Do wild bears sh!t wherever they want, lol.
YouTube - Alaska Bear Attacks Car (26 June 2009)
Not a Mamma, but you get the gist eh.
The Harm Stemming from Anti-Intellectualism in the U.S.
- Thread starter mentalfloss
- Start date
YouTube - Alaska Bear Attacks Car (26 June 2009)
Not a Mamma, but you get the gist eh.
'Cause in a Disney movie, it would have been. The cub would have been cute and cuddly and eaten out of their hands while Mama Bear looked on benignly, possibly doing a song and dance routine.
I blame Disney for the anti-hunting crowd, and rise in unreasonable animal activism.
Been chased by one and all we were doing was sitting on the bridge watching a group of about 10 griz fishing. One moma decided she had enough of having her picture taken and made it from the middle of the river up onto the road in about three bounds. Good thing the truck had four doors. And that over all she was more interested in fresh salmon than a can full of smelly loggers.
Experience has indicated that an intellectual is one with lots of ideas about how everything should be , but no clue how to make it happen. Sort of like arm chair athletes.
I think we can lay at least partial blame on Disney and his damnfool heartwarming stories for a lot of other silly ideas too: animals are harmless, they're motivated by the same things that motivate humans, Mother Nature is kind and gentle...
I hate cute, except in babies.
I think that's a nice example of the kind of anti-intellectualism the OP talks about, and an unfair characterization of intellectuals. Intellectualism is about understanding, analyzing, and reasoning, as opposed to, for example, wishing and feeling and dreaming, and is a far better way to comprehend most things.
As my first and only post in this thread, I must say that in my lifetime I have found that most sel-proclaimed; meaning those that look in the mirror and think they see an intelectual, are usualy condescending twits.
Those that are internationaly recognized may be a bit better but they all have that know-it-all way of looking down at the rest of the population that turns me off...
Now, I'm not talking about Liberals, even though a lot of them seem to have those qualities..(My appologies to the "normal" Liberals out there;-)
I have found more common sense when talkin to that old farmer I meet at coffee once in a while than in a lot of "intelectuals"........
Those that are internationaly recognized may be a bit better but they all have that know-it-all way of looking down at the rest of the population that turns me off...
Now, I'm not talking about Liberals, even though a lot of them seem to have those qualities..(My appologies to the "normal" Liberals out there;-)
I have found more common sense when talkin to that old farmer I meet at coffee once in a while than in a lot of "intelectuals"........
Then the self-proclaimed intellectuals you've met are just posers, not really intellectuals. Lots of condescending twits around, but I wouldn't take any of them seriously as intellectuals, proper intellectualism doesn't produce that kind of self-image.
The purpose of a contemporary public intellectual was to actually act as a conduit for some legitimate movement that would not have happened otherwise. If the farmer you met at the coffee shop was able to find a way to become a well respected figure that incited some change outside the scope of his routine, daily work life then he could also possibly constitute as a public intellectual.
A self-proclaimed, condescending twit, is just a self-proclaimed condescending twit. It doesn't take much to dismantle them. But some philosophers, for instance, are also public intellectuals who have made an enormous impact on today's culture. There does need to be an accepting audience to justify their rationale, so snootiness won't be rewarded.
Number 34 on the Top 100 Intellectual list of 2008... I figured I would make this one festive... 
Michael Ignatieff
Michael Grant Ignatieff QPC MP (pronounced /ɪɡˈnæti.ɛf/; born May 12, 1947) is a Canadian politician who has been the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and Leader of the Official Opposition in Canada since 2009. Known for his work as a historian, author, university professor and diplomat, Ignatieff held senior academic posts at the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, Harvard University and the University of Toronto before entering politics in 2006.
He was an assistant professor of history at the University of British Columbia from 1976 to 1978. In 1978 he moved to the United Kingdom, where he held a senior research fellowship at King's College, Cambridge until 1984. He then left Cambridge for London, where he began to focus on his career as a writer and journalist. During this time, he travelled extensively. He also continued to lecture at universities in Europe and North America, and held teaching posts at Oxford, the University of London, the London School of Economics, the University of California and in France.
