What do you think of Sarah Palin? I’m in love. Truly and deeply in love.At the time, I dismissed this as partisanship. I figured a man as brilliant as Murray could only support an intellectual sloth like Palin for political expediency. I've since changed my mind and now understand the criticism Murray offered. Murray's derisive allusion to "pointy-headed intellectuals" refers to the "clever sillies" phenomenon whereby high intelligence individuals reject mass wisdom for their own, often convoluted progressive schemes. They concoct these initiatives simply because they can, offering wildly speculative and usually impractical suppositions for support. In essence, their hubris derives from intellectual aptitude, a dangerous combination when the fate of a nation hangs in the balance.
She attended five colleges in six years. So what?
Why is the McCain clan so eager to advertise its anti-intellectualism? The last thing we need are more pointy-headed intellectuals running the government. Probably the smartest president we’ve had in terms of I.Q. in the last 50 years was Jimmy Carter, and I think he is the worst president of the last 50 years.
Murray clearly favors established wisdom as the best political option (ironic from a self-described libertarian). This established wisdom, forged over the years through actual implementation and a sort of practical survival of the fittest, manifests as conservative ideology. Individuals removed from the Ivory Tower and its potent inculcation methods often reflect said wisdom. Of course, Sarah Palin epitomizes this salt of the earth type person. And Murray correctly notes that basic ideology and pragmatism trump intellectual creativity in enacting political successes.
Yet, why then does this insistence on intelligence persist? Why do so many ignore the venerable William Buckley who said, "I would rather be governed by the first two thousand people in the Boston telephone directory than by the two thousand people on the faculty of Harvard University". Why was Obama lionized as an intellectual superhero here to save us from ourselves? Why are all candidates vetted for their intellectual bona fides, their Princeton undergraduate theses dissected, their Harvard Law degrees held up incessantly?
Unsurprisingly, liberals love this meme because it keeps them in power. First, they simply make the association between intelligence and good governance without any real reasoning behind it. As Murray notes, Jimmy Carter was a nuclear engineer and I'm sure Karl Marx was no dummy either. They merely assert the necessity of intelligence and use that as a means of advancing "suitable" candidates. I'd classify this tactic as a reverse ad hominem. To strengthen the association further and depict conservatives as dumb, liberals hurl insults about conservative intelligence and mock supposed conservative ignorance. So now, the public falsely believes intelligence is a requirement and all conservative are dumb - almost there.
To ensure the cycle repeats, liberals champion the association between intelligence and elite college attendance. Of course, I'll refrain from arguing the correct underlying premise. Instead, I'll note that liberals may not even actually believe that elite college students are smarter (how could any true egalitarian after all), but it serves their purpose to advance the connection. Liberals convince us that Ivy League schools imbue their students with some mystical cognitive aptitudes and the public should trust these individuals accordingly. Now, the avenue to political power passes through an exclusive bottleneck that elites themselves control. And in this insular environment, the elite can indoctrinate a whole new generation, bequeathing all the absurdities of leftism unto these pliable and eager youths.
So on election day, vote for the candidate who will simply put down the right check mark on his votes - not the one who will proffer some unnecessarily complex garbage.
25 comments:
Indeed. I suspect that Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky all had very high IQ's. They all championed the cause of the "Common Man," with whom they had very little actual contact. Instead, they believed in the absurd concept of the "New Socialist Man" - as if their dreamy philosophies could change human nature. The liberal elitists are good at making rules for others, but they don't expect to follow them. Just ask Al Gore.
You need to vote the party (Republican obviously) and not the so-called "best" candidate, an illusion akin to unicorns and virgins. Empirically you know nothing about the candidate except party affiliation.
All talk about qualifications and brains is nonsense. All claims/comments about individual candidates are lies--no exceptions. The only hard truth is party affiliation.
Party affiliation indicates general tendencies and has some predictive value.
That was the dorkiest interview Charles Murray ever gave. And it makes him a hypocrite, since he wrote an entire book about the importance of IQ in everyday life.
Even Karl Rove now says that Palin lacks the "gravitas" to be president.
Minor point, but I do believe I read elsewhere, maybe from a poster on Sailer's blog, that Carter was not a physicist but rather an engineer. Others who seemed to be familiar with Carter's education at the Naval Academy, concurred.
