The Intelligence of Hillary Clinton

Her recent Vox interview had some wonderfully telling moments as well.

I hear you on Klein. Dude is a bootlicker.

There’s a transcript, thank goodness. I don’t know that I could manage listening to either for the whole 40 mins runtime. At least not without a tranquilizer of some kind.

I read the “people we need to rely on…” sentence a few times but I ignored the rest.

Not sure why I ended up reading it that way.

What is wrong with that sentiment? Do you doubt that it is possible for people to try and define reality for others? Democrats did precisely this by telling us how great we all are under Obama, how we are experiencing an unprecedented recovery, and repeating selective statistics over and over again, getting others to do the same. Many people knew that things were nowhere as good as that.

What about anti-vaxxers? There is a whole sub-genre of these people, refusing to believe in science, instead believing in conspiracy theories that the government is trying to control us. They live in an alternate reality.

Are you disagreeing that this is a tactic of authoritariansm? Look at North Korea to see how it is there.

I am no Clinton apologist. I think she was a horrible candidate that exuded a sense of entitlement. But I think that she is right on this point – the right has been creating an alternative reality for its followers, and now people who used to be reasonable no longer believe in demonstrable facts. They dismiss them as trickery, wild conspiracy, “fake news”, etc.

I knew a lot of people like Hillary in my small town high school. Bright and striving enough to be big fish in their particular pond, but totally parochial in their general outlook and worldviews. Many people, including some of her admirers have called Hillary a “queen bee”. What about that characterization is not about simple dominance?

Craven unbridled ambition, a certain low level cleverness, boundless greed, huge self absorption, and the eternal quest for the main chance defines many of our leaders. These are the qualities that neoliberalism rewards. “She demonstrated she could grovel on all fours while scribbling with two” are the wonderful words of John Helmer describing the ability of a reporter from the Financial Times interviewing Ivanka Trump. Hillary could be described in a similar manner.

But it is evidently an old (2500 years?) human problem. The following quote from the Katha Upanishad sums it up: “Living in the abyss of ignorance yet wise in their own conceit, deluded fools go round and round, the blind led by the blind” (Katha Upanishad 1:2:5).
Bhuddists consider that abyss of ignorance to be the source of all suffering. The slight positive is that ignorance is curable…over a long period of time…Kalpas perhaps.

It just would never occur to Hillary Clinton that she was a corrupt, godawful candidate from a party which stands for absolutely nothing, and that this is why she lost an election that a ham sandwich could have won, and in a lot of senses, did win. If her level of arrogance and narcissism is reminiscent of Trump, it is because both belong to the same class of the rich and elites. Both feel endlessly entitled. And it is always, always, about them, not us.

But hey, a grifter’s got to grift. So though most of us wish she would just go away, and stay away, this idiot book is signaling no such luck. It was all about those damn Russkies. And everybody knows that Comey was born Ivan Ilyich Cominski. And OK so what if those people WE need to rely on are the same rich and elites who are flushing the country down the crapper. We can’t live without them, and how do we know this? because this is what they are constantly telling us. And I don’t know about everybody else, but I’m holding up just one finger for you, Hill. Not my problem you refuse to see which one it is.

“…when we are looking at the political elite, we are looking at the dancing monkey, not the organ grinder who calls the tune.”
– Joe Bageant

https://www.joebageant.org/2010/08/16/understanding-america/

NoPolitician, I want to respond to your assertion that anti-vaxers don’t believe in science. Science can be of enormous value when it is done properly. Sadly we live in an era when the corrupting hand of profit has reached into many places where it does not belong, and that includes medical research. A long time editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Marcia Angell had much to say about this. “It is no longer possible to believe much of clinical research published”.
I am also of the opinion that the pharmaceutical industry has been long engaged in the practice of regulatory capture.

A smart people can pick a bad ghost writer. Not saying she is smart.

Duder
Chris Hedges calls it “inverted totalitarianism.”

Actually, Hedges got it from Sheldon Wolin.

