Before we get started, a huge “Thank You” to Johnna Cornett who reworked Cogito! into this nifty new look. Also a big thanks to my wife, Denise, who took the photo in the masthead during a trip to Acadia National … Continue reading
Category Archives: Anti-intellectualism
Now that the triumph of Barak Obama at the polls is a little more than a week behind us, I have sufficiently come down from the adrenaline high of the election to think clearly about what this could mean for … Continue reading
Let’s be honest; very few people read this blog (or would cop to reading it), and even fewer leave comments. So it was with some surprise that I saw a comment awaiting moderation on my recent post about the need … Continue reading
The June 26, 2008 issue of The Nation has a brilliant, ringing address by E. L. Doctorow to a joint meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society on the theme of “The Public … Continue reading
From the website of the American Bookseller’s Foundation for Free Expression comes this interesting item: On March 25, the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE) condemned a new Indiana law that requires mainstream bookstores to register with the government … Continue reading
Anti-intellectualism is an American tradition; for whatever reasons, the knowledgeable individual, the brilliant thinker will have their detractors who are not so much in disagreement with what they think or believe, but with their presence. Religious dynamics have driven much … Continue reading
Burning a library, especially an ancient one, is usually seen as the act of ignorant, barbaric, people with the intellect of a crow bar. The Library of Alexandria is the canonical example; burned once by the Romans, and later again … Continue reading
The intellectual legacy of the western world has few equals to the discipline of science. The careful, sometimes chaotic winnowing of facts from the chaff of traditional hearsay and bias is, in the words of a good scientist friend of … Continue reading
By Michael P. Jensen Guest Blogger Disasters and political problems have led to some very dumb statements by some very thoughtless people. • Televangelist Pat Robertson blames the debut of homosexual comedian/actor Ellen Degeneres’s television talk show for the insurgency … Continue reading
NASA scientist Dr. James Hansen has leaped into the headlines after he made allegations that he was subjected to political pressure to keep him from expressing his findings on global climate change. Dr. Hansen, director of the agency’s Goddard Institute … Continue reading