Tag Archives: intellectuals

I Agree with Rick Santorum on Something

Finally, Rick Santorum says something I can agree with. Concerning the right-wing base of the Republican Party, he recently said the following: We will never have the elite, smart people on our side, . . . Santorum’s explanation for this? “[B]ecause … Continue reading

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Christopher Hitchens’s Opiate: Not Religion, But Alcohol

Marx was right. Religion is an opiate. But Sophocles was right as well. In the furnace of this world, it’s understandable if, Oedipus-like, a person avoids too naked and persistent a confrontation with the world by plucking out her eyes. … Continue reading

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Chris Hedges the Prophet on Print Culture Turning to Image Culture

Former New York Times war correspondent, Chris Hedges, has, over the past couple of years, taken on the mantle of a secular prophet—an emperor has no clothes truthteller—writing scathing (and I think powerful) books and essays documenting the messes that we find ourselves … Continue reading

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Are Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek Authoritarian Leftists?

At Dissent, Alan Johnson worries that two revered intellectual theorists, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, are increasingly sounding—it’s hard to be polite about this—old school authoritarian: I propose to write a series of posts on what I will call the “new authoritarian … Continue reading

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Atlases Shrug: Honors Students Boycott Arizona State University

In response to its Latino targeting anti-immigration law, honors students from outside of Arizona are ditching their plans of attending Arizona State University. This today at Inside Higher Ed: President Robert E. Shelton released a letter in which he said: “We … Continue reading

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Did Sarah Palin write this Amazon review?

I thought that the below Amazon review of Michael Hyde’s The Life-Giving Gift of Acknowledgment  (Purdue 2005), in its unironic anti-intellectuality and impatience with anything not conventionally “normal,” inadvertently channelled Sarah Palin. It was as if the person had accidentally walked into the … Continue reading

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Mike Wallace’s Interview with Reinhold Niebuhr (1958)

It doesn’t embed, but I think that this Reinhold Niebuhr interview with Mike Wallace in 1958 is interesting: http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/wallace/niebuhr_reinhold.html

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Jacob Weisberg’s Advice to Obama: Pick REALLY SMART People for Your CABINET

Here’s a novel idea. How about acting as if intelligence and experience actually matters in staffing the people around the president? Unlike President Bush, Barack Obama is intellectually confident and won’t mind having super smart people (like himself) surrounding him.  Jacob Weisberg, … Continue reading

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