Bill Whittle has a new one up!
Essayist
Bill Whittle has another one up on
his website:
bq.
Chapter Two: It's a trap
So here we are at Point “A,” otherwise known as “the present.” And all of us want to get to Point “B,” a land of freedom and safety and peace, where our children can play out in the flowers with the bunnies and the baby deer.
bq. The arguing starts when we begin to plot a course from Point A to Point B.
bq. It reflects no great credit on us as a species when we come to the sorry realization that most people would rather just sit in the chartroom and argue about the maps than actually navigate to safety. This tendency to believe social theory over practical observation has cost the lives of hundreds and hundreds of millions of people – every one as unique as that wonderful and charming you.
And more:
bq. There was a time when intellectual meant someone who uses reason and intellect. Today, people who call themselves intellectuals are in a form of mental death spiral: they search for, and find, those index cards that support their world view, and clutch little red books like rosaries in the face of all external evidence. They are ruled by appeals to authority. Their self-image and sense of emotional well-being trumps any and all objective evidence to the contrary.
bq. How many students today believe what they believe because they met someone who knew a guy whose girlfriend turned him on to an article by Noam Chomsky? Noam Chomsky predicted, in his even, intellectual, authoritarian, tenured manner, that if the US went to war in Afghanistan after 9/11 the result would be 3 million Afghan casualties. How many of these students who worship St. Noam independently ask themselves why he has, to date, come up 2,999,500 bodies short? Noam is not wrong by a fact of one or two; Noam is not wrong by an order of magnitude. Noam is not wrong by a factor of a hundred to one. Noam is wrong by more than three orders of magnitude. Noam is wrong by a factor of 6,000 to one. Noam says the reef is ten feet off the port bow; when in fact it is more than three miles away. That’s six thousand to one. Noam says the ocean is six thousand feet deep when in fact the keel has been ripped out and is sitting on the sandbar back yonder: that’s a 6,000-to-one error. Extrapolating this accuracy rate, if Noam writes 6,000 pages on the evil of the United States, how many pages of truth might there by in such a twenty-volume set?
And one more:
bq. Intellectualism, as it is practiced today, is a trap.
bq. It is not a palatial hall of great minds looking for answers and then testing them in the real world; it is a basement in your parents house filled with lazy and filthy hippies eating your leftovers and drinking the last of your milk. Intellectualism is certainly not the same as intelligence, and more and more, it is becoming antithetical to intelligence. When well-off people who call themselves intellectuals drive their SUV's to march in support of Marxism, you can see the chasm between intellectualism and intelligence in full flower. When elitists who fancy themselves brighter and more compassionate than the rest of us choose to support the Taliban, with its stoning of women and execution of homosexuals in football stadiums before mandatory audiences, over a representative democracy with unparalleled structural protections of minorities and freedoms of expression, then self-styled intellectuals have abandoned intelligence altogether, as well as morality, reason, compassion and indeed sanity.
Read the entire thing - it's well worth the 10 minutes it will take.
Posted by DaveH at March 31, 2004 12:12 PM