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it's not indoctrination but the magic is sucking you dry

Sep 6th, 2009
by Drew Tatusko.

alexThis hub-bub over the President's address to students irked me this weekend. How stupid are we as a public to lack any form of discernment?

It's not indoctrination. Indoctrination is what happens during basic training for the military which is literally called "indoctrination school." A non-coercive presidential address is indoctrination as much as teaching evolution is indoctrination. Indoctrination is a form of rhetoric that requires a coerced consent among the recipients of it. Those who maintain that a public speech given to school children is indoctrination sound to me like the ones who have been indoctrinated in the form of self-justified assent to what others have told them. Read that last sentence one more time and you can see the irony. This is the GOP sponsored press release that is at the very root of the problem:

The idea that school children across our nation will be forced to watch the President justify his plans for government-run health care, banks, and automobile companies, increasing taxes on those who create jobs, and racking up more debt than any other President, is not only infuriating, but goes against beliefs of the majority of Americans, while bypassing American parents through an invasive abuse of power.

The next bit is where it gets totally absurd.

Public schools can't teach children to speak out in support of the sanctity of human life or traditional marriage. President Obama and the Democrats wouldn't dream of allowing prayer in school. Christmas Parties are now Holiday Parties. But, the Democrats have no problem going against the majority of American people and usurping the rights of parents by sending Pied Piper Obama into the American classroom.

To get this straight, forcing a Muslim to have a Christian celebration, or forcing an agnostic to assent to a religiously constituted notion of the sanctity of human life is not indoctrinating, yet watching a speech is? It is so absurd it is laughable. But I am not laughing and neither should you.

What is disturbing is how many people actually believe this bullshit and have claimed it as their own view of the world. I have heard the term "brainwash" as well. I guess this goes along with all the bizarre whack that associates the President with Nazism, fascism, and communism all the same sentences. Brainwashing is a very intense process that requires a bit more effort than a presentation of a speech. Here is an example:

In for a little of the old Ludwig Van now are we? The fact that the President could hold all of these views in the same policy is odd since Hitler and fascism was in serious conflict over communism! It reveals how disgustingly and appallingly ignorant many Americans actually are and emphasizes why the people who are taking their kids out of school should be held accountable for truancy since their kids clearly need education. Education should be both from teachers and parents who should talk to kids about what they learn so these kids can learn to think for themselves.

So what is all of this absurdity? It is nothing but magic designed to get people off the issues that are important. Hell if I know why the GOP wants to give magic shows to the degree of absurd foolishness to which they are now stooping. I will let conspiracy theories sort that out with no doubt more poison designed to make us dumb. Be that as it may, the "indoctrination" nonsense is the "turn" in the magic trick where you do all your business with the left hand and get people to look somewhere else. It's working too. So Glenn Beck can go on with his faux-intellectualism which really despises intellectuals, Limbaugh can keep getting fat on his trough of public gullibility, and Hannity can just act like a total asshole and pass that off as some kind of prophet. Meanwhile Olbermann only annoys us more with his griping and Bill Mahar just gets increasingly cynical and loathsome with each poison dart. Others like Malkin, Coulter, and Levin are even worse with their cynical contempt.

What do we do? We suck it up like the sweetest nectar from Xanadu – automatons who find God in lies and myths about the world that have no correspondence to reality itself. While we suck on that nectar of dishonesty the same problems persist that our self-imposed corporate culture sucks up even as it sucks value from our local communities:

  • a growing wealth gap,
  • rationed health care from insurance and pharmaceuticals who could care less about your health,
  • rising unemployment,
  • a national debt that will not go away health care or no health care,
  • a corrupt centralized currency that controls the entire economy,
  • more people graduating college with debt that will take decades to pay off,
  • a failed and persistently expensive "war on drugs",
  • labor as the primary corporate export while more goods are produced over seas,
  • continuing declines in community involvement that empower the whole system to suck us dry,
  • and all the politicians everywhere who continue to get paid by the system thus not representing the people who put them in office,
  • arbitrary marriage restrictions that make no civic sense,
  • and ___________.

