Introduction ("Noam WHO?" -- Why haven't you heard of "the most important intellectual alive?" -- Chomsky's two careers) -- The file on Chomsky: a biographical sketch (Growing up during the Depression -- His uncle's kiosk in New York -- College dropout -- On a kibbutz in Israel -- Speaking out against Vietnam) -- The shoulders of giants: antecedents to the thinking of Chomsky (Plato -- Rene Descartes -- Jean Jacques Rousseau -- Wilhelm von Humboldt -- Karl Marx -- George Orwell -- The anarchist tradition -- Zellig Harris -- A note to the reader) -- Linguistics (What is linguistics? -- The evolution of linguistics -- Linguistics as a science -- Universal generative grammar -- Evidence that generative grammar is innate -- Is grammar learnable? -- The infinite variety of language -- What is the nature of the original state? -- Chomsky on Skinner and behaviorism)
Noam Chomsky and the media: can you believe what you see and hear?(Necessary illusions: the science of propaganda -- What is the function of the media in a democratic society? -- Engineering consent -- Walter Lippman -- Reinhold Niebuhr -- Recap of Chomsky's view -- The targets of propaganda -- The threat of democracy -- How does "ownership determine content"?: the propaganda model -- Filter #1. Money: "the media of influence" -- Filter #2. Advertising: how does that distort the news? -- Filter #3. "Experts": who do they work for, and why do the same ones keep popping up? -- Filter #4. "Flak": who writes all those letters-to-the-editor? -- Filter #5. Anti-Communism: creating a bogeyman -- Concision: how "sound bites" are used to kill opposing viewpoints -- Keeping the herd in line -- Don't take Chomsky's word for it, check it out yourself! -- What are they hiding?)
Chomsky on politics (Chomsky's first hand expereience with The Censor -- Why doesn't the news compute? -- The myth of the Classless Society -- The myth of the Free Market system -- Welfare for the rich: how it works -- Uncle Newt's double standard -- "National Defense" is a sick joke -- Colonialism: then and now -- Foreign policy: friendly dictators and client states -- The real New World Order: how it started -- The real objective of the New World Order -- "Corporate interests"/"American interests" -- History: one or two things they forgot to tell you -- Coming home to roost) -- Chomsky on fighting back: What can one person do? (Taking responsibility: what can one person do? -- Intellectual self-defense -- Knowledge and information) -- Interview with Noam Chomsky.
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