You don’t need Nixonland to explain this.  This is common human psychology when explained in the US-based individualism ideals.  The rugged individualist swallowed the academic somewhere in the post-bellum era, partially due to reconstruction being focused on academic/intellectualism and the mass flood of immigration with machine politics, and a dash of popular culture finally taking root.  Americans as a country both want to say “I don’t need book smarts to get the job done!” and “Well atleast the academics do agree with me!”  Because deep down they know that the smartest people are the academics the inevitable reply that they aren’t merely proves my point for the psychological outrage that is generated by that statement.

The invention of the “Republican Intellectual” is basically political hacks that were handed degrees from private conservative colleges or sold out post-doctorate for a life of media hackery over a poor doctorate’s life.  I found the whole 9/11 parades to be a bit much, as I stood there talking with a friendly barista over the weekend, a fifth generation Japanese-American, he was both in awe of it and frightened by it.  He didn’t want to speak bad because we both felt 9/11 is a sad event in American and human history but to have parades and treat it like a holiday somewhere between memorial day and July 4th is a bit over the top.  It noticeably only played in white-suburban neighborhoods around here, the city simply ignored it and moved along, but the small suburban communities dragged it out into a parade and other shows as if the communities of 6,000-10,000 had been personally injured by the acts done a decade ago.

Move this community center and we will have the following score:

President Washington and Original Intent: 0
Osama Bin Laden: 1

I guess I’m unclear on what an “anti-colonial” worldview is. Aren’t we anti-colonial because we rebelled against our colony status to become the USA? So then why would it be weird for Kenyans to be anti-colonial? Maybe Gingrich doesn’t know Kenya was also a British colony. Or maybe he thinks colonization was good for Africa. Or maybe it’s a nonsense term.

Explanations?

Kenyan anti-imperialist? Okay, one option would be go “wait, what?” and devote valuable time to explaining why that’s wrong (predator drone strike and anti-colonialist don’t jive).

I suggest we just keep undermining teabaggers instead.

In this case, the wingnuts are referring to their belief that those African and Asian countries were much better off under the rule of colonial powers, and that the problems that came about after independence were because certain people are too inferior to run their own countries.

That doesn’t apply to the U.S., of course, and I bet you can guess why.

I think sooner or later there is going to be a big wingnut push to change the federal holiday from Labor Day to 9-11. As a matter of fact, I don’t know why they haven’t tried it already. Then we won’t have to even pretend to give lip service to working people and their hard-won protections and can just concentrate on glorifying the military.

Oh come on, there’s much less to this than meets the eye. “Kenyan” is just another attempt at finding a socially acceptable way to say “n****r”. The rest is window dressing.

I think it was Oliver Willis who said it: The reason we leftys believe that GWB was wiretapping people without warrants, imprisoning people without charges and shipping them off to other secret prisons in other countries to be tortured was because, you know, he actually was. It was in the New York Times, and when asked about it, he said he was doing all those things.

The stuff the wingnuts accuse Obama of doing - death panels, socialism, now “Kenyan ani-colonialism” - they’ll admit “Well, yeah, there isn’t anything in the bills that actually says any of that, but you just KNOW he wants to!”

Which totally isn’t racist. At all.

I guess I’m unclear on what an “anti-colonial” worldview is. Aren’t we anti-colonial because we rebelled against our colony status to become the USA? So then why would it be weird for Kenyans to be anti-colonial? Maybe Gingrich doesn’t know Kenya was also a British colony. Or maybe he thinks colonization was good for Africa. Or maybe it’s a nonsense term.

That’s easy: British colonial rule was intolerable to us, because we were, um, you know. And British colonial rule was just and good and fair to Africans, because they’re, um, you know.

Which is also totally not racist at all.

@Comment #3: Entomologista on 09/13 at 09:33 AM

Explanations?

Daniel Larison, America’s (mostly) Sane Conservative [TM] has a pretty good explanation of what D’Souza means by “anti-colonialist”, and why its horseshit, at his blog:

http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2010/09/09/obama-anticolonial-hegemonist/

(the short version: D’Souza is asserting that Obama is steeped in the anticolonial beliefs of figures like Edward Said & Bell Hooks.)

Like Amanda explained, D’Souza & Gingrich are basically taking dumb, crazy beliefs and giving them an intellectual-sounding spin.

In 30 years people will talk of these people in the way people on TV talked of McCarthy in the 90s: as deluded fucking morons.

The problem is that in 60 years people will talk of these people in the way people on TV talk of McCarthy now: as an unjustly villified, bona fide American hero who saved us all from communism.

Stupid world and its stupid cyclical history.

When I first pulled up this thread, I looked at the picture at the top and thought of this.  And I wondered why…

Then I read Amanda’s post, and I realized I picked the correct mental image to go along with her look into the wingnutty goodness of D’Souza and Gingrich.  Put a big, white, mustache on it and you’ve got John Bolton’s Special Reserve Wingnut Kool Aid, Aged 150-Years.  Old times there are not forgotten…

(In case the link goes bad later, it’s an image of “Kool Aid Man” imposed over a picture of the Jonestown Massacre.  “9” and “11” look like “Kool Aid Men” to me…)

. . . you could probably give D’Souza and Gingrich a quiz on the first paragraph on Kenya on Wikipedia, and they’d flunk it, but they nonetheless feel free to spin academic-sounding bullshit about what Kenyans supposedly believe, why it’s supposedly so wrong, and how that’s what Obama secretly believes.

