The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.
Updated December 18:
In the comments section, Uncle Milton disagrees with me when I say that the Republican Party has been cultivating anti-intellectualism for a long time now. He goes on to list a number of bright Republican politicians, but concedes Gerald Ford was a dunce.
They truth is this. The Republicans have been cultivating anti-intellectualism and just being shit-ignorant in general for a long time now.
In part this has roots in pro-business culture. For a long time in the US, the business and money crowd was aggressively anti-education and anti-intellectual.
I've worked around rich people a lot so I know it still exists. For many years as I was growing up, I could not count the businessmen who delighted in telling me that they either hadn't spent a day in college or didn't have a degree. The idea was that you didn't need a degree to make money, and college just got in the way of making a buck.
One great thing about MBA-addiction is that we seem to have done away with that silliness once and for all. Now, for an entry-level position at many corporations and other institutions, a BA or BS from an accredited university is required. Increasingly, a degree is indeed required in order to make decent money.
I've also spent a lot of my life around some real intellectuals, including the poetry crowd, the artist and art crowd, the writer crowd and the Hollywood crowd. A lot collected books and art, listened to opera, went to art movies, the theater, seminars and dance performances, and could bend your ear about all sorts of highbrow stuff. As a general rule, while these folks were not poor, they were not rich by any stretch.
The truth is that the Republican Party cultivates nothing less than hatred for educated people, intellectualism, knowledge, culture and brains. They hate college professors, they hate intellectuals, they hate Hollywood.
Of course many Republican politicians, thinkers, authors and voters are very smart. Sure they have advanced degrees, law degrees and medical degrees. Sure they write books and whatnot.
But the message and tone of the party is deep contempt and hatred for education, college degrees, advanced degrees, intellectuals, eggheads, all of that.
Ronald Reagan was a fucking dumbass and a hardcore anti-intellectual. He was not smart enough to be either governor or President. I don't care what his IQ was.
A friend of my father's met him once at a party in Los Angeles when Reagan was head of the Screen Actors Guild, and said he was really friendly but not that smart. A friend of my grandmother's dated him in Iowa and said the exact same thing about him. That's what everyone said about him. She dumped him because he was too dumb for her.
It was under Reagan that anti-intellectualism was cultivated to an extreme degree. With every stupid, idiotic, dumb-fuck thing this moron said, the Republicans just cheered more and more. It was like the more stupid shit he said, the more delirious they were. They weren't ashamed at all. They were rolling in the mud.
They were finally sticking it to the ivory tower eggheads, the weenie desegregationist judges, Agnew's "nattering nabobs of negativism" (a clever dig at academia) and Wallace's "pointy-headed liberals who can't even park their bicycles straight" (same thing). It was like a revenge party of stupid, and it carried on for most of a decade.
Gerald Ford is a very intelligent man with a very high IQ.
Richard Nixon was a very smart guy.
George Bush Sr. is not only extremely smart, but he is also a real intellectual.
George W. Bush is intelligent. I read a 5-6 page interview with him in a major news magazine once and I came away thinking, "All this time I thought this guy was dumb, but he's actually a bright fellow." But he is not a deep thinker, nor is he intellectual at all, and furthermore, he is unbelievably shit-ignorant.
He continues the aggressive cultivation of ignorance started with Reagan.
Sarah Palin, an intelligent woman who is also appallingly ignorant for the job she is running for, continues in Reagan's footsteps.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Showing posts with label Sociology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sociology. Show all posts
Friday, October 24, 2008
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Hispanics and Alzheimers
The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.
Updated October 24:
Interesting article shows that, tragically enough, Hispanics seem to be developing Alzheimer's at an earlier age than Whites.
Suggested factors were stress and low educational attainment. The low educational achievement is quite clear, since US Hispanic culture, while not made up of morons, places nearly zero value whatsoever on education.
I don't buy the stress thing though. I live in a mostly-Hispanic city, and these people do not worry about much of anything at all. They are some of the least neurotic people I have ever met. The whole philosophy is, "So what, take it easy, be apathetic, don’t worry about it, don’t think about it, take it one day at a time."
Hispanics seem to live very much in the present moment. Most of the time, they seem to be thinking about their immediate environment and reacting to it. I’m not sure that they think that much beyond the present moment and what’s directly in front of them.
There are advantages to that, but it doesn’t create a forward looking society.
I don’t buy that Hispanics experience massive levels of stress. They seem to be pretty stress-free, happy go lucky, people from what I can tell.
The stress that does exist is in the form of acting out. Couples fight it out like wildcats and stress and distress over this. People go to jail a lot, and there are lots of health problems. Unplanned pregnancies are typical, and I am starting to wonder if any Hispanics ever have a planned pregnancy.
Once you get to know them, the happy go lucky Hispanic will sometimes complain of depression. Ask him what should happen in his life to relieve his depression, and he is likely to say nothing. There is no hope. Misery will always be his secret company. Other Hispanics, like young gangbangers, sometimes say that they don't care if they live or die. Sounds like a depressed person of some type to me.
Hispanic females can be very quiet, such that they seem nearly schizoid, except that the emotional life is full, but the introversion is such that it cannot be easily glimpsed. It's a very shy woman of few words and deep emotions. Obviously a personality type that could be prone to depression. The extent of depression in Hispanic females is not well-known. The culture is people-rich and there is probably a lot of somaticizing.