It's one big suck fest and the citizens are the hosts for the parasites. People who think they are "taking government back" are worried about words like "socialism" which they probably don't even understand, "Marxism" when they have likely not even read a word of Marx, "communism" as if the only form of it was in the Eastern Bloc and Cuba, and "fascism" with clearly no clue as to what it is given the sick enjoyment of screaming Hitler to Jews and people of color! These are magic tricks that only disempower people to exercise their right as Americans to rule themselves. The so-called "tea-parties" are advertisements for the magic. They have nothing to do with genuine change.

Want to change something? Consume less, get out of debt, and volunteer to do something in order to invest in your local economies. Stop selling your souls to banks and mega church preachers who want to suck your value out in order to fuel up the private jet. Turn the damn TV off, stop watching Fox and MSNBC, and read a damn book by a scholar who cares more about truth than selling another book of crap. The way to take control of our situation is by taking control of what you consume – period. Otherwise you will just let this poison continue to suck the life out of whatever soul you have left.

Related posts:

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  2. simple single-payer health care solution
  3. the good congress woman: a good samaritan redux
  4. joan rivers' charity should not exist
  5. witness supporting prop 8 gives good reason to oppose it

Posted in: Education, Life, Politics, Religion, Society.

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  • Drew, I'm constantly amazed when reading your posts in how many divergent paths one can take to the same truths; we often would employ differing means to acheive the same ends (Tho I'd certainly take issue with this statement: "there should be some form of equal opportunity or sharing through public consent of natural resources". I'd agree only if it's voluntarily entered by all parties affected; otherwise, homesteading takes precedence)

    I'd like to point out that while the GOP is certainly rife with bullshit-spewing imbeciles, so are the Demoblicans. Grnated, during previous administrations, the DNC rarely (if ever) bloviated so about Republicrat Presidents making schoolhouse speeches.

    The truth is, Obama and Bush both are socialists... and fascists. Bear in mind, it was Mussolini who originally developed (or at least named) the fascist philosophy, not Hitler, and the oft-overlooked third school of Communist thought was that of Leon Trotsky. The Bush/Obama neocons are simply whitewashed Trotskyites, now bent on exporting 'democracy' via permanent revolution instead of Trotsky's class equality. Either way, socialism and fascism are two sides of the same coin. The sole visible difference I can discern--and it's not really much of one--is that in the one, government serves corporate interests, while in the other corporations serve political ends; at some level(s), this difference is meaningless.

    And, since 'free' public education is a foundation of both Marxism and fascism, it, happily, invokes my overriding political solution: scorched earth. Abolish politically indoctrinating, intellectually numbing, morally enslaving, totally un-'free' public schools. The real problem isn't whether this group or that group is calling the shots in the indoctrination--yes, 'indoctrination,' because whether the topic is 'Obamacare' or a US-centric view of world history, the sole purpose (as both Marx and Hitler opined) is to produce complacent, compliant little drones--of America's youth; the real problem is that the venue exists in the first place.

    Today the schools (and the FED); tomorrow, the rest of the bloated anachronism called 'government'! (Okay, granted, as slogans go, that's not quite as catchy as it could be ;) )
  • i have no problem arguing all those points as you know. my problem is that the people protesting are protesting the wrong things based on junk distributed by junk media outlets that are making us more stupid with each press release.

    if you want to argue that this was an advert for the public school system and the failure that has been compulsory education (yes it has failed folks look at the outcome data and report back if you care to) great. cato has been doing it over and over again with seemingly no audience on capitol hill. basically this whole issue shows ho far our system has fallen and just how sick the GOP has become.

    if we consume less goods produced by big ass corporations that export labor, for one, things would change. buy local, volunteer local, make communities happen. simple really. but the sort of junk that people are filling their heads with like this is the problem i am addressing here.

    regarding the comment on public schools, i went to a pretty damn good one in a pretty damn good system in MD. i also know quite a few public school teachers who are the opposite of "politically indoctrinating, intellectually numbing, morally enslaving, totally un-'free'". now they all take serious issue with NCLB as do i. locally managed schools and locally managed outcomes are the way to go in any system. so i agree with Paul in getting rid of the DoE as it has been more harmful than good especially in recent years. federal capacity building grant money should be a state affair.
  • tedseeber
    "arbitrary marriage restrictions that make no civic sense"

    I was with you until this one. From a pure evolutionary standpoint, restricting marriage and family life to monogamous heterosexuality actually makes a ton of civic sense in temperate zones.

