Worlds Greatest Thinkers According To Recent BBC Poll

[Dr_Phibes]

1. Karl Marx
2. Albert Einstein
3. Sir Isaac Newton
4. Charles Darwin
5. Thomas Aquinas
6. Stephen Hawking
7. Immanuel Kant
8. Rene Descartes
9. James Clerk Maxwell
10. Friedrich Nietzsche

[BSmack]

What! George W. Bush wasn't on the list?

Though I have to seriously question a list that does not include Ben Franklin.

[Dr_Phibes]

Von Clausewitz should be in there, I think.

But wasn't Franklin more of an employer/inventor? From what I've read, he employed a sweatshop of people to come up with things and slapped his name on the product.

[poptart]

Barry Switzer....?

[Mister Bushice]

Thinker, poptart, not Stinker.

[Dr_Phibes]

Past millennium only.

[Dr_Phibes]

Clausewitz was an empirical, dialectical thinker, like Marx. There is no other way of measuring or interpreting history, as far as I'm concerned.

Best stick with petty bias, eh?

[Dr_Phibes]

About what? History isn't finished quite yet.

[titlover]

1. Karl Marx
2. Albert Einstein
3. Sir Isaac Newton
4. Charles Darwin
5. Thomas Aquinas
6. Stephen Hawking
7. Immanuel Kant
8. Rene Descartes
9. James Clerk Maxwell
10. Friedrich Nietzsche

so it's basically a name popularity contest.

real official there. :roll:

[DrDetroit]

Marx?? Not surprising to see him on top...I wonder why people still flock to his ideas despite the fact that they've only resulted in death on a massive scale.

[See You Next Wednesday]

Geez, what a ridiculous list. Da Vinci anyone?

[mothster]

Marx?? Not surprising to see him on top...I wonder why people still flock to his ideas despite the fact that they've only resulted in death on a massive scale.

i don't think pure marxism has ever been attempted and sustained

[DrDetroit]

Geez, what a ridiculous list. Da Vinci anyone?

Who? Vinci, Italy? Or Leonardo?

[DrDetroit]

Marx?? Not surprising to see him on top...I wonder why people still flock to his ideas despite the fact that they've only resulted in death on a massive scale.

i don't think pure marxism has ever been attempted and sustained

So?

His ideas spawned a movement that resulted in tens of millions tortured, slaughtered, etc.

Period, End of Fucking Story.

[mothster]

Marx?? Not surprising to see him on top...I wonder why people still flock to his ideas despite the fact that they've only resulted in death on a massive scale.

i don't think pure marxism has ever been attempted and sustained

So?

His ideas spawned a movement that resulted in tens of millions tortured, slaughtered, etc.

Period, End of Fucking Story.

ya what mvscal said----neener neener

[Variable]

1. Karl Marx
2. Albert Einstein
3. Sir Isaac Newton
4. Charles Darwin
5. Thomas Aquinas
6. Stephen Hawking
7. Immanuel Kant
8. Rene Descartes
9. James Clerk Maxwell
10. Friedrich Nietzsche

:x I never make any lists.

[mothster]

wheres the love------

albert schwitzer

[BSmack]

Marx?? Not surprising to see him on top...I wonder why people still flock to his ideas despite the fact that they've only resulted in death on a massive scale.

i don't think pure marxism has ever been attempted and sustained

So?

His ideas spawned a movement that resulted in tens of millions tortured, slaughtered, etc.

Period, End of Fucking Story.

Using that line of reasoning we could totally discount most political and religious thinkers throughout history. Because lesser men have failed to understand Marx does not diminish him.

[Mikey]

wheres the love------

albert schwitzer

Barry's little brother?

[Dr_Phibes]

It is quite finished with von Clausewitz and nearly so with Marx.

The thoughts of "great thinkers" should transcend their age, shouldn't they?

He's no Sun Tzu. He's no Scipio Africanus either.

Maybe he is, maybe he isn't, that was a different millennium. Clausewitz wrote the defining treatise on warfare for his age and he's hardly 'finished'. I posted a lengthy article in the Book forum listing his impact on military thought, including American - the sources are all listed. I'll wager you dislike him simply because he's German.

