The Ruling Class

America is often described as a society without the Old World's aristocracy. Yet we still have people who feel entitled to boss the rest of us around. The "elite" media, the political class, Hollywood and university professors think their opinions are obviously correct, so they must educate us peasants.

OK, so they don't call us "peasants" anymore. Now we are "deplorables" -- conservatives or libertarians. Or Trump supporters.

I don't like Donald Trump. I used to. I once found him refreshing and honest. Now I think he's a mean bully. I think that partly because he mocked a disabled person. I saw it on TV. He waved his arms around to mimic a New York Times reporter with a disability -- but wait!

It turns out that Trump used the same gestures and tone of speech to mock Ted Cruz and a general he didn't' like. It's not nice, but it doesn't appear directed at a disability.

I only discovered this when researching the media elite. Even though I'm a media junkie, I hadn't seen the other side of the story. The elite spoon-fed me their version of events.

Another reason I don't like Trump is that he supported the Iraq war -- and then lied about that. Media pooh-bahs told me Trump pushed for the war years ago on The Howard Stern Show.

Trump replied, "Yeah, I guess ... so." Later, on Neil Cavuto's show, Trump said, "Perhaps (Bush) shouldn't be doing it yet, and perhaps we should be waiting for the United Nations." I wouldn't call that "support" -- the way NBC's debate moderator and many others have.

I was stunned by how thoroughly the media have distorted Trump's position. That's a privilege you get when you're part of the media elite: You get to steer the masses' thinking.

At the second debate, we all know that Trump walked over to Hillary Clinton's podium, as if he was "stalking Ms. Clinton like prey," said The New York Times. CNN said, "Trump looms behind Hillary Clinton at the debate."

Afterward, Clinton went on Ellen DeGeneres' show and said Trump would "literally stalk me around the stage, and I would just feel this presence behind me. I thought, 'Whoa, this is really weird.'"

But it was a lie. Watch the video. Clinton walked over to Trump's podium. Did the mainstream media tell you that? No.

When Clinton wore white to a debate, the Times called the color an "emblem of hope" and a Philadelphia Inquirer writer used words like "soft and strong ... a dream come true." But when Melania Trump wore white, that same writer called it a "scary statement," as if Melania Trump's white symbolized white supremacy, "another reminder that in the G.O.P. white is always right."

The ruling class decide which ideas are acceptable, which scientific theories to believe, what speech is permitted.

In the book "Primetime Propaganda," Ben Shapiro writes that the Hollywood ruling class calls conservatives "moral scum."

He says, "If you're entering the industry, you have to keep (your beliefs) under wraps because nobody will hire you ... they just assume you're a bad person."

They won't tell you why you weren't hired. They just tell you, "You weren't right for the part," explains Shapiro. "Talent is subjective, which means that it's pretty easy to find an excuse not to call back the guy who voted for George W. Bush."

Years ago, the ruling class was the Church. Priests said the universe revolved around Earth. Galileo was arrested because he disagreed.

Today, college lefties, mainstream media, Hollywood and the Washington establishment have replaced the Church, but they are closed-minded dogmatists, too.

We are lucky that now we have a lot of information at our fingertips. We don't need to rely on the ruling class telling us what to believe. We can make up our own minds.

Excellent oped by John. Freepers need to read past the first couple paragraphs to realize where John is going with his oped.

Earlier this year, another excellent oped was posted about how the elites want to run our lives, maim us or kill us, The Intellectual Yet Idiots! The Intellectual Yet Idiot medium.com ^ | 9/16/2016 | Nassim Nicholas Taleb Posted on

9/19/2016, 12:45:55 PM by Darnright

What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us

1) what to do,

2) what to eat,

3) how to speak,

4) how to think… and

5) who to vote for.

But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligenzia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence hence fall into circularities — but their main skill is capacity to pass exams written by people like them.

With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time.

People are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons. Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats who feel entitled to run our lives aren’t even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking.

They cant tell science from scientism — in fact in their eyes scientism looks more scientific than real science. (For instance it is trivial to show the following: much of what the Cass-Sunstein-Richard Thaler types — those who want to “nudge” us into some behavior — much of what they would classify as “rational” or “irrational” (or some such categories indicating deviation from a desired or prescribed protocol) comes from their misunderstanding of probability theory and cosmetic use of first-order models.) They are also prone to mistake the ensemble for the linear aggregation of its components as we saw in the chapter extending the minority rule.

