Good piece from my old colleague Brink Lindsay that underscores a source of frequent annoyance & amusement for me, which is how much of what passes as intellectual work on the right is play acting for an audience that can’t tell it’s reading vapid nonsense. open.substack.com/pub/theunpop... - ThreadSky

normative.bsky.social • 48 days ago

Good piece from my old colleague Brink Lindsay that underscores a source of frequent annoyance & amusement for me, which is how much of what passes as intellectual work on the right is play acting for an audience that can’t tell it’s reading vapid nonsense. https://open.substack.com/pub/theunpopulist/p/the-postliberal-delusion-that-trump?r=5g74e&utm_medium=ios

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burtonad.bsky.social•48 days ago

Interesting. Pair it with this (longer) essay, which I read this morning. There is nothing new under the sun… https://bsky.app/profile/sethcotlar.bsky.social/post/3lovrleo7bk2h

normative.bsky.social•48 days ago

There’s a kind of cycle where the middlebrow right picks an intellectual villain. In the 90s it was postmodernism. More recently it was critical race theory. In the piece Brink is picking apart it’s Karl Popper, of all people, who anticommunist conservatives used to rather like.

normative.bsky.social•48 days ago

In basically evey case, a cartoon version of the villain gets presented by writers who don’t much understand the school of thought they’re attacking, with the goal of flattering a semiliterate audience that they’ve grasped the lofty battle of ideas behind the scenes.

jefffreyspies.bsky.social•48 days ago

I’ve seen someone refer to it as the Quillette Syndrome

ealluia.bsky.social•48 days ago

I have long called this intellectual shadowboxing. I specifically associate it with evangelical pseudointellectualism, but it also exists as a common problem you see on the broader right. I think it worsened when evangelical leaders rose to prominence within Republican politics.

ealluia.bsky.social•48 days ago

They cycle through these relatively fast. It might be situational ethics one day and the Frankfurt school the next, but the central feature is a totally off-base intellectual history that conveniently serves as a strawman for their enemies, sounds erudite, and is easy to summarize and grasp.

ealluia.bsky.social•48 days ago

The central lesson in all of these for the lay audience is that they are smart, so you can trust that reasonable people who know a lot think just what they do, and that their enemies are some combination of lost, ignorant, and corrupted by immoral impulses.

normative.bsky.social•48 days ago

It always has a whiff of the teenager conspicuously toting around a pipe he can barely smoke and a copy of “L'Être et le néant” he’s definitely going to read eventually.

iwasid.bsky.social•47 days ago

Offered without comment ...

https://unherd.com/battle-of-ideas-student-under-26-complimentary-subscription/

sfomel.bsky.social•48 days ago

Alexander Dugin explicitly: "National-Bolsheviks… accept absolutely and without reservations Popper’s dualist view and are totally in agreement with his classification. However, in contrast, they consider themselves to be the resolute enemies of the ‘open society’ and its philosophical foundations…"

ealluia.bsky.social•48 days ago

Something I've been fascinated by and dispirited with is how the idea of a "paradox of tolerance" developed in online discourse into a philosophical insight you can specifically attribute to Karl Popper rather than banal intuition any reasonably educated adult should land on with a little thought.

ealluia.bsky.social•48 days ago

Anyway, because this happened, you sometimes see conservatives who really dislike ideas associated with liberal tolerance learn the same lesson, but react to it by trying to come up with ways of hating Karl Popper - now anointed the philosopher of tolerance. It's surreal.

dukakisdude.bsky.social•48 days ago

Recently had the pleasure of sitting through a Texas legislative hearing where witness testimony revolved around a grand pedophile conspiracy that started with Alfred Kinsey

theangelofhistory.bsky.social•48 days ago

There are four routes to getting to what social reactionaries want. 1. A massive reversal in opinion about womens’ education & economic role 2. A massive spike in religiosity 3. A massive, almost cataclysmic reversal in knowledge 4. A Iranian style minority seizure of the state & public square.

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