Yes!  It IS illegitimate to spin a yarn (make a political statement) asserting the beliefs, motivations and thinking of others, particularly political or cultural adversaries, without any empirical evidence supporting the yarn.  Can we on the left try to avoid doing so also?  Please?

Gingrich’s reference to “anti-colonialism” is probably an attempt to raise the bogeyman of Frantz Fanon.  I expect Gingrich to keep it up, even though he’s overshooting the literary acumen of his audience, since Fanon is mentioned in one of Obama’s books.

“Yes!  It IS illegitimate to spin a yarn (make a political statement) asserting the beliefs, motivations and thinking of others, particularly political or cultural adversaries, without any empirical evidence supporting the yarn.  Can we on the left try to avoid doing so also?  Please?”

Did you just wake up or something?  Not been too aware of what’s been happening over the last couple decades?  Feel it’s unfair of Amanda to say something accurate about the Reichwing unless it’s “balanced” by a poisonous dose of “Libruls Do It Too!” bogosity?

Thanks for dropping by and giving us a nice acrid taste of Concern Troll…

Pause for a moment, if you will, to consider the irony of Dinesh D’Souza actually complaining about someone being (allegedly) anti-colonialist… But then he is, as far as I’m concerned, a male Michelle Malkin.

Thank you for the link to the Daniel Larison essay, atheist. It must be a frustrating time for the intellectually honest and sane conservatives in America, the ones who aren’t basing their conservatism on a sense of privilege and resentiment but actual logic and reasoning, because they are seeing their side of the political divide going into some very deep and dangerous delusions. I do not agree with sane conservatism on ideological grounds but I know that they exist and deserve sympathy and empathy.

  Hearing the rightists try to be intellectual is always frustrating on the ears because it really doesn’t take much to point out where they are wrong even if you hapen not to be a fan of Fanon or whatever leftist intellectual that they are trying to link to Obama or any other Democratic politician. Intellectual chicanery in the service of politics tends toward the disastorous more often than not.

“Gingrich’s reference to “anti-colonialism” is probably an attempt to raise the bogeyman of Frantz Fanon.”

...rrriiiggghhhttt… 

Yeah, no doubt Mr. and Mrs. Whitebread Teabagger are very aware of Frantz Fanon, since he’s taught to American High School students in their freshman year, during their Marxist Anti-Colonialism History classes.  (You’ve gotta give it to them early, before they drop out as seniors to become Marxist Community Organizers.)

Ultra-radical, ultra-Leftist American high schools are really big on that kind of thing…

#16

MikeEss, stupid as it really is, I think that’s pretty much what D’Souza is actually saying.

It’s an article of faith in the wingnutteria that pointy-headed college professors don’t have common sense and aren’t worth listening to.

The irony being that Gingrich is himself a college professor by trade.

#18

I think that’s part of what Amanda is talking about. Gingrich does have a position as a college professor and at the same time, is constitutionally incapable of doing any real intellectual investigation. He spouts nonsense.

He wants the title, he wants the approbation of being an intellectual, but doesn’t or really can’t do the hard work it takes to be one.

D’Souza grew up in a former British colony, raised by parents who grew up in a former Portuguese colony. He is a lapsed Catholic.

Or maybe it’s a nonsense term.

Ding ding ding!

Feel it’s unfair of Amanda to say something accurate about the Reichwing . . . ?

If the assertion has no basis in evidence, what an adversary says or does, then it can can have no authority as accurate.  It’s just the musings or rantings of one’s own brain or repeated as tenets of faith from a revered leader.  In other words, crap.  I’ve noticed that the method is crap when I hear it from Limbaugh and his ilk.  It’s nice to know Amanda sees it as crap in this instance.  It would be nice if those with whom I agree on important political and cultural points wouldn’t’ engage in such crap also.

Yeah, no doubt Mr. and Mrs. Whitebread Teabagger are very aware of Frantz Fanon . . .

Thanks for intentionally missing my point.  Gingrich no doubt read Fanon in his pre-Congress trek through academia.  I’m guessing that’s what he thinks of when he uses the term “anti-colonialist” and that the reference goes right over the heads of his tea-bagger audience.  But it’s a guess, based on his age and the sense I’ve had of him over decades that he’s better read than he lets on.  Also that his dissertation for his Ph.D. in modern European history from Tulane was titled “Belgian Education Policy in the Congo: 1945-1960.”  Yeah, he probably read Fanon.

To add to atheist at 17’s point, it makes more sense when you realize that intellectuals like Fanon aren’t real people with real ideas to the average American conservative but scary bogey-man who wage war against all that is good and holy. Its part of the epic battle theme that is very important to the American right. They see the world in an us vs. them cosmology and eveybody who is them works together against us even when this makes no sense in reality. Obama is them, so is Marx. Therefore, Obama is a Marxist. Obama is them, so are Muslims. Therefore Obama is a Muslim. Same goes with Fanon. The result is that Obama is Marxist Muslim anti-Colonialist even though Marxist Muslim is an oxy moron.

To point out the obvious, skin color is genetic, so yes, everything the Newt decides he knows about Kenya and Kenyans is genetic.

God that first paragraph is awesome! (and the rest of course) but DAMN. Just what I needed to read this morning.

MiddleAged is just still bitter about the evidence I marshalled to disprove his assertion that men who visit prostitutes are great guys trying to find relief from an oppressive matriarchy.

