World War 3?

[housel]

Foundation of our civilisation is rotten from the start.
Blood is spilled in name of everything.
WW3 is on for quite some time..
Those who forget the past will have it happening again and that is exactly what is going on.
People are being manipulated from dawn of our time.
When it clicks in your head once, you will see the same patterns in every direction.
Way I see it is that we will burn all the books every few hundred years.. until something bigger resets us and everything wrong in human head.

If you want to do something good for all of us.. spread the love, learn how to give it and how to accept it, that's all you can do

 

[Skarekrow]

Foundation of our civilisation is rotten from the start.
Blood is spilled in name of everything.
WW3 is on for quite some time..
Those who forget the past will have it happening again and that is exactly what is going on.
People are being manipulated from dawn of our time.
When it clicks in your head once, you will see the same patterns in every direction.
Way I see it is that we will burn all the books every few hundred years.. until something bigger resets us and everything wrong in human head.

If you want to do something good for all of us.. spread the love, learn how to give it and how to accept it, that's all you can do

I think you are spot on.

 

[housel]

I knew I heard someone singing about burning books
Awesome song..
[video=youtube;AVdB-UKfxD4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVdB-UKfxD4[/video]

 

[dogman6126]

Free will is a pet-peeve subject of mine and I can argue for it or against it all day honestly haha.

Free will holds a strong interest for me as well. I'll show my cards and admit to being a compatibilist
I wrote a semester paper on it last semester for my Space, Time, and Matter Phys/Phil class. Very enjoyable and very challenging subject. I can very well understand why some might not be a compatibilist.

It’s the “hard” question of consciousness.
We can go around in circles talking about determinism and why a predetermined event is still determined.

Many views in Theory of Mind agree with determinism, and all are interesting to discuss. Personally, I think I'm an emergentist who accepts either deterministic causation or non-deterministic causation. However, I don't think I would accept such things as non-causation if I may use such a term.

I'm sorry, I'm a bit off topic here. This is just a very interesting area of discussion to me. Perhaps you'd like to discuss these in better detail...?

I actually believe in God….so take it easy…hahah.
I just don’t adhere to the concept of “Hell” and it being a just place or God being just for allowing it.
We can agree to disagree there.

I don't require you to believe in a God to ask questions of the like you have asked here. Perhaps your conception of God is necessarily different than that of the commonly accepted Christian God. I think that mine is, even though I still believe in a single, moral, omnisentient, omnipotent, creator.

I'm going to post something in this forum soon I think you'll find interesting. I'll link you in the post.

My concern was, and there are even certain forum members that I have noticed getting religiously riled up so to speak…that almost seem excited that the middle east is destabilizing because they feel this confirms a very vague Bible chapter that was almost added to the Apocrypha.
I might add that in Peter’s apocalypse there is a very real way for “evildoers” to find salvation and that the Apocalypse itself was only to “scare strait” the world.

What I am trying to understand is if this is going to turn into some full-blown religious war, and how that can be avoided?

To be honest, I sincerely hope not. I hope that our species is more evolved intellectually than to have a repeat of past fully religious wars. A war driven by religion to me demonstrates that such people do not understand their own religion. However in this area I can only speak to Christianity.

 

[Skarekrow]

Free will holds a strong interest for me as well. I'll show my cards and admit to being a compatibilist
I wrote a semester paper on it last semester for my Space, Time, and Matter Phys/Phil class. Very enjoyable and very challenging subject. I can very well understand why some might not be a compatibilist.



Many views in Theory of Mind agree with determinism, and all are interesting to discuss. Personally, I think I'm an emergentist who accepts either deterministic causation or non-deterministic causation. However, I don't think I would accept such things as non-causation if I may use such a term.

I'm sorry, I'm a bit off topic here. This is just a very interesting area of discussion to me. Perhaps you'd like to discuss these in better detail...?


I don't require you to believe in a God to ask questions of the like you have asked here. Perhaps your conception of God is necessarily different than that of the commonly accepted Christian God. I think that mine is, even though I still believe in a single, moral, omnisentient, omnipotent, creator.

