Who are your favorite American intellectuals? Which of their books do you recommend?

>>American intellectuals
My first reaction. But it applies to America's public intellectuals.
The truth is that most scientific knowledge does seem to come from the United States.

This election cycle has destroyed this generation.

>alex jones not crying about the Globalists are sodomizing kids

This and a finger in my ass are the only things that get me off anymore

We don't have public intellectuals that aren't in some way related to some dirty money or disinfo campaigns. We used to have people like Vidal and Buckley, and we need that real bad, but we aint got that.

More like revived it.

Sorry Jew, but Trump is president and there's nothing you can do about it. Your shekels have no power over our government any more.

>I'm a leftist
>But I like a tinfoil hat paleo-conservative

Literally what.

for entertainment broseph

Alex Jones and Cenk Uygur, intellectuals? I'm not even talking shit really, I just want to know why people regard them as such and actually pay attention to them

obviously bait cmon now

desu I was thinking that but thought I'd go through with the reply just in case it was serious haha, because the thing is, these people are actually taken seriously by quite a few people

I chuckled

I know this is a troll but I'm actually triggered right now

10/10 m9

I mean "destroyed" as in no one can think in anything but memes now. Like you just demonstrated.

I get the joke with Joe Rogan and Alex Jones being talked about as "public intellectuals," but what the fuck does the cockroach symbolize?

>implying chink oy gor isn't the millennial's greatest champion

I bet you think the Armenian genocide is real too you faggot

its the left-center-right intellectuals in america

roach is left

>Liking Sam Hyde
>an alt right wing kiddie

I'm leftist too and even I think he's full of shit

Memes are a spook

Spooks are a meme.

Eh, while Cenk Uygur is kind of a blowhard, but I've liked some of the things he's had to say about the election, even if none of it's exactly brilliant. Alex Jones is on an entirely different wavelength from him and Rogan, however. The man is actually insane, and I cannot believe that he has any voice in the political sphere, even among the most extreme of the extreme right.

t. Cenk

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>le bald mommy issues meme man
>American

youtube.com/watch?v=ollGQR4a3Es

I want to read an autobiographical thriller written from the perspective of Alex Jones chronicling his war against the Judeo-Masonic Illuminist reptilloids.

ITT

I am not sure you could consider those guys to be intellectuals. They are entertaining to watch, but what's so intellectual about them?

Who are these people? I don't own a tv.

They are all on Youtube

Search Alex Jones

They are youtubers.

From left to right (position, not ideological/political alignment.)

1.Joe Rogan
2.Cenk from The Young Turks
3.Alex Jones from Info Wars

Sam Hyde is a comedian.

Sam Hyde is a revolutionary.

See pic related: Here he is locking one of the Petit-Bourgeois in a worker's chokehold.

>watching The Young Turks coverage of election night because I wanted to see how buttflustered they get
>tfw Ana had to leave for half an hour and she admitted she had to drink some booze to cope
>tfw Cenk crying and comparing Trump winning and getting away with being a bigot to Alex Jones getting away with humiliating Cenk pic related

Nagel.

So is Gregg Turkington

I want /pol/ to leave and never come back. Saged and reported.

Why does everyone shit on Joe Rogan? I wouldn't be surprised if all these people making fun of him aren't much smarter than he is. There's nothing wrong with being a dilettante if you are genuinely interested and know when to change your mind about things when you learn new stuff.

not that user but I'm also a lefty that watches fox news and alex jones, they fascinate me

The only correct answer

Wow this thread is a stack of shit. Anyway, not sure how it hasn't been mentioned yet but Sam Harris. I think a lot of people on Veeky Forums don't like him but i think he's a great straightforward writer with a lot of knowledge on some really interesting things. Waking Up is my favorite book.

It's okay bro it's "postmodern politics"

of course

>Scientific knowledge
>United States
That's really just due to the amount of money the country can spend on research and the amount of bodies STEM courses shit out in a year. If you consider scientific knowledge per capita then the U.S. probably has the same grade of science as fuckn South Africa.
Not really disagreeing with you I just wanted to shit on the U.S.

isnt red label for mixing

fuckin gay frogs

doubles!

