Childrens Television Making Kids Dumb - Page 3

EscapeVelocity · 07-29-2009, 11:16 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Trip

I had a whole response typed up, and then I remembered that I said I wasn't going to stir the pot. I'm already too involved, so I'm removing myself from the conversation.

I am very opinionated and thus try not to get involved in these things if I can help it.

- Trip

Im not a shrinking violent Trip. Let it rip. What is it they say...."Dont talk about politics or religion."

OO was right, I did jump the gun labeling you, however experience has taught me that college students are an amalgamation of their experience, and that experience is heavily influenced by the education system and media and not tempered by experience. That is why many people move conservative as they grow older, their experience and deeper understanding trump the propaganda and brainwashing they recieved when younger.

So no offense was meant.

I realize that some get very upset when talking politics, because it can be emotional (even for me), but IMO not talking about politics (in general doesnt have to be on this board if its bad of board cohesion) leads to even greater misunderstanding and more conflict.

EscapeVelocity · 07-29-2009, 11:20 AM

And OO, I am biased....just like everyone is.

Interestingly enough, there is a school of thought that the Western Left in its drive for its utopian visions, has eskewed rational thought in favor of a dumbed down populace which has been taught not to discriminate.

Evan Sayets video is pretty good on this point.

HERITAGE FOUNDATION: "How Modern Liberals Think"

EscapeVelocity · 07-29-2009, 11:32 AM

Can everyone agree that the 60s New Left is the establishment these days? That all of the agendas of the 60s are in play and advancing further and further, via the march of Baby Boomer New Leftist radicals through the institutions.

Example (not a Baby Boomer) but an Alinsky Community Organizer is now in the White House. Affirmative Action is widespread. Leftwing activist judges have been dominating the courts for years (that has changed recently). PBS kids is promoting multiculturalism. The television news media is heavily Leftwing biased. Hell I heard the expert interviewee on NPR news sneer "Conservative" at Blue Dog Democrats for balking on a Leftist agenda legislation in Congress. This is the way it is.

In Europe in several countries its a much bigger problem. Why? Because their birthrates are way down and they are importing not Latino Catholics....but North African and South Asian Muslims. And the indigineous populations of Europe are starting to wake up and smell the roses....because they arent just importing foreign cultures and promoting them over the indigenous culture (reverse colonialism as it were), they are importing a supremacist agressive ideology, Islam that seeks to dominate and subjugate and oppress the other, politically, cultureally, etc. Its going to get ugly over there.

bicker · 07-29-2009, 11:38 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by EscapeVelocity

Its about driving the dominant culture to the side and promoting other cultures over it.

That is not what multiculturalism is of course. It is about living in harmony with people who hold to other perspectives.

EscapeVelocity · 07-29-2009, 11:49 AM

Maybe we should look at the policies that have been promoted by the Western Left as multicultural policies bicker.....then my assertion will be shown to be the more accurate.

Tolerance is different than Multiculturalism. Do you understand the difference between them?

EscapeVelocity · 07-29-2009, 12:17 PM

Im sorry to hijack the thread with Multiculturalism, because I think their are other issues of child manipulation with childrens TV.

But here is an excellent examination of what is going on in Western Civilization. The only thing I would add is that teh Western Left is driving this zeitgeist with and as policy. Driving a stake through the heart of Western Civlization with a sense of righteousness while doing so. Its very bazarre, this ideology or collection of ideologies bent on suicide and self flagellation and emolliation.

Here is Clair Berlinski review Delsols book Icarus Fallen (along with Magraths book). In a sense, Delsol is saying the same thing as Evan Sayet, but more intelligently and intellectually.

Fantastic stuff here....do not skip it.

Quote:

BOOKS:
Is God Still Dead?

By Claire Berlinski

Claire Berlinski on The Twilight of Atheism by Alister McGrath and Icarus Fallen: The Search for Meaning in an Uncertain World by Chantal Delsol and translated by Robin Dick

.....One might equally expect the reaction to be a condemnation of zeal and faith in all its forms, theist or atheist, in preference for the weak solutions of moral relativism — or the spread of general outright despair.

