eric> and women I uncover, I hope you can let it pass. To those that defend
eric> Noam on this issue (that he did *nothing* wrong), can you point me to
eric> something that you think qualifies as a mistake by Noam?
I don't defend Chomsky on this point, though I have tried to represent to others what I take his position to be. (There is a point in Manufacturing Consent where he says (rough paraphrase) "we lose our humanity if we are even willing to enter the arena of debate with those who seek to deny or underplay Nazi crimes." It's hard to make him an antisemite when he says stuff like that.) And I host the second biggest archive of his stuff on the Web (http://monkeyfist.com/ChomskyArchive), so I guess I'm a supporter of his work in at least an indirect sense. That being said...
For my two cents, his mistake lies in being a free speech absolutist to begin with. While I've learned a lot from him, and agree with a good deal of his work, I'm routinely disappointed every time I bump into his free speech absolutism, especially since I've still yet to found a *nuanced* defense or presentation of it. Whatever else may be true of free speech absolutism, it strikes me as a difficult and complex issue, worth at least some trouble to unpack it in detail. Especially when, as Chomsky does, one appeals to it so often.
He can be oddly uninformed and uninforming -- he often gives the impression that the questions themselves *bother* him -- when asked questions about what are often called identity politics. This may be less a conceptual or factual mistake and more about his level of comfort with certains kinds of analysis. I'm only interested in this seeming discomfort, however, insofar as it follows from his public beliefs, and not if it's just a quirk of his personality.
In a general sense, I think he often too loosely identifies "what Washington wanted to happen" with what it says in some, perhaps obscure and unheeded, planning document. Some of those moves make me nervous and seem careless. But I'm not particularly well-suited to say much more about this.
He tends toward a kind of odd scientism that's hard to reconcile with some of the things I believe about philosophy of science, the nature of rationality, and so on. And I think he unhelpfully dismisses interesting work in the social sciences with his oft-repeated refrain of "we don't know anything about foo or bar" -- sure, if "know" can only mean what it means in physics, but why on earth would anyone believe *that*?
On a personal note, he and his wife are apparently some of the warmest and most welcoming people one could hope to know. A friend of a friend bought an old Eames (I think...) chair from the Chomsky's two or so years ago. He's a furniture dealer in MA and answered an ad they'd put in a local 'green pages' type newspaper. He was shocked when he realized it was Chomsky and his wife who were selling the chair. When he went to buy it from them, they insisted he sit and talk with them about himself, his business, the world. He said they were amazingly gracious. Chomsky got up a few times to go into his office and do some work during the visit.
The chair had a bit of notoriety in Dallas leftist circles... I used to enjoy sitting in it during local meetings, trying -- very unscientifically, of course! -- to soak up a bit of his courage, tenacity, and decency.
Kendall Clark