Category archive: Pseudo-Intellectuals
Dissecting progressive arrogance, Part II
By Chuck Roger • July 8th, 2011 12:00 am
The Clear Thinking blog is on hiatus and will return with new posts on July 18, 2011. Meanwhile, please enjoy this re-post of the “Dissecting progressive arrogance” series. More “Dissecting Progressive Arrogance” I, III, IV, V, VI, VII By Chuck Rogér Yesterday, we examined part of a Financial Times piece and found progressive arrogance only [...]
Programming Scientists to Perform Social Engineering
By Chuck Roger • June 14th, 2011 12:00 am
Originally at National Association of Scholars By Chuck Rogér An Arizona State University professor wants to train physical scientists to be social engineers. Political science professor David Guston contends that “stakeholders” in academia and industry should work with consumers and the feds to manage the “societal implications” of “environmental health and safety issues” surrounding certain technological [...]
Obi-Wan Berwick Rears His Head Again
By Chuck Roger • April 20th, 2011 12:00 am
Originally in American Thinker, April 19, 2011 By Chuck Rogér “These are not the droids you’re looking for” With those words and a barely perceptible rippling of the fingers, in Star Wars: A New Hope, Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi convinces two Empire Stormtroopers to overlook the obvious. R2-D2 and C-3PO, the androids in question, sit [...]
Of Joseph Stiglitz, by Joseph Stiglitz, for Joseph Stiglitz
By Chuck Roger • April 19th, 2011 12:00 am
Originally titled “The Spreading of Economic Fallacy” in American Thinker, April 15, 2011 By Chuck Rogér The world of academia provides a comfy home to progressives. And when one of the critters writes in Vanity Fair magazine, gems of “thought” tend to emerge. In a new Vanity Fair article, “Of the 1%, by the 1%, [...]
Obama’s head of Medicare and Medicaid again flaunts his ruling-class arrogance
By Chuck Roger • March 31st, 2011 12:00 am
By Chuck Rogér President Obama’s head of Medicare and Medicaid, the contemptible Dr. Donald Berwick, crawled out of his Beltway cave a few weeks ago to testify at a hearing of the House Ways and Means Committee. My hearing coverage notes got buried in a stack of stuff during the recent Clear Thinking website redesign. So [...]
Knocking the Constitution: an exercise in enlightened, academic arrogance
By Chuck Roger • February 2nd, 2011 12:30 am
Calling the U.S. Constitution “The Commandments” may seem like something that an overly enthusiastic, strict interpretationist might do. And that’s exactly what Harvard history professor Jill Lepore implies in an article in The New Yorker, titled “The Commandments.” Lepore makes much of the allegedly shoddy treatment dealt the actual document in the decades after ratification. [...]
‘Journalist’ uses the Giffords shootings to disparage the Tea Party
By Chuck Roger • January 12th, 2011 12:30 am
The Tea Party has an “obsession with the Constitution.” Presumably this is a bad thing, according to Gideon Rachman, columnist for Financial Times. Rachman goes out of his way to point out that what murderer Jared Loughner’s “ramblings most suggest is a troubled mind. Anybody who lists both Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto as among [...]
Republicans squander first shot at exposing Donald Berwick, Obama’s arrogant head of Medicare and Medicaid
By Chuck Roger • November 23rd, 2010 1:41 am
Will the new Republican House majority scrutinize the past history of Obama appointees who were slipped through during congressional recesses? If Republicans’ pitiful performance during last week’s appearance of Donald Berwick before Senate Finance Committee is any indication, then there is little chance that the Messiah’s “fundamental transformation” of America will be stopped. Leftwing zealot [...]
Dissecting progressive arrogance, Part II
By Chuck Roger • October 19th, 2010 2:21 am
More “Dissecting Progressive Arrogance” I, III, IV, V, VI, VII Yesterday, we examined part of a Financial Timespiece and found progressive arrogance only two paragraphs into the article. We’ll return to that piece later this week. But today, let’s introduce another exhibit. In an article titled “A dramatic shift in West Virginia,” Clive Crook (yes, [...]
