Originally posted by AdRiaN
I actually ended up watching the interview. Chomsky did a good job of selling his book, which I realize was the entire point of appearing on Hot Type, but I was honestly expecting a little more sophisticated rhetoric from him.
Complaining about being asked to remove his glasses for a photoshoot? Give me a break!
And his statement that 3,000 people being killed in Chile is the "equivalent" of 60,000 people being killed in the United States was ridiculous (errrr, it made me want to barrel over with laughter -- to borrow one of his jingles from the interview).
I generally have a certain degree of respect for Chomsky because at least he's an intellectual despite my disagreement. But he seems to really dumb-down his rhetoric sometimes, like last night.
I'll agree wtih you here...somewhat. I think he did in fact dumb down the conversation last night. You have to grant him the fact that he covered a lot of different subject matter, and if you want to really criticize him for dumbing down, one would first have to read his book, then make that determination. (Although, even his critics rarely suggest that Chomsky "dumbs things down").
However, his quip about Chile was interesting. We're only talking about proportional scale, right? Now, I'm not sure exactly what the population size was in Chile at the time, but I take it to mean that it was about 1/20 of the U.S. population. So we're talking about scale: if there were about 250,000,000 in America, and 12, 500, 000 in Chile, then 3000 in Chile is proportionally equivalent to 60,000 in the United States.
The numbers aren't really important anyway, they were meant to exemplify (simplifiy) his discussion a bit....it's the "drama" that Ditto might be talking about.
