House of Eratosthenes

I’m noticing with AOC and Jen Psaki running around, and Placeholder Joe in charge…or holding the place at least…this left-wing drumbeat of “Our guy is so smart that only a tiny portion of the populace can understand him” is in remission. Barack and Michelle are out of the spotlight. No one is taking their place. It’s weird because liberals are still swaggering around with their monotone about “You’re stupid if you don’t agree with us.”

But if you say “Like AOC?” they’ll go…”Who?” Their champions stop being their champions whenever it’s no longer convenient for them to be that. Until their profile is suddenly lowered in this way, they’re representing lots of things but intellectual horsepower is not one of those things, either in substance or in packaging. They don’t even try to pretend. I’m not entirely sure what this means. But it’s new. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say, it’s in motion.

I’m thinking back and I see this idea of having an intellectual representative has been like a faulty flashlight, flickering on and off. It seems to have started off as a way to explain their losses, beginning maybe with Adlai Stevenson. “He’s too smart, the public didn’t get it.” Carter and Mondale used this excuse against Reagan, to lick their wounds after the “likeable dunce” decisively defeated them.

And then Bill Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar. In the aftermath, we remember Clinton for just one thing, and it wasn’t that, but at the time we got that Rhodes thing rubbed in our faces over and over again. You must be dumber if you don’t agree with Bill, he’s a Rhodes Scholar.

John Kerry had “nuance” and could “see things in shades of gray.” This was an unusually well defined critique against the evil others; implication being, if you weren’t on their side, you were like a Sith, dealing in absolutes. But it was projection, of course, because read that sentence again. If you’re not with them, you’re terrible. An absolute.

After Kerry there was Obama…the Lightworker. Obama often applied the Kerry pattern, speaking often of “false choices.” The guiding narrative had something to do with a splendid, capable mind dealing with delicate things, and until He came along we were struggling in the darkness coping with 21st century challenges with 12th century techniques or something. Lightworker was constantly intoning His higher wisdom to us about what we could and could not do, blowing our minds with His newfound wisdom that had never dawned on us before…usually followed by lots of “uh” sounds to make sure He got it absolutely, positively, right. It became quite tiresome, I think even to the people on His side, although they’d never admit it.

Hillary Clinton, of course, was the smartest woman on the planet.

Things are not now the way they were before. Since 2016, the democrats are just…not Donald Trump. That’s it. They don’t have to be smart. People used to make fun of John Kerry for not being George W. Bush, but you know, in addition to that he had to be this nuanced deep-thinker guy. Now the “not Donald Trump” guy is…Placeholder Joe. Kneepads Kamala. Gray Goose Nancy. “The Squad.” You can plausibly accuse these weirdos of lots of unsavory things, but overthinking something is not one of those things.

It may be the manifestation of a new generation with a bad attitude. Many’s the journeyman or master who took on an apprentice from this new “Apple Ear Buds” crowd, and come away with the observation that it’s so hard to tell them anything. They seem to have the attitude of, If it’s really worth knowing, they must know it already. Their hero is Rey from Star Wars, who instinctively knows all about everything in the galaxy, both technological and spiritual. People wonder why she doesn’t capture the imagination like her predecessor, Luke Skywalker. The obvious answer is that we got to see Luke learn. He made mistakes, sulked like a loser, banged his head against things. Then he learned. Rey just knows everything, so she’s learned nothing. She’s failed as a successor-character who captures passions, but never forget she’s also supposed to be an emblem of this new generation. And there, evidently, she’s a success. They generally don’t value the process of learning.

Of course, as the democrats market themselves to this crowd with this mantra of “Who cares if I think on anything deeply, I’m not that other guy” — they have yet to find real success. They had to cheat to get Joe in there, and their rebuttal against anyone who noticed the cheating is to forbid us from talking about it. The discussion seems to be limited to “Who cares what you say, we’ll just remove your post.”

This is not good. Are they resorting to censorship because of what they’re able to do? Or…because of what they’re not able to do? They want to be thought of as intellectual titans, but their champion is the bug-eyed Brooklyn bartender, and others like her…and whether they realize it or not, the rest of us get to form whatever opinions about it we like, nevermind whether our posts can survive any length of time on Facebook or YouTube.

I have to predict the youngsters are in for a series of unpleasant surprises. Not any great variety of them. Just a lengthy series of similar, unpleasant surprises. It’s just not realistic to force people to respect your intellectual acumen, by clamping down on, obfuscating and altogether prohibiting any discussion of your intellectual shortcomings. That doesn’t make people respect you as some kind of a genius. It’s not how it works.

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Intellectual AcumenFriday, December 10th, 2021

Intellectual Acumen
Friday, December 10th, 2021