This.
His stand up might not be funny, be he has pretty widespread general knowledge at least. He understands dumb-ass meme culture and whatnot, he knows about sports, he has a decent book collection, and even is really smart when it comes to building computers. It's not like he's a retard.

This pretty much

he's right about 9/11, i like his energy, i think he means well at heart, and he's funny to watch ironically. i don't have to agree with someone's politics to like them or respect the way they practice their politics. (ie; by selling snake oil pills and water filters)

He's gonna be doing reports from the White House now on, better get used to it, libfag.

Mencius Moldbug
Stephen Molyneux
Nick Land

Huntington, Fukuyama, William Bernstein, Kagan, Gordon S. Wood

you're not a leftist you're a retard with cognitive dissonance.

Milton Friedman

>i think he means well at heart

Lol? Alex Jones? He's a fucking con artist.

Based Thoreau.

>no Chomsky
Huh

Antways, Moldbug

lol I bet you're being unironic too

Chomsky has sullied his academic purity by lowering himself into an untenable political position, and then becoming a hack about it.

nybooks.com/articles/2016/06/09/a-case-against-america/

A review of his latest book which raises some pretty good criticism about the laziness of his political discourse.

What happens when you shroom one

not its sole intended purpose but its a low quality scotch and most people mix it.

>favorite American intellectual
Thomas Sowell

>Which of their books do you recommend?
Basic Economics
Black Rednecks and White Liberals
Wealth, Poverty and Politics

jesus anyone else was SO happy for him at that moment?
He spent his entire life spooked by gigant owls and jews, and after all those years he finally was truly happy for a while

Yeah it seems to me Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, Howard Zinn, and the like have lost a llot of influence in the past decade, probably because they mostly are dead now, but it also just seems like people don't take their brand seriously anymore.

Apart from others mentioned, Dan Carlin for sure.

A few hours he published a pro Trump articl.

I love it so far

townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2016/11/14/what-now-n2245644

>gregg turkington

No he's not. He's a fence sitting shithead liberal.

What Now?: Part II is a great read as well.

townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2016/11/14/what-now-part-ii-n2245643

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Probably Chomsky, Sowell and Fukuyama, in no particular order.

I kind of agree with Chomsky that the idea of a "public intellectual" is stupid, and also with his opinion that it's a relatively good thing that America is less reverent of intellectuals than Europe is. Why should it matter to the average citizen what Sartre or Foucault think of the Vietnam War, what Karl Popper thinks of the collapse of the USSR, what Judith Butler thinks of Israel-Palestine, or what Zizek thinks of the 2008 financial crisis? I'll read their books for facts and theories, but I'm not going to just swallow their opinions on current events, and I think most peop leare capable of doing the same.

I realize the irony in referencing Chomsky in stating this opinion.

Norm Macdonald is the greatest north american intellectual

>Wrote a book
>Reads Tolstoy every day
>Writes tons of 2deep4u posts on Twitter
>Could have won $1million on WWTBAM but didnt want to take the chance and piss of Paul Newman
>His comedy is like, 5 or 6 layers deep at this point

>townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2016/11/14/what-now-part-ii-n2245643

>electing cruz as the next supreme court justice.

holy....

My main objection to Cruz as a SCOTUS Justice is that he would probably waste a ton of energy trying to overturn decisions he doesn't like, like the Obamacare and gay marriage decisions. I think he would not be deferential at all to stare decisis, even to decisions within the past 5 years, and his apparent dogmatism would take a toll on the collegiality of the court. He'd be a great solicitor general though.

I think he'd eventually have a mental breakdown and be a total pushover. Like he just seems like the type.

I didn't like Scalia, but the guy had real obstinate drive and that's rare as fuck without being a busybody.

I'm pretty sure none of the other Justices ever had mental breakdowns, despite handling substantially heavier caseloads than they do today. He can probably handle it. I don't think his or Scalia's legal philosophy makes much sense, but I doubt mental state is much of a concern.

