I have so much to say about the smear campaign targeting Noam Chomsky, that picked up steam in late 2025, but progress is slow in publishing it all, because there is so much wrongdoing that it stuns me into depression every time I look at the brain rot of it all. In the mean time, please read this recent piece by Michael Albert, if you’d like to know my core opinions on the matter.
A friend of mine used to be a counseling instructor, and she once had a student that was very resistant to the approaches that she was teaching, and this student believed it was all overcomplicating the simpler solution found in the Christian emphasis on forgiveness. To the non-Christian, this single-word solution for problems feels like a bit of a frustrating, incomplete, philosophy of anything, but sometimes you do have to admit that the whole point of modern restorative justice is an elaborate effort in forgiveness. But even if “forgiveness” was self-explanatory, it could still not regulate the potential use of itself as a pathological, subjective, moral license. So, forgiveness has its limits, in spite of much to recommend it, like the South African process.
Credit to Erika Jordan for making me think about it today. https://vt.tiktok.com/ZSaAY1bKB/
I was recently overgeneralizing to a friend about the overall value I find in a lot of brain imaging research, and I just now had a moment to privately dance to music in a way that made me want to clarify what was I saying. A specific example of the problem would be the false positives in that dead fish fmri study. But that example is just to say there are real statistical problems when “rigourous” brain imaging is only connected to remedial cognitive science. The subsymbolic layer of thought is a blind spot for a lot of neuroscientists in my experience.
Of course there is lots of good brain imaging research. And certainly you don’t need a bleeding edge cognitive model of the data just to reduce the uncertainty of any leading systemic detections that might be discovered in localized brain regions. Like using Bayesian priors based on meta analysis of a literature, to say this or that brain region is associated with this or that function. Yes, that’s true. But even at this level you bring unmodeled priors to the table about what you’re trying to find with the research questions you’re asking. For example, doing instinguishable, though interesting, basic research, while a genocide in the Middle East conducted by our “ally” Israel, threatens to engulf the world in mass despotism that will certainly nullify the value of this interesting research. Almost as if it’s time for those concerned to revisit Chomsky1967 about the responsibility of intellectuals.
This is the song I was dancing to:
And Chomsky1967 spoon fed to you:
From the game Campaign:
https://github.com/jordanbCS/Campaign
“presidential Parkinson’s – controlled power vacuum resets all bidding candidates to rolling 2 or less.”
I’m pretty sick of dystopian sci-fi at the moment, but this movie always seemed like a pretty accurate account of modern politics in the “west”, and probably most everywhere. Would be great if they would release a Volume 2.
Shout out to Michael Pacitti at Art Deco world for putting me on to this track. He made a very cool art deco car slideshow set to this song and it’s on his YouTube channel if you want to see it. Music: Mesmerized P2 (East Cafe’s Enchanted Mix) · CJ Peeton · East Cafe
PDF of this, for closer inspection.
