Comments at Greg Cochran’s blog West Hunt:
* How about Jason Malloy? He did a brilliant defence of James Watson years ago, and is collecting and analysing IQ data in a very productive way. Perhaps even more obvious, Ian Deary, for his monumental work on intelligence.
* Steve Sailer is incredibly productive and interesting. Two other interesting characters are jewamongyou (that is his chosen nom de plume) and Linh Dinh on Unz.com. Also, John Derbyshire.
* Somebody like Steve Pinker seems pretty solid model in my opinion.
-Charles Murray is another. Brought some realism to the understanding of the welfare state in the 80’s, to broad societal problems with the Bell Curve, human achievements in the 00’s, the social decline of America with Coming Apart.
-John McWhorter as one of the few(if any) public intellectuals who have addressed the most stunting ideology in America.
-Jonathan Haidt for a very interesting book to address the increasing political and social hostility in America, his campaign for intellectual diversity, his campaign against PC-culture and micro-aggressions.
-I personally I enjoy historian Niall Ferguson quite a bit. Brought some much needed correction on the past study of empire which had been bogged down with moralising.
* J. Michael Bailey of Northwestern University, whose subject of study is gender identity. His popular writing on this charged subject is thoughtful and civil. Sailer’s summary of Bailey’s becoming embroiled in charges of academic misconduct, here.
* Peter Thiel: Guy is clearly a full blown heretic on issues of equality, gender, race, democracy, etc. I think he’s regularly converting close confidants to his views based on what I’ve heard from many in interviews. Track record – check. Public talk/prediction is sparse because he’s got businesses to run, but I expect we’ll hear more from him over the years.
* Theodore Dalrymple. I thought his books about culture and the “worldview of the underclass” were very good. Here’s a good quote from Dalrymple:
“Of the thousands of patients I have seen, only two or three have ever claimed to be unhappy: all the rest have said that they were depressed. This semantic shift is deeply significant, for it implies that dissatisfaction with life is itself pathological, a medical condition, which it is the responsibility of the doctor to alleviate by medical means. Everyone has a right to health; depression is unhealthy; therefore everyone has a right to be happy (the opposite of being depressed). This idea in turn implies that one’s state of mind, or one’s mood, is or should be independent of the way that one lives one’s life, a belief that must deprive human existence of all meaning, radically disconnecting reward from conduct. A ridiculous pas de deux between doctor and patient ensues: the patient pretends to be ill, and the doctor pretends to cure him. In the process, the patient is wilfully blinded to the conduct that inevitably causes his misery in the first place.”
* Hitch had a head full of batty ideas, but he he could hold your interest because he was very good at expressing them.
One of the problems many HBD bloggers have is they post 5,000 word essays loaded with jargon. The message they are sending is that they don’t know the material well enough to be brief and they are more interested in signalling than attracting new people to their banner.
* Steve Sailer is an updated George Orwell, but with a better sense of humour and wider range of interests. And he likes Evelyn Waugh.
The late Larry Auster was no good on science but very good in other ways. See for example: LAPD coins new phrase for rampant black homicide of non-blacks. He would have been rich and famous if he’d taken the course that you might have expected from his genetics (cf. Charles Krauthammer, Jennifer Rubin, et al).
* I don’t think somebody counts as a public intellectual if his only platform is a blog that respectable people won’t mention. A PI writes newspaper columns and goes on talk shows and that kind of thing. Otherwise he’s just an intellectual.
* For an amusing read I’d recommend Paul Johnson’s ‘Intellectuals’ which essentially sets out the appalling person failings of several prominent figures who have been seen in this category.
Steven Pinker, Jon Haidt, & Richard Dawkins are some of the better PI’s. Dawkins has obviously become quite controversial since he started including Islam in his polemics against religion.
Otherwise it’s easier to think of ones who have managed to outrage the progressive consensus. Examples, include Martin Amis (on Islam), David Starkey (London riots). Actually, Cambridge historian Starkey seems to have caused outrage to various groups going on this quotation:
“This is not the case for Dr Malachi McIntosh, director of studies in the English department at King’s College, who said: ‘David Starkey is widely known for his racist, sexist and classist comments and because of that does not represent a community composed of people from all places and walks of life.’
