The Trick of the Communists

[Pedro I Rengel]

To make you think that figuring out the proper theoretical stance is more important than knowing what is actually going on in the world.

For propaganda nerds, the reasoning behind this is to make you doubt your ability to draw conclusions. How can you make a judgment on actual occurring things if you don't have a proper theoretical basis? Surely you don't think your own free thinking judgment will do? Surely?

[Pedro I Rengel]

For geopolitics nerds, the goal is obviously to have as few people as possible actually looking into what is going on in the world. At least not to any significant detail.

"You are not qualified to have an opinion!"

[Serendipper]

To make you think that figuring out the proper theoretical stance is more important than knowing what is actually going on in the world.

That is a reprocessed version of the "smart people are stupid" ethos of the Right.

republicans.jpg (71.12 KiB) Viewed 7678 times

For propaganda nerds, the reasoning behind this is to make you doubt your ability to draw conclusions. How can you make a judgment on actual occurring things if you don't have a proper theoretical basis? Surely you don't think your own free thinking judgment will do? Surely?

Without a theoretical basis for rational thought we're left only with an authoritative basis, which is what the Right wants:

reasoning and confusion.jpg (122.86 KiB) Viewed 7678 times

[Karpel Tunnel]

Serendipper,
I know you've been having interactions with him elsewhere, but at the level of abstraction in the OP, here, you would probably find yourself agreeing in many specific cases. I mean, look at Global Warming. Now you may say that you have theoretical bases to support your minority position, but you would be marginalized precisely in the way he is cataloguing in the OP.

I would have once dismissed the right's position on higher education and its effects in a similar way, but I have since seen how much truth there is in it. A set of specfic worldviews are created in much higher education. Good in many ways, but also loopy in others. I think its more complicated than your response would indicate.

[Silhouette]

To make you think that figuring out the proper theoretical stance is more important than knowing what is actually going on in the world.

For propaganda nerds, the reasoning behind this is to make you doubt your ability to draw conclusions. How can you make a judgment on actual occurring things if you don't have a proper theoretical basis? Surely you don't think your own free thinking judgment will do? Surely?

Yeah figuring out the proper theoretical stance is for chumps and the inventors of unbelievably advanced and complex technologies. Those idiots!

The personal incredulity fallacy is rife amongst the uneducated. They think that just because the methods and abstractions made by the best minds on the cutting edge of human knowledge don't get the application of revolutionary genius 100% right every time, it can't be that it's as far beyond them as it seems and is proclaimed and valued to be. Mimicking traditions that seemed to work well enough in the past, which still get more reliable results in the present, must therefore be superior to trying new provisionally less understood things. The risk of innovation and the unfamiliarity of the complex must be scary!

Of course they both matter, and the mental and emotional state of the less mentally capable matters too. It could be chaotic if too many innovations (always praised by the same people as a strength of Capitalism once they finally work well enough!) were tried at once, before they were sufficiently tested. But only a black and white thinker would then proceed to rule out the value of theory in favour of familiar practice - even worse, under the assumption that the two are diametrically opposed! In practice, theory and practice are combined under the scientific method, which is what all these tricksy intellectual "Communists" are actually using. Obviously there are people who identify with Communists and/or Intellectuals, or who are associated with them by proxy, who are anything but - and these charlatans certainly deserve posts like this. But despite the increased noise that they make, increased further by the sensationalist media, they're really really not representative of this popular point by the uneducated about higher education. I admit that there are non-scientific subjects that have been elevated to the status of "higher education", bringing the whole enterprise down in terms of reputation, but even then I hesitate to bring down all artistic study. For all the whacks, there is genius in art, and while it's a stretch I don't think it's wrong to say that artistic thinking is what inspires actual intellectuals and scientists to explore the theory that has become progress in practice for a long time now.

There's nothing wrong with higher education, except its PR. There may however be a problem with what is being called higher education, and the relative importance it's being given at the expense of the legitimate higher education that is the whole reason we advance as a species (via theory).

[Serendipper]

Serendipper,
I know you've been having interactions with him elsewhere, but at the level of abstraction in the OP, here, you would probably find yourself agreeing in many specific cases. I mean, look at Global Warming. Now you may say that you have theoretical bases to support your minority position, but you would be marginalized precisely in the way he is cataloguing in the OP.

I would have once dismissed the right's position on higher education and its effects in a similar way, but I have since seen how much truth there is in it. A set of specfic worldviews are created in much higher education. Good in many ways, but also loopy in others. I think its more complicated than your response would indicate.

