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Posts Tagged ‘critical thinking’
Critical Thinking
Posted by M. C. on November 21, 2024
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It’s How Ya Herd Cows!
Posted by M. C. on August 2, 2023
It only took a year of raising beef to observe the parallel; herd behaviors of cows are the same as peoples’..Neither can stand being approached, being separated, being “hunted,” or being singled-out for slaughter. Cowboys know this! Elite human cowboys use this against us!!!
Nature is chock-full of parallels. One most striking example is how cowboys move cows and just how governments control the human herd.
The idea here is not to spook the herd, which would only result in a dangerous unmanageable stampede, utter chaos and unpredictable outcomes; full blown fight/flight!
The key is patiently applying mild anxiety. A cowboy only needs to approach a cow within about 20ft. It begins to leave as the cowboy’s side to side movement steers that cow in the exact direction desired. Slow, patient advances will put that cow in the corral. In time, the cows know the drill and comply under the gentlest of pressure.
The human parallel is found in “State Media Cowboys,” slowly patiently consciously deviously applying mild anxiety. Could there be food, energy or water shortages? How ’bout wars on the horizon, climate emergencies or disease epidemics? Or threats of economic collapse, rising criminal activity, mass shootings or other intrusions on one’s personal situation? We must be ready and willing to die for the endless war agenda and line up for vaxxxinations.
The “news” is designed to scare you a lil-bit, make you angry a lil-bit and finish on an up-note with an act of kindness or dog story…they don’t want you rattled, just a lil-bit uneasy and primed for the next injection of narrative. We get trained to hate or feel sympathetic through the tone and focus of the storyteller, jerking us around by our fearful egos and then soliciting tender emotions. Recognizing the psychic costs of news watching, smart doctors recommend “news fasting” to reduce anxiety and improve mind-body coherence and healing.
Incessant incremental media grooming is exactly how elite cowboys fence the public herd! Before ubiquitous mass communications, word of mouth served empires throughout history. Workers were kept working, soldiers were kept fighting and rulers extracted all the honey from their human hives. Now they operate on personal details gleaned from a total cyber-invasion of privacy…they know what makes us tick and which strings to pull…they know what you had for breakfast!
This is not deep spooky psychology, it’s simple animal behavior, it’s what every farm kid learns at an early age. Realizating this obvious parallel points out how we humanimals are constantly tricked, seduced by marketeers and otherwise controlled via the constant patient pressure of mild anxiety. Cows are also incredibly lazy. Their human counterparts avoid intellectual curiosity and prefer to rest on subconscious programming and the repetition of ingrained behaviors…with minds basically in a box.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Common Sense, critical thinking, Herd Cows, State Media | Leave a Comment »
Watch “How to Improve Your Critical Thinking (A Practical Exercise)” on YouTube
Posted by M. C. on May 27, 2022
Jordan explains some mechanisms we can exploit to optimize critical thinking. Step by step, he goes through his own process for critical thinking so that listeners can replicate it. What constitutes critical thinking? Why think at all? What is the ‘dialectical process’ in critical thinking? How can we refine our ideas? And where should they even come from?
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Critical Thinking in Troubled Times
Posted by M. C. on April 18, 2022
As a sign of the times, this week I witnessed a 40-something year old black cop at a gas station speaking to the 50-something white station owner when the cop said, “I am so sick of this fear bull*@$t, as soon as they put the Covid bottle of fear back on the shelf, they take the Ukraine fear bottle off and put it in front of people and yell lies at them until they are actually afraid! Don’t people know that all this BS only benefits the people trying to control you!”
https://www.williambernardbutler.com/critical-thinking-in-troubled-times/
In a matter of about a month, the United States federal government silently and unilaterally exited from a two-year war on an illusory, and perhaps illusionary, virus, and pivoted toward fomenting and provoking a kinetic war with a nuclear-armed Russia. While many people in the U.S. unquestioningly and dutifully removed their masks and started using the Ukrainian flag emoji on their iPhones and social media feeds, the rest of us are left with trying to discern between whether we are on the precipice of a kinetic World War III or simply witnessing a bankrupt and petrodollar-dependant Leviathan in its death throes.
Or perhaps both.
