Discuss: Anti-Intellectualism

Is it just like how someone would rather go and relax on a beach then calculate complex math equations?

Or Maybe Not, But Explain Your Position!

(that's the point I'm illustrating, btw)

Og-or OA-I, I guess

Antipasto Spread

ingredients for 7 servings :

2 x 4 oz cans mushroom stems and pieces, drained and finely chopped
1 14 oz can artichoke hearts, drained and finely chopped
1 10 oz jar pimiento stuffed olives, drained and finely chopped
1 6 oz can ripe olives, drained and finely chopped
1/4 c Chopped green pepper
1/2 c Chopped celery
3/4 c Vinegar
3/4 c Olive oil
1/4 c Instant minced onion
2 1/2 ts Italian seasoning
1 ts Onion salt
1 ts Salt
1 ts Seasoned salt
1 ts Garlic salt
1 ts Sugar
1 ts Cracked black pepper

preparation:
Combine first 6 ingredients, mixing well; set aside. Combine remaining ingredients in a saucepan;
bring to a boil. Pour dressing over vegetables; place in a large jar with a tight fitting lid. Shake jar to
stir ingredients; refrigerate overnight. Serve spread with assorted crackers.

I don't think Bush is hiding anything like that.

What's sad is that people who think that obviously didn't get the opportunity to meet too many smirky stupid frat boys, because I think GWB is actually a cliche.

xpost otm

Yes, he did receive a Rhodes scholarship. But privately, and well into his political life, he was quite fond of William Faulkner's Southern writings. I think he and Havel bro'd out on the whole literature thing.

Clinton drank beer modestly, but does Bush drink at all? Or is he too good for beer, that no-good...

andy have you been to the south? EVERYONE down here is quite fond of william faulkner's southern writings (which leaves out what? that stupid ww1 fable? yeah, bill's right - fuck that shit). don't make you intellectual anymore than being southern and loving gone with the wind makes you a film buff.

So being actually privileged and choosing to act like a dumbass is preferable to accepting your good fortune and making good use of it?

George W. Bush = (acts like a) dumbass.

Most people/Americans don't want to feel like they're being talked down to, regardless of class status (on either end). The feeling is that a rich, connected guy with an Ivy League edumacashun is more likely to patronize you.

Bush covered for his Ivy League education with the aw shucks demeanor and people bought into it. (This comes at the expense of some derision which serves only to reinforce Bush's act.)

Look at that compared to Hillary Clinton and Gore. Both of these are hated hated hated by a lot of people in a completely irrational way. Both come from an upper-middle/upper class background and have Ivy educations, just like Bush.

Gore tried to put on a man of the people act, but many still felt like he was the ivory tower egghead treating them like children. That's why his goofs ("invented the Internet" - no, he didn't say that, etc. etc. etc.) got so much more milage than Bush's. It's okay when the frat boy makes a mistake, no one's expecting better. When the smartest kid in class screws up, everyone laughs.

Hillary fares worse, because she's a woman and because she doesn't even try to fake populism.

GWB is worthy of about as much respect for his schtick as a woman who giggles and plays dumb in deference to the male ego is for her schtick. But tactically they both work well for their deployers in the short term gratification sense.

Also when your nearest and dearest confuse a few fifty-cent words for condescension they may be suffering from the anticipation of being somehow left behind if there is a palpable sense of the big-words person trying to better their own situation.

...oh wait

(xpost)

Please.

In the case of politics, 'anti-intellectualism' is feigned by the wealthy and well-connected because they have an insulting view of everyone from the 'lower classes', which to them is like, 90% of the population.

'Anti-intellectualism' (whatever that is) among the working-class (real, or self-styled) means you ostracize anyone who reads a book. This would include many girls and anyone else who does 'sissy stuff' and don't be an immigrant or child of an immigrant - don't have family who talk funny or eat funny food, either. Hell, just act like you imagine the Brawny paper towel man acts and you'll get along FINE, unless you look that way because you're gay. It means that when children get to a certain age, very good students will sabotage their own achievements just to fit in.

It means that being good at sports is the most important thing in the world, and if you suck at them, you will get beaten up. It means that many sensitive, creative people will flee to escape the bullying which means that the bullies can continue to enforce the stereotypes.

Anyone who intends to 'fuck the rich' in this manner ought to realize that their imagined rich-fucking doesn't make a damned bit of difference to whoever 'the rich' are.

Many of 'the rich' are actually not that cultured or whatever it takes to be considered 'intellectual' these days, and even Burger King managers feel entitled to 'talk down' to someone.

x-post: Prude, OTM

strong currents of this in punk sometimes--can relate to whole 'selling out' bullshit mud slinging. drunk punx even; think smash if smash was real. (and there are people like smash, make no mistake.)

analog vs. digital?
it tends towards that same old vs. new argument that everything really boils down to.

heh. see "The Simple Life" for examples of both, oddly enough.

Absolutely, I find myself doing this sometimes even now. But I did go through a huge smartarse-of-the-people stage when I was 14 to save my bacon.

The problem with intellectuals is that they tend to look down on humanity, to see common people as cogs in vast systems that can be perfected by clever people like them.

