I don’t have a strong opinion on Thunberg herself, but no, truths aren’t always in the middle. Thiel is clearly a complete fruitcake, so it does not make sense to triangulate based on any position that he holds.
Oh completely. I think you missed my point. Divisive narratives are almost entirely always wrong. The truth generally sits way away from the fruitcakes somewhere in the middle.
The problem these days is we give fruitcakes a stage. Or they buy one.
Right, but if you are using Thiel as a point of reference, you’re going to find a midpoint between sanity and insanity, which isn’t the truth. Say what you will about Thunberg, but she is not insane in the way that Thiel is.
She's not exactly what or who she purports to be. Definitely not the antichrist however. But if we want to fix this shithole of a planet we should stop listening to both of them.
Again, you're suggesting an equivalence between someone who has strong views and someone who's simply disconnected from reality. Thunberg is right to be concerned about the environment. You could argue that she's too concerned (maybe). Thiel is not right to be worried about the antichrist and Armageddon.
We don't need to find some kind of mythical middle ground between people who are too worried about the antichrist and people who aren't sufficiently worried about the antichrist. Rather, we should just set eschatological eccentrics aside when it comes to orienting our political outlook.
It’s not the environmental campaigning that’s the issue. I am very much aligned with that. In fact I’ve done a fair bit of that myself and you’ll occasionally find me at demonstrations. I think most people are well aligned with that.
It’s the deep dive into geopolitics which is now being used to discredit her that is the problem. There’s things you don’t touch with a pole and she’s been all over them. That’s why the media have shut up about her. There isn’t universal support or consensus there. She did a lot of damage to the environmental cause getting involved.
That makes her a pariah on all causes.
The mid ground is a rational scientific approach and consistent pressure and staying within the rails that are your primary cause.
> These laws can only be used by the EU commission against specific companies.
In the UK at least, the GDPR was incorporated into UK law (where it remains, essentially unmodified, even after Brexit). So it is certainly not necessary to get the EU commission involved to enforce the law. In the UK, the ICO is the relevant regulator. There are other national regulators that enforce the GDPR, such as the French CNIL.
Reminds me of the possibly-apocryphal-but-not-entirely-off-the-money story about Bertrand Russell’s response to an American questioner who asked him why he had given up philosophy: "because I discovered that I preferred fucking".
I don't think Chomsky's relationship with Epstein is in any way defensible, but I've seen similar comments to yours all over the interwebs and I'm confused by them. Chomsky never decried capitalists or told us to be suspicious of them on a personal level. Or at least, not in any of his political work that I've ever read. He was anti-capitalist, but he didn't have a simplistic view of the world where individual capitalists were inherently evil.
>In order to clarify the check: Epstein asked Noam to develop a linguistic challenge that Epstein wished to establish as a regular prize. Noam worked on it, and Epstein sent a check for US$20,000 as payment. Epstein’s office contacted me to arrange for the check to be sent to our home address.
This part honestly makes no sense. There is no 'Chomsky linguistic challenge'. I guess the claim is that Chomsky was paid as a consultant to develop the supposed challenge which was then to be administered by Epstein (who – guess what – did nothing of the sort). But it sounds an awful lot like an entirely spurious reason for sending someone $20k.
Taking the narrative as presented in this article seems plausible Epstein just crumpled it up and threw it out. He just wanted a way to further endear himself to Noam in order to have someone credible vouching for him. Work like this is a good way to do that, like that old Ben Franklin trick of having someone do something for you.
Yeah, of course. But the question is what Chomsky thought about all this. His wife seems to want us to think that Chomsky genuinely believed he was being paid $20k to develop a 'linguistic challenge'. I think what's nearer the truth is that he was happy to receive mystery money from rich financiers without asking too many inconvenient questions. And this is someone who we know was very good at asking inconvenient questions when he had a mind to.
TBH, if you are a top scientist, or whatever, and you meet a rich admirer who wants to donate some $$$, it is very easy to accept. Chomsky probably knew this was just a way to give $$$ to him, but he didn't see anything wrong with it.
Chomsky won't be the first or the last person to be tempted by offers of free money from dodgy gentlemen. There are consequences to accepting such offers, as we now see.
Why do you find it implausible that he got money to develop this challenge? I work in the non profit space and we get these kind of gifts all the time, with minimal strings attached or sometimes the deliverables don't see the light of day. 20k is actually small in my experience and they often come from random people who support our mission. Sure we do investigate and sometimes refuse based on findings, but we don't know or find everything. Taking money doesn't mean you know and support everything the person who have the money ever did, thought, said...
Primarily because there is no evidence that the challenge exists, and it's hard to imagine what it could even be. Chomsky's own research interests didn't really lend themselves to setting some kind of math olympiad style 'challenge'. If he was excited about setting up prizes or challenges in linguistics, you have to wonder why he never once did it. He certainly could have if he'd wanted to.
Just because you can't find it doesn't mean it didn't happen. Also just because you give it hard to imagine, does not mean that it didn't happen, or that people with better imaginations as you could accomplish that.
I was a generative linguist in my previous career and no linguist that I know has ever heard of this Chomsky challenge thing. It’s hard to prove that something doesn’t exist, but I’m fairly sure it doesn’t.
