Noam Chomsky: new video interview (October 2019)

The picture above is taken by Jimi Giannatti on 2019-10-19 and is used with kind permission.

The video above is quite recent. Noam is interviewed at home and talks to great extent with a couple of persons who express far too much interest in Jordan Peterson than anybody really should.

Noam did say that he doesn't spend any time ruminating Peterson, but he did mention one singular thing about his oeuvre, as would be expected: Nathan J. Robinson's excellent The Intellectual We Deserve, which is an article for Current Affairs. This article is an in-depth analysis of how Peterson is taken as "a wonderful psychologist" (to quote Malcolm Gladwell), how the chair of the Harvard psychology department could praise Peterson's magnum opus Maps of Meaning as 'brilliant' and 'beautiful', and how he's selling many books to people who usually don't read them. In short, Robinson uses his mental faculties to have created an article that should have existed before Peterson started writing his stuff so that the latter would understand how serious and pop-intellectual work should be both constructed and executed.

The interview is far more wide-spread than that subject. Noam goes into post-modernism, what differs 'the left' from 'the right', the suicidal tyranny of the Republican Party of the USA, the first amendment of the US constitution and the importance of attending schools for meetings with peers, describes his days—walking his dogs, answering e-mail, reading—among other discussion subjects.

This interview is conducted by interested and jokey young men; in spite of this, Noam is respectful and kind. At the end of the video, he smiles as his wife Valeria turns up and holds him. It's lovely to see that Noam seems to be doing well in Arizona.

I've not yet reached half of Noam's current age and I strive to be as respectful and, well, generally more the way he is about facts and his views of the world: humanism, anarchism, people, and love are at the center of a lot of things, and for this (and his many books and open conversations) I am very grateful to him for.