"Now, the avenue to political power passes through an exclusive bottleneck that elites themselves control. And in this insular environment, the elite can indoctrinate a whole new generation, bequeathing all the absurdities of leftism unto these pliable and eager youths."
OneSTDV forgot to mention (although it is certainly implied) the elite feeder schools, such as Choate, Deerfield, Andover, and Exeter. These schools aren't the prep schools that Joe Average's children attend either. Above even these are the English and Swiss boarding schools.
A few of the reasons why the elite love the Ivy League are different from why the general public loves it, and that is because said diplomas act as certificates of "good genes", thus, such a degree is conducive for one's pedigree. Furthermore, apart from the "this will superbly reflect my good genes and family" dimension, attending such elite schools is a social initiation and a proof of one's being an insider. Although even attending the schools themselves aren't good enough, a person needs the right parents and early environment too.
Smart people voting for "morons" to lead them are also committing "clever sillies".
Murray needs to write a new book where he prefers a universe where our Founding Fathers are typical "morons" instead of men of great intellect. They would have won the Revolution in shorter time. Or more preferably still stick with the old British Empire.
When someone else does it, it's "clever sillies", when the right people does it, it's not "clever sillies". Oh how silly.
Murray, on this topic, you're just plain old silly.
When you choose politics more than common sense, you sound like a moron.
Smart people voting for "morons" to lead them are also committing "clever sillies".
Ideally, of course we wouldn't have to, but given the political landscape and the liberal feeder system (prep schools and elite colleges), it's the only choice we have. Though calling these people "morons" is very misleading.
And it makes him a hypocrite, since he wrote an entire book about the importance of IQ in everyday life.
Again, ideally, we would have highly intellectual conservatives. But as you've noted with Ross Douhat and Gaiaism, the religion of the elite is liberalism.
Even Karl Rove now says that Palin lacks the "gravitas" to be president.
She does, but if I had to, I'd still vote for her over Obama in a heartbeat. Wouldn't you?
"She does, but if I had to, I'd still vote for her over Obama in a heartbeat. Wouldn't you?"
Sure. Anybody the Republicans nominate is going to be better than Obama. But we have to be careful. The purpose of the 2006-2008 elections was to kill Bush-McCain Republicanism. This being the Halloween season, we need to certain that it doesn't come back to life. The Republicans are going to do very well tomorrow, capturing one or even both Houses of Congress, not because of the brilliance of their new ideas, but mostly because they are against Obama and the Democrats. The last thing we need is for the GOP'ers to think they have some sort of entitlement. That's what got them into trouble last time, when they thought they could get away with playing Democrat-lite. The Republicans should choose newly elected freshmen to be their leaders in both Houses of Congress. This would symbolize a clean break with their past.
Too bad disparate birth rates and such have already doomed the republican party.
First, Liberals believe in an aristocracy of "true intelligence and salvation." It is debased Calvinism, shorn of the Christianity, where there are pre-ordained saved and damned shown by their beliefs and stations in life.
Second, Liberals want a hereditary aristocracy for them and their allies, hence Teddy Kennedy's seat, Camelot, Obama as the Half Blood Prince, etc. That most Liberals are also women, who LOVE LOVE LOVE stories about princes, princesses, royalty, aristocracy, etc. like Michelle Obama at the Costa Del Sol is of course obvious.
Third, as I've pointed out, Yale/Harvard elites are not the most intelligent. Merely the most credentialed. Technical knowledge is found in non-legacy/AA schools like Caltech, Mudd, Georgia Tech, Carnegie-Mellon, etc. Neither Harvard nor Yale nor Stanford run the Fed's Computer Emergency Response center, that is out of Carnegie Mellon.
Let me add that the Liberal/Media model assumes that "good breeding" produces an aristocracy of merit. Constant inbreeding instead seems to produce Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria, severely retarded, subject to constant seizures, bawling during state dinners "I am the Emperor, and I want Noodles!" Simple regression to the mean implies that say, Chelsea Clinton absent the experiences that shaped her father's political ability, she will have LESS political ability.