It's conceivable, but I doubt it, for the reasons I mentioned. If Chomsky created this thing then presumably his wife can dig out some kind of record of it (as she apparently handled the communication with Epstein's office). So far we haven't seen it.
Noam strikes me as someone deeply attached to their "art", honestly this "linguistic challenge" feels like a nerd-snipe and Noam might have even done it for free.
I think the payment aspect works more in favor of Epstein than Noam. I don't think Epstein was oblivious to the "we go down together" nature of some of his relationships, quite the opposite.
The talent of Epstein was to offer to each prominent people things they cared about. To Chomsky it was "linguistics"; to Jack Lang (a very public figure, former Cultur Ministry, who just resigned from his position yesterday because of the scandal) it was to make an "art foundation" of some sort, and a movie about his (Lang's) life work.
Bezos paying tens of millions to Trump's current wife to make a "documentary" about her hats is similar. The only difference is, Bezos is not (yet?) accused of statutory rape. But the idea is the same.
You never "bribe" people up front, offering them money in a direct, obvious quid pro quo. You're sincerely excited to contribute to their pet project.
But wait, there's more, also a strange explanation about 270000 dollars being sent from Epstein to Chomsky. Apparently something had happened to Chomsky's retirement fund, and Epstein was helping him recover money?!
It makes no sense to me.
Honestly, Chomsky I am willing to believe unconditionally. He has spent his entire life speaking out on US imperialism, and Israel. His career is longer than Epstein's whole life.
Tinfoil hat on, I'd rather believe this was Israels attempt to discredit Chomsky, through Epstein.
> Regarding the reported transfer of approximately $270,000, I must clarify that these were entirely Noam’s own funds. At the time, Noam had identified inconsistencies in his retirement resources that threatened his economic independence and caused him great distress. Epstein offered technical assistance to resolve this specific situation.
Yeah. What? This paragraph answers nothing and just raises more questions. Epstein just magically walked Noam through making 270k just reappear in his account? This is played off like he accidentally sent a quarter of a million dollars to his checking account instead of his savings account and Epstein told him how to use the bank's website to transfer funds between the two.
Chomsky, like most involved in arguing for or against Post-modernism/post-structuralism/Neo Marxism, was likely doing it on purpose to neuter any meaningful left wing opposition to US policy and keep them in "fashionable nonsense" territory. Anyone engaging with them in anyway is suspect by definition.
There's so much more evidence than just this. I'm tired of always linking it all and getting me that much deeper into shit with people who I hopefully will never meet face-to-face.
Chomsky is about as far from post-modernist and post-structuralist as you can get in terms of the American left. He spent his career insisting on rational & logical discourse and using reason as a tool and opposing the postmodernist turn in the left.
He believed in true and false, and insisted those were tools to be used to disarm the powerful. Which... man that would be nice right about now.
I don't always like the guy or agree with his arguments, but this is a bizarre claim from you.
Reading comprehension (for OR against). Engaging at all is what flags him as part of this. Really intelligent people just write them off and don't engage.
I don’t even see what would be incriminating about receiving money? Is the implication that it’s some kind of hush money? Why would that be necessary? Surely Chomsky received similar amounts as speaking or consultancy fees or grants all the time?
It would be another matter if Chomsky had paid Epstein for mystery services or whatever.
The command line incantation is just a convenience. You can unblock the app that you just tried to run by going to Privacy and Security in system settings and clicking around a bit.
That seems an entirely false sense of inevitability. Once perfectly possible outcome is that representative democracy keeps chugging along as usual in most of the West and we don’t have mob rule or rule by a corrupt group of oligarchs. The present situation in the USA isn’t encouraging, but Trump hasn’t canceled the midterms yet.
Things in Europe aren't looking good. The consent of the governed is being eroded and manipulated just as badly as it is in the US. The UK, for instance, is a tinder box, where the share of the population that simply votes against the status quo is growing to become an absolute majority.
The UK is a country where the Prime Minister may very probably have to resign because he is unpopular. See also Liz Truss and Boris Johnson. Prime Ministers in the UK don’t usually last that long if the public turns against them. Compare to the US, where Trump is deeply unpopular but also in an essentially unassailable position as POTUS. If Keir Starmer, or any other British Prime Minister, gave one press conference where they attacked a female journalist instead of responding to her question, and then criticized her for not smiling enough, they would be out of Downing Street within a day. So no, things are not going “just as badly” in the UK as they are in the US. You’re comparing general problems of discontent in a representative democracy with a total breakdown in standards of public life.
I’m not sure exactly what you mean by Brits “voting against the status quo”. That’s what happens any time you change from one party to another in a democracy. Wouldn’t it be more worrying if everyone kept voting for the same party and same policies all the time?
> If Keir Starmer, or any other British Prime Minister, gave one press conference where they attacked a female journalist instead of responding to her question, and then criticized her for not smiling enough, they would be out of Downing Street within a day
Gordon Brown did an interview with a member of the public and forgot to take his microphone off when he got in the car. He said (in private) he'd just spoken to a biggoted woman. That was broadcast and it lost him the election.
> The code is not thread-safe as, if multiple threads attempt to use this lock, we could read invalid values of isLocked (in theory, and on a CPU where tearing could happen on its word size).
The issue isn’t just tearing but also memory order. On some architectures you can read a valid but out of date value in Thread A after Thread B has updated that value. (Memory order is mentioned later in the article, to be fair.)
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