I'm going to post something in this forum soon I think you'll find interesting. I'll link you in the post.



To be honest, I sincerely hope not. I hope that our species is more evolved intellectually than to have a repeat of past fully religious wars. A war driven by religion to me demonstrates that such people do not understand their own religion. However in this area I can only speak to Christianity.

I’m very much a believer in the dualistic, non-local, post-materialist view of the mind and brain.
Here’s the brief manifesto - http://opensciences.org/about/manifesto-for-a-post-materialist-science
It doesn’t eliminate God…and actually I think God can be that old dude with robes and white flowing beard…I think God is whatever God is supposed to be for someone.
Having read many accounts of Near Death Experiences I find the correlations within the accounts themselves that do surpass race, religion, or country of origin.
I believe in a human soul…and when we die we leave this body.
Much more would be speculation based more on the subjective nature of the tales.
That is why I focus more on things like the Global Consciousness Project and try to be as logical as one can get when discussing our illogical human minds.

 

[dogman6126]

I’m very much a believer in the dualistic, non-local, post-materialist view of the mind and brain.
Here’s the brief manifesto - http://opensciences.org/about/manifesto-for-a-post-materialist-science
It doesn’t eliminate God…and actually I think God can be that old dude with robes and white flowing beard…I think God is whatever God is supposed to be for someone.

For clarification, does this mean you believe in some sort of relative God? Is there no single God with a nature that is his own, or is the nature of this God constituted by the number and content of the beliefs of those that believe in a God?

Having read many accounts of Near Death Experiences I find the correlations within the accounts themselves that do surpass race, religion, or country of origin.
I believe in a human soul…and when we die we leave this body.

I very hesitant when it comes to Near Death Experiences, even with the strong correlation. An argument could be made that the human mind is a very structured thing. Certain things, similar things, are construed in similar ways. Assuming that NDEs are just some sort of dream state, it is conceivable for similar patterns to develop. A similar argument can be made when talking of hallucinations in cases of sleep paralysis.
However certain cases I find significantly more...unexplainable. For example, the case of Eben Alexander. PhD neurosurgeon from Harvard, NDE caused by severe and rare form of bacterial meningitis. His refutes for the possible known causes of NDEs are very interesting, and certainly beyond me, lol.

Btw, dualists are not the only ones who have an explanation for existence after death. There explanation is just a simpler one. Some kinds of non-reductive physicalists can conceive of "myself" continuing after bodily death. It just gets very complicated.

 

[Skarekrow]

For clarification, does this mean you believe in some sort of relative God? Is there no single God with a nature that is his own, or is the nature of this God constituted by the number and content of the beliefs of those that believe in a God?

I think we and the universe are actually extensions of God and the universe and the bubbling up of consciousness.
We are here to learn to overcome suffering…that of course can be achieved in many different ways.
I don’t think that God interferes in our lives per say…I do think that we hold some free will…I just think of God as being out of time…God knows all because it’s all already happened, even though you are making those choices now.
I don’t believe in a judgmental God…that purpose to me is logically flawed.

I very hesitant when it comes to Near Death Experiences, even with the strong correlation. An argument could be made that the human mind is a very structured thing. Certain things, similar things, are construed in similar ways. Assuming that NDEs are just some sort of dream state, it is conceivable for similar patterns to develop. A similar argument can be made when talking of hallucinations in cases of sleep paralysis.
However certain cases I find significantly more...unexplainable. For example, the case of Eben Alexander. PhD neurosurgeon from Harvard, NDE caused by severe and rare form of bacterial meningitis. His refutes for the possible known causes of NDEs are very interesting, and certainly beyond me, lol.

Btw, dualists are not the only ones who have an explanation for existence after death. There explanation is just a simpler one. Some kinds of non-reductive physicalists can conceive of "myself" continuing after bodily death. It just gets very complicated.

