From this thread and this thread on r/ssc; feel free to keep making suggestions in the comment thread here. I’ve tried to sort them into categories by political opinions; feel free to correct me if I have a miscategorization. Please note that I included every name that was nominated by a person who did not say they agreed with the nominated person or stan for the Cultural Revolution in the same comment; presence on this list does not mean that I approve of a person or even know who they are. (Decisions about whether the person said they agreed with the nominated person are made by me, and are final.)
Miscellaneous
- Left, Right and Center (podcast)
Christians
- G. K. Chesterton (3 votes)
- C. S. Lewis (3 votes)
- Mark Yarhouse
- Melinda Selmys
- J. R. R. Tolkien
- Marilynne Robinson
- Grahame Greene
- Peter Blum
- Samantha Field
- Guy Consolmagno
- Tolstoy
Libertarians
- David Friedman (3 votes)
- Tyler Cowen (2 votes)
- Adam Smith
- Megan McArdle
- Bryan Caplan
- Penn Jillette
- Jeffrey Tucker
- Kmele Foster
Conservatives
- Ross Douthat (4 votes)
- David French (4 votes)
- Rod Dreher (2 votes)
- Rich Lowry
- Charles Murray
- Niall Ferguson
Feminists
- Catharine MacKinnon (2 votes)
- Judith Butler (2 votes)
- Barbara Ehrenreich
- Barry Deutsch
- Julia Serano
- Zoe Quinn
- Crash Chaos Cats
- Jeana Jorgensen
- Contrapoints
Liberals
- Harold Feld
- Kevin Drum
- Ruth Bader Ginsberg
- Ezra Klein
- Yannis Varoufakis
- u/yodatsracist (on reddit)
- Liz Bruenig
- Jane Coaston
- Bret Weinstein
Leftists
- Nathan J Robinson (2 votes)
- Freddie de Boer (2 votes)
- William Gillis
- Noam Chomsky
- Karl Marx
- Ursula K Le Guin
Effective Altruists
- Will MacAskill
- Jeremy Bentham
Rationalists
- Kelsey Piper (theunitofcaring on tumblr) (4 votes)
- Scott Alexander (2 votes)
- Jacob Falkovich
- Alicorn
Depressing Germans
- Heinrich von Kleist
- Philipp Mainländer
Thing of Things 
(trigger warning: me listing all the errors you made in the post with some snark)
thread (except if you think an article of you being posted on r/ssc is threatening, I guess)
In their comment, @mel boiko said that they agreed with Zoe Quinn, one of the persons they nominated, but you included her name anyway.
Unless there are two separate conservatives named “David French”, I assume this is a typo.
Ursula K Le Guin is AFAICT a leftist, not a liberal.
Only one t.
I didn’t checked, but considering he died in 1832 I doubt Jeremy Bentham was an Effective Altruist (although he would probably have liked the idea. Perhaps you meant something like “Utilitarians” ?
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)
There, probably saved some of you from unresolved tension (Don’t worry, I had unresolved tension on this too.)
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Nope, classifying Jeremy Bentham as an EA was absolutely deliberate and if he were alive I’m sure he’d be proud to identify as such.
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Ok.
ZQ is still in the list despite breaking the “nominated by a person who did not say they agreed with the nominated person” rule, though.
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It’s not quite the same thing, but I have a specific *writing* I disagreed with but found worthwhile*. Legitimately thoughtful, and kept enough of a lid on the lack of compassion for me to not ragequit reading.
Mencius Moldbug’s “Open Letter to an Open-Minded Progressive” (http://www.thedarkenlightenment.com/moldbugs-open-letter/) made me better understand the common assumptions of liberal/leftist/progressive ideologies, and how one could reject them, though without convincing me to reject them. I’m a better liberal for having read it.
(I wouldn’t suggest you put it on the list; I think ‘in a comment on the page with the list’ is just the right level of exposure)
*Though only if you don’t view reading enormous amounts of text as much of a cost. Value per word is abysmal.
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An immediate observation is that as far as I can see none of the Conservatives listed is a Trump enthusiast – they range from never-Trumpers to nose-holders.
I think this is probably non-coincidental – the combative style associated with Trump probably doesn’t lend itself to reaching out to adversaries.
But I’d be interested to see the names of genuine Trump enthusiasts who qualify, if anyone can suggest any.
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There was a exposé in my newspaper the other day about a community of progressives trying to find Trump supporters to talk to. They had great trouble, but eventually found some.
As an exercise to bring people together, they had people tell everyone about their history, based on the assumption that this would result in people connecting over having similar pasts. However, it turned out that the progressives all had migration stories, being new to their community, while the Trump supporters had stories about many generations of living in the same place.
One of the Trump supporters discussed how she understood the issues with coal burning & mining, but that for her community, it was part of a proud narrative of having dug coal to win WW 2. Of having fed and housed their kids with money earned with hard, but fair labor.
I think that this speaks to two fundamentally different cultures, where one has high openness to experience, but low sense of tradition and respect for the past, while the other culture is the opposite. The low-openness tribe fundamentally lacks certain ambitions and desires which largely keep them out of politics (as candidates), out of the media (as journalists), out of Hollywood (as directors), etc.
They are like Milton from Office Space (the guy with the red stapler). A person without huge skills and ambition, who just wants to be treated fairly and allowed to work up until his pension with fairly little change. Yet the very absence of people like Milton from management means that he is managed by people with a very different culture, who reward other behavior. Peter shows up late, violates the company’s dress code and transgresses in other ways, but is rewarded for being insightful, not for doing a good job at his assigned work. In contrast, Milton is treated worse and worse, but he lacks the skills to fight back against his. He comes from a culture where you don’t demand, loudly proclaim your own qualities/achievements or dare to tell people with a different profession how to do their job, but where you are rewarded for doing your own job decently.
