4 posts tagged “occident”

[Cross-posted] Sometimes I surprise myself on what comes up in blog comments. In a thread about the Iraq war and the short memories of nations over on Vox, I wrote the following. And as I wrote, I believed this to be a possible truth.

To go forth in the future we need to discover our past, a hard thing in an age of short memories as you say. … Leadership might not come from size but from those nations that have steadfastly refused to give in to the prevailing decline in so many places. Switzerland, for all its refusal to join the EU, has managed to maintain one of the greatest gun ownership rates in the world yet not have a single gun-related murder attributable to its own in most years; Singapore, retaining its Confucian philosophies, manages a city-state with limited natural resources.
   Their example needs to be communicated to the world, as well as the positive aspects of certain parts of the US or China—they exist, but they are hidden.
   This is one reason to like blogs because they can cut through the shield of the MSM and government propaganda. I do not think that we have reached any critical mass among netizens, networking citizens together in a form of moral leadership. … [T]here are pockets of good people everywhere as you and I have witnessed, just that we are not necessarily visible.
   But that critical mass can come—and if warfare now is at a terrorist, guerrilla level in so many places, I suspect moral leadership itself will come from a grass-roots base.
   The system needs idealists like us, reminding people of their short memories, and maybe change will be effected not through top–down governmental, propagandist methods or the MSM, but through one-on-few communications from each of us.
   I would rather hope that the next superpower, therefore, is not a nation or even an ideology, but a collective of humankind cutting through the BS and revealing the truth. Who says the ’net cannot be a force for good once more? If it can propagate hate and porn, it can just as easily propagate hope and truth.

   I get reminded of this every now and then by others who feel the same way: Chris, at the Edutainment & Convergence blog, wrote to me privately and inspired me. And when I think back to books like Beyond Branding and Typography & Branding, I think there was a great deal of post-9-11 optimism and the desire to build a better, more understanding world. I find passages of my Typography & Branding inspiring, if an author is allowed to be inspired by his own work, and I can’t have been this cynical back then.
   It’s a good zone to be in and I haven’t felt this hopeful about the potential of the ’net in about a year.
   Last year, I was bemoaning the decline of the blogosphere as it began looking more and more like the darker parts of society, with gossipmongers and rude, anonymous commenters finding their way on to it. Where were, I asked, the globally minded idealists of the 1990s?
   On the other hand, their entry into this world surely puts them closer to the hands of the idealists who can now shape agenda, creating more hopeful sites and messages.
   And maybe channelling or finding the above message from my subconscious helped me put things into perspective more. If indeed the state nation is less relevant and change is better effected by people helping people directly, because technology has now made that possible, then the moral vacuum caused by various changes in society can be filled.
   All it needs are willing participants prepared to get together to make the world a better place, regardless of their political, cultural or religious stripes.
   That’s really why I got into media.
   If we agree on this target, then the rest must follow.

I found this on the Informer’s blog here on Vox. Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, who was senior policy adviser to the Department of Education under the Reagan Administration, talks about the dumbing-down of the United States and how education has been set on a socialist path by Marxists. She has written a book called The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, which you can download free of charge in PDF format from her site.
   From the preface, with footnotes omitted and some paragraphing changed for clarity:

