Idiot America

http//templeofpolemic.prob/...

Read the entire article, then post.

way too much reading

Make your point.  Why should I have to read a long article in order to be able to respond? 

However, I did read it, if only skimming, and I find it to be the exact type of propaganda that it decries as evil. All this "Bush lied" bullshit...  On the one hand, he's the stupidest guy since Elmer Fudd, on the other hand, he's a liar and a con artist as great as Hitler.  Fucking make up your mind, damn.

I don't like Bush.  I don't support him.  But using idiots in arkansas (I forget exactly which state that museum was in) to define all of america is just stupid.  There are some of us who are sick of what they're doing, and those of us who are sick are not all left-tards.

It's in Texas (God's country).

I read it, but only because I am the choir being preached to by the article.  On the one hand, I can laugh (in the cosmic sense) at the existence of a Creation Museum, but on the other hand, it DOES bother me to distraction that such things are prominent in this country.  While I can tolerate a religion or a nutjob (as we all should, for peace), toleration is not acceptance.  People who accept or defend the class of recent religious American tropes-including the Museum, the ID debate, and the substantial presence of end-times theology in our government, should be made to feel not only intellectually, but also morally, inferior.  Perhaps our national irony is such that we no longer laugh idiots off the public stage-another interesting point of the article.  We keep them around, hence keeping them on television and in print, because the smarter ones among us like to laugh.  But the rest are taking it all at face value.

So we have this Idiot America.  But let's get a few things straight first.  1.  Any group of people so fortunate to have inherited such a vast geography and material wealth, while at the same time being subjected to similar political and social controls, would develop in a similar way.  This is not to excuse America, but to explain the present situation with a view toward overcoming it, which I also think is necessary.  Conservatives, being conservative, usually eschew considerations of great change.

2.  THE BATSHIT RETARDS ARE NOT A STATISTICALLY INSIGNIFICANT MINORITY.  It's not five dudes raping a kid in a bus.  It's a mass of people who can be led-And even if they comprise one or two percent of our number, that's still several million nasty, highly opinionated folks who vote and speak with the Rapture in mind, with the one item they just saw on television on mind, and the Gut on mind, to nick from the article.  In exactly the same way that 'the vast majority' of muslims, catholic priests, and Americans are peaceful and law abiding, the presence of a statistically significant group of very dangerous nuts and lawbreakers is observable in each group, according to remarkably simple patterns of human nature
(priests can't marry, unemployment and national resentment breeds terrorism, fading priority of the temporal world plunges us back into the only real hell).  And something should be done about it.  I'm not talking about the kind, law-abiding man in rural Kansas who hates abortion, goes to church every week, and would even like intelligent design taught.  I'm talking about the loudmouth.  The hypocrite evangelist, the sure politician-this personality type is more prominent than you would care to imagine.

Unlike the more conservative tone of those who would state the previous items and leave them at that, NONE of the above should be taken to validate or rationalize our current epoch-only to explain it.  The point of explaining and understanding how things got the way they did is to begin a positive (i.e. active) project of change.

I would like to explicitly invite a reply to this statement, because /poli/ usually just has people yelling back and forth, forgetting what they were even talking about.  Generally, the statement is a series of agreements with the tone of the article:

1.  Yes, while most people in America would find a Creation Museum laughable, or at least embarrassing, the presence of such a thing in our country, and the fact that its patrons cannot be neatly divorced from Christianity proper as a cult, is disturbing.  Much of the reason why we enjoy the quality of life that we do today is because our forebears had two primary concerns:  the temporal world, and something APPROXIMATING to an intellectual inquiry, whether a craft, or something else. 

2. Yes, science does not command the respect that it did during the cold war.  Moreover, intellectualism has never commanded any special respect in our culture.  Perhaps this is because we've reached a comfort plateau with our hard sciences, or perhaps it is because of another factor.  This is a poor indicator of our culture, and something should be done about it.

3. Yes, cable news is horrible.  Many of us avoid substance.  For one thing, reading a substantial article (it can even be something in Time, or the National Review, or the Nation!) is so haaard!  Journalism, the Debate, and the public sphere should be reconceptualized in post-PC times along these lines:  1. While facts alone do not a story make, they are to be preferred to shouting matches.  2.  Not all opinions are of equal worth.

1> Agree.  Batshit retards are a problem.
2> Intellectualism is someone acting smarter than they really are, critisizing artists and what not, being a general doucher (like you my friend).  Being genuinely smart, and being able to understand scientific and political things, and use that in your life is well respected, at least among my peer group.
3> Cable news (I assume you're talking about fox)is just as good as Time Magazine.  And at least when they present an opinion, they state that it is an opinion, and when there are two sides to an issue, you find out about them. 

Why the hell did you write that?  It seems to me that you could have vastly simplified your opinion and wasted a lot less of my time reading your post.  In fact, I could have read your last three enumerated points and known everything you presented in the first five paragraphs.  God damn, this isn't a college course where every paper has to be five pages long dude.

You have made a false dichotomy between 'intellectualism' and being 'genuinely smart'.  The fact that you're allergic to the word itself goes some distance in proving my claim.

Intellectualism properly understood is not confined to an artfags' debate, or to a bitter, wordy political feud.  It also refers to every researcher and interested citizen that is in a community, plugging away (often in a depoliticized fashion-imagine that!) at their various areas of study-math, science, engineering, art, philosophy.  Most of these people are nice enough, and the reason why we don't hear about them is the same reason we don't hear much news about a group of people quietly doing good work-frankly, it's really boring.  But the WORD 'intellectual' automatically and frequently only conjures up the NEGATIVE associations in American culture, as you've just shown.  Your allergy to reading a long post, as well as your reliance on anecdotal evidence (auto-death), are just gravy at this point.

3> just no.  Cable news means precisely cable news (MSNBC, CNN, beholden to finance and ratings-grabbers), although yes, Fox is the worst among them.

fuck all of you morons

>>7
It's not a false dichotomy; people I know can sit down and have a good discussion about stuff like physics and pholosophy and shit without pulling out all the big words and acting like we're better than others.  Plus, our knowledge is something we use in every day life, things we've remembered because of how they apply... for example, I knew what dissolves rubber cement and why from my chemistry class, freind of mine, she knew how bread and sugar are basically the same thing when you eat them for quick energy, we understand how electricity works because a few of us will repair an odd electrical appliance.  We have the ability to connect one concept to another, and use that to our advantage.

You on the other hand, probably haven't done any of those type of thing.  You're like this group of stupid polo shirt fags at my college; they sit around and talk about intellectual stuff, always attuning their conversation to empower themselves and their own intellectual capabilites.  Yet I beat them in most debates, and without even using many big words.  I'm genuinely smart; I don't feel the need to smear my writing style feces all over the forum landscape.

>3 Everyone is beholden to someone.  Learn to think critically instead; there's always something you can gain from watching any news story, no matter how the spin pisses you off.  And since when is CBS not trying to grab ratings?

Consider this; a fellowship (I forget the name of the oganization) of a few hundread thousand was awarded to a conductor of a symphony recently.  I guess this is all well and good, but seriously, few people enjoy classical music anymore, and most of them are intellectuals.  So why did they give this guy a fellowship?  You can say to preserve culture, I guess, but the real reason is to make them look good, to make them look smart.  All the fellowships are given out on this criteria; few scientists get them, most of them are either social activists or things that are safe (as far as looking smart) for intellectuals to be interested in.