Posted on 11/13/2008 6:32:23 AM PST by Notary Sojac
There are plenty of people of EVERY persuasion, education level, religion, ideology, etc. who are clueless. The fact that the author singles out one particular group, (with no supporting data, I might add) shows his complete bias, imho. But then, that leads us to another question - who decides what is “clueless”? LOL.
Some of the most complex intellectual writings and ideas throughtout the ages have been the product of Christian theologians.
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I don't think I could agree with you more. The insane swipe he takes at religious people is absurd. My experience is that religious people are often very well read.
As far as our radio talkers are concerned perhaps many of them are not well read but when I listen to Hugh Hewitt and sometimes Michael Medved I am impressed to hear what they have read.
I personally seldom read much more than one or two books a month, I just have too many other responsibilities but when I walk into the homes of my Conservative friends they have their bookshelves running over with the books they have read. When I enter the homes of those I know that are suffering from their maxed out credit cards and whom espouse the liberal mantra I don't find bookshelves at all, in the rare case where there is a bookshelf it is filled with movie DVD’s.
The occupants of this country have no understanding of the founding principles of this country. When I went to school in the 50’s and 60’s the good wisdom of the founding fathers was praised and taught with respect. Today we are barely taught who Thomas Jefferson is except that some people say he impreginated a slave girl, (he didn't).
As I reach my retirement years I shake my head with disgust at the stupidity of our electorate but I don't know what to do about it. If we don't teach wisdom in our schools then our society won't have it.
The religious right at least teaches the wisdom of man through ancient scriptures. Perhaps not all religious people understand the reason for the action of the ancients but follow them based on faith. I find that preferable to those who would do something “new” just to be shedding the past.
I am very sad to see our society disintegrating, it was mostly a good run.
Only to an audience comprised mainly of other lawyers...
Reading assignment 3: Daniel Boorstin, The Image: a Guide to Pseudoevents in America.
My point exactly, and I would only add “and there always have been”. I’m only surprised the author didn’t use the slur “Joe Sixpack” to describe the bulk of the population. I think the article is intended to appeal to the “elite” and to justify the idea that a select group should make decisions for the rest of us. If we on the right buy into this thinking, then we simply make ourselves competitors for the role of telling other people what is best for them (and, frankly, we’ll probably do just as poorly at it as the left does -— witness the current administration). That’s the point Sowell makes in his book “The Vision of the Anointed”.
It goes further than that. Today’s “debates” are nothing more than moderated talking point presentations. The Lincoln-Douglass debates really were debates, using extemporaneous logic and facts to attempt to prove their position. No scripts, no format, and they lasted hours.
Even if you could force the network to allow enough time for a single true debate, no one in the audience would sit through it, or even understand most of it, nor would any modern candidate be capable of executing it.
However, smart people will always continue to have sex with dumb people. The size of a woman's brain is not what catches a man's eye from across the bar. Well actually, maybe her frontal lobes...
Ditto. The guy is a fount of conventional wisdom.
Good heavens! You’re not falling for what Sowell, in “The Vision of the Anointed”, calls “quotient hysteria”. You take a “statistic” (in this case, an absolutely unsubstantiated proportion) and extrapolate it into the future and, voila!, you have yourself a real crisis”. Usually this is applied to things like natural resources (we’ll be out of oil in xx years, out of tin in yy years, etc.) or more recently to climate (the earth will warm up zz degrees in nn years, ice will melt and we’ll all drown), but this guy seems to view humans as just another “resource” to be managed. I’m surprised he doesn’t propose we prevent the emergence of separate “breeding stocks” (!) by forced interbreeding -— but then I suspect he’s not exactly an egalitarian.
Mark Steyn.
I've worked all over my state, traveled to different locations around the country and I see the problems. They are programed to stay in the flock and they see no need to go out in the field to work on anything. The world could be crumbling around them, you could scream it from the tops of the roofs, yet they would look at you like a robot and say something like, "Trust God". No one wants to work in the field or the battle front to make a difference. Sure...they help out others in their own communities, but we are separating ourselves from the places where the cancer is growing.
Yes and the practical solution to this is to get more right thinking teachers in the inner city schools and the Universities. Do you want to volunteer your spouse for duty?
I took my pastors call to work in the field literally...many just brush it off and stay cozy in their blissful world. Work like that is for someone else...not my family./s
Yes..the churches are not doing their jobs. Christians are not doing their jobs. Christ didn't sit on his butt in the burbs and let the outside world come to him.
Those who actually heed the call are ostracized on suspicion of cooperating with the enemy. It's thankless and lonesome and only the extremely mature can handle it. I've actually had a Southern Baptist minister call me out in a service for the crime of "working".
If we don't get our act together soon the goons are going to infiltrate our cozy little world with armies of angry inner city mongrels who don't even know who we are.
However you diss the author, Hannah Arendt was right.
Who's filling their shoes today?? Maybe Thomas Sowell ...
You are absolutely right. In the last 8 years or so, I have purchased two "conservative" books. And while interesting, and certainly agreeable, they were at no where NEAR the level of erudition I had expected. Light weights..
I was expecting a light weight effort as all I had read was his NRO commentary. What a great surprise to find that it was a work of solid scholarship, arguement and great detail.
Gertrude Himmelfarb is also still creating works of real merit. The periodical Modern Age besides being a source of scholarly articles does reviews of most works of conservative worth. Three books on Russell Kirk and his views were reviewed in the last issue.
Freeper LS has a new book out that I have just started about the 48 biggest liberal lies in history commonly being taught or accepted.
They are all good reading - definitely a notch above the Coulter/Malkin/Hannity/Limbaugh class - but still lightweight compared to the names I mentioned up-thread.
“All the traditional tools of democracies, including dispassionate scientific and historical truth, facts, news and rational debate, are useless instruments in a world that lacks the capacity to use them.”
What a crock.
Science has gone off the rails completely. The Scientific Method has gone the way of the dinosaur as scientists make predictions about the future (i.e., global warming) and symbolically burn at the stake anyone who disagrees with them.
Science has become just another exercise in religion.
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