The Intellectual Yet Idiot is a production of modernity hence has been accelerating since the mid twentieth century, to reach its local supremum today, along with the broad category of people without skin-in-the-game who have been invading many walks of life. Why? Simply, in most countries, the government’s role is between five and ten times what it was a century ago (expressed in percentage of GDP).

The IYI seems ubiquitous in our lives but is still a small minority and is rarely seen outside specialized outlets, think tanks, the media, and universities — most people have proper jobs and there are not many openings for the IYI. Beware the semi-erudite who thinks he is an erudite. He fails to naturally detect sophistry. The IYI pathologizes others for doing things he doesn’t understand without ever realizing it is his understanding that may be limited. He thinks people should act according to their best interests and he knows their interests, particularly if they are “red necks” or English non-crisp-vowel class who voted for Brexit. When plebeians do something that makes sense to them, but not to him, the IYI uses the term “uneducated”.

What we generally call participation in the political process, he calls by two distinct designations: “democracy” when it fits the IYI, and “populism” when the plebeians dare voting in a way that contradicts his preferences.

While rich people believe in one tax dollar one vote, more humanistic ones in one man one vote, Monsanto in one lobbyist one vote, the IYI believes in one Ivy League degree one-vote, with some equivalence for foreign elite schools and PhDs as these are needed in the club. More socially, the IYI subscribes to The New Yorker. He never curses on twitter. He speaks of “equality of races” and “economic equality” but never went out drinking with a minority cab driver (again, no real skin in the game as the concept is foreign to the IYI).

Those in the U.K. have been taken for a ride by Tony Blair. The modern IYI has attended more than one TEDx talks in person or watched more than two TED talks on Youtube. Not only will he vote for Hillary Monsanto-Malmaison because she seems electable and some such circular reasoning, but holds that anyone who doesn’t do so is mentally ill.

The IYI has a copy of the first hardback edition of The Black Swan on his shelves, but mistakes absence of evidence for evidence of absence. He believes that GMOs are “science”, that the “technology” is not different from conventional breeding as a result of his readiness to confuse science with scientism. Typically, the IYI get the first order logic right, but not second-order (or higher) effects making him totally incompetent in complex domains.

In the comfort of his suburban home with 2-car garage, he advocated the “removal” of Gadhafi because he was “a dictator”, not realizing that removals have consequences (recall that he has no skin in the game and doesn’t pay for results).

The IYI has been wrong, historically, on Stalinism, Maoism, GMOs, Iraq, Libya, Syria, lobotomies, urban planning, low carbohydrate diets, gym machines, behaviorism, transfats, freudianism, portfolio theory, linear regression, Gaussianism, Salafism, dynamic stochastic equilibrium modeling, housing projects, selfish gene, Bernie Madoff (pre-blowup) and p-values. But he is convinced that his current position is right.

The IYI is member of a club to get traveling privileges; if social scientist he uses statistics without knowing how they are derived (like Steven Pinker and psycholophasters in general); when in the UK, he goes to literary festivals; he drinks red wine with steak (never white); he used to believe that fat was harmful and has now completely reversed; he takes statins because his doctor told him to do so; he fails to understand ergodicity and when explained to him, he forgets about it soon later; he doesn’t use Yiddish words even when talking business; he studies grammar before speaking a language; he has a cousin who worked with someone who knows the Queen; he has never read Frederic Dard, Libanius Antiochus, Michael Oakeshot, John Gray, Amianus Marcellinus, Ibn Battuta, Saadiah Gaon, or Joseph De Maistre; he has never gotten drunk with Russians; he never drank to the point when one starts breaking glasses (or, preferably, chairs); he doesn’t know the difference between Hecate and Hecuba; he doesn’t know that there is no difference between “pseudointellectual” and “intellectual” in the absence of skin in the game; has mentioned quantum mechanics at least twice in the past five years in conversations that had nothing to do with physics.

He knows at any point in time what his words or actions are doing to his reputation. But a much easier marker: he doesn’t deadlift. Postscript From the reactions to this piece, I discovered that the IYI has difficulty, when reading, in differentiating between the satirical and the literal. PostPostscript The IYI thinks this criticism of IYIs means “everybody is an idiot”, not realizing that their group represents, as we said, a tiny minority — but they don’t like their sense of entitlement to be challenged and although they treat the rest of humans as inferiors, they don’t like it when the waterhose is turned to the opposite direction (what the French call arroseur arrosé).

(For instance, Richard Thaler, partner of the dangerous GMO advocate Übernudger Cass Sunstein, interpreted this piece as saying that “there are not many non-idiots not called Taleb”, not realizing that people like him are < 1% or even .1% of the population.)

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