ARTICULATE AS OPPOSED TO INTELLIGENT

The keys to YouTube Kingdom are within the grasp of the photogenic and articulate. 

PewDiePie is a stunning example, but there are others. Jordan Peterson's rise to fame is in part due to his photogenic looks and his fluid articulation of retrievable information. Andrew Tate, a kick-boxer with a gargantuan ego, fluently articulates troglodyte masculinity and gets attention because he is photogenic. 

These three men represent extremely varied forms of masculinity.  They share articulate speech and photogenic faces. I would want Tate on my side in a knife fight. I would want to party with PewDiePie. I could spend many hours learning from and discussing the world with Peterson. 

All three men are articulate and intelligent, each in his way. But there are many more people on YouTube who are articulate and not intelligent. They too get a lot of attention. And this is not social progress. 

Much is said about free speech. But not all free speech is good speech. And I am not referring to the paranoid panic found in some quarters about 'hate speech'. 

Some photogenic individuals with poor diction, lousy vocabularies and nothing to add to the cultural conversation are extremely popular on social media. This has been true of certain stand-up comics before social media became the center of cultural conversation. Russel Simmons' Def Comedy Jam on cable TV in the 1990's heralded the age of popular commonplace rudeness and crass speech, as an example. 

The crass culture on television, represented by the likes of Roseann Barr, significantly branched away from intelligent television humor, perhaps best represented by Seinfeld, in the 1990's. Vapid sitcoms rapidly replaced variety shows and talk shows on broadcast TV, the refuge of 'deplorables' who could not afford cable subscriptions. The reflected image of this new America was slovenly, depressed, mean and smug without the wit of sophistication. Now, this has built into a tsunami in all media. 

The loud-mouthed Left, those crayon-colored dye jobs who display all the mannerisms of nineteenth-century anarchists, are intentionally rude and aggressive, despite their Liberal-Arts indoctrination at finer universities. Marshall McLuhan would grin. These say-nothings reflect the media garbage they were weaned on.. 

Intelligent media is now identified with White Privilege and The White Patriarchy by those who have nothing constructive to contribute to the cultural conversation in the U.S.. Their prolonged group tantrum appears to be weakening. Even the most Liberal coastal parent tires of enabling an unproductive whiner who won't leave the nest or clean his/her/their space. It's not just a racial or class thing.

The trend downward in favor of optics and soundbite articulation can be seen on cable news channels and some streaming news channels. Depth was once the measure of a news story's credibility. Now it is dismissed as "boring". I recently watched a tutorial by a successful current-events blogger who cautioned against paragraphs exceeding two or three short sentences. Understanding requires attention. But catering to short attention spans does not lead to understanding complex issues. 

Intelligence is now considered less important than "equality" in Liberal circles. The corruption of education and the resulting behaviors of those reared in this deluded fashion are readily observable in urban life. "Equality" has rapidly translated to "Whatever I feel like doing is just fine." Laws against texting while driving are intelligent, for example. However, they are disregarded by many young people whose sense of impunity from cause and effect is obvious. And, I am sure, some of those young people would articulate a coherent rant about the restriction of laws passed by Old White Men. That defense, while perhaps articulate, would be inane, sexist, ageist and racist.