Patters

One of the issues I've always had with much of the right wing is their utter lack of respect for the educated. On the right, we recently had a bunch of bozos claiming the pollsters were all skewing things in favor of Democrats, pulling around the naive and trusting by the nose. In the end, it turned out that the statistics geeks were, if anything, skewing things in favor of Romney.

On the right, we have attacks on those scientists who believe in manmade global warming as corrupt, frauds, or hungry for government grants. On the right, we have seen attacks on educators, social scientists, journalists, evolutionary scientists, artists, and so on. Who are these ignorant dopes who attack the educated, and why do they have so much power? Sometimes they are truck drivers, sometimes they are slumlords, sometimes they push miracle cures, but mostly they are people in my opinion who get information fed to them by talk radio and tv. To a large degree, they are not readers (which is vastly the most efficient way to learn) and they are not worldly in their opinions.

They mostly live in like minded communities, clinging to their Bibles and guns, living in irrational fear of that which they refuse to grasp with intelligence -- gays, Muslims, blacks, Hispanics, feminists, liberals, and of course the educated, those who are smarter than them who have always shaped our nation, making it more inclusive, safer, stronger, more dynamic, more free, and more sophisticated. Their fear of the educated forces them to embrace simplicity -- two word phrases, many of which are nearly meaningless -- smaller government, family values, lower taxes, deficit reduction, accountability, trickle-down, saving Medicare (meaning to cut Medicare). Even monkeys can handle three phrases, but not a lot of Republicans apparently.

Their views are fine if they want to live in their simple world surrounded by yes-men, but when they enter the real world, very few of their ideas win the popular imagination. For one, they have almost no ideas. They have no significant accomplishments in history, whether we're talking about the economy, the military, or other parts of our society. They are the ones who want to drag our culture back to an era that never existed based on idea rooted in old family traditions and values passed on by grandma in her 90th year rather than put faith in the great thinkers of the age.

PatriotsReign

Why obsess over "left vs right" when there actually is no left or right?

I rarely think about left or right....never really have. But I do think about ISSUES. And real issues have nothing to do with liberal or conservative.

But that's just me....

BTW....that LAST thing we need in our politics is intellectualism. I'll take pragmatism all day.

1960Pats

Thanks for the window into the soul of how an elitist snob thinks.

Liarwatha is a perfect match for all who sit on that same high horse and look down on the rest of us.

Oh yeah, and the Kennedy's are champions of women's causes too.

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DarrylS

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"Being the best doesn't mean you always win. It just means you win more than anyone else".. tweet from Kurt Warner to Tom Brady.

PatsFanInVa

And one more thing. I'm sick and tired of Republicans looking up my nose at me!

Sirrously, the extent to which the political right wing is afraid of intellectual achievement was brilliantly illustrated by Rick Santorum in the primaries.

We're all aware that we're at the point where a bachelor's degree is the equivalent of what a high school education got you back in the day. President Obama says he wants a country where every child has the opportunity to go to college. Santorum says "What a snob." Scott Brown thinks it's an infectious rallying cry to point out that his opponent was a Harvard professor (almost as infectious as saying "wah! She thought she was an Indian but maybe wasn't!!!")

There are plenty of people who are great people who didn't go far in academia. That's not the point. The point is that in the modern world it is a good thing, not a bad thing, to invoke real science, not wish-science, to determine objects of scientific study. It is a good thing, not a bad thing -- as we just found out -- to let the data speak for themselves in polls. It is a good thing, not a bad thing, if your science and tech committees make their decisions based on real science. You don't get to invent an ideological branch of science to maintain one or another religious tradition.

Patters is absolutely right here -- and predictably, righties come back with crap about how you're a snob if you value intelligence and education. Somehow, as if it's a current event, one of these worthies decided it was also important to mention that members of the Kennedy family had affairs or something.

Ad hoc ergo propter hoc, I suppose. It is true that Kennedys behaved badly with women, and it is true that Dems are more likely to respect intellectual endeavor than their pubbie counterparts. So obviously, that respect for intellectual endeavor must be caused by the Kennedys' moral failings

This "hate people smarter than you" thing on the right has been a staple for decades. It used to be a much more astute tactic than now, I think. After all, you can much more easily leverage an American's envy for greater intellect than an American's envy for greater buying power. We've never really driven by the rich guy's house and said "that evil so-and-so has too much money, I hate him." But we might just drive by the king nerd's house and say "that evil so-and-so played with his computer every Saturday night instead of getting drunk and now he can buy and sell us -- wish we could just beat the crap out of him like in high school."

It's okay to hate people (for life) who are smarter than you... or at least that was the case. I think people are beginning to understand that being smart's now the primary survival trait out there in the market.

As usual, pubbies think the most efficacious way to counter this trend is to believe as hard as they can that things were better before it happened, so the trend itself is one of the nation's moral failings.

PFnV

PatsFanInVa

On the other hand, they're still selling these to entitled mouth-breather parents...

PatsWSB47

Republicans are stubborn, not uneducated. This liberal agrees:

Sorry,went way over the paragraph limit there

PatsFanInVa

Okay, so all liberals need here is a mole, telling reactionary intellectuals to never give up on transmuting lead to gold. Party's intellectual energy diverted.

So I take it we have perfectly healthy processing power in the right-wing mind, with the single glaring inconsistency that they'll presuppose that everybody else who is, objectively, as smart as them or smarter, are wrong. Similarly, the data may well be wrong, if they can expend enough intellectual energy explaining how wrong is right, up is down, and day is night.

Interesting findings, and it goes right along with the "look at me I'm a lone wolf" model, as opposed to a "communitarian" model, wherein previous findings and peer review would play important parts.

The Earth's still about 14 billion years old. Call me conventional.

PFnV

Nikolai

What I found in the halls of the undergraduate world was that critical thinking is preached as the end-all, be-all. However, using proper discernment in the process was never really taught. Instead, people leave college as perpetual skeptics, subconsciously tearing down any argument that doesn't fit their preconceived worldview, while thinking that they are exercising their critical thinking abilities. It's not hard to see how such a dynamic becomes exponentially polarizing.

The wisdom to discern comes with experience. It's one of the reasons why it's fairly easy to pick out the young bucks who have just discovered the wonders of "intellectual skepticism" versus those who have seen and experienced a few things, hence taking a more measured approach to the world.

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We get what we deserve.

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“On a day when they could have had impact players David Terrell or Koren Robinson..they took Georgia defensive tackle Richard Seymour, who had 1 sacks last season in the pass-happy SEC and is too tall to play tackle at 6-6 and too slow to play defensive end. This genius move was followed by trading out of a spot where they could have gotten the last decent receiver in Robert Ferguson and settled for tackle Matt Light, who will not help any time soon.”

Nikolai

All I know for sure is that the world is at least as old as the 1970s.

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We get what we deserve.

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“On a day when they could have had impact players David Terrell or Koren Robinson..they took Georgia defensive tackle Richard Seymour, who had 1 sacks last season in the pass-happy SEC and is too tall to play tackle at 6-6 and too slow to play defensive end. This genius move was followed by trading out of a spot where they could have gotten the last decent receiver in Robert Ferguson and settled for tackle Matt Light, who will not help any time soon.”