19 Comments

This is absolutely proof of your insane moral bankruptcy and twisted worldview. It makes me hope the Christians are right. You’ll have a great seat in hell

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Well done! A pleasure to read. I call them pseudo-intellectuals. They are rife. But scholars are another quantity entirely and there are still quite a few of them around.

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True, not all scholars and intellectuals have embraced postmodern discourse. But it is the dominant theme in academia.

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So I've heard tell! ;-)

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I wish all the “intellectuals “ a job in Siberia, no shoes and a shovel.

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Paul Johnson's book, The Intellectuals, has a similar theme - beware the intellectuals.

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Indeed. Great book.

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What we learn from the Nazis, the actual German Nazis from the 30s and 40s, I don’t mean people I dislike, is that being at the pinnacle of academic achievement is no protection from being absolute evil.

The other lesson, more nuanced, is that self-discipline, while an important marker on the way to refinement of character, is not ideal without compassion. Self-discipline without compassion is an ugly thing.

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I could not have stated it better.

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How do they resign because of genocide without first ascertaining “context”?

Each step is more ridiculous than the one before.

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Thomas, in the event that you haven’t already seen it, I highly recommend Niall Ferguson’s “The Treason of the Intellectuals” which appeared in the Free Press in December, 2023. See,

https://www.thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-treason-intellectuals-third-reich

I also highly recommend Paul Berman’s “The Flight of the Intellectuals: The Controversy Over Islamism and the Press.” See,

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1935554441/ref=tmm_pap_title_sr?ie=UTF8&qid=&sr=

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Let's not forget Julien Benda's 1927 Treason of the Intellectuals (La Trahison des Clercs), which mapped the rise of this sort of thing after WWI. It's still a very relevant book.

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Theorists are not intellectuals. Their schematic un-nuanced approach is intellectually lazy.

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No, they are,intellectuals. You err in thinking that intellectuals are in any way noble. They aren’t.

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One aspect of the problem is that Muslim groups and activists who are hostile to Israel are well aware of which buttons to push in manipulating naive academics, intellectuals and college kids. Painting the Palestinians as victims of Western colonialism and imperialism has been a very effective trick. Falsifications of the historical record are also very effective with people who don't know much to begin with.

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Believe me, though the college students may be naive the academics are not. They’re the ones who invented CRT, “postcolonialism” and all the rest of that rot, and applied it to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

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I forgot, some - more likely many academics and journalists - are as you said not naive at all but are deliberately devoted to an agenda. But some may still be naive in that they do not know the deeper agenda of Islamic radicals who are telling them what they want to hear for their own ends.

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Well, maybe, but if they haven't figured it out by now, they never will.

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"...The worst are full of passionate intensity..." Yeats

Unfortunately they spew their poison into society.

Aided by the ignorance of the educated.

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