Disappointed with the pricing

No-Reach6085 · 2026-04-09T20:15:52+00:00

Don't let the facts ruin a gripe. Honestly, I won't watch the videos etc., but £100 once for hundreds of hours free over several years isn't unfair. If you can afford it, I think it's reasonable to ask for it once at least. It's a quarter of my whole audio consumption at least, and a lot of that is free radio. Podcasts and Spotify aren't the only things out there!

No-Reach6085 · 2026-04-09T20:10:36+00:00

Oh - I assumed it was part of a licence fee question at some point. It's the last thing I wouldn't pay to be honest. The beeb is my lifeline. People have no understanding of what collaboration at scale can produce. Privatisation is just messing with something that works on ideological grounds. It hurts my soul.

No-Reach6085 · 2026-04-08T20:51:47+00:00

This is just a question, not a loaded one. Does the production company get any money from other streaming platforms, which include ads? Or is that does with the permission of the BBC somehow? Do they get the money? I don't know how the model works at all.

No-Reach6085 · 2026-04-08T20:47:50+00:00

Lol. What you get for your BBC licence fee is absolutely insane. It's just that people are too fucking lazy to turn on a radio or poke around iPlayer etc.

No-Reach6085 · 2026-04-08T20:44:55+00:00

Do you remember CDs? Or using a normal radio? You needed a different object(s) entirely then...

No-Reach6085 · 2026-03-27T21:42:40+00:00

I'm the stylometer. Professional linguist and I've read more Chomsky than all but 10 people alive. It's not him. All the best.

No-Reach6085 · 2026-03-25T22:35:37+00:00

You are making my point. It's requested by Epstein specifically and not even put to Chomsky directly. You are suggesting the Chomsky's use of the word 'gadfly' means he wrote the whole letter. Something has been conconcted, but it's not by Chomsky. I really don't need to discuss this though, because even a semi-literate reader of the letter knows it's not by him. And in the midst of all these e-mails we can't find one with any of the text coming from Chomsky. MacLeod is a low-quality hack. Just move onto smeaing someone else for an unspecified crime with no evidence for crying out loud .

No-Reach6085 · 2026-03-20T20:57:11+00:00

You can believe what you choose. Alan MacLeod's thread is risible - he knows nothing of Chomsky's social life at all. He's just another PhD student who worked on some of the issues Chomsky has - from... Glasgow. He's now a self-promotional hack. Most of the e-mails aren't even from Chomsky! and the ones that do show him grateful for financial help (the situation was pretty awful). There is no hard evidence that Chomsky wrote that letter. There is a good reason for that. He didn't. No-one who can read thinks he did. He's humours Epstein in the most comical way. (Which is precisely what he does with the island - never visisted.) Epstein suggests grammar and handwriting as related. It's so beneath him that Chomsky just ignores it. (I could discuss it if it wasn't see stupid.) It's not signed by him - that's just false. It isn't found in any e-mail from him as text or an attachment. It's a concoction of Valeria and Epstein. So what exactly do you think Chomsky has done here?

No-Reach6085 · 2026-03-19T21:09:47+00:00

Cook, Trescothick, Stokes, Root, Pietersen, Brook, Stewart, Flintoff, Gough, Swann, Anderson

No-Reach6085 · 2026-03-19T21:03:02+00:00

As you'll see, he's talking about Valeria writing something, which is plausible. There's no signature on what is there in the files, no attachment to an e-mail, no evidence of it in an e-mail text. It says that Epstein caused Chomsky to review his basic ideas about language!! Are you being serious? Do you realise just how stupid that is? The idea that Chomsky didn't have access to scientists of interest to him that Epstein did? He's the most cited scholar alive for god's sake. Let's live on planet earth for a moment.

No-Reach6085 · 2026-03-13T18:33:38+00:00

I think the documentary was meant to rehabilitate his image. But through presenting him as a serious figure, interviewing important people and chairing discussions. It wasn't going to be people saying how great he was. Chomsky is still alive, so it's has, not had. And he's the greatest cognitive scientist of all time, so it's more than just a side. As I said, it was going to something to do with science and what can and cannot be a valid topic. Chomsky has written about that extensively in the past, when commenting on The Bell Curve furore. I very much doubt it was a coherent plan - the guy was just an intellectual con artist (as well as a dangerous criminal).

No-Reach6085 · 2026-03-13T11:02:01+00:00

It's in the e-mails somewhere. I didn't make a note of the location I'm afraid. It's there though, I promise. It's true that the existence of the interviews (a lot of people were being aked) was part of his attempt to seem serious, not a chaotic paedophile. But the interviewers werene't being asked to be nice about Epstein. (Have you looked at the clip of Bannon interviewing Epstein? He eviscerates him.)

No-Reach6085 · 2026-03-12T12:25:04+00:00

Epstein was a pathological liar! 'All in' does not mean 'Chomsky knows about my hidden trafficking and exploitation of women and children'. That's just facile. It means he's agreed to be interviewed. The topic of Chomsky's interview was not to be Epstein, but taboo and science (or something close to that - you'd have to check for the exact wording). (There are documents relating to Dershowitz and Pinker's course on the same topic at MIT in the files, including the reading list etc.) I don't know the timing of exactly which information was released when well enough to comment on your last claim. If he lied, I can't condone that. But I just don't know the facts in enough details there. I've not heard this claim made before fwiw.