While living in the United Kingdom, Ignatieff became well-known as a broadcaster on radio and television. His best-known television work has been Voices on Channel 4, the BBC 2 discussion programme Thinking Aloud and BBC 2's arts programme, The Late Show. His documentary series Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism aired on BBC in 1993. He was also an editorial columnist for The Observer from 1990 to 1993. In 1998 he was on the first panel of the long-running BBC Radio discussion series In Our Time.
In 2000, Ignatieff accepted a position as the director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.[6] In 2005, Ignatieff left Harvard to become the Chancellor Jackman Professor in Human Rights Policy at the University of Toronto and a senior fellow of the university's Munk Centre for International Studies.[7] He was then publicly mentioned as a possible Liberal candidate for the next federal election.
Writings
Ignatieff has been described by the British Arts Council as "an extraordinarily versatile writer," in both the style and the subjects he writes about.[16] His fictional works, Asya, Scar Tissue, and Charlie Johnson in the Flames cover, respectively, the life and travels of a Russian girl, the disintegration of one's mother due to neurological disease, and the haunting memories of a journalist in Kosovo. In all three works, however, one sees elements of the author's own life coming through. For instance, Ignatieff travelled to the Balkans and Kurdistan while working as a journalist, witnessing first hand the consequences of modern ethnic warfare. Similarly, his historical memoir, The Russian Album, traces his family's life in Russia and their troubles and subsequent emigration as a result of the Bolshevik Revolution. A historian by training, he wrote A Just Measure of Pain, a history of prisons during the Industrial Revolution. His biography of Isaiah Berlin reveals the strong impression the celebrated philosopher made on Ignatieff.
Philosophical writings by Ignatieff include The Needs of Strangers and The Rights Revolution. The latter work explores social welfare and community, and shows Berlin's influence on Ignatieff. These tie closely to Ignatieff's political writings on national self-determination and the imperatives of democratic self-government. Ignatieff has also written extensively on international affairs.[16]
Blood and Belonging, a 1993 work, explores the duality of nationalism, from Yugoslavia to Northern Ireland. It is the first of a trilogy of books that explore modern conflicts. The Warrior's Honour, published in 1998, deals with ethnically motivated conflicts, including the conflicts in Afghanistan and Rwanda. The final book, Virtual War, describes the problems of modern peacekeeping, with special reference to the NATO presence in Kosovo.
Canadian Culture and Human Rights
In The Rights Revolution, Ignatieff identifies three aspects of Canada's approach to human rights that give the country its distinctive culture: 1) On moral issues, Canadian law is secular and liberal, approximating European standards more closely than American ones; 2) Canadian political culture is socially democratic, and Canadians take it for granted that citizens have the right to free health care and public assistance; 3) Canadians place a particular emphasis on group rights, expressed in Quebec's language laws and in treaty agreements that recognize collective aboriginal rights. "Apart from New Zealand, no other country has given such recognition to the idea of group rights," he writes.[17]
Ignatieff states that despite its admirable commitment to equality and group rights, Canadian society still places an unjust burden on women and gays and lesbians, and he says it is still difficult for newcomers of non-British or French descent to form an enduring sense of citizenship. Ignatieff attributes this to the "patch-work quilt of distinctive societies," emphasizing that civic bonds will only be easier when the understanding of Canada as a multinational community is more widely shared.
