No Guru, No Method, No Teacher

Oh, Friedman is an absolute must. Also John Ralston Saul. Basically anybody who has ever been keynote speaker at a “Festival of Ideas”. And much as I adore the little Slovenian munchkin myself, I suspect Slavoj Zizek would garner a few votes.

50% of this list makes me feel ignorant (I have no idea who they are). However, Malcom Gladwell is not an intellectual – I love his books, but only as works of fiction – he applies zero intellectual rigour to his interesting ideas. Can I give all three of my votes to him please.

i am a public idiot — i only voted once

i once had an awesome drunken conversation with a very earnest young german university student who explained to me that he was in correspondence with noam chomsky and had been for some time and the problem was that no-one understood him: and it was almost exactly like those interviews you see on television of women who develop relationships with men on death row.

that said i actually quite like the chomsk.

I wanted to vote against Alain de Botton and then I read one of his books (The pleasures and Sorrows of Work) and discovered it was actually good. Oh no… what a shame. It’s always so much easier to hate.

I voted for the one Charlie Brooker once described as “an absolute pair-of-aching-balls of a man – a slapheaded, ruby-lipped pop philosopher who’s forged a lucrative career stating the bleeding obvious in a series of poncey, lighter-than-air books aimed at smug Sunday supplement pseuds looking for something clever-looking to read on the plane.”

Surely Camille is terribly 1994… but then Ignatieff is terribly 1988 (although isn’t he a David Mamet*/Martin Amis-style born-again rightist? Has that given him topicality).

*Mamet’s belated announcement that he has ‘become’ a conservative was a classic; rather like a colleague expecting a shock reaction when they finally tell they are gay and you’re too polite to go “well, everyone assumes that when they meet you…”

It looks like a potentially decisive late surge for De Botton there.

Noam Chomsky in 3rd place?… just glad this is obviously unrepresentative (hah!) given the tiny sample size etc.. otherwise I’d be worried.

I can only assume Zizek is missing here because he fails on the “intellectual” part of “worst living intellectual”. Then again, it’s pushing the envelope somewhat to include Ignatieff as an intellectual, while had this been the “worst living pedant” contest Jakob Nielsen would have won by a mile; reading him is like being stuck in a lift with a sysadmin suffering from Asperger’s and OCD. Quite unusable.

On the other hand, Chomsky and Kawasaki have no business being on a worst *anything* list.

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