 

[muir]

World war 3 is already here

It is being waged through financial weapons of mass destruction, cyberspace, media information wars, proxy wars and sanctions

The aim is to destroy all opposition to the new world order global government

They're very clever though.....they control the media so they constantly tell you that the enemy is: 'the muslims' or 'immigrants' or 'terrorists' or 'extremists' or 'the iranians' or 'the north koreans' or the 'russians' or the 'syrians' etc etc etc etc etc

When really the enemy are the people telling you that crap..they are the ones poisoning your mind and manipulating you into fear and hate for others

Everytime there has been a world war the money changers step in and say ''we need a more integrated global economy'' and they create new globalised infrastructre because their dream is to rule the world; they want a world government that they will control

World war 1 gave them the league of nations. World war 2 gave them the UN, the IMF, the world bank and the EU and world war 3 they hope will give them a global government and a new globalised currency

 

[Skarekrow]

8 Reasons Young Americans Don't Fight Back: How the U.S. Crushed Youth Resistance

The ruling elite has created social institutions that have broken the young's spirit of resistance.
​

Traditionally, young people have energized democratic movements.
So it is a major coup for the ruling elite to have created societal institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance to domination.

Young Americans–even more so than older Americans–appear to have acquiesced to the idea that the corporatocracy can completely screw them and that they are helpless to do anything about it.

A 2010 Gallup poll asked Americans “Do you think the Social Security system will be able to pay you a benefit when you retire?”
Among 18- to 34-years-olds, 76 percent of them said no.

Yet despite their lack of confidence in the availability of Social Security for them, few have demanded it be shored up by more fairly payroll-taxing the wealthy; most appear resigned to having more money deducted from their paychecks for Social Security, even though they don’t believe it will be around to benefit them.

How exactly has American society subdued young Americans?

1. Student-Loan Debt.
Large debt–and the fear it creates–is a pacifying force.
There was no tuition at the City University of New York when I attended one of its colleges in the 1970s, a time when tuition at many U.S. public universities was so affordable that it was easy to get a B.A. and even a graduate degree without accruing any student-loan debt.

While those days are gone in the United States, public universities continue to be free in the Arab world and are either free or with very low fees in many countries throughout the world.

The millions of young Iranians who risked getting shot to protest their disputed 2009 presidential election, the millions of young Egyptians who risked their lives earlier this year to eliminate Mubarak, and the millions of young Americans who demonstrated against the Vietnam War all had in common the absence of pacifying huge student-loan debt.

Today in the United States, two-thirds of graduating seniors at four-year colleges have student-loan debt, including over 62 percent of public university graduates.
While average undergraduate debt is close to $25,000, I increasingly talk to college graduates with closer to $100,000 in student-loan debt.

During the time in one’s life when it should be easiest to resist authority because one does not yet have family responsibilities, many young people worry about the cost of bucking authority, losing their job, and being unable to pay an ever-increasing debt.

In a vicious cycle, student debt has a subduing effect on activism, and political passivity makes it more likely that students will accept such debt as a natural part of life.

2. Psychopathologizing and Medicating Noncompliance.
In 1955, Erich Fromm, the then widely respected anti-authoritarian leftist psychoanalyst, wrote, “Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man.”

Fromm died in 1980, the same year that an increasingly authoritarian America elected Ronald Reagan president, and an increasingly authoritarian American Psychiatric Association added to their diagnostic bible (then the DSM-III) disruptive mental disorders for children and teenagers such as the increasingly popular “oppositional defiant disorder” (ODD).

The official symptoms of ODD include “often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules,” “often argues with adults,” and “often deliberately does things to annoy other people.”

Many of America’s greatest activists including Saul Alinsky (1909—1972), the legendary organizer and author of Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals, would today certainly be diagnosed with ODD and other disruptive disorders.

Recalling his childhood, Alinsky said, “I never thought of walking on the grass until I saw a sign saying ‘Keep off the grass.’ Then I would stomp all over it.”
Heavily tranquilizing antipsychotic drugs (e.g. Zyprexa and Risperdal) are now the highest grossing class of medication in the United States ($16 billion in 2010); a major reason for this, according to theJournal of the American Medical Association in 2010, is that many children receiving antipsychotic drugs have nonpsychotic diagnoses such as ODD or some other disruptive disorder (this especially true of Medicaid-covered pediatric patients).