“Gingrich no doubt read Fanon in his pre-Congress trek through academia.  I’m guessing that’s what he thinks of when he uses the term “anti-colonialist” and that the reference goes right over the heads of his tea-bagger audience.”

...but it sounds intellectual, and even the proles can get that.  But that’s not the important part. 

It’s the use of the word “Kenyan” that’s key.  They may not be able to identify where Kenya is on the map, but the know it’s not here.  Many of them will know it’s in Africa.  Most of them will have heard the word from Beck or Limbaugh, so they know it’s bad.  Add in the birther bullshit, and it becomes a perfect dog whistle, making little sense to anyone with any education or understanding of the world, but coming through loud and clear to the Teabagging morons.

It also serves to keep Gingrich’s name before the public (especially Reichwing primary voters), helping to prepare the ground for a POTUS run.

His use of the term “Kenyan” reminds me of Pat Buchanan’s quote here: “If we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year, or Englishmen, and put them up in Virginia, what group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia?” (“This Week With David Brinkley,” 1/8/91)

The average American will not know with any precision just what a “Zulu” is, but they know they’re Not American, and most will know they’re from Africa, and being Not American and from Africa is enough to make them “Bad”.

Same thing here.  Fanon don’t mean squat to Gingrich’s target audience.  “Anti-Colonialist” isn’t much better.  But “Kenyan”?  Comes shining right through and its meaning to them is unmistakable…

Wow, not stacking the deck much there with that comparison, are we Pat?  Asshat.  Yeah, people who share a common language and many similar traditions to the population of the place to which they’re moving are going to assimilate more easily.  There’s a shocker.  Kinda why, when I consider studying or working abroad, I consider mostly English speaking countries.  Trying to get serious work done while learning a new language is a daunting task.  (This is why I have a lot of respect for the folks who come from non-English speaking countries to the US for doctorates in chemistry.  Even if there are communication issues, their English is miles better than the proficiency of most American students in any other language, and on top of all the normal challenges of grad school, they’ve got language and cultural hurdles to clear, all while thousands of miles from their family, friends and support systems.)

I think that’s part of what Amanda is talking about. Gingrich does have a position as a college professor and at the same time, is constitutionally incapable of doing any real intellectual investigation.

One of the salient social aspects of professors that I’ve noticed is that they manage to get by on a middle class lifestyle without the sort pf desire for or admiration of or dependence on wealth/upper classes you might see among their socio-economic peers, not to mention an influence greater than someone who might be making a comparable salary. The combination of job security via tenure and professional acclaim/attention they get from their own peers in their field means that unlike a politician or think-tank fellow, they don’t need the rich and feel confident enough to take on the powerful on their own terms, without the sort of deference you might find from, say, a small town (or even national) politician. By contrast, Newt Gingrich was known for being slavishly devoted to and admiring of those he thought were wealthy. Lots of congressmen enjoy their position for the opportunity it gives them to act like the rich (and get them to take them on golfing junkets). The resentment of intellectuals always seemed to have an aspect of people thinking, “who do they think they are? I have to suck up to my superiors, and they shpuld, too!” The rich, of course, think, “who are these damn eggheads who have the audacity to say these things without showing us proper respect?” D’Souza and Gingrich have the benefit of “knowing their place” in this social hierarchy.

“If we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year, or Englishmen, and put them up in Virginia, what group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia?”

The answer is obviously the Zulus. The English or Germans for that matter would go apeshit regarding America’s poor infrastructure and mediocre government services. If we started accepting large numbers of middle class western European immigrants, our political system would change substantially—their expectations of government are much different than it would be for immigrants who expect nothing at all: and the latter group are more preferable to conservative politicians, at the end of the day.

MiddleageLiberal, your comment only makes sense if Gingrich thought up the phrase, but ‘anti-colonialism’ came from D’Souza. So, Gingrich didn’t use the term because of Fanon, he used it because D’Souza uses it. D’Souza does mention Fanon in passing, but mainly he concentrates on Obama’s father. This way he can pound home his point: Obama acts like an African and is anti-American. And he really has to pound to make some of his examples fit his hypothesis.

@BrianX I’m not surprised. I saw him speak once and he said that colonialism was a good thing because it brought him to Christianity.

MikeEss,

Yeah, no doubt Mr. and Mrs. Whitebread Teabagger are very aware of Frantz Fanon, since he’s taught to American High School students in their freshman year, during their Marxist Anti-Colonialism History classes.

I dunno, I grew from whitebread teabaggerdom, and one my classmates loaned me a copy freshman year, which I still have.

Tyro,

their expectations of government are much different than it would be for immigrants who expect nothing at all: and the latter group are more preferable to conservative politicians, at the end of the day.

Of course, they’d have to decide between that malleability and the political capital they’d squander by admitting non-Aryan folk into the Motherland.

Jeeze.  Those happy 9/11 giant ping pong balls are about as tasteful as a peanut butter and pickle relish sandwich.

#30 Heh, heh, heh. Cute, Tyro.

One of the salient social aspects of professors that I’ve noticed is that they manage to get by on a middle class lifestyle without the sort pf desire for or admiration of or dependence on wealth/upper classes you might see among their socio-economic peers, not to mention an influence greater than someone who might be making a comparable salary. The combination of job security via tenure and professional acclaim/attention they get from their own peers in their field means that unlike a politician or think-tank fellow, they don’t need the rich and feel confident enough to take on the powerful on their own terms, without the sort of deference you might find from, say, a small town (or even national) politician.

