Human Behavior

Palin as the Leftwing Anti-Christ

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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

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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!”

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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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Fisking Mauro, Part 1: Raising Beyond One’s Station

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I am not a big Palin fan. I am an atheist and not a social conservative in any meaningful sense. In my estimation, her chief virtue is that she annoys and enrages all the right people. However, I do recognize that she does honestly represent a wide and vital section of the America polity. I think the left’s inability to see Palin as a legitimate political figure reveals a great deal about their insular mindset and their deep need to see themselves as superior to other people even at the cost of a loss of political power.

In my previous post on Palin hate as leftwing status-anxiety, an anti-Palin comment by a Mauro jumped out at me as a prime example of how leftists think about themselves and the rest of us. I wanted to go through it in detail to try and explain where these cognitive distortions come from.

I’ll break this up into several posts. In this post, I will examine how Mauro’s comment reveals his intrinsically elitist world view:

Mauro starts with:

… I think that the real issue with her is that she’s basically a walking cliché.

and followed it by:

Honestly, I can’t remember any of her positions right now…

His further comments demonstrate that he really doesn’t understand anything what Palin thinks or even what she has stated. If he doesn’t have even basic knowledge of her positions, how can he say Palin is a cliche?

Easy: When applied to person, a cliche is just a euphemism for a stereotype. Stereotypes are at best statistical descriptions of groups of people that exist solely in the minds of the individuals holding the stereotypes. In short, stereotypes are simplified cartoons that don’t reflect the real people that they purport to describe.

Mauro is clearly working from a cartoonish stereotype. He doesn’t know anything about Palin other than she is not one of his imagined leftist elite. So where does he get his stereotype from in the first place?

It’s not her ideas that are problematic, but her middle-America anti-intellectualism and superstition that is a problem,[emph. added]

Here we see Mauro’s highly typical leftist elitism in its purest form. It’s not Palin’s ideas that he sees as dangerous but simply who she is. By superstition he means “religious” and by anti-intellectualism he means, “refuses to acknowledge how brilliant and infallible people like Mauro are.”

Mauro problem with Palin isn’t that she is unusual, Mauro’s problem with Palin is that he believes her to be an ordinary middle-class American who are themselves unfit to influence public policy

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Quote of the Day

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Any system susceptible to a Black Swan will eventually blow up.

–Nassim Taleb [Link is a pdf.]