US Authoritarianism

In grade school, I can think of two specific examples where we were taught a lesson that was supposed to develop critical thinking skills. The infamous Tongue Map and the Mpemba Effect (hot water freezes faster than cold water)

Both of these are examples where an authority will confidently tell you a fact (which is bogus), then have you conduct an experiment which ought to disprove them.

I did the tongue map in kindergarten. It's obvious that it doesn't hold up, but when I told my teacher about it she said I must have been doing it wrong. Later in grade school I did the experiment to 'confirm' the Mpemba effect. Despite the evidence before me I still lied on report and said that the hot water froze faster because I thought that's what the teacher wanted. Apparently so did half the class, and because we did the experiment we all got a passing grade and were never told that it was supposed to be false.

So I dunno. I guess they ought to teach critical thinking at a young age, but the instructors have to buy into it to.

Corruption is a spectrum and many faceted. We don't have to bribe police or doctors here. In many ways we're much less corrupt than average. I think most of the FBI and most federal agencies are really pretty clean. The FDA and EPA and IRS might have issues, but corruption isn't really one of them.

In other ways, we have a Supreme Court to bring balance to that.

He means it's hard to teach things like religion* and woke-ism and climate change denial if you know how to properly research.

*(Religion and science isn't incompatible, if the religion is more principles based than made up facts based. Catholicism generally does okay.)

Zachariah's saying that empiricism, cricical thinking, and scientific reasoning are seen as dangerous by people whose worldviews are based on faith rather than reality because questioning traditional and baseless narratives about the world causes cognitive dissonance. I think that the people who find it most dangerous are those in positions of power on the basis of those narratives who don't want their followers or supporters to stop believing.

This is kinda true and of course oversimplified.

"Ideology" as a term was first popularized by, surprisingly, Napoleon, as a politically loaded set of ideas akin to a belief system.

Philosophers and economists worked the term over for refinement so that it built up quite a bit of nuance and academic controversy over the next century.

In common vernacular it trended towards simpler uses like a synonym for 'worldview' or 'dogma', but in scholars it's been fractured into contentious specifics.

Terry Eagleton's book Ideology is a good read as he's both a great explainer of historical thought and fairly practical, and he settled on 'a system of ideas and beliefs that allows the oppressed to participate in their own oppression,' which is fairly summarized and useful.

I never really thought about it like this, but it makes sense now, thank you.

The point was that when you report the facts, and just the facts, without spin, the right fairly reliably calls it leftwing bias, because it contradicts the rightwing position which was misleading. Why would normal people vote for policies that only make rich people richer? Only because you convinced them it was in their interests. "Reality has a left-leaning bias" means that if you're fully aware of all the facts, you tend to draw a more left wing conclusion. It's unusual that a rightwinger would admit this, but Trump's press officer was told "but the facts are....." and responded with "we have some alternative facts for you" and was widely ridiculed for admitting out loud that their "facts" were different to the objectively verified facts.

Oh yeah, also the slaves benefited from slavery because it gave them shelter and food and useful life skills.

Also also the Civil War was about evil Northern aggression and the Confederacy is heritage, not hate.

Public school US history textbooks do not tell that America was founded on anti-democratic principles and was built from its foundation to suppress democracy, do not tell the story of how the US government hunted buffalo into extinction in the wild to starve the Plains Indians, do not tell about the systematic abduction of Native children to be raised by white families and erase Native heritage, do not tell the story of the hero John Brown who hunted down slave owners, do not teach about how the US turned on Ho Chi Minh when he reached out to America to help with his own country's war for independence, do not tell of how the US attacked Soviet Russia to aid the overthrow of the Bolsheviks, and do in fact preach that systemic racism isn't real and racism is merely an individualist phenomenon where some people are racist but the United States is not a racist white settler state.

Some schools sometimes have some good teachers, but the majority are propaganda dispensaries. Structural racism exists and one of the ways structural racism expresses itself is in the public school system. You literally believe racism is over in most of America!