and my ample experience says the opposite. ultimately chomsky's making a claim to being a more important person who's experiences outweigh others. what kind of logic is that?
also, chompers? dewd? ever heard of selection bias? his sample is the listeners who go to the trouble to call in to talk radio?
if i went by the people who "call in" to my blog and the like, I'd think I was a fucking lucid genius ferchrisake. He apparently isn't listening to me who needs a box of toothpicks to get through a page. not because i don't get it, but because i just happened to learn of similar critiques from others first, so he's a snoozefest. or my partner who finds chompers a big mess of incomprehensible meandering. i bought him chomsky's stuff for christmas hoping that it was just me and everyone who was big on him was right. he's got a high school education, grew up in idaho, and was in the navy for 20 years. my dad? a high school drop out with a GED and a few courses in accounting at the local cc? chomsky is totally incomprehensible to him.
I don't know if they're ordinary, but they're literate and not tarnished by a college edumacation.
oh. sorry sorry. an N of 3 does not generalizable research make. neither do chomsky's claims. so, if he's so big on research, why doesn't he back up what he says with actual pointers to such data. there's not doubt that there is research somewhere on the topic. or would that be, uh, coming from the halls of academe where everything anyone ever pumped out is horseshit. but his work, of course. Why is it that every time I see him speaking to this issue, he seems to drop the love of logic and research -- the demands he places on the pomos?
not to mention the freakin' people out there who don't like chomsky. are they all highly educated folk, too? why leave those folks out of the mix -- if you're going to be honest about whether your lucidity is what is actually doing the trick?
accents. schmaccents.
>"Johnb made the point that 'plain language is not enough when the
>frame of reference is not available to the listener'; correct and
>important. But the right reaction is not to resort to obscure and
>needlessly complex verbiage and posturing about non-existent
>'theories.' Rather, it is to ask the listener to question the frame of
>reference that he/she is accepting, and to suggest alternatives that
>might be considered, all in plain language. I've never found that a
>problem when I speak to people lacking much or sometimes any formal
>education, though it's true that it tends to become harder as you move
>up the educational ladder, so that indoctrination is much deeper, and
>the self-selection for obedience that is a good part of elite
>education has taken its toll. Johnb says that outside of circles like
>this forum, 'to the rest of the country, he's incomprehensible' ('he'
>being me). That's absolutely counter to my rather ample experience,
>with all sorts of audiences. Rather, my experience is what I just
>described. The incomprehensibility roughly corresponds to the
>educational level. Take, say, talk radio. I'm on a fair amount, and
>it's usually pretty easy to guess from accents, etc., what kind of
>audience it is. I've repeatedly found that when the audience is mostly
>poor and less educated, I can skip lots of the background and 'frame
>of reference' issues because it's already obvious and taken for
>granted by everyone, and can proceed to matters that occupy all of us.
>With more educated audiences, that's much harder; it's necessary to
>disentangle lots of ideological constructions."
>
><http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/chomsky-on-postmodernism.html>
>___________________________________
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