Neoliberalism is the political economy of both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. It is the political economy of Thatcher and Reagan and all leaders that followed them in both parties. It is and was the political economy of the conservative thinkers/economists that immediately preceded Thatcher and Reagan. People on the left often attach the term to certain Democrats exclusively. That is a mistake. I understand why they do that as they understandably have a very strong animus toward the Democrats who have betrayed the American people, but the Republicans got there first. The simplest definition of neoliberalism is that it is a philosophy that sees the purpose of government as exclusively concerned with the fostering of free market solutions, devoid of social content and that the market should be allowed to decide all issues related to human life. This mischaracterization is found in most of the media as well. The liberal part of the word trips them up. It only refers to economic liberalism. Yes, it has different connotations in each party. Ultimately each gets us to the same terrible place, however.

As to Ian’s comment on Clinton’s intelligence, it was awkwardly made. Certainly her recounting of Orwell’s text is true. She, along with all the he’s in our midst (vastly more than she’s), lack insight. She does not know or cannot admit that is exactly what she and all the rest of her type are doing. She shows that in the excerpt you chose. And she is graceless in defeat. It should not surprise anyone that our so-called leaders are mediocre and venal. Certainly most of the he’s of history and currently are so. She is no exception.

Hillary Clinton is living proof that psychology trumps intelligence lol.

Jousting cults and cult leaders are an inescapable feature of a two-party electoral system such as that embedded in American politics. Thus presidential candidates are almost by definition “cult leaders.”

You may agree or disagree with the candidates and their cult followers, but you can’t really escape them, not without changing the System. And that’s not happening.

Authoritarianism is embedded as well. It’s inescapable in the American system of government. As it is in the British system — which Orwell was deeply familiar with.

Soon enough Hillary will be a political footnote — if that. All the energy expended denouncing her after her electoral defeat seems entirely wasted when there is a clear and present authoritarian on the throne.

For years, I have been hearing how brilliant HRC is, even though I am yet to see anyone point to a concrete example of her brilliance.

For that matter, if she’s so smart, why does she keep on saying so many stupid things and doing so many stupid things?

Simple dominance? The evidence is that neoliberalism is very bad public policy where the proven end result is a few dominating the many. It’s harder to question the logic or reason of something when it benefits oneself, but there are those who still can. Not Hillary, who winds up blaming Bernie, Trump… hell, anybody… else.

In short, Hillary cannot pull her head out of her ass because she likes the way it smells and feels. I’ve seen monkeys in zoos…

I don’t think the quote makes her an idiot more than it is an expression of a particular ideological position that is very well known and at the center of modern technocratic thinking. The thinking is, there is an objective reality that is concealed under many layers of indirection and flawed perception, and we have a social class whose purpose it is to access and reveal that and make decisions based on that. We have another class who has taken upon itself to further obfuscate this difficult-to-access ur-reality, and it has the upper hand — that is the role of Orwell’s Party. The fundamental conflict is between these two groups. If you view the world that way, Clinton’s interpretation of 1984 makes sense. I mean the worldview is probably wrong/self-deceiving. But it’s not a surprise or even news that Clinton would share it.

Is HRC intelligent? Who knows and even more importantly, what possible difference does it make.

For a short time (one year), I was a member of MENSA. I soon discovered that raw intellectual horsepower meant very little. Smart people can easily believe some of the most absurd BS imaginable. I have been thinking about this now for over 35 years and have come up with some interesting possibilities:

1) There is no greater impediment to mental development than bigotry. Want to know why ‘Merikuns are hopelessly ignorant when it comes to the rest of the world. Blame “American Exceptionalism!” If you believe that we are #1 in everything important and that everyone else is jealously trying to catch up, there is no reason at all to know about anyone else because they are just insufficiently developed ‘Merikuns anyway. Groups that think they are endowed by nature with extreme intelligence suffer from the same problem—no one else has anything to add.

2) Historical illiteracy. Anyone who lacks a general grasp of history is like a child who believes the world was fully formed when he was born. If you don’t know where you came from, it is impossible to know where you are. And if you don’t know where you are, it is impossible to make informed decision about where you want to go.

3) Technological illiteracy. The world was built by skilled users of tools. Anyone who does not understand this and lacks an appreciation for the tool users is forced to believe in magic. And if this were not bad enough, the techno illiterates usually believe that their ignorance makes them socially and intellectually superior.

