My FB friend Caroline put forth her opinion on the Confederate Battle Flag flying over the South Carolina Capital grounds and I posted my response. Now one thing she did post was about someone writing that America was becoming "Anti-Intellectual". Interesting concept so I want to first come up with a definition so we are on the same sheet.
Full Definition of INTELLECTUAL
1 a: of or relating to the intellect or its use
b: developed or chiefly guided by the intellect rather than by emotion or experience : rational
c: requiring use of the intellect
2 a: given to study, reflection, and speculation
b: engaged in activity requiring the creative use of the intellect
Now that we got the definition, let's delve further.
Anti-intellectualism Is Killing America
The tragedy in Charleston last week will no doubt lead to more discussion of several important and recurring issues in American culture—particularly racism and gun violence—but these dialogues are unlikely to bear much fruit until the nation undertakes a serious self-examination. Decrying racism and gun violence is fine, but for too long America’s social dysfunction has continued to intensify as the nation has ignored a key underlying pathology: anti-intellectualism.
From what I've seen over the last few days the only issue that explained how this punk committed mass murder was the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia flying over the grounds of the South Carolina State Capital. You know, the flag that was put there by then then Governor Fritz Hollins, DEMOCRAT-SC. And with a DEMOCRATIC controlled state legislature. Strange, why is this a Republican issue? Just asking. Maybe I'm given to study, reflection, and speculation a bit too much?
America is killing itself through its embrace and exaltation of ignorance, and the evidence is all around us. Dylann Roof, the Charleston shooter who used race as a basis for hate and mass murder, is just the latest horrific example. Many will correctly blame Roof's actions on America's culture of racism and gun violence, but it's time to realize that such phenomena are directly tied to the nation's culture of ignorance.
In a country where a sitting congressman told a crowd that evolution and the Big Bang are “lies straight from the pit of hell,”, where the chairman of a Senate environmental panel brought a snowball into the chamber as evidence that climate change is a hoax, where almost one in three citizens can’t name the vice president , it is beyond dispute that critical thinking has been abandoned as a cultural value. Our failure as a society to connect the dots, to see that such anti-intellectualism comes with a huge price, could eventually be our downfall...
Or a CONGRESSWOMAN actually asked NASA controllers to send the Mars Rover to the landing spot of the Apollo astronauts?
Ok, another definition. What does he mean by "Critical Thinking"? Just want to make sure I've got the definition right. From another online dictionary, here we go again:
critical thinking
1. disciplined thinking that is clear, rational, open-minded, and informed by evidence:
Ok, first to the global cooling, wait, global warming, no, climate change, no man made climate change, oh, yes, latest update, climate disruption.
Maybe the issue is that there has not been any warming in the last 15 years?
In considering the senseless loss of nine lives in Charleston, of course racism jumps out as the main issue. But isn’t ignorance at the root of racism? And it’s true that the bloodshed is a reflection of America's violent, gun-crazed culture, but it is only our aversion to reason as a society that has allowed violence to define the culture. Rational public policy, including policies that allow reasonable restraints on gun access, simply isn't possible without an informed, engaged, and rationally thinking public.
No, this mass murder reflects poorly on this sack of human waste who took a firearm and murdered people. And the straw man argument, "reasonable restraints". Yo Dave, you know what is also restrained by law, murder! Sorry, but this is not showing much intellectualism.
...Some will point out, correctly, that even educated people can still be racists, but this shouldn’t remove the spotlight from anti-intellectualism. Yes, even intelligent and educated individuals, often due to cultural and institutional influences, can sometimes carry racist biases. But critically thinking individuals recognize racism as wrong and undesirable, even if they aren’t yet able to eliminate every morsel of bias from their own psyches or from social institutions. An anti-intellectual society, however, will have large swaths of people who are motivated by fear, susceptible to tribalism and simplistic explanations, incapable of emotional maturity, and prone to violent solutions. Sound familiar?
And even though it may seem counter-intuitive, anti-intellectualism has little to do with intelligence. We know little about the raw intellectual abilities of Dylann Roof, but we do know that he is an ignorant racist who willfully allowed irrational hatred of an entire demographic to dictate his actions. Whatever his IQ, to some extent he is a product of a culture driven by fear and emotion, not rational thinking, and his actions reflect the paranoid mentality of one who fails to grasp basic notions of what it means to be human.
