And a germinal insidiousness in that is what has become of our education system. It's been turned instead into an indoctrination system from K through graduate degree. Very few institutions buck this, what has been a slowly escalating trend since probably sometime in the '80s.The Annoyed Man wrote: ↑Sun Apr 02, 2023 11:28 am I don’t think it is possible for the left to revert to something more rational. Most of them have gone past the point where they still possess a vestigial logic core that is capable of suppressing reactive hysteria when processing information. Therefore, any incoming data is reacted to, rather than processed…and the rest of us get to "benefit" from their neuroses because they increasingly outnumber us.
Critical thinking? Bah, never needs to be in the curricula. Teach formal logic? Have students understand the major logical fallacies? Teach them analytical skills and how to evaluate information for themselves? What a useless, anachronistic concept.
It's positively Orwellian. And now--if we assume an average generational interval of 27 years--we've had time to inculcate group-think into two different generations, going on three. That will be a very difficult clock to roll back. It's resulted in an exponential growth curve. If we were to plot pervasive "wokeness" or extreme left-leaning ideologies as mainstream, I think it would have been the inverse of a logarithmic curve: it started relatively slowly, perhaps as a reaction to the Reagan administration. But then it continued to increase rapidly...to the point now that the general public seems to be perfectly fine with what we would have considered radical notions at the turn of this century, in the George W. Bush administration and the time of 9/11. Now we're fine with Disney (of all companies) putting LGBTQ+ themes and stories in everything they touch. We hardly blinked at the hundreds of violent riots in 2020 because...BLM; you must be a racist if you thought killing people and destroying property was unacceptable.
So let's also gut and destroy the English language while we're at it. And not just pronouns, although some of us will never be able to read without stumbling again: "John opened the door and, after checking their watch, they looked outside." No, not just that, because English reflects back to old white men and toxic masculinity. We need wholesale changes. Like ones recommended last month by the British humanitarian organization Oxfam that wrote, in part, "[English is] "the language of a colonising nation" and therefore it must be cleansed "in order to decolonise our ways of working and shift power." Among the words Oxfam cautions should strictly be avoided are: "colonial," "master," "headquarters," "local," "people," "youth," "the elderly" and "seniors." Using "parent" or "parenthood" is preferable to "mother" or "father"; "expectant mothers" should be replaced with "people who become pregnant."
And a few days ago Fox News reported on Utah school district that was considering banning the Bible under new a new "sensitive materials" law.
We're heading in the wrong direction faster than ever. The faster an object is moving, the more difficult it is to stop. At the start of the '90s it was a .22 Short. Now it's a .257 Weatherby Magnum. If we don't do something, before the end of this decade it'll be a depleted-uranium penetrator rod fired from an M-1 Abrams.