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447029 |
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Date: March 21, 2025 at 09:51:26
From: The Hierophant, [DNS_Address]
Subject: The Attack On The American Mind |
URL: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/trump-s-attack-on-the-american-mind/ar-AA1BoHCV?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=297bd117383b4c27ea35d743bfabbedb&ei=11 |
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One of the key sentences here: "Throughout history,
tyrants have understood that their major enemy is an
educated citizenry. Ignorance is the handmaiden of
tyranny." And isn't that what he said - he loves the
uneducated...
"Today, Trump is dismantling much of the Department of
Education. He has ordered wrestling executive-turned-
Education Secretary Linda McMahon to shut most of her
department, although student loans and special
education funding will continue.
His executive order will effectively destroy a $100
billion-a-year executive department created by Congress
under President Jimmy Carter 45 years ago.
But there’s a much larger story here.
Combine this with Trump’s attacks on higher education —
his gutting the funding of the National Institutes of
Health (which provides a large portion of biomedical
research) and the National Science Foundation
(engineering and computer research), and his effective
closure of USAID (which underwrites research in global
diseases).
Put this together with Trump’s attacks on the freedom
of speech of university students and professors.
And with Trump’s (and RFK Jr.’s) attacks on vaccine
science,
With Trump’s and rightwing governors’ attacks on
teaching the truth in our schools about America’s
history of slavery and Native American genocide.
Combine this with Trump’s attack on America’s libraries
— last week’s executive order mandating cuts in the
funding of libraries around the country — which will
jeopardize literacy development and reading programs,
reliable internet access for those without it at home,
and homework help and other resources for students and
educators.
And his attacks on America’s museums (the same
executive order cut their funding, too). And his attack
on the arts, as illustrated by Trump’s takeover of the
Kennedy Center (last month, he announced himself its
new chair, replaced 13 board members, and inserted a
new interim president).
What’s the larger picture?
Not an “attack on the liberal state,” as I keep
reading. Not “the culmination of Trump’s culture wars.”
Certainly not that Trump seeking “small government”
over “big government,” or advancing traditional
conservatism over traditional liberalism.
Throughout history, tyrants have understood that their
major enemy is an educated citizenry. Slaveholders
prohibited slaves from learning to read. Nazi’s burned
books. Putin and Xi censor the media.
Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny.
Those who believe in democracy, on the other hand, have
been at the forefront of the movement for free,
universal public education; and for public libraries,
museums, and the arts.
They understand that democracy depends on people
knowing what’s occurring around them and having the
capacity to deliberate critically about it.
Trump is only the frontman in this attack on the
American mind.
The attack is really coming from the anti-democracy
movement: From JD Vance; and from Vance’s major
financial backer, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who
staked $15 million on Vance’s Ohio senatorial election
in 2022 and helped convince Trump to make Vance vice
president. And from Thiel’s early business partner,
Elon Musk.
Thiel is a self-styled libertarian who once wrote: “I
no longer believe that freedom and democracy are
compatible.”
Hello? Freedom is incompatible with democracy only if
you view democracy as a potential constraint on your
wealth and power.
Behind Vance and Musk is a libertarian group of rich
crypto bros, tech executives, back-to-the-landers, and
disaffected far-right intellectuals.
Curtis Yarvin comes as close as anyone as being their
intellectual godfather. He has written that political
power in the United States is held by a liberal amalgam
of universities and the mainstream media whose
commitment to equality and justice is eroding America’s
social order.
In Yarvin’s view, democratic governments are
inefficient and wasteful. They should be replaced with
sovereign joint-stock corporations whose major
“shareholders” select an executive with total power,
who serves at their pleasure. Yarvin refers to the
city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful
authoritarian regime.
Make no mistake: Trump’s attack on the American mind —
on education, science, libraries, and museums — is an
attack on the capacity of Americans for self-
government.
It is coming from the oligarchs of the techno-state who
believe democracy is inefficient, and want to replace
it with an authoritarian regime replete with
technologies they control.
Be warned."
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Responses:
[447051] [447055] [447034] [447035] [447050] [447059] [447030] |
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447051 |
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Date: March 22, 2025 at 01:00:01
From: ao, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: The Attack On The American Mind |
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"One of the key sentences here: "Throughout history, tyrants have
understood that their major enemy is an educated citizenry. Ignorance is the
handmaiden of tyranny." And isn't that what he said - he loves the
uneducated... "
Keep in mind, we have brought this on ourselves. We, the societal we, have
predicated our society, far more than just our entertainment, on flooding the
viewer, the participant, with advertising. Which in general is the science of
manipulating the viewer/listener/audience into doing the advertiser's
bidding, buying their product. We did this.. we agree to let this happen to all
of us.. all the time.
