Category Archives: Pseudo-intellectualism

The American Electorate As Seen By The Left

Celebrity, Democrats, Elections, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Politics, Pseudo-intellectualism, Sarah Palin, The Zeitgeist

“How D.C. Became Hollywood for Semi-Attractive People” is the title of an Esquire blog post by Tom Junod. It is not particularly well-written, or especially thoughtful—this guy is not Christopher Hitchens—but the post got its author on cable today. “Hardball” I think it was. Here is what Junod thinks of you yobbos and your politics:

“The Democrats didn’t think they had to worry about any of this. They weren’t looking for stars because they had the biggest star in the world as their president. He didn’t have a populist bone in his body, but he was a deeply thoughtful man and a galvanic speaker both, and he promised to transcend the bone-grind of American politics. With his promise of one-man racial reconciliation, he was transfixing, but the independents who were transfixed by him needed to keep being transfixed, and on this, he couldn’t deliver. The American public turned against Obama not when it found out he was radical, or wish-washy, or power-mad, or timid, or what have you; it turned against him when he stopped being entertaining. It turned against him when it found out his real secret — that under his professorial mien he was, well, a professor. Outside the enforced electricity of a national electoral referendum, he was dutiful, and he was dull.”

“It is something of an unfair fight now: a party led by a man who clearly thinks too much before he speaks against a party led by a semi-sexy woman who will say anything — hell, whose idea of a debating strategy in 2008 was a table dance. And the Democrats don’t have an answer, because they’ve so deeply misjudged what the American electorate wants and is capable of. They thought that after the trauma of the Bush years, we would want a no-drama president; a regal First Lady; endless pages of necessary legislation, achieved at a political cost that proves the party’s commitment and courage; and a few more women on the Supreme Court who prove the party’s emphasis on excellence and ethnicity over eros. They didn’t realize that what we want is drama and nothing but, and so the Democrats became the CNN to the Repubican [sic] Fox, clueless in their competence, bewildered by their own best intentions.”

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/female-candidates-2010#ixzz12Do5TbPi

Goon Meets Supercilious

Journalism, Media, Neoconservatism, Political Correctness, Pseudo-intellectualism, Republicans, The Zeitgeist

Put evil and supercilious together and what do you get? “Parker Spitzer,” the new current-events program CNN is about to launch staring Eliot Spitzer, whose most elevated job was as a John, and Kathleen Parker, a pseudo-intellectual in the Peggy Noonan and David Brooks mode, also a member of the “Soft Left (otherwise known as Conservatives).”

This just goes to show that statists, and individuals with low moral character and banal ideas will always have a prime place on American TV and in its restricted market place of ideas.

Glenn Is Great

Ann Coulter, Gender, Glenn Beck, Intelligence, John McCain, Media, Political Correctness, Pop-Culture, Pseudo-intellectualism, Republicans, The Zeitgeist

The One and Only Glenn Beck, still a scrupulously good fellow despite fame and fortune, would contend that only G-d is great, and that’s what makes Mr. Beck so good.

His humility and love of grace aside, Glenn is one of the most important popular forces for liberty today.

Yes, he often gets it wrong. Yes, he often confuses genuine forces for liberty (Ron & Rand Paul, Peter Schiff) with snake-oil merchants (the neoconservatives Andrew Breitbart and Stephen Moore). Yes, he overestimates the wisdom of the American People, and never touches the topic which accounts for the future dissolution of the people and the election of another. (Embellish, if you will.)

BUT.

No one in mainstream media has done what Glenn has to drive home the reasons and consequences of an irrevocably insolvent America: the twin evils of monetary policy and mind-boggling state profligacy.

And no one, myself excluded, has come out swinging as Glenn has against the Meghan McCain phenomenon and what IT represents. Meghaaan’s delusions of grandeur are those of America’s miseducated, exceedingly arrogant, deeply dopey, utterly outsourceable youth, worshiped, nay deified, by parents and pedagogues (and slowly being displaced by Asia’s pleasant, wickedly hardworking, bright, respectful kids). Glenn hasn’t quite gotten there, but he’s almost there.

Today Glenn galvanized his comedic gifts to roast this fattened goose. Not one Republican has done so satisfactorily. Laura Ingraham practically apologized for lampooning Meghan McCains’s unmistakable moronity; Michelle Malkin also backed down from a less-than adequate evisceration. Coulter opted out as usual, and said nothing much important (as she does on immigration).

Updated: Reduced To Grunts By Grown-Ups

Education, English, Intelligence, Literature, Pseudo-intellectualism, Reason, The Zeitgeist

Reid Buckley on teaching a writing course to the functionally illiterate students in a run-of-the-mill American university:

“…These young people had not been taught to edit. They had not been taught self-criticism. They had been reared in an environment of self-esteem, even when this went unexamined and was unearned. And when they returned a week later with the fruits of their labors, I was appalled. I took the papers home and spent two afternoons and two evenings past midnight editing them.”

“I had to contend with an illiterate heaping of multisyllabic social-studies mush whose meaning was either obscured or contradicted by other heapings of academic mush, as indecipherable as they were ungrammatical. Illicit inferences lurked under false premises like salamanders under rocks. Logical connections did not exist. Non sequiturs were thick as chiggers. Do not mention grace or style. Of the 28 papers I labored through, only in two did I detect talent buried in the rubble. I had never seen anything so hopeless.”

“When I proceeded to go over the essay of another young man, his voice caught in his throat and he broke down. I was taken aback. We hadn’t proceeded beyond the first page. His wasn’t the worst effort, either. But he wasn’t protesting my criticisms. To the contrary. ‘You’re right,’ he kept repeating, tears flowing, ‘It’s awful. I can’t write my thoughts down. They come out a mess, I know!’ And then he related a scandal. Not in four years of high school and three years of college had a single teacher expressed concern about his writing or offered to edit it. When he said this, other students spoke out to confirm cognate experiences. ‘What can I do now?’ this young man asked me despairingly. ‘I graduate in two months!'”

“The dimensions of his doom and that of these other young people hit me with full force. Not once in their educational lives had they been taught to impose order on chaos, that being contrary to the central dogma of liberal-arts education in our country today. There is no such thing as choosing, as distinguishing between the false and the real, discriminating between good and bad. The cost of this heresy to our nation is beyond calculating: for two generations our businesses, professions, universities, and politics have been populated by moral illiterates who reject reason.”

“The art of writing is the soul of reason, from which all civilization has spun. If one cannot give expression to one’s thoughts, one is reduced to grunts. These young men and women were to be graduated in two months’ time. Yet they were functionally illiterate, as the saying goes—a hideous euphemism for being thrust into the adult world intellectually crippled. Several other students who crowded around me now claimed that never had they had their written work reviewed. I was incredulous. “Never?” “Not once!” came their reply…”

[SNIP]

Do read “The Write Stuff.” It’s a tad overwritten, in my opinion. Reid, moreover, fails to distinguish between the problem of functional illiteracy and the blight of postmodern writing. The two are distinct, with some overlap. In all, the extent of the horror of the betrayal of generations of students by pedagogues cannot be repeated often enough. Kids don’t deserve this.

Update (August 26): Edmund Burke: “Learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.” (From “Reflections on the Revolution in France.”Vol. iii. p. 335.)