House of Eratosthenes

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.

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.

Well, at least the guy can string two words together into a sentence. That’s more than most left-wingers can do these days.

Sadly, this commenter is unable to provide any specific, concrete examples of this lack of “intellectual curiosity” on the part of either Palin or Bush. Nor does he provide even the names of anyone whom he does consider “well traveled, well read, or well spoken” or what criteria he uses to determine those things.

It’s like you said, Morgan. We’re increasingly at a point where people are apt to label a person “intelligent” or otherwise, based only on how well the person agrees with our own views – and worrying about the incompetence of allies or the genius of enemies, seems to be a thing of the past. (That was an absolutely profound observation and I’m stealing it.) Sadly again, this phenomenon afflicts the Left even more than the Right; I wouldn’t presume to call Obama, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Henry Waxman, or Rahm Emanuel “stupid” or blather on about their lack of “intellectual curiosity.” Rather, I question their values, their priorities, their ethics, their judgment, and their commitment to the betterment of this nation.

But, you know. We backwoods, redneck hillbilly Bible-thumping fundamentalist types are no match for all that Manhattan-elite intellectual firepower anyway, are we?

I’m less concerned about how “smart” someone appears to be (whatever that means) than in the wisdom of the decisions they’ve made up to this point.
- cylarz | 11/15/2009 @ 02:33

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On IntellectualismSaturday, November 14th, 2009

On Intellectualism
Saturday, November 14th, 2009