3. Schools That Educate for Compliance and Not for Democracy.
Upon accepting the New York City Teacher of the Year Award on January 31, 1990, John Taylor Gatto upset many in attendance by stating: “The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions.”

A generation ago, the problem of compulsory schooling as a vehicle for an authoritarian society was widely discussed, but as this problem has gotten worse, it is seldom discussed.
The nature of most classrooms, regardless of the subject matter, socializes students to be passive and directed by others, to follow orders, to take seriously the rewards and punishments of authorities, to pretend to care about things they don’t care about, and that they are impotent to affect their situation.

A teacher can lecture about democracy, but schools are essentially undemocratic places, and so democracy is not what is instilled in students.
Jonathan Kozol in The Night Is Dark and I Am Far from Home focused on how school breaks us from courageous actions.

Kozol explains how our schools teach us a kind of “inert concern” in which “caring”–in and of itself and without risking the consequences of actual action–is considered “ethical.”

School teaches us that we are “moral and mature” if we politely assert our concerns, but the essence of school–its demand for compliance–teaches us not to act in a friction-causing manner.

4. “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top."
The corporatocracy has figured out a way to make our already authoritarian schools even more authoritarian.
Democrat-Republican bipartisanship has resulted in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, NAFTA, the PATRIOT Act, the War on Drugs, the Wall Street bailout, and educational policies such as “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top.”

These policies are essentially standardized-testing tyranny that creates fear, which is antithetical to education for a democratic society.
Fear forces students and teachers to constantly focus on the demands of test creators; it crushes curiosity, critical thinking, questioning authority, and challenging and resisting illegitimate authority.

In a more democratic and less authoritarian society, one would evaluate the effectiveness of a teacher not by corporatocracy-sanctioned standardized tests but by asking students, parents, and a community if a teacher is inspiring students to be more curious, to read more, to learn independently, to enjoy thinking critically, to question authorities, and to challenge illegitimate authorities.

5. Shaming Young People Who Take Education–But Not Their Schooling–Seriously.
In a 2006 survey in the United States, it was found that 40 percent of children between first and third grade read every day, but by fourth grade, that rate declined to 29 percent. Despite the anti-educational impact of standard schools, children and their parents are increasingly propagandized to believe that disliking school means disliking learning.

That was not always the case in the United States.
Mark Twain famously said, “I never let my schooling get in the way of my education.”

Toward the end of Twain’s life in 1900, only 6 percent of Americans graduated high school.
Today, approximately 85 percent of Americans graduate high school, but this is good enough for Barack Obama who told us in 2009, “And dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It’s not just quitting on yourself, it’s quitting on your country.”

The more schooling Americans get, however, the more politically ignorant they are of America’s ongoing class war, and the more incapable they are of challenging the ruling class. In the 1880s and 1890s, American farmers with little or no schooling created a Populist movement that organized America’s largest-scale working people’s cooperative, formed a People’s Party that received 8 percent of the vote in 1892 presidential election, designed a “subtreasury” plan (that had it been implemented would have allowed easier credit for farmers and broke the power of large banks) and sent 40,000 lecturers across America to articulate it, and evidenced all kinds of sophisticated political ideas, strategies and tactics absent today from America’s well-schooled population.

Today, Americans who lack college degrees are increasingly shamed as “losers”; however, Gore Vidal and George Carlin, two of America’s most astute and articulate critics of the corporatocracy, never went to college, and Carlin dropped out of school in the ninth grade.

6. The Normalization of Surveillance.
The fear of being surveilled makes a population easier to control.
While the National Security Agency (NSA) has received publicity for monitoring American citizen’s email and phone conversations, and while employer surveillance has become increasingly common in the United States, young Americans have become increasingly acquiescent to corporatocracy surveillance because, beginning at a young age, surveillance is routine in their lives.

Parents routinely check Web sites for their kid’s latest test grades and completed assignments, and just like employers, are monitoring their children’s computers and Facebook pages.

Some parents use the GPS in their children’s cell phones to track their whereabouts, and other parents have video cameras in their homes.
Increasingly, I talk with young people who lack the confidence that they can even pull off a party when their parents are out of town, and so how much confidence are they going to have about pulling off a democratic movement below the radar of authorities?



