Thursday, February 19, 2015

Have I Gone Apolitical?

     I'm a lot less likely to express strong and specific opinions on political matters these days.  It's not due to any change in my core beliefs, that most people are (or at least aim to be) decent and good and aren't made any more so by an ever-increasing burden of law and regulation.

     Nor have I lost the feeling that most new laws -- especially on old topics -- are intended mainly to aggrandize their proposers, enrich some group or class of rent-seekers, or pander to an increasingly dumbed-down base.

     That thought bears expanding: we live in a bumper-sticker kind of world, where Twitter's 140-character limit about matches the typical attention span.  Buckley, Vidal and Mencken* are all dead and buried deep and the latter's "boobocracy" is in the driver's seat, encouraged by as rotten a pack of politicians as we've ever had.  --No worse than the worst, but certainly not a patch on the best.

     The Right have become modern-day Know-Nothings (and even the Left has learned to drop final g's when hectoring the unwashed); the Left encourages a culture of smug superiority, especially among the average (and the Right emulates it with a wink and a chortle), with a resulting downward pressure on the intellect of the body politic: Sure, both sides say, we're Average Folks, but we're way smarter than those crooks and fools who support the other party. Next thing you know, we're all extras in Idiocracy.  (I'm not talking about who does or doesn't have a college degree -- you can walk out with a Ph.D. and still be an ignorant lout about anything outside your specialty.)

    By under-estimating themselves and way underestimating the other guy, by measuring "smart" and "savvy" in terms of buzzwords and unexamined bullshit, The People generally act dumber than they are -- and our "Leaders," who were supposed to be high-minded public servants, have become rulers, laughing behind closed doors at the milling pack of rubes who comprise the electorate. It ain't no way to run a railroad, let alone a nation of people who were supposed to be largely left alone, neither run nor railroaded unless they violated the peace.

     What can I say about all that other than what I just have?  Yeah, if I see a candidate or serving politician I can root for, I'll root for 'em loud and long, and likewise changes in the laws, but more and more I see less and less of either.

     I still pay attention to politics but it's like looking at car wrecks: sure, you do it, and you'd help if you could; but you don't go talking about it much.
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* What do these three men have in common?  Hint, it's not politics, it's not their sex-lives, it's not their religion, it's not even that I think any of them had ideas that everyone ought to rush right out and wave banners for.  But they weren't idiots; they didn't celebrate incompetence.  They weren't spooked by big words or big thoughts or sentences so long MSWord suffers conniptions and wavy underlines.  You'll look in vain for their like today.

8 comments:

Fuzzy Curmudgeon said...

I'd add Heinlein to the list, because these are certainly the Crazy Years.

Robert Fowler said...

"(I'm not talking about who does or doesn't have a college degree -- you can walk out with a Ph.D. and still be an ignorant lout about anything outside your specialty."

Yep, a great education without any common sense won't keep you from being dumber than a brick. My ex called them educated idiots.

Douglas2 said...

All three liked the unfair dig, but all three tremendously liked honing their argument against the opposition as well.
I can't keep track of the times I've contacted someone on MY side and said "I just read your piece, these are the three giant gaping holes in your argument, you probably want to fix that before speaking in public again" and gotten pushback like I was Satan himself.
I've got lots of politics in my facebook feeds, mostly from work-networking contacts. One of the things I've recently noticed is that the guys with advanced technical degrees and patents seem to be the most credulous, sharing clickbait headlines that, if they are not contradicted in the very text of the linked article, are clearly mischaracterizing the govt data or academic study that the article talks about.

Mark Matis said...

Off topic, but perchance one ought to look into something such as these for one's tower monkeys:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/ontq8pf

Of course, it could be quickly brought back on topic by putting most politicians at the top of a tower in a sleeting gale WITHOUT any such device...

Roberta X said...

Mark, the "sky monkeys" are contractors -- they (or their employer) provide their own safety equipment.

We do own a couple of climbing harnesses with approaved fall restraints, but they're for lower work, 50' or less.

markm said...

"you can walk out with a Ph.D. and still be an ignorant lout about anything outside your specialty."

For many majors, it's quite possible to walk out with a PHD and still be an ignorant lout about most things _within_ your specialty.Education majors often can't teach. Social workers were taught by PHD social "scientists" that there is no genetic basis for intelligence and behavior. Lawyers, especially the ones who run for office, either haven't learned anything about the Constitution, or are unaware that it is our respect for the law based in that Constitution that keeps us from shooting them. Journalists...

The Freeholder said...

"...you can walk out with a Ph.D. and still be an ignorant lout about anything outside your specialty."

You haven't by chance ever worked at a university, have you? Because you have surely nailed 80%+ of faculty to the wall.

halojones-fan said...

"One of the things I've recently noticed is that the guys with advanced technical degrees and patents seem to be the most credulous..."

It's cargo-cult intelligence. 'I'm smart, and I've got the degrees to prove it," these people think, "and so if I think something is correct and makes sense, then that must actually be true, because I'm smart."