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offsite link North Korea Increases Aid to Russia, Mos... Tue Nov 19, 2024 12:29 | Marko Marjanovi?

offsite link Trump Assembles a War Cabinet Sat Nov 16, 2024 10:29 | Marko Marjanovi?

offsite link Slavgrinder Ramps Up Into Overdrive Tue Nov 12, 2024 10:29 | Marko Marjanovi?

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offsite link The Ed Miliband Phenomenon ? What Makes ?Britain?s Most Dangerous Man? Tick? Fri Nov 29, 2024 09:00 | Tilak Doshi
With his zeal for impoverishing Britain and his imperviousness to inconvenient facts, Ed Miliband is Britain's most dangerous man, says Tilak Doshi. What makes fanatics like him tick?
The post The Ed Miliband Phenomenon ? What Makes ‘Britain?s Most Dangerous Man’ Tick? appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

offsite link In Episode 21 of the Sceptic: David Frost on Allison Pearson, Starmerism and Kemi Badenoch, and Nick... Fri Nov 29, 2024 07:00 | Richard Eldred
In Episode 21 of the Sceptic: David Frost on Allison Pearson and free speech, the meaning of Starmerism and Kemi Badenoch, and Nick Dixon on whether Trump will put woke away.
The post In Episode 21 of the Sceptic: David Frost on Allison Pearson, Starmerism and Kemi Badenoch, and Nick Dixon on Whether Trump Will Put Woke Away appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

offsite link News Round-Up Fri Nov 29, 2024 01:17 | Richard Eldred
A summary of the most interesting stories in the past 24 hours that challenge the prevailing orthodoxy about the ?climate emergency?, public health ?crises? and the supposed moral defects of Western civilisation.
The post News Round-Up appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

offsite link Only Psychological Therapy Could Cure Long Covid, Major BMJ Study Finds Thu Nov 28, 2024 19:00 | Will Jones
Psychological therapy may be the only treatment to successfully cure lingering 'Long Covid' symptoms, landmark new research in the BMJ has suggested.
The post Only Psychological Therapy Could Cure Long Covid, Major BMJ Study Finds appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

offsite link Backlash as Cows Given Synthetic Additive in Feed to Hit Net Zero Thu Nov 28, 2024 17:00 | Will Jones
Europe's biggest dairy company Arla is facing a backlash after giving cows Bovaer, a synthetic additive to their feed in an?attempt to cut their methane emissions as part of the Net Zero drive.
The post Backlash as Cows Given Synthetic Additive in Feed to Hit Net Zero appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

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Voltaire Network
Voltaire, international edition

offsite link Russia Prepares to Respond to the Armageddon Wanted by the Biden Administration ... Tue Nov 26, 2024 06:56 | en

offsite link Voltaire, International Newsletter N?109 Fri Nov 22, 2024 14:00 | en

offsite link Joe Biden and Keir Starmer authorize NATO to guide ATACMS and Storm Shadows mis... Fri Nov 22, 2024 13:41 | en

offsite link Donald Trump, an Andrew Jackson 2.0? , by Thierry Meyssan Tue Nov 19, 2024 06:59 | en

offsite link Voltaire, International Newsletter N?108 Sat Nov 16, 2024 07:06 | en

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Chomsky Reconsidered

category international | miscellaneous | other press author Friday February 04, 2011 18:44author by Chris Knight - Radical Anthropology Group Report this post to the editors

Chris Knight of the Radical Anthropology Group continues his examination of Chomsky's life and work. In particular he analyses an early work by Chomsky: Cartesian linguistics. He also looks at some sources Chomsky tapped for funding in his early days. Full text at link.

In 1966, Noam Chomsky (pictured) published his Cartesian linguistics. The book was a survey of rationalist conceptions of language and mind, focusing heavily on the French mathematician and philosopher, Réné Descartes (1596-1650). In his early years, Chomsky had been working within the structuralist tradition of Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, Leonard Bloomfield and his own teacher, Zellig Harris. Chomsky wrote Cartesian linguistics in order to signal to the world his change of mind. His distinctively 'Cartesian' approach, he now clarified, was a rebellion against the entire 20th century tradition of structural linguistics. ...

A brief round-up of Chomsky's most celebrated ideas will confirm that his point of departure is invariably the soul, with the corollary that this strange entity, being perfect, is autonomous with respect to man's intrinsically imperfect body.

Take Chomsky's admission that, superficially, language does not look perfect at all: "One massive case," he notes, "is the phonological system: the whole phonological system looks like a huge imperfection; it has every bad property you can think of."[34] Phonology makes languages sound different. This is obviously anomalous: "strong minimalism", after all, would predict just one language spoken by everyone. Does this mean that the theory is falsified by the data? Not at all, claims Chomsky. Humans really do speak just one common language. Yes, he admits, they sound different. Variations exist in choice of sounds and also in arbitrary sound-meaning associations. "These," he says, "are straightforward and need not detain us."
...

Related Link: http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004261
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