Lately, I have been asking myself: how can we have so much intelligence around us and yet find ourselves deluged by stupidity? I mean, we have smart phones, smart TV’s, smart thermostats, computers everywhere, information at our fingertips. . .But if stupidity were a river, I would say that it’s at flood stage.
When writing was invented, humans lost the ability to memorize epic poems. But it didn’t make us stupid.
Perhaps because of machine intelligence, people are immersed in the present and have lost historical perspective. My guess is that 90 percent of Harvard graduates today know less about the Second World War than what you can find in this book that I read as a child.
Is Sullivan right thought that trans activists are ignorant of that history? I seriously doubt it, thus he’s not passing the Ideological Turing Test here.
Even if they didn’t pick it up in schools or leftist media, it’s not like Hollywood hasn’t put out innumerable portrayals of the stereotypically intolerant and illiberal Christian bigots oppressing sexual minorities and suppressing their freedom of expression over the past few generations.
Instead, I think the typical wokester would just say that liberalism and tolerance are not the highest, terminal finals, but merely instrumental values when good, right-thinking people are out of power, and even then, only a mere expedient to evade having to confess to a socially undesirable opinion until the shoe is on the other foot. Tolerance is only good – and it’s good to pretend one supports it in the abstract – when good people are being kept down. Likewise intolerance is only bad when bad people are doing it for bad reasons.
That is to say the the liberal, tolerant nonjudgmental society is not actually their vision of The Good: the Good Life, the Good Society, and so forth. The Good Society is one in which the Bad People are kept down, and their Bad Actions and Bad Ideas are suppressed. The problem with those intolerant ‘Christianists’ in the past wasn’t that they were intolerant but because they were Christian.
Saying “you are just like them” is thus false equivalence: they were bad, while we are good, QED.
There are two contradictory versions of the gay marriage narrative.
One is that “Gays are just like us”. This proposes that gay society is just like straight society and wants to live good bourgeois heteronormative mostly monogamous family life.
The second is the gay pride parade, where gays want to be all Sodom and Gomorroah but without the divine judgement.
Andrew belongs to the latter view. He compared masks to condoms…just a reminder that he is an unprepentend hedonist with GRIDS. Every schoolchild in America has to wear a mask because of “Bear Weak” in Provincetown, MA which Sullivan defends.
Sexual Hedonism died with #MeToo, so its no surprise that his brand of “don’t ask don’t tell” isn’t resonating with the woke crowd.
Sullivan, like all fags, has to reconcile with the fact that his lifestyle and philosophy isn’t compatible with stable bougious society. You push to far and civilization pushes back. Xi gets it.
Sullivan > asdf. Just saying. Sorry.
For whatever virtues Sullivan may have, I wouldn’t put him on a FIT.
His liberalism is hard enough to reconcile with Catholicism, but defending the licitness of one of the four sins which cries out to heaven for vengeance while denouncing as “Christianist” those with orthodox Christian views on sexuality is a paradigmatic case of motivated reasoning.
It’s sort of like watching Dexter Morgan insist that being a serial killer isn’t really incompatible with Catholicism.
I doubt many people are consciously that cynical. I think it’s just a natural progression to always want more ground. I don’t think the early Christians expected to turn Rome into a Christian theocratic state, they mainly wanted religious tolerance, but once they’d gotten that, the next logical thing to do with all the momentum of the movement is to become the new masters, a temptation few can resist once it’s in front of them.
Stupidity is a virtue in a foot soldier and a worker ant, at least from the perspective of the army or the ant hill.
True, but nowadays most of the foot soldiers and worker ants have their own tiny megaphones and can share all of their stupid *opinions*. We didn’t have that before. There were all of these institutional filters in place. Now the ratio of opinions to facts is very high and getting higher. That’s our flood stage of stupidity. It’s an information glut. Talk is cheap. Valuable information is drowned out in all of the noise.
Your children’s book about WWII was probably filled out with lies. Have you read Sean McMeekin’s recent Stalin’s War? What about Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke?
Sean McMeekin’s picture of naive, silly, well-meaning FDR and his people getting duped and led by the nose by a scheming, villanous Stalin is not exactly new. I’m not quite sure why some think it is some kind of revolutionary advance in historiography; perhaps it is simply because the preceding recrudescences have been forgotten. It may be useful to counterbalance the implicit viewpoint popular during the Cold War that USSR did nothing wrong, or at least did not intend to, and if it did, it was the evil capitalist encirclement that forced its hand, but it does not jibe too well with available facts. The single incident of FDR rejecting the Poles’ complaint and suppressing evidence, including a British Foreign Office report officially forwarded to USG by Churchill, of Soviet involvement in the Katyn massacre, should be enough to dispose of the “naive, silly, well-meaning” picture (see e.g. Manchester & Reid, The Last Lion, vol. 3, ch. 4 on the Tehran conference).
Well meaning and silly? I agree these are not words which come to mind for FDR, Harry Hopkins, etc. These men knew exactly what they were doing.
I don’t think McMeekin is as naive about that as you imply. Have you read the book?
nice piece on the cancel culture panic that I just happened upon
https://michaelhobbes.substack.com/p/moral-panic-journalism
Or “wokeness” if you prefer. Both terms pop up, but of course it’s all essentially the same crap.
