Real World Event Discussions

Anti Intellectualism is Killing America

POSTED BY: Magonsdaughter
UPDATED: Monday, July 13, 2026 01:26
VIEWED: 26774
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JO753

Sunday, August 16, 2015 12:32 AM

Sorry, I wuznt really finished with my previous post but had to do sumthing else, so didnt want to looz it. Posted with the intent uv editing it asap.

A few thingz about fonetic vs nonfonetic languajez:

Even if there were no other languajez to compare English to, the expens iz real. A theoretic ideal orthografy iz the best way to juj rather than thoze for other languajez.

Az I per the added stuf in the above post, I agree that bad spelling iz not the fundamental cauze uv our bad lojik, but it duznt help. You can postulate that human speciez iz jeneticly prone to nonsens, but re-enforsing this tendensy in our critical early formativ yirz iz obviously a bad idea.

The most common example peepl think uv for 'eazy to learn' spelling iz Spanish. But its actually very sloppy, with more deviationz from the fonetic
prinsipl than the number uv soundz it haz! Italian iz much better, but still less than perfect. Same with Polish and Russian. I dont know about Korean and a few other languajez that claim to be fonetic.

Then therez relijun, superstition, constant false info and bad lojik being pumped into our hedz from day 1. All that plus our parents needing to direct us with only 'bekuz I say so' makes it a crapshoot az to wether we will develop any sort uv reliable lojik befor the sement sets.

Given that, you cant claim that a fonetic orthografy woud be no help in improving the level uv lojik in the jeneral public. It can only help, but how much iz a 0 to 100% propozition for each individual.

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DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early

http://www.nooalf.com

1KIKI

Sunday, August 16, 2015 2:36 AM

"You talk about China. It wuz stagnent for 5,000 yirz and their low literacy rates were a key part uv that."

During that time Europe and Western Russia were inhabited by warring tribes that had no written language at all, and then later by illiterate fiefdoms - despite the fact that Europe adopted various forms of phonetic alphabets. The last (need I mention illiterate) serfs were freed in historically recent times. "Finally, serfdom was abolished by a decree issued by Tsar Alexander II in 1861." Obviously the absence or presence of a phonetic alphabet wasn't enough to alter millennia of European and Russian stagnation.

If you look further through time and across geography, many places had highly advanced historical civilizations - Central Africa, Egypt, Babylonia, Mohenjo-Daro, the ancient Greeks and the imperial Romans, among others, as well as the Chinese. Some of these advanced civilizations even had phonetic alphabets - the Greeks and Romans for example. And yet, the lack of a phonetic alphabet didn't prevent advanced civilizations from developing. Nor did the presence of a phonetic alphabet secure any from falling. And all of the scientific discovery (the Library of Alexandria comes to mind) didn't give them the power to advance to modern levels.

There are many people who've looked at this question - how did Western Europe make such rapid technological advancements in the last 200 years? None that I've read attributed any outcome to the style of alphabet. If you want to read ideas other than your own, let me recommend Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond.

In any case, off of the topic of phonetic alphabets and on to human mentation, I'm going to posit that a large fraction of what we 'know' comes through language, irrespective of the form of our alphabet, or whether we even have one.

Do you believe that being hit by a car is a bad thing? How did that happen? Have you ever been hit by one? Do you know that that being hit by a car is a bad thing from personal, painful, damaging, frightening, experience? I'm guessing statistically - no. Nearly everybody knows it because they've been TOLD so. In fact, even without personal experience, if they have a close call they'll have an adrenalin surge.

Their - our - experience that becomes hardwired into our biology comes to us through words.

And then there's the vast majority of our experience that never rises to the level of awareness - feelings are felt, biological evaluations are adjudicated, adjustments are made and actions taken, without conscious intervention - without words. And so without alphabets.

The form of the alphabet has, in my opinion, less to do with the human experience than the color of the decoration on a cake has to do with the flavor of the batter. In other words - it's completely irrelevant.

ETA: I think we'd be far less destructive and self-destructive if we could bring those automatic responses up to the conscious level and examine them for veracity.

SAGAN: We are releasing vast quantities of carbon dioxide, increasing the greenhouse effect. It may not take much to destabilize the Earth's climate, to convert this heaven, our only home in the cosmos, into a kind of hell.

MAGONSDAUGHTER

Sunday, August 16, 2015 6:00 PM

This idea that the simplification of spelling will increase literacy is kind of a meh concept. Literacy levels depend upon people sending their children to school, that they have the resources to send them there and not have them working to contribute to family income at an early age. If you look at world literacy rates, its pretty easy to see that poor,developing or war torn countries have poor literacy rates.

Literacy is about economics. Not phonetics.

JO753

Monday, August 17, 2015 10:55 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
"You talk about China. It wuz stagnent for 5,000 yirz and their low literacy rates were a key part uv that."

