Our Liberal Intellectuals

[PoliticalChic]

…or, is that an oxymoron?




1.Now, before Democrats/Liberals attempt to bask in the glow of the term ‘intellectual’ remember that the Left turns the meaning of all sorts of terms inside out. Do you really believe that ObamaCare’s ‘Affordable Care’ was actually affordable???

"...the exchanges are on the brink of collapse. Major insurers are quitting, premiums are skyrocketing, enrollment is below expectations, and the administration is taking increasingly desperate measures to paper over the problems. By this time next year, the exchanges could be out of business."
Read more at: More Duct Tape Won’t Save Obamacare’s Collapsing Exchanges





2. How about their use of the term ‘healthy’?

"Cosmo Magazine Runs Series Of Obese Women On February’s ‘This Is Healthy’ Cover
Cosmopolitan is featuring multiple “plus-size,” “fat” women in a magazine issue that commends every body size as “healthy.”

Cosmo Magazine Runs Series Of Obese Women On February’s ‘This Is Healthy’ Cover

Cosmopolitan is featuring multiple “plus-size,” “fat” women in a magazine edition that commends every body size as “healthy.”
dailycaller.com





3. Liberals have given real life meaning to Orwell’s ‘Newspeak’….. ”propagandistic language marked by euphemism, circumlocution, and the inversion of customary meanings” Definition of NEWSPEAK

Now…..to what sort of individuals does the term ‘intellectuals’ apply?



4. Modern intellectuals, Sowell writes, have a “vision of themselves as a self-appointed vanguard, leading towards a better world.” They lack respect for the wisdom inherent in experience and common opinion…. an abstract rationalism that values ideas over the experience of actual human beings.
Intellectuals, he argues, are particularly suspicious of the ties ordinary men and women feel to family, religion, and country. They look down upon “objective reality and objective criteria” in the social sciences, art, music, and philosophy. Their “systems” tend to be self-referential and lack accountability in the external world. See Intellectuals and Society, by Thomas Sowell



Based on this understanding, using the term ‘intellectual’ no longer carries quite the luster. Perhaps it should be applied to Liberals.....who certainly aren't 'liberal.'

 

[candycorn]

…or, is that an oxymoron?




1.Now, before Democrats/Liberals attempt to bask in the glow of the term ‘intellectual’ remember that the Left turns the meaning of all sorts of terms inside out. Do you really believe that ObamaCare’s ‘Affordable Care’ was actually affordable???

"...the exchanges are on the brink of collapse. Major insurers are quitting, premiums are skyrocketing, enrollment is below expectations, and the administration is taking increasingly desperate measures to paper over the problems. By this time next year, the exchanges could be out of business."
Read more at: More Duct Tape Won’t Save Obamacare’s Collapsing Exchanges





2. How about their use of the term ‘healthy’?

"Cosmo Magazine Runs Series Of Obese Women On February’s ‘This Is Healthy’ Cover
Cosmopolitan is featuring multiple “plus-size,” “fat” women in a magazine issue that commends every body size as “healthy.”



View attachment 438122


Cosmo Magazine Runs Series Of Obese Women On February’s ‘This Is Healthy’ Cover

Cosmopolitan is featuring multiple “plus-size,” “fat” women in a magazine edition that commends every body size as “healthy.”
dailycaller.com





3. Liberals have given real life meaning to Orwell’s ‘Newspeak’….. ”propagandistic language marked by euphemism, circumlocution, and the inversion of customary meanings” Definition of NEWSPEAK

Now…..to what sort of individuals does the term ‘intellectuals’ apply?



