America: Freedom to Fascism

[Bigshadow]

No...?

http://allaboutfrogs.org/stories/scorpion.html

Here is a link to the story.

 

[Makalakumu]

Every president who has ever advocated "interest-free" money has either been assassinated.

 

[Makalakumu]

According to Mr. Russo, 67 million Americans do not pay their income tax. I've researched the laws behind this a bit and as far as I can tell, these people are not breaking the law. The 16th Amendment be damned! There are eight supreme court cases that basically say that the Amendment gives the government no new powers.

I think about how much money my government is spending on things in which I consider immoral. 50 cents out of every tax dollar I pay goes to those things. Why am I paying for these things when their is no law that obligates me to do so?

 

[Bob Hubbard]

What the law says or allows, and what the government does, are often 2 different things.

 

[Fluffy]

http://allaboutfrogs.org/stories/scorpion.html

Here is a link to the story.

"It's my nature......."

I can see it in the next state of the union address.

 

[Kane]

It's about time people opened their eyes. America already was heading down this path 36 years ago with the start of the War On Drugs. One can argue that extends even further back, perhaps when the federal government started regulating automatic guns. And then there is social security and the rest of the unneeded social programs that destroyed economic liberty IMHO. Go back even further, when the federal reserve bank was created and it makes even more sense where things are going. Now we have the Patriot Act, an act with some of its parts opposing the 1st Amendment.

Our founding fathers are rolling in their graves. And yet the people do nothing. Perhaps they don't care about liberty anymore!

 

[TonyMac]

If you're wondering how this could have happened type in the words dumbing down on google and have an informative read.

 

[Kensai]

If you're wondering how this could have happened type in the words dumbing down on google and have an informative read.

I got 31 out of 38 in the Guardians "dumbing down test". Not bad. Some of the questions were a bit fiddly though.

It is beyond dispute that there has been a profound change in our cultural and historical reference points in the past thirty or forty years, and this has accelerated in more recent years. In part, this represents the triumph of the Americanisation of culture: film and music more than the other art forms show the dominance of American influences and attitudes and these are part of the new dominance of popular culture that have increasingly defined the only, and delimited, cultural horizons of the young, the horizons of an increasingly culturally uneducated and challenged youth. The Americanisation of culture has increasingly extended beyond these limits of age and also country to become an influence that has displaced and destroyed other alternative cultural influences. What we see today in our cultural landscape is a uniform consumerist whole that has been partly manufactured by the mass media and business interests and also by the privileging of monetary and capitalist structures and influences, but that importantly arises logically and inevitably from the wholesale dismantling of previously existent social and cultural inhibitions and prohibitions on the expression of narcissistic, individualistic, and selfish desires. Consumerism and commercialism are merely one aspect of more general social forces that serve to generate and perpetuate the cultural matrix that I attempt to describe below.

Postmodernism's intellectual assumptions have also infected educational philosophy and technique producing an educational dumbing down. Ideas such as that truth is a matter of opinion, there is no real world outside of language and hence no facts independent of our descriptions of them, render postmodernist assumptions entirely inappropriate as a teaching tool in an era of information excess and complexity. When it comes to the facts about events, there is truth and there is falsehood and we need to be able to distinguish between the two. It appears that there is a contemporary confusion that a justifiable desire to avoid imposing one point of view on others requires a wholesale rejection of the idea of truth and an unwillingness to take up a position. Nor are students well enough acquainted with their own cultural traditions for teachers to justify dumbing down the school curriculum by treating all forms of communication (literature, films, E-mails and even conversations) as texts equally worthy of their attention so that King Lear is the pedagogical equivalent of King Kong.

For the rest of the article... Have to say, I agreed with much of what I read.

http://nomuzak.co.uk/dumbing_down.html

 

[Kensai]

Further reading from the same site, also contained points, that in the main, I agree with.

At the very least, knowledge gives the power to say no and the ability to give reasons for the rejection. The new cultural amnesiac is marooned on an island where only the ephemeral and evanescent matters and there are no signposts to a wider world. On this island discriminatory powers fail and it is then possible for charlatans and the manipulators of common taste to gain power and influence. The act of thought must be severely restricted by limited access to knowledge, a narrow vocabulary, and limited perspectives on the world. "Discrimination," every anti-elitist tells us, is a bad thing, subversive, and elitist. But the whole point of an education used to be to teach discrimination, to get students to discriminate between good art and bad, good writing and bad, sound science and bad. The dictionary, in fact, defines appreciation, first, as "judgment, evaluation . . . critical estimate"; second, as "sensitive awareness . . . recognition of aesthetic values"; and, only third, as "an expression of admiration, approval, or gratitude. The new populist tendency to aim education at the lowest common denominator; to teach misplaced egalitarianism in the service of unmerited self-esteem; or to encourage attitudes toward aesthetic appreciation that, by failing to discriminate, grant equal but undeserved artistic stature to all works of art and entertainment, fails the student and society in general. However, we live in a cultural climate that is against standards and against judgment so that the worst insult you can offer someone is to suggest that he or she is judgmental.

The bogus, the derivative, and the flashy and gaudy now catch the attention of the mass, who, sans sense, are captive to a superficiality of response based on degraded attentional abilities and the need for familiarity and sameness. A nationalised, homogenised culture has been created in the past few generations, moving from a partially commercialised popular culture and evolving into a more fully commodified mass culture, and leading to the creation of a current generation whose minds are more empty than open. The sources of this full-fledged mass culture emerged after the Second World War and have led to the concentration of mass-culture power in ever larger global media conglomerates.

There are no great figures in this contemporary world: where are the Beethoven’s, the Tolstoy’s, the Freud’s? Instead, there is froth and frantic ferment all around, a tidal wave of vapidity. Despite the benefits promised by high technology and mass education and communications, there seems to be a distinct lack of real creativity. Instead, we see only a lacklustre globalised homogeneity, and cultural standardisation across the world.

Question is, is this a naturally occuring phenomena, or is there some form of (apologies for the expression) intelligent design behind it? What are the benefits of a poorly educated, inarticulate, consumer driven "mass culture" to any given ruling body? You decide.

 

[Bigshadow]

The movie is available here

Freedom to Fascism