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Forums - Politics Discussion - The American Right and Anti-Intellectualism

Kasz216 on 14 March 2012

I dunno. It really seems like that's only a half truth.

There is some anti intellectualism in the right when it comes to a lot of social issues.

While there is a lot of anti intellectualism in the left when it comes to a lot of economic issues... and ironically in general issues dealing with numbers.

I mean shit, people still try keynsian economics (though granted that's both parties.)


Republican voters do seem to have a problem though with people who don't seem "authentic".  Which many intellectuals come off as, unfeeling people incapable of getting the human element.  Which erally.  Is ironic when you consider things.


Complaining about elitists is kinda silly though when you consider pretty much 90% of politicans had some sort of elitist background.



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Kasz216 on 14 March 2012

The reason it happens on both sides of the political isle is a pretty simple one though.

People are willing to give up logic for emotion... and despite how either side wants to see it... both are doing it for emotion because they view their policies as helping people short term.

Politics has devolved into a "My idea is best for every single issue someone may have, and has no holes or problems at all."

Rather that debating the flaws and merits of a plan and deciding what is important.



badgenome on 14 March 2012
Mr Khan said:

In measured doses, more centralization and control does good things for a society, so long as this control does not undermine certain inalienable rights in the process, but the need for vigilence against overreach should not take the form of an entity whose rallying cry is "get yer guvmint hands off my medicare," nor an entity that enshrines avarice and believes in the inherent evil of the public sector. Accountability is important, but we shouldn't give in to the idea that we should restore a variant of anarchy just because it sounds easier than working to hold the government accountable.

The idea that people are going to be able to hold the government accountable as it grows and grows and grows is mere fantasy. Most people are already politically disengaged and completely uninformed, and aren't in a position to hold anyone accountable. And this growth and increased centralization does invariably undermine individual rights. Every day the Democrats seem to turn over a rock and find a new right underneath it, and these "rights" are never of the negative sort but always of the positive, affirmative variety. (See: the "right" to free contraception.) But of course nobody can be entitled to anything that they can't provide for themselves without someone else being forced to provide it for them, and one of the left's biggest problems - even among the few who are truly mindful of civil liberties, like Glenn Greenwald - is that they see economic freedom as somehow divorced from personal liberty when they're actually inseparable. And, of course, there's the fact that when you find health care to be an inalienable right, when a bunch of people are big fat asses, it's no longer their problem; it's our problem. This necessitates (read: gives an excuse for) the government to step in and regulate... well, everything. (To tie this back into pseudo-intellectualism and the frequent silliness of academia, there's this study which concludes that a penny per pound tax on soft drinks would prevent 2,600 premature deaths per year by causing the average adult to consume a whopping 9 fewer calories per day. Nine.)

That you think the Tea Party advocates a variant of anarchy (and presumably is stupid for doing so) while the Democrats are Very Smart People for screaming bloody murder about cutting the growth of spending as some sort of draconian austerity measure kind of says it all about why you see anti-intellectualism as existing predominately on the right: it's not anti-intellectual when your side does it.



Kasz216 on 14 March 2012
Mr Khan said:
badgenome said:
Mr Khan said:

Granted, anecdotal evidence on my end, but this returns to other ideas from my original topic: any institution the right sees as espousing the wrong kind of fact is inherently a liberal conspiracy: the ivory tower and the "Lame-stream media" being two of them. Once they are dismissed as liberal conspiracies, anything they say can be freely disacknowledged.

 

The question of "intellectual overreach" is a considerable one, but i sure as hell would rather have someone learned fixing their own mistakes than someone blustering forward on mere "conviction." Smart people can make dumb decisions, but they are better-equipped to fix them. If you want someone who is going to exercise caution and restraint, you're not going to find it on the right as it is (perhaps in the libertarian movement, but i've noticed users around here have a hard time figuring out that the american right doesn't like libertarianism except where it suits them, which is again factual evidence presented by the fact that Ron Paul is currently fourth place to Newt frickin' Gingrich, but this is a rant aside).