7. Television.
In 2009, the Nielsen Company reported that TV viewing in the United States is at an all-time high if one includes the following “three screens”: a television set, a laptop/personal computer, and a cell phone.

American children average eight hours a day on TV, video games, movies, the Internet, cell phones, iPods, and other technologies (not including school-related use).
Many progressives are concerned about the concentrated control of content by the corporate media, but the mere act of watching TV–regardless of the programming–is the primary pacifying agent (private-enterprise prisons have recognized that providing inmates with cable television can be a more economical method to keep them quiet and subdued than it would be to hire more guards).

Television is a dream come true for an authoritarian society: those with the most money own most of what people see; fear-based television programming makes people more afraid and distrustful of one another, which is good for the ruling elite who depend on a “divide and conquer” strategy; TV isolates people so they are not joining together to create resistance to authorities; and regardless of the programming, TV viewers’ brainwaves slow down, transforming them closer to a hypnotic state that makes it difficult to think critically.

While playing a video games is not as zombifying as passively viewing TV, such games have become for many boys and young men their only experience of potency, and this “virtual potency” is certainly no threat to the ruling elite.

8. Fundamentalist Religion and Fundamentalist Consumerism.
American culture offers young Americans the “choices” of fundamentalist religion and fundamentalist consumerism.
All varieties of fundamentalism narrow one’s focus and inhibit critical thinking.

While some progressives are fond of calling fundamentalist religion the “opiate of the masses,” they too often neglect the pacifying nature of America’s other major fundamentalism. Fundamentalist consumerism pacifies young Americans in a variety of ways.

Fundamentalist consumerism destroys self-reliance, creating people who feel completely dependent on others and who are thus more likely to turn over decision-making power to authorities, the precise mind-set that the ruling elite loves to see.

A fundamentalist consumer culture legitimizes advertising, propaganda, and all kinds of manipulations, including lies; and when a society gives legitimacy to lies and manipulativeness, it destroys the capacity of people to trust one another and form democratic movements.

Fundamentalist consumerism also promotes self-absorption, which makes it difficult for the solidarity necessary for democratic movements.
These are not the only aspects of our culture that are subduing young Americans and crushing their resistance to domination.

The food-industrial complex has helped create an epidemic of childhood obesity, depression, and passivity. T
he prison-industrial complex keeps young anti-authoritarians “in line” (now by the fear that they may come before judges such as the two Pennsylvania ones who took $2.6 million from private-industry prisons to ensure that juveniles were incarcerated).

As Ralph Waldo Emerson observed: “All our things are right and wrong together. The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.”

Bruce E. Levineis a practicing clinical psychologist.
His latest book is Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite.

 

[muir]

8 Reasons Young Americans Don't Fight Back: How the U.S. Crushed Youth Resistance

The ruling elite has created social institutions that have broken the young's spirit of resistance.
​

Traditionally, young people have energized democratic movements.
So it is a major coup for the ruling elite to have created societal institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance to domination.

Young Americans—even more so than older Americans—appear to have acquiesced to the idea that the corporatocracy can completely screw them and that they are helpless to do anything about it.

A 2010 Gallup poll asked Americans “Do you think the Social Security system will be able to pay you a benefit when you retire?”
Among 18- to 34-years-olds, 76 percent of them said no.

Yet despite their lack of confidence in the availability of Social Security for them, few have demanded it be shored up by more fairly payroll-taxing the wealthy; most appear resigned to having more money deducted from their paychecks for Social Security, even though they don’t believe it will be around to benefit them.

How exactly has American society subdued young Americans?

1. Student-Loan Debt.
Large debt—and the fear it creates—is a pacifying force.
There was no tuition at the City University of New York when I attended one of its colleges in the 1970s, a time when tuition at many U.S. public universities was so affordable that it was easy to get a B.A. and even a graduate degree without accruing any student-loan debt.

While those days are gone in the United States, public universities continue to be free in the Arab world and are either free or with very low fees in many countries throughout the world.

