You’re Un-American, He Said

They don’t call David Gelernter one of the most brilliant men in America for nothing.

Bill Joy, founder and chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, said Gelernter was “one of the most brilliant and visionary computer scientists of our time.” The New York Times called him a computer science “rock star”.

Here Gelernter responds to the absurd ravings of Jonah Goldberg with You’re Un-American.

“If your ‘belief’ in our country,” Goldberg writes, “is so fragile and pathetic that you will lose ‘hope for our nation’ unless Donald Trump is given free reign [sic] to cleanse the land of evildoers, then you don’t actually believe in this nation. If your love of country is contingent on your preferred faction being in power, you’ve confused partisanship for patriotism. Taken seriously, all of this banana republic talk is un-American.”

Meanwhile, here is a tourist interviewed yesterday in the New York Post as she watched Donald Trump arrive for a grilling by the New York state attorney general: “In Argentina this is normal, usual, the rule. The party in power tries to put the other side in jail. Now the vice president who was president two times is being investigated in 10 separate investigations by the opposition party. But I didn’t know they do this in the United States.”

and this,

Jonah Goldberg makes a lot of “belief” in our country. He thinks we don’t “believe in this nation” anymore. But he seems to be confusing the idea of America, which is one of unparalleled beauty, with the current implementation of that idea, which today is lousy. When Jefferson became president, he fired all the federal tax collectors. He had opposed the creation of a Navy out of fear it would lead to an income tax. Madison wrote that “Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending have enslaved the people.”

Gelernter and Goldberg have some history, but Jonah who turned out to be a monumental disappointment, has chosen to rile up the wrong guy.  David Gelernter is more intelligent than Goldberg and the entire conga line of clowns at The Dispatch and The Bulwark put together.

They try to slander Gelernter on the sly in Wikipedia’s biographical profile.  It is risible.

Jonah Goldberg makes a lot of “belief” in our country. He thinks we don’t “believe in this nation” anymore. But he seems to be confusing the idea of America, which is one of unparalleled beauty, with the current implementation of that idea, which today is lousy. When Jefferson became president, he fired all the federal tax collectors. He had opposed the creation of a Navy out of fear it would lead to an income tax. Madison wrote that “Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending have enslaved the people.”

The man is too intelligent and has made fundamental contributions to computer science for even the lemmings at Wikipedia to conceal.  Read the rest.