Movable Type is terrific, but if Z wants some kind of real community in the weblogs, they should use Scoop, the software that Kuro5hin and Daily Kos use. No comments without being a member!
Regarding Chomsky's contributions to linguistics and related fields, I thought he was responsible for some basic results in automata theory as well--what type of automata will parse what sort of formal language. I understood his contributions were so basic, you couldn't have reliable parsers without them. It would be a wicked irony if all these wingnut coders were spamming the man who basically made their jobs possible....
As far as criticism of his linguistic work goes, its true that the old version of UG is gone, but its doubtful that the mouth breathers are capable of understanding the original theory, let alone the critique.
Curtiss
Dwayne Monroe:
> I think most of the attackers will eventually drop out
> leaving only the most dedicated trolls to keep up the
> fight. And even those folks, over time, will see
> their comments drowned out by real debate.
>
> The charges of "self hating Jew" and accusations
> Chomsky "blames America for everything" are typical
> and unsurprising. And, given the deep stupidity of
> many of the so-called 'war bloggers' (who've been
> deprived of a lot of thunder lately due to the 'long,
> hard slog' of Iraq and major Bush admin embarassments
> and need a target) it's not surprising some of these
> jackasses would do things like fill up as much space
> as possible with "jew" or just random text -- acts
> which are borderline insane (and not joking crazy but
> just crazy).
>
> Even so, I was surprised to read inept, know-nothing
> 'critiques' of Chomsky's linguistic work.
>
> The number of people who truly understand Chomsky's
> ideas in his primary field, well enough to
> intelligently dispute all or parts of it, is very
> small indeed. Yet this dosen't stop a fair number of
> the diehard Chomsky haters from simply declaring,
> based upon their hatred, the "idiocy" of generative
> grammar. One poster even claimed a "right wing
> linguist" had "debunked" Chomsky's work -- a funny and
> disturbingly thick-headed assertion for many reasons.