Posted on 11/11/2018 7:22:04 AM PST by Kaslin
If you don’t like the Left, you can probably come up with many reasons you believe they don’t measure up in their intellectual capabilities, some of those may be questionable. Over the years, the reason I have found most egregious and irrefutable rests with my involvement with this publication.
Recently, I was working on background for a panel discussion on California propositions prior to the election. I found the director of the Public Policy Institute of California's Water Policy Center. PPIC is clearly a left-of-center think tank. I was researching information for a proposition to commit another $8.89 BILLION in bonds for California water infrastructure.
When I got the director on the phone and introduced myself, she had no clue who I was (as expected). I told her I was a columnist with Townhall.com. She told me she had never heard of the publication. This is par for the course. Inevitably when I am trying to interview a Democrat politician and speak with them or their staff and tell them I am affiliated with Townhall.com, they are clueless. And that is exactly what makes them clueless. They have no desire to read anything outside their little domain.
They surely read the NYT and WaPo, the Los Angeles Times or Chicago Tribune, Slate or HuffPost or stoop to reading Daily Kos, but looking at Townhall or National Review would be beyond the pale.
When I started on Townhall.com ten years ago, I was proud to have gotten a slot. I was on a publication that as I described had every major center or right-of-center writer on it except George Will. We had Krauthammer at the time and, of course, the master, Thomas Sowell. We had Prager, Coulter, Elder, Jonah Goldberg, Walt Williams, Michael Barone and Byron York. The list goes on. If you wanted to know what Republicans and conservatives were thinking, all you had to do was get the Townhall.com daily distribution and it was all available there.
Things have changed since then, and only for the better. Of course, Krauthammer is writing in heaven and Sowell is retired, but Townhall.com still has almost every columnist of worth in the same political realm. New faces like my Sunday morning running mate Derek Hunter puts out a couple of columns a week. Kurt Schlichter and Wayne Allyn Root have become very popular. Mona Charen is a regular as well as Brent Bozell and David Harsanyi, a new favorite of mine. I am sure you have some others you read regularly who you would throw in here.
It seems the Left can only complain about Fox News, Fox News, and more Fox News. They don’t seem to be watching it because if they were they would see two homegrown Townhall.com stars on regularly: Guy Benson and Katie Pavlich. The reason they don’t know them is that The Left likes to complain about Fox News, but does not watch it. Their only knowledge of it is the snippets CNN and MSNBC use to distort what is on the network.
The point is they live in an intellectual bubble. They only see what they want to see and hear what they want to hear. This was evidenced by a recent conversation my wife had with a few left-of-center folks when she invoked the term “shovel ready jobs.” They had never heard the term. If this were an isolated incident then I would not address it here, but it is a constant one. Listening to NPR and reading left-wing publications did not even educate them on President Obama’s favorite rhetoric.
Sometimes it seems like we lurch into this topic ad nauseum, but it cannot be discussed often enough. The reason the Left adopts some of their failed policies is because they refuse to educate themselves beyond their little realm. That does not mean it does not occur on the right, it is just that it is so frequent among their intellectual leaders.
Take for example people supporting Socialism. How failed and murderous does a concept have to be before you abandon it? If all you read is manipulated arguments for Socialism or the new silly one stating the reason it failed is because it was not fully implemented, then you come away with dangerous notions. If you don’t read what a disaster the British health care system is for their people, then you actually believe single-payer (government-run) health care makes sense. Renaming it “Medicare for All” defames the term ‘putting lipstick on a pig.’
If you wonder why, when you listen to a political leader or an acquaintance spew ridiculous notions of how public policy is run better when controlled by a central government with faceless bureaucrats, you now know why. They may have college degrees and fancy titles, but they are the unwashed hordes. Their complete lack of intellectual curiosity insults themselves and disqualifies them from having a voice of worthiness.
The only place where they are educated is in their self-induced coma.
I’m a little tired of intelligence being bashed. That is not the problem, IQ is disassociated from things like character, integrity and creativity.
There is also no parallel between intelligence and high education. I do realize that academia has been conflating “intelligence” with “education”, but, I’ve also seen studies that I.Q. actually drops after 4 years of college. If you have enough money to stay the course, anyone can become a college professor, especially in a day and age where academia is driven by political correctness and Plato’s legendary “philosopher kings”. Just because most academicians are smug, self-aggrandizing oafs, please don’t confuse that with intelligence.
