Getting back to the idea of ‘hate.’ I mentione dit because when Right Wing Supremacist groups have been called on their race hatred, they respond in kind by calling those who disagree w their Fundy principles haters.

PC Elitists started this trend, but the Right has co-opted the word to the point it’s meaningless. Very few of the people who have condemned Falwell, or Chomsky or Churchill, have exhibited ‘hate’- merely distaste.

Words lose their power when misused.

I’ve argued this with gays I’ve known, that every time they label someone who does not agree with them 100% a homophobe they are doing a disservice. Even Falwell was likely not a homophobe, which means that he had fear of homosexuals, or implying a fear that the homophobe is gay.

Most people I’ve met who have a distaste for homosexuals do so becaus eof the ‘yuck’ factor. They simply are disgusted by it. Similarly, having had aparent smoke for 6 decades, I feel nauseated by the thought of cancer sticks. However, such a feeling is not homophobic, but what I call homotaedium- or a disgust for the act and/or idea.

‘Hate’ has been similarly abused. Again, only a couple of folk here have declared hate for Falwell, and as Mikkel said, it’s a waste. But, simply believing the world is better off w/o a slimeball like Falwell is not hate. Even a two-step on his grave is not hate. So, put that strawman aside, and deal with the real implications- pro or con- of Falwell and his legacy.

The point is that if you are in the academic environment, you will see some support for these ideas, and the people who provide that support are often quite loud. I have an idea where Jason was coming from therefore when he said that.

At the same time, and now disagreeing with Jason, academia is a really bad sample of the left / liberals / Democrats. While Churchill was invited to our school and got a hundred people to show up, he has had little influence outside of single digit percentages among even Democrats, has never met with presidents, and is all but forgotten already.

No one should ever listen to Jason Steck again. That is not the statement of an honest person.

Carry on.

Holly said:

When I took a course in anthropological linguistics 30 years ago, I don’t recall that Noam Chomsky was ever mentioned.

You happened to take one of the few areas of linguistics in which Chomsky has had little to say. Linguistically, he’s not very interested in culture and society. Instead he cares about the individual mind.

It’s hard to describe how influential Chomsky is in linguistics, but I just did a google search on “Chomsky linguistics” and came back with 1,170,000 hits. That’s not a shabby number. I can’t come up with the source at the moment, but I’ve read that Chomsky is one of the top 10 most cited names in all of academic literature. And he’s cited not for his political stuff, but for his linguistic and psychological theory. If you are going to say anything at all from about 1963 until now about grammar or about what language is, you have to start out saying how your grammar was different or a refinement of Chomsky’s.

Cosmoetica mentioned that Steven Pinker and cognitive scientists such as him will replace Chomsky’s theories. I think Pinker would be the first to say that he himself is working precisely within the Chomskyan tradition of linguistics and cognitive science. Pinker’s NY Times best seller from several years back is called The Language Instinct, which argues that language is essentially an inborn faculty, an instinct, of all humans. It’s not something that’s just learned by hanging around people who speak. It’s as biological as growing a heart or the ability to see. This is precisely Chomsky’s idea. In fact, I just pulled out my copy of Pinker’s The Language Instinct and according to the Index, Chomsky is mentioned on 37 pages, starting at page 21 and going all the way to 434. In fact, Pinker only makes it 7 pages into chapter 1 before he has to give a 3 paragraph blockquote from Chomsky. Chomsky’d have to assault someone before MIT would fire him. (Pinker’s at MIT as well. What a coincidence!)

I am sure I sound like a Chomsky linguistics adherent. In truth, I am currently working on an academic article which, in part, argues precisely that Chomsky and Pinker’s arguments about the language instinct are wrong. But this doesn’t stop me from admitting that Chomsky’s ideas, starting from his destruction of B.F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior in 57 or so, revolutionized the field of linguistics and helped create the entire notion that there is a legitimate scientific field called cognitive science.

I’ll try to write a post up about the arguments for the language instinct on my own blog in the next day or so for people who care.

This is the most intellectually dishonest things I’ve ever seen posted by one of the co-bloggers here even though it’s in the comments. This is from the Wikipedia biography of Churchill.

