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Post a Comment On: Steve Sailer: iSteve

"Freeman Dyson on Thatcher hate"

36 Comments -

1 – 36 of 36
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I think you picked an imperfect example with the Eliots. TS was a banker for most of his life until he was hired by Fabers because there was no money to "support" his career as a poet. They were pretty much always a mix of commercial and intellectual caste and never super wealthy. There is a reason they were college presidents and not for instance globe hopping amateur botanists. Think Carraways not Buchanans in Gatsby.

Movers perhaps but not shakers. Although TS would have been a good Shaker.

4/10/13, 4:39 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/oct/18/inside-room-237-the-shining

"It would be nice to dismiss Ascher's subjects as a gaggle of idiotic, excitable fan-boys with too much time on their hands. Annoyingly, the shoe won't quite fit. Geoffrey Cocks, who sees the film as a Holocaust parable, is professor of history at a Michigan college. Bill Blakemore, who decided that the film was about the genocide of the Native American, after spotting a carton of baking soda in the background, is a senior correspondent at ABC News. These people are educated, articulate and often plausible. Yet somehow The Shining has infected them."

If educated people can be this ridiculous, I shudder for humanity.

4/10/13, 4:47 PM

Blogger Luke Lea said...

"The old commercial wealth funded the careers of worthies such as Harvard president Charles Eliot, Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison, and poet T.S. Eliot."

Wouldn't William and Henry James fit in here?

4/10/13, 4:49 PM

Anonymous Enoch Baden-Powell said...

Wedgwood Benn was a deranged and unpleasant piece of work, and that quotation you cite from Wikipedia shows how he'd so imbibed the poisonous chalice of leftist nonsense that he loathed himself. And those who indulge in pop psychology might be tempted to explain the vitriolic hatred of the left directed at Margaret Thatcher as a form of projection. After all, as that other great representative of the British thinking class, Monty Python, informs us, murder is simply extroverted suicide.

4/10/13, 4:56 PM

Blogger DR said...

"The only thing I'd add is that in reality, a commercial middle class usually breeds its own critics. And I'm using "breeds" literally."

Yeah, but sometimes it goes the other way. In Silicon Valley particularly, and to a certain extent in Wall Street. For example Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Steve Jobs all had very academic parents. Arguably they founded and ran the two most important corporations of the 21st century.

4/10/13, 4:59 PM

Anonymous Bobbye said...

So, the Carnegies and the Vanderbilts are middle class? Who knew!

4/10/13, 5:13 PM

Blogger Assistant Village Idiot said...

Nice to see the College of William and Mary figuring prominently in the Lunar Society. We took a significant downturn over the next 150 years, to gradually rise in the late 20th as an elite academic institution again.

Of course, that often means great foolishness these days, but we were pretty good when we were on the make in the postwar era until the fall of the Iron Curtain.

4/10/13, 5:35 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

As a kid I was friends with descendants of the celebrated Bingham family, who got rich as Hawaiian missionaries/landowners in the early 1800s, which let the grandson become an explorer and discover Macchu Picchu. The one I knew was a northern California hippie/dropout who through native ability became first a commercial salmon fisherman, then a successful Sacramento lobbyist.

4/10/13, 5:37 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

http://southtownstar.suntimes.com/19404787-522/story.html

Shoo!

4/10/13, 5:59 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/the-ever-shrinking-role-of-tenured-college-professors-in-1-chart/274849/

4/10/13, 6:06 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Isn't Benn a Jewish name?

4/10/13, 6:17 PM

Anonymous Willie the Red said...

All of which argues against the idea of "regression to the mean"...

4/10/13, 6:31 PM

Blogger TGGP said...

Freeman Dyson is known as a climate skeptic, but ironically enough there a climate skeptic documentary called "The Great Global Warming Swindle" which blames pro-nuke Thatcher for starting the hype!

4/10/13, 8:16 PM

Anonymous Mr. Anon said...

"TGGP said...

Freeman Dyson is known as a climate skeptic, but ironically enough there a climate skeptic documentary called "The Great Global Warming Swindle" which blames pro-nuke Thatcher for starting the hype!"

Dyson also supported the idea of strategic missile defence, while most academics poo-poohed it.

4/10/13, 8:41 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

For example Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Steve Jobs all had very academic parents. Arguably they founded and ran the two most important corporations of the 21st century.


Well, no. They didn't. No argument about it.

4/10/13, 9:53 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Isn't Benn a Jewish name?


No.

4/10/13, 9:56 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

All of which argues against the idea of "regression to the mean"


Oh? The descendants of wealthy and presumably intelligent businessmen turning out to be vapid nitwits sounds like a fine example of regression to the mean in action.

