Comments on: High-IQ stupidity

By: ezra abrams

ezra abrams — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 22:39:03 +0000

in case you are wondering why no one comments on this post, which suggest few readers…
the firt few paragraphs are incomprehensible to soneone who doesn’t already know all the dramatix personae, but they do show off the worst sin of a writer, showing off
the remainder of the post is so long, and such navel gazing…..
KISSaH (keep it simple, stupid, and humble)

By: Sunday Reading « zunguzungu

Sunday Reading « zunguzungu — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 05:20:23 +0000

[...] High-IQ stupidity: I once heard a female professor of mathematics talk about an encounter she had with a senior colleague soon after taking her first faculty job. He told her that he didn’t think she belonged there because he knew for a fact that women weren’t good at math. Coming from a math professor, of all people, the reasoning is mind-boggling — surely he understood the basics of probability distributions. It could be true that on average women are less capable mathematicians than men and also true that this particular woman was more capable than most men, including a certain professor standing in the hall making an ass of himself at that very moment. [...]

By: Patrick S

Patrick S — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 04:41:37 +0000

I'm with you, man. That Jeff G just makes my head spin. Might be the peyote, might be the prose. Guess I shouldn't have had all that cough syrup.

By: Robert Zimmerman

Robert Zimmerman — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 04:30:23 +0000

Hey, serr8d, I see you're hip to Goldsteinian intentialism, too! As in, read whatever the fuck you want into the text, as long as it makes you look and feel good. But you're right, the post is long and boring. I was kind of depressed about that when I finished it. I feel better now, though — thanks.

I like Goldstein's comment over on PW even more.

Why is it, do you think, that the preferred attack on me is that I'm an intellectual fraud -- this has come from both the left and the right, from academics and lawyers -- ...

Yeah, like Donald Trump. Why do people always wanna call him a clown? And Bernie Madoff. Why is it that everyone — left, right, gay, straight, living, dead, undead, unborn — calls him a crook? There's gotta be a reason!

...and that the driving force behind the charge is that I seem to be able to ape the language of the academy [I didn't suggest anything like "aping"], but that I nevertheless use my (powerful but quite superficial) rhetorical skills in silly, "iconoclastic" [I used the word for his beliefs, not his language] ways to promote intellectually vapid notions (in needlessly dense prose) [yes, like right now] that do little to actually challenge established academic notions about where meaning is to be anchored [who cares?], how interpretation actually works, [none of this has anything to do with my post...] and why these things -- the subversion of which is intended, cynically, as a means toward political ends, and yet has become a marker for contemporary epistemology -- matter outside the rather arcane world of literary theory?

Wow, that's a really loooonnnnggg question! And all I wanted to know was why folks like me and others totally not like me call him an intellectual fraud. Let's see...

If I am "an intellectual fraud, a billowing gasbag of pedantry, hypocrisy, and self-pity, and the perfect poster boy for the puffed-up but ultimately hollow cult of superior intelligence," why spend so much time insisting on it? Clearly I'm not worth the trouble -- especially if you find yourself criticizing my pedantry in a blog post that features fucking footnotes. Right?

But wait, that's kind of a bait and switch, isn't it?

Anyway, it's great to see that all he can come up with is evasive bullshit and lame ad-hominem. Otherwise I'd worry that I missed my target.

By: serr8d

serr8d — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 01:31:32 +0000

Seems your intent was, using some 25-plus entry paragraphs of yawn-inducing fluffery (oh! and those three footnotes are teh icing, my man!), to set-up those last two sentences; two sentences that are nothing more than a run-of-the-mill crescendo of so-obvious LeftLibProgg hatreds. As a matter of fact, I'd guess you wrote those two lines first, then sat around for months consuming no telling how many joints, picking and grinning on your two-string lute, trying to figure out a way to properly get 'em out there without seeming so spiteful, hateful and jealous.

A shame, really. All that work for nothing, as you still come across as insanely spiteful, hateful, jealous, and, unfortunately for your own eggshell ego, easily dismissed.

By: JeffG

JeffG — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 23:04:46 +0000

"He’s also an intellectual fraud, a billowing gasbag of pedantry, hypocrisy, and self-pity, and the perfect poster boy for the puffed-up but ultimately hollow cult of superior intelligence."

That's a keeper for the rotating blurbs, thanks!