Unfortunately, that may not be the case much longer if the MBA-type university admins and university trustees continue the trend of cutting tenure-track positions, increasing the proportion of adjuncts in the colleges/universities, bend over backwards for spoiled upper/upper-middle class undergrads and their parents who feel they are entitled to an A just for registering and existing….whether they show up to class and do the work or not, and bending over backwards for the wealthy and powerful to the point when even a tenured faculty member is not safe. 

Faculty and academically oriented supporters need to act to take back the universities from their MBA minded admins and upper/upper-middle class infested trustee boards if they want to maintain genuine academic freedom….especially to tweak/challenge those who are rich and powerful and their lackeys.

My favorite Marxist, President Blackula.

Gingrich no doubt read Fanon

Thanks for making it clear that your admonishment against assumption was projection. 

Thanks, again, for your concern.

By the bye, I have a Poli Sci degree, with a Commie academic advisor, and I just heard of Franz Fanon today.  That’s not who D’Souza is referring to, for the Forbes audience.

@Comment #39: Punditus Maximus on 09/13 at 01:10 PM

I just heard of Franz Fanon today.  That’s not who D’Souza is referring to, for the Forbes audience.

Yossarian had done his best to warn him the night before. ‘You haven’t got a chance, kid.’ he told him glumly.‘They hate Jews.”
“But I’m not Jewish,” answered Clevinger.
“It will make no difference.“Yossarian promised, and Yossarian was right. “They after everybody.”

What’s weird about this to me is that birtherism is in many ways per se an intellectual, or at least pseudo-intellectual pursuit. I mean, reallly: parsing “natural-born”, freaking out about different forms of birth certificate, inventing birth-announcement conspiracies—how much more purely mental wankery do you want?

I was struck by the degree to which all of this resembles what Feynman called “cargo-cult science”—cobbling together a bunch of fancy-sounding nonsense that falls apart as soon as you touch it—but then I remembered that the original “cargo cult” designation has huge stinking piles of ethnographer’s privilege associated with it…

Paul at 42, so what you are saying is that conspiracy theories are the intellectualism of fools.

Unfortunately, Linnaeus, there is something to claim (2).  I very likely will not have my current professor job next year due to continuing budget cuts to higher ed and the fact that I have a non-tenure-track position.  And if that happens, it will be the second time it’s happened to me (lost my previous job in across-the-board post-Katrina cuts).  But these tenured folks who have not written a new lecture or exam, or published a paper, in 20 years (and who make twice what I do) will still be here.  These are people who consider themselves “overworked” if they actually have to be here more than 10 hours a week.  But, thanks to tenure, they stay and I go, despite how many of my better colleagues have expressed their desire for me to stay rather than this “dead wood.” 

I do believe in academic freedom and something to ensure it (for example, I worry I’ll start getting pressure to lower my grading standards, as our legislature keeps focusing on nothing but graduation rates).  But the current system of tenure is not functioning as intended, to encourage academic excellence and free inquiry.  I don’t have a solution, I’m afraid.  But I am sick of losing jobs in favor of poor performers, when I’m working my ass off.

I saw him speak once and he said that colonialism was a good thing because it brought him to Christianity.

Ewww. Plus, brought him? Like is was a gift he got to unwrap? Yeah colonialism “brought” him to christianity like predator drones bring much needed gifts of rubble and shrapnel.

Lee: I’m not sure it’s that simple. Some conspiracy theories and some things like them are pseudo-intellectualism. But I think that “conspiracy theory” isn’t quite right, because those are making (usually wrong) statements about a bunch of facts. Birtherism, in at least some of its incarnations, is much more about wacky-parsing of documents and factual statements, so that for the people who have the right arcane knowledge, stuff that means one thing to the rest of us means something entirely different to them.

It’s a little like the “free and sovereign citizen” and “maritime law” nuttery, where finding exactly the right set of words to put in a legal filing will supposedly free you from taxes or the requirement to obey local law enforcement. A conspiracy theory ends up being part of it, but that’s not where the pseudo-intellectual meat is.

Speaking of wingnuts on parade, the Onion gets it perfect today:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/nation-once-again-comes-under-sway-of-pinkfaced-ha,18076/

“Pink-faced half-wit” is going in the lexicon.

(the short version: D’Souza is asserting that Obama is steeped in the anticolonial beliefs of figures like Edward Said & Bell Hooks.)

The irony being that if Obama WERE steeped in those beliefs (which he is not) that would be a good thing.

What exactly are those 9/11 characters supposed to be?  And who would have thought Mr. Met was the most normal-looking one in the family?

Gingrich does have a position as a college professor and at the same time, is constitutionally incapable of doing any real intellectual investigation. He spouts nonsense.

He wants the title, he wants the approbation of being an intellectual, but doesn’t or really can’t do the hard work it takes to be one.
LCforevah @ #19

Like government-is-bad Republicans, showing that they are the perfect example of their rhetoric.  “Intellectuals aren’t really smart and government is really ineffective - vote for us and we’ll prove it to you!”

<em>Kenyan anti-imperialist?</i>

=“Nigger fighting against white people”.

This has been another edition of SATSQ.

It’s part of a larger “corportization” or “businessification” of universities, under the guise of “efficiency”, “flexibility”, and “accountability”*, the idea being that universities should adopt the administrative practices and culture of business organizations.