    It makes slightly less sense in harsher climates, such as deserts and tundra, but even there marriage restricted to polygamous heterosexuality makes a ton of sense for a civilization struggling to survive against a hostile environment.

    Where it doesn't make sense, is if your civilization is trying to commit suicide, having judged it's own major species as a big part of major environmental problems. But even then, embracing non-procreational sexuality is just a means to a swift end, not useful for the perpetuation of the civilization.
  • so don't get married or hook up with anyone else unless you plan to make babies because you are in a temperate zone? marriage restrictions based on climate. quite bizarre and quite unconstitutional.
  • tedseeber
    From the point of view of CIVILIZATION, which is not concerned with the mere wants of individuals, yes.

    Think about it a second. What does civilization need to keep going past the current generation, more than anything else? BABIES. Thus, what does it makes sense to *reward* as far as sexual behavior is concerned? *THOSE WHO MAKE BABIES*.

    In temperate zones, where you're not using every ounce of strength to survive, it also makes sense to add the restriction of 1:1 marriage, monogamy, to prevent jealousy and using that extra energy to kill potential sexual rivals. This is less so in hostile environments where it simply makes more sense to have as many children as possible, and let those who are able to survive do so.

    As far as "unconstitutional" is concerned, well, the laws of man and the laws of nature rarely coincide, and I'm talking laws of nature here, not laws of man. 40,000 years of trial and error went into the system of marriage we have today- it's older than any of our religions by far- and way older than your mere constitution. It's EVOLUTION baby- and from this point of view, homosexuality is a mere mutation with no survival characteristics whatsoever.
  • of course you are not correcting for life expectancy and immigration or use of natural resources, etc. besides with all the unwanted babies out there, there is a perfect evolutionary purpose for homosexuals. and there's IVF too. lots of ways of having babies other than penis inserted into vagina in a loving marriage to produce offspring.

    evidence is that affluence not climate predicts population replacement. the north happens to be more affluent than the south. climate and environmental richness may play a part in that too. but the climate is not what regresses to population growth, its existential security (see norris & inglehart's provocative argument for secularization here as well since existential security also predicts secularization).

    as areas over populate homosexuality makes more sense (see the wanting seed as a thought experiment). right now there are more homosexuals in urban environments for a lot of reasons than in other geographic areas. so there it makes more sense too as population dense areas continue to strip resources to sustain life over the long haul.

    so it's not simply to have babies or not. you have to consider environmental equilibrium and actual predictors of population growth for a given environment if you are going to put this in terms of natural selection. too many counter examples for this line of argument to hold enough water to manage public policy. if there is a statistical model for this that makes sense, i'd like to see it though as there are plenty for these and perhaps other counter-examples.
  • tedseeber
    "of course you are not correcting for life expectancy and immigration or use of natural resources,"

    Oh, the overpopulation myth. That was disproven back in July of this year by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and their research was confirmed by UNFAO.

    http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227143....

    And IVF is horrendously expensive in comparison- need a laboratory and a hospital for that. Talk about over use of resources, when there is a perfectly good method for getting the job done.

    The north hasn't had replacement level demographics for 20 years now, and I'm talking about cultures a lot older than a mere 200 years, so Norris & Inglehart can go take a flying leap in comparison to the previous 40,000 years of research into this topic.

    Overpopulation is a myth at best- Malthus was WRONG. Any sign of overpopulation is just politics combined with people doing the stupid thing and moving into cities- Africa alone could feed the world.

