…about the future, that is. Particularly with regard to the younger generation, currently being edjyoomakayted in our institutions of higher learning, readying themselves to take up the leadership mantle in the world of tomorrow.

It’ll cure your optimism about the present as well. Or at least Yahoo News will do that. Or Pew Research. Or whoever wrote this godawful summary paragraph.

From April 2008 to October 2009 the percentage of Americans saying there is solid evidence of global warming has fallen from 71% to 57%. A third of the country now says there is no evidence of global warming, up from 21% last year. Views of the evidence of global warming is related to how seriously people see earth warming as a problem. Interestingly, among global warming skeptics a third still sees it as a serious problem (10% very serious, 23% somewhat serious). Roughly two-thirds of those who do not say global warming evidence exists say it is not a problem. Among the 18% of the public who say there is evidence of global warming, but that it is caused by natural phenomena a majority say it is a serious problem, with 27% saying it is a very serious problem. Americans who say global warming exists and is man made (47% of the public) are unanimous in their opinion that earth warming is a serious problem (97%), with two thirds describing it as a very serious problem.

Here’s the issue I have with this: Carbon dioxide does have insulatory properties. And the “science is settled” on that. It is in our atmosphere, to the tune of some 385 parts per million, about a thirtieth of a percent. This unique animal species we refer to as “man” does put out some. All this is backed up with solid evidence.

The evidence is also united in saying something else: This is patently absurd. A whole lot of other animals emit CO2, there is a whole mess of other things in the atmosphere that cause this “greenhouse effect” and there are lots of other variables that factor into the mean temperature of the earth…and oh, by the way, there are lots of ways to measure that. All the solutions on the table have to do with shuffling money around. All the people plugging those solutions — minus the loudmouths on the innerwebs who just like to shoot their digital mouths off, that is — stand to profit from it. And they just got caught red handed bullying the real scientists, cherry-picking the evidence, and re-defining the “peer review” process to silence dissenting viewpoints.

Now take a look at the FARK thread. It is a textbook case of a little tiny bit of knowledge being a dangerous thing. In their first handful of comments, the FARKists’ “science” is settled quite nicely. A cold snap, a bunch of rubes out there thinking they can get a reading of the earth-mean-temperature by peaking out their trailer windows, and this accounts for the fourteen-point plunge in the “belief in global warming.” Not a syllable to be uttered about the ClimateGate scandal. Propagandize harder! The earth is at stake!

Or use sarcasm. With a lot of them, that’s the only way they can argue anything…and think of all the poor woodland creatures with the big sad eyes.

It could very well be that all the posters who’ve added content that fits the above — and this looks, to me, like about sixty percent — none of them go to college. I last paid some diligent attention to this when I first created my account, nearly a decade ago. And these things will always change with time. But my habit is to view FARK as a window into the universities…because college students are cheap, and many of them have access to the webs for free. On free hardware. The Mac Powerbook Whatever was just one more item in the mad scramble of Mom and Dad, junior’s education was so important.

That’s just my impression. The way these kids write their stuff, it’s like they live in a whole other society all their own…one that can only exist on college campuses. They’ve all got that “anybody who doesn’t agree with me is skullfuckingly stupid but I’m going to project that ignorant, obstinate attitude of mine onto everyone else” thing going on.

Here & there some brave souls step up to point out Climategate, that it might have something to do with the public’s change in perception. They are promptly called stupid and “shouted” down.

Behold, the educated minds, being readied to become the captains of industry in tomorrow’s world. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Nobody reads this blog…ever. And I gotta tell you, it’s times like this that we just bust with pride over that, because nobodies tend to be a lot smarter than somebodies overall. The same way that just about anybody is smarter than “everybody.” Everybody. Feh. That’s another thing…the festering crap that is crammed into “everybody”‘s head…how did we all make it as long and as far as we have. Well, that is a bunny trail.

Stephen J. came up with the name for which I was searching. What is the opposite of this “intellectualism” being promoted, defended and apologia’d by people such as David Brooks of the New York Times? What is the proper moniker for that style of thinking in which you indulge in such rustic and primitive fantasies as…up is up and down is down? Terrorism is perhaps more dangerous than climate change? You know, that neanderthal mindset that ensnares most of us as we go about our laughably simple lives just, uh, you know…building things that people will actually use? As opposed to writing drivel that will line birdcages and end up as targets of dark comedy in the blogosphere? Or coming up with plans that seem to do the opposite of what they’re supposed to do…ratcheting up the public debt to cure our financial ills, trying Kalid Sheikh Mohammed in civilian courts to show the world how fair we are, feeding the terrorists three squares a day making sure they’re comfy while we wait for them to talk…et cetera.

