"To appreciate quite how much this must have troubled Chomsky, we need only recall his response when he heard the news of the Hiroshima bombing in August 1945. As he said in an interview with C J Polychroniou in 2019:
"I was then a junior counsellor in a summer camp. The news was broadcast in the morning. Everyone listened – and then went off to the planned activity – a baseball game, swimming, whatever was scheduled. I couldn’t believe it. I was so shocked I just took off into the woods and sat by myself for several hours."
Chomsky was similarly shocked when Philip Morrison, a scientist who had worked on the Hiroshima bomb, told him that he couldn’t remember any discussion about the consequences of what he and his colleagues were doing until after the bomb had been used:
"These are some of the most brilliant human beings in the world – very humane, European culture, high culture – not just engineers … [But they’re] so immersed in the challenging technical problems of getting this thing to work that they were simply not considering what the effects would be until afterwards!"
Chomsky was always dismayed at how ‘brilliant’ people could so guiltlessly stoke up the possibility of destroying the human race."
People...
https://aeon.co/essays/an-anthropologist-studies-the-warring-ideas-of-noam-chomsky
misharogov / Mikhail Rogov 🇷🇺
npub1mk…ns355
2023-12-08 14:08:09
Author Public Key
npub1mkkcqvat78ghhlaxmyz2vpfq7cekm3sf3k2ygtnp4sew65wnplgs7ns355Published at
2023-12-08 14:08:09Event JSON
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"content": "\"To appreciate quite how much this must have troubled Chomsky, we need only recall his response when he heard the news of the Hiroshima bombing in August 1945. As he said in an interview with C J Polychroniou in 2019:\n\n\"I was then a junior counsellor in a summer camp. The news was broadcast in the morning. Everyone listened – and then went off to the planned activity – a baseball game, swimming, whatever was scheduled. I couldn’t believe it. I was so shocked I just took off into the woods and sat by myself for several hours.\"\n\nChomsky was similarly shocked when Philip Morrison, a scientist who had worked on the Hiroshima bomb, told him that he couldn’t remember any discussion about the consequences of what he and his colleagues were doing until after the bomb had been used:\n\n\"These are some of the most brilliant human beings in the world – very humane, European culture, high culture – not just engineers … [But they’re] so immersed in the challenging technical problems of getting this thing to work that they were simply not considering what the effects would be until afterwards!\"\n\nChomsky was always dismayed at how ‘brilliant’ people could so guiltlessly stoke up the possibility of destroying the human race.\"\n\nPeople... \n\nhttps://aeon.co/essays/an-anthropologist-studies-the-warring-ideas-of-noam-chomsky",
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}