And 'intellectual abstraction'? So the Soviet Union did not go from ploughshares to atomic weapons and into space in a period of fifty years? A world superpower was propelled in what took America two hundred years! End of!

And Detroit, piss off with 'tens and billions'. Every chicken that got knocked down by an apple cart in the Caucuces does not count as being 'murdered by Communists'.

(RACK Bsmack)

[Gunslinger]

Marx?? Not surprising to see him on top...I wonder why people still flock to his ideas despite the fact that they've only resulted in death on a massive scale.

i don't think pure marxism has ever been attempted and sustained

So?

His ideas spawned a movement that resulted in tens of millions tortured, slaughtered, etc.

Period, End of Fucking Story.

This is why you aren't a great thinker.

Bush's current run with our democracy has killed (going on thousands) of our own people and tens of thousands of other people. Considering we are now in an aircraft age as well as internet age the world is going global and millions die in Africa.

See you aren't a thinker, because when our great grandchildren are dancing on the moon and thinking about Earth's past problems and the shit that we are incurring in our present day, they will see that Earth had its problems just like logistics fucked up Oklahoma in the Great Expansion. But see you are a great thinker indeed, so I assume you thought of this growing world like Napolean did or Hawkings.

Because you obviously realize that you have people from around America and not just in your work place telling you that you are a clueless fuck, that the world is growing and when a man from Indianapolis can tell you that you are an ignorant dipshit as well as a man in California all in the same place, then technology is gaining strides.

So, in summary. Cavemen will be able to use technology to communicate their ideas, but they will never truly understand the whole of what is occuring.

Just ask Bin Laden, who still lives and waits to fight another day, while you go on internet message boards preaching how Iraqis are the threat. It's like being a KKK member on the net. You are stupid, yet you get your word out.

[tough love]

I'm guessing that if those Poll_Brits knew Gunner, he woulda made their list.

Anyone else catch the mini series by Steven Spielberg called, INTO THE WEST: http://alt.tnt.tv/itw/

While watching the horror, it occured to me that the nature of your American Leadership Mindset, which justified the slaughtering and destruction of Indian Nations (for one eg: look up - Wounded Knee) really has not changed all that much over time.

A simular selfish hateful evil mentality appears to be still at play today.
De$pots has just gotten better at masking and spinning their true intent, is all. :(

[Dr_Phibes]

That doesn't matter in the least other than as an indictment of von Clausewitz's mediocrity. The operational concepts favored by Scipio Africanus are still in play today. Clausewitz has no relevance outside of direct force on force conflicts between developed powers.

Sun Tzu wrote the defining treatise on warfare for all ages.

No, not true. Clausewitz's references were within the context of the Napoleonic Wars as that was his personal experience. The themes are universal and can be applied to anything in any context, that's the nature of dialectical investigation as applied by Clausewitz, Marx and Sun Tzu himself.
The method is entirely the same. Also, Clausewitz changed German military thinking of the time, therefore he changed the world.

Clausewitz and Sun Tzu are companion pieces and should not be pitted one against the other as it's wooden headed.

And all it took was the murder of 30 million of his own citizens and the theft of technology developed by Western scientists. Hardly an accomplishment to write home about. I also can't help but notice you glossing over the collapse of this "superpower" a scant 40 or so years later.

The attempts to introduce Marx into the real world have uniformly disasterous to those subjected to it's doctrines. It is an irremediable failure as an economic concept.

30 million eh? ooo theres a lot. Famine? Natural disasters? War? Or did Stalin beat them over the head personally?

Theft of technology? Does Von Braun ring a bell? Funny how that works.

And Socialism is a triumph as an economic concept. Marxism defines it as democratic centralism and economic planning which only existed in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Revisionism set in under Khrushchev, so in fact - The Soviet Union self destructed under the weight of it's own Capitalism, which is the nature of the system itself.

[DrDetroit]

30 million eh? ooo theres a lot. Famine? Natural disasters? War? Or did Stalin beat them over the head personally?

That's not counting the tens of millions in China nor the millions in North Korea. Certainly, it doesn't count those few millions in Vietnam, either.

All in pursuit of some perverted bullshit.

[Cicero]

Karl Rove needs to be on there.