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Bakari Chavanu

Amazon.com: Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free eBook:... - 0 views

www.amazon.com/...ref=pd_sim_kinc_6

shared by Bakari Chavanu on 03 Oct 09 - No Cached
  • Question: What inspired, or should I say drove, you to write Idiot America? Charles P. Pierce: The germ of the idea came as I watched the extended coverage of the death of Terri Schiavo. I wondered how so many people could ally themselves with so much foolishness despite the fact that it was doing them no perceptible good, politically or otherwise.
  • Question: Is there a specific turning point where, as a country, we moved away from prizing experience to trusting the gut over intellect? Charles P. Pierce: I don't know if there's one point that you can point to and say, “This is when it happened.” The conflict between intellectual expertise and reflexive emotion—often characterized as “good old common sense,” when it is neither common nor sense—has been endemic to American culture and politics since the beginning. I do think that my profession, journalism, went off the tracks when it accepted as axiomatic the notion that “Perception is reality.”
  • Question: What is the most dangerous aspect of Idiot America? Charles P. Pierce: The most dangerous aspect of Idiot America is that it encourages us to abandon our birthright to be informed citizens of a self-governing republic. America cannot function on automatic pilot, and, too often, we don't notice that it has been until the damage has already been done.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • To this day, we have a political party—the Republicans—who, because it embraced a “movement of Conservatism” that celebrated anti-intellectualism is now incapable of conducting itself in any other way. That has profound political and cultural consequences, and the truly foul part about it was that so many people engaged in it knowing full well they were peddling poison.
  • Charles P. Pierce: Look at the political opposition to President Obama. “Socialist!” “Fascist!” “Coming to get your guns.” Hysteria from the hucksters of Idiot America is still at high-tide. People are killing other people and specifically attributing their action to imaginary oppression stoked by radio talk-show stars and television pundits. That Glenn Beck has achieved the prominence he has makes me wonder if there is a just god in heaven.
  • "Idiot America" is great, informative book about concepts we see everyday. Also, many of the 1-star reviews are likely biased because of some of the political and religious topics noted. I think this book is definitely a full, 5-star book.
  • The author notes "The 3 Great Premises: and applies them to many instances in this book: 1. Any theory is valid if it moves units (rating, and making money). 2. Anything can be true if it is said loudly enough. 3. Fact is what enough people believe (the Truth is what you believe).
  • POLITICAL TALK RADIO: One set of rules noted by a professor studying radio discourse: *Never Be Dull *Embrace willfully ignorant simplicity *The American public is stupid; treat them that way *Always ignore the fact and the public record when it's convenient
  • TELEVISION: "Television is an emotional medium. It's entertainment, not analysis or reasoned discourse."
  • But to someone willing to take the time to read it, this book tells people what practically everyone should know about American politics -- that the American people are being sold a sob story about how experts are an elite that is keeping them from being The Best Damn Nation In The World. (In that regard, one should definitely read "The Paranoid Style In American Politics" by Richard Hofstadter -- it's over four decades old, but saw from the very beginning what has come into full bloom now with the barking lunacy of the American Right.)
  • The main problem with this book is this: the people who are likely to read it already know most of the story, and are mostly getting background information, and the people who won't read it are like the six reviewers I mentioned in my intro -- determined to ignore its stories and insights as "bias" because their politics and faith won't let them look outside the cloister.
  • He lays the blame at the feet of various ideology-driven entities, with special attention given to the same corporate-media war cheerleaders who happily passed on Bush's lies about Iraqi weaponry to a somnolent public, and who, in the name of putting "balance" over reality, treat specious creationist nonsense and hard scientific fact as if both had equal validity. Highly recommended!
thinkahol *

t r u t h o u t | Memories of Hope in the Age of Disposability - 0 views

www.truth-out.org/es-hope-age-disposability63631

t r u h o | Memories of Hope in the Age Disposability henry giroux

shared by thinkahol * on 03 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 03 Oct 10
     
    Any rigorous conception of youth must take into account the inescapable intersection of the personal, social, political and pedagogical embodied by young people. Beneath the abstract codifying of youth around the discourses of law, medicine, psychology, employment, education and marketing statistics, there is the lived experience of being young. For me, youth invokes a repository of memories fueled by my own journey through an adult world, which largely seemed to be in the way, a world held together by a web of disciplinary practices and restrictions that appeared at the time more oppressive than liberating. Lacking the security of a middle-class childhood, my friends and I seemed suspended in a society that neither accorded us a voice nor guaranteed economic independence. Identity didn't come easy in my neighborhood. It was painfully clear to all of us that our identities were constructed out of daily battles waged around masculinity, the ability to mediate a terrain fraught with violence and the need to find an anchor through which to negotiate a culture in which life was fast and short-lived. I grew up amid the motion and force of mostly working-class male bodies - bodies asserting their physical strength as one of the few resources over which we had control.
thinkahol *

How propaganda poisons the mind - and our discourse - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...index.html

How propaganda poisons the mind - and our discourse Glenn Greenwald Salon.com

shared by thinkahol * on 13 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 13 Jan 11
     
    The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and Politico are just some of the outlets in need of a real retraction
thinkahol *

A Philosophical Orientation Toward Solving Our Collective Problems As a Species | Think... - 0 views

thinkahol.wordpress.com/...llective-problems-as-a-species

Philosophical Orientation Toward Solving Our Collective Problems As a Species | Thinkahol's Blog

shared by thinkahol * on 29 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 29 Dec 10
     
    To know what the most important virtue of our age is we need to have at least a basic understanding of our age. Our era is becoming increasingly characterized by uncertainty. Fortunately or unfortunately, more than a cursory elucidation of our situation is beyond the scope of this essay. There are geopolitical, economic, technological and environmental trends worth mentioning. When the more philosophical portion of this  discourse arrives I will argue that the virtue of wisdom underlies the meaningfulness and efficacy of all other virtues, and this in broad strokes is primarily due to (1) the aforementioned instability in our surroundings ; (2) the relationship between the deontological and virtue; and (3) the nature of agency itself.  Whether uncertainty itself can provide an ethical foundation for us to elaborate on will be a separate question, and finally I speculate on where wisdom leads us in the context of a philosophy that is politically active and not doomed to irrelevance to and by the larger population.
thinkahol *

The Forgotten Millions - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...18krugman.html

The Forgotten Millions - NYTimes.com Krugman

shared by thinkahol * on 18 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 18 Mar 11
     
    More than three years after we entered the worst economic slump since the 1930s, a strange and disturbing thing has happened to our political discourse: Washington has lost interest in the unemployed.
thinkahol *

Discourses on Liberty: Images of Freedom: Georgist Political Economy: We Can Have It Al... - 0 views

discoursesonliberty.blogspot.com/...reedom-georgist-political.html

Discourses on Liberty: Images of Freedom: Georgist Political Economy: We Can Have It All: The Beauty Value Capture

shared by thinkahol * on 26 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 26 Oct 11
     
    Note:  Today marks the start of our series "Images of Freedom."  In this lead, Edward Miller discusses the virtues of Georgist political economy, and how structural inequality, especially through land value, can be a threat to liberty.  
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