Sometimes I really question my ability to communicate.

I've been getting referrals from this now defunct blog. It appears to be some sort of Noam Chomsky tribute blog and the author links approvingly to this post I wrote on the MIT professor. Says he: "Here's a Blog entry that expresses my opinion better than I could. It's always gratifying to find out that someone else out there agrees with you."

I'm thinking he didn't read the post through to the end.

"Most of us pass through this experience as little more than a stage on the way to maturation as we realize at some point that the Chomskyan view is a constructed reality that is less than satisfying for explaining the more real, consensual reality the rest of the world inhabits.

Sadly, some people never grow up."

To be clear, I don't care much for the likes of Noam "The American Dissident" Chomsky. As Natan Sharansky points out, you can get a good idea of the nature of a country by how it treats its dissenters. In Stalin's Russia there were no dissidents - they were all dead.

Noam Chomsky, on the other hand, is a tenured professor at one of the world's top universities. He is published in more editions and in more languages in more countries than he, by his own admission, can keep track of. He routinely speaks to packed houses protected by the State's police - the State he spits on. He has never spent a day in prison for his views and travels out of and back into the country at will. He has become a wealthy man who wants for nothing.

Such is the horrible fate of the brave American Dissident.

The unquestionably best blog for "fact checking Chomsky's ass" is Oliver Kamm's site, here. Grab a beer, search the archives and enjoy.