4. Modern intellectuals, Sowell writes, have a “vision of themselves as a self-appointed vanguard, leading towards a better world.” They lack respect for the wisdom inherent in experience and common opinion…. an abstract rationalism that values ideas over the experience of actual human beings.
Intellectuals, he argues, are particularly suspicious of the ties ordinary men and women feel to family, religion, and country. They look down upon “objective reality and objective criteria” in the social sciences, art, music, and philosophy. Their “systems” tend to be self-referential and lack accountability in the external world. See Intellectuals and Society, by Thomas Sowell



Based on this understanding, using the term ‘intellectual’ no longer carries quite the luster. Perhaps it should be applied to Liberals.....who certainly aren't 'liberal.'

Being an obese woman yourself...you sound bitter.

Do you think all of the conspiracy theories you guys spin here daily are signs of intelligence from the right?

Conservatives make the dumbest liberals look like Rhodes Scholars.

 

[PoliticalChic]

…or, is that an oxymoron?




1.Now, before Democrats/Liberals attempt to bask in the glow of the term ‘intellectual’ remember that the Left turns the meaning of all sorts of terms inside out. Do you really believe that ObamaCare’s ‘Affordable Care’ was actually affordable???

"...the exchanges are on the brink of collapse. Major insurers are quitting, premiums are skyrocketing, enrollment is below expectations, and the administration is taking increasingly desperate measures to paper over the problems. By this time next year, the exchanges could be out of business."
Read more at: More Duct Tape Won’t Save Obamacare’s Collapsing Exchanges





2. How about their use of the term ‘healthy’?

"Cosmo Magazine Runs Series Of Obese Women On February’s ‘This Is Healthy’ Cover
Cosmopolitan is featuring multiple “plus-size,” “fat” women in a magazine issue that commends every body size as “healthy.”



View attachment 438122


Cosmo Magazine Runs Series Of Obese Women On February’s ‘This Is Healthy’ Cover

Cosmopolitan is featuring multiple “plus-size,” “fat” women in a magazine edition that commends every body size as “healthy.”
dailycaller.com





3. Liberals have given real life meaning to Orwell’s ‘Newspeak’….. ”propagandistic language marked by euphemism, circumlocution, and the inversion of customary meanings” Definition of NEWSPEAK

Now…..to what sort of individuals does the term ‘intellectuals’ apply?



4. Modern intellectuals, Sowell writes, have a “vision of themselves as a self-appointed vanguard, leading towards a better world.” They lack respect for the wisdom inherent in experience and common opinion…. an abstract rationalism that values ideas over the experience of actual human beings.
Intellectuals, he argues, are particularly suspicious of the ties ordinary men and women feel to family, religion, and country. They look down upon “objective reality and objective criteria” in the social sciences, art, music, and philosophy. Their “systems” tend to be self-referential and lack accountability in the external world. See Intellectuals and Society, by Thomas Sowell



Based on this understanding, using the term ‘intellectual’ no longer carries quite the luster. Perhaps it should be applied to Liberals.....who certainly aren't 'liberal.'

Being an obese woman yourself...you sound bitter.

Do you think all of the conspiracy theories you guys spin here daily are signs of intelligence from the right?

Conservatives make the dumbest liberals look like Rhodes Scholars.

My picture has always been in the upper left corner.
Your only contribution to any thread has always centered on a lie, such as this one.

"Being an obese woman yourself...."


Which reminds of this:

"The 13th chime of a clock, not only does it make no sense, but it calls into question the validity of the 12 chimes that preceded it."

So, you post to assuage the pain truth causes in your sort.

 

[Tax Man]

Intellectual wrongers is the oxym0r0n. The wrongers have intellectuals so far apart as to have none.

 

[AMart]

Marxists Intellectuals are not liberal.

 

[Moonglow]

…or, is that an oxymoron?




1.Now, before Democrats/Liberals attempt to bask in the glow of the term ‘intellectual’ remember that the Left turns the meaning of all sorts of terms inside out. Do you really believe that ObamaCare’s ‘Affordable Care’ was actually affordable???

