>>I can't have much respect for intellectual merits of folks
>>- who make the whole advertising industry possible (if it didn't work on them, it wouldn't exist as it does)
>>- who support an entertainment industry with zero content (unless we count mass culture)
>>- who can't understand the concept of interest rates and allow themselves to dig themselves into debt trap
>>- who have zero intellectual curiosity (lots of stories about my daughters' classmates - incredible amounts of "ah stop that, I don't want to know")
>>- who support few million con artists
>>- who fall for all sorts of propaganda
>
>As I said, I take a back seat to no one when it comes to being an elitist and a snob. I find most of popular culture mind-numbing and always have. I don't buy lottery tickets, I read books, I didn't rend my garments when Princess Diana died, I passed my Mensa test stoned, and I don't watch "Deal or no Deal".

Back home, I didn't watch any sports (which after a while included olympics, too), Hollywood pieces with singing and dancing, soaps, quasi folk music, advertising in general and probably a few more things I can't even remember. Coming here, I started watching a few things, just because it was a TV not under Milošević's foot, but it gradually fell off one by one. Movies went out the window after I understood that a feature takes 150 minutes to run; StarTrek ran away by itself; StarGate wasn't bad, but not a sufficient reason to keep SciFi channel along with twenty others that were useless (ditched them all - maybe a la carte would be the way?); BBC news were worthwhile for a while, until pretty much Iraq - I can't stand the bias anymore, specially against Russia; watched local news for a while for the weather, lost patience (25% of the time are ads, plus 18% or so of self-advertising)... so what's left? CSI (NY & LV, not Miami anymore), and Lawrder:CI (can't stand Mariska Hargitay permanently looking like she's swallowing a frog, and that guy Balloni being scripted into a psycho, while keeping Ice-T and Munch without text - if they ever change seats, lemme know).

>"Different" is objectively identifiable. "Superior" is subjective.
>
>But I don't claim to be a man of the people or the leader of a political party that represents the common man against the plutocrats. My problem is with a trend in modern liberalism that is as smugly self-congratulatory as the born-again's "when the Rapture comes I'm gone and your stuck" It is the vision of the self-annointed righteous and there is a lot of it going on on left and right fringes these days.

They all do take themselves too seriously, which is an obvious symptom. Though, the distance between the extreme right and right is not that great anyway.

>I am in a position to know this because I am smart and they are all dumb. ( one thing I learned from the 2000 and 2004 elections is that smart people do not argue issues but simply declare their opponent intellectually deficient and get their friends to agree and choose friends based on whehter or not they agree and then congratulate each other for being smart. )

Just like the bunch who invite each other into their shows, publish reviews on each other's books (which is often the same event - can't have a guest on a radio unless he's just selling his new book). There's too little intellectual cross-pollination, most of it is incest.