So they always fall for grand utopian schemes, turning them into apologists for Nazi terror (Heidegger, Ezra Pound) or apologists for Pol Pot's terror (Chomsky) or apologists for Soviet terror (probably 75% of "intellectuals" of the 20th century).

But they hate, hate, HATE boring social systems that offer modest economic growth without utopian fantasies. No apologists for that. They'll stick with their "looks great on paper" theories, thank you very much.

Fuck intellectuals. Their record is clear. They've been wrong about what really matters to normal people. They're a drain on human kind.

My father's a blue-collar guy, but he proudly introduces me as 'his daughter, the intellectual' (even though I dropped out of grad school countless times because I HATED the politics).

Incidentally, the ringleader (and MAJOR bully) behind this 'flunking on purpose' was the daughter of one of the few wealthy & powerful people in town - granddaughter of a restaurateur and daughter of a lawyer : her older brother became mayor and ended up in federal prison for corruption.

Here’s a little experiment you can do at home. Think of all the good things in our society that we can directly trace to the work of 18th century intellectuals, your Voltaires, your Humes, your Jeffersons, Adam Smiths, Hamiltons, Montaignes, etc. We’ve got modern democracy, secularism, free market economics, the concept of civil rights, and so on.

Now think of all the advances in our society that are directly the result of 20th century intellectuals. Think of every positive, concrete “plus” added to the civilization board by Chomsky, Norman Mailer, Arendt, Edmund Wilson, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, Barthes, Foucault, Habermas, Freud, Lacan, Weber, DuBois, Buckley, Nozick, Rosa Luxemburg, Immanuel Wallerstein, Gore Vidal, etc.

Hint: It’s a short fucking list.

All 20th century advances came from the scientists, the engineers, the businessmen, the artists, the statesmen.

All intellectuals have given us is discredited theory over discredited theory, and dumbass defenses of Trotskyism clogging every "New York Review of Books." Thanks.

Scientists, artists and statesmen aren't intellectuals? wtf? (I'm excluding businessmen from the question not because there aren't intellectual businessmen, but because intellectualism isn't as closely tied to business titans as to major achievers in the other three areas.)

I mean, I guess the achievements of 20th century intellectuals could look paltry if you excluded Einstein, Picasso, FDR, etc. etc. from the definition of "intellectual." But then, I'm not sure what definition of intellectual you'd be left with. People with doctorates in English?

As I said, intellectualism as most popularly understood in the US seems to mean anyone who is interested in 'effete' things like, you know, lowering your cholesterol, not going to church, watching PBS, or enjoying any film that's not an action movie.

So much for the lip-service paid to Arendt, then.

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7. Cum On Feel The Noize
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9. My Friend Stan
10. Everyday
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15. We'll Bring The House Dow
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;-)

Yeah, I saw an ABC News report on the start-up liberal talk radio network, and at the end of it the female anchor said something like, "Well, the question is whether liberals are just happy sipping their lattes and reading the newspaper or if they'll actually listen to talk radio." And I thought, first of all, how come you only hear of people "sipping" latte? No one ever gulps it or bolts it or swigs it. And second, where did this liberal/latte thing come from? There are now Starbucks in every Republican suburb in America, and there are a lot of conservatives out there sipping latte grandes (and even saying it "la-TAY gran-DAY" when they order). It's all part of this myth of effete, elite and -- yes -- intellectual "liberals" that the American right has been exploiting so well for the last 20-odd years.

Which, really, is what a lot anti-intellecutalism is about, redefining political stereotypes to uncouple the historical (and economically logical) association between the working class and liberalism.

"¿Quién es más macho, George Bush o John Kerry?"

Because they're hot! FFS.

as if contrasting a list of philosophers from 200 years ago w/ a list of still-living / just died philosophers is meaningful.

in rock reviews, maybe (though my beef is more with excessive use of jargon and relative inaccessibility), and that depends on my mood. When it comes to, you know, shit that matters, I'm definitely not anti-intellectual.

what the fuck is wrong with camus? i can see how you'd argue that sartre was a deluded stalin-apologist jerk (and i'd agree), but CAMUS? he wasn't no ivory tower type, he was a soccer player, for chrissake!

If anti-intellectuals advocated a return to monkey-hood -- de-industrialisation, ecological harmony -- I would be more sympathetic to their cause. Unfortunately what they tend to be advocating is conformity and the very middlest of all the worst human middlenesses.

THEY SAY a painting with eyes that follow you around the room is old hat

THEY SAY we've had enough of Shakespeare, Dickens, Dixon of Dock Green!

and who are these COMMISSARS OF CULTURE?

A PACK OF CHARLIES!

three things made Britain great: a strong navy, the white race, and narrative closure. Don't let's throw them away.

THE SUN SAYS: COME OFF IT!

so intellectuals love more and appreciate beauty more than the rest of us?

(It seems to me that the construction 'either/or' should have only two elements, but perhaps Hofstadter is following Kierkegaard here.)

x-post

I'LL MAKE YOU A BARGAIN TO CUT THROUGH THE JARGON.

Sorry Baz it was just a joke!

The simple qn. here seems to be "Discuss: Anti-Intellectualism". How you do that without talking politics and philosophy (and probably semantics too) is beyond me, maybe I'm dumm.

Unless you're talking about some other thread I haven't read.

(I was wondering if this was a thread I hadn't read either)