International affairs
Ignatieff has written extensively on international development, peacekeeping and the international responsibilities of Western nations. Critical of the limited-risk approach practiced by NATO in conflicts like the Kosovo War and the Rwandan Genocide, he says that there should be more active involvement and larger scale deployment of land forces by Western nations in future conflicts in the developing world. Ignatieff attempts to distinguish his approach from Neo-conservativism because the motives of the foreign engagement he advocates are essentially altruistic rather than selfserving.[18]
In this vein, Ignatieff was originally a prominent supporter of the 2003 Invasion of Iraq.[19] Ignatieff said that the United States established "an empire lite, a global hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights and democracy, enforced by the most awesome military power the world has ever known." The burden of that empire, he says, obliged the United States to expend itself unseating Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in the interests of international security and human rights. Ignatieff initially accepted the argument of George W. Bush administration that containment through sanctions and threats would not prevent Hussein from selling weapons of mass destruction to international terrorists. Ignatieff wrongly believed that those weapons were still being developed in Iraq.[20] Moreover, according to Ignatieff, "what Saddam Hussein had done to the Kurds and the Shia" in Iraq was sufficient justification for the invasion.[21][22]
The Lesser Evil approach
Ignatieff has argued that Western democracies may have to resort to "lesser evils" like indefinite detention of suspects, coercive interrogations,[33] assassinations, and pre-emptive wars in order to combat the greater evil of terrorism.[34] He states that as a result, societies should strengthen their democratic institutions to keep these necessary evils from becoming as offensive to freedom and democracy as the threats they are meant to prevent.[35] The 'Lesser Evil' approach has been criticized by some prominent human rights advocates, like Conor Gearty, for incorporating a problematic form of moral language that can be used to legitimize forms of torture.[36] But other human rights advocates, like Human Rights Watch's Kenneth Roth, have defended Ignatieff, saying his work "cannot fairly be equated with support for torture or 'torture lite'."[37] In the context of this "lesser evil" analysis, Ignatieff has discussed whether or not liberal democracies should employ coercive interrogation and torture. Ignatieff has adamantly maintained that he supports a complete ban on torture.[38] His definition of torture, according to his 2004 Op-ed in The New York Times, does not include "forms of sleep deprivation that do not result in lasting harm to mental or physical health, together with disinformation and disorientation (like keeping prisoners in hoods)."[39]
Notable Political Stances
Extension of Canada's Afghanistan Mission
Since his election to Parliament, Ignatieff has been one of the few[71] opposition members supporting the minority Conservative government's commitment to Canadian military activity in Afghanistan. Prime Minister Stephen Harper called a vote in the House of Commons for May 17, 2006, on extending the Canadian Forces current deployment in Afghanistan until February 2009. During the debate, Ignatieff expressed his "unequivocal support for the troops in Afghanistan, for the mission, and also for the renewal of the mission." He argued that the Afghanistan mission tests the success of Canada's shift from "the peacekeeping paradigm to the peace-enforcement paradigm," the latter combining "military, reconstruction and humanitarian efforts together."[72][73]
The opposition Liberal caucus of 102 MPs was divided, with 24 MPs supporting the extension, 66 voting against, and 12 abstentions. Among Liberal leadership candidates, Ignatieff and Scott Brison voted for the extension. Ignatieff led the largest Liberal contingent of votes in favour, with at least five of his caucus supporters voting along with him to extend the mission.[74] The vote was 149–145 for extending the military deployment.[73] Following the vote, Harper shook Ignatieff's hand.[75]
In a subsequent campaign appearance, Ignatieff reiterated his view of the mission in Afghanistan. He stated: "the thing that Canadians have to understand about Afghanistan is that we are well past the era of Pearsonian peacekeeping."[76]
Climate Change Policy
During the Liberal leadership race in 2006, Ignatieff advocated strong measures, including measures to address climate change.[77]
Following the 2008 election, he shifted his approach. In a speech to the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce in February 2009, he said: "You've got to work with the grain of Canadians and not against them. I think we learned a lesson in the last election."[78]
Forming of a Potential Coalition Government
During the Spring 2011 federal election, Ignatieff clearly ruled out the formation of a coalition government with the NDP and Bloc parties. Contrary to the suggestion from the Conservative party that he was planning to form a government with the other opposition parties, Ignatieff issued a statement on March 26, 2011, stating that "[t]he party that wins the most seats on election day will form the government".[79][80]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Ignatieff
Michael Ignatieff
Michael Grant Ignatieff QPC MP (pronounced /ɪɡˈnæti.ɛf/; born May 12, 1947) is a Canadian politician who has been the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and Leader of the Official Opposition in Canada since 2009. Known for his work as a historian, author, university professor and diplomat, Ignatieff held senior academic posts at the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, Harvard University and the University of Toronto before entering politics in 2006.
