It has underpinned leftist dogma for many years.

A modern paragon of the artificial intelligentsia has to be the alleged economist Robert B. Reich.  His emanations are so nonsensical that space does not allow for a representative accounting.  Suffice to say that his main rap has to do with the evils of private property.  Imagine compelling landlords to grant rent-paying tenants increasing ownership shares as a condition of their continued residency.

Just FYI, our world is populated by only two kinds of people: owners and renters.  Owners capitalize and improve property so it can be available and useful for renters.  Renters pay landlords for the benefit of being sheltered by the results of the landlord's investment.  It's a symbiotic relationship (mutually beneficial) rather than a predator-prey relationship.  Should renters stop paying their landlords, they join a subset known as squatters.

Reich's best known predecessor was a 19th-century artificial intellectual named Karl Marx.  Be it understood that Marx was not a pseudo-intellectual.  As does Reich, Marx truly believed in his outpourings and did not intend to deceive.  Interestingly, Paul Johnson considered Marx a throwback to that of a classical medieval philosopher.  Unlike modern thinkers, Marx had to reinvent the entire world of intellectual pursuit.  As a result, we have Marxist economics, Marxist history, Marxist biology, Marxist sociology, etc.

Meanwhile, the driving force behind the sustained existence of the artificially intelligent left is conformity.  A recent example of this force is mask-wearing.  True believers in artificially intelligent medical authority continue to dutifully cover their faces, regardless of any practical benefit, in order to show fealty to the revered masterminds.  Women living in Muslim societies endure similar requirements.

The "woke" agenda is the most pervasive aspect of this tendency.  Conformity invariably causes intolerance toward non-conformists.  In some cases, this takes the form of mocking disbelief — rather than the more familiar overt censorship.  Once, while dining with friends, I was asked if my conservative opinions were just a put-on, so as to provoke arguments, since I had various artistic tendencies that would supposedly render such a knuckle-dragging attitude incongruous.  "What do enjoying photography and music have to do with politics?" was my response.  Thus, another stereotype bit the dust.

Sort of in this vein, I was once talking to an old friend who was then a zoology professor at a well known major university.  He amusedly told of a common situation when a student would ask a question that had no answer.  He would then tell his class that was the reason universities and other institutions still do research — point being that our world is not yet completely understood.  The classical Romans referred to the mysteries of nature.  And sometimes, what was once thought to be a reliable answer — eventually turned out to be wrong.  I like to call this "intellectual honesty."

Absent that, the artificial intelligence of the left, while wrong, is still taken very seriously by its adherents.  The consequences are far-reaching.  One of the more conspicuous examples is the plethora of idle vagrants littering our parks and freeway margins.  Leftist dogma dictates that this is the result of a shortage of "affordable" housing — not because of widespread drug addiction.  Billions of dollars have been squandered in putting together accommodations for people who have no financial resources whatsoever.  Such "warehouses of failure" tend to burn down or otherwise become uninhabitable in short order.

An awakening is finally beginning to happen.  San Francisco's mayor London Breed has just declared war on "open-air drug markets."  However, the foot soldiers in this endeavor will likely be social workers (AKA otherwise unemployable social science graduates) rather than actual law enforcement.  Conformity must still be adhered to...at least as best as possible.  Crime, in general, is still being de-stigmatized...at the expense of the rest of us.  There's also a simmering burn-out over the gushing embrace of various "minorities" — especially those of a sexual nature.

Then there's the war on fossil fuels.  The economic damage being wrought by this form of artificial scientific intelligence is immense.  Only a truly prosperous society can afford such wasteful nonsense.  Little, if any, mention is ever made as to the actual physical chemistry of atmospheric heat trapping...let alone that the Earth's surface temperature has a lot more to do with air pressure than ambient carbon-dioxide.  We call this compression heating — when air molecules are crammed into a smaller space, things warm up.  Should they be released into a larger space, things cool down.  This is the driving force of mechanical refrigeration.

Powerline said it all in a picture panel: "There is no need for climate change protests in China because China is already communist."

Image: DeltaWorks via Pixabay, Pixabay License.