{"id":10120,"date":"2007-11-03T12:25:39","date_gmt":"2007-11-03T18:25:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/?p=10120"},"modified":"2007-11-03T12:25:39","modified_gmt":"2007-11-03T18:25:39","slug":"the-enemy-within-craigc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/?p=10120","title":{"rendered":"The Enemy Within (CraigC)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stephen Rittenberg has a wonderful post up at Horsefeathers<\/a> in which he discusses the dangers posed by “wordsmith intellectuals,” as he calls them. He draws a line from the intellectuals of the 19th Century, through Stalin\/Hitler apologist H.G. Wells, right up to today’s apologists for muslim fanatics. Here are a couple of particularly trenchant passages:<\/p>\n

Our wordsmith utopians disavow their own aggression. They feel, they care, they empathize, they are concerned about the children. They understand other cultures and wouldn\u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00e2\u201e\u00a2t think of using force to defend ours. They\u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00e2\u201e\u00a2d deploy overvalued, magically invested words to resolve all conflicts. Their own sense of identity is sentimental. They weep, they deeply sympathize, they admire themselves for being virtuous. When utopian tyrants\u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00e2\u20ac\u009dStalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro– behave murderously, it is rationalized as a temporary measure in pursuit of noble goals. Anyway, utopia requires scapegoats to blame for its failure to materialize. Just as Wells trivialized Hitler and Stalin\u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00e2\u201e\u00a2s violence, so do contemporary leftists minimize jihadi violence and blame Israel.<\/em><\/p>\n

Utopians are nostalgic not for anything real, but for a fantasy<\/strong>, a garden of Eden in which painful differences of talent, looks, fortune, do not exist, an egalitarian paradise where sexual and aggressive conflicts don’t exist and all problems are solvable with words. As long as human beings feel injured by their very condition, their own mortality, their own vulnerability, as long as reality includes blows to one\u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00e2\u201e\u00a2s sense of childhood grandiosity and entitlement, the fantasy of socialist paradise will persist.<\/em><\/p>\n

Read the whole thing<\/a>, as someone once said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stephen Rittenberg has a wonderful post up at Horsefeathers in which he discusses the dangers posed by “wordsmith intellectuals,” as he calls them. He draws a line from the intellectuals of the 19th Century, through Stalin\/Hitler apologist H.G. Wells, right up to today’s apologists for muslim fanatics. Here are a couple of particularly trenchant passages: Our wordsmith utopians disavow their own aggression. They feel, they care, they empathize, they are<\/p>\n

Read More<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":590,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/590"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10120\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}