this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
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US Authoritarianism

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[–] nifty 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

An intellectual is anyone who can utilize logic, reasoning, and critical analysis to probe ideas or help understand them. Moreover, a member of the intelligentsia is anyone who the ruling class in a society decides is worthy of membership. It’s not so simple as “that dude is only wearing a ninja costume” when someone can just say “yeah he’s a ninja, fuck you”.

[–] exanime -2 points 5 months ago

Hmmm to me that is just anyone with common sense...

I was leaning more into a definition like this one (from wikipedia)

An intellectual is a person who engages in critical thinking, research, and reflection about the reality of society, and who proposes solutions for its normative problems.[2][3] Coming from the world of culture, either as a creator or as a mediator, the intellectual participates in politics, either to defend a concrete proposition or to denounce an injustice, usually by either rejecting, producing or extending an ideology, and by defending a system of values.[4]

I mean, I use logic and reasoning and critical analysis to probe ideas.. but I am certainly no intellectual... the ideas I probe are more in the tune of "how sweet can I make bacon candy before my mother will come back from the grave and smack me for having dessert for breakfast?"

The ninja comment was in reply to the "many fascist disguise as intellectuals" which I took to be there to argue that in fact fascists can be intellectuals which I reject... I mean Trump pretends to be a religious person and he could not be further from that as well. However, I did not mean to turn this into a heavy argument as this is definitely not my area of expertise... I would however claim that, in my limited knowledge, most fascists came to power on populist grounds and populism is almost the opposite of intellectualism