Efficiency, flexibility, and accountability…...HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

From what I’ve seen during my own undergrad days and on other campuses as a special student taking post-college/grad courses….this is encouraging the stupid “students/parents are consumers” mindset which breeds entitlement…especially in the upper/upper-middle class that if they pay tuition…..they automatically get the degree with an A studded transcript….completing academic work and requirements be damned.  In fact, ....the prevailing attitude seems to be that they “shouldn’t have to work hard” as the mere fact they paid tuition and exist should be enough. 

After hearing countless friends who teach/TA undergrad courses complaining about this along with experiencing this firsthand by being yelled at by some idiot Ivy undergrad who mistook me for a TA who gave him a C-level grade for a paper which really deserved an F*......there are days I wished the Profs/TAs had the institutional/cultural support to tell such rude entitled students and their parents where they can shove their attitudes. 

* Kinda hard to miss not reading that piece of garbage when the student in question shoved it right into my face.

“MiddleAged is just still bitter about the evidence I marshalled to disprove his assertion that men who visit prostitutes are great guys trying to find relief from an oppressive matriarchy.”

This is jerky to say on an unrelated topic that he’s kinda right about, even if true.

But the idea that Amanda is supposed to stand aside and not sink to such vulgar depths as Gingrich and D’Souza? That’s nice and there are plenty of nice liberals who play it like that, but at some point you have to shoot back. And she’s a good shot.

But I don’t even have to invoke the goose and the gander, because Amanda publishes her guesses about what their really up to here, on the charitable assumption that they can’t mean the nonsense they’re saying out loud. Rightwingers assert that Obama faked his birth certificate and that third world countries are a threat to us because their leaders are willing to commit mass suicide just to lay a glove on us.

Take a closer look at the “11” lottery ping-pong ball—they’re wearing what appears to be a NYFD helmet with “343” on it. That’s the exact number of NYC firemen who died on 9/11.

Stay classy, New York State Lottery.

54:
Clicking the link, I see The Rude Pundit was apparently mistaken that they were from the New York State Lottery (a fine institution that provide entertainment at exorbitant prices). They’re apparently from some private business which I’m not going to give the web hits to try to find out what they are. I am now thinking bad about private enterprise, the backbone of Our Country. I blame John Dewey for this. Or George Dewey, come to think of it.

But the current system of tenure is not functioning as intended, to encourage academic excellence and free inquiry.  I don’t have a solution, I’m afraid.  But I am sick of losing jobs in favor of poor performers, when I’m working my ass off.

No kidding. There are professors in my department who are 60+ years old and have something like 14 publications to their name. There are graduate students in my department who have 14+ publications upon graduation. Note that I am not one of those students

Part of the problem in academia is that it’s not steady-state—it’s changed so much during the past 40 years as to be in many ways unrecognizable. (On the student side as well—I do applicant interviews, and I’d never get into the place where I went today.) The people who got tenured back then are still around (and it’s even worse in the US because of the court rulings that eliminated mandatory retirement). But if you eliminated tenure, who the fsck would bother going into academe?

I just don’t want to think that the picture is a real thing in the real world. 

And liberals don’t respect 9/11?  Ugh.

Attn Paul: What I was really trying to do is create a short, pithy summary of your argument thats a riff on “anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools.” In this case, I’m arguing that “conspiracy theories is the intellectualism of fools” because conspiracy theories like serious scholarship is an attempt to understand how the world works and what is happening through some sort of analysis and research. Unlike serious scholarship, conspiracy theories don’t really hold up that well when compared to reality and tend to be fueled a lot more by bitterness and resentiment than anything else.

The notion that all guesses of what’s going on in someone’s head are equal is simply wrong, though.  I can and frequently do bring evidence to bear when saying, “What wingnuts think.”  You can often figure it out through inconsistencies in their disingenuous claims, etc.  Which is, of course, what I did when I pissed the john defenders off.  Their claims—-that men who visit prostitutes are just sad sacks who can’t get laid and aren’t particularly picky—-were ridiculously easy to disprove.  Not to thread jack my own post, but the point remains.  We’re not all just tossing darts against the wall.  There is deductive reasoning going on.

Unlike serious scholarship, conspiracy theories don’t really hold up that well when compared to reality and tend to be fueled a lot more by bitterness and resentiment than anything else.

If I believe that the liberal media is constantly falsifying everying as a way of keeping me down or making whites look bad, then I have taken my shapeless feeling of abandonment by society and given it a shape. If a “Straw Man” keeps me tied to a government that considers me a slave, then I’ve taken my unfreedom and made it solid. In general these kinds of beliefs strike me as ways of solidifying feelings so that the feelings can be symbolically acted upon.

!!!!  Wow, the caption “WTF?” doesn’t do that picture justice.

atheist at 62: Yes, thats one way conspiracy theories work. Another way they work is to provide easy answers to people suffering, at least in a material way. Lots of people felt or feel that they are struggling and not doing as well as they should be doing, aren’t really sure why this is. People on the Left, from libearls to Marxists, have reasons but they tend to be complicated. Conspiracy theories are often “easier” to understand even if they don’t hold up that well in practice. Blaiming everything on “ZOG” or feminists or the LBGT community gives a suffering person, an identifiable target to blame for everything that is wrong rather than complex and often impersonal forces. Many people find this satisfying.

Yeah, no doubt Mr. and Mrs. Whitebread Teabagger are very aware of Frantz Fanon, since he’s taught to American High School students in their freshman year, during their Marxist Anti-Colonialism History classes.  (You’ve gotta give it to them early, before they drop out as seniors to become Marxist Community Organizers.)

