Bill Whipple with the first two installments of what looks to be another typically trenchant series about the divide between idealists and realists:
Intellectualism, as it is practiced today, is a trap.
It is not a palatial hall of great minds looking for answers and then testing them in the real world; it is a basement in your parents house filled with lazy and filthy hippies eating your leftovers and drinking the last of your milk. Intellectualism is certainly not the same as intelligence, and more and more, it is becoming antithetical to intelligence. When well-off people who call themselves intellectuals drive their SUV’s to march in support of Marxism, you can see the chasm between intellectualism and intelligence in full flower. When elitists who fancy themselves brighter and more compassionate than the rest of us choose to support the Taliban, with its stoning of women and execution of homosexuals in football stadiums before mandatory audiences, over a representative democracy with unparalleled structural protections of minorities and freedoms of expression, then self-styled intellectuals have abandoned intelligence altogether, as well as morality, reason, compassion and indeed sanity.
Likewise, when coffee-house intellectuals dictate their worldview according to non-existent pipelines or supposed theft of oil revenues where no evidence of such theft can be produced but deposits into Iraqi national accounts can, then one has to ask one’s self if this intellectual badge is worth the mud it’s printed on.
Beat Kuntz is a (European, it goes without saying) aquaintance I had a discussion with recently who raised some objections to the official explanation of 9/11 and advanced the no doubt original theory that the evil Amerkkkan president, no doubt spurred on by the Jooooos, was behind the whole thing– on the basis of some ambiguities relating, if I remember correctly, to the car rental records of the alleged terrorists. I was so croggled at this utter disconnect from reality I could only repeat the anti-idiotarian refrain: you need to deal with the world as it is, not as you would like it to be.
Of course you always think of better things to say after the fact. In this case, let’s look at the preponderance of the evidence: one one side two enormous gaping lacunae in the New York skyline, passenger manifests, personal documents, official declarations of Jihad, video tapes, etc., etc.; on the other, a firm desire to believe the worst of the United States.
As Bill Whipple says: get up on deck, take a look around, and smell the ammonium nitrate.