However, any such list that doesn’t include Dworkin is prima facie ridiculous. He is quite simply one of the most important legal thinkers in the last hundred years; he sets out a position on the law that is deeply important and, in my opinion, deeply wrong; and he is going to be taught to students in a hundred years, two hundred years, three hundred years. “Law’s Empire” alone qualifies him for Top 100 status.

Oh that is a joke. Thomas Friedbrains? The man who waves off his failure to see the impending quagmire in Iraq by saying that he was “duped” even though the evidence against WMDs was right in front of him all the fucking time?

I was surprised to see Clifford Geertz on the list. This means that at least some people are pondering the question of communicating across cultures and how much can we understand of one another.

Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate) and Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene) were both ranked a little high IMHO. When Pinker slashes at “feminist biology” he does a very sloppy job of representing what the studies in question actually represent. Yet we call him “one of us”.

Dawkins’ “meme” hypothesis has caught on with some intellectuals who have no clue about science. How do you quantify the concept and call it Science? He’s just stolen the idea of “culture” from anthropology and pretended that it was something new. And his “Blind Watchmaker” is not all that far from ID. Dawkins just throws out God. He and Pinker just don’t get that the only thing evolution cares about is that you live to breed. Therefore some pretty clumsy traits can live on and on.

Oh and look: Pope Rat is there, too.

John Ralson Saul didn’t make the list nor did Kay Jamison. Both of them, in my opinion, offer a great deal more to society than these pundits. Including Hitchens.

It comes down to this: most people wouldn’t know an intellectual if one bit them in the collective butt. Sometimes the arrogant ignorance is obvious, other times it just slips on by like a cunningly wielded enema.

*FLAME OF LIST OFF*

This is just objectively false, and possibly a bit offensive as well. (Was Goebbels ‘brilliant’ too?)

Name a single original or important idea Hitchens has ever had. Name a single contribution he’s made to any discipline. Name a single significant book that he’s written.

He is an apologist for US terrorism, nothing more, nothing less. Just because he speaks with a British accent and name-drops like it’s going out of style doesn’t make him brilliant. It makes him a pompous, British version of John Hinderaker.

World’s Top 100 Intellectuals I’m feeling especially anti-intellectual right now because there are a lot of intellectuals on this list that I do not recognize. I find the “bonus ball” list more instructive. Bono? An intellectual? [via Feministe]…