As a sign of the times, this week I witnessed a 40-something year old black cop at a gas station speaking to the 50-something white station owner when the cop said, “I am so sick of this fear bull*@$t, as soon as they put the Covid bottle of fear back on the shelf, they take the Ukraine fear bottle off and put it in front of people and yell lies at them until they are actually afraid! Don’t people know that all this BS only benefits the people trying to control you!” He was wearing a mask strapped absurdly far under his chin. When asked why he was wearing a mask, he said: “So I can ask everyone who two weeks ago was asking me to pull up my mask why they aren’t wearing theirs anymore! I’m going to keep wearing it like this until they wake up!”
COVID LESSONS AND CURRENT CONDITIONS
Acknowleding this reality, the CDC is now rapidly revising its statistics, admitting that “the pandemic” was a non-event health-wise. The brilliant saints who recognized at the outset that “Covid” was always the 2020 Seasonal Flu dressed up and repackaged for purposes of maintaining political control have now been vindicated. The pandemic narrative was and is a story, a story that appears to have been authored in order to distract the public from the pain and discomfort associated with an economic decoupling from China. It is now fairly clear that the Powers That Be (PTB) used the pandemic story to hold, gain, and consolidate economic and political power through an economic crisis that they knew was already upon us in January of 2020.
Although much ground has been lost in terms of loss of personal liberty in the last two years, much has also been gained in terms of accurate risk information–exposing precisely who the pandemic plotters and promoters were and are. The political and business leaders who were complicit in fostering the pandemic narrative are not qualified to lead going forward. As compelled vaccination injuries manifest and it is exposed and recognized that there never was a federal or state law or any other legitimate legal authority that would compel innocent and healthy people to submit to a dangerous, Nuremberg Code-violating experimental drug therapy, these political and business leaders must, and inevitably will, be removed from positions of power. We could not agree more with Dr. Robert Malone who advocates that these people be outed, removed from power, and monitored to ensure that they never be afforded the public’s trust in the future. As just two examples of the plans of the Davos clique, both the CEO of UPS, Carol Tome, and the CEO of Wells Fargo, Charlie Scharf, are World Economic Forum alums who were shoe-horned into their positions in late 2019. I suspect there are dozens, if not hundreds, of people like this.
Looking at the past two years with vision unclouded by fearful messages pulsating on every screen, the facts confirm that “Covid” was much more of an economic event than a health event. In January of 2020, before the first “case” allegedly appeared in the U.S.,we saw midnight videos from workers at the Port of Los Angeles showing that the port mysteriously had almost no shipping containers. We felt then that something was afoot. Also in January of 2020, we heard from U.S. CEO’s in Davos that U.S.-China trade had broken down and U.S. exports had come to a standstill. In March 2020, before the pandemic narrative had gotten its sea legs, we saw the Federal Reserve throw out its playbook, violate its charter and federal law, and engage in direct purchases of U.S. Treasuries and unprecedented money printing. Now an ever-increasing plurality of people (including the cop at the gas station) understands the psychological game being played when they hear a maskless Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock and World Economic Forum graduate, tell us that globalization is over and that the pandemic caused economic decoupling with China.
Going forward, we will be more aware and look for and seek to identify the “unseen” and potentially very dangerous and destabilizing second-order effects of things like lockdowns, and PPP money printing. Now add to this list military provocations intended to interfere with trade relationships between the EU and Russia and China and, perhaps most relevant, the very real threats to the international petrodollar system caused by U.S. seizure of Russia’s Forex reserves. If you want to understand why the Russian threat to the dollar is important, read this and this, and most importantly, this. In short, Putin’s so-far successful attempts to demand Russian roubles for Russian gas and Saudi Arabia’s coincident agreement to accept Chinese yuan for its oil rather than the U.S. dollars has the potential to cause an international run on the dollar. The second order domestic effect of this roubles-for-gas cause may mean significant, long-term inflation, and short to medium term stagflation as people and governments holding internationally weakened petrodollars bring them back to the U.S. to buy things that will hold value better than the dollars themselves.
What concerns us most about the recent events in the Russia-Ukraine drama is that the hopelessly outmatched people leading the U.S. have unwittingly taken actions that have resulted in petrodollar destablization and that this will result in an unexpectedly fast decline in U.S. living standards. We are also concerned that the PTB/Davos crowd will do something even more rash and reckless in an attempt to distract us from this reality and/or present a “false cause” for the domestic economic destabilization that they have created by stealing Russian Forex reserves. Whatever the case, the Keynesian fiction of a “consumption-based economy” is likely over. Consuming more than we produce is also therefore over. This will be a very difficult for everyone because all of us have “benefitted”–really been made weaker and more fragile–by an unstable monetary that has lost domestic trust (see the price of Bitcoin) and now has lost international trust. For decades, foreigners, particulary China, Japan, and Russia have been subsidizing the U.S. federal government and U.S. living standards by buying U.S. Treasuries that the U.S. has never had the capability to pay off. Those days are over.