It's not a conspiracy. It's just that there's a preponderance of leftists in those institutions, so those institutions become functionally leftist ones. If a media organization is comprised of 90% liberals, they don't have to conspire in order to present a blinkered view of things. It will just naturally happen. When conservatives outnumber liberals in the general population, but only comprise something like 0.3% of sociologists (while liberals are grossly overrepresented) it doesn't take the fevered mind of a conspiracy theorist to think that the field is going to be heavily biased, and actually, it probably explains why studies on normal, white, middle Americans often read like anthropology reports on some pre-human hominid.

It seems like you're saying that smart people don't exist on the right, and Democrats govern with greater restraint than Republicans. That's pretty hilarious given the eerie similarities between the governance of the quintessential "smart Democrat" Obama and the equally emblematic "reckless cowboy Republican" Bush. Also, as a self-professed radical leftist with fascist tendencies (or whatever), don't you really not want caution and restraint? I mean, when Obama seized control of one-sixth of the U.S. economy you thought it wasn't enough because it wasn't a complete nationalization of health care.

And no shit that Republicans hate libertarians. Both parties buddy up to libertarians when they're out of power only to kick us in the balls when they're in. But the worst of the Republican agenda can't even hold a candle to the worst of the Democratic agenda, both because it's more narrowly focused and because it simply won't fly in today's society. People today wouldn't stand for something like the banning of contraceptives, and even as uncomfortable as many people are with abortion, I don't think they'd like an overturning of Roe vs. Wade much more. Meanwhile, it always seems to be the Democratic precincts that are trying to ban owning a goldfish or throwing footballs or salt. I really don't even think it's debatable who the bigger control freaks - and thus who the bigger enemies of liberty - are.

In measured doses, more centralization and control does good things for a society, so long as this control does not undermine certain inalienable rights in the process, but the need for vigilence against overreach should not take the form of an entity whose rallying cry is "get yer guvmint hands off my medicare," nor an entity that enshrines avarice and believes in the inherent evil of the public sector. Accountability is important, but we shouldn't give in to the idea that we should restore a variant of anarchy just because it sounds easier than working to hold the government accountable.

You'd have a point if that was the arguement being made.

However... it isn't, and because of that... you are actually guilty of anti-intellectualism here. 

The arguements against it have been pretty clearly detailed in...

1) Will end up costing more. (Which anyone who knows how the CBO guidelines work could of told you that.)

2) Is the federal government compelling the purchase of something.

3) Is on the way to a system that forces uniform healthcare coverage... and in some ways already does.



HappySqurriel on 14 March 2012
Mr Khan said:
HappySqurriel said:

"Anti-Intellectualism" could also be termed "Anti-Propaganda"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8427-2005Mar28.html

College faculties, long assumed to be a liberal bastion, lean further to the left than even the most conspiratorial conservatives might have imagined, a new study says.

By their own description, 72 percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges are liberal and 15 percent are conservative, says the study being published this week. The imbalance is almost as striking in partisan terms, with 50 percent of the faculty members surveyed identifying themselves as Democrats and 11 percent as Republicans.

The disparity is even more pronounced at the most elite schools, where, according to the study, 87 percent of faculty are liberal and 13 percent are conservative.

Beyond this, mathematics is the language of the educated and intelligent and I refuse to call anyone who doesn't have a solid grounding in mathematics an "intellectual" so the vast majority of professors who have been educated in fluff do not have a right to claim "anti-intelectualism" when it is pointed out that all they teach is propaganda.

You respond with an accusation of intellectual conspiracy, and an ill-informed one at that. All sciences need some grounding in statistics, and i can quite assure you that most everyone with a PhD is by necessity at least as good at statistics as you are. It's pretty much the only way to launch a defensible dissertation or to keep putting out research.

