I was bewildered by the logic of this book -- you have made sense of it for me and I owe you a debt for that. "Weird intellectual history" or more specifically "a collection of incoherent thinkers" would be a great concept for a book. One thing I did enjoy in this book is that he compares Jews to Overseas Chinese, not in the service of historical analysis, but to use the success of both groups in overcoming discrimination to demean Black Americans by comparison, and bemoan foolish liberal tolerance for redneck culture. The idea that you could build a Singapore in Mississippi if it were not for some mysterious dark matter called "culture" is such a bold thought as to be amusing.
I was bewildered by the logic of this book -- you have made sense of it for me and I owe you a debt for that. "Weird intellectual history" or more specifically "a collection of incoherent thinkers" would be a great concept for a book. One thing I did enjoy in this book is that he compares Jews to Overseas Chinese, not in the service of historical analysis, but to use the success of both groups in overcoming discrimination to demean Black Americans by comparison, and bemoan foolish liberal tolerance for redneck culture. The idea that you could build a Singapore in Mississippi if it were not for some mysterious dark matter called "culture" is such a bold thought as to be amusing.