OK, I'll grant ya that…..

I have to abstain on all alcohol based ones as I'm a nearly teetotaler and have never been in a purposeful bar or gone drinking with anyone. I don't actually have any friends or family who use alcoholic or any non prescription drugs these days.

As for #23- I might qualify as an idiot there though the conversation was about metaphysics which is arguably a subset of physics

Apparently they sort of still do. For every 'holocaust denier' you can find ten 'socialist oppression deniers'.

Honestly, I think the M Day books are more _fun_. Still, there's a lot more philosophical meat in the Carreraverse.

A lot of this has to do with a very nasty side-effect of intellectualism, which is a willful blindness caused by getting too caught up in elegant theory at the expense of paying attention to the inelegant reality.

This is exactly why so many Soviet leaders regarded Western communists, intellectuals, and pro-USSR journalists as "useful idiots". Most of those intellectuals were very bright people, but they were not at all smart. As a result, they couldn't separate the factual reality from the fictional narrative that the Soviet leadership was selling them about how great Communism was.

The entire facade of Communism was, as LTC Kratman put it, "something profoundly intellectual, and profoundly unintelligent". Unsurprisingly, the IYIs of the world found such a thing very much to their liking.

Indeed, sir- sometime last year, as I recall. I went back and re-read it earlier today.

As you say, intellectualism and intellect are often quite separate and mutually exclusive. It is all too easy for intellectuals to fall in love with their own theories because they fail even to consider the three key questions that you had posed:

1) Would the philosophy depend for its continued existence and prosperity on a particular kind of society, which society is its antithesis?

2) Would it undermine the defense of the very kind of society it requires to continue to exist and prosper?

3) Having undermined its home society, would it need universality to continue to exist and prosper while having no credible way of attaining that universality?