Ace at Ace of Spades HQ explains why intelligentsias aren't always very intelligent.
Money quote(s):
"It is truly remarkable how all these maverick minds, these unshackled brains, these members of the Vanguard of Free Thought, nearly always manage to fall into line with what a few of their more mouthy members are saying at any particular moment.
Are we supposed to feel bad that we used lethal force to incapacitate a murderous force for evil? Are we to feel guilt that, having exposed so many of our troops to great risks to preserve innocent, and not-so-innocent life, on this particular mission we told our troops, "Don't worry about bin Ladin's life"?
Are we really supposed to regret this?"
Author Tom Kratman opines that this sort of thing isn't really a conspiracy, but rather a consensus based on a particular, and wide-spread, consensus. (My apologies to The Good Colonel if I've mis-paraphrased him. - CAA)
"This is the primary psychological drive of the bien pensants. If you understand this about them, you understand everything about them.
Everything they say, and everything they do, is calculated towards one specific purpose, one unchanging goal: To differentiate themselves from their "common" fellows, and, by differentiating themselves, in conspicuous demonstrations of anti-common sentiment, declare and affirm themselves to be members of the New Aristocracy." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA)
My experience to date is that doesn't actually require a great deal of higher education to cause one's native rational faculties to be over-ridden by politically correct dogma, although that does trend towards the likelihood of same.
It certainly requires a certain flavor of higher (and not-so-higher) indoctrination to make a bright person this stupid.
"This isn't thinking. This isn't reason. This is simply the automatic, reflexive contradiction of anything a commoner might happen to say. Even if the "commoner" happens to be right.
Because the whole point is to have a different opinion, one the commoners do not share. And the commoners, being, generally, a reasonable and sound-thinking lot, unfortunately have the tendency to think the right things a distressingly large amount of the time.
Forcing the New Aristocrats to often, and more and more, take increasingly unreasonable positions simply to signal their uncommonness.
And hence: Increasing stupidity from the supposedly smart.
As the saying goes: Only an intellectual can believe things this stupid." (Bold type added for emphasis. - CAA)