He has “decided to publish largely in alternative presses or journals, not in the university presses or mainstream peer-reviewed journals often favored by more conventional academics.

Does this sound like someone widely cited in academia?? Where did you get this idea? There is no truth in it.

Chomsky may be another matter to the “left” but I consider his overall effect on those slightly to the left and in the middle to be very minimal. This is a much more defensible position than your claim that

From where I live and work, Churchill and Chomsky are FAR more influential than Falwell or Robertson.

Let’s see. Does Ward Churchill have his own university with thousands of young people going out into the world to carry his ideological banner? Oh, that’s right. He’s being dismissed from his university position, where he was only a teacher, not the person directing the ideology of an entire university. Chomsky never went far enough in stupidity to get fired but he still doesn’t wield that kind of influence. See: Liberty University, Regent University. As far as the influence of these schools go never forget that

And oh, yeah. Neither Churchill or Chomsky ever produced a video that went to 300,000 people that smeared a sitting President to the extent that the Clinton Chronicles lied about Bill Clinton.

Found these Falwell quotes at PHB:

Selected Wit & Wisdom of Jerry Falwell
http://www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=1691

Lynx, I am sorry to have scared you about the KJV. It is known for its fine use of the English language of that period. I was referring to the accuracy of the translation. You might want to visit Bart Ehrman’s website at http://bartdehrman.com/

That said I can’t think of anything I admired about him (which I do for Pat Robertson’s poverty work even though I think he has the same misguided religious views) and don’t understand the “we should respect the dead” line of thought. Who cares, the guy is dead. Quite frankly, the rush to canonize anyone upon their death is pretty stupid. That energy should be spent respecting the followers/loved ones they left behind. The world isn’t a better or worse place now that he (or anyone) is dead. If you agree with his views then carrying them on is what matters and if you disagree, trying to convince others he was wrong is what matters.

The worst dictator’s death changes nothing if others are there to pick up the mantle and the greatest saint’s passing doesn’t diminish their message if it’s carried on. In the end, I’ve always found humanity’s incapability of living through the message instead of the person to be disconcerting.

I think folk like the Pinkers and other brain researchers will have left most of Noam’s legacy to rot….but I concede, his formal research will be all that remains.

I absolutely don’t see that the condemnation has extended to all the groups you cite. Perhaps you see condemnation even before it’s spiken.

Christians, as a group, were brought into the disucssion by CStanley by way of defending Falwell, not by his critics.

At any rate, I speak only for myself. (Who is Ward Churchill?)
You should try to remember, that the not-conservative, not-evangelical crowd includes an immense diversity, and every time you accuse someone who disagrees with you as representing this undefined (but evil, nontheless) LEFT, you make another convert to the not-conservative, not-evangelical crowd.

Read the quote again, he’s not just talking about paying any old debt, he’s talking about paying with their lives, about executing them:
“We visit prisoners on death row, and some of them are saved, but we believe their sentences should be carried out because they have a debt to society”

I’m not asking you to be Falwell’s defender, I can fully appreciate that most people, even a majority of conservatives, might not agree with him, but I have to remain firm in it being natural that he attract intense rejection of his person. You say he was probably talking about the sin, I think it was fairly clear that he either was talking about the so-called “sinners” (again, since when is being feminist a sin) or was purposefully vague enough to provoke anger and hatred in those who believed his word.

The negative reactions are all directed at him, specifically, or his brand of judgmental, assuming to speak for God, type of religious practice.

That’s only the case if you assume that it is actually true that *ALL* 100 million evangelicals AND *ALL* Republicans, conservatives, and right-wingers have adopted “his brand of judgmental, assuming to speak for God, type of religious practice”. Because the condemnations directed at Falwell have, at various points on this thread and other sites as well, been explicitly extended to include ALL of those large groups, not just Falwell.

And it is that extension that is truly dangerous. It indicates that there is a strong trend on the left (not all of them, but apparently a very vocal and substantially sized group) that believes that the right is monolithic in its adherence to what they think Falwell represents. And given the intensity of their hatred for what they think Falwell represents, it is reasonable to be concerned about how they will act towards those HUGE groups of people that they think are followers of Falwell.