… Achievement of Students, Key Points: U. S. twelfth graders scored below the international average and among the lowest of the 21 TIMSS nations in both mathematics and science general knowledge in the final year of secondary school. (p. 24)
   Obviously, something is terribly wrong when a $6,330 per pupil expenditure produces such pathetic results. This writer has visited private schools which charge $1,000-per-year in tuition which enjoy superior academic results. Parents of home-schooled children spend a maximum of $1,000-per-year and usually have similar excellent results. …
   The desire by “resisters” to prove their case has been so strong that they have continued to amass-over a thirty- to fifty-year period-what must surely amount to tons of materials containing irrefutable proof, in the education change agents’ own words, of deliberate, malicious intent to achieve behavioral changes in students/parents/society which have nothing to do with commonly understood educational objectives. Upon delivery of such proof, “resisters” are consistently met with the “shoot the messenger” stonewalling response by teachers, school boards, superintendents, state and local officials, as well as the supposedly objective institutions of academia and the press.
   This resister’s book, or collection of research in book form, was put together primarily to satisfy my own need to see the various components which led to the dumbing down of the United States of America assembled in chronological order-in writing. Even I, who had observed these weird activities taking place at all levels of government, was reluctant to accept a malicious intent behind each individual, chronological activity or innovation, unless I could connect it with other, similar activities taking place at other times. This book, which makes such connections, has provided for me a much-needed sense of closure. …
   In retrospect, I had just found out that the United States was engaged in war. People write important books about war: books documenting the battles fought, the names of the generals involved, the names of those who fired the first shot. This book is simply a history book about another kind of war:
   * one fought using psychological methods;
   * a one-hundred-year war;
   * a different, more deadly war than any in which our country has ever been involved;
   * a war about which the average American hasn't the foggiest idea.
   The reason Americans do not understand this war is because it has been fought in secret-in the schools of our nation, using our children who are captive in classrooms. The wagers of this war are using very sophisticated and effective tools:
   * Hegelian Dialectic (common ground, consensus and compromise)
   * Gradualism (two steps forward; one step backward)
   * Semantic deception (redefining terms to get agreement without understanding) …
   Much of this book contains quotes from government documents detailing the real purposes of American education:
   * to use the schools to change America from a free, individual nation to a socialist, global “state,” just one of many socialist states which will be subservient to the United Nations Charter, not the United States Constitution;
   * to brainwash our children, starting at birth, to reject individualism in favor of collectivism;
   * to reject high academic standards in favor of OBE/ISO 1400/90006 egalitarianism;
   * to reject truth and absolutes in favor of tolerance, situational ethics and consensus;
   * to reject American values in favor of internationalist values (globalism);
   * to reject freedom to choose one’s career in favor of the totalitarian K-12 school-to-work/OBE process, aptly named “limited learning for lifelong labor,” coordinated through United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization.
   Only when all children in public, private and home schools are robotized-and believe as one-will World Government be acceptable to citizens and able to be implemented without firing a shot. The attractive-sounding “choice” proposals will enable the globalist elite to achieve their goal: the robotization (brainwashing) of all Americans in order to gain their acceptance of lifelong education and workforce training-part of the world management system to achieve a new global feudalism.

   There’s more at www.deliberatedumbingdown.com. It’s useful food for thought in our technocratically biased society, and I think we can see some of the same things happening in our own educational system and media.

How popular was Benazir Bhutto? In November, CNN ran a story on its blog and the comments, many from Pakistanis, tell an interesting story, with numerous folks in support of President Musharraf.

http://edition.cnn.com/exchange/blogs/in.the.field/2007/11/pakistans-unanswered-question-how.html

   In any case, I believe they paint a more accurate picture of her popularity, or lack thereof, than what the MSM can muster. Certainly Pakistanis are better equipped to talk about their own nation than bloggers like me.

[Cross-posted] What has dawned on me these days is that the ’net is no longer a place of escape. Not that long ago, businessmen like me could go online, easily find colleagues who were interested in making a difference on the planet. Go online now, and you’ll find spammers, petty jealousies, gossips—everything that you might confront in the physical world, but more invasive. The shield of civility often disappears, replaced by the biting tongues of those who are ill-educated, but think they are armed with all the knowledge of the ancients.
   Inevitably, we will all congregate into groups, only to find that as those groups grow, the same pattern is followed. The ’net in general gave way to the blogosphere, where many of the better thinkers went. But as I watched the whole Jennifer Siebel-attacking matter unfold over the last week (SFist’s obsession seems unnatural, but try telling its contributors that), it is fair to conclude that the blogosphere is suffering from the forces that made the web clunkier, slower and less exciting. The new frontier, just like California must have been to its first settlers (I do mean the native Americans), gave way to the white settlers, lawlessness and disease, before an experimental civilization began to take root. That experimental, occidental civilization is now armed with the internet, slagging people off while ignoring the homeless people minutes away from their residences. It just seems easier to be nasty, but is it more natural given one’s humanity?
   I imagine we must start with other communities, other groups, and hope that contact with the educated class rubs off some knowledge on to the ill-educated. We now live, at least in this medium, in a world of the information-rich and the information-poor, but even we must depend on schools and governments—perhaps online schools (?)—and the hope that reasoning is something we are born with. That the internet remains somewhere where all can learn and better themselves, not a medium where pettiness and hate are propagated.
   The realignment of what the internet is must start with those of us who write in it, conducting ourselves in the hope that we are working toward a utopia that will, God willing, transmit its positive energy in to the real world.