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Comment by eob | Hacker News Reader

I think famous outspoken thinkers (Chomsky and Harris.. RMS comes to mind, Hitchens, Buckley, etc) can sometimes harbor off-putting personalities as a side effect of the situation they find themselves in: being a symbolic figurehead of a particular ideology. Or sometimes perhaps it's part of the reason they got to that place.

There is a certain level of social decorum most people keep that prevents no-holds-barred exploration of ideas. On the tails of the bell curve faith-based orthodoxy and intellectual orthodoxy.. rude but incredibly sharp instruments of exploring thought.

I'm not advocating for being an asshole... but rather for a select few we should try to see through the incivility to the ideas they're contributing.

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RMS isn't really an asshole, though he has some infamous quirks that some people tend to overemphasize because they find his otherwise straightforward ideas to be highly disagreeable to begin with.

Hitchens was inflammatory, but also flexible in his thinking.

Buckley was an interesting case. To some extent, he was more acerbic towards those he mostly agreed with than those who he had further ideological skirmishes with. For instance, he was friends and associates with Galbraith, but infamously brutal towards Rothbard over his non-interventionist views on foreign policy.

> Buckley was an interesting case. To some extent, he was more acerbic towards those he mostly agreed with than those who he had further ideological skirmishes with. For instance, he was friends and associates with Galbraith, but infamously brutal towards Rothbard over his non-interventionist views on foreign policy.

Buckley probably realized that without vigorous pruning of the anti-Semites, libertarians, Randians and John Birchers, American conservatism would collapse into a fairly terrifying fringe movement; something which has been borne out since his passing.

Why would the libertarians need to be vigorously pruned?

Ask Buckley. There's still kind of a libertarian wing to American conservatism, but libertarianism is the kind of thing that can easily be taken to extremes, as we've seen with the Tea Party lately. Rothbard in particular was an anarcho-capitalist, which is a fairly fringe position.

>To some extent, he was more acerbic towards those he mostly agreed with than those who he had further ideological skirmishes with.

At the start of his interview with Chomsky he threatens that if Chomsky loses his temper he (Buckley) will "smash [Chomsky] in the goddamned face."

One of those people in your list is one of the most important thinkers of our time, the others are...not.

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