A final concern–a concern that exists only because we have witnessed in the pandemic narrative that our political and business leaders have no allegiance to the United States, its people, or the Constitution–is that the PTB use dollar destabilization to conduct a controlled demolition of the domestic U.S. economy. This would allow fiat money insiders–the same people who benefitted from the 2008 financial bailouts and now include the many Davos/WEF-installed CEOs–to be first in line for the newly printed money and buy up U.S. assets for pennies on the dollar much like Russian oligarchs did following the December 25, 1991 lowering of the flag of the Soviet Union.
This is already happening. Just as in the post-2008 financial crisis, bailed-out Wall Street cronies are using first-in-line-at-the-new-money-trough to buy up U.S. assets. Goldman Sachs has a subsidiary named MTGLQ (“mortgage liquidator”) that is in the process of buying improperly securitized mortgages from Fannie and Freddie and then stealing the homes of people who were pushed out of the job market by Covid. All well under the mainstream media radar. Nothing to see here. Don’t look at your neighbor’s house being stolen by banksters, rather pay attention to the failed comedian dressed up in fatigues in front of a green screen playing the part of “President” of Ukraine.
I DON’T WANT LARRY FINK TO BE MY EMPEROR
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: banksters, critical thinking, Larry Fink, Leviathan | Leave a Comment »
Doug Casey on Why People Outsource Their Thinking to “The Experts”
Posted by M. C. on July 8, 2021
The people who run the State have control of the money supply, the economy, the education system, and the media. They’ve gotten control of the medical system. They’re replacing traditional religion, as well, with what amounts to new secular religions; that’s an interesting twist.
Christianity is on its way out. It’s already a dead duck in Europe and is hanging on in the US only among the lower classes. The elite no longer believes in traditional religion. It’s being replaced by updated versions of Marxism, which was always a secular religion, even though it claimed to be “scientific”—like Greenism and Wokeism.
by Doug Casey
International Man: Thanks to the internet and modern technology, the average person can now access information on almost any topic with relative ease.
But it seems people are doing less critical thinking than ever.
Why do you think that is the case?
Doug Casey: Technology is a double-edged sword when it comes to critical thinking. It’s paradoxical that something so associated with knowledge and research is often at odds with wisdom. I think that’s partly because today’s technology offers instant answers—no thought required. You can go to Google, and an answer is at your fingertips. It doesn’t require research or thought—the answer just appears. It subtly obviates the need for contemplation.
Let’s first define what critical thinking is. I’d say it’s the process of questioning the validity of the assumptions and the accuracy of the data for everything. A critical thinker never assumes or takes anything for granted.
We can’t always be sure what the quality of a googled answer is, but most people assume it’s honest and correct. However, considering the nature of the people who run Google, Wikipedia, and websites of that nature, I prefer to assume that the quality of many answers is low.
In fact, the volume of data available through computer technology is so great that there’s a tendency to confuse all that quantity with quality. When the world, and the data stream, is moving very quickly, it seems you have less time to contemplate its meaning. You can get lost in it and lose perspective.
It reminds me of a scene out of the original Rollerball movie from the 1970s with James Caan. Books no longer exist. All knowledge is contained in an all-powerful computer. The scientist in charge of the computer is talking to another character and says, “Yeah, for some reason, we’ve lost the 13th century,” and he kicks the machine. It’s the only source of what used to be in millions of books.
We’re almost in a situation where everything comes from one source—basically Google—rather than researching books, getting answers from a dozen points of view, and thinking critically about their meaning. Sure, Google gives you many references. But how many others have been “cancelled?” How many considered politically incorrect are buried as deep as the 13th century in Rollerball?
International Man: Whether it’s finance, economics, politics, and many other areas, it seems almost everywhere you look, people are looking to the so-called “experts” to tell them what they should think about a given topic.
Where does this come from? How did most people come to trust the “experts”?
Doug Casey: As the amount and complexity of data grows, it’s natural to want an expert to sort it out for you. But experts are known for knowing a lot about a little, not for having broad, integrated knowledge. People understandably look to them to make decisions for them. That’s foolish. Better that you go to a philosopher than a technician when the time comes to decide on something important. But philosophers are in short supply today, so people listen to celebrities.