During that time Europe and Western Russia were inhabited by warring tribes that had no written language at all, and then later by illiterate fiefdoms - despite the fact that Europe adopted various forms of phonetic alphabets.

Suppoze the 1st Chineze dynasty desided that universal education, including literasy, wuz a good idea. With so many brainz working a few levelz abuv the requirements uv farming and hunting for thouzandz uv yirz, do you think they woud hav made no progress?

Same with your other examplez in spite uv having very little stability.

Quote:
There are many people who've looked at this question - how did Western Europe make such rapid technological advancements in the last 200 years? None that I've read attributed any outcome to the style of alphabet.

Sertainly therez more to teknolojy than the quality uv the orthografy. Motivating peepl to inovate iz wut made America great. You are missing the undeniable point that a bad orthografy hinderz literasy. Many creativ jeniusez are dyslexic. How many uv them never did anything notable simply bekuz they never learned to read? Do you think there woudnt hav been any more Da Vinciz or Newtonz if it wuz eazier to bekum literate?

Quote:
In any case, off of the topic of phonetic alphabets and on to human mentation, I'm going to posit that a large fraction of what we 'know' comes through language, irrespective of the form of our alphabet, or whether we even have one.

Sivilization never gets very far without sum form uv riting.

This fellow makes a strong case that its essential:

Quote:
The form of the alphabet has, in my opinion, less to do with the human experience than the color of the decoration on a cake has to do with the flavor of the batter. In other words - it's completely irrelevant.

Suppoze the system iz so bad that it takes 50 yirz to learn how to read & rite. Do you think orally passing along information will suffise to get potential sientists and inovatorz up to speed soon enuf to take advantaj uv their most productiv yirz? (and dont forget they are spending a major chunk uv their waking owrz learning to read)

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DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early

http://www.nooalf.com

JO753

Monday, August 17, 2015 11:07 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Magonsdaughter:
This idea that the simplification of spelling will increase literacy is kind of a meh concept.

It may be soon. Wen computerz can dezine new stuf with no human help, it wont matter if Joe Sixpak can read or not. Too bad for him, but the world wont spin any slower. Up until then, we are dependent to sum degree on each person being able to pull hiz own wate on averaj. A guy driving a forklift who cant read the warning that woud hav stopped him from starting the chain reaction that destroyz a factory will hav a negativ net productivity for hiz life.

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DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early

http://www.nooalf.com

1KIKI

Monday, August 17, 2015 11:33 AM

He makes many claims that are on their face untrue.

If he wants to define marriage very narrowly as a written contract spelled out by the state that two people enter into, then he's correct - you can't have marriage per se without written language. But since the dawn of humanity people have made all sorts of commitments to each other without written language - alliances, mutual defense, mutual antagonism, childcare, hunting and gathering parties, teaching and learning, and of course men and women bonding together. He claims you can't have property without a written language, but hundreds of tribes that exist even today understand 'this is my bowl', 'this is my hut' without written language. And so on. I'm not going to dispute each and every false claim, but these two examples demonstrate that his argument contains falsities, and is invalid to that extent. It surprises me that you so unquestioningly accepted what he claimed as true, considering the contrary facts are so obvious.

As for written languages that take decades to learn - that's why only a relatively small fraction of people get PhDs, as each field of study is its own language.

And this; 'Motivating peepl to inovate iz wut made America great' is a myth. What made America great, or at least made a stratum wealthy, was having lots and lots of cheap labor. And killing off the natives so as to take their land helped too, I'm sure.

MAGONSDAUGHTER

Monday, August 17, 2015 1:16 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by JO753:

It may be soon. Wen computerz can dezine new stuf with no human help, it wont matter if Joe Sixpak can read or not. Too bad for him, but the world wont spin any slower. Up until then, we are dependent to sum degree on each person being able to pull hiz own wate on averaj. A guy driving a forklift who cant read the warning that woud hav stopped him from starting the chain reaction that destroyz a factory will hav a negativ net productivity for hiz life.

http://www.nooalf.com

So what?

MAGONSDAUGHTER

Monday, August 17, 2015 1:36 PM

Quote:
In the main we Australians get along pretty well, as long as we don't try to talk to one another about anything complicated. In that event, the name-calling begins. We're at each other's throats.

Then we try and put things back on an even keel, show that we're a top bunch of blokes and move on as best we can. Because what we really want from, say, the Adam Goodes imbroglio is the same thing we want from asylum seekers and climate change: we want the trouble to go away and for everything to be lovely.

Perhaps the most pressing question facing Australian society isn't: are we racists? Because, no matter the call for a national discussion, we're not ready to pull that one apart.

Rather, the question we need to answer first: are we just a bunch of anti-intellectual hicks who can't see beyond labels and slogans?
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Psychology Today published a piece in June that argued anti-intellectualism was the cause of social dysfunction in the United States. To wit, mass shootings, black shootings, climate change denial and the rise of Donald Trump.

