> He displays his usual depth here:
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/11/opinion/11brooks.html?hp
>
> Now maybe it's Alzheimer's (mine) but i'm totally lost in this argument.
> He says that number people support Bush and paragraph people support
> Kerry. Number people like hard clarity (like Bush) and paragraph people
> like post modern ambiguity (like Kerry). Whatever. Then he observes that
> 98% of academics support the demos....because they're paragraph people.
> Last time I looked, half of academia included Physics, Math, Life
> Science, Economics, etc. Plenty of numbers there.
>
> What am I missing here? Why is it enough for a right winger to be a
> moron to get published in the NYT?
Let me postulate that this is just another example of the polarization between hardcore liberals and conservatives that has degenerated into a bizarre form of essentialism. The rest of the world can see no difference in this Lilliputian battle between "Big-Endians" and "Small-Endians," but thos einvolved continue to invent rheotorica about how each side is different from the other. I only had to listen to Alan Colmes on the radio to be reminded of this. It seems that the rabid liberal side of this current battle believes that liberals are essentially smarter and more intelligent than conservatives. One caller to Colmes' show tried to cite a bizarre "study" that used some IQ test to find that people in "red states" are less intelligent than folks in "blue states." This is, of course, the worst form of folk demographics. On liberal talk radio these days there is this constant bashing of Bush and his supporters as stupid. This is the liberal essentialist equivalent of all the bullshit that conservatives say about liberals.
So I was thinking about this tonight as an anarchist and concluded that the most fun an outsider could have with this situation is to point out that both sides of this epic battle are basically the same thing. The new book from Counterpunch, "Dime's Worth of Difference", has an apt title indeed.
Chuck