Just Think About It

Opinion Journal ^ | 3/24/2004 | BRENDAN CONWAY

[Utah Girl]

A pair of liberal profs want to pay us to "deliberate." No thanks.

The chairman of Duke's philosophy department recently told a student reporter why the university hires so few conservative professors: It prefers smart ones. "If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire," he said. "Members of academia tend to be a bit smarter than average."

[goldstategop]

Liberal snobs think we're stupid, unenlightened, and uninformed. They want to run things for our benefit, naturally and get all bothered when we resist. How dare the peasants in flyover country resist their betters? After all the best and brightest have all the the answers and those conservative simpletons must be put in their place.

[Qwinn]

They want an "Indoctrination Day", eh? And bribe people with tax dollars to come to it?

Chilling.

Qwinn

[goldstategop]

Its called "public education."

[Utah Girl]

Yep, I think a lot about politics and about how things should work. I don't think those two professors would like my ideas...

[Qwinn]

Heh, good point! You're right, that's exactly what public education is too.

Qwinn

[goldstategop]

And that you're a woman makes them doubly angry. After all, a conservative is supposed to be a lone middle-aged white male with a pickup truck with a Confederate Flag sticker in the back window and a rifle rack behind the front seats.

[cartoonistx]

Kings, tyrants and slavemasters always think they're the smartest people in the room! And who can argue with them?!

[Fenris6]

OMG if I had a dollar for every liberal ivory tower idiot I shut down. They just don't get it.

[earonthief]

I get the impression I should report to the local "Reeducation Facility" and hand over my check book when I get there.

[Fenris6]

"The chairman of Duke's philosophy department recently told a student reporter why the university hires so few conservative professors: It prefers smart ones. "If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire," he said. "Members of academia tend to be a bit smarter than average."

Duke? Chairman of Philosphy Department must be an honorary title - no intelligent person would make such an ignorant statement. My repsect for Duke just nose-dived.

[packing heat]

Why?

I don't believe these idiots are even writing these things. If they are so intelligent, then why are they writing this meaningless drivel?

Of course, if you brain-wash any person who has no grounded political beliefs they'll agree with you. If all you say is what you believe and not give equal consideration to the other side of things i.e. facts, you can manipulate lots of people. I bet they consider this a scientific study. Well, it's not. This is the most biased piece of liberal crap I've come across in a long time.

I guess I'm just too damn ststststupid to hold my own penis when I urinate. Maybe the liberals should come and spend tax dollars to do it for me. Hey, I know, let's tell people they're stupid, we're smart, and then give'em some learnin'.

Ignorance is bliss. If I was ignorant of this ever taking place, my life would have a lot more bliss.

[packing heat]

And that's what I'm all about.

[BfloGuy]

No, really, we should do this.

And we could call the meetings soviets.

Oh, never mind, that's been done already.

[packing heat]

That's why I went to a private school and had lots of conservative teachers who mocked to liberals.

The English department was Democrat and everyone else was raging Republican.

I had a philosophy and logic teacher who would crush these two with his pinky and just laugh in his extremely weird way. This teacher also loathed Hawking. His life-long dream was to get in a debate with a man in a wheelchair who talks with a computer. But, of course, Hawking is an atheist bastard who fails miserably at proving that time is curved instead of pointed. There is no curvature to time. It started from one singular instant in which all matter and energy converged to explode outward and create the space-time continuum as we know it.

[thoughtomator]

Please tell me my tax dollars do not subsidize this

[moonhawk]

Don't hold back...

And welcome to FR.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Collective thought vs individual expression.

***It is possible to be a socialist, and radical in one's agendas, and yet moderate in the means one regards as practical to achieve them. To change the world, it is first necessary to acquire cultural and political power. And these transitional goals may often be accomplished by indirection and deception even more effectively than by frontal assault. Political stratagems that appear moderate and compromised to radical factions of the left may present an even greater threat from the perspective of the other side. In 1917, Lenin's political slogan wasn't "Socialist Dictatorship! Firing Squads and Gulags!" It was "Bread, Land and Peace."……..

……….If others could understand your truth, you would not think of yourself as a "vanguard." You would no longer inhabit the morally charmed world of an elite, whose members alone can see the light and whose mission is to lead the unenlightened towards it. If everybody could see the promised horizon and knew the path to reach it, the future would already have happened and there would be no need for the vanguard of the saints.

That is both the ethical core and psychological heart of what it means to be a part of the left. That is where the gratification comes from. To see yourself as a social redeemer. To feel anointed. In other words: To be progressive is itself the most satisfying narcissism.

That is why it is of little concern to them that their socialist schemes have run aground, burying millions of human beings in their wake. That is why they don't care that their panaceas have caused more human suffering than all the injustices they have ever challenged. That is why they never learn from their "mistakes." That is why the continuance of Them is more important than any truth……….

……For these self-appointed social redeemers, the goal-"social justice"-is not about rectifying particular injustices, which would be practical and modest, and therefore conservative. Their crusade is about rectifying injustice in the very order of things. "Social Justice" for them is about a world reborn, a world in which prejudice and violence are absent, in which everyone is equal and equally advantaged and without fundamentally conflicting desires. It is a world that could only come into being through a re-structuring of human nature and of society itself.

Even though they are too prudent and self-protective to name this future anymore, the post-Communist left still passionately believes it possible. But it is a world that has never existed and never will. Moreover, as the gulags and graveyards of the last century attest, to attempt the impossible is to invite the catastrophic in the world we know.

But the fall of Communism taught the progressives who were its supporters very little. Above all, it failed to teach them the connection between their utopian ideals and the destructive consequences that flowed from them. The fall of Communism has had a cautionary impact only on the overt agendas of the political left. The arrogance that drives them has hardly diminished. The left is like a millenarian sect that erroneously predicted the end of the world, and now must regroup to revitalize its faith.

No matter how opportunistically the left's agendas have been modified, however, no matter how circumspectly its goals have been set, no matter how generous its concessions to political reality, the faithful have not given up their self-justifying belief that they can bring about a social redemption. In other words, a world in which human consciousness is changed, human relations refashioned, social institutions transformed, and in which "social justice" prevails……… Source

[driftless]

Liberals confuse the ability to scribble words, warble a bit less off-key, emote in front of a camera, and daub paint on a sheet of paper a little better than average as proof of great intelligence. However what libs have on the plus side in the arts, they lack in the ability to think clearly on the average. In other words they have less common sense than the average conservative. Coupled with their desire to forgo hard work and deferred gratification in place of immediate gratification with little or no honest effort involved makes many of them appear more like overgrown adolescents than adults.

[91B]

Well, I agree that this proposal is elitist snobbery, but I do favor requiring poll tests for prospective voters. A few very simple questions about the workings of the Constitution (i.e. "which part of the Constitution lists the powers given to Congress") shouldn't be too stiff a requirement for voters to master-notwithstanding the Voting Rights Act of 1965.