- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
Note from the OP: this is an opinion piece, not a news piece.
On Wednesday, the news was all about a big bag of wind destroying Florida and flooding the South, spreading destruction and threatening pestilence and death.
Then there’s Hurricane Idalia.
Also on Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell froze and stood motionless in front of an assembly of reporters — for the second time this summer — so that’s encouraging.
But seriously, folks. Last Thursday, Donald Trump turned a 22-minute booking for a felony indictment in Georgia into a six-hour media special, complete with a larger motorcade than the actual president’s — with dozens of camera lights on the runway and a chopper-talk session.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden, the aforementioned actual president, quietly lent assistance to Hawaii after the devastating wildfires on Maui, for which he was criticized by Republican members of Congress. He also met with international leaders at the White House this week, and went after Big Pharma to negotiate reduced Medicare prices for 10 common prescription drugs.
The press? Well, we completely missed the point, as usual, and covered every juvenile tantrum Donald Trump threw in his malevolent attempt to stay in the news. The context is missing. The press is failing us, and people are too ignorant to notice the problem. That’s because we’re busy dividing ourselves into teams of social cheerleaders, cheering on our champions and literally booing the opposition.
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There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’ -Isaac Asimov
I kind of agree with Asimov here, I think the cult of ignorance has been with us a long time, I think it springs from the puritans who emigrated here to escape the “persecution” of living in Europe during the Enlightenment. I mean, we’re talking about dumbing things down for a country that historically had witch burnings and more recently a Satanic Panic? The cult of ignorance has always been here, it’s just grown cancerous due to proliferation of misinformation and disinformation.
George Carlin knew exactly why decades ago. No one noticed. No one cared.
"There’s a reason education sucks, and it’s the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It’s never gonna get any better. Don’t look for it. Be happy with what you got. Because the owners of this country don’t want that. I’m talking about the real owners now, the real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions.
Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want.
Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want: They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. Thats against their interests. Thats right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table to figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that.
You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you, sooner or later, 'cause they own this fucking place. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it."
-George Carlin
good bit. everybody laugh. roll on snare drum. curtains
What’s worse is Carlin was so correct that it helped create an entire disaffected generation, known as Generation X, that basically stopped caring about politics and became increasingly cynical because Carlin was right: it was never going to get better.
So why even bother trying to fight it? And they didn’t.
To be fair, I don’t blame them one bit, their numbers were dwarfed by the boomers, and they never, not once, had political relevancy.
Never going to get better? Perhaps. But it can sure get worse. And it’s worthwhile to slow that worsening as much as we can.
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I take umbrage with titles like this.
Isn’t it great that somebody is telling us that “everybody has gotten stupider” and at the same time implying that “you are not one of the people that got stupider, of course, dear reader”.
It’s bullshit. We’re not stupider. It’s somebody else right? There’s obviously got to be some giant group of stupid people out there and what it is is it’s the fucking prisoners dilemma and we don’t even realize we’re in it.
Telling us that we are smart and educated of course and there’s some invisible group of stupid people out there fucking everything up so there’s nothing we can really do about it?
it’s fucking mind control.
And you know, I personally hate being mind controlled by weird deceptive language.
Look past the article, find what they’re actually reporting on and think for yourself okay?
somebody is telling us that “everybody has gotten stupider”
I agree that Reagan started turning everything into crap. But it is not that simple. How come 50 years ago there was a lot more smoking and people believed in things like Extrasensory Perception? How come literacy and high school graduation rates were lower? How come half of Western Europe countries had large Communist parties and all of Eastern Europe had Communist dictatorships? How come conservatives were calling Eisenhower and Kennedy communists?
It’s a lot easier to control and fool an ignorant population.
“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time” -Abraham Lincoln
And my corollary to that is that you can hire all of the people that you can’t fool all of the time and get them to help you fool all of the people that you can fool all of the time.
The u.s also has a problem with narcissism. There are cleaning ladies and ditch diggers who think that they’re smarter and knows more than doctors, teachers, scientists, researchers, etc. People think they know better than anyone, and that everyone else is stupid.
Thanks for realizing it’s still capitalism’s fault. I was beginning to think no one would notice.
Trickling brain economics
