That's your entire comeback?
Essentially, yes.
Linguistic universals are a neat concept, and proud we are of Noam for all of that.
*clap clap*
But your oxymoronic characterization of him as a "liberal intellectual" is silly.
Chomsky began to pretend he had something to offer the world regarding his critique of U.S. foreign policy during the Vietnam era---thereby ensuring he had a receptive and uncritical audience willing to lap up anything that sounded even remotely like a rejection of the bourgeois norms.
The academic Chomsky found patterns in language that may or may not suggest that our ability to use language is innate.
The leftist hack Chomsky decided his little slivers of data regarding language could be extrapolated to infer that patterns of cultural and political development were also innate---so it was therefore cruel that the big meany United States was attempting to impose its will on the indigenous people of southeast Asia.
Because, God knows, what could be a more "innate" and natural than a bunch of rice-farming gooks in Vietnam being forced into an economic and political system manufactured by a 19th century German Jew?
His despicable obfuscation for the crimes of Pol Pot were the icing on the cake.
Using specious (if not creative) argumentation to simply transfer moral responsibility for horrific acts of mass murder from the perpetrator to "the corporations", or "the west", or "the white people", or "the United States" isn't an intellectual pursuit.
It's a template.
So yes, Noam Chomsky is from that unfortunate line of American pseudo-intellectuals whose appeal is primarily confined to trust-funded undergraduates desperately searching that "edgy" perspective they think mommy and daddy sent them to the university to acquire.
And when you refer to him as "one of the most influential liberal intellectuals in the world", you're saying far more about liberals than you are about Noam Chomsky---because serious people long ago ceased taking him seriously.
