January 30, 2023

I Bite My Thumb at Newsweek, and at a Graduate Student at a Texas University

Well, it looks I will get a rant directed at this published before a rant against the The Atlantic. They can take their appeals to end classism, and go frustrate themselves with them

'Classism' in America does not really exist, and is mainly about academic twits being conceited. As in 'argle garble, classism, racism, sexism, LGBT-a-phobia, repent, doooom' being something that only 'twit studies' scholars have much time for.

Credentialsim, yeah, I hate that. But, fancy humanities hand waving does nothing to fix that.

Elitism is a common whipping boy in critical theory. But, when it comes to 'intellectual elitism', it is very real that there are skill thinkers and unskilled thinkers (as well as morally licit thinkers and evil thinkers). The issue is not that there were a bunch of super skilled people looking down on layman, 'intellectual elitism'. It is that they were actually extremely unskilled, in addition to tyrannically assuming powers that everyone understood to be illicit.

In hindsight, public health was one of the fields where the 'experts' had nothing to do with actually solving real problems in order to show the public that they are experts.

Furthermore, there was a massive concentration of power in university aligned persons, a viewpoint that the public exists to serve universities (not the other way around), and a sneering contempt for any harm that universities might do to the business interests of people who have no degrees. ('We' were never 'in it together', because the universities were very careful to spare themselves the costs of shutting down their 'non-essential' business.)

Into that came the problem that the universities have for decades been hiring consensus followers who watch the same shows and read the same papers.

There was no scientific 'consensus' that this was a good idea. There was significant dissent, but everyone in academia with a gram of brains understands very clearly that there are matters that they are not allowed to question or discuss on the record, like the bankruptcy of an awful lot of the humanities.

It could easily be shown that this stuff was unsound or questionable from basic theory, but the people who could do so are also encouraged to spend their efforts on their main category of scholarship, and very much not to rock the boat for fear of a career long blacklist.

One simple illustration of the thinker skill issue is Debbie Birx. Debbie has been bragging, on the record, about some of the choices she made. Among these, was the decision to lie to Trump about the lockdown, and thus to indirectly mislead the American people. This directly resulted in Americans realizing that they were lied to, and thus to non-compliance with policy demands.

Posted by: PatBuckman at 09:32 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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