Ha-Ha, I Guess That Quote From Chuck Learned 'em Or, They Being Ineducable By Choice, At Least Shut Them Up

Apparently the tolls want to drop the matter of insect intelligence after yesterday morning's post.  Finding out that ol' Chuckie Darwin talked, not only about insect intelligence but he also cited the intelligence of the orders of insects I gave as examples, the Hymenoptera (as noted in the Japan Times, bees are even more impressive than previously known) and Coleoptera, the latter which I noted Boris Johnson is stupider than*.  Shut them up, it seems. 

Research, it pays off.  Post-literacy is voluntary stupidity of the Trumpian kind whether it's on the fascist right or when it's left (un)done on  the play-left but that's what culture has become in the post-WWII period.   I never really understood just how dangerous the dumbing down of Americans by TV was until I went online and started seeing the wreckage in their unedited thinking.  

One of the things I've realized is how much of the stuff I'd read, referencing authors, famous ones, generally, was a distortion of what they wrote until the internet made it possible to fact check in ways that would have involved a large library, a good card catalog and lots of stair climbing and looking through stacks and indexes (when that worked or those were provided).   That is the one thing I don't think I'd ever want to give up, the ability to fact check and check to see if authors really said what they're being claimed to have said.  The habits of that kind of dishonesty, twisting or distorting or lying about things is a lot more ingrained in secular, modern intellectual culture than I'd ever have guessed if that old inefficient means of fact checking hadn't given way to things like Archive.org, Project Gutenberg and machine search for strings of letters.    It's probably not going to ever overtake the bad things about it, lying is a lot easier than looking for the truth, but it makes finding the truth a lot easier than it used to be.  

And that platinum mine is left unused by the college-credentialed in enormous numbers.  Told you it was a big mistake to get rid of Frosh Rhetoric and Saturday classes. 

*  I have no doubt that Piers Morgan will revert to being officially stupider than a beetle soon.   Though I would never try to rank the intelligence of insects the way Darwin did.  It's obvious they have intelligence it's not an intelligence that human beings can really have much understanding of.  No doubt the enormous family of the beetles are smart enough to have persisted longer than the primates seem likely to.   Our terms are not their terms.