tagged w/ Anti-intellectualism
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I can’t help feeling disappointed in the message the article communicates, and for evidence of what that message is have a close look at the comment thread. I believe that Dr. Might has inadvertently made the world a slightly more accommodating place for those who ridicule education. Here in America, which is surely the most anti-intellectual of the world’s developed nations, that’s a large and booming segment that hardly needs encouragement.I can’t help feeling disappointed in the message the article communicates, and... more
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Republicans claiming that evolution is not true, that global warming is a myth, that the separation of church and state is unconstitutional, and that Einstein's theory of relativity is actually a liberal conspiracy to prevent people from reading the Bible.
Good stuff!
http://www.atheistmedia.com/2010/08/rachel-maddow-war-on-brains.htmlRepublicans claiming that evolution is not true, that global warming is a myth, that... more
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WTF?!
Its bad enough the South is trying its best to destroy science, but now we have to deal with Current giving it the boot from the front page? What's happening to Current?!
For shame, sirs. For shame.WTF?!
Its bad enough the South is trying its best to destroy science, but now we... more
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Conservative columnist David Brooks for the NYTimes:
"Modern conservatism began as a movement of dissident intellectuals. Richard Weaver wrote a book called, 'Ideas Have Consequences.' Russell Kirk placed Edmund Burke in an American context. William F. Buckley [pictured above] famously said he’d rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard. But he didn’t believe those were the only two options. His entire life was a celebration of urbane values, sophistication and the rigorous and constant application of intellect.
Driven by a need to engage elite opinion, conservatives tried to build an intellectual counterestablishment with think tanks and magazines. They disdained the ideas of the liberal professoriate, but they did not disdain the idea of a cultivated mind...
But over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare...
What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect...
The political effects of this trend have been obvious. Republicans have alienated the highly educated regions — Silicon Valley, northern Virginia, the suburbs outside of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Raleigh-Durham. The West Coast and the Northeast are mostly gone.
The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.
Conservatives are as rare in elite universities and the mainstream media as they were 30 years ago. The smartest young Americans are now educated in an overwhelmingly liberal environment.
This year could have changed things. The G.O.P. had three urbane presidential candidates. But the class-warfare clichés took control. Rudy Giuliani disdained cosmopolitans at the Republican convention. Mitt Romney gave a speech attacking 'eastern elites.' (Mitt Romney!) John McCain picked Sarah Palin.
Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive. But no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the 'normal Joe Sixpack American' and the coastal elite.
She is another step in the Republican change of personality. Once conservatives admired Churchill and Lincoln above all — men from wildly different backgrounds who prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking. Now those attributes bow down before the common touch.
And so, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away."
Read the full column here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/10/opinion/10brooks.html?hpConservative columnist David Brooks for the NYTimes:
"Modern conservatism... more
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SDLN
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added this
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3 years ago
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