Ultra-radical, ultra-Leftist American high schools are really big on that kind of thing…

Funny how this gives the vast majority of US high school students far more credit for being able to understand an ideology and its texts which even many college graduates and grad students focusing on this area have so much trouble with. 

Even more amusing when I know for a fact that even reading excerpts from Marx’s writings such as the Communist Manifesto would be considered “far too hard” and “demanding” by most mainstream US high school teachers….even the ones at the private schools.  From chatting with friends who teach high school….assigning Marxist writings….even the Cliff Notes version would be a good way to turn them off of it as it would be far above most of their comprehension capabilities. 

Even in college….most students IME tend to shy away from Marxist oriented courses…especially theory even if they’re not turned off by the “Marxist” label because there’s a common perception that it’s “too hard” and “inscrutable”.

Conspiracy theories are often “easier” to understand even if they don’t hold up that well in practice.

I sometimes think 9/11 Truthers use their conspiracy theories to avoid understanding that terrorism is a real phenomenon, and in fact an existential feature of modern societies. Somehow the way that Bush blew up the towers or Mossad did the whole thing protects them from realizing it. I guess you could say something similar about the Birthers. Obama’s missing birth certificate protects them from comprehending that conservative whites are not all-powerful. It’s like a shield.

Conspiracy theories give form to complex, unsettling feelings, and most importantly, give the theorist an “out”—-built in to the conspiracy theory is always a sense that if you could get more people and people in power to agree with you, then the thing that leaves you unsettled would end.  Think of how much, for instance, the fact of the Holocaust unsettles anti-Semites, because it exposes how ugly and evil their racism is.  So they deny that it was real or widespread and, in turn, reinforce their bigotry by implying that they’re oppressed by a Jewish cabal that is powerful it could actually cause the world to believe that millions upon millions of people were murdered when they weren’t. 

The moon landing hoax is an interesting conspiracy theory to ponder in light of this.  Initially, it was actually a product of leftist paranoia that had crawled so far up its own ass that it was becoming anti-technology, anti-science.  It imposed a narrative on the various feelings that the government of the people had actually turned on the people and was using illusion and propaganda to keep the people from seizing the power that belonged to them.  But over time, the moon hoax theory drifted rightward.  Now it’s a space for people to express anger at modernism, and to reject a world where science and reason matter more than received wisdom, class hierarchies, and inherited authority.

their expectations of government are much different than it would be for immigrants who expect nothing at all: and the latter group are more preferable to conservative politicians, at the end of the day.

Africans are also very conservative in the traditional sense of the term:  resistant to change.  The first generations of African immigrants would also be easily drawn into the culture wars.  Fortunately for us (and unfortunately for Republicans), Republican racism will push the majority of immigrants away from their cause.

Conspiracy theories are often “easier” to understand even if they don’t hold up that well in practice.

This is a really good point.  Conspiracy theories that are based on “common sense” are extra hard to rebut not only because they appeal to an anti-intellectual, populist idea that the everyperson is best at everything, but also because any rebuttal that is based on science, math, or a deeper understanding of the mechanisms at play is immediately dismissed as part of an establishment coverup.  I once watched a 9/11 denier insist that FEMA’s structural analysis after of the twin towers must have been bogus because they used ANSYS (a modeling package that is commonly used to determine deformation/failure) for part of it.  In his mind, the only reason an engineer would use that tool is to obscure their work from laypeople.

More generally: I think there is a real populist appeal to the idea that education only exists to confuse and obscure things from laypeople, and that we would all do better if we stuck to “common sense.”  It makes it really easy for certain parties to get large portions of the public on board with nonsense.

Even more amusing when I know for a fact that even reading excerpts from Marx’s writings such as the Communist Manifesto would be considered “far too hard” and “demanding” by most mainstream US high school teachers

I had to read Das Kapital my first semester in college.  It was almost as difficult as Rousseau and Hegel.

Maybe this explains why communism in practice has proven to be such a clusterfuck:  no one knows what in the hell Marx was talking about.

built in to the conspiracy theory is always a sense that if you could get more people and people in power to agree with you, then the thing that leaves you unsettled would end

So the Birthers believe that, if enough people knew Obama was really a commie Muslim agent from Kenya all the cities would be dismantled and the conservative whites would take back all their rightful powers and we’d all go to church. And the 9/11 Truthers, presumeably, believe that if enough people knew 9/11 was actually done with holographic planes and plastic explosives, then we would be free from having to deal with terrorism, because it doesn’t exist, and the world would be again peaceful just as it was before 2001.

Interesting about the moon landing hoaxers, I never really considered them too deeply.

If he doesn’t apologize for that statement I’d like to hear exactly why Gingrich isn’t anti-colonial. I thought every body was against colonialism at this point (at least the outright, direct-rule kind), and I mean everyone the same way everyone is against absolute monarchy or feudalism.

“If he doesn’t apologize for that statement I’d like to hear exactly why Gingrich isn’t anti-colonial.”

It ties in with the belief that there was only one political revolution that was acceptable and necessary: The American Revolution.

When we were a colony, this was a bad thing that necessitated that we revolt against our monarchical overlord to throw off the chains of oppression.  Since our revolution, all other colonization has been great, unless it’s someone else colonizing some place we want for ourselves — then it’s wrong.  Likewise every other revolution across the globe has been wrong, starting with the French Revolution and continuing through the Africans, Central Americans, South Americans, and Asians throwing out their colonizers over the last several hundred years. 

