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Showing Original Post only (View all)The United States Is Awash in Public Stupidity, and Critical Thought Is Under Assault [View all]
http://www.alternet.org/investigations/united-states-awash-public-stupidity-and-views-critical-thought-both-liability-andAmerica has become amnesiac - a country in which forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced but celebrated. The United States has degenerated into a social order that is awash in public stupidity and views critical thought as both a liability and a threat. Not only is this obvious in the presence of a celebrity culture that embraces the banal and idiotic, but also in the prevailing discourses and policies of a range of politicians and anti-public intellectuals who believe that the legacy of the Enlightenment needs to be reversed. Politicians such as Michelle Bachmann, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich along with talking heads such as Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck and Anne Coulter are not the problem, they are symptomatic of a much more disturbing assault on critical thought, if not rational thinking itself. Under a neoliberal regime, the language of authority, power and command is divorced from ethics, social responsibility, critical analysis and social costs.
These anti-public intellectuals are part of a disimagination machine that solidifies the power of the rich and the structures of the military-industrial-surveillance-academic complex by presenting the ideologies, institutions and relations of the powerful as commonsense. [1] For instance, the historical legacies of resistance to racism, militarism, privatization and panoptical surveillance have long been forgotten and made invisible in the current assumption that Americans now live in a democratic, post-racial society. The cheerleaders for neoliberalism work hard to normalize dominant institutions and relations of power through a vocabulary and public pedagogy that create market-driven subjects, modes of consciousness, and ways of understanding the world that promote accommodation, quietism and passivity. Social solidarities are torn apart, furthering the retreat into orbits of the private that undermine those spaces that nurture non-commodified knowledge, values, critical exchange and civic literacy. The pedagogy of authoritarianism is alive and well in the United States, and its repression of public memory takes place not only through the screen culture and institutional apparatuses of conformity, but is also reproduced through a culture of fear and a carceral state that imprisons more people than any other country in the world. [2] What many commentators have missed in the ongoing attack on Edward Snowden is not that he uncovered information that made clear how corrupt and intrusive the American government has become - how willing it is to engage in vast crimes against the American public. His real "crime" is that he demonstrated how knowledge can be used to empower people, to get them to think as critically engaged citizens rather than assume that knowledge and education are merely about the learning of skills - a reductive concept that substitutes training for education and reinforces the flight from reason and the goose-stepping reflexes of an authoritarian mindset. [3]
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The United States Is Awash in Public Stupidity, and Critical Thought Is Under Assault [View all]
xchrom
Jul 2013
OP
Mona Lisa, Nightwatch, Sunflowers, The Scream, The Girl with the Pearl Earring
AlbertCat
Jul 2013
#67
Another take on conspiracy theories: a tool to distract the non-sheeple sheeple:
Bernardo de La Paz
Jul 2013
#7
If I apply critical thinking skills to our government's official explanations
Eddie Haskell
Jul 2013
#100
And fund people like Alex Jones that promote BOTH wild and reasonable theories....
Junkdrawer
Jul 2013
#43
It's easy. Most people dont want to know the truth. The truth may require them to take sides, make
rhett o rick
Jul 2013
#89
I hope you are not saying that conspiracies dont exist. Politics is all about conspiracies.
rhett o rick
Jul 2013
#60
Conspiracies do exist. Watergate and Iran-Contra certainly existed. nt
Bernardo de La Paz
Jul 2013
#85
A lot of rich people have hired a lot of spin doctors to keep the public distracted and divided.
reformist2
Jul 2013
#5
the 'that's your opinion' thing, as if there are only opinions, no real facts. actively promoted
HiPointDem
Jul 2013
#12
right. and if it's all about opinions and you can get people to change theirs, then you have
HiPointDem
Jul 2013
#50
Which is staggering, because the internet has such potential to equalize people
XemaSab
Jul 2013
#72
Recently read "Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free"
mnhtnbb
Jul 2013
#20
I'd really like to know why Snowden never released any info on the 1%s effort to control our country
hue
Jul 2013
#22
I agree with this post. My question is why is this trend happening? If we can determine that,
ladjf
Jul 2013
#26
WE OPPOSE THE TEACHING OF . . .CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS!!! (Texas Republican Party Platform)
RVN VET
Jul 2013
#28
It's like Raygun's Alzheimer's was contagious--the whole country has it. nt
live love laugh
Jul 2013
#58
xchrom has just stated the obvious.... but thanks for the details, and reminding us
AikidoSoul
Jul 2013
#61
it won't get better until the left stops ignoring the main problem- the RW talk radio monopoly
certainot
Jul 2013
#73
this is incredibly important. It is most easily noticed when the TV is finally turned off...
NRaleighLiberal
Jul 2013
#80
I smiled at those also, then dictionary search to confirm my understanding of their meaning...
Deuce
Jul 2013
#115
The United States is now like waking up in the middle of a Carl Hiaasen novel.
Enthusiast
Jul 2013
#97
"...made clear how corrupt and intrusive the American government has become..."
randome
Jul 2013
#110