I love smart people but despise arrogant people.
Got it.
This horse’s patoot should be the poster boy for values-free elitism. He would be the first one to pull the rope on the guillotine used to provide “The Final Solution” to faith in anything but the State.
I’ll never understand why any nerd or geek would identify with the Left.
Neal who?? Seriously, I remember the old Cosmos program with Carl Sagan and loved it. Was looking forward to the new one with Tyson until the first episode when Obama did the intro for it and haven’t watched it since. Another example of the politicization of science for social reasons. If I’m wrong about the show now I’d be willing to listen if someone disagrees, but now, nope.
I despise hipsters. This is one of the funniest sites. The comments section is good, too. Language warning:
http://diehipster.wordpress.com/
‘My great fear,” Neil deGrasse Tyson told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes in early June, “is that we’ve in fact been visited by intelligent aliens but they chose not to make contact, on the conclusion that there’s no sign of intelligent life on Earth.”
HAHAHAHA, oh, Dr. Tyson, you are so funny and original.
“Beam me up, Scotty, there’s no intelligent life down here.” Bumper sticker from the early-1970s forward.
Thanks for posting this! I find it very affirming.
A few weeks ago, I made a snide remark about Tyson and was called a Flat-Earther by another FReeper!
I did respond, but only to say that the new “Cosmos” was introduced by Obama.
I did not receive a reply.
This sounds rediculously stereotypical. I just know I am nerdy as all get out, but am between conservative and libertarian on the political spectrum.
I will give it to Tyson though, when interviewed with Bill Maher, he refused to call those who disagree with him racist.
Bre Pettis of MakerBot fame has played the “Nerd” image schtick to the fullest. The media loves him and this has enabled him to sell his MakerBot to Stratasys for $403 million in stock, with an additional $201 million in performance-based earn-outs.
The MakerBot is not an exceptional example of a consumer grade 3D printer. My guess is that Stratasys bought MakerBot for all the free publicity attached to Bre Pettis’s “Nerd” image and press fawning.
Neither of the other MakerBot co-founders, Adam Mayer and Zach “Hoeken” Smith, projects the nerd image nearly as strong as Pettis.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson would be instantly labeled "stupid" the moment he stated he was pro-life or expressed doubt about anthropological global warming or touted the benefits of the second amendment. If you can find one who still remembers him, ask a liberal his opinion about the intelligence of pro-life, but otherwise old school leftie intellectual, Nate Hentoff.
Because liberals judge intelligence based solely on one's adherence to a political agenda, they have become the antithesis of the intellectualism they claim to value above all else. In their myopic view, any questioning of a liberal shibboleth instantly reveals a person not only as uncultured but as intellectually deficient as well.
You can only be considered a super-intelligent liberal if you agree to stifle any intellectual rigor in the formation of your worldview and accept the platter of provided opinions without question.
The aliens landed in Hollywood and Washington, and left because they didn’t find any intelligent life.
If the aliens tuned in to MSNBC or CNN, they would be correct in their assumption of no intelligent life on earth.
Smart is the new pretty.
Ironically enough, what Tyson and his acolytes have ended up doing is blurring the lines between politics, scholarship, and culture — thereby damaging all three…. Politics pretending to be science … is current, and it is chic….
Perhaps the greatest trick the Left ever managed to play was to successfully sell the ancient and ubiquitous ideas of collectivism, lightly checked political power, and a permanent technocratic class as being “new,” and the radical notions of individual liberty, limited government, and distributed power as being “reactionary.” A century ago, Woodrow Wilson complained that the checks and balances instituted by the Founders were outdated because they had been contrived before the telephone was invented.
Thank you so very much, 2ndDivisionVet, for posting this article by Charles C. W. Cooke. I read it last week in NR’s print edition, and thought it splendid.
Some thoughts, FWTW:
It ought to be completely obvious to all reasonable persons that not every human problem can be solved by differential equations, let alone the scientific method. (Which nowadays is still mainly on the Newtonian model, despite the revolutionary breakthroughs of General Relativity and Quantum physics, regarding which exactly nothing in Newtonian mechanics, based as it is on presuppositions of causal locality and direct observation, can comprehend or deal with.)