We threw the Spanish from the Philippines (bad colonization) and stayed there ourselves (good colonization), tossed the Spanish from Cuba (another bad colonization) and helped every crooked government they had (Fulgencio Batista, good dictator) until Castro (bad dictator), helped the French take Vietnam back after WWII (a good colonization which came back to bite us), overthrew Mossadegh in Iran (bad revolution) and reseated the Shah (good dictator, which came back to bite us).  We supported Saddam (good dictator, which came back to bite us) until he did something sufficiently naughty, then he became a very bad dictator, worse even than Hitler!, so we had to toss him…

keshmeshi: According to a history of Prussia I read, nobody understood what Hegel was talking about because he mumbled. Maybe Marx inherited this trait from Hegel, who strongly influenced him. .

  atheist and Amanda: Yes, exactly this.

“Interesting about the moon landing hoaxers, I never really considered them too deeply.”

A movie (not very good, and starring several mid-level actors, OJ Simpson among them) was made based on that conspiracy theory, for what it’s worth…

I’m getting a Super Mario vibe from the giant ping pong balls. Why trivialize the ultimate sacrifice of so many?

Conspiracy theories exist on the Left, but they are at their heart a right-wing phenomenon because they are based in right-wing tropes. They’re morality plays. A conspiracy is about individuals doing bad things on purpose, because they’re weak, greedy or power-hungry. In contrast, left-wing analysis tends to look at structures, how social organisms are designed in certain ways to incentivize or deincentivize certain behaviors.

They are a religion for the modern era. If our ancestors had to create a god of lightning and a god of fertility because they couldn’t explain the forces that directed their lives and they had no control over, modern human beings have created these ‘god’ figures to explain sociological phenomenas they can’t explain and have no control over.

MiddleAged is just still bitter about the evidence I marshalled to disprove his assertion that men who visit prostitutes are great guys trying to find relief from an oppressive matriarchy.
Comment #26: Amanda Marcotte

In the four years I’ve been reading here that’s the most dishonest statement I’ve ever read you make. #1 - I made no such assertion.  #2 - You marshalled no evidence at all on that or any other point in that thread, though others did on other aspects. #3 - I’m not bitter in the least.

I’ve seen you intentionally mischaracterize others’ arguments before but this goes beyond that into flat out lying.

BlackBloc:

Uh… CIA/crack connection?

keshmeshi: According to a history of Prussia I read, nobody understood what Hegel was talking about because he mumbled. Maybe Marx inherited this trait from Hegel, who strongly influenced him. wink.

Maybe they’re just political scientists starting the tradition of turning bad writing into a venerable art form. 

More generally: I think there is a real populist appeal to the idea that education only exists to confuse and obscure things from laypeople, and that we would all do better if we stuck to “common sense.” It makes it really easy for certain parties to get large portions of the public on board with nonsense.

This is not helped by some academics and grad students who do take great pleasure in crafting their sentences and writings in ways meant to promote a form of obscurantism for their own kicks and/or to avoid being pinned down about their actual position on a given topic.  Had some heated discussions about how effective/counterproductive their overly complex sentences and writing styles are in conveying their ideas to others….especially to neophytes and laypersons.

@MiddleageLiberal

It’s hyperbole.  But missing the humor certainly proves that you are not bitter in the slightest.

To get back on topic, it seems strange to me (although the right and apparently MiddleageLiberal do it all the time) that there is so much trouble recognizing the difference between characterizing a group based on a single feature (race, nation of birth, etc.) and characterizing a group based on action (visiting a prostitute, dressing up in a racist costume, writing pseudo-intellectual racist bullshit, etc.).

The idea that all Kenyans think the same way is as ridiculous as saying all liberals have never lived in the real world.  The idea that the Tea Party is racist because they say racist things, condone the racism in their group, etc. is a very different thing (as is saying that all men who engage in a specific misogynistic action are misogynists).  I suppose that both could be considered generalizations, but the difference between judging a group on a coincidental factor shared by members of the group and an action or actions that define membership in the group shouldn’t be this difficult to grasp, IMO.

To Tyro @ #29.  Unfortunately, the trend in academia is to increase the percentage of non-tenured/non-tenure track, adjunct faculty - who are making a pittance and have job security about on the level of a seasonal carnival worker.

TO Callipopejane@44 and apologies to those I merely seconded in previous post. 

One solution is to cut the deadwood business model of vice chancellor-ships and other admin posts which essentially are merely rewards for practiced ass-kissing. And yes, it’s being noticed as many of these positions aren’t producing as promised.

@MiddleageLiberal
It’s hyperbole.  But missing the humor certainly proves that you are not bitter in the slightest.

Oh ha, ha.  So you weren’t trying to discredit any argument or criticism I make on this thread with a lie about me on a different topic, a lie certain to cast me in a bad light among the readers of this blog who might not have followed the 300+ posts on the previous thread?  Sure, every slander can be excused by “just kidding”. 
http://www.hulu.com/watch/17003/saturday-night-live-weekend-update-judy-grimes 

I agree it’s proper analysis and comment to take a group’s actions or statements and judge their purposes and motivations, and to go further to say what the consequences of that group’s actions might be, intended or not.  I object to ascribing bad motives and intent where there isn’t any evidence of it, just because you don’t like their actions or what they represent.  Sort of like saying that what all prochoice advocates really want to do is kill babies.  It’s a poor habit of discourse.  And where we are engaged in a cultural war, improperly ascribing bad motives to anyone who disagrees with us lowers the chance of winning over those on the fence.