The person who answered my question, was kind enough to provide a full explanation, not that it’s needed:

You do not go on a construction site without putting on your hard hat (and other safety gear). You cannot build a real building without going on the construction site. And a building designed by someone who doesn’t know anything about real materials or real forces is going to fall down. Plus, it evokes “hardheaded practicality” and formal precision in “logic”; it’s a hat, so it evokes the “thinking cap” image; it sticks to a two-syllable word at its longest, no polysyllabic euphony; and doesn’t have the faintest breath of “-ism” in it.

So in future, whenever anybody says, “But the intellectuals say X,” you can always say, “Yeah — but what does Hard-Hat Logic say?”

Yes, that works. Thinking the way people are forced to think when they live in a virtual past, and are forced to — protect themselves from real dangers, build real things and do real work. And so they don’t have to use the word “reality” or do anything else to tell outsiders that their ideas are “real”…the reality is proven when they stay alive long enough to come back to it the next day. That, and when the stuff they build actually does what it is supposed to do.

Update: Guys on the radio are re-running an episode because it’s a Saturday. They’re talking about proposals that offer indigent women a thousand dollars give-or-take to tie their tubes. Actually, not that quite so much, but about people who are opposed to such a thing for ethical reasons.

Not even them, per se; this is not so extreme or unreasonable of a revulsion, you could sustain it simply because of the implication of eugenics. They’re zooming in on the people who are opposed to such proposals on ethical grounds, who simultaneous with that, are not opposed to abortion. How does one explain such a twisty ethical profile, without concluding that the ethicist must just-plain-like abortions?

It brings to mind another dubious ethical sensitivity: Opposing requirements for voters to present ID. All too often, we let this one go without serious debate or inspection — “Oh, you can’t do that, it’s discriminatory.” Or “prohibitively expensive for people in certain circumstances.”

Another example: The USA cannot drill for oil within its own land holdings, because of — all together now — BLAH BLAH BLAH PRISTINE WILDERNESS BLAH BLAH BLAH WILDLIFE BLAH BLAH BLAH VERGE OF EXTINCTION BLAH BLAH BLAH. Yes! Because nothing outside of the United States is pristine. As long as that barrel is imported, you’re good.

Things like this, I think, cast a big glaring spotlight on The Big Reveal: The outspoken opponent of such direct action, or someone who is the focus of his sympathies, is drawing some kind of benefit from the continuation of the problem. The objection is that the proposed solution is a bit too “hard hat”; it shows just a little bit too much promising potential of actually working, to merit further consideration.

The person so dismissing the idea on such frivolous grounds, naturally, thinks of himself as an intellectual. Or at the very least, well-read, up-to-speed, knowledgeable about what “the experts” say. But he forgot to put on his hard hat.

I seem to recall Ayn Rand explored this at length, when Dagny Taggart, Hank Rearden and crew climbed into a locomotive and took the first ride ever on a track made of gleaming green Rearden Metal. There followed three pages of prose, which amounted to roughly two thousand words. Unfortunately, the prose was “brilliant” in the sense that a typical Obama speech is brilliant: Quick, recite me a line of it from memory, or find someone who can. If you can do either of those, you’re better than me…so I can’t comment kindly on Rand’s talents as an industrial-age American poet.

I do remember the overall spirit of what she was trying to say, though. It’s exactly what Stephen J. is talking about. Such a locomotive ride is certain death, if any one person inside built something with too much fidelity to theory and not enough to practice. It was a chain of trust — one weak link would’ve compromised the entire thing. Inside that locomotive, the supposedly-evil capitalists managed to construct precisely the community that the “intellectuals” say they want to build, and it’s so hard because the evil capitalists keep getting in the way.

Our intellectuals live in a perfect upside-down, anti-matter universe. We’ve got a lot of people walking around who think they’re pretty smart, not because they’ve managed to master our ultra-sophisticated society, but because they’re dependent on it. They have been imbibing so exuberantly from the intoxicating elixir of theory, that they new eschew the wisdom acquired through practice. Just a few generations ago, when acquiring a bucket of water or evacuating one’s bowels were challenging and odious feats of manual labor, people like them would have had to be locked up for their own safety.