A celebrity is someone who’s famous for being well-known. People automatically assume that famous people must know something they don’t. The public doesn’t know much, but they know more about some celebrities than they do about their own friends, neighbors, and relatives. And that engenders trust. People trust a celebrity who endorses something he knows nothing about because they think they know him. It’s another consequence of mass media. The average person is much more likely to accept Google’s, or Wikipedia’s, or some celebrity’s opinion than to research something themselves. Critical thinking is hard work, and questioning authority doesn’t usually make you any friends.
I see it in the newsletter business all the time. Somebody who’s glib and can present well can be transformed into an instant expert, even though he knows very little—as long as he’s good at presenting and gaining people’s confidence. We see that with the talking heads on TV as well. They’re really just actors who don’t know anything, but they’re good-looking, well-promoted, and have a nice social veneer, so people trust them.
It makes no sense, and neither does the public’s obsession with credentials.
See then rest here
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: critical thinking, Outsource, TECHNOLOGY, Thinking | 1 Comment »
You Know It’s Bad When A North Korea Defector Says That US Similarities To NK Are “Insane” | ZeroHedge
Posted by M. C. on June 17, 2021
Yeonmi is watching America go down a totalitarian path.
Witnessing the depth of American’s ignorance up close has made Yeonmi question everything about humanity.
“North Koreans, we don’t have Internet, we don’t have access to any of these great thinkers, we don’t know anything. But here, while having everything, people choose to be brainwashed. And they deny it.” (source)
by Tyler Durden
Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper blog,
We interrupt your regularly scheduled brainwashing for a dose of reality for a brave young woman who defected from North Korea in a brutal journey so she could be free. Eventually, she made it to the US to attend an Ivy League American school.
Yeonmi Park has seen firsthand where the United States is headed….and it’s straight to North Korea if we don’t make changes soon.
Propaganda in North Korea
Anyone who saw the movie “The Interview” recognized that under the farce there was a lot of truth. Kim Jong Un is a brutal dictator who will not allow citizens to access the internet or learn anything about critical thinking. The propaganda in North Korea is rampant – both anti-American and pro-North Korea.
For example, there’s a long-running cartoon shown to schoolchildren called “A Squirrel and Hedgehog.”
Yet we should not forget that films and cartoons in North Korea send an ideological message. Usually it is very simple: all the army, the party, and the people follow the unsurpassed leaders of Mount Paektu in their march from victory to victory against the mortal enemies of the Korean people willing that the wicked American imperialists, the evil Japanese claimants of territory, and their south Korean puppets suffer defeat-after-defeat, bringing ever closer the day when they will be erased from the face of the planet.
The least ideological material on North Korean TV happens to be children’s cartoon series, the most well-known which is called “A Squirrel and Hedgehog”.
The story is quite simple. There is a community of good animals who live on Flower Hill, but they are attacked by an evil Weasel Legion. The Flower Hill animals respond by sending a brave squirrel named Goldie agent to infiltrate the Legion. Goldie becomes close to the evil overlord – the Weasel General – yet soon sabotages his plans, helping his allies from Flower Hill. And when the Weasel Legion is defeated in episode 26, a new enemy rises: a Jackal Legion…
…The morality presented in the series is utterly black and white alike those usually in North Korean fiction. Goldie and the other Flower Hill animals are smart, noble, witty and ready to self-sacrifice. Weasels, jackals and their allies, on the other hand, are mean and treacherous cowards, longing to betray everyone they see…
…Finally, and this is perhaps the saddest part of all, “A Squirrel and a Hedgehog” is actually a cruel cartoon.
Here I am not merely talking about the Jackal General, who suffers a nervous breakdown in almost every episode. The cruelty is actually more associated with Goldie and his allies, who constantly call their enemies “bastards” and “scum,” using violence against a defeated enemy on a regular basis…
…Outside of North Korea, most cartoons and films about wars talk about a show of compassion towards the defeated enemy and civilians, in which when the hero is forced to kill, it is not an easy thing. In North Korea, however, the mentality seems to be “We are right. The enemy is not. Kill the enemy and make him suffer.” (source)
In North Korea, there is no internet, all media is state-run, and there’s only one television channel. Only one point of view is allowed to exist. From the time they start school, children in North Korea are inundated with propaganda to the point that they’re completely brainwashed. Sound familiar?
