[QUOTE="Rhazakna"][QUOTE="BossPerson"]

Rhazanka,

briefly, whats your general opinion of chomsky? 

[/QUOTE] He has some good things to say, and his research on the connections between corporations and political groups is very thorough and well-researched. He also has many contradictory opinions. He'll talk about how the State is what creates maintains corporate power (as his own research shows), but will then say that the State is the only thing protecting us from corporate tyranny. [b]In general, he buys into the mainstream leftist idea that State power and corporate power are separate entities, instead of part of the same power structure[/b] (this idea is also supported by rightists, but from the opposite perspective). The research he's done contradicts this, but he doesn't internalize the implications of that.[/QUOTE] I don't think this is a fair take on Chomsky's views, his support of various state initiatives are a lot more nuanced than him just him buying into some idea about state power and corporate power being completely separate entities. The defining attribute of Chomsky's political activism is that he never asks for the moon - he does not waste his time writing long treatises about unrealistic anarchist goals, and this is something that he has talked about directly. To him such radical idealism amounts to nothing more than mere academic seminars that have no hope of having any real world influence any time soon. So to be relevant and not ignore the immediate problems that society faces in today's world he advocates policies along the lines of the existing political paradigm. It's not so much that these are "contradictions" as much as they are examples of him just being pragmatic.