Fierce anti-government anarchist Noam Chomsky in scathing attack on “postmodernist intellectuals”

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A literati roundup: Noam Chomsky to Postmoderns: Over-Inflated “Polysyllabic Truisms”

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Noam Chomsky Calls Postmodern Critiques of Science Over-Inflated “Polysyllabic Truisms”

To the delight and satisfaction of hundreds of our readers, we recently featured an interview in which Noam Chomsky slams postmodernist intellectuals like Slavoj Zizek and Jacques Lacan as “charlatans” and posers. The turn against postmodernism has been long in coming, a backlash the political right has made theater of for years, but that thinkers on the political left, like anarchist Chomsky, Marxist Vivek Chibber, and self-described “old leftist” Alan Sokal have pursued with just as much vigor (and more rigor). In the interview clip above, Chomsky makes a blanket critique of what the interviewer calls the “left criticism of science” as imperialist, racist, sexist, etc. His answers shed quite a bit of light on what Chomsky perceives as the political ramifications of postmodern thought as well as the origins of the discourse.

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The Science of Familiar Strangers: Society’s Hidden Social Network

The familiar strangers we see everyday on the bus and in the supermarket form an important hidden network at the heart of society, according to the first city-wide study of these passive links