And whereas in its formative years the product was soap.. seriously, you
really need MY soup! now it's the minds, the political views, the beliefs, of
the viewers that are bought and sold by the likes of Zuckerberg and Musk.
Trump's rise to fame is but a product of so many impressions bought and
the subliminal quality of the messages seen.. Russian troll farms harvesting
the wills of the impressionable.. stimulating their minds.. training their minds
to be stimulated by ever more subtle messaging.. all to waste.. to rob.. the
very potential that makes them human..
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[447055] |
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447055 |
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Date: March 22, 2025 at 07:51:32
From: The Hierophant, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Along those lines of thought |
URL: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/a-tragedy-for-the-world-how-the-trump-musk-takeover-is-sowing-global-chaos/ar-AA1BrPUh?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=b02d3b237ebc4dc9e78fedea63085b0b&ei=13 |
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I just read an interesting article - they interviewed a
Danish social psychologist who has a tool to analyze
the Danish democratic challenges in hopes of addressing
them.
Here is a snipet from the lengthier article and I
provide a link for the entire article:
A: "In that paper, you broke down the coalitional
functions of falsehood into three stages. The first of
those was mobilization. You said, "By enhancing the
threat — for example, by saying things that are not
necessarily true — then you are in a better situation
to mobilize and coordinate the attention of your own
group." I thought of that when Trump made the claim
about Haitian immigrants eating pets: Clearly that was
false, and they didn't care that it was false. That
didn't seem to matter at all to Trump's followers, who
seemed to revel in claiming it, regardless of whether
it was true or false. Could you say something about how
that works?
P: When you're trying to mobilize a coalition, you
need to overcome a fundamental problem, which is the
coordination problem. Even if everyone within a group
wants to do the same thing, it is actually difficult to
get the group to do that thing, because their attention
is scattered across multiple different issues. It's not
the only thing that they want to do. So they need to
agree: Is it now that we're doing that thing? That
problem of coordinating people's attention at the same
time to do X is a difficult problem. A lot of
propaganda is about creating that coordination, to say
it's now that we need to do something about it, and we
need to do this.
We have seen those kinds of processes operate over
human history. It's well documented in the context of
ethnic massacres and riots, to the extent that one of
the leading authors on the social dynamics behind
ethnic massacres, Donald Horowitz, says that when you
see propaganda spread prior to an ethnic massacre, you
should see it as essentially a recipe for what is going
to happen. A lot of that propaganda is always filled
with the atrocities that the other group has done, but
more than an accurate description of what they have
actually done, it psychologically functions as a recipe
for what we are going to do against them. We see this
on many occasions with the rhetoric coming from Trump
and Musk.
A: Can you be more specific?
P: I think a lot of what goes on with Canada is
similar. There is this constant talk about injustice:
Canada is treating the United States unfairly, Europe
is treating the United States unfairly. It's very
unclear how that is the case. But essentially that
serves as a pretext for going with the tariffs, and
this understanding that, OK, we need to do something
about this problem now.
If we go back to the story about the Haitian immigrants
eating pets, I think it shows something slightly
different but also quite interesting about our
psychology of falsehoods. Because I think it's
absolutely true that neither Trump nor his core
audience cared whether it was true or false, but part
of the reason is that they cared about the underlying
direction of society that was implied by the
misinformation. Trump and the core of the movement
wanted to do something about immigrants. They wanted
them to be deported. As long as the specific piece of
information that you are giving out has implications in
the direction that you want to go, then the actual
circumstances matter less. In that sense, you could see
what Trump did as a clever form of agenda-setting.
I don't think he believed that the migrants were eating
dogs. I don't think that a lot of his followers believe
that cats and dogs were being eaten. But it didn't
really matter, because it had the right implications.
By messaging those implications in the form of
misinformation, it got everyone to talk about it, which
meant that the underlying issue of immigration was kept
high on the agenda as people were trying to debunk the
underlying falsehood.
