amen.
Have a lovely end of the year, LM. Happy Eid al-Fitr as well.
Together we can hope for a better 2008. For without hope, what is there ...
OOPS! There I go agin, thinkin'. Can't have that in Bushland.
Tell me about it. When's the last time you saw an inventor, scholar, engineer or scientist as a hero. Try to find a true "walks the walk" geek hero on TV or in the movies. Subprime hucksters get better press than PhDs in the hard sciences or engineering.
Worse yet Sherri Shepherd in your face every day with her half-cerebrumed idiocy. All flat earths, and nothing's having existed before Christ.
As diligent followers of the one true faith of Haruhiism we all know that nothing existed before Haruhi!
If it weren't for the fact that CSI remains the top-rated show on network tv (baaagh! network tv!), I'd say all is hopeless. That's the only place in popular American culture I can think of where the smart kids are the heroes.
So sad that I have to pin my hopes on a crime procedural, but hey, it's the holidays. I'm practicing hope.
It's been a long time since I read "A Canticle for Liebowitz," but there was one bit that stuck in my head. Please forgive me if I get it wrong:
A scientist was being hanged because the local, Bomb-shocked villagers didn't understand what he was doing. Just before he died he called the villagers "Simpletons."
The villagers embraced it as a badge of honor, and a standard that they all measured themselves by.
Welcome to that village, thankfully sans the atomic saturation bombing.
I can commiserate with the teacher who had all those papers about 9/11--all erroneous.
Among my students, a couple blamed the frequency of divorce on those daggone feminists and 'the no-fault divorce law.' Unfortunately, they fail to give the proper name of the statute, and the state in which it was pioneered. You might have thought that Tricky Dick signed it into law from the way the papers were written. All the women are supposedly making enough money to support themselves and their children without a man. In other words, it's just too easy for women to get a divorce, but they never state why women file for divorce far more often--in his/her view, if at all.
Nothing is said about whether people are actually ready for marriage or for a wedding, and how people view marriage these days in comparison to 30 or even 40 years ago. Or even changing economic considerations. Or even The Pill. There may be more rational causes like these, but the writers seemed to attribute the problem of divorce to one book: Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique.
I feel like all my teaching about questionable websites and faulty reasoning was a waste of time. Why? Some people are just too wedded to am extreme point-of-view, like with guns and abortion, and that the only way to look at a problem is in terms of black and white, when it is really gray.
I see dumb people... they don't know they're dumb... make them go away...
LM, Your work gets better and better. I've developed a pretty finely tuned prejudice meter over the last 50 odd years and the two kinds of people who I really can't be around are bigots and idiots. In fact, idiots have driven me nuts since I was 5. I needed to be older to understand all the forms of prejudice. So, I will readily admit that I have a hard time dealing with the lame of brain and perhaps that makes me a bad person. So be it. And like you, LM, the proud and willfully stupid are the people that really enrage me.
OK, enough for now, I am getting worked up over idiocy as usual.
Hey, RC: I understand.
I'm a bad person with you, so no need to feel alone. Deep breaths ... may the educated and aware be with you.
The truth is incontrovertible; malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.
Sir Winston Churchill.
Gidget Commando:
True, Grissom is my role model and the series really gets good when he's matched up with another smart character such as Lady Heather.
One of the reasons I abandoned Network TV in favor of anime and Dr Who/Torchwood is that they are full of smart (often female) characters who are properly appreciated. Just check out Deathnote for a near Holmes/Moriarty conflict between two genius level main characters who systematically set and evade intricate traps for each other throughout the series. Or consider both the Read Or Die (ROD) OVA and TV series in which all the major characters are either maniacal bibliophiles or literary figures and those bibliophiles are smart sexy heroines (including the meganekko goddess Yomiko Readman).
One of my favorite examples of this is Angelic Layer in which our heroine must think her way out of every fight and the underlying purpose (in the anime) of the game is thoroughly unexpected but eminently reasonable.
An excellent post as always, LM, but 'it's hip to be a dip'? C'mon, everyone knows it's better to
'Dare to be Stupid'... 
On another note, The Wanderer reminds me of an episode of 'The Simpsons' alot like his quote, and rather appropo of the situation at hand: during the start of 'A Star is Burns', it shows examples of how backwards Springfield is, with the scene showing Principal Skinner tied to a stake with a number of other townspeople around him, with lit torches...
Skinner: I'm telling you people, the earth revolves around the sun!
Grandpa Simpson: Burn him! [lights the pyre]
Reporter: What a story! [takes a photo]
Grandpa Simpson: [chasing him] You've stolen my sooouuulll!
... Of course, at the rate things are going, how long is it going to be before we have another Coppernicus moment?
Go take a look at Stieglitz's article in the latest Vanity Fair. Points out exactly how much damage Bush et al have done to this country. Points out exactly how our sneering at science and technology is hurting us.
The Chinese must be laughing their asses off. Not only can they help us spend ourselves into oblivion, we are actively destroying the basis for anything that could get us out of this mess.
I guess the Jesus freaks are simply going to pray to make it all better. As I've mentioned before, the only economy that is in equilibrium with a fundamentalist mindset is subsistence agriculture.
*definitions*
flip flop: changing your views on something based on critical thinking.
flip-flopper: somebody who thinks, e.g. an adult homo sapien
Edited By Siteowner
oh ...
and whatever you do, please please PLEASE see the movie called
Idiocracy
It really should be necessary viewing in schools these days.
Edited By Siteowner
This country has always had a strong streak of anti-intellectualism. Since Reagan, it has been pretty much enshrined into law.
Go gotdamned post. As a lifelong 'intellectual', wimp was the word my fellows used until I got to UCB in '66, I'm pretty familiar with the culture you describe.