The millions of young Iranians who risked getting shot to protest their disputed 2009 presidential election, the millions of young Egyptians who risked their lives earlier this year to eliminate Mubarak, and the millions of young Americans who demonstrated against the Vietnam War all had in common the absence of pacifying huge student-loan debt.

Today in the United States, two-thirds of graduating seniors at four-year colleges have student-loan debt, including over 62 percent of public university graduates.
While average undergraduate debt is close to $25,000, I increasingly talk to college graduates with closer to $100,000 in student-loan debt.

During the time in one’s life when it should be easiest to resist authority because one does not yet have family responsibilities, many young people worry about the cost of bucking authority, losing their job, and being unable to pay an ever-increasing debt.

In a vicious cycle, student debt has a subduing effect on activism, and political passivity makes it more likely that students will accept such debt as a natural part of life.

2. Psychopathologizing and Medicating Noncompliance.
In 1955, Erich Fromm, the then widely respected anti-authoritarian leftist psychoanalyst, wrote, “Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man.”

Fromm died in 1980, the same year that an increasingly authoritarian America elected Ronald Reagan president, and an increasingly authoritarian American Psychiatric Association added to their diagnostic bible (then the DSM-III) disruptive mental disorders for children and teenagers such as the increasingly popular “oppositional defiant disorder” (ODD).

The official symptoms of ODD include “often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules,” “often argues with adults,” and “often deliberately does things to annoy other people.”

Many of America’s greatest activists including Saul Alinsky (1909–1972), the legendary organizer and author of Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals, would today certainly be diagnosed with ODD and other disruptive disorders.

Recalling his childhood, Alinsky said, “I never thought of walking on the grass until I saw a sign saying ‘Keep off the grass.’ Then I would stomp all over it.”
Heavily tranquilizing antipsychotic drugs (e.g. Zyprexa and Risperdal) are now the highest grossing class of medication in the United States ($16 billion in 2010); a major reason for this, according to theJournal of the American Medical Association in 2010, is that many children receiving antipsychotic drugs have nonpsychotic diagnoses such as ODD or some other disruptive disorder (this especially true of Medicaid-covered pediatric patients).

3. Schools That Educate for Compliance and Not for Democracy.
Upon accepting the New York City Teacher of the Year Award on January 31, 1990, John Taylor Gatto upset many in attendance by stating: “The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions.”

A generation ago, the problem of compulsory schooling as a vehicle for an authoritarian society was widely discussed, but as this problem has gotten worse, it is seldom discussed.
The nature of most classrooms, regardless of the subject matter, socializes students to be passive and directed by others, to follow orders, to take seriously the rewards and punishments of authorities, to pretend to care about things they don’t care about, and that they are impotent to affect their situation.

A teacher can lecture about democracy, but schools are essentially undemocratic places, and so democracy is not what is instilled in students.
Jonathan Kozol in The Night Is Dark and I Am Far from Home focused on how school breaks us from courageous actions.

Kozol explains how our schools teach us a kind of “inert concern” in which “caring”—in and of itself and without risking the consequences of actual action—is considered “ethical.”

School teaches us that we are “moral and mature” if we politely assert our concerns, but the essence of school—its demand for compliance—teaches us not to act in a friction-causing manner.

4. “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top."
The corporatocracy has figured out a way to make our already authoritarian schools even more authoritarian.
Democrat-Republican bipartisanship has resulted in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, NAFTA, the PATRIOT Act, the War on Drugs, the Wall Street bailout, and educational policies such as “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top.”

These policies are essentially standardized-testing tyranny that creates fear, which is antithetical to education for a democratic society.
Fear forces students and teachers to constantly focus on the demands of test creators; it crushes curiosity, critical thinking, questioning authority, and challenging and resisting illegitimate authority.

In a more democratic and less authoritarian society, one would evaluate the effectiveness of a teacher not by corporatocracy-sanctioned standardized tests but by asking students, parents, and a community if a teacher is inspiring students to be more curious, to read more, to learn independently, to enjoy thinking critically, to question authorities, and to challenge illegitimate authorities.