    As for "environmental equilibrium", we're about 15 billion people short of even considering it. I'm talking cultural evolution- which cultures survive and which do not, in the long term over thousands of years. By and large, in the fight for natural selection, homosexual cultures die out, ever since the Romans conquered the Greeks more than 2100 years ago.
  • those articles really do not debunk over-population. they are arguing that africa can indeed produce enough food for the population growth right now and for some time. we cannot overstate what research actually argues here. overpopulation has a lot more to do with food consumption. that's not the only resource an environment produces and that people consume. i am not arguing that overpopulation is going to happen any day now. could be a loooong time. and evolution takes place over very looong periods of time as do mass extinctions. certainly longer than after we both die. so its not a myth given the goods we are now consuming at exponential rates. as the comments indicate, there is more to sustaining an environment and a population of species than mass agriculture. but evolution as natural selection and adaptation/mutation is not really your point is it?

    expense of IVF is irrelevant as well. gay couples make more money than hetero couples as it is. it is actually more cost-effective than adoption which i would say is a morally stronger alternative. but evolutionary fitness also plays a role here since it is hard to tell a woman she should not be a mother. the instinct is strong as you know. it is equally strong among lesbian women.

    whether moving into cities is stupid is a total fallacy that ignores the fact that people in fact do. to call all people who move into cities stupid is itself a really ignorant claim that has little to do with the idea that in areas of highly dense populations, homosexuality actually thrives as a contributor to evolutionary fitness.

    so what if we are 20 billion short? if you are focused on only right now and for today, then it bemoans your entire assertion about civilizations and cultural evolution which takes a very long time to root out. your point is this odd idea of cultural evolution as if all cultures survive magically and indefinitely. this makes no sense in either anthropology or sociology since no culture or society is that durable regardless of how many babies it produces. people still speak greek. italians are be definition romans (check the gene pool). the jews today are sure as hell not the same jews during jesus. christians are not either.

    to say that greece or rome died out because homosexuality was normative you have to do a lot of work to substantiate that the variables of homosexuality and death of civilization are actually correlated much less that one cause the other. have you read "guns, germs, and steel"? i have not, but does his thesis go in this direction at all? since he is not arguing "guns, germs, and gays" (which would have sold a lot more books) i doubt it. that's an awful lot of revisionist history and political thinking over the past 100 years or so.

    cultures die out, and cultures change so much that they are totally different. to say that homosexual cultures die out is as fat of a red herring as you can produce. the evidence takes a view of culture that is so ignorant and preposterous its hardly worth a discussion. and i am not saying that to stop you from responding, i just think you are working in territory that needs a lot of work even to take seriously.
  • tedseeber
    If the urge to breed was equally strong among Lesbians, they wouldn't be lesbians. IVF is at best a waste of resources replacing a perfectly good system that has worked for millions of years in a wide variety of species.

    Cultures are no different than any other multicellular organism. Cultures do not survive magically- they survive on purpose. I've read Guns, Germs, and Steel; sexuality plays a minor role, but an existential one. Find me a conquering society where homosexuality played a major role in it's survival- you can't, because they don't exist.

    It's not as much a red herring- as a lack of one. My point is, before you go saying that there is no reason for monogamous heterosexuality, look back at the last 40,000 years and tell me what the advantage to a civilization would be to stop promoting breeding.
  • a person is a lesbian because they are attracted to women pretty much exclusively, not because they don't want babies. talk to some. talk to the infertile about IVF being a waste of resources. you are making a subjective value judgment with absolutely no evidence (i am seeing a pattern here).

    homosexuality does not need to play a major or minor role to correlate with a society's survival. your job is to produce a correlation since you are making the claim. and you changed the variable. now you want to talk about "conquering societies" instead of "civilization." still does not matter unless you can substantiate the assertion through a correlation. a "role" does not hold muster - especially an "existential one" whatever that might mean. does diamond make any such correlation in his book? he's not the end authority, but since you have read it... i am assuming he does not by the way that you yourself give very small credence to it. again, what is the correlation between homosexuality and a "conquering society" and what data are you using to make that claim? and what is the definition of a "conquering society"? how long does it need to conquer to be as such? is that the best kind of society to which we should all aspire? surely the nazis conquered for a time and they executed homosexuals. are all muslims nations that condemn homosexuality the same? are they "conquering?" again this does not seem like territory that proves to be very helpful for what you are trying to claim.