Update: The latest Crowder vid has a lot to do with this subject overall:

Hat tip for that one to Washington Rebel.

Yesterday, during our skewering of David Brooks’ New York Times column, we highlighted a “big reveal” or two but glossed over the really huge one. It’s something we’ve discussed before, but I think I like the job John Hawkins did with exploring the exact same idea. His explanation is easy to read, easy to understand, and one can quickly see it meshes with what’s going on and makes good sense.

Besides, John Hawkins quotes from smarter people than I do:

Intellectualism has become the readiness, willingness and ability to call dangerous things safe, and safe things dangerous. — Morgan Freeberg

The New York Times’ pretend conservative, David Brooks, got some attention for his latest column sneering the Tea Parties, but I found his misguided view of the “educated class” to be more interesting:

The public is not only shifting from left to right. Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the past year.

The educated class believes in global warming, so public skepticism about global warming is on the rise. The educated class supports abortion rights, so public opinion is shifting against them. The educated class supports gun control, so opposition to gun control is mounting.

The story is the same in foreign affairs. The educated class is internationalist, so isolationist sentiment is now at an all-time high, according to a Pew Research Center survey. The educated class believes in multilateral action, so the number of Americans who believe we should “go our own way” has risen sharply.

David Brooks is getting something backwards here. You see, it is not the general public that looks at the views of the “educated class” AKA “intellectuals” and turns away. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

That’s because intellectuals gain notoriety either by saying something that no one else is saying and making a case for it or by making a particularly clever argument that disagrees with the generally held wisdom. An “intellectual” who agrees with common sense positions and traditional ways of doing things generally isn’t considered an “intellectual” at all. Why is that? Well, how can you be smarter than everyone else if you have the same opinions held by the common man?

If you wonder why college professors and other intellectuals, who dedicate a lifetime to research and study, can often have less common sense than the average teenager, that’s the reason for it. They spend their lives in an environment where coming up with clever and novel theories are rewarded, even if they don’t work, while taking a common sense approach is at best considered dull and uninteresting at best — and at worst, it’s considered to be a flaw.

The average informed person, who doesn’t live in that world, can see that manmade global warming is joke and that “multilateral action” often doesn’t work out so well in practice. Many members of the “educated class” hesitate to admit something so obvious exactly because it is so obvious. How can they be these extraordinary minds if they come to same conclusion as Joe Sixpack — except a few years later? That has a lot to do with why the decision making process of the “educated class” in this country often goes so tragically awry.

It has been my general experience in dealing with people, that if you know what you’re doing, you can mold and shape their opinions not by attacking some arguments or bolstering others, or by introducing new evidence, but oftentimes by simply coming up with names for things. “Teabaggers” is one such example of this. Typically, it works best if the public is swayed away from the thing being named, and for this reason, our “intellectuals” tend to come up with new names for some viewpoints when it would make more sense to come up with a name for the opposite. “Laffer Curve,” for example — which says there’s a bell curve of tax revenue, such that if you raise the tax rate there will come some zenith point, at the far side of which revenues drop as the rate is raised. Wouldn’t it make far more sense to name the opposite viewpoint, so it can be targeted, mocked and ridiculed? Something like “The Sky’s The Limit” economics? “To Infinty And Beyond” economics?

And there are a lot of other examples. “Bush Doctrine,” which says — well, let’s not get into that again. Wouldn’t it be sensible to label the opposite so it can be similarly denigrated? The “Leave Saddam Right Where He Is And Let Him Do Whatever He Wants” doctrine?

However, in this case perhaps it makes sense to come up with a label for what is to be defended. The surreal and ridiculous, after all, has already been named: “Intellectualism.” This seems to me an exercise very much like the leftists coming up with the name “Political Correctness.” They managed to promote this, even with a confession right there in the name: Political Correctness. Alright, so we’re coming up with a new strain of correctness. “Correct” is a fairly simplistic concept, so we must have been more-or-less in agreement about what exactly the old flavoring of “correctness” was, which some powerful advocacy group deemed to be out of harmony with their desires. So we’re re-defining what it means to be correct.

