This interview with Chomsky is generally pretty good. He calls out the use of the pandemic as a pretext for expanding the surveillance state and the role of “big tech” in facilitating it. But there is one glaring contradiction. He criticizes the US inadequate response to the pandemic by blaming it on the lack of a strong federal government and then points out that Europe’s response has been even worse, and blames that on the transfer of power from individual countries to the EU. Is a strong central government only good in America but not good in Europe? Many of the US states are larger than many European countries. The EU is the US of Europe. Make up your mind, Noam.
AFP
The United States is on a chaotic path with no federal plan against the coronavirus pandemic as it reduces public health funding and ignores the advances of climate change, according to activist scholar Noam Chomsky, considered the founder of modern linguistics.
What follows are extracts, edited for clarity, from an AFP interview with the 91-year-old leftist intellectual, who has authored more than 100 books and is currently a professor at the University of Arizona.
For two months he’s been confined in Tucson with his Brazilian wife Valeria, his dog, and a parrot who can say “sovereignty” in Portuguese.
