Why would that be rejected?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLsCC0LZxkY

The socialist aspect yes, but the legalization no

Fun exchange from the football forum I hang out on that seems apropos:

Of course the socialist part. All libertarians should be for legalized drugs but not all people that think drugs should be legalized are libertarians.

I realize if someone is for legalizing drugs it doesn't make them libertarian. I thought your point was that libertarians weren't pro drug legalization b/c, like we've both acknowledged, the socialist part was obv - it's a ridic contradiction

Your anecdote illustrates the problem we just had with definitions. You run astray when everyone has their own personal one instead of following the dictionary. Your definition of anti intellectual wasn't in any of the web dictionaries I looked at.

Are you kidding? These are some of the greatest intellectuals of all time!

The meaning of what I said was mildly abstract but pretty clear.... I'm sure Tom Collins got it.

You make the term 'intellectual' politicized so it stands to reason that anyone that disagrees is ... anti-intellectual. Regardless of actual definition.

It's that common trait of elitism.


So the point of what you were saying was b/c they used a term incorrectly then, you get to now with no acknowledgment.

I never said I wasn't an elitist...

Not an intellectual =/= anti-intellectual

Is there some kind of confusion about this? Also I'm pretty damned sure "General Tsao" is not an intellectual and also holds many anti-intellectual positions. But you can certainly be a non-intellectual without being anti. I don't know anything about seismology but I'm not a seismology anti-intellectual (meaning: I don't go around disagreeing with seismologists and write about how they actually are just really stupid).

I am no huge fan of Rothbard, but it is ridiculous to say that he was not an intellectual.

As the person who said he wasn't... here is my case

an article he wrote in 1993 said

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard218.html


I can't imagine any intellectuals agreeing with this statement.... but anti-intellectuals would.

What he calls a ridiculous liberal cliche is now excepted by almost all intellectuals, liberals ,conservatives, and even libertarians. He still didn't get it in 1993!

And there is this article

http://mises.org/daily/2401

This is actually even more stupid... but a bit harder to see. It is an entire article about something not being calculable.... but he ignores the entire rigorous mathematical framework of what calculable even means (discovered and solved By Alan Turing) If he had learned this math (that was discovered 50 years before he wrote this nonsense article) he would have seen that what he wrote simply cannot be true.

People here like to say Paul Krugman sucks at economics.... but this is an article so bad that Krugman could never have wrote it. If he did, the entire Princeton math department would have been at his door ( well, at least for most of is career) telling him his article was gibberish. Krugman is an intellectual. Rothbard isn't.

Given that he is a racist and is terrible at math, I feel fine calling him an anti-intellectual. Frankly, he seems like a total idiot to me.

Yeah, this gets back to the original thing. As probably the only person on this forum who has read over 100 pages of Rothbardian pamphlets and 100 pages of actual economic scholarship, I can sort of understand how Tsao and friends would think that Hans Herman Hoppe counts as an intellectual. He writes like, way more words than are in a pvn post. He says he's right. What more could you need?!?!?!

But none of the Mises Institute guys write at the level of actual academic writing. They write at like a 7th grade level, because A) they know their audience and B) they ain't that smart themselves.

Basically, if you define anti-intellectual the way you guys are defining it you need to be like an unusually dull house pet to qualify. The idea that creationists and people who think the educational system is controlled by the Jews"the Fed" can't be properly called anti-intellectual because they are literate is torturing the definition, just because we've already decided that it's a bad thing to be anti-intellectual so nobody wants to own up to the term.

Most people are like this. This type of "believing" isn't any different than a religious nut believing that Noah built an arc with every species on earth inside it. The only difference is you listen to the scientic authorities instead of the religious authorities to explain the magics of the world around you.

Max was Heidegger an intellectual?

Someone who says it's obviously wrong, yes. Someone who says they don't understand it, haven't studied it, and don't have anything other than a personal opinion, sure. If you don't even know how overwhelming the support is of the academic community, there's another excuse.

It would be like if someone asked me if string theory was legit. I might say yes, I might say no, but honestly I don't even know if there is a consensus in the physics community. And I've even read up on it some, watched TV shows, etc...

Obviously you are intellectually curious, Max, but I'm sure there are tons of things you have no clue about, and acknowledge such, and have no interest in learning about. Certain people favor certain subjects and may be intellectually curious about one area but not another.

I'm very much less willing to judge someone on a subject they haven't taken the time to learn much about (especially when they take the time to learn about other subjects). Everyone is ignorant about some things. Some people just are cool with accepting the opinion of authority figures without actually understanding it themselves, others are not.

Bill Maher is the best example. Not sure if he still does it, but he considered himself a libertarian. Everyone is libertarian in some ways (except the most despicable people). Bill Maher thinks libertarian means "I like to get high".

Labels without meaning are absolutely horrible, and people have a huge influence in corrupting the meaning (anyone know what liberal used to mean?) of the labels, hijacking them (Tea Party anyone?), or trying to expand focus by focusing on only some issues and ignoring others (again think of Tea Party with spending on certain programs, but most Tea Party supporters being against cutting the military, Medicare, Social Security, and 99% else of the budget).

ITT people with PhDs are "not intellectuals"

SWEET.

What do you mean by this?

There's range, but the bottom end of the range is more like "mediocre undergraduate" as opposed to "7th grader".

I definitely agree with you (!) that the standard of research, thoughtfulness, and communication are much, much, higher in "mainstream" academic work. I read a lot of research in my job and a lot of Austrian stuff because of this forum and it's really no contest.

Scroll up.

Also there is no proof that there are any females enrolled at GT.

This post is full of facts.

This doesn't sound right to me. When I provisionally accept a near-consensus by the scientific community on a certain topic without having independently researched and verified it, I do so because of what I know and understand about the nature of scientific inquiry. You know, things like falsifiability, empirical evidence and testing, peer review, rational reasoning, and so on.

Compare this to encountering a claim or belief that emanates from some religious authority. Without being an expert in either scientific research or theological scholarship, a person who by default is more accepting of the former is valuing different standards of justification and belief than a person who by default is more or just as accepting of the latter.

You're both crazy. Clearly the correct answer is to pick your political philosophy then mold your scientific and religious beliefs to fit.

I am not sure the econ critiques are any more serious than this. Can people who say mainstream econ is obviously nonsense do all the prboelms from an intro grad level text book? That is crucial imo to being a serious critic of something.

Your viewpoint on this is totally rational and what I would expect 99% of intellectuals to say about string theory. Since you are bright/curious you have heard of it and probably know a few famous people doing it. But since you haven't devoted your professional life to learning it, you are agnostic about it. If you said it was wrong for obvious reasons involving high school math (as people actually do.... i have the emails to prove it )

Certainly. There are huge parts of human knowledge I know nothing about.... but I don't make strong statements about them.

Yeah, I would never say Rothbard is not an intellectual because he doesn't know string theory.... unless you chose to right about it. I feel like the subjects he thought alot about are politics and econ and some of his writing in those areas is severely lacking. I will admit that I could have a bad sample... but nobody seems to be arguing that

Yeah... I agree with you here, that we aren't talking about people who call themselves libertarian... but about people who respond a certain way to a fairly long set of questions.