4/10/13, 9:59 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/health/for-scientists-an-exploding-world-of-pseudo-academia.html?_r=1&

4/10/13, 10:14 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Nice to see Steve mention Freeman Dyson again. The last mention astonished me: at age 89, leaping into a completely unfamilar field, Dyson overthrew decades of academic consensus WITH A SINGLE DAY'S WORK.

I don't mean to sound as if I'm buttering up Steve, but he reminds me just a bit of Dyson:

Both combine quant smarts with sensitivity to people, politics, and art
Both enjoy cutting through the BS CW to present surprising perspectives
Both truly enjoy being mavericks and troublemakers

4/10/13, 10:15 PM

Anonymous JeremiahJohnbalaya said...

Second time I've read that write-up and wondered what the dude meant by "Now the odd thing kept happening: My program kept crashing, but at a different point in the strategy space each time. It took a while to recognize that all these points lay exactly on a plane, and that the reason that the program was crashing was because "

4/11/13, 12:48 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Interesting you mention Thatcher lowering her voice to sound more authoritative. I used to wonder why there weren't more tenors, why most men are baritones, with some bass voices. At meetings, the lower voice generally sounds more authoritative, less whiny. They get more respect whether their arguments are correct or not. Which kind of voice is going to lead to more reproductive success, more often? I'd say baritone or bass over tenor most of the time.

On the other hand, reproducing successfully is not just about producing a large number of children but also relates to the reproductive success of your children, your grandchildren and so on and so forth. So it pays to seek the center. Your manly man sons might do above average in reproducing, but your bulldyke daughters aren't going to produce many children. Similarly, your extra-feminine daughters may not make up for your gay sons.

4/11/13, 1:18 AM

Anonymous dearieme said...

I spent much of my career teaching in some of the better universities but am a son of the commercial middle class. I have never warmed to the academic class - to some members of it of course, but not to the generality. This may be partly due to my discovery, as a fresher, that few university teachers were as intelligent as my father. I don't mean "intelligent" in some feeble folksy way, I mean that both in power of reflection and in quick-witted reasoning he was clearly their superior. There are other reasons too but that'll do for starters.

4/11/13, 6:21 AM

Anonymous Whitehall said...

One of the English academia, Tony Jodt, wrote a book about Europe since WWII called "Post-War."

The Thatcher bashing should have been embarrassing to both the author and the editor.

Pretty decent up to about 1962 went it went south badly. I think it no coincidence that the author was born about 1949 so got the history correct until his hormones kicked in.

4/11/13, 8:22 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

It was her hair. Always that same hair that never changed. British society flattered itself for embracing change since the 60s, but Thatcher's hair was the same always, like Bozo the Clown's.

There was something about her that simply wasn't likable. You know the type. Never has any fun in school. Always does the homework and hands them all in time. Has no use for funny bunny talk. Always critical of bad manners. Always acting like she's in the wrong place--among inferiors--and must rise in the world.

What really pissed off the left was that she was successful. It's what riled many about Pinochet too. It wasn't just that he killed leftists--so did many latin american right wing dictators--but he did good things for Chile and had enough class to move aside.

Both Thatcher and Pinochet undermined the leftist pigeonholing of the right.
Thatcher was actually popular among the PEOPLE, indeed more so that the leftist academes, and the leftists were aghast--and this may be one reason why leftists took revenge on the British masses by allowing massive immigration. It's like 'how dare you re-elect that rotten Thatcher over and over when she holds you in contempt while WE LEFTISTS love you?'

And the fact that Pinochet was actually pragmatic and sensible enough to save the economy and then regally step aside made the LEFT fume. A rightwing thug was NOT supposed to succeed and improve lives for the people and not supposed to step aside graciously.

It all goes back to Chiang Kai-Shek. Western progressives just loved to bash him and blame him for everything wrong with China while praising Mao as a revolutionary and reformer and man of the people. Ideological blinders and moral narcissism among progressives.

4/11/13, 11:20 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"One of the English academia, Tony Judt, wrote a book about Europe since WWII called "Post-War. The Thatcher bashing should have been embarrassing to both the author and the editor."

Ironically, Eric Hobsbawm in his AGES OF EXTREMES is kinder to Thatcher though his politics was far more to the left than Judt's.

Hobsbawm even says what Thatcher did with the unions prolly needed to have been done.

4/11/13, 11:22 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/books-and-arts/107966/eugene-genovese-eric-hobsbawm-age-of-extremes#

An interesting piece. Genovese the ex-Marxist has praise for Hobsbawm the communist-by-habit(but without conviction near the end).

4/11/13, 11:25 AM

Anonymous Crawfurdmuir said...

"So, the Carnegies and the Vanderbilts are middle class? Who knew!"