That should have turned the public off of it. But it’s thirty years later, and Political Correctness is still going strong.

I think we should follow the example, and come up with a name for the kind of intellectualism that has earned the enmity of people like Brooks, as they rush to embrace this surreal, new-age “intellectualism.” This new name should make the point that, like “correctness,” “intellectualism” is a primary-color within the human palette and there never was a logical need to go re-defining it.

My new name should also make the point that, when you expect the experiments involving your novel new idea to outlive you, there is no incentive to make sure you get it right. So nobody comes up with a novel new idea that humans breathe water; disproving that would be quick and easy. We have these novel new ideas that we’re emitting carbon and burning up the planet, or that a country can live in solvency and comfort after embracing a socialist economic model…things that can be surrounded by logical arguments, or things that look like logical arguments, for years and years, perhaps centuries.

My new name should further make the point that ideas don’t mean very much if they aren’t based on observations — or if they’re based on observations that have been cherry-picked.

My new name should be laced with a frosting of irony. It should subtly make the point that we have been gradually acclimated, in recent years, to a rather phony brand of “intellectualism.” The kind Hawkins was describing above.

My new name should fit on a bumper sticker, just in case someone wants to carry it into 2012. It is, I perceive, the primary subject of the elections in that year: What kind of “intellectuals” are we putting in charge of things, and how exactly is it we decided they were “intellectuals” at all? It should point out the dirty trick the enemy has been doing: “We’re intellectuals, because that’s what we call ourselves, therefore if you disagree with us you’re not an intellectual!”

And so my new name, for the kind of intellectualism we used to embrace…and must embrace again, if we are to have any kind of hope for the future…is…

Real-World Intellectualism.

The kind of intellectualism that, before it spins its mental gears, first recognizes the world and the things in it for what they really are. It recognizes that when you’re neck-deep in debt and it’s become a big problem — you need to spend less money, not more. That safe things are safe. That dangerous things are dangerous. That when a terrorist tries to bomb a jetliner with his underpants, and he fails only because a fellow passenger tears his clothes off and the fuse is a dud, maybe it’s fair to say the system didn’t work. That when you promise food and money for Kim Jong-Il so he doesn’t build any nukes, and he goes ahead and builds them, maybe yet-another-treaty isn’t necessarily the best way to go.

That when you go several years saying “Jimmy Carter might have been a bad President but he’s still a wonderful human being,” and then Jimmy Carter goes on record behaving like a perfect asshole, and then does it again and again and again — maybe he isn’t that good of a human being either.

That if there was any policy enacted in 2009 that’s any good, someone somewhere should have something good to say about how 2009 shook out; and if that’s not the case, then the policies should be brought under serious scrutiny at the very least. That generally, when we want a problem solved, it might be a good idea not to make it illegal or impossible for someone to make a profit when they solve it.

The kind of intellectualism that looks & listens before it talks.

This is what we’ve been losing. This is what we need to bring back. Because thinking about any complex problem, or for that matter even simple ones, is like pulling something with a chain. If one link breaks it really doesn’t matter how glittery and shiny all the other links are.

Buck, like millions of others, prefers Fox News over CNN. He’s offered this juxtaposition of videos to explain why. Do you think this makes the case?

Yep…grown-ups, versus children.

It isn’t that right-wingers (or centrists, if you’re positioned to see things that way) are or more less inclined to see issues in an “us-versus-them” dynamic than left-wingers (or centrists, if you’re positioned to see things that way). What it is, is that if you’re a left-winger we tend to give you a pass. Left-wingers are revolutionaries by nature. That is their history. They are grown-up hippies. And so we’ve come to expect it out of them; every single issue that comes along, they see it in terms of “our side” and “their side.” One is left with little reason to conclude they’ve retained any capacity — any at all! — for seeing anything, anywhere, in any other way. Blue & Gray. Lilliput and Blefuscu. Lancaster and York. Elois and Morlocks. Jets and Sharks. Crips and Bloods. It’s their view of the world, they aren’t stigmatized for it.

You haven’t long to wait before you hear of a right-wing conservative talk about an “enemy camp,” to be sure. But it’s a far more rare occurrence on the right side for this kind of twaddle to be served up as supposedly thoughtful news commentary. Bill O’Reilly might drift down a little bit further, somewhere into this general zone. He might call someone a “pinhead” — some individual who’s said or done something to merit it. And the lefties will land all over him for it. And imagine — just imagine! — Brit Hume commenting on President Obama meeting with SEIU officials, wondering aloud what our President is doing having talks with the enemy. Oh, my goodness, the hijinks that would ensue. But Matthews calls West Point enemy territory, and that’s all good. Ridickerous.