As a student of history, what impresses me most is how little the universal questions regarding human nature and experience change over the millennia. The Neo-Darwinist account of “the evolution of species” neither anticipates, nor can answer, the following type of universally persistent human problems:
… [I]t is evident that the primarily nonsensory modes of experience address dimensions of human experience superior in rank and worth to those sensory perception does: experiences of the good, beautiful, and just, of love, friendship, and truth, or all human virtue and vice, and of divine reality…. Experience of “things” is modeled on the subject–object dichotomy of perception in which the consciousness intends the object of cognition. But such a model of experience and knowing is ultimately insufficient to explain the operations of consciousness with respect to the nonphenomenal reality that men approach in moral, aesthetic, and religious experiences. [Which happen to have phenomenal consequences, or effects.] Inasmuch as such nonsensory experiences are constitutive of what is distinctive about human existence itself — and of what is most precious to mankind — a purported science of man unable to take account of them is egregiously defective. — Ellis SandozIt should be obvious that the “nonphemonenal reality that men approach in moral, aesthetic, and religious experiences” is entirely beyond the reach of methodological science — whose reach extends only to phenomenal reality. What immediately comes to mind: (1) We have seven millennia [at least] of recorded human history that attest to the FACT that historical human beings, cross-culturally, that is to say universally, have ALWAYS been preoccupied by such questions. They happen to be the core questions of universal human experience/existence, in all cultures, at all times. [C.S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man, referred to this more-or-less permanent configuration of human interest and experience as the Tao.] (2) It should also be clear that such understandings of human nature and the human condition cannot be reduced to the methods of scientific investigation, which depend on direct observation of objects selected/intended by a subjective consciousness. [See: the observer problem in quantum physics.] (3) WRT selective consciousness, Einstein remarked that, although the “inertial frames” of observers inevitably differ, ALL inertial frames are ultimately subject to the universal laws of physics.
Which leads to the core question: Is there such a thing as “human nature?” Or are the Darwinists right, that nothing in biological nature is fixed, but all is in a process of random, purposeless change. Yet that purposeless change is usually supposed to be “progressive” change; that is to say, Nature, and the Natural Selection “she” imposes — though it operates by purely random means — is always wise enough to see to it that things are always just getting “better.” Therefore, man does not have a given nature (let alone a divinely-endowed one), but is always just a “work-in-progress,” leading to — WHAT???
At this point I ask about this perplexing “WHAT”: Does it lead to devolution of the human to the level of beasts? Or to machines? Or to — perhaps — self-divinization?
The Tysons of this world are very coy in answering such questions: It’s beyond the scope of science, don’t you know….
But that doesn’t mean such questions go away. If you want them to go away, you have to kill, not only God, but all of human history first. (For the reason that human history is always and quite characteristically full of questions relating to man's relationship with the Divine.)
So the strategy of the “science-y types” — who Charles Cooke points out probably could not tell you the temperature at which water boils — somehow become ersatz “experts” in science because they believe what such folks as Neil deGrasse Tyson, or Richard Dawkins, or Richard Lewontin, et al., are spewing as “experts” in the scientific field. Such ignoramuses can just join up with the “nerd herd” and be just as fashionable and “hip” in their own way as Jay Z and Beyonce are in theirs….
And dontcha know, but “fashion” seems to be everything these days. Truth be damned if it gets in the way of “fashionable” points of view.
And that is the key insight that lies at the very heart of Left Progressivism: Finally, it is a cataclysmic revulsion against human nature and experience (history both personal and social).
Must close, but not before noting two additional things: (1) I am definitely a "reactionary." (2) There's nothing "new" about Left Progressivism. Models of this sort of thing date back at least to 500 B.C. — that's what's actually OLD. That model's been tried repeatedly in human history, and it has never worked.
Which brings me to Einstein's definition of insanity: To keep repeating what has been (unsuccessfully) done before on numerous occasions, expecting a new and different outcome from "the same old same old," THIS time....
Thanks again for posting this great article, 2ndDivisionVet.
All this shows is that certain science followers are not immune from the seductions of the Cult of Celebrity, just as popular singers, actors, athletes, authors, and pretty much everyone else sucked into the maw of popular culture. Serious people have more serious things to worry about.
First and foremost? No, I'd say it's more of a class thing. If went to certain posh colleges and are under a certain age you might identify yourself as a nerd. It happens that most of the people who go to those colleges are liberal, but you can find conservatives who cultivate the same image: Tucker Carlson, Byron York (to judge by the bowties), any number of NR writers. Maybe even ueber-nerd George Will, if he wants to be trendy. Dinesh may not self-identify as a nerd, but he'd qualify too. I get the point, though, that it's mostly liberals who are pushing phony political nerdism and that MSNBC has taken it to a whole new level.
It is no accident that the president has felt it necessary to inject himself into the game: That’s where the cool kids are.
Well, kind of. But there's a lot of irony an confusion involved with just who the "cool kids" are. Are Washington nerds cool kids pretending to be uncool or uncool kids pretending to be cool? And outside of Washington and Ivy League circles elsewhere is anybody really fooled by any of this Washington nerdism?