Category Archives: Intelligence

The Worst has Become the ‘Best’

Democrats, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence, Iraq, Neoconservatism, The Zeitgeist, War

I watched Wonkette (or is it “Wonkette Emerita”) on Joe Scarborough. Unlike Tucker and Olbermann (good for them), he seems intent on parading airheads on his show (the segment “Hollyweird” comes to mind). Chris Matthews also invited this woman on his show to roll the words off her tongue, as she does with such affectation. In any case, she called Jim Webb a pumpkin head. The dictionary says that’s “a slow or dim-witted person.” Webb is nothing of the sort. When I first began writing about Iraq on WND.com, Webb e-mailed me in approval a few times, sending his editorials along. You have to be a complete wombat (“Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time”) like Wonkette to call Webb slow. A thought I recently shared with an interlocutor popped into my mind:

When I was young, the world was more merit based. It made more sense then. I could still be the best in the class. Now, the worst has become the best. Standards have been inverted. Nothing makes sense (except that one has to stick to one’s principles and be true to the truth). The awakening came when I first got to Canada and attended some course. A woman opened up her mouth to speak, and I thought, “Shame, she’s retarded.” Later it transpired she had degrees from McGill and other Ivy-league schools. I was in for an education. The woman wasn’t Wonkette, but came close…

The Worst has Become the 'Best'

Democrats, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence, Iraq, Neoconservatism, The Zeitgeist, War

UPDATED (12/8/2023): Monopolizers And Flyters (November 23, 2005)

Culture, English, Intellectualism, Intelligence, Literature, Media, The Zeitgeist

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On the flyting that flew between the two, Christopher Hitchens and George Galloway

Who monopolizes the market place of ideas in the Guardian’s view? The answer is assorted activists, liberal-leftists, statists, feminists, and other lightweights. Read the paper’s top 100 intellectuals and tell me it doesn’t distress.

I don’t profess to have heard of all the characters on the list. Far from it. But of those I recognize, I guess I’d go with German philosopher Jurgen Habermas. This is not to say I endorse his views or all his influences (the unlovely Theodor Adorno comes to mind). But this is not about agreeing with a thinker, only acknowledging his place on this list.

I’d also go with Pope Benedict XVI, and the marvelous Australian art critic Robert Hughes whose profundity, knowledge, and critical faculties are a credit to his Jesuit teachers.

I see Newsweek‘s wishy-washy Fareed Zakaria is considered an intellectual giant. Woe is me! Amos Oz is a popular writer (and not a good one when compared with Meir Shalev or Shy Agnon), but hardly one of the top intellectuals around. But if one is of the Left, one has an advantage in the selection process.

Now hold your horses, will you, because I also admire Christopher Hitchens as a stylist, conversationalist, and an extraordinary flyter. What is flyting, you ask? It’s an ancient Scottish form of invective, a true master of which is the MP George Galloway. I don’t care for his or Hitchens’ ever-shifting views, but I loved the flyting that flew between the two. Galloway called Hitchens a drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay. Hitchens responded over the pages of an august publication by likening the lickspittle praise Galloway once bestowed on him to spittle flung in place of argument. Later on, the two dueled deliciously on C-Span, where, I’m afraid, Hitchens proved his uncontested superiority in this spontaneous rhetorical art.

The Elusive Jewish Gene

History, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence, Judaism & Jews

I’m getting sick of the determinists who whittle down Jewish thinking and achievement over thousands of years to oppression-generated genetic mutations during the Middle Ages, or something. This article in the New York Magazine puts paid to such reductionism:

“To say that the Jews have a history of emphasizing scholarship is not just the fantasy of ethnic chauvinists and Woody Allen fans. To look at a single page of the Talmud is to understand this, with its main text at the center, its generations of rabbis arguing around the rim. The dialectic and critical reasoning are at its core.”

At the secular, Israeli secondary school I attended, not enough Talmud was taught, unfortunately. Still, the process of reasoning, called pilpul, captivated me; it’s marvelous—magic, really. The Talmud is calisthenics for the mind, for sure, but also sagacious.

Jay Homnick writes insightfully about the topic:

“In fact this analysis is not only demonstrably incorrect, its blind-man-and-the-elephant methodology doomed it from the start. Let’s ask this: is it logical to say that the people who produced the world’s greatest literary work in the 24 books of Scripture, the most powerful (and unprecedented) poetry in history in the Psalms and Song of Songs, and the most ingenious legal compilation, the Talmud, did not have these smarts? That by the merest coincidence their offspring fell into an ironic social anomaly two millennia later and only then achieved a belated smartening?”

He follows up with equal bite in an e-mail exchange:

“As for that rubbish about Jews suddenly getting smart because they had to suddenly figure out that 8 percent of a hundred dollars was 8 dollars, while in the old days they could just farm without having to figure out their overhead and the necessary profit margin to make it profitable, how crass is that?!”

True, “Jews make up a mere 0.25 percent of the world’s population and a mere 3 percent of the United States’, [yet] they account… for 27 percent of all American Nobel Prize winners, 25 percent of all ACM Turing Award winners for computer science, and 50 percent of the globe’s chess champions.” But if this Jewish menace upsets you, take comfort in the knowledge that there are plenty of stupid Jews to go around.