    i am nowhere suggesting that a civilization stop reproducing (that's a strawman by the way). this is again a totally different assertion than saying that US marriage restrictions are arbitrary. what is the percentage of homosexuals in societies that are affirming of it? pretty low right? so what is the mathematical probability that a very small population within a group can lead to its extinction simply by the rate at which that small population reproduces? again, without any correlation, which let's be honest you are not going to find because it does not exist, the hypothesis that this probability must be so incredibly low that it in no way warrants a claim that same gender marriage should be excluded from civil legitimacy as it is now.

    i am probably going to pull this out into a post since it is way off track with the actual post here.
  • Feel better?

    That's definitely one one of the best rants I read in a long time. The nonsense of the talking head's spouting this crap almost makes me proud of the level of politics we have this side of the pond (UK).
  • i did feel better thanks :-) i was not going to post on this crap, but i could not take it anymore and i needed a swift purge.
  • Awesome post Drew ...

    The best line I read this weekend was an article in the Huffington Post that ended with this paragraph: "Anyway, that's the state of the world today. If President Obama reminded people tomorrow to brush between meals, thousands of people would allow their teeth to rot right out of their heads, because OMGZ TEH SOCIALISM! The upside to all of this is that after Tuesday, every teacher in the world will know precisely what students are going to need remedial help."
  • nicely played.
  • bencurrin
    I know all the hub bub is like chicken little as I said on a similar post---"it does seem like these days the wing-nuts act more and more like chicken little with their sky is falling attitude. Both sides are like this like during Bush’s administration—all the left wingers were up and arms when Bush breathed and now with Obama the right wingers seeking revenge are throwing temper tantrums over Obama speaking to schoolchildren. It is like a large segment of society hasn’t evolved beyond grade-school and the mud-flinging and name-calling of playground politics. Also, schoolchildren aren’t as dumb as wing-nuts make them out to be and a large majority of schoolchildren make more sense than the wing-nuts do."
  • ben, feel free to link to said post here. thanks!
  • bencurrin
  • vojtas
    Hey, new reader. Mostly agree with the thrust of the post, but have a few questions.

    "...forcing an agnostic to assent to a religiously constituted notion of the sanctity of human life"
    It is religiously constituted, but how do you arrive at an idea of when personhood begins and to what extent it's human to refrain from fighting the practice if you believe it's carried on after a Person has come into being (I am on the fence about both of these issues, myself).

    "Otherwise you will just let this poison continue to suck the life out of whatever soul you have left."
    ...

    On the Marxism/Socialism thing, have you posted anything dealing with the topic?
  • on the first, i don't think that it is the place of public education to teach a given view of human life. they can teach sanctity in an ethics course where different views are discussed. of course i would say only a senior level AP course is appropriate.

    second, i honestly can't remember if i have covered marx or socialism in specific. i need to add a search field for people though...

    thanks!
  • vojtas
    I agree wholeheartedly that public education shouldn't teach a given view of life/personhood. I am interested in in hearing your views on a) when you think a genetically human organism becomes a person for moral purposes and b) If, let's say, the answer were to be within the time-frame where abortion is legal (I don't much follow this topic, so I don't actually know), how a christian ought to respond to that. My worry is that there probably isn't much of a secular justification for opposing it, but on the other hand it doesn't seem necessarily justifiable to not resist (without violence in this sort of case) the killing of a human hypostasis.

    By the way, looking at your blogroll, are you libertarian?

    Best
  • easy question! ;-)

    i actually tackle what you are asking and then some here: http://notes-from-offcenter.com/2009/05/17/is-c...

    and i am a left-libertarian meaning that three should be some form of equal opportunity or sharing through public consent of natural resources.
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