What’s Missing From This List?

An online poll is making the rounds.

How long you will live.
How much money you will make in your lifetime.
The NAME of the person best suited to you.
How happy you will be compared to the average human.
What profession you will spend most of your life doing.
Where will you live for most of your life.
How many children you will have.
How you will die.

Professor Bainbridge points out that the site originating the poll seems to be directed at a younger audience and the constraints of the thought experiment make the questions inherently personal.

Even so, don’t these questions seem tremendously self-centered?

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Call Now! Pride for the Low, Low Price of $19.95!

I started this post as a comment to Dan’s previous post but it grew overly long so I decided to make it a separate post. Dan asked an important question:

…do people of this generation or people in general seem to show more pride in today’s era than in past eras? Or do you think I am noticing something that isn’t there?

Most of the world’s traditional religious and secular moral systems view pride as the most dangerous emotion. Modern research bears this out. I think the dynamics of modern life make us very prone as individuals to rationalize our unearned pride.

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Palin as the Leftwing Anti-Christ

I started this post as a followup to my previous post on Palin hatred, and then I noticed this Instapundit post on the cluelessness of reporters who cover religion. I think it’s pretty safe to say that most reporters don’t know much about religion and neither do most academics or leftists in general.

That would certainly explain the following bizarre claim which I have seen more than once.

Palin is not bright, amoral, and divorced from reality. She is also a devotee of an apocalyptic toxic fundie xian cult, Assembly of god. I’d be afraid that President Palin would decide to help jesus bring about the End Times by launching our 5,000 nuclear weapons. Jesus is 2,000 years late and the Rapturists are getting more and more frantic about his nonappearance as time goes on.

WTF? The Assemblies of God is an apocalyptic cult? Since when? Isn’t like half of Kansas Assemblies of God? What, are they sneaking up on the missile silos?

I’d like to say that this is a rare comment but it isn’t.

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Palin Wars Part V: The Leftists Strike Back

Sometimes the Internet gives you a present.

While writing my previous post on Palin and the Left’s Status-Anxiety, I worried that I wouldn’t make my case sufficiently because I didn’t have room to add in any examples of the kind of leftist comments on Palin I thought supported my hypothesis.

Thankfully, Google’s inbound link service alerted me to a link from a leftwing blog in which virtually every comment provides a very good example of the kind of emotion-driven reasoning that I have written about in the Palin post and elsewhere.

I think there is fodder for several posts in some of the comments, but for now let’s just follow the main theme.

The parent post is hosted at Science Blogs and was written by Ed Brayton who describes himself as

… a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of Michigan Citizens for Science and co-founder of The Panda’s Thumb

He’s apparently some kind of professional atheist and science journalist.

(Let me just say, that I always get a little shiver of fear when I read someone like Brayton. I can’t help thinking, “that could have been me.”

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Palin Dumb? History Says, “Nope!”

In this previous post, commentator Mauro made this rather typical statement in regard to Palin and Tea Party members.

Those people in the middle states aren’t “educated elites” (and this is by no means a generalization of *all* people in those middle states), and they have resentment toward those who are more qualified to make rational decisions…And this is *bad*, because it turns out that yes, we college-educated guys *are* so smart, and we don’t go burning Korans or blindly invading Middle Eastern countries when we’re angry.

Is Mauro correct? Do the “college educated” (by which he clearly means leftist intellectuals) have a track record of making better decisions than the kind of middle-class people who support Palin and join the Tea Party?

Well, yes and no. It’s pretty safe to say leftists don’t burn Korans. Instead, they burn American flags and drop crucifixes in urine. Plus, its true that they never, ever fight for anyone’s freedom from tyranny, for any reason.

However, leftists do make their own class of colossally bad decision whose consequences dwarf those made by people like Palin and the Tea Party members.

Leftists make irrational decisions that arise from their own intellectual hubris. All leftists (and most intellectuals) vastly overestimate their individual and collective understanding of complex, poorly understood and hard to predict phenomena. In every generation leftists have claimed to precisely and accurately understand something that in hindsight they clearly did not. Likewise, in every generation, there were people much like the modern Tea Party or Palin supporters, i.e., religious, supposedly uneducated, dullard bourgeois who told the leftists they were wrong.

In many major areas, history showed that the supposedly ignorant and unimaginative bourgeois proved correct in the end.

For reasons of brevity lets look at the two biggest leftwing-intellectual idiocies of the last century: Marxism and Freudianism.

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