Tales ftom "The "Book": Demagogues, etc

The Problem:

The foregoing appeared as a comment on a thread I began on the 'Book this morning with the following warning:

Please be aware, friendz.

This is not "learned" incompetence; it is trained, institutionalized incompetence. And individual teachers are not to blame. Many of them --I am related to a couple of them--spiritually chafe at their inability to crack through the institutional resistance.

Which led to this link:

Which I elaborated with the following:

We did not "dumb ourselves down." That's blaming the victim. The decline and decay of US citizens' civic and historical knowledge is the result of the conscious connivance of the corpoRats at all levels to see to it that their hegemony would never again be threatened, as it was by the Boomers in the counter-cultural, social revolution of the 60s and 70s.
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I was born and went to school during a period when the prevailing wisdom favored a modestly intelligent, educated citizenry. That period ended, abruptly, about 1981, though it had been in decline for a previous decade.
In about '71, Nixon looked out upon the turmoil the war and other social controversies were causing, and upon the resistors who KNEW the law, the Constitution, and their rights, and decided THAT would never happen again.
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It is not an accident of fate that consistency of celebrity shit should occupy their minds. They are--you were, if you were born post 1970--trained to complacency, to incuriosity, to placidity by the most sophisticated, most expensive, most extensive, most thorough, most far and wide-treaching propaganda/brainwashing apparatus the world has EVER seen.
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We are a people TRAINED in perpetual adolescence, is the difference, Spoon. Didja ever take a psych course, and lern just how evvbective "stimulus-response" training is, and how irresistible it can be if conducted skillfully?
We Murkinis, all of us, are experimental subjects in the biggets Skinnerian experiment ever conducted. And it works to perfection.
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