I agree that High IQ and the proportion are vitally important. I just don't see very many High IQ (as opposed to credentialed) people inside the Ivies. For example, almost none in the Space program. The Wrights not the professor from Harvard and the Smithsonian put the first airplane into flight. The personal computer was the brainchild of Steve Wozniak, technically, not Bill Gates. Indeed innovation in the Ivies comes down to Gates and Zuckerberg only. Itself first-mover business advantage (itself nothing to sneer at) but nothing like the conceptual genius of one Idaho spud farmer (Philo T. Farnsworth) who created TV (i.e. rows/furrows allow "painting" the tube by alternating lines of pixels).
There is nothing but social attitudes and a certain verbal attitude (reminiscent of the French Aristocracy before 1789) that marks the elites and no real cognitive load. Compare that with the cognitive load of figuring out a way to keep farm machinery going with only a few simple tools and no machine shop.
There are more absolute numbers of smart people in the pool of middle/working class folks, and the highest proportion would seem to be in the rural White population, due to environment shaping the winners (those who can keep machinery going) and losers (those who can't).
How much cognitive load was required for the Bush, Kennedy, Obama, and Boxer families? How much "smartness" did it take for Boxer's son to rake in $8 million from the Indian Tribe Boxer resurrected by Federal Law?
I propose that some Tea Party winner propose that the Congress be in session no more than 3 months of each year. Pass a budget. Reconvene only if a national emergency occurs and they are needed. That's it.
One conservative talking head got it right tonight--a GOP landslide says that people want Congress to stop passing laws. Period.
Rarely is there justification for all the legislation that is passed. Other than restoring the Bush tax cuts and killing Obamacare, I don't want them to DO a damn thing except ---go home!
And Murray correctly notes that basic ideology and pragmatism trump intellectual creativity in enacting political successes.
Bingo. Here's Governor Palin's speech in Hong Kong last year:
On Conservatism:
You can call me a common-sense conservative. My approach to the issues facing my country and the world, issues that we’ll discuss today, are rooted in this common-sense conservatism… Common sense conservatism deals with the reality of the world as it is. Complicated and beautiful, tragic and hopeful, we believe in the rights and the responsibilities and the inherent dignity of the individual.
We don’t believe that human nature is perfectible; we’re suspicious of government efforts to fix problems because often what it’s trying to fix is human nature, and that is impossible. It is what it is. But that doesn’t mean that we’re resigned to, well, any negative destiny. Not at all. I believe in striving for the ideal, but in realistic confines of human nature…
On Liberalism:
The opposite of a common-sense conservative is a liberalism that holds that there is no human problem that government can’t fix if only the right people are put in charge. Unfortunately, history and common sense are not on its side. We don’t trust utopian promises; we deal with human nature as it is.
Seeing reality through the distorted lens of ideology rather than as it is results in the need for overly complex solutions. Look at the Achievement Gap as an example of how two different visions see the issue in two fundamentally different ways. Liberals have been very adept at using intelligence to come up with novel ways to explain the Gap and with novel ways to remedy the Gap. The problem is that all of that intellectual horsepower is sending us down blind alleys and incurring financial and human capital costs that could be avoided. If people can't recognize the reality within which they live and operate on the premise that reality is what they want it to be, then the solutions that they craft, even remarkably brilliant solutions, will never actually address the problems that they are designed to solve because they solutions are crafted to solve problems that have been fundamentally misdiagnosed.
Look at how Palin was one of the first to characterize ObamaCare as invoking Death Panels. Clear as bell. Cost containment will come through rationing. She got the message out and got it out effectively. Sure, she didn't offer an alternative that solved the cost issue and didn't involve rationing, but that's a concern for a future date for the first mission was to stop ObamaCare. There as no lack of opportunity for ambitious conservatives to charge forward and become the face of opposition to ObamaCare but very few, if any, took up the challenge in the early days and got much traction. Only Sarah Dumbledore with her simplistic characterization actually penetrated the public consciousness and she did that with a post on her Facebook page. The reason her message resonated was because it saw the problem with ObamaCare accurately.
That was the dorkiest interview Charles Murray ever gave. And it makes him a hypocrite, since he wrote an entire book about the importance of IQ in everyday life.