I'm on about the general demonization of intelligentsia for the purpose of arrogantly pedestalizing oneself as somehow intellectually superior; that "common sense" trumps a lifetime of research.

You're picking specific instances where academia is wrong, and sure I agree they are, but I'm not decreeing that educated people are stupid specifically because they're educated and I'm not asserting that I know more than them specifically because I know less. <- That is what I'm trying to showcase here.

On global warming, I'm not appealing to "common sense" and I feel like I've educated myself enough to merit holding an opinion, which is more than most could say. I'm not asserting that I am correct and all the climate scientists are stupid, but I'm saying I have valid objections and questions that need to be answered.

Christopher Hitchens stated that he doesn't know enough to have an opinion on the subject, but then went on to say, however, that we only have one shot at determining the truth and if we do nothing, but later discover our initial assumption was wrong, then we don't get a second chance to repeat the experiment, so prudence lies in assuming it's manmade and acting accordingly. I agree... even though I can't see how it's manmade. Besides, we should pursue alt energy anyway because it's abundant and efficient.

I used to love this song, but now I see with new eyes that it's just more glorification of the uneducated:



Nothing wrong with being a Simple Man, but don't arrogantly proclaim knowledge above and beyond those who are not Simple.



Smart people are not stupid specifically because they are smart.
Stupid people are not smart specifically because they are stupid.

If one wants to characterize hillbillies as genuine, kind, caring people, then fine, but that doesn't earn them the right to proclaim everything common sense.

If they were really genuine, they would say "I don't know anything about the issues, so I'm not voting." That display of humility would be admirable and an attribute of a Simple Man.

But instead they sing:

You know what's wrong with the world today?
People done gone threw their bibles away
We're living by the law of the jungle not the law of the land.

Well the good book says it so I know it's the truth:
An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
You better watch where you're going; remember where you been.
That's the way I see it; I'm a simple man.

Just arrogant chest beating like some backwoods hillbilly could be qualified to diagnose what's wrong with the world. What's wrong with it is people who have never been out of the sticks think they know what's wrong with it.

[Serendipper]

The personal incredulity fallacy is rife amongst the uneducated..

You're slowly teaching me the proper names for these fallacies

The divine fallacy is an informal fallacy that often happens when people say something must be the result of superior, divine, alien or supernatural cause because it is unimaginable for it not to be so. A similar fallacy, known as argument from incredulity, appeal to common sense, or personal incredulity, asserts that because something is so incredible or difficult to imagine, it is wrong. Arguments from incredulity are called non sequiturs. Arguments from incredulity can take the form:

I cannot imagine how P could be true; therefore P must be false.
I cannot imagine how P could be false; therefore P must be true.

Arguments from incredulity happen when people make their inability to comprehend or make sense of a concept in their argument. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_fallacy

If something doesn't make sense, we must ask ourselves "Am I stupid or is he stupid?" Most would never consider the former to be a possibility. That's the problem.

Specious - superficially plausible, but actually wrong. The conservative position is specious.

Low-effort thought promotes political conservatism. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22427384

Together these data suggest that political conservatism may be a process consequence of low-effort thought; when effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases.

Conservative ideas such as elimination of min wage or flat taxation might seem superficially sensible, but are revealed to be detrimental once researched and pondered deeply, which explains the divide between academia and laymen.

[Antithesis]

To make you think that figuring out the proper theoretical stance is more important than knowing what is actually going on in the world.

While representative democracy and unbridled capitalism is sufficiently bad, we're not fortunate enough to have that.

What's actually going on in the world is plutocracy and corporatism, so I guess we should all just be pragmatic realists, and submit to it like men.

Because that is what real men do, they submit to things.

They play it safe, they don't rock the boat, they don't gamble on their ideals.

[Gloominary]

That's a false dichotomy, you can have a 'proper theoretical stance', and still know 'what is actually going on in the world', in fact ideally the two ought to be complimentary.

[Pedro I Rengel]

I ain't simple.

Shit.

If anything, University manages to get the simple to think they are complicated.

"ought "

See where it happens?

That ther. That's the trick of the communists.

Where promethean went crazy and descended into Wittgenstein and deli sandwiches.

No my friend. The world precedes theory by a great many eons.

[Silhouette]

That ther. That's the trick of the communists.

Where promethean went crazy and descended into Wittgenstein and deli sandwiches.

No my friend. The world precedes theory by a great many eons.

The Genetic Fallacy.

Seeming pretty simple to me...

[Pedro I Rengel]

Oh shit!

He used a fancy University word!

The fuck do I do now?