These, in fact, are precisely what we are seeing, according to Chantal Delsol, a professor of philosophy at the University of Marne-la-Vallée in Paris. (This institutional affiliation is noteworthy: It is striking that public figures in France with innovative and unorthodox ideas are no longer apt to be associated with the Grandes Ecoles or the traditional French educational elite; Nicolas Sarkozy, for example, recently elected chief of France’s ruling party, is not a graduate of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, the traditional feeder school for the French administrative and political elite.) In her subtle, highly intelligent meditation on the moral state of modern European man, Delsol considers his profound disillusionment: European man has in recent memory suffered two great losses, first his Christian faith and then its replacement — a vision of human perfectibility absent supernatural guidance. Failed experiments in utopianism, particularly in its communist and fascist expressions, have left him, like Icarus, singed at the wing-tips and fallen, paralyzed by self-doubt.

Utopian ideologies were, as she says, “systems of reference structured like cathedrals,” and her use of this rich simile is no accident. Europe has spent the past several centuries, not just this one, in a series of struggles to find a replacement for its lost Christian faith. Until recently, for example, nationalism was a substitute for religious belief; in France, the idea of France itself and its civilizing mission lent meaning to the lives of Frenchmen, just as the mystical Aryan ideal stood in for religious belief in Germany. The nation-state, the arts, music, science, fascism, communism, even rationality itself — all of these were substitutes for Christianity, and all failed. “We have watched all the cathedrals fall into ruin,” Delsol laments, “one after another.” But where McGrath sees in this the inevitability of religious revival, Delsol discerns no such thing. She finds her contemporaries’ fear of ideological certainty fully reasonable: Rigid orthodoxy, after all, did give rise to both the Inquisition and the Holocaust. So a return to the past is impossible, and no one has the faintest idea what the future might hold.

Man continues, nonetheless, to long for utopia and for the absolute — this is a design feature, to paraphrase Delsol, not a bug — and for a means to interpret his existence. But he no longer possesses a coherent ideological vehicle by which to express this longing. Here she sees the source of the profound risk-aversion of the modern European: “In general,” she writes, “our contemporary cannot imagine for what cause he would sacrifice his life because he does not know what his life means.” Though Delsol does not explicitly say as much, this is as good an explanation as we are apt to find for Europe’s recent approach to international affairs: How better, for example, to explain the willingness of the Spanish people instantly and obediently to capitulate to the demands of the terrorists who last year slaughtered some 200 of their countrymen?

Lacking any sense of purpose, Delsol asserts, modern man enshrouds himself in technological and physical comfort, leading a life that is at once free of risk and mediocre, mouthing vapid, unexamined clichés. These she calls “the clandestine ideology of our time” — clandestine because no overt adherence to ideology is now socially permissible. Yet the banishment of the economy of ideology, she astutely remarks, has encouraged a black market to flourish in its place: “This underground moral code is saturated with sentimentality yet arbitrarily intolerant.” The code is a close cousin to the political correctness of the Americans, and it is the unspoken foundation of the modern European welfare state — a society predicated on an ever-expanding sense of entitlement:
Anything contemporary man needs or envies, anything that seems desirable to him without reflection, becomes the object of a demanded right. Human rights are invoked as a reason for refusing to show identification, for becoming indignant against the deportation of delinquent foreigners, for forcing the state to take illegal aliens under its wing, for justifying squatting by homeless people, for questioning the active hunt for terrorists. It is not only desire or whim that leads to rights claims, but instinctive sentimentality and superficial indignation as well.

Another principle of this code is the estimation of tolerance above all other virtues. Once defined by the absence of state prohibitions against certain ideas and behaviors, tolerance has come to be conflated with legitimization — as the state itself now actively encourages those ideas and behaviors through legal and material aid. Delsol finds this pernicious, and rightly so. One need only look at the Netherlands to see exactly where this orthodoxy leads: When an artist created a street mural with the words “Thou shalt not kill” in response to the murder — by a Muslim radical — of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, Dutch police immediately destroyed it in the name of tolerance. Deputy Prime minister Gerrit Zalm was widely criticized for declaring the Netherlands to be at war with Islamic extremism. “We fall,” said Green-left leader Femke Halsema, “too easily into an ‘us and them’ antithesis with the word war.” No more perfect example of Delsol’s thesis can be imagined. “Dominated by emotion,” she observes,
our era overflows with treacly sentiment. It is almost as if the feelings that were once associated with a certain type of piety have contaminated the whole population. . . . Seeking the good while remaining indifferent to the truth gives rise to a morality of sentimentality.
My only quibble: This is not just a morality of sentimentality; it is a morality of eager, collective suicide.