He was an assistant professor of history at the University of British Columbia from 1976 to 1978. In 1978 he moved to the United Kingdom, where he held a senior research fellowship at King's College, Cambridge until 1984. He then left Cambridge for London, where he began to focus on his career as a writer and journalist. During this time, he travelled extensively. He also continued to lecture at universities in Europe and North America, and held teaching posts at Oxford, the University of London, the London School of Economics, the University of California and in France.
While living in the United Kingdom, Ignatieff became well-known as a broadcaster on radio and television. His best-known television work has been Voices on Channel 4, the BBC 2 discussion programme Thinking Aloud and BBC 2's arts programme, The Late Show. His documentary series Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism aired on BBC in 1993. He was also an editorial columnist for The Observer from 1990 to 1993. In 1998 he was on the first panel of the long-running BBC Radio discussion series In Our Time.
In 2000, Ignatieff accepted a position as the director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.[6] In 2005, Ignatieff left Harvard to become the Chancellor Jackman Professor in Human Rights Policy at the University of Toronto and a senior fellow of the university's Munk Centre for International Studies.[7] He was then publicly mentioned as a possible Liberal candidate for the next federal election.
Writings
Ignatieff has been described by the British Arts Council as "an extraordinarily versatile writer," in both the style and the subjects he writes about.[16] His fictional works, Asya, Scar Tissue, and Charlie Johnson in the Flames cover, respectively, the life and travels of a Russian girl, the disintegration of one's mother due to neurological disease, and the haunting memories of a journalist in Kosovo. In all three works, however, one sees elements of the author's own life coming through. For instance, Ignatieff travelled to the Balkans and Kurdistan while working as a journalist, witnessing first hand the consequences of modern ethnic warfare. Similarly, his historical memoir, The Russian Album, traces his family's life in Russia and their troubles and subsequent emigration as a result of the Bolshevik Revolution. A historian by training, he wrote A Just Measure of Pain, a history of prisons during the Industrial Revolution. His biography of Isaiah Berlin reveals the strong impression the celebrated philosopher made on Ignatieff.
Philosophical writings by Ignatieff include The Needs of Strangers and The Rights Revolution. The latter work explores social welfare and community, and shows Berlin's influence on Ignatieff. These tie closely to Ignatieff's political writings on national self-determination and the imperatives of democratic self-government. Ignatieff has also written extensively on international affairs.[16]
Blood and Belonging, a 1993 work, explores the duality of nationalism, from Yugoslavia to Northern Ireland. It is the first of a trilogy of books that explore modern conflicts. The Warrior's Honour, published in 1998, deals with ethnically motivated conflicts, including the conflicts in Afghanistan and Rwanda. The final book, Virtual War, describes the problems of modern peacekeeping, with special reference to the NATO presence in Kosovo.
Canadian Culture and Human Rights
In The Rights Revolution, Ignatieff identifies three aspects of Canada's approach to human rights that give the country its distinctive culture: 1) On moral issues, Canadian law is secular and liberal, approximating European standards more closely than American ones; 2) Canadian political culture is socially democratic, and Canadians take it for granted that citizens have the right to free health care and public assistance; 3) Canadians place a particular emphasis on group rights, expressed in Quebec's language laws and in treaty agreements that recognize collective aboriginal rights. "Apart from New Zealand, no other country has given such recognition to the idea of group rights," he writes.[17]
Ignatieff states that despite its admirable commitment to equality and group rights, Canadian society still places an unjust burden on women and gays and lesbians, and he says it is still difficult for newcomers of non-British or French descent to form an enduring sense of citizenship. Ignatieff attributes this to the "patch-work quilt of distinctive societies," emphasizing that civic bonds will only be easier when the understanding of Canada as a multinational community is more widely shared.