It's America as it really is pal.
Those who are smarter than the rest have always been the targets of the smaller minds. Nothing new about that. SF used ta be a real underground phenomona then it surfaced and then it got dumbed down to fantasy. No more 'hard' SF is being written outside of MIlitary SF...whoops, rambling here.
I take your point But nothing's really changed the butthead cheerleaders, of both sexes, are still sought after sex objects and the guy in the corner office is there not because he's smart but because he's a psycho.
Only difference now is that society, thanks to guys like Wozniac who used to build phone switches so my pals the Thai Stick importers could talk to Thailand for free, have created a society so complicated that the buttheads can't run it anymore.
They just fuck everything up. And this isn't going to change any time soon.
So eventually the average citizen is going finally, finally understand that the 'intellectuals' are real necessary to running everything.
At which point things will change.
Of course Global Warming may send us all back to the Stone Age and put the 'cheerleaders' back in charge.
Interesting times indeed.
.
LM- Thank you, brilliantly put together. I wish I could organize my thoughts so eloquently.
Will people (read dumbass redneck conservatives) finally quit voting against themselves and admit the smartest guy in the room is the one we need for President? Nah.
I don't have much faith left in the process.
C.M. Kornbluth foresaw all of this half a century ago in his classic science fiction short story, whose title says it all: "The Marching Morons." Sort of like how bad money is supposed to drive out good money.
LM, your stuff is always wonderful to read. I especially enjoyed this:
"..and the only evolution there has ever been is our developing tough bottoms of our feet from propelling and stopping carved stone vehicles!”
Made me spit my coffee. And laugh.
Also liked the comments:
Shannon Spencer Fox: Another great Simpson's episode involved the discovery of the "Angel" on the construction site of the new mall.
A scene in Moe's bar has the TV on and a reporter covering the story, mentioning the controversy as a science-vs-religion thing.
Moe says in a derisive tone "Science! Pfft. What's Science ever done 'fer us? TV Off!".
Of course the TV shuts itself off.
americangoy, I have seen Idiocracy and highly recommend it. At the rate we're going, people of the future may well be buried in garbage avalanches. At least they've got electrolytes to look forward to!
The way to promotion in the Bush administration was loyalty over competency.
Bremer and Tenent fuck up? Give them medals of freedom. They are made men and no one can touch them.
Scientists at NASA putting out papers that say Global Warming is real, dangerous, and man-made? Send some kid barely out of college who knows nothing about the topic to censor them. His only evaluation point to be considered is loyalty to the Bush vision. As with the US Attorneys. As with every single politically appointed official that has served this menacing moron that is laughed at and despised all around the world.
Alas, the Bush base of idiots will push another rubber-stamped moron out of their primaries but without the perfect fusion of an established name plus religious wackery, plus dress up cowboy. And they will consume one another for lack of it. We aren't in the Bush-Clinton-Bush post-Cold War world anymore. The Washington Consensus is breaking down and outsider candidates(and its really an outsider of an outsider) like Ron Paul is going to have the most money raised of any Republican candidate this quarter.
People fucking hate this President and hate this Congress for giving him what he wants. And that's a good start. Remember, some of these people believed Bush or gave him the benefit of the doubt on issues like WMD's in Iraq and are now feeling the sting of what it is like to be lied to over and over again by a truly callous and ill-intentioned bunch of criminals in the White House. And check the generational gap in these numbers. The kids are all right...they are the most anti-Republican Party generation there is. The only difference between now and many decades ago is the availability of a 24/7 echo chamber for the rightwing radicals. This will likely lead to even more rightwing violence.
Off topic: I own copies of the first two volumes of Haruhi, but I haven't got around to watching them yet. I only know about it from AMVs on YouTube [I'm amrak63 there] and the Wiki article(s).
In the Trek universe, Haruhi could be explained easily: she's a Q but doesn't know it.
Yeah, one of the reasons Dubya "won" was that lots of people, including most of the brain-dead corporate media whores, PREFER being led to ruin by a dipshit to being led to survival by someone with a functioning and educated brain.
And the non-USAmericans of the world laugh until they wet their pants.
Until they remember this nation of moron-worshippers with moronic leaders stocks enough nuclear explosives to destroy civilization, perhaps even the species.
And then they wet their pants again, for a very different reason.
Happy fuckin' holidays, everyone! 
SteveK try big bang thery
SteveK,
Lady Heather. Way cool. Smart, independent woman in fetish gear=ROLE MODEL!
I'm finally going to my first SF convention next month. Realized that while I can get along with pretty much everyone, I prefer freaky smart people. Salud!
Science fiction author C.M. Kornbluth saw all this coming nearly sixty years ago in his brilliant short story, "The Marching Morons." There's a good Wikipedia entry on it.
The morons indeed have now marched in, an army of no-nothing-ess, and their leaders have run our government for nearly eight years. And all is actually quite well, by their lobotomized standard. Why, things are really looking up in Iraq, dontcha know. Duoh! How could I have overlooked our successes there? Da libruhl medya, of course.
And so, with morons, you get morass.
As for suspected felonious acts in the White House, the White House won't comment as long as the White House-run investigation lasts, and its investigation, like the Iraq war, will last forever. They'll surely see to that. It reminds me of the old National Lampoon Radio Dinner skit in which the Watergate burglars are surrounded by the FBI. A bullhorn comes out:
"This is L. Patrick Grey, FBI director. Now, I know I'm in there. If I don't come out with my hands up, I'm coming in after me!"
It's a wonder what miracles a bicameral mind can render when the connective tissue to the prefrontal cortex is severed.
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