{"id":96392,"date":"2016-05-17T11:38:04","date_gmt":"2016-05-17T19:38:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=96392"},"modified":"2016-05-17T11:50:48","modified_gmt":"2016-05-17T19:50:48","slug":"who-are-leading-public-intellectuals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=96392","title":{"rendered":"Who Are Our Leading Public Intellectuals?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Comments at Greg Cochran’s blog West Hunt<\/a>:<\/p>\n

* 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.<\/p>\n

* 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.<\/p>\n

* Somebody like Steve Pinker seems pretty solid model in my opinion.<\/p>\n

-Charles Murray is another. Brought some realism to the understanding of the welfare state in the 80\u2019s, to broad societal problems with the Bell Curve, human achievements in the 00\u2019s, the social decline of America with Coming Apart.<\/p>\n

-John McWhorter as one of the few(if any) public intellectuals who have addressed the most stunting ideology in America.<\/a><\/p>\n

-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.<\/p>\n

-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. <\/p>\n

* 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\u2019s summary of Bailey\u2019s becoming embroiled in charges of academic misconduct, here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

* Peter Thiel: Guy is clearly a full blown heretic on issues of equality, gender, race, democracy, etc. I think he\u2019s regularly converting close confidants to his views based on what I\u2019ve heard from many in interviews. Track record \u2013 check. Public talk\/prediction is sparse because he\u2019s got businesses to run, but I expect we\u2019ll hear more from him over the years.<\/p>\n

* Theodore Dalrymple. I thought his books about culture and the \u201cworldview of the underclass\u201d were very good. Here\u2019s a good quote from Dalrymple:<\/p>\n

“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\u2019s state of mind, or one\u2019s mood, is or should be independent of the way that one lives one\u2019s 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.”<\/p>\n

* Hitch had a head full of batty ideas, but he he could hold your interest because he was very good at expressing them.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t know the material well enough to be brief and they are more interested in signalling than attracting new people to their banner.<\/p>\n

* Steve Sailer is an updated George Orwell, but with a better sense of humour and wider range of interests. And he likes Evelyn Waugh.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. He would have been rich and famous if he\u2019d taken the course that you might have expected from his genetics (cf. Charles Krauthammer, Jennifer Rubin, et al).<\/p>\n

* I don\u2019t think somebody counts as a public intellectual if his only platform is a blog that respectable people won\u2019t mention. A PI writes newspaper columns and goes on talk shows and that kind of thing. Otherwise he\u2019s just an intellectual.<\/p>\n

* For an amusing read I\u2019d recommend Paul Johnson\u2019s \u2018Intellectuals\u2019 which essentially sets out the appalling person failings of several prominent figures who have been seen in this category.<\/p>\n

Steven Pinker, Jon Haidt, & Richard Dawkins are some of the better PI\u2019s. Dawkins has obviously become quite controversial since he started including Islam in his polemics against religion.<\/p>\n

Otherwise it\u2019s 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:<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is not the case for Dr Malachi McIntosh, director of studies in the English department at King\u2019s College, who said: \u2018David 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.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21791],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-96392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-america"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=96392"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96392\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":96403,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96392\/revisions\/96403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=96392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=96392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=96392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}