I thought Scalia was the best justice on SCOTUS, followed closely by Ginsburg and Roberts, then some combo of Kennedy/ Breyer/ Kagan, then Alito, then Thomas and Sotomayor tied for worst (both are too dogmatic). Scalia was the best writer, an honor I would now give to Kagan. He's more of a textualist than a pure originalist like Thomas is, or like Cruz would be. I didn't always agree with him, particularly on stuff like Miranda warnings, gay rights and some aspects of campaign finance, but he certainly had a clear vision on how to interpret the law and the Constitution.

I don't know that Cruz would have a mental breakdown, but he doesn't seem the type who would accept political realities and would just end up being 10 times the miserable grump Thomas is.

Textualism, for me, is a scam. Textualism sounds good until you get to ambiguity (and of course almost anything can be ambiguous). When Scalia trots out his parade of "well-traditional canons of construction," the whole thing becomes ludicrous, especially when practically nobody in Congress is aware of any of these canons, and if they are aware, they certainly don't care about them. His (what does traditional mean, anyways? Is it lenity? Avoidance? Which of the textual canons?) can be applied every which way, and to me aren't anything more than a clever way to justify to yourself and to others that you're strictly interpreting text when in fact you're doing anything but.

Posner has a fair view of Scalia:

newrepublic.com/article/106441/scalia-garner-reading-the-law-textual-originalism

I agree that he was the best writer of the bunch.

Textualism, for me, is a scam. Textualism sounds good until you get to ambiguity (and of course almost anything can be ambiguous). When Scalia trots out his parade of "well-traditional canons of construction," the whole thing becomes ludicrous, especially when practically nobody in Congress is aware of any of these canons, and if they are aware, they certainly don't care about them. His (what does traditional mean, anyways? Is it lenity? Avoidance? Which of the textual canons?) canons can be applied every which way depending on mood, and to me aren't anything more than a clever way to justify to yourself and to others that you're strictly interpreting text when in fact you're doing anything but.

Posner has a fair view of Scalia:

newrepublic.com/article/106441/scalia-garner-reading-the-law-textual-originalism

I agree that he was the best writer of the bunch.

He would easily be the one candidate that would anger Hillshills the most though and considering I only supported Trump to piss off my aunt in the first place I support him.

Vidal is still worth reading. Burr is the great antidote to Hamilton. He also championed Tim McVeigh (without endorsing what he did).

>American intellectuals

>Who are your favorite American intellectuals?
Immanuel Wallerstein

>Which of their books do you recommend?
All of them. I haven't read all of them, but based on what I have read of his, you likely can't go too wrong. I can definitely recommend his books on World-Systems Analysis (his theory of global development over the past several hundred years) and African politics.

You can also check out his very brief bimonthly articles on the website Agence Global to get a taste of what he's about.

Alex Jones is the most entertaining man alive.

>His (what does traditional mean, anyways? Is it lenity? Avoidance? Which of the textual canons?) canons can be applied every which way depending on mood, and to me aren't anything more than a clever way to justify to yourself and to others that you're strictly interpreting text when in fact you're doing anything but.

Well, all judges (and many lawyers) know this at some level, but "the law" is kind of a pretend game where you accept certain terms of art and principles as truths and then rhetorically battle over how to apply them. Kagan is basically a textualist too, she just applies the canons a little differently than Scalia does. I think textualism is better than pure originalism like Thomas. I personally am not wild about Posner's law and economics approach, but I agree that Scalia wasn't true 100% of the time to his principles. That said, I think Posner himself has a tendency to forget that the law functions a little bit like religion. He wrote an article earlier this year criticizing various legal terms of art, saying "Aren't these terms arbitrary?" and "Couldn't people differ on how they understand these these terms?"; all the lawyers I knew reacted along the lines of, "No shit Judge Posner, but we need some kind of suspension of disbelief to make the legal system function."

The principles are precisely what's in question though. Scalia rejected purposivist and historical approaches to interpretation under the pretext that his method is somehow more grounded in reality and free from judicial meddling when it's clearly not. Now, I'm not saying that delving into legislative history produces better or worse results than textualism, but pretending that textualism has some intrinsic and ineffable virtue to it is a tad intellectually dishonest.

Friendly Reminder

>will self
>pseud

...

kek I forgot about her. She's kind of a hack, but she has some refreshing perspectives and a lot of rhetorical skills.