Pushing Junk Science on Children
By Chuck Roger • October 7th, 2010 2:47 am
Originally in American Thinker, October 6, 2010. Humans have angered Mother Nature. Our species must stop multiplying, give up our addiction to huge-screen HDTVs, stop eating so many steer, and travel on twenty-pound electric tricycles forty miles at a time between charging stations. Otherwise, we are doomed. This is a story about the ruling class [...]
Large-scale behavioral manipulation by government
By Chuck Roger • September 22nd, 2010 2:48 am
Nowadays, winning the Nobel Prize in economics recognizes one’s talent for embracing the arrogant, condescending attitude of a big government, central planning elitist. Nobel laureate and New York Times resident sage Paul Krugman illustrates the point. I’ve discussed Krugman’s ideas here. Today let’s turn to a reliable source of progressive foolishness, Financial Times. FT brings [...]
Another global warming alarmist calls for civilization to move backwards
By Chuck Roger • September 10th, 2010 3:01 am
As noted in my 9-7-10 post, Financial Times has become a hangout for advocates of global warming alarmism. In today’s post we discuss the latest installment in FT-hosted lunacy. University of Oxford professor of energy Dieter Helm makes [free registration required] two absurd statements to open his recent FT article. See if you can detect [...]
Ivy League economic nonsense
By Chuck Roger • August 24th, 2010 3:14 am
The arrogant liberal intellect has a knack for putting on a show. Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz is a showman. I have dissected Stiglitz’s illogic once before, in an early 2009 column titled “Clowns behaving badly.” Presently, we treat the matter of Stiglitz’s recent proclamation in Financial Times that: The blame game continues over who [...]
The radicals are teaching our children
By Chuck Roger • August 6th, 2010 3:39 am
Accuracy in Academia’s Malcolm Kline points out a disturbing statistic. One-quarter of the former members of the national council of the radical anti-American Students for Democratic Society (SDS) “has either worked in academia, guest lectured there or written textbooks.” Earlier this year, I showed how leftwing radicals are commandeering American education. I described a process [...]
Stupid is as stupid says
By Chuck Roger • August 4th, 2010 3:46 am
People say some dumb things. I’ve said my share. But when it comes to sounding truly clueless, over-the-top, shrill, or hyperbolic, liberals win hands down. For instance, take something that ABC substitute news anchor David Muir said recently. …the President marked quite a week in Washington. The [Deepwater Horizon] oil, for now, is finally stopped, [...]
The Cobalt Blue Left
By Chuck Roger • July 21st, 2010 3:09 am
Originally in American Thinker, July 17, 2010. One morning, twenty-seven years ago, I saw daybreak. It seemed as though a crazy painter had stretched a crazy canvas across my window, for an impossibly intense backdrop framed the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Then the sun floated higher, Santa Fe’s sky ignited, and I was hooked on [...]
‘Leader with a Plan’ Invites a Health Care Nightmare
By Chuck Roger • June 23rd, 2010 3:25 am
Originally in American Thinker, June 6, 2010. The American people are too simple to choose from “an array of products” in “a system as massive and complex as health care. That is for leaders to do.” Behold the words of Donald Berwick — doctor, Harvard professor, and Obama’s nominee to run the Centers for Medicare [...]
America needs to hit rock bottom
By Chuck Roger • June 3rd, 2010 9:01 pm
The government “stimulus” spending theory of progressive English economist John Maynard Keynes was soundly discredited not only by FDR’s Great Depression follies, but also by LBJ’s Great Society and the Nixon-Carter nonsense of the 1960s and 1970s. Nevertheless, as economist Robert Higgs observes: Now [Keynesian spending] has come roaring back. Of course, the general public, [...]