They were bourgeois - not members of the upper class (i.e., the aristocracy). Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt were both self-made businessmen, not scions of inherited wealth. Carnegie was a poor Scottish immigrant; Vanderbilt quit school at age 11 to work on his father's ferryboat in New York harbor. He was said to have retained the coarse accent of his origins until the day he died. Both were considered "jumped up" by the established society of their time.

4/11/13, 12:43 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Benn's brother Michael was a decorated pilot killed in WWII.

Benn wrote in the Guardian of attending the funeral of a left-wing Labour MP, Eric Heffer. He turned round and there was Mrs Thatcher crying. She respected an honest opponent.

4/11/13, 1:46 PM

Anonymous Willie the Red said...

"Anonymous said...

All of which argues against the idea of "regression to the mean"

Oh? The descendants of wealthy and presumably intelligent businessmen turning out to be vapid nitwits sounds like a fine example of regression to the mean in action."

Yeah, because only vapid nitwits disproportionately become successful, wealthy businessmen, world-renowned scientists, inventors, famous doctors, successful politicians, and top military leaders like the descendants of the Lunar Society.

4/11/13, 6:24 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

In the 1970's British classic TV show The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin Reggie Perrin's son wore a t-shirt with "Wedgewood-Benn for Pope" on it.

In the pre-internet days I wondered who Wedgwood-Benn was. As an anglophile, I had heard of arch lefty Tony Benn but it took a while to put 2 and 2 together.

BTW, the net also informed me that in the original Perrin novel the t-shirt read "Wedgwood-Benn for King."

4/11/13, 8:17 PM

Anonymous Thurston Watterford IV said...

Oh, dear me, you said FREEMAN Dyson. I had momentarily confused the chap with that irksome light-skinned negro fellow- What's his name? MICHAEL Dyson. Well of course MICHAEL hates Thatcher, and anyone else to the right of ultra leftist hatemongering.

4/12/13, 7:58 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Freeman Dyson's comment contains some truth but perhaps could use expansion, to judge by the confusion on display in some comments. English society did, traditionally, have two types of middle-class: the kind that depended on commerce of various kinds and that owed nothing to the Establishment, i.e. the aristocracy, and the second type of middle-class, considerably older and usually poorer, that owed its social place and money to the Crown: barristers, doctors, clergy, soldiers.

What muddles the story is that the former often ditched the religion, occupations and accents that carried the taint of commerce as soon as they were established enough to do so, and married into the latter class. If they were really lucky/successful, they married into the aristocracy, or were given titles of their own.

Margaret Thatcher, of course, had not got far enough away from her commercial origins to please the non-commercial middle-class. And, of course, as an Oxford wag said of her when the university refused to give her an honorary degree, "why should we feed the hand that bites us?" She was a direct threat to that particular class, and for most of them, that was enough reason ti dislike her. Few had the detachment to wonder if she might be good for the country as a whole.

4/12/13, 12:30 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Oh, dear me, you said FREEMAN Dyson. I had momentarily confused the chap with that irksome light-skinned negro fellow- What's his name? MICHAEL Dyson."

Isn't there a Neil Degrassie Tyson?

4/12/13, 12:35 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Last year there was a movie about what Hitchcock really may have been thinking while making PSYCHO.

Now, this nutty movie on Shining.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/millman/labyrinths-of-reason/

4/12/13, 11:33 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

All of which argues against the idea of "regression to the mean"

There are two sources for regression to the mean, in practice:

1) Intelligence has a genetic and random component.

Children will, on average, tend to inherit the average of their parents' genetic component (with scatter around the biparental mean due to random sampling).

However, they won't tend to inherit their parents' random component, and if this is high in parent, it will generally tend to be lower in a child, because probability. The random component will tend to be average in children, on average. This regression tends to be gone in the first generation.

Henry Harpending has explained this at his and Cochran's blog, if you are interested.

2) Random mating.

Even intelligent children will tend to mate with other less intelligent people if mating is purely random, since the number of intelligent people is relatively few compared to less intelligent people (and equally very stupid people are less frequent than less stupid people). So will have less intelligent offspring for this reason.

4/16/13, 12:29 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Generally, I think the right view of Thatcher is of someone whose deregulation and conflict program ultimately produced no real industrial growth for the country, no industries other than buying and selling a lot of dodgy debts and whose lack of any real manufacturing growth was masked by the extraction of the North Sea gas and oil. True, she may have had limited options with the abysmal performance of British industry by the late 1970s, but did not provide any genuine sustainable solutions.

Her deregulation framed the opening of Britain to all and sundry via immigration, even if this was never intent, and that is her only true legacy.

In particular, she in part manufactured a property boom with the selling of nationalized property, maintaining which property boom is one of the key drivers of migration as supported by the "commercial middle classes".

4/16/13, 12:36 AM

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