"...the exchanges are on the brink of collapse. Major insurers are quitting, premiums are skyrocketing, enrollment is below expectations, and the administration is taking increasingly desperate measures to paper over the problems. By this time next year, the exchanges could be out of business."
Read more at: More Duct Tape Won’t Save Obamacare’s Collapsing Exchanges





2. How about their use of the term ‘healthy’?

"Cosmo Magazine Runs Series Of Obese Women On February’s ‘This Is Healthy’ Cover
Cosmopolitan is featuring multiple “plus-size,” “fat” women in a magazine issue that commends every body size as “healthy.”



View attachment 438122


Cosmo Magazine Runs Series Of Obese Women On February’s ‘This Is Healthy’ Cover

Cosmopolitan is featuring multiple “plus-size,” “fat” women in a magazine edition that commends every body size as “healthy.”
dailycaller.com





3. Liberals have given real life meaning to Orwell’s ‘Newspeak’….. ”propagandistic language marked by euphemism, circumlocution, and the inversion of customary meanings” Definition of NEWSPEAK

Now…..to what sort of individuals does the term ‘intellectuals’ apply?



4. Modern intellectuals, Sowell writes, have a “vision of themselves as a self-appointed vanguard, leading towards a better world.” They lack respect for the wisdom inherent in experience and common opinion…. an abstract rationalism that values ideas over the experience of actual human beings.
Intellectuals, he argues, are particularly suspicious of the ties ordinary men and women feel to family, religion, and country. They look down upon “objective reality and objective criteria” in the social sciences, art, music, and philosophy. Their “systems” tend to be self-referential and lack accountability in the external world. See Intellectuals and Society, by Thomas Sowell



Based on this understanding, using the term ‘intellectual’ no longer carries quite the luster. Perhaps it should be applied to Liberals.....who certainly aren't 'liberal.'

I wish I could bent like that...You never appreciate what you have until it's gone.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Intellectual wrongers is the oxym0r0n. The wrongers have intellectuals so far apart as to have none.

Excellent, Einstein: a Liberal intellectual.

I couldn't have asked for a post better proving the OP.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Marxists Intellectuals are not liberal.

Liberals aren't liberal.


Did you know that Communist John Dewey got the Socialist Party to change its name to Liberal?




Finally, Dewey arguably did more than any other reformer to repackage progressive social theory in a way that obscured just how radically its principles departed from those of the American founding. Like Ely and many of his fellow progressive academics, Dewey initially embraced the term “socialism” to describe his social theory. Only after realizing how damaging the name was to the socialist cause did he, like other progressives, begin to avoid it. In the early 1930s, accordingly, Dewey begged the Socialist party, of which he was a longtime member, to change its name. “The greatest handicap from which special measures favored by the Socialists suffer,” Dewey declared, “is that they are advanced by the Socialist party as Socialism. The prejudice against the name may be a regrettable prejudice but its influence is so powerful that it is much more reasonable to imagine all but the most dogmatic Socialists joining a new party than to imagine any considerable part of the American people going over to them.” Dewey’s influential 1935 tract, Liberalism and Social Action, should be read in the light of this conclusion.

....although limited government may once have been the best means of securing individual liberty, its perpetuation in the changed social and economic circumstances of the 20th century would simply ensure liberty’s denial. If contemporary defenders of limited government only realized this, he concludes, they would drop their commitment to limited government and enthusiastically join their fellow “liberals” in expanding the power of the state. Dewey’s argument has enjoyed a potent legacy in subsequent scholarship, blinding many to what he and his fellow progressives plainly understood: However superficially similar, the founders’ conception of freedom, and the way of living to which it gave rise, differs markedly from the progressive conception of freedom and the more wholly “social” way of living that follows from it.

Dewey’s thought, like that of his fellow progressives generally, was decidedly Hegelian. Even after turning away from Hegelian metaphysics, Dewey retained a significant Hegelian residue.