4) Trained Incapacity (Thank you TBV) The greatest motor for intellectual mediocrity are our “elite” colleges. Four of the biggest fools I know have Harvard degrees. Robert Strange McNamara believed that “if you cannot count it, it does not exist.” No one believes something that freaking stupid at birth, one must be taught that in school. Odds are extremely high that he learned that at Hahvahrd. And so his relentless belief in numbers and body counts drove his madness on Vietnam. Lawrence Summers, a former president of Harvard once penned a memo that postulated that “the Third World was under-polluted so was a perfect place to ship our toxic wastes.” We know about this deep thought because he was so proud of it, he spread it around. The problem is made all the worse because folks who learn madness at elite schools find it VERY hard to abandon these crazy ideas. They have too much ego invested.

Thanks so much Karl Rove! You’re an asshole.

@ Duder

You have articulated my reaction to the passage better than I could.

“Inverted totalitarianism” as a concept is often attributed to the late Sheldon Wolin, who is very worth much paying attention to. Here is Chris Hedges interviewing Wolin. Good stuff.
https://youtu.be/LGc8DMHMyi8

@Ian “The simplest explanation is just that she really is unable to think clearly.”

I think this might well be true. I have not read her book, but I have noted that reviewers remark on how disorganized is the plan of the book considered as a whole.

She has been treated long-term for hypothyroidism and also takes Coumadin. Hypothyroidism can impair the ability to think strategically, especially regarding the mechanics of action. I have dealt with a few accomplished people, who have impaired thyroid function. One was editor of a leading glossy magazine devoted to architecture for many years. A fortune in high-end residential house-flipping — a venture pursued after leaving the magazine — dissolved in a couple of years, when no one noticed the developing hypothyroidism or the impairment of executive function. Another is a national authority on personnel/human resources, heads a high-powered consulting firm and is active as a director and frequent speaker for national professional associations; his staff tracks his computer use and car, because that is where his periods of confusion, which are frequent, show up clearly.

It is an odd impairment, because if you set one of these people a task where they have to imagine and put in motion a series of steps taking account of the mechanics of everyday life, the deficiencies are stark. I saw how the real estate person, who had assembled a major magazine for publication lost the ability to put together and control a straightforward renovation project. The HR guy would get agitated when he could not manage his iTunes library. But even when quite severely impaired, both could give speeches in large groups and remained emotionally appropriate and charming and I suppose you could say manipulative, in a normal, non-pathological sense. They could get their needs met smoothly with no display of a handicap, as long as they had access to service businesses or staff or friends.

I do not like to medicalize or “diagnose”. But, I am struck by the way the quoted passage is psychologically consistent or ideologically consistent, as Mandos and others have pointed out, but makes no sense when examined for the logic of its social mechanisms.

It is striking to me that Clinton could not understand why a no-fly zone in Syria made no sense, even after the Turks shot down a Russian plane. Or, why a plan for after in Libya was necessary.

Why using a private email server for official business might be a bad idea might actually be less about political judgment than about the inability to manage the distinction between public business and private, mechanically.

There is a lot of evidence that thinking critically and clearly is not her strong suit.

The thinking is, there is an objective reality that is concealed under many layers of indirection and flawed perception, and we have a social class whose purpose it is to access and reveal that and make decisions based on that.

But this is not at all what Orwell was writing about.

Look at what HRC wrote, again:

The goal is to make you question logic and reason, and to sow mistrust against exactly the people we need to rely on; our leaders, the press, experts who seek to guide public policy…

In 1984, the torturer was working for the same people as the leaders and the press and the experts, they were all working for the totalitarian state.

The torturer wasn’t trying to get Winston Smith to distrust his own leaders, the torturer was working for them and trying to get Smith to accept their obfuscated version of reality.

Also, there is much room for disagreement on the statement that “we have a social class whose purpose it is to access and reveal that and make decisions based on that”. If we did, this country would not be where it is today. But that is another discussion.

The passage Ian cited reminds me of Clinton’s non-apology apology for her Iraq War vote:

“I thought I had acted in good faith and made the best decision I could with the information I had. And I wasn’t alone in getting it wrong. But I still got it wrong. Plain and simple.”

Here too we see the appeal to “logic” (best decision I could with information I had) and the deflection “It wasn’t my fault” (And I wasn’t alone in getting it wrong.)

As I wrote about this at the time:

This is like an engineer designing a plane that keeps crashing killing all on board. After years of denying that there was any problem, she comes out and says that her calculations were correct but the numbers she was given were wrong. Oh, and lots of other people made the same mistake.

