The New York Times today has a piece on National Review, and its alleged decline in erudition. It looks to me, on reading the piece, that it is another in the Palin-bashing thread of the left. Erudition and intellectual power on the left have virtually disappeared in an academic world exposed by The Sokol Hoax. Books have been written about the implications of the Hoax for intellectual life in the 21st century.
Now, we have elected an alleged intellectual as president. The Republican Party has been attacked as “anti-intellectual. Sarah Palin has been the focus of some of these stories. Not everyone agrees with the premise.
the left has long been the welcoming home of fashionable postmodern nonsense like deconstructivism and moral and cultural relativism. Under these doctrines there are supposed to be different kinds of “logics” (male logic, female logic, &.) and none is more valid than the other. All of them are simply clever masks for a brutal competition for wealth and power. This is a profoundly anti-intellectual strain of pseudo-thought which avoids the need to take any arguments seriously, because such ideas simply be accused of corruption. When Sandra Harding called Newton’s Principia a “rape manual,” she did so from the left, not from the right. And the cultural relativists who demand that we treat the dismal productions of barbaric cultures as the intellectual equivalents of Shakespeare and Homer—and tars as “racist” anyone who suggests that some cultures and their mores are better than others—are fundamentally, even proudly anti-intellectual.
We’ll see how the “intellectual” president does.
The most common delusion of the intellectual today is the global warming hysteria, which is reaching a stage where facts appear to be irrelevant. Typically, it was a British newspaper that called attention to the errors.
A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.
This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China’s official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its “worst snowstorm ever”. In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.
So what explained the anomaly? GISS’s computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.
So the data was merely extrapolated from September to October. No matter that the time is fall when temperatures are falling in temperate climates.
In fact, there is some evidence that we may be entering a new Ice Age due to decreased sunspot activity.
The intellectuals will persist in their delusion until glaciers begin to appear in upstate New York.