...as evidenced by the drop in percentage of Americans who agreed with the factual statement “the movie and television industries are pretty much run by Jews”?
It used to be that people felt proud of knowing the score, of understanding the way of the world, of being clued in to how things work.
Today, though, it’s cool to be ignorant. I don’t think it’s just people who actually know the facts about Hollywood and lied to the ADL to be safe.
Judging from comments by countless anonymous people on the Internet, a lot of people are proud of being out of touch with what’s happening. They want you to be aware that they’ve cultivated their cluelessness. It’s really very strange for somebody like me who can remember back to the late 1960s. That era had its flaws, to be sure, but willful ignorance was not one of them.
***
Exactly.
How many arguments have I had on the web (Damian Penny’s comments section is particularly bad for this) with idiots who — after I’ve made a matter of fact, everybody-knows statement about the importance of preachers/barbershops/grandmothers/basketball/hair in Black culture, for instance — leap at the opportunity to engage in some moral exhibitionism:
“Do you have proof to back up that racist statement? Any studies? Any statistics??”
Of course not, you dickhead.
Unlike you, I didn’t waste the last good years of my life being brainwashed in academia; I lived with and worked with and talked with actual, normal human beings (professors definitely don’t count) and that’s how I formed my knowledge of how the world really works. Through the evidence of my senses and my own personal experiences.
I do not rely upon junk science or faux history or Marxist theory.
Most of these commenters and bloggers are clearly jealous of the simple fact that I’m smarter and more worldly than they are, that all their “education” and backpacking around the world actually made them dumber than I am — but they can’t admit that.
(PS: What’s the point of backpacking around the world if you can’t admit to yourself, let alone your friends, family and strangers on the web when you finish, that different people in different countries are different? Wasn’t that kind of the point? Actually no: today the point of aimless bourgeious gap year wandering is to a) try different kinds of booze, b) sleep around and c) reaffirm in spite of all evidence to the contrary everything you’ve already been taught your whole life: that “deep down, we’re all the same…”
(How much energy do these people expell trying desperately not to notice, for example, in general, that Asians and natives can’t handle their booze as well as Caucasians and Blacks? If you just accept this stuff, life is so much easier and less stressful. But then I supposed lots of useless stressing over trivial provides Leftists with the semi-satisfying sensation that they’re engaged in something resembling work…)
Too humiliating. Better to play the “studies & statistics” card.
UPDATE:
Nuts! I’ve been trying without success to arrange a bunch of English words into this precise order for about 10 years now:
Nancy Carpentier Brown observes:
“Our current culture holds the twin paradoxical views that racial diversity is gloriously wonderful, but racial descriptions of individuals are taboo.
Celebrating diversity is good; describing diversity is bad.
We should acknowledge that people are of different races and be glad, but not glad enough to wonder what those races are.”