The Refounding of America | National Review

The “progressive” label is back in vogue; politicians of the Left routinely use it to describe themselves, hoping to avoid the radical connotations associated with being “liberal” in the post-Reaga…

www.nationalreview.com

 

[PoliticalChic]

5. A further distinction should be made between the Democrat/Liberal elites who aspire to the claim of being ‘intellectual,’ and their voters who might like to be known by that title, by extension. Nothing could be further from being intelligent, much less an intellectual, than those followers for whom, if a multisyllabic term is necessary, it would be ‘troglodytes.’



This sort is all over the message board, like barnacles on an ocean liner.

If their ignorance isn’t evidence from the start, ask ‘em to name several of the books that have informed their geopolitical outlook….and watch their lips move as they try to sound out ‘books.’




Better still, ask them to explain or defend the Democrat policies for which they cast their vote:

The Democrat Party is now running on full-blown anti-white racism,
socialism,
infanticide,
opposition to free speech,
substituting illegal alien voters for the American citizenry,
support for rioters, arsonists, murderers, and anarchists,
accepting payment from Communist China for future considerations,
and anti-Semitism… the knuckle-dragging, atavistic pagan party.


'Intellectuals' exposed as 'imbeciles.'

 

[shoshi]

You could say leftist or progressive or liberal. it means the same thing. Calling them communists is exagerating.

 

[PoliticalChic]

You could say leftist or progressive or liberal. it means the same thing. Calling them communists is exagerating.

“Let’s have a new first party. A Republican Party raising a banner of bold colors, no pale pastels. A banner instantly recognizable as standing for certain values which will not be compromised. "
Ronald Reagan


Now....perhaps you can elucidate any differences between leftist or progressive or liberal, versus communist.

The Democrat Party stands for the same things the Communist Party did.



......it is ...extraordinary.....the correspondence between the aims of the communist party and the aims of the Democrats.....

1. Develop the illusion that total disarmament [by] the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.

2. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces.

3. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.

4. . Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.


5. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policy-making positions.

6. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.

7. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.

8. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."

9. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity, which does not need a "religious crutch."

10. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.


11. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."

12. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.

13. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce



Now....wouldn't an honest appraisal agree that all or almost all are clearly the aims and direction of Democrats/Liberals/Progressive leaders?

I got 'em from a website of declared communist goals...

The Communist Takeover Of America - 45 Declared Goals
The Communist Takeover Of America - 45 Declared Goals



You might take a look at this one, too.
10 planks of Communist manifesto
Communist Manifesto 10 Planks

1. Abolition of private property and the application of all rents of land to public purposes.

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.

 

[shoshi]

I know people who lived in Soviet Union. I know about communism from them. No private property it all belonged to the state. State controlled monopolies. If you spoke against the party if you were a disident you would lose your job and unable to find work because the state controlled the economy. No free market. government planning.

that system is a failure. You know what happened to the USSR and to Albania and the rest of the eastern block. Collapse of the central finance system what happens.

 

[PoliticalChic]

I know people who lived in Soviet Union. I know about communism from them. No private property it all belonged to the state. State controlled monopolies. If you spoke against the party if you were a disident you would lose your job and unable to find work because the state controlled the economy. No free market. government planning.

that system is a failure. You know what happened to the USSR and to Albania and the rest of the eastern block. Collapse Lof the central finance system what happens.

The question is whether Liberals can be called communists. You brought it up.

 

[shoshi]

I know people who lived in Soviet Union. I know about communism from them. No private property it all belonged to the state. State controlled monopolies. If you spoke against the party if you were a disident you would lose your job and unable to find work because the state controlled the economy. No free market. government planning.

that system is a failure. You know what happened to the USSR and to Albania and the rest of the eastern block. Collapse Lof the central finance system what happens.

The question is whether Liberals can be called communists. You brought it up.

Do American liberals believe in those things? They want state controlled monopolies and the state to own all land? If so they are fools.