Another thought: Sad to say, but our current President owes his victory to several jackasses just like Matthews. Folks who dutifully trudged off to the polls on a Tuesday thirteen months in the past, then later that day squealed with delight as His Holiness proclaimed victory. Then, in the weeks that followed, bellowed with bellicose triumph as the winter air cackled with with the spark of this stuff called “hope.” Divisions healed, and all that.

Obama makes a speech at West Point and the hubbub distills down to a plaintive wailing of “What the heck are ya doin’? That’s the enemy!”

No sense of irony whatsoever. Vote for a healing of the divide, breathlessly anticipate a healing of the divide, and then protest vehemently against any move toward a healing of the divide. All in one, smooth, fluid motion. They think they’re being consistent, and maybe in their surreal, tie-dyed universe, they are.

Too much funny stuff smoked back in the sixties, I reckon. Pretty damn sad. National tragedy. An entire generation of people who can’t think in a straight line.

Next time the arguing starts up about Fox News I’m linking to Buck’s post, or to this one. This is a rather serious problem. It afflicts more than the afflicted, because how in the world are we going to gain access to serious news, if we lose our ability to define what it is?

Me:

I think we’ve reached a turning point, and the turning point is this:

Intellectualism has become the readiness, willingness and ability to call dangerous things safe, and safe things dangerous.

If you’re ready, willing and able to call dangerous things dangerous and safe things safe, you are a moron.

Farker BigSteve3000 (2009-11-13 05:12:23 AM):

[C]ould anyone please explain the hate for her [Sarah Palin] thing.

she seems no more dopey than any other politician. one catch please have a logical thought not “I hate her cuz she sux” or “See she is just wrong for the US” or “RU Kiding she is lame”[.]

Farker coco ebert (2009-11-13 05:33:06 AM):

Because Katie farking Couric swept the floor with her.
Because she has quit almost every political office she has ever held.
Because she is not well-educated. That’s fine if she wants to be governor of a state like Alaska but don’t try to be president. We had enough with Dubya.

Farker totally_out_of_ideas (2009-11-13 06:08:05 AM):

I don’t care for Sarah Palin because she seems to have no intellectual curiosity. She’s not well traveled, well read, nor does she speak well. She doesn’t demonstrate a good grasp of current events, and she seems to have acquired her political and life philosophy from reading bumper stickers. And she is oblivious to all of this.

We Americans just had a President with these qualities and I didn’t like it.

Mmm, hmmm…and our current President, who is “sort of God,” referred to her original municipality as “Wasilly.” By this point, persons of all ideological persuasions will concede that without His wonderful teleprompter, He can’t give a speech to save His own ass.

“Intellectual” titan Al Gore won’t even debate his own magical pet humans-destroying-planet theory. There’s some “intellectual curiosity” for you.

We are not talking about raw mental horsepower here. We’re not talking curiosity. We’re talking about something…something…similar to what I was describing. An irony with regard to belief about what’s safe and what’s dangerous.

FrankJ, putting on his “serious writer” hat (I think — it’s always a little tough to tell with him)…nails down what we clueless dorks see as what’s going wrong with the Fort Hood massacre. It’s the “intellectuals” that are the problem here. They’re deciding too many things.

Now, it seems to me that the appropriate response from the military right now should not be to assure us diversity will be preserved; that’s secondary and a concern for another day. What they should be doing is vowing that if anyone else in the military is found to have views similar to Hasan, they will be immediately thrown out of the military and gutted like a pig.

All of which comes back to my original point.

We’re doing a wonderful job of showing proper respect to intellectualism. We’re accomplishing way too much there. We’ve got bagfuls of respect for it. We’re just doing a shitty job of defining what it is.

You have to show some abysmally bad judgment in deciding what’s malevolent and what’s benign — you have to get the two of them mixed up. At least sometimes. And more often is better. Failing that, you’re not an “intellectual”; if you make sensible decisions about these things, consistently, then you’re a great big ol’ dummy.

Cross-posted at Cassy‘s place and at Right Wing News.