Fair enough. I'll leave my post as-is for the record but consider it edited.<p>Further followup, it is obvious that "intellectualism" can have many definitions. My primary point is to demonstrate that for a large set of definitions, mistrust is rational. Playing with the definitions as so many of my repliers do makes it easy to lose the point in a flurry of words as we redefine "intellectualism" to something harmless <i>by definition</i>, which proves nothing about what's out there in the real world. All this is a way of obscuring and hiding from my point, though, which is that there <i>is</i> a kernel of truth here. That there are definitions of "intellectualism" that are not scary does not prove that there isn't a rather large, scary line of "intellectualism" that <i>has</i> proved very dangerous in the real world, seductive academic ideas and theories trusted over empirical evidence to dangerous effect.