Hacker News Reader

Comment by bduerst | Hacker News Reader

As someone who grew up in rural Wisconsin, I can tell you that there has always been a streak of anti-intellectualism, but the past few years it has transformed into something even worse.

The suspension of critical thinking that comes from ingesting information, sourced from anything tagged as "Republican", has left the Wisconsin people vulnerable to being taken advantage of.

I speak from experience and discussions with people I had last summer. For example, some didn't believe me when I told them that Foxconn had to put suicide nets around some of their factories. They believed Foxcon is this shining star of a company come to save them, because that was what they were told by Republican leaders.

View on HN

I also grew up in rural Wisconsin, but lived in Madison for several years as well, and I've seen the other side of that coin too. There's plenty of snobby progressives who live in their blue bubble, often working for the state gov't or university, and assume they know what's best for the hicks in the rest of the state. The /r/wisconsin subreddit is full of the type.

The tribalism from both ends is definitely disheartening.

The fact that you label the two sides as "hicks" and "snobby progressives" only hurts your stance.

I think we can agree that both sides don't typically listen to each other, and if we're all using language like that then we never will.

Why should I debate you on medicare subsidies, e.g. if you've labeled me a "snobby progressive" and then have taken the victim role to boot?

I think the poster was using deliberately provocative words to call attention to the emotional angle of the debate, not making those judgements themselves.

Except that it was awfully one-sided and appeared to be labeling actual people directly (those in r/wisconsin)

It was one-sided because I was replying to a comment calling rural Wisconsinites easily-misled Republican voting robots. It was an attempt to show balance in the other side's perspective.

This is what I was going for and I didn't realize my original comment would be misconstrued so badly.

Madison isn’t called “The People’s Republic of Madison” for nothing.

Also the original "X square miles surrounded by reality" coined back in 1978 by Lee Sherman Dreyfus that similar cities have since borrowed. :-)

Hey, I lived in Madison for a time too!

As a politically moderate person, I agree that there are neighborhoods in that one blue city in Wisconsin that have an air of snobbery and resentment, but I'm not sure how Madison has made the state vulnerable.

I also agree tribalism is part of the issue, but not in the way you do. Whenever I brought up these issues of confirmation bias, the immediate discussion following would be "well whatabout..." or "us vs. them", with them being the hypothetical liberal boogeyman. Or in this case, the "blue bubble".

While it is true that Madison is liberal, the Willy-street hippies didn't strip the incoming Governor of his powers, gerrymander political lines, or push to evict Wisconsites from their land so Foxconn could build a plant.

Saying "both sides" are the problem does a disservice to Wisconsin by ignoring who has been controlling and responsible for the state for the past decade - who need to be held accountable.

I think we can all agree that anyone trying to blame ANY of the people of Wisconsin at this point are just attempts at deflection. Clearly the fault lies with Walker and his cronies.

On that everyone can agree.

Here's the thing though, it's the people who will have to pay the bill. ALL of us. There's no getting around it. There are a thousand ways for Foxconn to hose us in this agreement, and almost no ways for us to get out of it if I'm understanding this correctly.

So you guys, in Madison and in rural Wisconsin, can sit and call each other names until the cows come home, but in the end you'll all be kicking in a sizable chunk of tax money to pay off Foxconn. Just like I will.

The best thing that could happen for us is for the whole thing to fall apart, Foxconn to walk away, and we just eat the losses we have taken to date. I know that doesn't give farmers their land back, or give people in southeastern Wisconsin their homes back, but it does allow us to forego any further losses on this thing. (And the families that have already been hosed out of their property were never gonna get their farms back anyway.)

Probably won't happen though, this is Wisconsin. Wisconsin politicians are in charge, and there is a lot of money up for grabs. So my own bet would be that come hell or high water, they're gonna find a way to trigger those cash payments to Foxconn. (And consequently, "service" fees I'm sure will be paid to-, and construction contracts will be signed by-, their cronies.)

