House of Eratosthenes

Trouble with this though….lots of liberals like to sit around in coffee houses, faculty lounges, and forums…and talk about abstract ideas and concepts. They sit there congratulating themselves and each other on what “great people” and “enlightened intellectuals” they are for having the wherewithal to sit there and discuss wonderful ideas….like how socialism would work if we only had the right people in charge.

Average people talk about ” things,” yes. I guess that simply refers to the observation that this is what most of us spend our time discussing with one another day-to-day: things. Work, a sports team or sporting event, traffic, the weather, perhaps a news item.

I suppose the entry about “small people” refers to gossip. Probably true, yes, but does this refer to people the speaker knows personally, or does it also make a person small if he discusses politicians, sports figures, and showbiz celebrities?

The last one you added: Dead on and darn right.
- cylarz | 06/19/2011 @ 09:40
Oh, and Happy Father’s Day.
- cylarz | 06/19/2011 @ 09:41
To you as well, Cylarz.
- mkfreeberg | 06/19/2011 @ 10:34
Trouble with this though….lots of liberals like to sit around in coffee houses, faculty lounges, and forums…and talk about abstract ideas and concepts. They sit there congratulating themselves and each other on what “great people” and “enlightened intellectuals” they are for having the wherewithal to sit there and discuss wonderful ideas….like how socialism would work if we only had the right people in charge.

This hasn’t really been my experience. Maybe if I made the personal acquaintance of Karl Marx I’d be able to say differently.

From all I have been able to witness with my own eyes and ears, though…even the most professorly liberals, like for example our current President, just go through the motions of thinking about ideas. They don’t really do it. If you listen really closely you hear they’re just saying “I like this thing I don’t like that other thing.”

Someone like me steps in and says something like “this seems to be a clash of two different cultures,” just trying to find the single epicenter-point where the true disagreement has originated — those coffee-house liberals will do just about anything to change the subject. Sneer, deride, ridicule, make a punchline everyone’s supposed to find hilarious even though there’s nothing funny about it…

Some liberals have been great men. Most of them existed back in the day when the word “liberal” had different meaning. All of the founding fathers, I would guess, would have no problem referring to themselves as “liberals” — they’d object only after a week or two following their resurrection, once they started to figure out how the word has morphed.
- mkfreeberg | 06/19/2011 @ 10:41
One other thought though that does help to support the objection you’re making: Dr. Thomas Sowell’s definition of “intellectual.” It’s a pejorative term, the way he uses it, describing people whose vocations begin with ideas and end with ideas as well…such that the ideas are never exposed to the purifying fire of reality to see how they shake out.

These are not great people by any means. And they aren’t all liberals…it’s also a little challenging to call them “average.” I hope they never become average — if everyone could get a cushy job just spouting ideas that may-or-may-not work, why, we’d all be doing it. And what a disaster that would be!

One might argue we’re sliding in that direction already.

But yes, I’d say if you see the world in terms of ideas and then you test those ideas, you’re already great, or at least on the road to becoming great…provided you pay attention to that testing phase. But the point is, in my view, anybody who works to avoid thinking about ideas, scolding and resisting and sneering-at and shutting-up anybody else who tries to think about ideas…there’s a person who will never be great until he changes his damn attitude, in fact, there is a person who will be surrounded by mediocrity, much like a black hole is surrounded by gravity.
- mkfreeberg | 06/19/2011 @ 10:46
From all I have been able to witness with my own eyes and ears, though…even the most professorly liberals, like for example our current President, just go through the motions of thinking about ideas. They don’t really do it. If you listen really closely you hear they’re just saying “I like this thing I don’t like that other thing.”

And actual professors don’t even do that. The “research” side of the professing biz is simply stuffing tired old leftist cliches into new and more torturous circumlocutions. They start out with the same old tired “arguments” — “white male capitalists are evil,” basically– and cherry pick “evidence” to fit them…. when they don’t just make it up as they go along. (Ever notice how those big academic frauds — Bellesiles’s Arming of America, for instance, or Ward Churchill’s entire career — turn out to be laughably amateurish? I mean, Bellesiles flat made up an entire archive’s worth of material, and Churchill fabricated his whole damn CV. These guys won major awards, though, because they told the left what they wanted to hear, and nothing’s ever too good to be true when it confirms the left’s worldview).

The other 50% of the professing biz is pure indoctrination. In both cases, though, they’re just talking about other people — regurgitating the “ideas,” argument-from-authority-style, of the old masters. There’s a reason the most-cited people in the humanities continue to be Marx, Lenin, Foucault, and Chomsky.

If there’s an original idea to be found in academia, it sure as hell ain’t in the liberal arts.
- Severian | 06/19/2011 @ 16:18

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Great, Average, SmallSunday, June 19th, 2011

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Sunday, June 19th, 2011