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• June 19, 2024
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Noam Chomsky for beginners: What you ought to know about world’s greatest living intellectual | World News

The Devil’s Advocate (advocatus diaboli in Latin) was a formal position in the Catholic Church whose job was to argue against the canonization of a particular candidate. The candidate’s job was to find flaws in the beatification process, to prove that the miracles attributed to an aspiring saint were, in fact, fraudulent. It’s a testament to Christianity’s influence on the English language that the term is now commonplace in everyday usage, with the Devil’s Advocate being a position where one argues the negatives.On the other hand, Noam Chomsky, the person who has influenced global intellectualism for the last six decades was called the Devil’s accountant. Of all the epithets shoved on Chomsky’s shelf – including being labelled the Father of Modern Linguistics – the Devil’s accountant sticks because it most coherently explains his worldview, which albeit cold, has a modicum of Spock-like logic that can never be faulted. Devil’s Advocate (1997) Official Trailer – Al Pacino, Keanu Reeves Drama Movie HD While reports of his passing, to quote Steven Pinker, were greatly exaggerated, a Chomsky 101 feels quite appropriate in the circumstances. Explaining Chomsky from scratch is an arduous task, much like explaining Shah Rukh Khan to someone who has never watched a Hindi film. But that doesn’t matter one shouldn’t try: Noam Chomsky – The Devil’s Accountant The epithet was bestowed upon him by Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit. As New Yorker profile writer Larissa MacFarquhar explains, the Devil’s accountant implies that he follows the mathematical logic of tort law. She wrote in the New Yorker: “His moral calculus is simple arithmetic. Nothing exculpates or complicates the sheer number of the dead.”For the uninitiated, tort law refers to a civil wrong where the price for compensation must be borne by the indicted (usually moral compensation), as opposed to criminal law, which is punishable by the state. In this argument, the tort law is based on the number of deaths (and…