Faulty conclusion. IQ is indeed important for succeeding but it's not an essential ingredient for being able to see reality clearly gives us a better chance of crafting solutions which work, are sustainable and which don't misallocate scarce resources. Look at the mortgage mess. Plenty of high IQ individuals succeeded by either believing or operationally believing that loans given to people with bad credit histories could be mathematically massaged away in a housing market that would never dip below a certain threshold. That's a pretty skewed vision of reality, yet it was held by many smart people. Those smart people did very well for themselves playing in a reality-distorted market. Look at the harm that has been caused by allowing smart people to lead society down the wrong path.
Even Karl Rove now says that Palin lacks the "gravitas" to be president.
Appealing to the authority of Karl Rove. Man, your confirmation bias is in overdrive. You'll cling to any flotsam in order to hold onto your beliefs. Rove thought that the future of conservatism laid with building hispanic representation and doing so by engaging in a game of racial spoils with the Democrats. Rove's judgment is not to be trusted. He's more like the mortgage traders - he games a flawed system he helps to perpetuate.
Murray needs to write a new book where he prefers a universe where our Founding Fathers are typical "morons" instead of men of great intellect. They would have won the Revolution in shorter time. Or more preferably still stick with the old British Empire.
Much is dependent on the intellectual substance produced by men of great intellect. Using great intellect in aid of societal progress results in visions and plans that are anchored in reality or anchored in fantasy. When choosing between intellect in the service of fantasy or mediocrity in the service of reality, Murray would likely contend that society is better served by dedicating its scarce resources and it efforts to the mission of the mediocre who have a far better chance of returning something worthwhile to society than the intellectual giants who are off on a quixotic quest. Secondly, if the founders' experiment had the same success that we see with the Left's attack on the Achievement Gap, then we wouldn't be here waxing rhapsodic about the genius of the founders. The founders are held in high esteem because their experiment succeeded and the principal reason that the experiment succeeded is because it was well grounded in an understanding of the human condition rather than because it was spawned by men of great intellect.
@ TangoMan:
Thanks for posting that link to Palin's speech in Hong Kong. Loved it. That has greatly increased my confidence in Palin.
"The reason her message resonated was because it saw the problem with ObamaCare accurately."
The message "be afraid of death panels" resonated because it made people afraid. Obviously not because her nightmare vision was accurate, as demonstrated by the fact that it soon turned out to be a fiction.
"Unfortunately, history and common sense are not on its side. We don’t trust utopian promises; we deal with human nature as it is."
How does this message apply to the wars waged by the Bush administration?
More from her speech in Hong Kong:
On what caused the financial crisis:
While we might be in the wilderness, conservatives need to defend the free market system and explain what really caused last year’s collapse. According to one version of the story, America’s economic woes were caused by a lack of government intervention and regulation and therefore the only way to fix the problem, because, of course, every problem can be fixed by a politician, is for more bureaucracy to impose itself further, deeper, forcing itself deeper into the private sector.
I think that’s simply wrong. We got into this mess because of government interference in the first place. The mortgage crisis that led to the collapse of the financial market, it was rooted in a good-natured, but wrongheaded, desire to increase home ownership among those who couldn’t yet afford to own a home. In so many cases, politicians on the right and the left, they wanted to take credit for an increase in home ownership among those with lower incomes. But the rules of the marketplace are not adaptable to the mere whims of politicians.
…
Lack of government wasn’t the problem. Government policies were the problem. The marketplace didn’t fail. It became exactly as common sense would expect it to. The government ordered the loosening of lending standards. The Federal Reserve kept interest rates low. The government forced lending institutions to give loans to people who, as I say, couldn’t afford them. Speculators spotted new investment vehicles, jumped on board and rating agencies underestimated risks.
Now, please point me to more intelligent politicians who are actively making the points that she raised in her speech.
One of her co-commissioners on the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission noted the following:
"She's pro-development, not pro industry. She'll tell you, 'My boss is the people of Alaska."
"She's smart, a quick study. Her adversaries biggest mistake is underestimating her intelligence, her understanding of issues. And she uses their arrogance against them." - Dan Seamount
In my opinion, what sets a lot of her critics off is her style. Her manner of speaking doesn't appeal to me. I get it. Her accent, her disjoint sentences, her slang. These all speak to lack of intelligence or education.
