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.
leftists don’t have to think. Just follow.
I read one study that said that the higher your IQ the more self deceptive you are. Explains why you can;t believe Professors!
The left looks to the UK and Europe. What ever they see there they copy or try to copy here.
There is no left intellect beyond modifying what they find abroad to fit here
Yup. They are true NPC’s.
Well how do you expect them to be able to think with their pea-sized brains?
That study was obviously by jealous sour grapes purveyors trying to be relevant
Successful brainwashing.
They really believe that the Obama Administration was virtuous and scandal free.
Interesting. I once saw a show that claims the smarter you are the more easily you are fooled by a magic trick-because you know what should happen. By that measure I must be pretty smart, but I'm no a liberal.
Leftist think and say exactly what they are told to. They have zero critical thinking skills.
This all ties into the mental damage/retardation all leftists have. It’s like a certain part of their brains never developed in the womb or at any point afterward.
The problem with the left is less having to do with intellect and more to do with immorality. If one is continuously taught the wrong things from youth, the brainwash will be nigh indelible.
Really?
So explain the people like me, who have IQs 150+, who like to hang out here and inform ourselves?
Oh come on, they’re just as smart -they just do not try to see all sides of issues any more. Some on the right are equally built of love Bing in their own echo chambers. Critical thinking and integration of information from multiple sources to inform ones world view is a diminishing skill.
See my post #6
Take for example people supporting Socialism. How failed and murderous does a concept have to be before you abandon it?.
Their logic is the same as Jane Fonda’s idea about communism it fails because people fail to embrace it,liberals and slackers have slow and few brain cells.
I think a lot of the problem is environmental/societal.
If you have never heard of it before, check out the Mouse Utopia Experiment. In this experiment, many generations of mice were raised in a habitat that should have been perfect for mice. In the first several generations, the mice thrived and the population grew. But at some point, long before the mice ran out of food or room, the population leveled off and the mice started exhibiting aberrant behavior. Their reproduction rate slowed down, males became obsessed with their appearance, females lost interest in raising their pups. Eventually, the mice barely reproduced and the colony died.
This experiment was repeated several times, with mice and rats, and the outcome was always the same.
I see a lot of parallels between the mouse behavior and human behavior. In my opinion, the mouse habitat can be likened to a city, and liberal behaviors are an outcome of being raised and living in environments where there are too many people for optimal social development.
To the libs thinking or looking for facts is considered a waste of time.
I think I know what you’re saying. I think there is some truth to it.
From my observations very bright people often have vivid imaginations which often breeds high idealism with unrealistic expectations. It also breeds arrogance and a peculiar notion that their perspectives & ideas are unique, possibly unique in the history of the world. If they go into professions like the arts, academia (particularly liberal arts& social sciences), even politics where these notions sre tested against reality - well we see the end result! They also develop a contempt or disdain for the “real world” - reality! It has a tendency to contradict their genuis. (How dare it!) And they don’t need to inform themselves the already know!
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