If there is propaganda in colleges i haven't seen it, and i've made it a point to pay attention to all my professors for biases in one direction or another, and while i have seen more liberals than conservatives, i've seen a fair few who were better at playing their beliefs closer to their chests, and never have i witnessed substantive distortion of the facts. Granted, anecdotal evidence on my end, but this returns to other ideas from my original topic: any institution the right sees as espousing the wrong kind of fact is inherently a liberal conspiracy: the ivory tower and the "Lame-stream media" being two of them. Once they are dismissed as liberal conspiracies, anything they say can be freely disacknowledged.

And it was not the point of my post to declare the left free from guilt in all cases on these matters. Aside from "9/11 was an inside job" i really don't remember much that was circulated about Bush that was factually false (likely by his own admission, he has a checkered past of fratboy antics).

The question of "intellectual overreach" is a considerable one, but i sure as hell would rather have someone learned fixing their own mistakes than someone blustering forward on mere "conviction." Smart people can make dumb decisions, but they are better-equipped to fix them. If you want someone who is going to exercise caution and restraint, you're not going to find it on the right as it is (perhaps in the libertarian movement, but i've noticed users around here have a hard time figuring out that the american right doesn't like libertarianism except where it suits them, which is again factual evidence presented by the fact that Ron Paul is currently fourth place to Newt frickin' Gingrich, but this is a rant aside).

There are even elements on the right who are openly yearning for the movement to shed the mantle of wilful ignorance. George Will's been reasonably vocal about it, which could be one of the reasons why he's one of the few conservative thinkers i respect, because he actually promotes thinking.

I think you need to be introduced to the Sokal affair (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair) to understand the academic rigor of many journals ...

Few people (essentially no-one) questions the mathematical background of engineering and the hard sciences, but in the humanities and social sciences (especially fields that end in "studies") there is almost no solid mathematical background; and the journals are such jokes that statistics professors will use published papers as examples of lying with statistics.



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Kasz216 on 14 March 2012
Mr Khan said:
HappySqurriel said:

"Anti-Intellectualism" could also be termed "Anti-Propaganda"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8427-2005Mar28.html

College faculties, long assumed to be a liberal bastion, lean further to the left than even the most conspiratorial conservatives might have imagined, a new study says.

By their own description, 72 percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges are liberal and 15 percent are conservative, says the study being published this week. The imbalance is almost as striking in partisan terms, with 50 percent of the faculty members surveyed identifying themselves as Democrats and 11 percent as Republicans.

The disparity is even more pronounced at the most elite schools, where, according to the study, 87 percent of faculty are liberal and 13 percent are conservative.

Beyond this, mathematics is the language of the educated and intelligent and I refuse to call anyone who doesn't have a solid grounding in mathematics an "intellectual" so the vast majority of professors who have been educated in fluff do not have a right to claim "anti-intelectualism" when it is pointed out that all they teach is propaganda.

You respond with an accusation of intellectual conspiracy, and an ill-informed one at that. All sciences need some grounding in statistics, and i can quite assure you that most everyone with a PhD is by necessity at least as good at statistics as you are. It's pretty much the only way to launch a defensible dissertation or to keep putting out research.

If there is propaganda in colleges i haven't seen it, and i've made it a point to pay attention to all my professors for biases in one direction or another, and while i have seen more liberals than conservatives, i've seen a fair few who were better at playing their beliefs closer to their chests, and never have i witnessed substantive distortion of the facts. Granted, anecdotal evidence on my end, but this returns to other ideas from my original topic: any institution the right sees as espousing the wrong kind of fact is inherently a liberal conspiracy: the ivory tower and the "Lame-stream media" being two of them. Once they are dismissed as liberal conspiracies, anything they say can be freely disacknowledged.

And it was not the point of my post to declare the left free from guilt in all cases on these matters. Aside from "9/11 was an inside job" i really don't remember much that was circulated about Bush that was factually false (likely by his own admission, he has a checkered past of fratboy antics).