–“About 50 minutes in, McWhorter makes the interesting claim that if you ended the drug war, culture in black communities would quickly improve. His idea is that if you take the profit of criminality, young black men would have no choice but to take work, perhaps only menial work, in the mainstream economy.”–
My guess is that decriminalizing drugs would help, but you need to have the subsequent incentives properly aligned. Hoping that young black men flock en masse to low paid menial jobs doesn’t seem realistic, especially in a welfare state economy in which sexual gratification can be had by means outside of marriage or even with another person.
Young men in general need access to legitimate channels for income and status in their community, in particular so that they can find women who will want to marry them. Working at a grocery store as a 25 year old man isn’t going to get a lot of women looking in your direction. The social incentives are basically this:
a) Find legitimate channels to income and status (but if this is rare, by sheer math most can’t do this), get married and have a family.
b) Work just hard enough to be able to support yourself and hang with your buddies and play Xbox in an extended hedonistic adolescence, waking up at 40 with little chance of ever having what used to be considered a normal life.
c) Be a criminal entrepreneur to fill in the hole left by the missing drug trade, in order to get that wealth and status.
If you legalize one lucrative criminal activity, there are still plenty of others, and maybe the thing you legalized had a risk-reward ratio high enough and was elastic enough that it was soaking up most of the labor supply for the kind of people willing to be criminals. So maybe they just shift into the next best crimes. As bad as drugs are for many people, there are worse things in life. The end of alcohol prohibition did not eliminate the mafia. For example, in a lot of the world, kidnapping for ransom is still a really big deal.
So, maybe right now it’s hard and expensive to hire a hit man because the kind of people willing to kill for bitcoin are better off dealing drugs. But if drugs don’t pay, maybe they’ll put up a shingle on dread and join the assassin’s trade union. Let’s say half of the dealers go straight and half go into the dark arts. What would you rather have, a million drug dealers occasionally shooting at each other, or half a million guns for hire, who make it their profession to kill people’s bosses, rival, prosecutors, judges, romantic interests, and so forth?
It’s really hard to make crime not pay more than bagging groceries.
It’s worse than that. Crime currently doesn’t pay. Your average street dealer makes an average of $3.30/hour.
Amazon warehouse workers now make $15+ with thousands in sign on bonus.
It was never about the money. Being a street dealer is:
1) “Cool”
2) Let’s you indulge your base instincts
3) Has option value, however remotely probable (there is a 1/XX,XXX chance of becoming a “boss”)
People are in fact willing to tolerate making dramatically less money to be criminals, because there is a subset of people that just want to be criminals. If it wasn’t drugs it would be whores. If it wasn’t whores it would be dice. If it wasn’t dice it would be kidnapping. Etc.
The entire point is that they WANT to participate in a violent and exciting winner take all tournament. The particular thing they shoot each other over is almost irrelevant.
Per Ghettoside:
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=ghettoside&linkCode=sl2&linkId=b5d2923030175f62b6fa9ebbc4a2209a&tag=dvidlt-20&ref=as_li_ss_tl
“The fights might be spontaneous, part of some long-running feud, or the culmination of “some drama,” as Skaggs would put it. These male “dramas,” he observed, were not so different from those among quarreling women of the projects. In fact, they were often extensions of them. “Women work through men by agitating them to homicide,” observed an anthropologist studying Mayan villages in Mexico. The observation fit scores of killings in L.A. that cops chalked up to “female problems.” The smallest ghettoside spat seemed to escalate to violence, as if absent law, people were left with no other means of bringing a dispute to a close. Debts and competition over goods and women— especially women— drove many killings. But insults, snitching, drunken antics, and the classic— unwanted party guests— also were common homicide motives. Small conflicts divided people into hostile camps and triggered lasting feuds. “Grudges!” Skaggs would exclaim: to him the word summed up scores of cases. Every grudge seemed to harbor explosive potential. It would ignite when antagonists met by chance in the streets or in liquor stores. Vengeance was a staple motive. In some circles, retaliation for murder was considered all but mandatory. It was striking how openly people discussed it, even debating the merits from the pulpit at funerals.”
“Despite the super-heated street drug scene, only about 20 percent of killings had to do with drug business; the usual beefs, vendettas, and respect killings were the order of the day.”
I suppose we can extend Thomas Sowell’s observation to include, “It doesn’t matter how smart your magic boxes are” either
“It doesn’t matter how smart you are unless you stop and think” – Thomas Sowell
The magic boxes seem to inhibit thinking, either by distraction or transference.
We might also look toward “school helplessness” that has seemingly become more the norm in schools across the country. This trend creates the habit throughout life not to think beyond superficially about most topics.
“In spite of the fact that schools exist for the sake of education, there is many a school whose pupils show a peculiar “school helplessness”; that is, they are capable of less initiative in connection with their school tasks than they commonly exhibit in the accomplishment of other tasks.”
Arnold,
If you are monitoring public intellectuals who would score well in FIT, I just came across dynomight.net.
For instance, a suggested way to argue that could evade culture wars: https://dynomight.net/culture-war-island-hopping/
And a gentle push-back on Sam Quinones’ meth conjecture:
https://dynomight.net/p2p-meth/