We make ourselves stupid...

Sarah Hoyt:

...Look, I'm not going to consider whether or not communists can be very smart. Maybe they can. I've never met any, though.

Oh, raw IQ, sure. But people don't move and choose through raw IQ. My brother is brilliant. He's also a deeply conventional man. This mean his thoughts move only in the "approved thoughts for brilliant people" mode of the last century - that is, leftist...

We see this all around us. People locked into the thought-forms of the past. That in itself is self-imposed stupidity. But it is much worse for those people now, because the old conglomerations of beliefs simply don't work any more. They used to work moderately well,.

The Blue Model, for instance, has been the dominant paradigm of the 20th century. And it worked quite well, though I suspect it was not the best model to follow. The Republican platform for all my life has basically been that we can make the Democrat model work better than they can. People who thought outside the paradigm were "crazies and bomb-throwers." "Neanderthals." "Kooks."

But to defend the model now you have to make yourself stupid. You have to fill your brain with "road closed" signs. Same with believing in CAGW. (Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming.) Or believing in top-down management of any kind. Thinking that government (or big business) can "manage" the economy. Or that the WH can "manage" our diets. These are all crazy ideas, and you have to make yourself stupid to think them and ignore evidence to the countrary.

You have to make yourself stupid to think that people can just re-define a ten-thousand year old institution like marriage and not get ramifying unforeseen consequences. Or, more generally, to re-define anything, and expect everything else to just keep going slog the same.