On the other hand though she has her priorities straight, by my standards. She's demonstrated that she can't be bought. She quit her Commission job and then went on a legal jihad against the corruptocrats in her own party.She fought big oil interests in order to advance the interests of Alaska citizens in regards to demolishing rentseeking arrangements. A true rube wouldn't understand the nature and scope of the corruption that they faced.
The message "be afraid of death panels" resonated because it made people afraid. Obviously not because her nightmare vision was accurate, as demonstrated by the fact that it soon turned out to be a fiction.
The message resonated because it was true. Her Death Panel critics are arguing against the position that there is no administrative body that is an actual death panel. This is like arguing that the critics of the Strategic Defense Initiative were completely fabricating their position because there were no wars amongst the stars, aka Reagan's Star Wars program.
There are administrative bodies authorized under ObamaCare which set heath treatment standards and deal with cost effectiveness decisions. Obama even recess appointed a director for this agency a short while ago. What we're dealing with is a move to a centralized rationing agency. Death Panels has a nifty ring to it which accurately captures the essence of cost effectiveness medical decisions. There are no legitimate grounds for criticizing Palin's effective use of language and her branding, so to speak, of the central feature of ObamaCare.
How does this message apply to the wars waged by the Bush administration?
From Palin's perspective, I don't know. I don't know how much she's been influenced by Neocon philosophy. From my perspective, it condemn's Bush's nation-building experiment.
Some people need to stop looking at the world through Republican-colored glasses. Just because someone is on the right side doesn't mean he or she is smart, or worthy of being president of the United States.
Just because someone is on the right side doesn't mean he or she is smart, or worthy of being president of the United States.
Sure, but just because someone is smart doesn't mean they are worthy of being the president of the United States. Wolfowitz and Perle may be very smart guys, but these are the fellows who confidently predicted the Iraq War would be over in a few weeks and that Iraqi oil would pay for the venture. Their intelligence didn't lead them to a different conclusion than George Bush because their intelligence was directed only toward defending stances they had already adopted.
All things being equal, I would prefer a more intelligent candidate to a less intelligent one. The problem is that things are rarely equal and stances mean more in politics than intelligence. How a person arrived at their position is less important than whether or not it is the correct one.
Who is more intelligent, Sarah Palin or Andrew Cuomo?
Palin believes the following:
Lack of government wasn’t the problem. Government policies were the problem. The marketplace didn’t fail. It became exactly as common sense would expect it to. The government ordered the loosening of lending standards.
Cuomo believes the following:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lr1M1T2Y314
I'll take Palin's leadership anytime over Cuomo's leadership. Hands down.
"Even Karl Rove now says that Palin lacks the "gravitas" to be president."
A Republican elitist joins Democrat elitists in the opinion that a non-elitist candidate hasn't "gravitas." What a telling point!
If there is one thing I know for sure it's that Palin has been gravid, while Rove hasn't.
Given the catastrophe to which the Founding Father's political theory has lead, praising their intellects is counter-productive. They fail by their own standards: the Republic was designed to limit faction and to divide power. Instead one faction, an academic, self-important, corrupt intelligensia, has unified the legislative, judicial, and executive branches and merged them with the educational and media establishment.
The Founding Father's vision was wrong on so many counts.they cannot be numbered. It must be swept aside.
sillie teabaggers.
The horrible unelectable candidates like COD and Paladino that are being forced on conservo leadership are the direct result of Douthat-Salam stratification on cognitive ability.
Didn't you read Grand New Party?
Anti-meritocratic candidates are unelectable in a democratic meritocracy.
I guess you don't actually read Murray either.
The intellectual elites and the cultural elites have left the conservative building. All you have left are business class elites and they are low-influence-- look at Forbes campaign for example.
94% of scientists are not-republican. Anti-intellectualism is unsustainable.
You should pay more atention to electoral demographics. This may be the last win EVAH for an increasingly old white CHRISTIAN GOP.
50 years of race-baiting and IQ-baiting has left the conservative movement the party of old white intransigent racists. It is memetic selection for stupid.
And the demographic timer goes tick.....tick.....tick.
Here's your new motto, guyz an grrls.
Conservatism: where even the smart people are retards.
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