It was a sneering and over-reaching piece and the response to it was loudly divided.

When boiled down, the intellectual is simply someone – trakky daks and a paucity of teeth are no barrier – who applies critical thinking to a problem. It takes patience and practice but it's not rocket science.

Yet the view of the intellectual as an airy pontificator remains, and one has to wonder to what extent this serves to discourage people from putting on their thinking caps.

Sure, we may be a clever country as far as scientific and medical innovation go, but we're not fostering generous, creative thinkers who can lead us out of the moral swamp (asylum seekers, Indigenous history and identity, radicalisation of unhappy youth).

Reaction sucks up vastly more oxygen in the public sphere than reflection. And for reflection to do its work, raw-scab opinions must be put aside, at least for the moment, while other possibilities are considered. Not happening. How come?

Five years ago, former Labor MP and bright boy Lindsay Tanner wrote about the value of intellectual life: "Perhaps it's one of those things that should be restricted to consenting adults in private. Few politicians would own up to being an intellectual. In the present age of vacuous populism, intellectual means elitist, theoretical and out of touch. I suspect a new version of Barry Jones would struggle to win community support."

Indeed, 20 years ago, Barry Jones was asked to name the nation's top intellectuals but only managed 17 names.

Joy Damousi? is professor of history in the University of Melbourne's School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, whose research includes the history of intellectual life in Australia, which has flowered periodically.

"During the post-war reconstruction, Australia led the world in social reforms ... and there was a lot of debate around those issues," she says. "Those enduring policies didn't make political or economic sense, but they made social and cultural sense ... there was a commitment to a set of principles and values in terms of what kind of society you wanted to make for the next generation."

For evidence of intellectual decline, Damousi points to the current level of political debate. "Compared to that in France and the US, it's arguably fairly undeveloped, unsophisticated" – a consequence of politicians "electioneering most of the time rather than leading. The whole political landscape has changed".

The complaint that politicians are held captive by a 24-hour news cycle and the tyranny of the sound bite, is old hat. So too the complaint that our leaders lack vision.

Jeff Kennett recently declared Australia has been leaderless for a decade. There's a tendency to shrug and say "way it goes". Not good. The reliance on knee-jerk slogans – "you're either with us or you're against us," to quote our Prime M

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SIGNYM

Monday, August 17, 2015 9:55 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Magonsdaughter:
This idea that the simplification of spelling will increase literacy is kind of a meh concept. Literacy levels depend upon people sending their children to school, that they have the resources to send them there and not have them working to contribute to family income at an early age. If you look at world literacy rates, its pretty easy to see that poor,developing or war torn countries have poor literacy rates.

Literacy is about economics. Not phonetics.

I have to disagree here. Both my husband and MIL were immigrants, and our daughter is brain-damaged, and they ALL had problems learning to read, and husband and MIL never could spell correctly. I also recall other kids in my Catholic school learning how to read, and it was a struggle. When I learned how to read, it was the phonetic method, which works well for words like cat and hat and pan, but then you get to the long "a's" and the "silent e's" and then it gets worse from there. The "SH" sound in fish is easy to explain, but how do you explain it in "action"?

Yes, teaching and literacy is a matter of time and effort balanced against resources, but if the time and effort is greater in one system than another, given equal resources you'll have less success with the more effortful system.

The one statistic that indicates this is the general scores of literacy, math, and science across the globe. ALL English-speaking nations do worse in math and science. Is it because English-speaking peoples are inherently stupid or lazy? Or is it because so much time and effort of every day is put into "I before E, except after C, or when sounding like A, as in neighbor or weigh"?

I'm not claiming that phonetic English will suddenly make people logical, but what it WILL do is make learning to read and write English a lot easier.

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You can't build a nation with bombs. You can't create a society with guns.

1KIKI

Monday, August 17, 2015 11:53 PM

I think phonetic English is a perfectly solvable problem that regrettably isn't going to get solved. But in the pantheon of solvable problems that aren't going to get solved - overpopulation, global warming, species extinction, human aggression, to name a few - phonetic English is way down on my list.

And I seriously disagree with JO's solution. I find it EXTREMELY awkward to read. And the idea that we should all just spell out our accents and create a non-uniform spelling will lead to enclaves of people not only not understanding the spoken word, but not using or knowing understandable written words as well.

My solution - the phonetics at the bottom of the dictionary page - was offered tongue-in-cheek. Because while I find it better than JO's idea, I understand it would be too difficult to implement.

We need an alphabet - perhaps something like yours Signy - that uses familiar letters and letter combinations that people who already know and currently use standard English spelling can easily read. AND we need an alphabet that doesn't irretrievably cut off future generations from the information found in today's English.

This is not something I personally am going to do - but I bet if you evaluated modern English, you'd find that at least a majority of words conform to phonetic rules. The problem comes with the exceptions. Those I think could be altered to match the phonetic rules we already have, creating a spelling that mostly matches what we already know.