Pre-Wiscon PSA

I am flying in this afternoon!

There is a chance that I'm getting a cold, so ask first before hugs even if we are on a hugging basis.

I am still a tiny bit weepy about recent upheavals and may need a good bit of alone time. But I am really looking forward to seeing all of you whom I know!

(no subject)

My first boss, when I was in college in Japan, was a Canadian dude who liked to talk smack about how Canadians were smarter than Americans. He thought he could get away with it because I was also Canadian and would understand. (In fact, he could get away with it because he was twice my age and in a position of authority over me.) He couldn't read or write Japanese despite having lived in Japan for nine years or so, and his speaking ability was genuinely lousy, and he sexually harassed the cashier at the donut shop, so I did not have much respect for his claims of intellectual superiority.

That's the main thing I thought about when I read this Macleans article about anti-intellectualism in the US.

Anti-intellectualism is a real problem. The fact that a lot of people don't believe in evolution, and don't believe in climate change, is probably going to have serious consequences in the future. But that's not actually related to the word "folks" (which is the friendliest, most gender-inclusive word I know to address a group: "Folks at the computers there, please watch your language.") And anti-intellectualism isn't the same thing as the breakdown of public education in high-poverty districts, which is above all a poverty problem and not an education problem. The wealthy congresspersons who talk about evolution being lies from the pit of hell are the same people who vote against minimum wage increases and school lunches and education funding; but they do so because of an ideology and a political climate that's much bigger than who values knowledge, or science, or education. (My experience is that the southern conservative upper-midde-class actually places an enormous value on education in their personal lives and for their families, and raises a lot of really smart homeschooled or private-schooled kids who can read and write at a very high level even if they do think the earth is 4,000 years old.)

The fact that conservatives play both sides of the intellectualism coin -- "Those people over there are poor because they don't make the effort to educate themselves" at the same time as "We don't need those elite people in ivory towers thinking they know better than we do" -- is interesting, and deserves a better article than that one to explore it.