The real intellect in the political spectrum is on the conservative side. People with very high intelligence are always curious and eager for new ideas to examine. The left just doesn’t have any of those. It’s proponents are not particularly intelligent. Being too cowardly to ever leave school is probably the greatest single characteristic that unites most professors at the progressive centers of higher learning.
The Left/Progressives have diseased minds.
Because......women?
“So explain the people like me, who have IQs 150+, who like to hang out here and inform ourselves?”
The IQ test measures memory & focus, not emotional irrational thinking. We operate on things that keep our ego’s happy 80-90%, not rational thinking. since we are fed tons of untrue information from the “professors” and media, etc. We believe it and our pitiful ego’s have a hard time discarding stuff we accepted as true.
It’s entirely possible both theories are correct.
Intellect and intelligence similar but are different things.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-consciousness-question/201205/intellect-and-intelligence
Wow!!!! What a bunch of hooey. They are talking about “emotional intelligence” or “social intelligence”, made-up terms to give credibility to low I.Q. people so they can become college professors. It should be self-evident that being driven by “emotions” is not a measure of “intelligence” which is logic and thought-driven.
Perhaps intelligence has different meanings. Intelligence Quotient, or the measurement of intelligence, is merely the “speed of processing” information (per Jordan Peterson). What they are calling “intelligence” in this article probably has more to do with neuroticism.
Check out some of Jordan Peterson’s youtube videos on intelligence, creativity and the “Big Five” personality assessment. Under the main characteristic of neuroticism, there are 2 sub-characteristics, “Withdrawal” and “Volitility”. Withdrawal is what it sounds like, what causes a person to back down or avoid something. From the article, it sounds like they are equating neuroticism with intelligence.
Peterson also distinguishes between “intelligence” and “intellect”. According to him, “intellect” means interest in ideas, abstract ideas. Such an interest does not necessarily equate to high intelligence or processing speed, but they often go hand in hand.
It’s fascinating stuff and from what I’ve seen of his videos, he is a true scholar and scientist. I don’t always agree with him, but his thoughts are all worthy of consideration.
Leftists are totally pre-occupied with changing the meaning of words to validate themselves, their irrationality and narcissism. Please don’t fall for it. Go to Mensa and take their sample IQ test to see for yourself if it is measuring emotional sensitivity or raw processing speed.
Good reply.
I’ve viewed intelligence as being hard processing (math, logic, spacial relationship, sequencing, cognizance) and intellect as being the successful application of intelligence in life (determining truth, problem solving, controlling emotions, common sense).
From that, an intelligent person (technically masteful) can be absolutely lost on life issues (the classic highly educated idiot).
They are MORALLY bereft!
A very insightful post. I vary from you, though, in that I see the degeneration of our culture from another perspective. It is an internal rot that has festered for over one hundred years, and hit it’s stride under Dewey’s education system. While international socialism followed the example of the French Revolution, we were, once a different kind of people. We truly believed in government from the bottom, up. That would not do for the international cabal of elitists, and so, we were burdened with leaders and president’s who would do what they could to destroy us from within, from slavery to the Federal reserve, unions and the rest of the garbage that has hurt us so badly. But nothing has worked so well for them as the take over of the education system. The loss of intellect and the destruction of critical thinking skills, and the dumbing down of generations of children has been their greatest success. How many little goofballs are dancing around with meaningless degrees? Fully indoctrinated and oblivious to facts right in front of their faces. Groups like antifa, occupy-anything, blm don’t happen in a vacuum. The biggest mistake was allowing the fed to take over education, and until we take it back, we will continue down this Rocky rabbit hole
If you don’t like the Left, you can probably come up with many reasons you believe they don’t measure up in their intellectual capabilities, some of those may be questionable.
I heard a new female congresscritter today
Why was she elected ?
She said. Preexisting conditions and infrastructure
She also said the demoncraps do not have a leader
Apparently this is how they convinced the women to vote for them
Go figure
Excellent article. Thomas Sowell has been posting on Twitter. He still has must to say.
People who have no moral integrity have no need of intellectual integrity.
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