So now, take for example ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. It's corporate funded, the Koch brothers and those guys. It's an organization which designs legislation for states, for state legislators. And they've got plenty of clout, so they can get a lot of it through. Now they have a new program, which sounds very pretty on the surface. It's designed to increase "critical thinking." And the way you increase critical thinking is by having "balanced education." "Balanced education" means that if you teach kids something about the climate, you also have to teach them climate change denial. It's like teaching evolution science, but also creation science, so that you have "critical thinking."
All of this is a way of turning the population into a bunch of imbeciles. That's really serious. I mean, it's life and death at this point, not just making society worse.Truthout
Noam Chomsky on Democracy and Education in the 21st Century and Beyond
Daniel Falcone | Truthout Interview
""Balanced education" means that if you teach kids something about the climate, you also have to teach them climate change denial. It's like teaching evolution science, but also creation science, so that you have "critical thinking."
ReplyDeleteThat could backfire if the teachers actually taught critical thinking. ;) Unfortunately, that would not happen at a lot of schools. My nephews' biology teacher was a creationist, for example. Mandating the teaching of "creation science" would have given her a green light to indoctrinate her kids, instead of the amber light she actually had.
I wonder if many MMTers sympathize with climate change skeptics? After all, MMTers know what it's like to be marginalized by the popular consesus among professional Economists. Could a similar dynamic be going on with AGW?
ReplyDelete"All of this is a way of turning the population into a bunch of imbeciles"
ReplyDeleteThe fact that so many people accept it, suggests the majority may already be imbeciles.
Creation "science"? WTF, this is the first problem, when you can give any credibility to bullshit in the first place.
ReplyDeleteAlso about climate change sceptics, tbh how are they being marginalized? No one is doing shit about this issue so IDK why would they be scared of any brainwashing. People will keep consuming all they can regardless public speaking.
So it better not be very distasteful cause we are already screwed if it's going be, nothing is going to change to help on that front. And while we speak and speak' about it the 'sceptics' have their way and nothing really changes.
Chomsky: ""The guiding principle (for American government) is that as long as the public is under control, everything is fine," he said. "(The traditional argument is) the powerful should gain ends by any possible means. As long as the public is kept under control, public will doesn't matter."
ReplyDeleteChomsky referred back to this principle many times throughout his lecture and said it was the base of many of the nation's problems.
He said the principle was a security threat to the U.S. and was at the root of both terror and the huge military budget that is strangling the economy.
"The military budget is half of the deficit," Chomsky said. "The other half is the heavily privatized health care system. We would not have debt and might even have a surplus if we did not have (the health care system)."
http://utdailybeacon.com/news/2011/jan/26/noam-chomsky-lectures-nations-problems/
So you can see here that Chomsky has great FEAR of authority... a strong libertarian bias.
This leads DIRECTLY to his blindness on our govts absolute fiscal authority... he just can't see it.
So he thinks it would be good if govt could run a surplus, etc...
It also looks like he doesnt want premium health care probably because he thinks "we cant afford it and we're out of money, etc..."
This lack of knowledge is sad to see in Chomsky, imo I'd like him to focus more on linguistics as over the years I have seen certain patterns of words that seem to act to keep many people in the dark about how our current monetary system operates...
It would be good to expose these linguistic patterns that have an ability to deceive many of the weaker minded among us...
rsp,
Ignacio,
ReplyDelete'Creation "science"?' good point...
Operative scripture: "6 nevertheless for us there is one God, the Father, out of Whom all is, and we for Him, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through Whom all is, and we through Him.
7 But not in all is there this knowledge."
imo these evangelists need to chill out... this simple knowledge cannot be "reasoned" or "proven" by humans...
rsp,
"The military budget is half of the deficit,"
ReplyDeleteConflating two largely unrelated numbers...one is a flow, one is a measurement of an outcome.
It's a little like saying the food I eat accounts for half of the temperature reading of 98.6 when I take my temperature.
Increased military spending (which I am opposed to...just making a point) would most likely lower the deficit.
So you can see here that Chomsky has great FEAR of authority... a strong libertarian bias.
ReplyDeleteChomsky warns against confusing authority with power. This is and has been the basic political problem standing in the way of popular sovereignty. Lincoln recognized this in his famous saying in the Gettysburg Address, "government of the people, by the people and for the people." When power is confused with authority, popular sovereignty remains an empty ideal.
Chomsky is an anarcho-syndicalist after all. He is against hierarchy of power, not authority as such. He believes in popular sovereignty as political authority that rests with the people in a direct democracy rather than in a hierarchal institutional form like a republic or representative democracy controlled by a power center than is different from the people at large. See C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite.
What is hierarchical politically, that is, wrt to power, is by definition oligarchy, whether of strength (tyranny), land (feudalism) or ownership of wealth (plutocracy), or some combo thereof.
Those who hew to non-hierarchical democracy grounded in , popular sovereignty hold that all are created equal. Those who espouse political hierarchies of any sort implicitly hold that some are better than others.