
.
Papaw, back in the day, was sippin' shine in a Mason jar a symbolic FU to the Illuminati?
Maybe not before, child...but it sure as hell is now!
(Grandpa sports a red hat that says: Make America Grain Again)
Cheers,
Cousin Vinny
Loved the second Darkness Darkness and the trippy B&W spazzy 60's video. Cumberland Blues is some blazing fast fretwork. Interesting use of a violin as a ?
Quite the contrast between cute barefoot girls in shorts and Joan Jett on Summertime Blues.
Oh and the alley behind my house is PawPaw Alley. Jus' sayin'.
We knew my Mom's parents in Owensboro, KY as Mamaw & Papaw.
More fretwork & fiddlin' on CB here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhAjG_X8Rd4
Xtreme fiddlin'... Watch closely at 8:00: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1BILktmFZ4
Flintstones riff redux toward the end: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ICDIb9b4Kw
Thanks for posting the Joe Bageant site. I had to stop and read this one on Lynndie England, remember her?: https://www.joebageant.org/2004/06/11/mash_note_for_t/. I knew at the time she came from near my hometown, although Joe calls Cumberland upscale because it has a Martin's grocery. Joe sums up the flag-waving class well as "Their families got here first and stole early. Their daddies stole land from farmers during the Depression and they made millions later selling it to Wal-Mart, the new medical center, and all those low wage non-union factories."
And Joe always manages to slip in some statistics with his quips.
Now on to the music!
You and your commenters are so kind about Chomsky! I am inclined to think the guy has gone senile.
I think it would be more kind to Chomsky to think his ideology is from dementia, although I don't dismiss that possibility. I have found, with others whose research was a turning point for me, that their views ossified over time. At one point they could be revolutionary but then they became fixed in that stance, so they became merely reactionary.
Was Chomsky set up by Epstein and others to take positions that would discredit his earlier work? That would indicate, to me, that there was something important in that early work that needed to be made impotent. Or maybe he reached the end of his cognitive ability to assimilate new information on his own, with all the adulation going to his head. I wonder.
If I were a target of the globalists I would feign senility. Look at Joe Biden! He is doing a terrific job of abstaining responsibility by appearing to be defective!
The rare and pure joy of re-organising and re-configuring our creative works!
I could be mistaken, but I think Tim came to my DIY space in Chicago once, during a debate event. I had a conversation about guns with someone I'm pretty sure was him. This was early 2016, I don't think he was podcasting back then. But if it was him, although he struck me as a contrarian, he was pretty left leaning. And mentioned 'systemic racism' a few times during our conversation. This was Chicago and I was pretty left leaning myself. Of course, I now know that all the political two party framing is complete BS.
Thanks for expanding a bit on the 'balkanization' implication. It does feel like language can be interpreted in a reductionist way and this short hand vernacular leaves not so perfect impressions. It's all about perspective and framing. You ask anyone around those parts and they'll tell you the balkanization of Yugoslavia is the best thing that could have happened to that region. Too bad it took war to get there.
I love how many books you have and how you keep finding new nooks and corners in your lovely home to be your backdrop. I'm stealing that idea if I ever start filming monologues. I will have to clean and feng shui those areas before filming tho, so maybe not. As the kids say, #goals
The messaging around getting the jabs feels so insidious, especially in retrospect, because we now know how unsafe and ineffective they were. They weaponized people's empathy and rewarded their virtue signaling with digital likes.
Your kids are funny! Interesting about Tim. It was my impression that he flipflops. I remember watching a video of their huge mansion in the woods, where they could shoot deer and build skateboard ramps and have whole decks of video games. I don't know if it was at Deep Creek Lake but it's DC money that builds those fortresses. That was before I did any research on the Pedo-Sadist Cults but the woman who testified before Congress that she'd been groomed as a child sex slave there just haunted me.
Thanks for the kudos on moving around my house. It will give me the incentive to keep roaming, which is a good instigation to feng shui. Although you can hide a lot out of frame ;-)
And yes, it's been interesting to go back and watch those videos from 21-22. It feels important to remember how things were and how they felt. Thank you for watching this!
I was doing research on DID for a play and came across some interviews with adults who claim they had been groomed to split personalities and act as sex slaves and bait for elites. It made my skin crawl and there’s no way to chalk it off to them acting. Really quite chilling.
Yea, you can hide a lot out of frame. 😂
That's very interesting about split personalities. The psycho-sadistic research that's been done is sickening. What is DID?
Looking forward to your interview with Gabe and Liam if I can figure out the tech ;-)
DID= Dissociative Identity Disorder (what used to be called multiple personality disorder)
Thanks for taking the time, Tereza. ❤️
Absolutely true. In Appalachian Rage, I tell the story of running into my West Coast neighbors who happened to be riding the bike trail through my Appalachian town. It was during the 2016 election and they (academics both) scorned the Trump signs they saw everywhere as signs of hateful racists. They recounted how another academic from the neighboring college town called my hometown 'Scumberland' for Cumberland. But calling an entire town 'scum' didn't strike them as at all racist. Imagine that!
Trump at least pretends to like these people, unlike the shunner of deplorables. He saved his scorn for shithole counties. But I think that's another divisionary tactic.
Yes! The Gap Trail, I think it's called. It's a block away from my childhood home, which I've now completely revamped (unearthing many 'surprises' in that 100 yr old house) and turned into an AirBnB. It gave me a way of being close to my mom after my dad passed, and now gives me an excuse to go back. It is beautiful!
💯
I live in a left-leaning CT town, where most pay attention to the never-ending ways one might offend someone else's feelings, 'sensitivity' to diversity is very much paid attention to (without of course asking some key questions about why and how all these things became a thing seemingly overnight) with the ONE exception of rural town white people. (particularly from the south) where it's just assumed they are uneducated, Trump supporters, bible readers. Here no 'sensitivity' about diversity - this group (as if its monolithic) is discussed with a roll of the eyes or a shake of the head. The hypocrisy is stunning. (Pointing that out doesn't make one popular.)
This needs a 'love' button. And the 'overnight' aspect is quite curious, eh?
Always a 'tell' in my mind.