Noam Chomsky Blogs

While I tend to agree with much of Chomsky's political analysis, as a writer he's pretty boring. The most entertaining thing about his writing is the rage he triggers in his opponents. They might reflect that if an unexamined life is not worth living, an unexamined thought is not worth thinking.

Now you can examine his examination of your thoughts in his new blog, Turning the Tide. It doesn't permit comments, which makes it annoyingly reminiscent of some right-wing blogs, but I expect his readers will find other places to discuss his posts. So far, Chomsky's posts are encouragingly brief. But I take a literalist's exception to his title. As King Canute demonstrated long ago, people can't turn the tide. That's the moon's job.

Comments

[Duncan]

I do think his writings are a little dry but his speeches are very funny. Have you ever heard him speak? He's actually very funny!

[Derek]

?1?´s weblog may be less jargony and dense than his other writing, but it's still pretty high-level. I ran it through the online readability analyzer:

http://www.readability.info/info.shtml

The results show that his blog is roughly as readable as a jargon-filled PC World article, and more difficult than the New York Times, ESPN, Nickelodeon, or a White House press release (or my own blog, for that matter):

http://penmachine.com/journal/2004_03_01_news_archive.html#108074683842132353

[Derek]

BTW, here are the results for this blog:

readability grades:
Kincaid: 7.2
ARI: 7.9
Coleman-Liau: 11.9
Flesch Index: 69.2
Fog Index: 10.3
Lix: 39.5 = school year 6
SMOG-Grading: 10.0

Roughly comparable to the NY Times.

(...and the first word in my previous comment should be "His.")