5. Shaming Young People Who Take Education—But Not Their Schooling—Seriously.
In a 2006 survey in the United States, it was found that 40 percent of children between first and third grade read every day, but by fourth grade, that rate declined to 29 percent. Despite the anti-educational impact of standard schools, children and their parents are increasingly propagandized to believe that disliking school means disliking learning.

That was not always the case in the United States.
Mark Twain famously said, “I never let my schooling get in the way of my education.”

Toward the end of Twain’s life in 1900, only 6 percent of Americans graduated high school.
Today, approximately 85 percent of Americans graduate high school, but this is good enough for Barack Obama who told us in 2009, “And dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It’s not just quitting on yourself, it’s quitting on your country.”

The more schooling Americans get, however, the more politically ignorant they are of America’s ongoing class war, and the more incapable they are of challenging the ruling class. In the 1880s and 1890s, American farmers with little or no schooling created a Populist movement that organized America’s largest-scale working people’s cooperative, formed a People’s Party that received 8 percent of the vote in 1892 presidential election, designed a “subtreasury” plan (that had it been implemented would have allowed easier credit for farmers and broke the power of large banks) and sent 40,000 lecturers across America to articulate it, and evidenced all kinds of sophisticated political ideas, strategies and tactics absent today from America’s well-schooled population.

Today, Americans who lack college degrees are increasingly shamed as “losers”; however, Gore Vidal and George Carlin, two of America’s most astute and articulate critics of the corporatocracy, never went to college, and Carlin dropped out of school in the ninth grade.

6. The Normalization of Surveillance.
The fear of being surveilled makes a population easier to control.
While the National Security Agency (NSA) has received publicity for monitoring American citizen’s email and phone conversations, and while employer surveillance has become increasingly common in the United States, young Americans have become increasingly acquiescent to corporatocracy surveillance because, beginning at a young age, surveillance is routine in their lives.

Parents routinely check Web sites for their kid’s latest test grades and completed assignments, and just like employers, are monitoring their children’s computers and Facebook pages.

Some parents use the GPS in their children’s cell phones to track their whereabouts, and other parents have video cameras in their homes.
Increasingly, I talk with young people who lack the confidence that they can even pull off a party when their parents are out of town, and so how much confidence are they going to have about pulling off a democratic movement below the radar of authorities?



7. Television.
In 2009, the Nielsen Company reported that TV viewing in the United States is at an all-time high if one includes the following “three screens”: a television set, a laptop/personal computer, and a cell phone.

American children average eight hours a day on TV, video games, movies, the Internet, cell phones, iPods, and other technologies (not including school-related use).
Many progressives are concerned about the concentrated control of content by the corporate media, but the mere act of watching TV—regardless of the programming—is the primary pacifying agent (private-enterprise prisons have recognized that providing inmates with cable television can be a more economical method to keep them quiet and subdued than it would be to hire more guards).

Television is a dream come true for an authoritarian society: those with the most money own most of what people see; fear-based television programming makes people more afraid and distrustful of one another, which is good for the ruling elite who depend on a “divide and conquer” strategy; TV isolates people so they are not joining together to create resistance to authorities; and regardless of the programming, TV viewers’ brainwaves slow down, transforming them closer to a hypnotic state that makes it difficult to think critically.

While playing a video games is not as zombifying as passively viewing TV, such games have become for many boys and young men their only experience of potency, and this “virtual potency” is certainly no threat to the ruling elite.

8. Fundamentalist Religion and Fundamentalist Consumerism.
American culture offers young Americans the “choices” of fundamentalist religion and fundamentalist consumerism.
All varieties of fundamentalism narrow one’s focus and inhibit critical thinking.

While some progressives are fond of calling fundamentalist religion the “opiate of the masses,” they too often neglect the pacifying nature of America’s other major fundamentalism. Fundamentalist consumerism pacifies young Americans in a variety of ways.

Fundamentalist consumerism destroys self-reliance, creating people who feel completely dependent on others and who are thus more likely to turn over decision-making power to authorities, the precise mind-set that the ruling elite loves to see.

A fundamentalist consumer culture legitimizes advertising, propaganda, and all kinds of manipulations, including lies; and when a society gives legitimacy to lies and manipulativeness, it destroys the capacity of people to trust one another and form democratic movements.

