Justin Schwartz wrote:
>
>Chuck was
> saying that all right wingers in govt were mediocre idiots. I listed a few I
> thought were pretty smart.
>
My own feeling, not developed in any detail, is that all judgements in terms of intellectual capacity (low or high as the case might be) belong in the same order if not the same genus as conspiracy theories. They turn the focus away from social relations and history to focus on an "x" that is neither measurable nor even very definable.
Carrol
Incidentally, I mentioned this a year or so in reference to Tigar's book on the rise of capitalism -- he gave a really wonderful quotation from Diderot that was nevertheless not wholly intelligible without some comment and/or context (What _was_ Diderot's trinity?)and he failed to give a citation. The head of the French dept. here at the time was a Diderot scholar (he had written his dissertaion on Diderot), and shortly after I asked him about it (and he was unable to identify it) he attended a conference and met his old dissertation director, also a specialist on Diderot. I could have made real use of the quotation in my teaching if Tigar had just given the least hint of its location and some gloss on Diderot's metaphor. Decades later I'm still a bit pissed off at that.