Delsol’s is certainly not the first baleful assessment of our ambient culture of moral relativism — perhaps quasi-relativism is more apt because, as she rightly notes, its practitioners unquestionably accept moral absolutes (“one must be tolerant”) while insisting that they indignantly reject them. But her criticism is particularly lucid, and her analysis of the reasons for the rise of this ideology — and the kind of culture to which it in turn gives rise — unusually canny.

Alister mcgrath contends that a new “cultural sensitivity” has “led to religious beliefs being treated with new respect.” Yet on the pages of our major news organs we find the faithful described in the most disrespectful terms. Here is novelist Jane Smiley, in Slate, depicting them as “unteachably ignorant,” advising us to “[l]isten to what the red state citizens say about themselves, the songs they write, and the sermons they flock to. They know who they are — they are full of original sin and they have a taste for violence.” Brian Reade of the Mirror calls the faithful “self-righteous, gun-totin’, military-lovin’, sister-marryin’, abortion-hatin’, gay-loathin’, foreigner-despisin’, non-passport ownin’ red-necks.” Maureen Dowd, predictable as sunrise, sees “a vengeful mob — revved up by rectitude — running around with torches and hatchets after heathens and pagans and infidels.” And Nicolas Kristof echoes his New York Times colleague with his nod to “wheat-hugging, gun-shooting, Spanish-speaking, beer-guzzling, Bible-toting” Americans. If Delsol’s thesis needs further confirmation, consider this: These critics are exercised about the intolerance of the religious.

No, not much newfound respect for religion on display here — just a good deal of what Delsol calls the “ideology of the apostate.” Mainstream moral thinking remains, above all, structured around the rejection of religious morality. “The drama of the present age,” she observes, “does not lie so much in the return of certain figures of existence as it does in the fact that these figures were — and in many cases still are — despised.” Evidence for Delsol’s somber assessment of Western man, with his limited, repulsive view of truth and transcendence, is everywhere, belying McGrath’s sunny appraisal of man’s renewed spiritual sensitivity.

EscapeVelocity · 07-29-2009, 12:22 PM

The difference between tolerance and multiculturalism is bolded in the above quote. Tolerance vs the active promotion of other cultures, values, religions, and well being of "the other".....over the Western indigenous peoples.

EscapeVelocity · 07-29-2009, 12:34 PM

That article I just posted should be required reading, its deep and their is a lot to digest in there.

Lets take the sneering at the "Western Redneck" for example by the Western Left and the Western Leftist elite (this can be seen in the outrageous slanders and slurs and attacks on Sarah Palin as a prime example, or in the "bitter clingers" comment by Barack Obama in San Fran after having just campaigned in Pennsylvania). The utter disdain that these folks have for these backwards uncivilized Western Rednecks and their culture....does not translate into the same for other cutlures (at least not outwardly expressed and Politically Correct). You see them fall all over themselves celebrating and protecting other indigenous people and their cultures, primitive African cultures and tribes, savages in the Amazon jungle...extolling the deep virtures and wisdom of these folks, while at the same time sneering at the Western redneck. This double standard is not hypocrisy though, its just indicative of the Anti Western ideology of the Western Left....its hostile to the West. Very twisted. You can see that the Western left is turning or has turned on Israel....another example of just how twisted their ideology and agenda has become.

EscapeVelocity · 07-29-2009, 05:41 PM

Look wop, you dont have anything on the Irish. Irish need not apply. Catholics need not apply.

BTW, I heard that Have-a-Tampa is closing its production fascilities this year. Kind of emblematic of America's problems.

EscapeVelocity · 07-29-2009, 09:39 PM

I hope you know I was just making a joke.

Perhaps I should go back to not talking politics.


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