The question of "intellectual overreach" is a considerable one, but i sure as hell would rather have someone learned fixing their own mistakes than someone blustering forward on mere "conviction." Smart people can make dumb decisions, but they are better-equipped to fix them. If you want someone who is going to exercise caution and restraint, you're not going to find it on the right as it is (perhaps in the libertarian movement, but i've noticed users around here have a hard time figuring out that the american right doesn't like libertarianism except where it suits them, which is again factual evidence presented by the fact that Ron Paul is currently fourth place to Newt frickin' Gingrich, but this is a rant aside).

There are even elements on the right who are openly yearning for the movement to shed the mantle of wilful ignorance. George Will's been reasonably vocal about it, which could be one of the reasons why he's one of the few conservative thinkers i respect, because he actually promotes thinking.


A)  With statistics... not really, I mean you need to have a Statistics class for Qualitative research, but they'll push qualitative students through statistics with both hands usually.  Most social science papers have pretty much no statistical backing.  It's just based on how your methods were conducted, how well your article represents said journal, and some would maintain, how much it fits the current view or a popular "off view"

B) As for not seeing a distorition of the facts... you yourself are quite libral.  Isn't more apt to say, you haven't seen much distortion of the facts.... based on how you see the facts.



Mr Khan on 14 March 2012

Have to take this piecemeal due to the fact that multi-quoting is a skill that eludes me.

-Badgenome: I'll admit hyperbole on my part for declaring it a variety of anarchy, but in arguing with you i often find that you inject points into the argument that didn't really belong there in the first place, placing presumptions on my mode of thinking and then attacking those presumptions rather than my actual points. Remember also that talk is cheap, while action is the name of the game, and while there are hysterical elements on the left that decry spending cuts in an irrational manner, one must take at least part of that hysteria as signaling in lieu of belief. I would argue that the left doesn't believe in spending as a fundamental good, whereas the right believes in the lack of spending as a fundamental good, where the difference lies.

-Kasz: again, hyperbole on my part regarding the "guvmint hands" comment. My point was that the hatred of "government" tends once again to be a core belief, rather than a practically applied idea, such that you see the Republican base embrace these oddly contradictory ideas where they try to bolt reality onto the "anti-government" rallying cry. Because the Right isn't anti-government, but merely uses it as a rallying cry, much like how they aren't truly anti-intellectual or anti-elitist, but use them as a rallying cry in a way which, i contend, is harmful to the national discourse.

And therein lies the root of the matter. The shrunken American left relies on black-and-white matters to stay relevant (literally "black and white" in the case of race, where otherwise conservative poor blacks vote democrat because the other side has racist tendencies), but the Right runs a constant play for the least-common-denominator, reducing debate to a number of platitudes in a way that is more distinctly pervasive and actively discouraging those who seek shades of grey moreso than the Left, and when one side runs entirely on platitudes, can there truly be national debate?



Monster Hunter: pissing me off since 2010.

Kasz216 on 14 March 2012
Mr Khan said:
Have to take this piecemeal due to the fact that multi-quoting is a skill that eludes me.

-Badgenome: I'll admit hyperbole on my part for declaring it a variety of anarchy, but in arguing with you i often find that you inject points into the argument that didn't really belong there in the first place, placing presumptions on my mode of thinking and then attacking those presumptions rather than my actual points. Remember also that talk is cheap, while action is the name of the game, and while there are hysterical elements on the left that decry spending cuts in an irrational manner, one must take at least part of that hysteria as signaling in lieu of belief. I would argue that the left doesn't believe in spending as a fundamental good, whereas the right believes in the lack of spending as a fundamental good, where the difference lies.

