“Expert” me no “experts.” Nor no “intellectuals,” neither.
The Return Of The 20th Century Pestilence
The pestilence of the 20th century that killed millions was not the Spanish flu, not communism, not fascism. It was intellectuals. Intellectuals laid the foundation and rationale for communism and fascism, which resulted in millions dead, and science, art, history being stunted.It is no wonder that both George Orwell (“So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot”) and Eric Hoffer (“When you look into the question of what it is about this country that brings out all the malice and hatred of the American intellectual, you discover that what he can’t stomach is the mass of the people”) had an intense hatred for intellectuals.
Before I continue, I must define my terms. Intellectuals are persons who have a mastery of words and are good at only words, or as Thomas Sowell has so deliciously phrased, they are “masters of verbal virtuosity.” Some disciplines’ entire raison d’être is based on this ability; examples are lawyers, journalists, pastors, writers, and several college disciplines.
This is not a modern phenomenon. It has been with us ever since some individuals were gifted with verbal diarrhea. In Ancient Greece, there were intellectuals called sophists, who were so known for this that the word “sophist” has come down to us to mean someone who is glib at advocating an absurd or immoral viewpoint. And in Roman times, Cicero observed that, “There is nothing so absurd that it has not been said by some philosopher.”
When I first went to study at a university, one of the things that I learned to my surprise is that anything can be argued for and justified. Anything! I mean anything!
Well, not necessarily, or not convincingly, anyway. Not for anyone who is truly intellectually-astute, at any rate, as the author seems to be. To wit:
Today’s leftist intellectuals offer arsenic by calling it honey, censorship of free speech by calling it hate speech, dictatorship and fraudulent elections by calling it democracy, racism by calling it inclusiveness and diversity, methods to prevent electoral fraud are called voter suppression.
Like all pathological liars, they know they are most convincing when they act like they really believe it while simultaneously knowing it is bulls**t – and many do, through the process of doublethink. Read and listen to all of the justifications that liberals use for the purpose of censorship.
The interesting thing is that their rationale at first sounds logical. It kind of makes sense. For example, you can see this phenomenon in reading the rationale for all the countless things that liberals now label “racist” (the outdoors, disliking body odor, organized pantries, horse riding, weight reduction, philosophy, preventing cheating, white paint, proper grammar). When you read the arguments, they sound reasonable, they have a certain logic to them. Except that it’s all BS. You may not be able to initially voice why the argument is BS, but you know it’s BS.
The same is true for just about every other liberal obsession. Like euthanasia, or “reparations,” or solutions for climate change. One of those solutions is that because cow flatulence is a greenhouse gas, we should kill the cows (except a handful, reserved for the elite), do away with farms, and have everyone eat crickets and cockroaches.
There is a certain logic there.
Except it’s bulls**t.
Yep, t’is. Which means that, by definition, it ain’t really logic at all. Being intellectually discriminating enough to discern the difference betwixt the geniune article and the steaming, stinking, fly-blown pile has become something of a lost art in these, the latterly days of our managed decline. And that ain’t no kind of accident, neither.
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“When you read the arguments, they sound reasonable, they have a certain logic to them.”
I don’t find this to be true at all. The arguments put forth by the marxist left are pathetic, unreasonable and illogical.
Logical only to idiots who don’t get logic or those who are paid well not to see logic.