 

[PoliticalChic]

I know people who lived in Soviet Union. I know about communism from them. No private property it all belonged to the state. State controlled monopolies. If you spoke against the party if you were a disident you would lose your job and unable to find work because the state controlled the economy. No free market. government planning.

that system is a failure. You know what happened to the USSR and to Albania and the rest of the eastern block. Collapse Lof the central finance system what happens.

The question is whether Liberals can be called communists. You brought it up.I'l

Do American liberals believe in those things? They want state controlled monopolies and the state to own all land? If so they are fools.

Watch this:


"Obama Set To Propose Taxes On Capital Gains, Inheritance, And Wall Street"
Obama Set To Propose Taxes On Capital Gains, Inheritance, And Wall Street - Shadowproof

And this:

"Government control of private sector activity...is aptly described as Bolshevik- or Marxist, socialist, collectivist, statist, or, for that matter, fascist, too.Indeed, nationalized health care was one of the first programs enacted by the Bolsheviks after they seized power in 1917(Banks, insurance companies and means of communications were also taken over by Soviet authorities immediately."
Dziewanowski, "A History of Soviet Russia," p. 107.


They didn't call it ObamaCare....




....we are now free of that inordinate fear of communism.... Jimmy Carter Jimmy Carter: UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME - Address at Commencement Exercises at the University


President Barack Obama downplayed the differences between capitalism and communism, claiming that they are just “intellectual arguments.” He urged those at a town hall eventin Buenos Aires, Argentina on Wednesday to “just choose from what works.”
Obama Downplays Difference Between Capitalism, Communism [VIDEO]

 

[PoliticalChic]

6. Anointing themselves as ‘the best and the brightest,’ and as ‘intellectuals,’ their argument for said award is that the meaning of life….and that means the political meaning, as that is where their power to dictate comes from…. ‘meaning’ must conform to their opinions and wishes….because, after all….they are the ‘intellectuals.’ A circular argument at best.



Kenneth Minogue, writing of about the consequences of secular faiths, and quoted by Bork, lists three variants in the intellectuals’ quest for meaning. (These developed after religion ceased to provide meaning for the intelligentsia.) The first is the idea of progress, which eventually spawned a Marxist version, and then, when communism’s promises proved disastrous, was incorporated into an alternative endeavor that abandoned the “quick fix of revolution” for a more gradual course of instructing the public in proper opinions.

“…it is the project of an intellectual elite that believes that it enjoys superior enlightenment and that its business is to spread this benefit to those living on the lower slopes of human achievement.

And just as Communism had been a political project passing itself off as the ultimate in scientific understanding, so [this biased intellectualism] burrowed like a parasite into the most powerful institution of the emerging knowledge economy—the universities.”
Kenneth Minogue, “‘Christophobia’ and the West,” The New Criterion 21 (June 2003): 4,9 [Quoted by Bork in “A Country I Do Not Recognize”]

 

[shoshi]

Any politician with any intelligence knows to leave the private sector alone. Like Bibi wealth is created by firms. Thats why he lowered taxes and slashed regulations like a sword as he says.

Under communism you have state controlled monopoly with no competition allowed. There is no market just government planning. that system failed badly.

 

[PoliticalChic]

7. Those of us not claiming the intellectual status, as our brilliant Liberals have, have a very different basis for our views.

"This is the great contribution of our Judeo-Christian foundation to Western civilization. The principles of justice are laid down in the Torah and the Gospels, and implemented through human actions memorialized in judicial codes.
The written laws and rules are codifications of the unwritten ones worked out over millennia as the result of human interactions and experience."
David Mamet

The species is wiser than the individual (Burke).