-Kasz: again, hyperbole on my part regarding the "guvmint hands" comment. My point was that the hatred of "government" tends once again to be a core belief, rather than a practically applied idea, such that you see the Republican base embrace these oddly contradictory ideas where they try to bolt reality onto the "anti-government" rallying cry. Because the Right isn't anti-government, but merely uses it as a rallying cry, much like how they aren't truly anti-intellectual or anti-elitist, but use them as a rallying cry in a way which, i contend, is harmful to the national discourse.

And therein lies the root of the matter. The shrunken American left relies on black-and-white matters to stay relevant (literally "black and white" in the case of race, where otherwise conservative poor blacks vote democrat because the other side has racist tendencies), but the Right runs a constant play for the least-common-denominator, reducing debate to a number of platitudes in a way that is more distinctly pervasive and actively discouraging those who seek shades of grey moreso than the Left, and when one side runs entirely on platitudes, can there truly be national debate?


Again... I don't think you can argue that only the right does that.

For example... Mitt Romney isn't worried about the poor because he believes our social saftey net is adequate enough.

Yet it's portrayed as "Mitt Romney doesn't care about the poor and doesn't think about them!"

Many polticians suggest affirmitive action should be gotten rid of, primarily because it doesn't actually seem to work.

This is always mentioned as "He/She's a racist!"

When, a real national debate, Democrats would acknowledge that affirmitive action is greatly failing in a real way... and would try and argue for different programs, and a replacement of the old ones.  (My suggestion would be a transformative assets bank, or if what we're really looking for is to have an ~ equal number of rich and poor, more focused effort on specific individuals.)

 

I mean, the amount of hyperbole and out of context reporting about Mitt Romney has been ridiculous.  (Though that cheesy grits comment was hysterical.)

 

I wouldn't vote for Obama over Romney, but it's pretty clear Romney has been getting a bad shake from the media, and has been hugely taken out of context on a number of things.

 

Your only seeing it from one side, because you only care about one side.



Dark_Lord_2008 on 14 March 2012

Politicians on both sides of politics are renowned for being self-righteous, arrogant, pompous, know-it-alls who generally create more problems than they solve. I am right and you are wrong.



badgenome on 14 March 2012

Mr Khan said:
Have to take this piecemeal due to the fact that multi-quoting is a skill that eludes me.

-Badgenome: I'll admit hyperbole on my part for declaring it a variety of anarchy, but in arguing with you i often find that you inject points into the argument that didn't really belong there in the first place, placing presumptions on my mode of thinking and then attacking those presumptions rather than my actual points.

Examples, please? It's not something I'm trying to do. Sometimes I see things as being connected when other people don't.

Remember also that talk is cheap, while action is the name of the game, and while there are hysterical elements on the left that decry spending cuts in an irrational manner, one must take at least part of that hysteria as signaling in lieu of belief. I would argue that the left doesn't believe in spending as a fundamental good, whereas the right believes in the lack of spending as a fundamental good, where the difference lies.

I suppose, to the extent that the economically liberal right believes that the absence of spending should be the natural order of things because the government shouldn't do what it doesn't absolutely have to, and more fundamentally, because that rightfully money belongs to the citizens from whom it was taken (or in whose name it was borrowed from other countries).

And therein lies the root of the matter. The shrunken American left relies on black-and-white matters to stay relevant (literally "black and white" in the case of race, where otherwise conservative poor blacks vote democrat because the other side has racist tendencies), but the Right runs a constant play for the least-common-denominator, reducing debate to a number of platitudes in a way that is more distinctly pervasive and actively discouraging those who seek shades of grey moreso than the Left, and when one side runs entirely on platitudes, can there truly be national debate

It sounds to me like you're basically admitting that the left engages in demagoguery and platitude spewing (Obama's entire campaign) but only because the right has forced them into it. In reality, the left has been far more influential than the right over the past century and has won so many more and bigger victories that it's actually an embarrassment. Those victories have stuck, too. As you alluded to, even the Tea Party largely doesn't want its entitlements touched at this point. Plus with the media, entertainment, and academia being dominated by the left, I'm really not sure what more you could want.