There may be masked male depression, probably appearing most of the time as depression or drug abuse. Hispanic culture is a culture of action, not delay, introspection and denial of present action.
The true extent of psychopathology in such a culture is not easy to discern, but the absence of observable neurosis and worry is clear. It's not White culture at all; it's something altogether different.
Whenever I look for parallels to Hispanic culture, I keep getting reminded of the psychological type of the American Indians. To understand the Hispanic, first observe the Amerindian of the West and Latin America. There's other stuff going on - machismo from Spain - but that's a good place to start.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Updated October 24:
Interesting article shows that, tragically enough, Hispanics seem to be developing Alzheimer's at an earlier age than Whites.
Suggested factors were stress and low educational attainment. The low educational achievement is quite clear, since US Hispanic culture, while not made up of morons, places nearly zero value whatsoever on education.
I don't buy the stress thing though. I live in a mostly-Hispanic city, and these people do not worry about much of anything at all. They are some of the least neurotic people I have ever met. The whole philosophy is, "So what, take it easy, be apathetic, don’t worry about it, don’t think about it, take it one day at a time."
Hispanics seem to live very much in the present moment. Most of the time, they seem to be thinking about their immediate environment and reacting to it. I’m not sure that they think that much beyond the present moment and what’s directly in front of them.
There are advantages to that, but it doesn’t create a forward looking society.
I don’t buy that Hispanics experience massive levels of stress. They seem to be pretty stress-free, happy go lucky, people from what I can tell.
The stress that does exist is in the form of acting out. Couples fight it out like wildcats and stress and distress over this. People go to jail a lot, and there are lots of health problems. Unplanned pregnancies are typical, and I am starting to wonder if any Hispanics ever have a planned pregnancy.
Once you get to know them, the happy go lucky Hispanic will sometimes complain of depression. Ask him what should happen in his life to relieve his depression, and he is likely to say nothing. There is no hope. Misery will always be his secret company. Other Hispanics, like young gangbangers, sometimes say that they don't care if they live or die. Sounds like a depressed person of some type to me.
Hispanic females can be very quiet, such that they seem nearly schizoid, except that the emotional life is full, but the introversion is such that it cannot be easily glimpsed. It's a very shy woman of few words and deep emotions. Obviously a personality type that could be prone to depression. The extent of depression in Hispanic females is not well-known. The culture is people-rich and there is probably a lot of somaticizing.
There may be masked male depression, probably appearing most of the time as depression or drug abuse. Hispanic culture is a culture of action, not delay, introspection and denial of present action.
The true extent of psychopathology in such a culture is not easy to discern, but the absence of observable neurosis and worry is clear. It's not White culture at all; it's something altogether different.
Whenever I look for parallels to Hispanic culture, I keep getting reminded of the psychological type of the American Indians. To understand the Hispanic, first observe the Amerindian of the West and Latin America. There's other stuff going on - machismo from Spain - but that's a good place to start.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Conservative Math: Liberals = Nigger Lovers = Queers
The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.
Updated October 24:
In the comments section, huy, a Leftish Brit, is stunned by the weirdness and stupidity of American conservatism, and really White American society as a whole:
Interesting stuff. I have noticed that the Democrats = liberals = socialists = Communists = fags thing is worst of all with the White racists, I mean White nationalists, excuse me!
This seems to be a standard line of their discourse. Not only are we queer because we are liberal - Democrat - socialist - Communists, but there is something uniquely faggoty, unmanly and queerish about a White man being a nigger-lover. After all, that is the White racists one and only beef against the Left. We support their racial enemies (anyone not White) and we supposedly oppose White folks.
The image they have constructed is of an ubermasculine White man as super-racist. If you're White and you're not a racist, you're not much of a White man, therefore not much of a man. It's a most interesting construction, and I wish more people wrote about it.
It's a bit beyond me why the pinnacle of masculinity is to be a racist shit, and why the commanding heights of faggotry are reached by loving humanity before one's tribe, but I'm trying to get my mind around it.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Updated October 24:
In the comments section, huy, a Leftish Brit, is stunned by the weirdness and stupidity of American conservatism, and really White American society as a whole:
I'm still amazed by the American right wing.
According to them:
Liberal = sexually liberal = faggot.
Liberal = left wing = socialist = Commie.
Thus Commie = faggot.
Rich Texan Oil tycoons who wear cowboy hats and drive SUV's and only date blond women and drink jack Daniels, or violent redneck skinheads on crystal meth or Harley Davidson gun loving biker gang members are the only real men in America.
The more individualist and selfish you are, the more manly you are.
In Europe, its the homosexual men that are most individualist with their fancy clothes etc.
Interesting stuff. I have noticed that the Democrats = liberals = socialists = Communists = fags thing is worst of all with the White racists, I mean White nationalists, excuse me!
This seems to be a standard line of their discourse. Not only are we queer because we are liberal - Democrat - socialist - Communists, but there is something uniquely faggoty, unmanly and queerish about a White man being a nigger-lover. After all, that is the White racists one and only beef against the Left. We support their racial enemies (anyone not White) and we supposedly oppose White folks.
The image they have constructed is of an ubermasculine White man as super-racist. If you're White and you're not a racist, you're not much of a White man, therefore not much of a man. It's a most interesting construction, and I wish more people wrote about it.
It's a bit beyond me why the pinnacle of masculinity is to be a racist shit, and why the commanding heights of faggotry are reached by loving humanity before one's tribe, but I'm trying to get my mind around it.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