So that also shows something about how difficult it is
for benign actors to navigate strategically in an
information environment where some people have
absolutely no regard for the truth, and perhaps to
figure out: Is this a falsehood we should just sort of
ignore? Or is this a falsehood we should strongly push
back against? Because the risk is that by pushing back
against the falsehood you are keeping the underlying
issue at the top of the agenda.
What you're talking about there involves both the
mobilization and the coordination functions. But
there's a third aspect you talk about, regarding
commitment. A good way to signal group loyalty is to
take on a belief that's the exact opposite of what the
other group believes. That creates pressure to develop
bizarre beliefs about the other group being evil. That
sums up what I see, as an American, in Trump openly
claiming to be king while simultaneously claiming that
his enemies are trying to destroy America, which of
course was founded on rejecting the rule of a king.
What does that look like from your perspective?
I think that's a very good example of the kind of
dynamics that we are trying to describe in our work.
Going back to these different forms of beliefs, it's
not a good team signal to believe that Mount Everest is
the highest mountain in the world, because everyone
believes that. So if your basic goal is to figure out
who's loyal and who's not, you need to push a narrative
that is against a large number of people's basic way of
understanding things.
In the U.S. context, proclaiming you are king is very
much in opposition to a large number of American values
and therefore it's a pretty good signal of loyalty if
you're actually going along with the narrative. Just as
it's a good signal of loyalty if you go with the
narrative of Trump buying Gaza and turning it into a
beach resort. Because from a European perspective, that
looks so bizarre that I almost don't have words for it,
especially for the video that that he used to
communicate this on Truth Social.
But it really makes it helpful from a leadership
perspective, especially if you are a leader looking for
blind obedience. Because by making it bizarre — where
people will feel pressure and tension in going along
with it — then it becomes what we in psychology call a
"costly signal." You need to pay something to go along
with it. And we're seeing this not just at the level of
rank-and-file voters in the MAGA movement but among
elected Republicans who are putting out legislation or
proposals to put Donald Trump on Mount Rushmore, who
are suggesting that Donald Trump should be on $100
bills, who are suggesting to turn Trump's birthday into
a national holiday.
All these over-the-top proposals are signs of loyalty.
You cannot show loyalty to a dominant leader just by
doing something that doesn't cost you anything. You
need to do something that will make other people turn
their backs on you. "
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447034 |
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Date: March 21, 2025 at 15:47:11
From: Sue/Seattle, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: The Attack On The American Mind |
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I have laid awake nights wondering what the true end game
is for all of this.
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Responses:
[447035] [447050] [447059] |
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447035 |
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Date: March 21, 2025 at 16:10:56
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: The Attack On The American Mind |
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it is to destroy any opposition to the disturbed, psychotic rumpian mindset...wipe the playing field clean of anything that isn't patriarchal and white nationalistic, so the brotherhood of white oligarchs can rule in what they think is peace...they should remember the french revolution and others...their heads will roll...
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Responses:
[447050] [447059] |
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447050 |
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Date: March 21, 2025 at 20:04:29
From: mitra, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: The Attack On The American Mind |
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LOL.
I posted this on the thread above then read this one.
What I think is amazing is your economy of words.
to repeat:
Republicans, long before this administration had a war
against science and education, creating morons.
Then they puffed up the importance of same morons by
glorifying ignorance and substituting falsity for
history.
All while instilling fear against the most law abiding
groups and justifying purchase of guns and arsenals.
Next they destroy the economy and set these frightened,
ignorant creatures loose with weapons. No belief in
the system, suspect of neighbors, having lost their
minds.
Then they cut off the checks that feed the creatures
and that their parents depend upon.
And they expect these hungry people not to use the one
functioning tool in their possession?
Putin would love it. And so apparently would his puppet
government.
Not me.
Even the Republicans will go to fight when the Chinese
(and friend Russians) invade to put down the civil
violence and disorder that threatens Chinese
investments. (How many times has the USA taught that
strategy?)
Putin and the violence spewing Kool aid swigging
propagandists want us to kill each other before they
get here.
So far, it's a comedy of air-errs.
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Responses:
[447059] |
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447059 |
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Date: March 22, 2025 at 15:34:08
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: The Attack On The American Mind |
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your response is much more measured and diplomatic than my piss and vinegar harangue...we'll hit em from both sides!
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447030 |
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Date: March 21, 2025 at 10:03:45
From: shadow, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: The Attack On The American Mind |
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And the anti-democracy movement is the right arm of the
global corporocratic domination machine seeking its biggest
and most necessary victory to their complete tyranny...
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