MiddleageLiberal, your comment only makes sense if Gingrich thought up the phrase, but ‘anti-colonialism’ came from D’Souza. #31: JohnL

Ah, OK.  I took Amanda’s statement ascribing it to Gingrich at face value and didn’t read the linked article.

Unfortunately, the trend in academia is to increase the percentage of non-tenured/non-tenure track, adjunct faculty - who are making a pittance and have job security about on the level of a seasonal carnival worker.

Anecdatally, I have seen adjuncts outlast many a tenure-tracker—the fear that one may grant lifetime job security to a dud severely limits the number of those actually given tenure. (This may not be true of people working at state schools.) Plus many schools want to offer classes in fields (like foreign languages) that they don’t want to establish full-out departments. Adjuncts are ideal for colleges there. But it would suck to try to be a primary breadwinner on adjunct pay. (One language lecturer I know works at three different schools to make ends meet.)

@MiddleageLiberal

I wasn’t trying to discredit you with a lie at all, I didn’t make the original comment.  I did, however, understand it as hyperbole which is distinctly different from an “flat out” lie.

Yes, the culture war over prostitution is certainly…oh, wait, you were the one who continued an argument from a different long thread into another to cast someone in a bad light.  Obviously, it would be insane to expect anyone not involved in it to read it, since it is clear you (who were involved in it) didn’t bother to.

I object to ascribing bad motives and intent where there isn’t any evidence of it, just because you don’t like their actions or what they represent.  Sort of like saying that what all prochoice advocates really want to do is kill babies.  It’s a poor habit of discourse.

And where there is evidence of bad motives and intent, you ignore discussions of that evidence.  Since pro-choice advocates don’t actually kill babies (or advocate killing babies), whereas johns do actually visit prostitutes, you are once again conflating a (willful in this case) misrepresentation of a disliked position by the opposition with examining the statements (by johns and prostitutes) and coming to a conclusion you personally dislike.

Anecdatally, I have seen adjuncts outlast many a tenure-tracker—the fear that one may grant lifetime job security to a dud severely limits the number of those actually given tenure.

Also, sometime back in the 70s or so, the AAUP and others forced many/most universities and colleges to limit the amount of time that you could employ someone on a tenure track without giving them tenure. 7-10 years from acceptance of thesis, iirc. With adjuncts, they can do as they used to with assistant and associate professors, and pay them nothing for 20 years. (The mother of a couple of kids I knew in elementary school was among the test-case plaintiffs—by the time she was finally awarded tenure she’d been teaching undergraduate and graduate courses for 20-plus years, at a third the salary of tenured faculty.)

TO Callipopejane@44 and apologies to those I merely seconded in previous post.
One solution is to cut the deadwood business model of vice chancellor-ships and other admin posts which essentially are merely rewards for practiced ass-kissing. And yes, it’s being noticed as many of these positions aren’t producing as promised.

QFT!  I just recently found out about the existence of such positions, and how much some of those people are getting paid for doing almost nothing.  “Appalled” is too mild a word for my reaction.  One of those positions could pay for three of me! 

Well, maybe we’ll see if they can teach intro classes, after all us non-tenure-track faculty are gone.  Somebody’ll have to.

Here is an interesting take on this:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/09/obama_derangement_syndrome

Testing

Ah, it is better to Blaspheme and pray for forgiveness than to pray for permission via Preview, apparently.

Here’s my attempted post, I hope it doesn’t show up again after being delayed in some kind of moderation.

—-

Hi, everyone! Been a while since I’ve posted here.

Re WTF D’Souza was saying, more obvious to me than Fanon are the following equations:

Kenya=Mau Mau

Mau Mau=Anti-colonialism

That’s straightforward, but how is it relevant to the President?

Well, in America, especially among right-wing culture warriors

Mau Mau = uppity black folks.

See for instance Tom Wolfe, “Mau-Mauing the Flack Catcher.”

Sure, this stuff is nearly sixty years out of date. Fanon is of course just as dated, or more so. But these guys have long, if selective, collective memories.

I know that _I_ sure heard of Mau-Mau long before I heard of Franz Fanon*. Perhaps someone like D’Souza wouldn’t have heard of it as casually as I did, growing up in the Seventies. But aside from how likely such intelligensia as he or Gingrich would be to have read Fanon, their broader audience would much more likely have read Tom Wolfe. Or just heard all manner of pop culture reference to Mau-Mau, which would persist in rightist circles at all levels long after everyone else started to forget all about it.
————-
*It was still longer before I read him, and that was strictly extracurricular—most familiarity with most people’s ideas, even in academia, or perhaps especially there, is via name-dropping and other elliptical references, and all too often strictly by opponents who caricature or outright falsify their foils’ arguments. Having seen Fanon’s name dropped a lot, mostly in stuff from the Sixties that was also extracurricular reading for me, I was curious. And in the end not all that impressed by his stress on a strictly psychological interpretation of events. It seemed to me that the “Wretched of the Earth’s” behavior could be understood well enough in straightforward terms of the politics of basic human dignity, without all that Freudianism.

21st Century “elitism”: http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com/2010/09/just-usual-apes-throwing-shit.html

@Comment #90: Lee on 09/14 at 05:50 AM

That’s a pretty good response, helps to show the inherent stupidity and bigotry of D’Souza’s article. For D’Souza, though, I will always prefer James Wolcott’s post about him from a few years back: “Ratfink Writes New Book”