Back to Yeonmi Park’s interview
Yeonmi, now 27, escaped from North Korea with her mother when she was 13 years old. The journey was treacherous. She and her mother were sold to sex traffickers, then rescued by missionaries, they walked across the Gobi Desert to reach freedom. Eventually, they reached safe haven in South Korea. She wrote about her fight to live free in her 2015 memoir, In Order to Live.
We’ve talked here before about a Marxist agenda in the US education system and Park agrees. When she transferred to Columbia University, she says she was deeply disturbed by what she saw.
“I expected that I was paying this fortune, all this time and energy, to learn how to think. But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think,” Park said in an interview with Fox News. “I realized, wow, this is insane. I thought America was different but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying.”
Those similarities include anti-Western sentiment, collective guilt and suffocating political correctness.
Yeonmi saw red flags immediately upon arriving at the school…
…It only got worse from there as Yeonmi realized that every one of her classes at the Ivy League school was infected with what she saw as anti-American propaganda, reminiscent to the sort she had grown up with. (source)
Yeonmi was baffled by what American students considered oppression.
“Because I have seen oppression, I know what it looks like,” said Yeonmi, who by the age of 13 had witnessed people drop dead of starvation right before her eyes.
“These kids keep saying how they’re oppressed, how much injustice they’ve experienced. They don’t know how hard it is to be free,” she admonished…
….”The people here are just dying to give their rights and power to the government. That is what scares me the most.” (source)
This is something we’ve witnessed to a shocking degree during the Covid pandemic, which has been used as an opportunity to change the world forever. People have given up their livelihoods, their lives, their very freedom to walk their dogs.
The United States of America was not what she expected.
Yeonmi had always dreamed of coming to the United States.
Having come to America with high hopes and expectations, Yeonmi expressed her disappointment.
“You guys have lost common sense to degree that I as a North Korean cannot even comprehend,” she said.
She thought she was going to come here and learn to think critically.
She accused American higher education institutions of stripping people’s ability to think critically.
“In North Korea I literally believed that my Dear Leader [Kim Jong-un] was starving,” she recalled. “He’s the fattest guy – how can anyone believe that? And then somebody showed me a photo and said ‘Look at him, he’s the fattest guy. Other people are all thin.’ And I was like, ‘Oh my God, why did I not notice that he was fat?’ Because I never learned how to think critically.”
“That is what is happening in America,” she continued. “People see things but they’ve just completely lost the ability to think critically.” (source)
Critical thinking is indeed becoming a lost art, particularly as anyone thinking outside the status quo gets “canceled” or “defunded.” Our country is rapidly turning into the kind of place in which only one opinion can be held. To hold a different viewpoint is practically criminalized.
The worst part is that people here have chosen their path.
Yeonmi is watching America go down a totalitarian path.
Witnessing the depth of American’s ignorance up close has made Yeonmi question everything about humanity.
“North Koreans, we don’t have Internet, we don’t have access to any of these great thinkers, we don’t know anything. But here, while having everything, people choose to be brainwashed. And they deny it.” (source)
We’re seeing changes though, that take us further and further toward that kind of world. Alternative news sites are shut down in a wave of virtual book-burning. Social media purges any dissenting point of view. TikTok brainwashes young people in 15-60 second intervals. University professors promote violence against those who think differently.
Have things gone too far?
Is it fixable? Yeonmi questions where our country goes at this point.
“Where are we going from here?” she wondered. “There’s no rule of law, no morality, nothing is good or bad anymore, it’s complete chaos.”
“I guess that’s what they want, to destroy every single thing and rebuild into a Communist paradise.” (source)
There’s a playbook, we wrote it, and it’s being used to turn our once-proud nation into a parody of itself. Our very education is brainwashing students into hating our country and being ashamed of our race if we’re white. Social media inspires paroxysms of self-induced guilt over the possibility one may have accidentally micro-aggressed or not been 100% inclusive to everyone on the planet, thinking ahead of any potential handicap or mental illness that might have caused someone discomfort. Americans have become offended over practically everything and the butthurt is real. Some of it would be funny if it wasn’t so damned tragic.
Critical thinking is frowned upon, canceled, and defunded. Why?