...Corporate influence on climate and environmental policy, meanwhile, is simply more evidence of anti-intellectualism in action, for corporate domination of American society is another result of a public that is not thinking critically. Americans have allowed their democracy to slip away, their culture overtaken by enormous corporations that effectively control both the governmental apparatus and the media, thus shaping life around materialism and consumption.
Indeed, these corporate interests encourage anti-intellectualism, conditioning Americans into conformity and passive acceptance of institutional dominance. They are the ones who stand to gain from the excessive fear and nationalism that result in militaristic foreign policy and absurdly high levels of military spending (link is external). They are the ones who stand to gain from consumers who spend money they don’t have on goods and services they don’t need. They are the ones who want a public that is largely uninformed and distracted, thus allowing government policy to be crafted by corporate lawyers and lobbyists. They are the ones who stand to gain from unregulated securities markets. And they are the ones who stand to gain from a prison-industrial complex that generates the highest rates of incarceration in the developed world.
Americans can and should denounce the racist and gun-crazed culture that shamefully resulted in nine corpses in Charleston this week, but they also need to dig deeper. At the core of all of this dysfunction is an abandonment of reason.
Gee, seems like he's not the least bit intellicularilly curious about differences in opinion on global warming. Well, the "accepted number" is 97% of scientist out there believe, no question, there is global warming and man's use of fossil fuels is causing it. Well, back in January I ran the numbers and it doesn't quite go with reality. A summary:
So next time people ask if you “believe in” global warming, answer yes — and no.
Notwithstanding all those natural climate variations, serious scientists such as Koonin do say this:
Part of the slight warming over the past few hundred years was probably human-caused. We don’t know how much.
It’s not factual that 97 percent of scientists believe that global warming is a crisis. What those 97 percent actually believe is the first point — that some part of that slight warming over the past few hundred years was human-caused.
And to add to that, the "97 percent of scientist", is there a list of these people we can refer to? All the scientist in the world, in the US, only UN countries, what is the population of academics. And are we referring to only academic scientist or also those who work in the private sector. Just asking. I've heard this quoted too many times but no one has an accurate list of these "scientist".
I Googled the question "How many scientist are in the world" and there is no firm number. This is what I found from ResearchGate.net, when another person asked "How many active academics/scientists are there worldwide?":
Andrzej Szymanski · Poznan University of Technology
@ Michael
Indeed, it is an important issue for long-term development planning ResearchGATE , but also in itself - for all of us - very interesting.
I do not think we were able to get to the precise data on the global number of scientists, inter alia, because of the large dispersion - not only in the various scientific institutions and universities, but also in industry. We must also take into account the independent scientists .
I was wondering on the "scale of the problem". On the basis of knowledge on the number of scientists working in about 20 major Polish universities and the Polish Academy of Sciences, I can say that the profile of the ResearchGATE has an average of about 20-25 % of scientists.
It seems to me, that in Polish universities and other scientific institutions ResearchGATE is not as popular as in other countries. So if we assume that the global number of people who have a profile on ResearchGATE medium reaches 35-40 %, it can be assumed, that the "global market" there are about 10-12 million people in the "scientific sector".
Ok, we got a number and I'll admit it's a swag. What the global warming believers will have us think is, using the low number of 10 million, 9.7 million scientists out there believe in global warming. OK, how did they come up with that number? Did they go to 9.7 million people across the planet and ask? Another question for an "objective journalist".The author is a typical libtard idiot. He bemoans American's "Anti-Intellectualism", yet engages quickly by not engaging and debating the Global Warming canard. He may not understand, Global Warming is not "settled science". No one has to change the names of the laws of science (e.g. Newton's First, Second and Third Law) every few months because it's not held up to scrutiny. For some "Global Warming" cannot hold up to any scrutiny, the proponents of this religion always say the disasters are decades off and cannot be stopped except for destroying our economy. But for some reason Dave doesn't find this curious and he doesn't like being questioned. And the ability to question, take questions, at least attempt to answer them, is one of the foundations of intellectualism. Sorry David, you don't hold up to that minimum standard.
Oh, back to my previous comment about ST-V, maybe you should look at this simple piece of curiosity. When Bill Shatner is lightyears ahead of you in intellect, you pretty much suck:
What does God need with a starship
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