Talk:Anti-intellectualism/Archive1
Actual article[edit]
It would be nice to have an actual article here... I think I might stub it up really badly right now! ħuman
21:24, 1 October 2010 (UTC)
Not really a movement-[edit]
It's hard to call this a movement, in that people don't really self-identify as being "anti-intellectual," and there isn't a core set of beliefs that bring people together under a banner. Not only is it more like an attitude, it's a interesting one for a few reasons. Some folks that I consider anti-intellectual because they don't read what I read might think the same of me because I don't read the Bible. also, there's a class dimension at work here, or at least a question of cultural capital. While it takes as much smarts to fix a transmission as it does to read Foucault, who's more likely to get called an "intellectual"? And not to make this CP-centric, I remember on more than a few occasions TK calling out one of my socks for elitist intellectual pretensions (moi?!?!?)-- this on a blog owned by a Princeton/Harvard grad. P-Foster (talk) 22:26, 20 February 2011 (UTC)
- No, it's definitely not a movement in itself, but it tends to be the glue for a lot of them. Ironically, anti-intellectual movements tend to be populist and "anti-elitist," yet they always produce the most authoritarian, batshit insane leaders (see Hitler, Pol Pot, etc.). I guess once you stop thinking, truth is about whoever yells the loudest.
- Also ironically, the "anti-intellectual card" is a useful one for academic bullshitters. I recall Chomsky being denounced by the post-modernists as "anti-intellectual" whenever he called them on their bullshit.
- Re, the Bible, I don't know if I'd go so far as to say it's anti-intellectual not to read it, but it's definitely a huge cultural literacy fail. If someone said, "I won't read the Bible, it's just a book written by Iron Age morons about their imaginary skydaddy!" that sounds about the same to my ears as "Durr, I won't read that Richard Dawkins stuff, he's a CommuNazi atheist!"Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 23:36, 20 February 2011 (UTC)
biased strawman arguments[edit]
the entire first sentence sums up the entirety of this biased strawman argument. take it from the horses mouth and look at what they actually say http://www.conservapedia.com/Essay:Liberal_Intellectualism
- Liberal ideology, and liberal arguments, have their greatest appeal with intellectual wannabees: people who are long in academic degrees but short in intellectual achievements of their own. Perhaps they genuinely fall for the superficial, fallacious liberal logic, or perhaps they just enjoy the attention and extra income in being pseudo-intellectuals and media-promoted experts.
Sounds to me a lot like hitting all 4 examples given in this article of what isn't anti intellectualism.
The fact that the only concrete examples on this page are "George W. Bush" and "Rick Santorum" as telling as well. Aside from the horrible political angle, there is the issue that no actual quote is held up as an example statement, rather individuals are held up. This is as ridiculous as an article titled "evil" and having its sole concrete example be "Adolf Hitler" (with no explanation of why or how, and note that obvious he was evil, I am criticizing the quality of the hypothetical article). But the heavy political bent of this actually makes it more likely that the examples would be contemporary politicians rather than hitler