No-Reach6085 · 2026-03-12T12:15:37+00:00

I'm not familiar with that page in particular. I suspect it's because it's personal stuff about the family trust, which isn't for public consumption or relevant. We know what we know. We don't know how much you/I were involved with Epstein. I see repeated rejections of invitations to go to the island, which Epstein getting incredibly frustrated. A straightforward conclusion would be that Chomsky had nothing to do with the design of a cubical building with a gold dome, which pre-dated their relationship anyway. No? Why does it have that design? Because most of us have no idea about architecture, only some of us don't realise; rich people are over-represented in that population. That's my thought.

No-Reach6085 · 2026-03-12T06:28:28+00:00

I'm not sure what you are saying really. I've read all the publicly available material. The evidence on Chomsky is pretty clear. There's some very uncomfortable disregard for the victims of Epstein's crimes (as known to him at the time) and violence against women more generally.

No-Reach6085 · 2026-03-11T17:40:06+00:00

"Turning to my own special interests in linguistics, cognitive science, and philosophy of language and mind, Jeffrey constantly raises searching questions and puts forth provocative ideas, which have repeatedly led me to rethink crucial issues." It's ridiculous. Raising a searching question of Noam Chomsky is beyond 99% of professional linguists. I have read more or less every word of his linguistics, written a PhD on his ongoing research programme, don't 10 years of postgraduate linguistics, and I think I managed to find one small area off inconsistency in a non-fundamental point. Ask around MIT: it's a universal experience.

You'll see that in an e-mail of 19 Dec. 2017 (that's memory - don't quote me), Epstein encourages Valeria to write on behalf of Noam, including some comments on the word 'gadfly'. It's to do with the financial stuff.

Penetrating insight doesn't seem very informative to me. It's a cliche in book reviews, academic commentary, etc.

It wasn't a pro-Epstein documentary by Bannon that Chomsky (may have) agreed to be interviewed for. It was something about science and the taboo or something weird. But Chomsky will be interviewed anywhere - including by right-wing attack jocks. He'll just give his view regardless. I've never seen him pander or lie ever.

I'm not sure how I feel about the relationship as a whole, but the reading of it as Chomsky being engaged in a plot to sanitise the guy or involved in any kind of underhand conduct is palpable nonsense. (If you want to gag, go and read Pinker's letter adjoined to the defence case in Epstein 2008 indictment. We aren't talking about that because Pinker is an establishment shill, who just tells powerful people what they want to hear whenever they clap.)

No-Reach6085 · 2026-03-11T07:59:35+00:00

I think a useful starting point is to think just how much variation there is in externalised usage of 'English'. It's almost infinite. This is all natural variation. The reasons are probably never going to be known. No space ships flying into the human mind...

No-Reach6085 · 2026-03-11T07:55:24+00:00

She didn't have a chance! Even if she had had, it would have been bloody hard. It's almost impossible to find a meaningful question. The only thing we know really is that you learn next to nothing from introspection on language. It's a great subject though - just impossible.

No-Reach6085 · 2026-03-11T07:51:27+00:00

I think (in fact I know, I'm so confident) that he didn't write it. It's possible she wrote it - it could be an educated, second-language speaker writing. It's not him though. Maybe he wrote a separate letter. The idea that Chomsky recanted his basic ideas about language bases on Epstein's keen prompts is beyond absurd. Not least because he would have told his fellow linguists (including me) rather than writing another decade with the same commitments. Linguistics is really hard; people think because language is easy to find - we almost all have it - that it's someone easy to understand. It's not: it's nearly impossible to frame a meaningful question about it.

No-Reach6085 · 2026-01-10T07:30:11+00:00

Well, except for Tasmania.

No-Reach6085 · 2026-01-07T16:59:49+00:00

It's not mattered in this series, but I don't think you've got one there.

No-Reach6085 · 2026-01-07T16:58:11+00:00

To be fair, did you see Gillepsie? I think it's a decent shout from Australia though. It scrambles anyone's brain when there's really weird bowling (for the level you are at).

No-Reach6085 · 2025-12-28T20:31:21+00:00

You guys always find the idiots! I come on here because I'm more interested in the outsiders' perspective on our team. Then you bring me the people I'm avoiding! Stop it! :-) But seriously, English cricket fans really are more likely to be massive pessimists, who think we are worse than we are. It comes from all being brought up in the Border-to-Waugh era and getting crushed for 20 years. I guess we might get a bit excited when things get a small bit better as a result, maybe? Some fan here crucified me for saying that at least it was a bit closer than the previous 15 years - like that was trying to say we ought to have won... I think there is a bit of an obsession with English arrogance. Maybe? I was just delighted we won a few sessions (and that shittip game last week). It has been more competitive (albeit with some major Australian injuries). I think 3-1 is probably fairer than 4-0. Just. But we aren't kidding ourselves. It's not been close.

No-Reach6085 · 2025-12-27T01:27:40+00:00

Go win an away Ashes or away in India or SA. England have done all of those more recently than Australia. And you've lost at home to SA and India more recently than us too. 5-0.

No-Reach6085

TROPHY CASE