[Serendipper]

Pedro, you're doing a fine job representing your side

[Pedro I Rengel]

Ah, snark!

Blessed be our Universities. For truly do they produce great and superior overlords.

We are not worthy.

[Serendipper]

The first thing authoritarians do is kill the intellectuals. Can't trust em smart fellas. Kill everything you don't understand.

Totalitarian governments manipulate and apply anti-intellectualism to repress political dissent.[2] During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and the following fascist dictatorship (1939–1975) of General Francisco Franco, the reactionary repression of the White Terror (1936–1945) was notably anti-intellectual, with most of the 200,000 civilians killed being the Spanish intelligentsia, the politically active teachers and academics, artists and writers of the deposed Second Spanish Republic (1931–1939).[3] In the communist state of Democratic Kampuchea (1975–1979), the Khmer Rouge régime of Pol Pot condemned all of the non-communist intelligentsia to death in the Killing Fields.

In the first decade after the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks suspected the Tsarist intelligentsia as potentially traitorous of the proletariat, thus, the initial Soviet government comprised men and women without much formal education. Moreover, the deposed propertied classes were termed Lishentsy ("the disenfranchised"), whose children were excluded from education; eventually, some 200 Tsarist intellectuals such as writers, philosophers, scientists, and engineers were deported to Germany on Philosophers' ships in 1922; others were deported to Latvia and to Turkey in 1923.

During the revolutionary period, the pragmatic Bolsheviks employed "bourgeois experts" to manage the economy, industry, and agriculture, and so learn from them. After the Russian Civil War (1917–22), to achieve socialism, the USSR (1922–91) emphasised literacy and education in service to modernising the country via an educated working class intelligentsia, rather than an Ivory Tower intelligentsia. During the 1930s and the 1950s, Joseph Stalin replaced Lenin's intelligentsia with a "communist" intelligentsia, loyal to him and with a specifically Soviet world view, thereby producing the pseudoscientific theories of Lysenkoism and Japhetic theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism

Keep up the good work Pedro! You are the Democrat's MVP!

[Pedro I Rengel]

In honor of Breitbart, here goes this:

The idea you have of universities, where they combine all the elitest knowledge available to the intellectuals of society and educate the leaders of society, is one that was sort of born, or at least consolidated, somewhere in the 50's. Then it was still true that University was just a mostly neutral house of arguably the most useful and most elevated societal arts.. But soon after the communists noted that they could easily, or at least without too much trouboe if they invested the necessary decades and propaganda effort, overtake such a non-militant institution and make it a center of power for a politics that has no institutions in the west beside it and the FARC or something. Since then, quality has heavily been sacrificed in favour of political training.

It's not so much that the Russians infiltrated, but that communism isn't a Russian invention, and the communist modus operandi is and always has been to infiltrate, overtake and revolutionaize, as well as to prioritize the attainment of power (fullfillment of revolution) over all other things. Like, I'm sure the Soviets where more than happy to help whenever they could, but that's a bit of a straw man ther.

Thank you Brietbart! You beautiful bastard of a genious! We miss you.

[Serendipper]

In honor of Breitbart, here goes this:

The idea you have of universities, where they combine all the elitest knowledge available to the intellectuals of society and educate the leaders of society, is one that was sort of born, or at least consolidated, somewhere in the 50's. Then it was still true that University was just a mostly neutral house of arguably the most useful and most elevated societal arts.. But soon after the communists noted that they could easily, or at least without too much trouboe if they invested the necessary decades and propaganda effort, overtake such a non-militant institution and make it a center of power for a politics that has no institutions in the west beside it and the FARC or something. Since then, quality has heavily been sacrificed in favour of political training.

It's not so much that the Russians infiltrated, but that communism isn't a Russian invention, and the communist modus operandi is and always has been to infiltrate, overtake and revolutionaize, as well as to prioritize the attainment of power (fullfillment of revolution) over all other things. Like, I'm sure the Soviets where more than happy to help whenever they could, but that's a bit of a straw man ther.

Thank you Brietbart! You beautiful bastard of a genious! We miss you.

That dispatch of nonsense is an honor to no one. You have swallowed the propaganda and you are empowering the very elites you say you're against.

Knowledge isn't exclusive to intellectuals ya know. You can crack a book sometime. Read something besides propaganda. Read some real research and learn something instead of the brainwashing. Or go on youtube and watch science videos. Do something besides patting yourself on the back for being uneducated.

And learn how to spell "genius" if you intend to ridicule them.

No, wait, nevermind, disregard all that. You're my MVP