>trying to blame ANY of the people of Wisconsin at this point are just attempts at deflection. Clearly the fault lies with Walker and his cronies.

...what about the voters?

In a democracy when has a voter base ever acted out of shame? I almost feel like it’s a socially impossible thing to happen given group dynamics.

Funny thing: often enough, in person or in the media, you'll hear ex-voters give their reasons for sitting out an election or quitting voting altogether. I've never heard anyone say "it became obvious I was not any good at it" or anything of the sort.

Uhhh, the people of Wisconsin voted for those in power, several times, even despite fairly clear evidence that walker and others were of questionable morals out motives.

When are Americans going to take responsibility for the society they continue to create, or allow to be created?

> Clearly the fault lies with Walker and his cronies.

Voters are the only people to blame, Walker was re-elected TWICE.

> As someone who grew up in rural Wisconsin, I can tell you that there has always been a streak of anti-intellectualism, but the past few years it has transformed into something even worse.

Not just Wisconsin. I grew up in a rural town in the South, and it was horrible. I'm back there teaching and it's even worse, if such a thing is possible. The only light I see is that a vast majority of the non-"yee yee" kids are fairly left-leaning, and nobody actually questioned me when I mentioned global warming yesterday. Shame is, those kids usually get the hell outta Dodge and never return.

re:suicide nets. Their employee suicide rates are equivalent to China. Its just that they employee so many people, its cost effective to place the nets. If only the rest of China was as cost effective.

re:re:suicide nets. The suicide rate in China is 8.0 per 100k people per year. In the US it's 13.7.

I trust the numbers coming out of the U.S., grim as they may be. China has a habit of massaging numbers in a way that would have made Soviet propagandists blush.

I agree that the numbers in the US are unlikely to be changed post-collection, but there are still pressures that lead to the under reporting of suicide rates here as well. For example, accidental overdose can be very difficult to distinguish from suicide. If there is any question, coroners will often err on the side of ruling the death an accident to spare the survivors additional emotional hardship.

A good point, but it means you can make a high estimate by including a statistical model accounting for a percentage of accidental deaths (including overdose) that are likely suicides. As long as you have all of the data, and it’s reliable, the rest is easy. Misclassification is a much easier issue to deal with than outright fiction. The problem with China is you can’t tell what if any parts of the dataset are reliable so no methods can be employed short of espionage.

This kind of selective thinking/reporting has definitely hurt credibility of the "intellectuals". Who has the time to figure out how you lied or wrongly implied certain things with your data?

Right, according to Foxconn. Employees and insiders have stated that there are suicides that have gone unreported.

anti-intellectualism has been a strong part of American history from nearly the beginning. It only went away for a while when the entire country was being drafted for wars.

Is that backwards? ISTM when we let the intellectuals run things, they come up with all sorts of plausible pretexts for wars... Right now the most anti-intellectual politician in several years is the one who happens to be bringing the troops home from Syria, Afghanistan, etc.

I'm reminded of a great passage from ITBWTCL:

But more importantly, it comes out of the fact that, during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.

[EDIT:] Of course, in the next paragraph Stephenson describes a different sort of intellectual devolution in USA.

I don't have to look back too far to see that the last anti-intellectual occupying the hot seat had no problem getting us involved in more wars. ISTM that is not a defining characteristic.

You're right Libya was a terrible idea.

[EDIT:] You mean Iraq and Afghanistan, of course. Bush the Lesser was not so much anti-intellectual as he was easily suggestible. If a Wolfowitz or a Paulson or a Cheney had a horrible idea, he didn't have the resources to challenge that idea. Of course all the worst neocons have some sort of Ivy League credentials.

>Bush the Lesser was not so much anti-intellectual as he was easily suggestible.

How certain are you that those attributes aren't correlated?

I'm not certain of any of this, but if I may go by personal experience, I would say the two qualities are orthogonal. I have known intellectuals who could be bullied into just about anything, and I've known an "anti-intellectual" who wouldn't step out of the street if you told him there was a truck bearing down on him.

