LieStoppers: Get in line

Sunday, February 04, 2007

Get in line

2 comments:

Anonymous said...: I love the Fongster in his bath robe! LOL; 11:22 AM
ptolemy said...: This is an excellent post that I will use for my "Family" class in the university here to illustrate the pitfalls of assuming reality and then arranging facts to fit it, as feminists and academics on the far left are prone to do. I have had students read "Group 88 for Credit" posted on Durham in Wonderland and this will be a fine companion piece, especially as Amanda Marcotte is from here and my son was in her graduating class and knew her well. What I feel is a revealing antidote about her and her cultural snobbishness as reavealed at the local senior prom was previously posted here on the first article about Amanda Marcotte here that came out.

Last night, I asked my son about his impressions of her when he was in high school. He knew her well because he went to a small school and Amanda was the boy freind of his best friend, so he was with both of them often. He recalls she was fairly smart but not nearly as smart as she deigned herself to be. He also noted her disdain for her fellow students whom she felt were neither as smart or knowledgable as she.

My experience in academia is that students who are intelligent but not nearly as smart as they think they are are especially likely to fall prey to extremist ideologicies and subsequently develop a closed mind. They are smart enough to want a general framework for organizing information and a sense of general mastery over the social environment by having an overarching paradigm that explains everything. At the same time, they are not smart enough to see that the real world is far messier than any idealized framework and furthermore feel insecure with any ambiguities as they are not smart enough to handle them. Although such students generally gravitate to the left, some adopt Ayn Randian objectivist ideas and a few become fanatical about religion.

Whatever views such people gravitate to, they are dangerous. They create hells on earth in their rush to create their social utopias.; 11:00 AM

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