Chomsky (in common with many philosophers teaching in colleges) uses fallacies. Philosophers know all the fallacies, but the general public and callow youth do not recognize them. They deliberately use fallacious arguments and can depend on not being caught by most people. I quote from Chomsky here:Gary Childress wrote:
I'm familiar with some of our nation's history. Again, your statement above is pretty cryptic. And I'm not sure how it bears relation to your apparent distaste for Noam Chomsky's political writings. Maybe if you articulated your beliefs such that they are comprehensible by those who can't mind read it might help. Really that's all I ask, Melchior. I'm perfectly open to new ideas or new knowledge if it exists and I'll admit my errors. But you have to be the one to make your points and back them up with evidence or good reasons. That's the way good philosophers operate. You're smart. Surely you can do that?
"So if the United States ends up being almost universally isolated on Iran, that won’t be anything particularly new, and in fact there are quite a few other cases. Well, in the case of Iran, the reasons for U.S. concerns are very clearly and repeatedly articulated: Iran is the gravest threat to world peace. We hear that regularly from high places—government officials, commentators, others—in the United States. There also happens to be a world out there, and it has its own opinions. It’s quite easy to find these out from standard sources, like the main U.S. polling agency. Gallup polls takes regular polls of international opinion. And one of the questions it posed—it’s posed is: Which country do you think is the gravest threat to world peace? The answer is unequivocal: the United States by a huge margin. Way behind in second place is Pakistan—it’s inflated, surely, by the Indian vote—and then a couple of others. Iran is mentioned, but along with Israel and a few others, way down. That’s one of the things that it wouldn’t do to say, and in fact the results that are found by the leading U.S. polling agency didn’t make it through the portals of what we call the free press. But it doesn’t go away for that reason."
This is a blatant fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum
Using such a standard fallacy is beneath contempt. Now do you get it? Do you understand why Chomsky is a scumbag?