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Thursday, November 04, 2004

Mission Control, we have a problem 

From Unenviable Situation:

Liberals are a condescending lot.I wonder how many of those who voted for Bush would say that their obligations, to family and friends and community, were more important to them than personal freedom. That's certainly the case in my neighborhood. What calculations could Brad DeLong do with that?Brian Leiter once linked approvingly if half in jest to an article or a blog entry by some professor or other that claimed to analyze the IQ's of the populations of various Red states. Conclusion: the peasants are stupid. I was I think the only one I know of to point out that the post and the link to it were obscene.I wonder how many of you spend time in college towns. Do you know how humiliating life can be for the locals in such places?...I'm sick to death of technocrats and libertarians, of liberal yuppies who destroy what's left of old neighborhoods and then wonder why their neighbors, the little old ladies, vote for Bush. But liberals are the public face of hard-core economic conservatism: of the logic of the market. DeLong and Krugman would be happy to have a population of corporate drones with really good health insurance.The peasants don't expect life to be easy. They don't want much. But they don't like being condescended to by people who want to help them out of pity....For the record I'm an atheist. But given a choice between spending time with someone who's thinks the meaning of life comes from understanding a calculation and someone who thinks it comes from the study of a book, I'll gladly choose the latter. And 'Riverbend' has a wider range of reference, a better prose style in her second language and is, frankly, more intelligent than Ophelia Benson.And I'm sorry if the above quote is dirty pool. The problem with my country is very simple: college professors don't know how to sit at the same table with truckers and taxi drivers; and that's not the taxi drivers' fault. Whites are not allowed any more to speak for blacks; men can no longer comfortably be assumed to speak for women, or straights for gays; but the educated may speak freely to each other about the rest of the country without acknowledging that there might be a problem.Well there is one.

# posted by scorpiorising : 11:06 AM |

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