International affairs
Ignatieff has written extensively on international development, peacekeeping and the international responsibilities of Western nations. Critical of the limited-risk approach practiced by NATO in conflicts like the Kosovo War and the Rwandan Genocide, he says that there should be more active involvement and larger scale deployment of land forces by Western nations in future conflicts in the developing world. Ignatieff attempts to distinguish his approach from Neo-conservativism because the motives of the foreign engagement he advocates are essentially altruistic rather than selfserving.[18]
In this vein, Ignatieff was originally a prominent supporter of the 2003 Invasion of Iraq.[19] Ignatieff said that the United States established "an empire lite, a global hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights and democracy, enforced by the most awesome military power the world has ever known." The burden of that empire, he says, obliged the United States to expend itself unseating Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in the interests of international security and human rights. Ignatieff initially accepted the argument of George W. Bush administration that containment through sanctions and threats would not prevent Hussein from selling weapons of mass destruction to international terrorists. Ignatieff wrongly believed that those weapons were still being developed in Iraq.[20] Moreover, according to Ignatieff, "what Saddam Hussein had done to the Kurds and the Shia" in Iraq was sufficient justification for the invasion.[21][22]
The Lesser Evil approach
Ignatieff has argued that Western democracies may have to resort to "lesser evils" like indefinite detention of suspects, coercive interrogations,[33] assassinations, and pre-emptive wars in order to combat the greater evil of terrorism.[34] He states that as a result, societies should strengthen their democratic institutions to keep these necessary evils from becoming as offensive to freedom and democracy as the threats they are meant to prevent.[35] The 'Lesser Evil' approach has been criticized by some prominent human rights advocates, like Conor Gearty, for incorporating a problematic form of moral language that can be used to legitimize forms of torture.[36] But other human rights advocates, like Human Rights Watch's Kenneth Roth, have defended Ignatieff, saying his work "cannot fairly be equated with support for torture or 'torture lite'."[37] In the context of this "lesser evil" analysis, Ignatieff has discussed whether or not liberal democracies should employ coercive interrogation and torture. Ignatieff has adamantly maintained that he supports a complete ban on torture.[38] His definition of torture, according to his 2004 Op-ed in The New York Times, does not include "forms of sleep deprivation that do not result in lasting harm to mental or physical health, together with disinformation and disorientation (like keeping prisoners in hoods)."[39]
Notable Political Stances
Extension of Canada's Afghanistan Mission
Since his election to Parliament, Ignatieff has been one of the few[71] opposition members supporting the minority Conservative government's commitment to Canadian military activity in Afghanistan. Prime Minister Stephen Harper called a vote in the House of Commons for May 17, 2006, on extending the Canadian Forces current deployment in Afghanistan until February 2009. During the debate, Ignatieff expressed his "unequivocal support for the troops in Afghanistan, for the mission, and also for the renewal of the mission." He argued that the Afghanistan mission tests the success of Canada's shift from "the peacekeeping paradigm to the peace-enforcement paradigm," the latter combining "military, reconstruction and humanitarian efforts together."[72][73]
The opposition Liberal caucus of 102 MPs was divided, with 24 MPs supporting the extension, 66 voting against, and 12 abstentions. Among Liberal leadership candidates, Ignatieff and Scott Brison voted for the extension. Ignatieff led the largest Liberal contingent of votes in favour, with at least five of his caucus supporters voting along with him to extend the mission.[74] The vote was 149–145 for extending the military deployment.[73] Following the vote, Harper shook Ignatieff's hand.[75]
In a subsequent campaign appearance, Ignatieff reiterated his view of the mission in Afghanistan. He stated: "the thing that Canadians have to understand about Afghanistan is that we are well past the era of Pearsonian peacekeeping."[76]
Climate Change Policy
During the Liberal leadership race in 2006, Ignatieff advocated strong measures, including measures to address climate change.[77]
Following the 2008 election, he shifted his approach. In a speech to the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce in February 2009, he said: "You've got to work with the grain of Canadians and not against them. I think we learned a lesson in the last election."[78]
Forming of a Potential Coalition Government
During the Spring 2011 federal election, Ignatieff clearly ruled out the formation of a coalition government with the NDP and Bloc parties. Contrary to the suggestion from the Conservative party that he was planning to form a government with the other opposition parties, Ignatieff issued a statement on March 26, 2011, stating that "[t]he party that wins the most seats on election day will form the government".[79][80]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Ignatieff
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