What Clinton’s statement overlooks, of course, is that that plenty of people pointed out the dangers which she chose to ignore. Instead she slammed and belittled those who tried to avert the Iraq disaster. Nor is there anything about why it took her 12 years to even partially understand the nature of her screw up or long after virtually every other being on the planet with a pulse. Only grifters like the Clintons would then take this monumental, impossibly bad example of self-serving, poor judgment and seek to spin it into the gold cloth of “foreign policy experience” or even more ludicrously a Hard Choice.

In looking for her Iraq quote, I came across some notes I made on why Hillary lost:

Hillary Clinton lost because
she is a terrible person
she is a terrible politician
she ran a terrible campaign
she hired a bunch of sycophants, hacks, and consultants with long records of failure
she doubled down on her mistakes
she is infuriatingly arrogant and entitled
she hated most of the electorate
she lies like a rug
she is Corrupt with a capital C
she was the candidate of a deeply hated status quo
she was the candidate of Big Money
she had no platform for the bottom 80%
she threw too many groups that she needed to win under the bus: progressives, Millennials, Berniecrats, and the “deplorables” of the white working class
she relied on TINA
she pivoted to a non-existent Hillary right
she relied on identity politics
she failed to energize these identity groups
she ran solely on the message that she was not Trump

Her paragraph is actually entirely correct, apart from the words between “on:” and “ourselves”; if you strike out the words between those two, the paragraph is a perfectly decent summary of 1984 and Trump, the sort of thing I’d expect a decent high school student to write.

So I wouldn’t call it stupid, so much as weird. Weird in the way only ideology can be, weird in the way Orwell so carefully dissected himself. The eruption of those words in the middle — our leaders, our press, experts, etc — is so contrary not just to everything that 1984 was about, but everything else in that very paragraph, that that abrupt and utterly inconsistent appeal to authority itself seems to illustrate the sort of Orwellian conditioning the rest of the paragraph and 1984 more generally is about. Somehow her brain has been warped by her ideology to misread the clearest, most well-written argument against it, even while in the midst of actually reasonably understanding what she is reading. It’s like some sort of post-hypnotic suggestion, including the inability to see your own bizarre self-contradiction. Which, in short, is what ideology is — trusting authorities instead of ourselves, expertise instead of our own eyes.

So anyway, I wouldn’t call it stupid. It’s much more interesting that that, and much more illuminating about how power works even when directly and willingly confronting ideas inimical to it.

Spoken like a true Goldwater Girl.

Boy, a lot of “missing the point” going on. “Smart?” Maybe, or maybe not, but where is the notice paid to the degree to which thinking is discolored, disrupted by ideology, which is what Orwell was all about?

Liberals are the archtype for Orwell Syndrome. “I’m a Liberal,” they say, or, since liberal has become a dirty word, “I’m a progressive,” which they think means what liberal used to mean but without the perjorative connotation. Asked for reasons, they can never give reasons. “Everyone has a right to health care” is nonsense. Ask them to show that to you in the constitution. No, “putsuit of happiness” does not guarantee good health, and it’s not in the constitution, it’s in the Declaration of Independence. That “a healthy society is a productive and peaceful society” never occurs to them because logic is not what drives them, ideology does.

When you ask them what defines their liberalism/progressivism, they cite the preservation of Social Security, Medicare, welfare programs and all sorts of things that we currently are doing, which is the definition of “conservative,” not “liberal.”

( I still read Naked Capitalism every day. And I am still bitter over what still looks like a sneaky secret stealth-ban from the shadows. But NaCap still offers interesting articles.)

The window this book offers into Clinton’s brain is not the only point of the book. The other point of the book is that it is part of a broader multi-platform Psychological and Information Operation designed to advance the policy of Internet Censorship. Here is an artlcle about why Amazon is censoring so many negative reviews of Clinton’s book. Amazon is doing it to try and extend the reach and influence of Clinton’s book, so that the various pieces of Information Operation “messaging” in favor of Internet Censorship can reach the widest possible audience.

Here is the link.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/09/15/clin-s15.html

“dark-net” not darkness.

@Webstir,

I will gather my thoughts and then write about that on this very thread , and then I will speak no more of it on any later threads. ( I may well speak more of it on THIS thread . . . but not on any other threads).

@VietnamVet,

Oh my . . . . well, this places an added burden on me to make my description and explanation of events as accurate and complete as I can. And then place some bounds on the inevitable bitterness of my final summing-up.

So I am still thinking of how to design and assemble my comment on this.