8. After religion ceased to provide meaning for the intelligentsia, they supplanted the wisdom of the species with their own divine wisdom. They display a “formal adherence to democracy as a rejection of all forms of traditional authority, but with no commitment to taking any serious notice of what the people actually think. [These intellectuals] instruct mortals, they do not obey them…. are highly suspicious of the people: “democracy is the only tolerable mode of social coordination, but until the majority of people have become enlightened, it must be constrained…” (Bork)



But the term ‘democracy’ is put through the same filter as the words ‘affordable,’ and ‘healthy’ are in the OP. It no longer means what you think it to mean: Talmon said it:
The latest variation of totalitarianism is neither religious, nor even political: it is cultural. “Totalitarian democracy” is a term made famous by J. L. Talmon to refer to a system of government in which lawfully elected representatives maintain the integrity of a nation state whose citizens, while granted the right to vote, have little or no participation in the decision-making process of the government.

Cultural totalitarianism is rule by the individual freed from all external authority or constraints, morality fully privatized with Judeo-Christian traditions under attack.
Moral and cultural relativism are predominant; no lifestyle is better than any other.

Paradoxically, relativist doctrine becomes absolutely unassailable: it brooks no challenges or deviations.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Democrats….Communists? Hard to tell the difference.



9. Edmund Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France and Alexis de Tocqueville in The Old Regime and the Revolution, both cast what we call ‘intellectuals’ as what they really are. Burke and Tocqueville both observed a new intellectual type: thinkers inebriated by revolution and the dream of a radically new social order, and dismissive of the inherited wisdom of the past. True, their intentions may be to produce good, but they cast aside any consideration of the possibility of terrible effects on the lives of those forced to live under their pronouncements. (See An Independent Mind)



But we do know….it doesn’t work.

10. This is the appropriate place to consider the multiple examples in recent history where the attempts at Utopia end up as dystopia.

. In September of 1991, the President of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, was asked about the history and future of Communism:

“One of their more dramatic responses came to a question by Los Angeles actor Ben Stein, who asked whether the two leaders believed any country should live under communism.

Yeltsin answered first: "This experiment which was conducted on our soil was a tragedy for our people and it was too bad that it happened on our territory. It would have been better if the experiment had happened in some small country, to make it clear that it was a Utopian idea, although a beautiful idea."

Gorbachev said history has shown that "that model has failed which was brought about in our country. And I believe that this is a lesson not only for our people but for all peoples.” GORBACHEV, YELTSIN SAY COMMUNISM FAILED USSR



The Democrat Party and its intellectuals, encompass all of the views of the Communist Party. A failed system and a failing agenda.

 

[PoliticalChic]

11. Now….what’s the problem with these intellectuals? Their vision for America is not that of our heritage.


“The tendency of elite domination, moreover, is to press America ever more steadily towards the cultural left.
The complaint here is not that old virtues are eroding and new values rising. Morality inevitably evolves….What is objectionable is that, in too many instances, a natural evolution of the moral balance is blocked and a minority morality forced upon us by judicial decrees.”
Robert Bork, “A Country I Do Not Recognize: The Legal Assault on American Values,” xi



a. "We Americans are heading into a 'crisis of foundations' of our own right now. Our judicial elites, with politicians and pundits close behind, are already at work deconstructing our most fundamental institutions — marriage, the family, religion, equality under the law."
Column on the human sciences




12. There are the American people, and then there are the cultural Marxists, the elites, exercising their tyrannical oppression.


“On one side of this “culture war” is the majority of the American people, largely committed to traditional American values, practices, and institutions. On the other side is what might be called the “knowledge” or “verbal” class or “cultural elite,” consisting primarily of academics, most importantly at elite schools, and their progeny in the media, mainline churches, and generally, the verbal or literary occupations—people whose only tools and products are words.

At one time the most educated and successful members of a society could be expected to be its strongest defenders. Today, however, for a variety of reasons, they—particularly academics—often see it as part of their function to maintain an adversary relationship with their society, to challenge its values and assumptions, and to lead it to the acceptance of newer and presumably better values.

The justices of the Supreme Court, usually products of elite schools, especially law schools, are themselves members of this cultural class.”
Professor Lino Graglia https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/uploads/documents/0817946020_1.pdf

The courts and judges are the modern day Simon Legrees, and the American people....slaves.

The species is wiser than the individual (Burke).