It is my opinion that directly telling people the truth does not work. The public is so naïve, so gullible, so committed to their belief in a principled country, with principled leaders, that even direct video quotes do not seem to matter. They watch their leaders lie repeatedly on video, yet they refuse to believe they saw them lie. It is simply unbelievable.
People do not want to look, confront or believe that they have been duped, that they are actually being manipulated by a tiny fraction of the world’s elite, the Old World Order, the ole boy network, the status quo, Club Elite. They do not want to face what answers to unanswered questions and unexplained coincidences might mean. Such an awareness might require them to look into the mirror and realize that their ignorance has contributed and enabled what, by any measure, is now an Evil Empire.
Is evil too strong a word? Conjure up Monsanto, or RJ Reynolds or BP or Halliburton or Blackwater or Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan. Hell, entire industries like banking, oil and gas, agriculture, pharmaceutical, chemical and defense are run by predatory capitalists who daily sacrifice the health and safety of the public, the indigenous people they are exploiting or the planet, to make a buck.
Club Elite has purchased Congress, Media, the White House and our judicial system. It’s the White Collar Mafia and if you clear your mind of all the engineered distractions and think, If only for a moment you will see.
You will see that the leading congressional war profiteer in Congress in 2008 was John Kerry. He is now Secretary of State. A former corporate attorney for Monsanto currently sits on our Supreme Court. Our President constructs list of people he decides to kill with no trial, no jury, no accountability and complete impunity.
These old boys who live in the shadows and under the rocks are pulling the strings totally confident that money buys complete control of the public. It is a simple formula … engineer awareness and perception with corporate media, write the laws with a purchased Congress, interpret the laws with purchased judges and enforce the laws with thugs who thought that protecting the constitution meant protecting the rich.
And if one dares to analyze, question or challenge any of the official positions, they are labeled, marginalized, discriminated or eliminated by the very forces they are trying to illuminate. Solid facts and quality references, even DIRECT VIDEO QUOTES are made worthless. But we are a stubborn and committed lot; determined to ask questions, look under rocks and daring to challenge. I thought truth was born from a critical eye not a blind one.
How is one taught critical
How is one taught critical thinking, and who teaches it?
I heard a teacher on NPR say that he expected parents to teach critical thinking skills to their kids.
I can’t really recall how I gained critical thinking skills. It seems a bit like they are a collection of rules of thumb to refer to when confronted by new information. Some that I use are:
– Consider the source.
– Follow the money.
– The unnamed source at the top of a story is often named later on.
– Precise large numbers (like Kerry’s number of deaths in Syria) are suspicious.
– Other people will do things I’d never consider doing.
– It’s easy to lie with statistics and graphs.
– Financial “projections” are made up and often inaccurate.
– Some will work to sabotage, confuse, frighten, and mislead.
– There is often more to the story.
– Images and videos can look real and be fake.
– If it is on one tabloid cover at the supermarket, it’s not true. If it is on three, the President probably did meet with aliens.
The list seems to grow over time.
My parents certainly taught me about being suspicious of TV and magazine ads (and advertising in general). I was also taught to look for bias in reporting.
teaching critical thinking
The Center for Critical Thinking works under the auspices of the Foundation For Critical Thinking, an educational non-profit organization, to promote essential change in education and society through the cultivation of fairminded critical thinking.
Critical thinking is essential if we are to get to the root of our problems and develop reasonable solutions. After all, the quality of everything we do is determined by the quality of our thinking.
direct quotes from this site:
http://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/our-mission/599
With all due respect when you
With all due respect when you begin a piece with “The public is so naïve, so gullible” you’ve already thrown critical thinking out the window and resorted to blanket condemnation. I find nothing that resembles critical thinking in these sorts of condemning defensive posts. Critical thinking doesn’t mean you are supposed to be critical of everything. Does critical thinking by definition not require a willingness to approach issues with an open mind?
Old as the Hills
Critical thinking can be attained by simple application of the Socratic method. Question vigorously, and peel the layers to the core.
That alone, however, is not sufficient to fix things. It takes a measure of courage, or abandon, to act on what one discovers.
Old as the hills
Before one acts one has to think. What one thinks about is greatly influenced by awareness.
For me that is where it all begins and what I am all about
awareness, critical thinking and free speech.
Ask Why
There’s an old ad what says: “Why ask why?” But one critical thinking skill I’ve learned is to always ask why. Why now? Why this course of action? Why are they doing that awful thing? Why are they telling us that obvious falsehood? Etc. I’ve found, to my surprise and chagrin, that the reason often has to do with money, as in “Because if we do this, we’ll make tons of money.”
I don’t think I was taught critical thinking prior to high school, and for years, I was pretty darn gullible. I thought everyone thought more or less as I did. I trusted leaders and authority figures. I believed what they said on the news. Some time in the 80s, I started to pick up on the fact that my trust was being betrayed, over and over again. Eventually, I stopped trusting them and started asking questions. So in my case, I learned a lot of my critical thinking skills through experience, more than anyone overtly teaching them.
I’ll give Chris’ family credit — he was a much more critical thinker when I met him than I was. I still believed what I read in newspapers. Now I look for the back story, and friends, there is always a back story. In other words, the blithe recitation of “facts” one hears everywhere (even NPR! oh my) is almost never the whole story. Once you know more than one side, things are inevitably more complicated but also more understandable. In fact, in many cases, discovering the back story allows you to answer, or at least posit an answer to, the question “Why?”
Some appropriate quotes
“Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them.” – Mark Twain (1835-1910), American author and satirist
“Lying and war are always associated. Listen closely when you hear a war-maker try to defend his current war: If he moves his lips he’s lying.” – Philip Berrigan (1923-2002), American peace activist and former Roman Catholic priest
“If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.” – Noam Chomsky
“War is the health of a totalitarian state. And peace is its disease.” –
Norman Mailer
“The strength of a civilization is not measured by its ability to fight wars, but rather by its ability to prevent them.” – Gene Roddenberry
More critical thinking
“Who stands to benefit?” is another good question to ask.
Another thing I do is look to see if something is being done out of habit. “We’ve always done things this way” can be great, or it can be a block to new ideas.