Because we’re being set up for a communist takeover and the brainwashed masses will applaud. With jazz hands, of course, so they don’t “trigger” those who are bothered by loud noises. And definitely no memos will be sent announcing the changes using “frightening” all-caps.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: critical thinking, North Korea, Yeonmi Park | Leave a Comment »
MIT Researchers Admit Anti-Maskers Are More Scientifically Rigorous | Chronicles
Posted by M. C. on May 15, 2021
At the same time the academics admit, almost in a puzzled fashion, that these “anti-maskers” do their investigations in a very scientific manner. “Indeed,” the paper claims, “anti-maskers often reveal themselves to be more sophisticated in their understanding of how scientific knowledge is socially constructed than their ideological adversaries, who espouse naive realism about the ‘objective’ truth of public health data.”
Upon recounting my bout with COVID to an acquaintance, I was asked if I knew where I might have picked up the virus. When I mentioned my hunch about the source, my acquaintance gasped, then inferred that I and those I caught it from must not have been wearing masks since the virus had spread.
“No,” I responded, much to her surprise, “we were wearing masks.”
Such a comment demonstrates the great confidence which many have placed in measures such as lockdowns and mask mandates in recent months. “Science confirms that these measures work!” many exclaim, arguing that those who question masks or other allegedly helpful restrictions are anti-science.
Yet new research from several MIT academics casts some doubt on the anti-science nature of COVID skeptics. In their paper, “Viral Visualizations: How Coronavirus Skeptics Use Orthodox Data Practices to Promote Unorthodox Science Online,” the academics show some curious cognitive dissonance, making anti-mask proponents out to be clever propagandists who create easily understandable charts and graphs to sway the public away from the authoritative opinions of experts.
At the same time the academics admit, almost in a puzzled fashion, that these “anti-maskers” do their investigations in a very scientific manner. “Indeed,” the paper claims, “anti-maskers often reveal themselves to be more sophisticated in their understanding of how scientific knowledge is socially constructed than their ideological adversaries, who espouse naive realism about the ‘objective’ truth of public health data.”
The MIT academics go on to admit that those opposed to masks are not afraid to get down and dirty in looking at statistics, nor are they afraid to increasingly question the media and government authorities, a trait MIT researchers call “a weaponization of critical thinking.” Even more surprising is the revelation that anti-maskers’ “approach to the pandemic is grounded in a more scientific rigor, not less.”
People can bicker all day long about which side is right on this issue, but in this instance, these straightforward, honest comments from the MIT researchers should give us pause. They are clearly opposed to the ideas of the anti-maskers, yet they can’t help but begrudgingly respect the scientific methods of their opponents.
So how do we cut through the obvious politics of this issue and discern between science and propaganda? American philosopher James Burnham offered some insight into this question in his 1941 book, The Managerial Revolution, writing:
The aim of propaganda is to persuade people to accept certain ideas or feelings or attitudes. The aim of science is to discover the truth about the world. The propagandistic aim is usually best served by being thoroughly one-sided, by presenting only what is favorable to your case and suppressing all that might weaken it and bolster your opponent.
One could say that both the anti-maskers and the MIT researchers are engaging in propaganda, anxious to present only evidence favorable to their side. But in another sense, one could argue that they are only parroting the narrative promoted by the mainstream media and our politicians, while anti-maskers are actually approaching the data critically.
Burnham expands upon this thought by noting, “In the case of any hypothesis which is under consideration, science, in contrast to propaganda, is always anxious to present all the evidence, for and against. The scientific aim is just as well served by proving a hypothesis false as by proving it true.” [Emphasis added.]
Given these facts, why is it that nearly every media source, politician, and even the average Joe is so eager to squelch “unorthodox” opinions like those explored in this MIT paper? If they refuse to allow their hypotheses to be tested, then they are the ones who are truly anti-science.
Annie Holmquist
Annie Holmquist is the editor of Intellectual Takeout. When not writing or editing, she enjoys reading, gardening, and time with family and friends.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Anti-Maskers, critical thinking, MIT, propaganda, Scientifically Rigorous | Leave a Comment »
NYTimes warns readers against critical thinking lest they realize the ‘paper of record’ is feeding them lies — RT Op-ed
Posted by M. C. on February 20, 2021
Warzel cites a professor who warns that “the goal of disinformation is to capture attention, and critical thinking is deep attention,” implying that to think critically about some forbidden morsel is to fall victim to the evil mastermind who created it. “The natural human mind-set is a liability in an attention economy,” he continues, making very sure the reader gets the point that “it allows grifters, conspiracy theorists, trolls, and savvy attention hijackers to take advantage of us and steal our focus.” You wouldn’t want that, would you? Close that browser window NOW!
