Monday, December 28, 2020

Thomas Sowell on intellectuals and crises

Interview, The American Enterprise OnlineAugust 2004
There's something Eric Hoffer said: "Intellectuals cannot operate at room temperature." There always has to be a crisis—some terrible reason why their superior wisdom and virtue must be imposed on the unthinking masses. It doesn't matter what the crisis is. A hundred years ago it was eugenics. At the time of the first Earth Day a generation ago, the big scare was global cooling, a big ice age. They go from one to the other. It meets their psychological needs and gives them a reason for exercising their power. Many intellectuals' preoccupation with the poor is very much the same thing. The thing that gives it all away is that after they say, "We must have this program because the poor can't afford medicine, or can't afford housing," they will splutter if you say, "OK, let's have a means test so it really goes to the poor." If they were really concerned primarily about the poor, they would agree to it. But they are bitterly opposed to that, because the poor are a lever to reach other, political, goals.

Walter Williams figured out some years ago that the amount of money needed to move the poor out of poverty would be trivial compared to the amount of money that's spent on these damn programs that are supposed to help the poor but usually don't. But the poor are being used as human shields in the political battle. You put the poor up in front of you as you march across the battlefield and enemy troops won't fire, so you can expand your power, and raise taxes, and so forth.

Friday, July 17, 2020

Intelligence vs. reversed stupidity

Eliezer Yudkowsky:
Someone* once said, “Not all conservatives are stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.” If you cannot place yourself in a state of mind where this statement, true or false, seems completely irrelevant as a critique of conservatism, you are not ready to think rationally about politics. 
* John Stuart Mill (in a Parliamentary debate with the Conservative MP, John Pakington, May 31, 1866):
What I stated was, that the Conservative party was, by the law of its constitution, necessarily the stupidest party. Now, I do not retract this assertion; but I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally Conservative. I believe that to be so obvious and undeniable a fact that I hardly think any hon. Gentleman will question it.

Tuesday, June 30, 2020

The gullibility of the educated

“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”
C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, ch. 5, section 1 (Miss Hardcastle speaking to Mark Studdock)

Monday, June 08, 2020

C. S. Lewis on the state of colleges

CSL, letter to his father, 3 Nov. 1928, a few years after becoming a tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford:
Two or three of us who are agreed as to what a College ought to be, have been endeavouring to stimulate the undergraduates into forming some sort of literary society. In any other Colleges the idea that undergraduates should require, or endure, stimulus in that direction from the dons, would be laughable. But this is a very curious place. All [Magdalen] College societies whatever were forbidden early in the reign of the late President—an act which was then necessitated by the savagely exclusive clubs of rich dipsomaniacs which really dominated the whole life of the place. […] When I came I found that any Magdalen undergraduate who had interests beyond rowing, drinking, motoring and fornication, sought his friends outside the College, and indeed kept out of the place as much as he could. 
[…] I am quite sure that this College will never be anything more than a country club for the idlest 'bloods' of Eton and Charterhouse as long as undergraduates retain the schoolboy's idea that it would be bad form to discuss among themselves the sort of subjects on which they write essays for their tutors. Ours at present are all absolute babies and terrific men of the world—the two characters I think nearly always go together. Old hearts and young heads, as Henry James says: the cynicism of forty and the mental crudeness and confusion of fourteen. 
Except for classics (and that only at Winchester, and only a few boys even there) I really don't know what gifts the public schools [not the same as USA public schools] bestow on their nurslings, beyond the surface of good manners: unless contempt of the things of the intellect, extravagance, insolence, self-sufficiency, and sexual perversion are to be called gifts.

Tuesday, June 02, 2020

Cloward–Piven strategy

Wikipedia:
The Cloward–Piven strategy is a political strategy outlined in 1966 by American sociologists and political activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven that called for overloading the U.S. public welfare system in order to precipitate a crisis that would lead to a replacement of the welfare system with "a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty." 

Wednesday, March 11, 2020

Chaucer's color vision

Chaucer didn't have words for the colors like orange, but he could see them.

Canterbury Tales

Knight's Tale, 1273-4
The cercles of his eyen in his heed,
They glowéden bitwyxen yelow and reed
Nun's Priest's Tale, 136-7
His colour was bitwixe yelow and reed,
And tipped was his tayl and bothe hise eeris;