I had not really kept up with Gelernter but he seems to be moving to an increasingly special place. From a review of America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered in the Obamacrats)
Gelernter highlights the role of American Jews as "carbon 14," a way to trace the enormous cultural change and its consequences in higher education. Up through the 60s, the WASP establishment excluded Jews from elite universities. But by 1970, Jews had pushed their way into student bodies, faculties, and administrations. The consequences? Again, easy. Jews are both leftist and aggressive. "Naturally, we would expect that an increasing Jewish presence at top colleges" would imprint the schools with those qualities. "And this is just what happened." Colleges and universities became more leftist as well as more "thrusting" and "belligerent."
I have a love/hate relationship with personal background takedowns. On the one hand, having the damning background information like this is usually entertaining and often informative. On the other hand, flawed people often produce good work, and there are a bunch of instances where I'm glad that I saw work before biography.
Gelernter seems to be a toad.
"F. Winston Codpiece III" was a really good pseud.
All I know about this is in the OP itself, plus a general awareness of him in the culture. The implausible thing to me is that someone married to him would post a comment so poorly proofread; such people place a high premium on these things. It's possible she has gone off the deep end, and has lost this check on herself that anyone in that society tends to have to excess, but now I'm reaching for explanations.
2: Is anybody trying to discredit his scientific work? The background work here just indicates he comes from a long line (or, a line, anyway) of conservative nuts and his conservative nutwork hardly needs discrediting.
Further down the page from that post (in 2005), ogged displays foresight:
"Arianna Huffington is starting a massive collective blog featuring lots of famous people--Cronkite, Mamet, Fallows, etc. If other famous-before-they-start blogs are any guide, this one will suck..."
Just for the record, I haven't been able to confirm anything in the posted comment, and I think it might be total bull.
IME, one need not actually be either drunk or enraged to post comments full of typos and grammatical errors. Not that it doesn't help. That is, I think 4 is quite wrong.
Louisville was already 60 years old by the 1840s.
Can one identify the precise moment in history HuffPo stopped being a Baldwin/Cronkite group blog and started being a collection of nipslip galleries? (Or was it always both?)
I think it's probably bullshit. The only hit for searching the two names in quotes is unfogged. And google autocomplete wants to add "psychic" after "Barbara Reader".
On the other hand, I looked up some things and found that Louisville does exist and that there really was a rabbi of that name at that synagog in 1944. See here.
(DG was married to a woman named Barbara 1976-1984, says the public CT divorce records. One could quite easily figure out whether he's got a connection to KY [and the KY records on Ancestry are certainly in the upper 50% among states for coverage] but that would seem to me to be pretty far off point . . .)
(Because it wouldn't tell you a damn thing about household dynamics, or if they even matter. My brother's politics and mine are very strikingly different. We all are familiar with this sort of thing . . .)
If you follow the links here, his mother's mother was born in Austria in 1887.
If you don't, then we don't really exist, except as the thoughts of an intelligent machine.
15: yeah, I saw. Crowd went wild. Provoked a thought about how this time 100 years ago the best and the brightest of Europe were all cheerfully queueing up to enlist and go and slaughter each other, but now they're all hugging each other in Darmstadt because they've successfully landed on a comet.
I'm sure some day they'll do something that isn't either violent or millions of miles away.
20: As could be predicted from a careful analysis of our time on the veldt.
20: As could be predicted from a careful analysis of our time on the veldt.
21: if Darmstadt is millions of miles away from you, then I am going to violate the anonymity of the blog and reveal that all this bar-fly persona thing is a ruse and "Moby Hick" is really the Rosetta probe. Stop commenting, Moby, you've got work to do!
18 And not only that, it makes DG the son of his grandfather -- DG's actual father didn't die in Florida in 1984, but is still on the Stony Brook website 30 years on. And it's very unlikely that DG's aunt was born in 1807.
I don't blame you, ogged, for going with the superficial here. Really, not at all. The person who posted the Geni tree, though is an utter moron. (And, if asked, will probably tell you she got that stuff somewhere on the internet, doesn't remember where . . .)
29.last: Yeah, we've pretty much given up on Geni as being an exercise in misplaced hope that ends up as not much more than a time sink where everyone is inadvertently trolling everyone else.
30 -- I use it as a google trap -- I want people searching for a particular person to find and contact me.