Lucky for US the NYT realizes how dumb you are.
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/516095-nytimes-critical-thinking-wrongthink-lockstep/
Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23 and on Telegram
Critical thinking is dangerous, according to a Times editorial urging readers to vet sources with Wikipedia lest they fall into traps set by evil conspiracy theorists and be tricked into questioning the paper’s iron-clad truths.
Charlie Warzel, a Times columnist who styles himself an expert in “online radicalization,” has implored his readers not to “go down the rabbit hole,” in a Thursday op-ed luridly depicting the dangers of evaluating new information, questing out into the internet armed with nothing but one’s own mind. Thinking critically can lead to giving away one’s precious attention to dastardly conspiracy theorists whose only apparent goal is to dupe you, he warns, as opposed to the friendly narrative managers at the New York Times, who just want to make sure your brain is quivering with the required fear quota – of viruses, Russians, your neighbors, terrorists, white people or, now, the capacity for believing wrongthink lurking within your own brain.
It’s logical that the Times should warn its readers against engaging too deeply with “wrongthink,” of course – Times readers often lack a solid grasp of the views they consider to be their deeply-held beliefs, having picked them up absent-mindedly from one ‘approved’ source or another without thinking too deeply about their implications or how they might possibly conflict with their existing values.
That is, if the average Times reader were to think too deeply about the material they ingest every day with their morning coffee, the resulting cognitive dissonance would cause their heads to explode. The paper contradicts itself on at least a weekly basis, as the narrative managers gleefully mine out society’s foundations from beneath it. Merely comparing the paper’s evolving coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic makes it clear that if they aren’t trying to keep their readers fear-stricken and off-balance with constant infusions of cognitive dissonance, they couldn’t have paid someone to do it better.
Warzel cites a professor who warns that “the goal of disinformation is to capture attention, and critical thinking is deep attention,” implying that to think critically about some forbidden morsel is to fall victim to the evil mastermind who created it. “The natural human mind-set is a liability in an attention economy,” he continues, making very sure the reader gets the point that “it allows grifters, conspiracy theorists, trolls, and savvy attention hijackers to take advantage of us and steal our focus.” You wouldn’t want that, would you? Close that browser window NOW!
The professor, one Michael Caulfield of Washington State University Vancouver, offers up a series of thought-stopping clichés to be reverted-to whenever one believes one is reading wrongthink: “1. Stop. 2. Investigate the source. 3. Find better coverage. 4. Trace claims, quotes and media to the original context.” On the surface, this isn’t necessarily bad advice, though the professor’s advice to take no more than 90 seconds on a given fact-check should raise a few eyebrows – not every fact is that easy to check, especially the sort that gets smeared as “conspiracy theories.”
It’s where one “investigates” the source and finds “better” coverage that the problems lurk. While Warzel doesn’t come right out and recommend its readers seek out Wikipedia, the bathroom wall of the internet, he does quote an assistant political science professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, who believes the supposedly crowd-sourced yet intelligence-agency-dominated “encyclopedia” known for hosting massive hoaxes and conducting reputational hit-jobs is actually great for evaluating sources.
And while Warzel pads that professor’s advice with his disclaimer –er, worry– that recommending Wikipedia is a method that “could be exploited by conspiracy theorists” (oh, the irony), he has no problem recommending searching unknown sources on Google and going with the top results. The Google contractors in charge of ranking websites for the search engine are advised to use Wikipedia as their primary source of guidance for evaluating the trustworthiness of an unfamiliar website – never mind the massive disclaimer the site carries warning that any or all content may be false. That doesn’t deter the underpaid contractors doing Google’s dirty work from swearing by it – and apparently it doesn’t bother the Paper of Record either. At least now we know where the Times’ journalists are really doing their fact-checking.
It’s no secret that establishment journalists – especially the sort who write for self-styled ‘papers of record’ – consider themselves something of a priest class, tasked with translating the divine word of politicians and ‘experts’ so that ordinary people don’t realize there’s something deeply wrong with the whole situation. And it’s no secret either that these narrative-managers realize they’re outnumbered by the alt-media commenters who’ve taken it upon themselves to report the facts left out by the establishment. So the only hope of the Warzels of the world is to hold their noses and convert ordinary folks to their doctrine, in which the once-noble discipline of “fact-checking” is perverted into an unsubtle bludgeon against ideological foes. This growing movement is reflected in Twitter’s “Birdwatch” program, in Facebook’s since-discontinued effort to crowd-source the rating of news sources, and, of course, in Wikipedia. Only by knighting the hoi polloi as the foot soldiers of orthodoxy can they be inoculated against the threat of critical thinking.