    ISTM -> It seems to me
    ITBWTCL -> "In the Beginning was the Command Line" By Neal Stephenson

In case anyone else was also puzzled.

>Is that backwards? ISTM when we let the intellectuals run things, they come up with all sorts of plausible pretexts for wars...

Is the premise here that plausible pretexts for wars are less preferable than implausible ones? That an anti-intellectual launching a war on an irrational or purely emotional pretext is better than someone led by reason?

Because we had that with George W. Bush, and I'm not sure it was an improvement.

>Right now the most anti-intellectual politician in several years is the one who happens to be bringing the troops home from Syria, Afghanistan, etc.

He also said we should torture the families of terrorist suspects because fear is the only thing they understand, and warned North Korea that "the button for nuclear war is on my table". He would probably invade Iran tomorrow if someone told him Obama wouldn't have had the guts.

>> In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir.

Meanwhile, anti-intellectual zealots like Pol Pot forcibly relocated people from the cities to the countryside and murdered anyone who demonstrated any form of "intellectualism" including wearing glasses or literacy.

> ight now the most anti-intellectual politician in several years is the one who happens to be bringing the troops home from Syria, Afghanistan, etc.

Trump said he wanted to pull of of Syria, but his cabinet second guessed it, it was a pure PR stunt. I would concede Afghanistan, but that has been the policy for years.

He is actively pushing for war with Iran and a commercial war with China, so the link between anti-intellectualism and pacifism does not compute. Let's not even get to Venezuela...

Wars are fought that are a net negative to the world and scratching out a win for even the victors in the long run is implausible as long as a minority that controls the levers of power stand to gain.

The troops aren't coming home because of trump. In the long run it was a fight that was never going to be "finished" and will to keep spending money indefinitely isn't there. As well blame the sunrise for clearing up your cold instead of your immune system.

The most anti-intellectual politician in years has also repeatedly asked his aides to provide him with military options for dealing with Venezuela so I'm not impressed with the quality of your analysis here - especially coupled with your deliberate misreading of other people's posts.

Correction: anti-intellectualism and the forces of ignorance have been a part of "history" from the beginning. I fail to see what makes America so special in this regard. There's plenty of ignorance everywhere you look. Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, South America. Yup.

I can't speak to other countries.

The conservative movement has a very vibrant intellectual sphere, particularly when it comes to economics, politics, and the law. Much of the Republican Party platform is nominally premised on the Laffer Curve (i.e. trickle down economics), "Taxation is Theft" (political meme delegitimizing government), Original Meaning (a particular vein of constitutional originalism), and Realpolitik (the zero-sum, might-makes-rights approach to foreign policy of neoconservatives).

IMO, these radical concepts (at least radical in the context of conservatism) were reactions to leftist intellectual movements, and also have served to supplant moralism.

The problem with intellectualism and moralism (which is being revived on the left with the social justice movement), whether from the left or the right, is that it makes is easier for people to think and speak in absolutes.

Absolutism is where intellectualism and anti-intellectualism can reinforce each other.

I wouldn't call neoconservatives realpolitik. They were idealist proponents of an activist foreign policy.

Realpolitik would have been leaving Saddam in place as less risky than invading.

Good point. I was being too loose with the language. But IME the two groups tended to mix. For example, John Bolton traveled in neoconservative circles during the run-up to the Iraq War even though he's rather Machiavellian.

I don't think this is a problem unique to Wisconsin

That may be true. I can only speak to my experience.

It’s not, but Wisconsin is an example of the secondary demographic that the Republicans target heavily — white blue collar people who have lost the stability that they had.

We were talking about this a year ago. And no doubt before that:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16164106

Foxconn is a bad business partner and that should have been more obvious to everyone. Self serving politicians like Walker and Trump are looking for a photo spray with golden shovels and a big American flag in the background to sell to people desperately looking for jobs.

https://www.commondreams.org/sites/default/files/styles/cd_l...

It is transparent and a damn shame for the politicians and voters involved. It's like a Nigerian email scam bilking your grandma out of her savings.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com