House of Eratosthenes

For anyone who’s argued with liberals sometime since the Bush v. Gore debacle a decade ago, this is NOT news. They’ve been going at this pretty hard: Things are getting derailed/chaotic/frightening/disorganized, whatever, because too many Americans (sneer) are uneducated. They lack the sophistication, the nuance, the juno se qua to make truly innovative and insightful observations like…[insert hackneyed cliche here]. “Gun toting”…scary…scary…scary.

Let it go on long enough, and this hatred of Jews eventually comes spilling out.

I suppose I should be offended by this coastal white guy bitching up a storm about midwestern white guys. And the Jewish thing. And the “we can do without funding oh no we can’t all these stations would go dark” double-talk. Even though I’m a coastal white guy myself (from the other coast), protestant…but what gets under my skin is this talk about educated.

This now-former NPR stooge, like a lot of liberals, is not ready for any so-called educated people to come up with anything new. There is a real cost being paid by the rest of us here, and it has nothing to do with NPR funding. “Educated” is a word that is being used, more and more, to describe a personal quality that would be more fairly and accurately called “predictable.” Listen carefully to how it is used; that’s what they mean. You can be as stupid and uneducated as you want, but if you say all the right things and have all the right opinions you’re “educated.”

One of my favorite challenges has been to ask if Peggy Joseph, the woman who thought Obama was going to pay her mortgage and put gas in her car, is smarter than Charles Krauthammer, George Will, Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams — since she has the right opinions, and they don’t. Is she better educated. I haven’t gotten a straight answer back on that yet.

It’s not too hard to figure out the agenda here. Our modern liberals are servicing an agenda, which can take a back seat to none other. And they’re calling people names in order to get it fulfilled. Using taxpayer dollars to do it.

Update: Schiller has resigned. No not that one, the other one.

There is a difference between education and indoctrination.

From the progressive point of view, there is not.
- philmon | 03/09/2011 @ 09:41
When the best educated man on earth described the Americans of 1831 as being the best educated people on earth and yet where almost no one was highly educated, he noted that Americans often became literate through learning the bible and a few odd volumes of Shakespeare, or at most through an eighth grade education. But literate they were, and they participated in the education of work from an early age to receive its practical lessons.

The average educational level of Americans in 1940 was tenth grade. Have we evolved? As those who serve the state demand longer terms for its inmates, the quality lowers in proportion. The highest prized are illusions of excellence, the lowest are cruel deceptions.

In this system of thinking, sixteen years of education must take the place of eight. The result is greater ignorance through eight, and educated ignorance though sixteen.

A government entirely dependent on public opinion looks for some security on what that opinion should be, strives for the control of the forces that shape it, and is fearful of suffering the people to be educated in sentiments hostile to its institutions–
Lord Acton
- xlibrl | 03/09/2011 @ 10:50
When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail.

All leftists have are college degrees and a word-of-the-day calendar, and so therefore education = a college degree = the ability to recite dogma in the appropriate $5 vocabulary. Those among the “educated” who consider themselves “intellectuals” are, to a man (or, much more often, woman) the most unlettered, inexperienced, incurious people I’ve ever hung out with.

If you’re a connoisseur of self-delusion, as I am, it’s endless fun to watch. For instance, the academic-industrial complex loves to preen about its tolerance of “dissent.” What they fail to mention, of course, is that their “dissent” is like NASCAR — it only turns left. There is a remarkable diversity of opinion in academia…. it’s just that it starts at “hard left” and runs the gamut through “radical left” and down to “barking at the moon and frothing at the mouth left” (I once had a professor refer to counterpunch.org as an “independent news site.” I shit you not).

This is what passes for “education” among the “educated.” Me, I kinda like ignorance.
- Severian | 03/09/2011 @ 14:41
Time to haul this one out.

The Tennesee Middle School Football coach who wrote and performed the song was fired over it.
- philmon | 03/09/2011 @ 15:36

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Your Obligatory NPR Scandal Video Embed
Wednesday, March 9th, 2011