Because the real issue – with politics, with Covid-19, with the endless bloody wars, with pretty much all of the US’ problems – is a failure to think critically. The majority of Americans go through life believing that the status quo is ‘that way’ for a reason beyond inertia and graft, unwilling to imagine – let alone attempt to create – a better world. This is in large part because American children are taught in school not to think critically, but to obey – which some might deem a necessary casualty of sticking one helpless teacher with a class of 40 rowdy children, but which any honest person has to call a recipe for disaster. After all, one cannot have a functional democracy without an educated populace, and for all its newfound post-Trump enthusiasm for Our Democracy™, the US does not have a populace capable of critically evaluating information.
The narrative managers, Charlie Warzel included, want to keep it that way. Why mess with a good thing? Don’t strain your brain, just relax and let the Times rock you to sleep. Anything else is letting the bad guys win.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Charlie Warzel, critical thinking, NYTimes, online radicalization, wrongthink | 1 Comment »
Watch “Light in the Darkness Episode 4: Logical Fallacies Part 1” on YouTube
Posted by M. C. on May 27, 2020
How to tell when they are jiving you.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: critical thinking, Logical Fallacies | Leave a Comment »
It Wasn’t The “Virus” That Crashed The Economy, It Was The People Who Obeyed
Posted by M. C. on May 18, 2020
Instead of just blindly obeying the commands, think about it and ask if what you are doing is right. Do you have the moral right to take the rights of others? Applying even the most minimal amount of critical thinking to something can usually get people to what is right. But you have to do be willing to take a look at yourself, and correct your mistakes yourself, and take responsibility for your own actions. Which is exactly why most Americans won’t. Blaming a virus and blindly obeying the ruling class and it’s foot soldiers is much easier than critical thinking.
Mac Slavo
Most atrocities in human history have all been committed by individuals and agents of government who were “just following orders” or “just obeying the law.” The virus didn’t give any orders. It was the people who obeyed the commands of tyrants that crashed the economy and ruined the livelihoods of others.
Most human beings still think like slaves. Instead of asking questions or using critical thinking skills to ask if something is right before doing it, they simply obey perceived “authority”. The truth is, this lockdown is the fault of everyone who complied and everyone who used forced to exact revenge on those who disobeyed. It was the same in all tyrannical takeovers in history.
The mainstream media keeps blaming the economic devastation on the coronavirus, but it wasn’t the fault of a virus. It was the fault of the government and the slave mentality of the police and the public willingly obeying their commands.
Mainstream media outlets are still trying desperately to spin the narrative and fault the “invisible enemy” for the very real toll on human life the government’s overreaction has already caused. This is nothing more than propaganda, and once you pick it up, you’ll be able to see it. The media doesn’t want you to put the blame where it belongs and figure things out for yourself, so they hide behind deception headlines that will keep you in fear of COVID-19 as long as possible.
This is all a part of the larger plan to keep the public panicked about a virus and looking the other way when the tyrannical boots of the state come down on them. We know this is what the media does, and we know they are doing it to keep the ruling class in power and the public panicked and in a constant state of fear so they will comply with any and all enslavement measures.
The Science of Fear: How The Elitists Use it to Control Us & How to Break Free
Sheep: Watch How People Blindly Follow Orders From An “Authority” Figure
Instead of just blindly obeying the commands, think about it and ask if what you are doing is right. Do you have the moral right to take the rights of others? Applying even the most minimal amount of critical thinking to something can usually get people to what is right. But you have to do be willing to take a look at yourself, and correct your mistakes yourself, and take responsibility for your own actions. Which is exactly why most Americans won’t. Blaming a virus and blindly obeying the ruling class and it’s foot soldiers is much easier than critical thinking.
The police state and tyranny is brought to you by those willing to follow commands, regardless of the morality of the command. Tyrants can’t have power without people willing to enforce the tyranny. If there are no order followers, there are no orders.
Copyright Information: Copyright SHTFplan and Mac Slavo. This content may be freely reproduced in full or in part in digital form with full attribution to the author and a link to http://www.shtfplan.com.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: coronavirus, critical thinking, following orders, obeying the law, order followers | Leave a Comment »
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