Arts Education Eminently Practical

Yes, a university liberal arts education is so useless, I'm sure the rich will stop sending their children to get them at expensive private schools. Or is it only the working class and the middle class who are supposed to remain ignorant of the finer things in life?

Sigh. Just Sigh.

A road sign on the path to the slow, agonzing death of critical thinking in this country.

Saved by a Liberal Arts Degree

Yes, a university liberal arts education is so useless, I'm sure the rich will stop sending their children to get them at expensive private schools. Or is it only the working class and the middle class who are supposed to remain ignorant of the finer things in life?

"And Coming Up Next on Fox News: The Dunning-Kruger News Hour!"

Trying to get a Republican to understand the value of education is like trying to explain money to a dog.

Republicans always think that because they are ignorant of something, that makes it untrue.

“You can be wrong or ignorant," wrote Jef Rouner. "It will happen. Reality does not care about your feelings. Education does not exist to persecute you. The misinformed are not an ethnic minority being oppressed. What’s that? Planned Parenthood is chopping up dead babies and selling them for phat cash? No, that’s not what actually happened. No, it’s not your opinion. You’re just wrong.”

Ignorance is the GOP's Most Important Product

"Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.“

— Oscar Wilde, but he had it wrong. Ignorance is stubbornly persistent.

The Elephant Is Hiding in the Tree

As Garry Kasparov wrote: "The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth."

To Those Who Use Science to Hate Science

“The minds of our young people are being poisoned by knowledge,” Stephen Colbert said. “And the source of this toxic cerebral sludge is our schools. They fill our kid’s heads with dangerous concepts like evolution and PE. Happily, there is one bright spot in education, Texas, the large hadron collider of denying science. I have long praised the Texas Board of Education for their valiant work rewriting our nation’s history textbooks. But now, I believe they’ve got some stiff competition from the Texas GOP, who recently put a plank in their 2012 party platform regarding children’s education, that says, and I quote, ‘We oppose the teaching of critical thinking skills.’ Amen brother. For too long we have blindly accepted the idea of not blindly accepting ideas.”

I've always said that I'm surprised televangelists don't give up broadcasting by technology created by that science they so despise, and transmit their message to the masses through that "Power of God" they're always going on and on about.

Saving Those Too Stupid to Save Themselves

Savvy wrote: "My mom broke down today. There were over 80 patients in the ER last night, understaffed, and today she had to hear family tell her COVID isn’t real and that feeling burnout makes you a terrible nurse. She just kept crying and said there’s no help to be seen."

Facing the Terrors of Theocracy

Irrational, inhuman tribal brutality can be washed down much more easily with a big dose of divine sanction. Always nice to know that an omnipotent being has your back and approves of your crimes, that his rod and his staff they comfort you.

The Uncertain Fate of Certain People

"Certainty itself is really an emotional state, not an intellectual one. To create a feeling of certainty, the brain must filter out far more information than it processes, which, of course, greatly increases its already high error rate during emotional arousal. In other words, the more certain you feel, the more likely you are wrong. 

“Life can be hard for the certain — reality simply won't cooperate with their view of it. Fortunately, life can also be exciting and more valuable for those who embrace its inherent uncertainty.”

— Psychologist Steven Stosny

When Liberty Equals Death

 

The selfish and self-destructive refusal to be vaccinated in order to stop a global pandemic reveals the insanity dwelling at the bottom of the rabbit hole that is libertarianism.

Parachutes Are For Cowards

How many of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who were slowly choked to death by the pandemic before a treatment was available would have given anything to get the vaccine now being refused by dangerous fools? 

In a Word, Check

 

Case in point: I just saw a meme about Barbie being 85. She isn't.

Helicopters on Mars, Cretins on Earth

Republicans are such cruel cretins, and I mean every damned one of them.

 

Intellectual Integrity 101

Republicans always think that just because
they are ignorant of something, that makes it untrue.

 

Spoiler Alert: The Morons Win

Watching a half-century-old discussion between Rod Serling and James Dickey about the problematic lack of intellectual quality on network television. 

Like a visitor from the future, I can now answer their questions for them: TV’s abdication of its public responsibility was ultimately even more disastrous than they feared.

Stupidity and ignorance won the day, electing an insane clown as president of the United States by appealing to citizens who snarl at scientific fact and prefer to believe whatever ugly supernatural fantasy coddles their vacuity and scratches the itch of their nastiest prejudices. 

Corporate executives and government officials might not have been able to stop all this from happening, but they could have tried. 

Instead, they did quite the reverse.

Thinking Is Critical

This critical thinking issue precedes and underlies politics. If we don’t know what the facts are, we can’t know where our interests lie. 

Of course, many would prefer that we don’t. Public relations, advertising, religion, bureaucracy and partisan politicians often work to subvert critical thinking. 

Yes, educational institutions praise critical thinking, but sometimes hollowly and warily. Real critical thinking is often at odds with institutional authority because it accepts only the authority of fact.

A Nation Driving Into Darkness

Dee-dumb. That's a fine kinda free-dumb.

 

Well, Who Can Argue With That?

Margaret Atwood said, “Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.” And Republicans always think that because they are ignorant of something, that makes it untrue.

The Job of Journalists

American corporate "journalism" persists in putting demonstrably false lunatics on the air. It’s as if “Network” has collided with “A Face in the Crowd” and sprayed stupidity everywhere.