At the end of the movie, Milton can’t take the disrespect & abuse any longer and he
votes Trump into officeburns down the company.Anyway, my point is that these people less often seek debate in the way that those of ‘our’ tribe seek the debate. So they usually don’t learn these skills to the extent that the other tribes does. So they can only get a chance to make their points in a debate with the other tribe if the other side holds back their punches and meets them more than halfway.
However, they currently tend to expect to be dismissed and mocked if they seek out a debate. Imagine a child who is meek, but has very loud and opinionated parents, who challenge everything that the child says and who are much more skilled at arguing. Is it weird if such a child gives up on trying to get their way in most cases, as she never wins any debate, but that the child then throws a tantrum if the parents truly go too far for her? After all, throwing a tantrum is the only thing that works to get her way…
This behavior is then very confusing to the tribe with high openness, who expect frustration and discontent to come out gradually and fairly loudly even at lower levels of discontent, not for people to bear it relatively quietly and then to suddenly become enraged.
Anyway, while you see the Trump-supporters as combative, I’m fairly sure that they will generally see the high openness tribe as the combative people. Your implicit demand is that they adapt to you and communicate how you like to communicate, although this is like Magnus Carlsen challenging you to a chess match to settle a dispute.
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I think that going into uh, pretty much any online space that’s not overwhelmingly dominated by progressives will show you that there are plenty of Trump supporters who are very willing to argue with their adversaries and stridently make their case in the public sphere. The intellectuals that Trump supporters most valorize– like Dinesh D’Souza, Jordan Peterson, Milo Yiannopoulos, Ben Shapiro, etc– are all extremely confrontational people who rose to prominence because of their polemics, not because of any sort of genuine intellectual or literary contribution. I’m not sure that you can reconcile a case that Trump supporters are a fundamentally discourse, debate, or conflict-averse group with the contents of say, r/thedonald, the average Breitbart comment section, or the replies to Bill Mitchell’s posts on Twitter.
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No Theodor Adorno on the Depressing Germans list?
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The list is crowdsourced, if you want him to be there, ask Ozy. (Your comment should be enough.)
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You neglected to list yourself, even though you’d received a couple nominations; was that intentional?
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Yep!
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Thanks to the various people who recommended David French – I’ve been reading some of his stuff on the strength of that, and while I don’t agree with all of it it’s definitely worth reading.
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Megan McArdle doesn’t belong within a mile of any “compassionate” list. Did people read the Grenfell Tower response? It’s like a parody of nitpicky libertarians
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Cyborgbutterflies doesn’t consider herself a rationalist or even adjacent to them, and is pretty clear about that, so it might be better to put her under “transhumanist” or another category! (Sorry if this is out of line; I lurk a lot but I’ve never commented before)
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Yeah, definitely, good catch.
She’s very explicit about not being a rationalist. But she is one of the few anti rationalists I tend to read on a regular basis because she is open to different opinions.
She does post a lot of transhumanist ideas.
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I’m not surprised that Douthat got four votes, and I’d like to add my own endorsement. He gets a ton of progressive hate for his traditionalism, but when I actually read his work in good faith, I notice just how often his views are distorted and misrepresented by his opponents. That’s one mark of a strong thinker – if his arguments were weaker, there would be no need to caricature him. (And indeed, most conservative writers working today don’t get this treatment, because they’re awful enough all by themselves. As far as I’m concerned, Douthat is the Bill Watterson of contemporary conservative punditry: so far beyond his peers it’s a little bit embarrassing.)
I still disagree with him on – well, quite a few things. But I would say he’s made me at least somewhat more open to the conservative worldview, broadly defined. The only other conservatives who have done that are all dead.
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Hm, the people who mentioned Barry Deutsch and Nathan Robinson all said that they didn’t quite make it (so did two out of the three people who mentioned Rod Dreher, who indeed you only counted for two). Not sure they should be on the compiled list?
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I think Contrapoints should be categorized as a leftist as well as a feminist.
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Is “depressing Germans” not a redundancy? Are there any non-depressing German writers? 🙂
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Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
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Hesse can be quite uplifting, in an outdoorsy and quietly spiritual kind of way.
But the only other German Lit I’ve read is Böll.
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Georg Christoph Lichtenberg.
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Ruth Bader Ginsburg, not “Ginsberg”
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I’m curious as to why you classified Contrapoints under ‘feminist’ and not ‘leftist?’
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I had to go and find the comment on that other thread to see if whoever said Penn Jillette had had those discussions personally, because I can see how you’d get there from that, but not from 99% of written or broadcast stuff… I would agree with the follow-up commenter, you’re very much looking at a situation where ‘compassionate’ can be highly debatable, particularly depending on where the entertainment versus rational debate dial has been set to.
I happen to enjoy the honesty in not ‘compassionately’ pretending to see more value in an opposing viewpoint than one actually does, but I can’t imagine everyone would feel that way.
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Just remembered that Meredith Patterson exists. I broadly disagree with her about the value/necessity of tech feminism, but she’s great. Probably more insightful than compassionate, but well worth a read.
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Not sure why you added Ezra Klein. I don’t see him as particularly thoughtful and I see no evidence that he’s compassionate. Who knows though, maybe he isn’t intellectually dishonest on purpose
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@lifesalad
From the very first paragraph:
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