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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Smartly Stupid |
| 2016-03-13 |
| The infrastructure of manufactured intelligence has become a truly impressive thing. Today as never before there is an industry dedicated, not to educating people, but to making them feel smart. From paradigm shifting TED talks by thought leaders and documentaries by change agents that promise to transform your view of the world, manufactured intelligence has become its own culture. ...Smart once used to be an unreachable quality. Einstein was proclaimed a genius, because it was said that no one understood his theories. Those were undemocratic times when it was assumed that the eggheads playing with the atom had to be a lot smarter than us or we were in big trouble. Intelligence has since been democratized. Smart has been redistributed. Anyone can get an A for effort. And the impulse of manufactured intelligence is not smart people, but people who make us feel smart. Intelligence to a modern liberal isn't depth, it's appearance. It isn't even an intellectual quality, but a spiritual quality. Compassionate people who care about others are always "smarter", no matter how stupid they might be, because they care about the world around them. ...Liberal intelligence exists on the illusion of its self-worth. The magical thinking that guides it in every other area from economics to diplomacy also convinces it that if it believes it is smart, that it will be. The impenetrable liberal consensus in every area is based on this delusion of intelligence. Every policy is right because it's smart and it's smart because it's progressive and it's progressive because smart progressives say that it is. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #4 "if it believes it is smart, that it will be." Isn't this called Magical Thinking, a psychopathology, a sign of Personality Disorder types of mental illness? |
| Posted by: Knuckles Trotsky2582 2016-03-13 22:11 |
| #3 I've been saying this for 20 years. Reading the NYT makes you *feel* smart. They leave out all the important bits, but if that's your only source of information you'll never notice. Reagan: "The trouble with our Liberal friends is not that they're ignorant; it's just that they know so much that isn't so." |
| Posted by: Iblis 2016-03-13 12:54 |
| #2 ...Liberal intelligence exists on the illusion of its self-worth. The magical thinking that guides it in every other area from economics to diplomacy also convinces it that if it believes it is smart, that it will be. The impenetrable liberal consensus in every area is based on this delusion of intelligence. Every policy is right because it's smart and it's smart because it's progressive and it's progressive because smart progressives say that it is. We've are seeing this arrogance play out on the left today and we have seen it before. In other words, the lemmings march over the cliff in lock step. Where's the intelligence, thought, compassion, and diversity in that? Lenin had a phrase for these folks--"useful idiots." |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2016-03-13 10:59 |
| #1 Intelligence to a modern liberal isn't depth, it's appearance. Wizard of Oz: Why, anybody can have a brain. That's a very mediocre commodity. Every pusillanimous creature that crawls on the Earth or slinks through slimy seas has a brain. Back where I come from, we have universities, seats of great learning, where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they think deep thoughts and with no more brains than you have. But they have one thing you haven't got: a diploma. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2016-03-13 10:40 |