Fundamentalist consumerism also promotes self-absorption, which makes it difficult for the solidarity necessary for democratic movements.
These are not the only aspects of our culture that are subduing young Americans and crushing their resistance to domination.

The food-industrial complex has helped create an epidemic of childhood obesity, depression, and passivity. T
he prison-industrial complex keeps young anti-authoritarians “in line” (now by the fear that they may come before judges such as the two Pennsylvania ones who took $2.6 million from private-industry prisons to ensure that juveniles were incarcerated).

As Ralph Waldo Emerson observed: “All our things are right and wrong together. The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.”

Bruce E. Levineis a practicing clinical psychologist.
His latest book is Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite.

That article is spot on

All the methods listed are silent weapons in a quiet war against the US public with the aim of making them docile, ignorant, poor, unhealthy, lethargic, apathetical, disarmed and disheartened

So far it is progressing well, but what happens when the public wake upto what is being done to them for example when their wallets become empty?

 

[Skarekrow]

That article is spot on

All the methods listed are silent weapons in a quiet war against the US public with the aim of making them docile, ignorant, poor, unhealthy, lethargic, apathetical, disarmed and disheartened

So far it is progressing well, but what happens when the public wake upto what is being done to them for example when their wallets become empty?

That’s when the rich are going to fly to their private islands while the nation burns.
Hopefully we can interrupt such a scenario before too much destruction.

 

[muir]

That’s when the rich are going to fly to their private islands while the nation burns.
Hopefully we can interrupt such a scenario before too much destruction.

lol yeah i think the bush family has bough up large estates down in south america

Our ignorance is their oxygen

 

[Artisan]

I don't think WW3 will be fought primarily in the middle east.
The middle east has always just been a pre-lude to whats to come.
It's like the testing field for the US to test if they still got the skills and a perfect way to keep the minds of the masses off the problems back home...
And if they can help their corporate shadow government a little by specifically targeting countries who refuse to center their currencies around the dollar, then that is all the better.

The US government has, since WW2 been gunning for Russia. They're freaking phobic of them.
And you know, honestly ? I really wouldn't give a damn if america and russia went to war.
The thing I care about is that the US government has used Europe over and over for its nefarious conquests,
ruined countries over and over, and now they're hoping to fight a war against Russia on our soil. That is one thing I absolutely refuse to be dragged into.
Did we just get liberated in ww2 from one tyrant just so we could participate in the genocide of yet another ?

Cause really this is the truth, europe has been the tool for a country who not only used two nukes on civilians, but even threatened to keep using them until the other guy surrendered.
The lapdog of a country who has since build up a history full of military interventions and deployed forces specifically to destabilize other countries.
Do you have any idea how many people died or lost everything as the result of their actions?
And do you realize that we as their pathetic pets helped them do this and thus are just as guilty?

It's like drone strikes, it seems so much less of a significant psychological impact when you see it on a screen.
But really, if the wars were fought in your yards, would you still feel so benevolent to your governments foreign policy since ww2?
For generations all wars the US government has been involved with were over seas, out of sight and out of mind.
You're basically on your own continent, nice and Isolated from any real personal harm. But we in mainland europe are not.
We don't see wars as something akin to a basketball game where we feel happy if our team scores... WARS SUCK.
Just wait till you one day witness your own Neighbors, Friends, Father, Mother, Brother and Sister DIE at the hands of another.
And not just one of them, no MANY of them. And for us europeans, this will not be as mild as the few wars we've had in recent decades.
This will be a full blown escalated death toll beyond any we've seen before on our own soil, in our own streets, in our own backyards.

Personally I'm not against a big European union as long as it is independent from foreign influence and interference, gets the hell out of NATO and takes up a neutral position before it's too late.
Whatever nasty tricks might have to be pulled to get europe to stand together, independent and disentangled from WW3, I Approve.

Its either that, or succession from the eu, and strengthening ties with russia to the point where we can stand neutral as loners between giants.
I'd prefer to stand together as one big european union and declare our neutrality and no matter what happens, not getting involved with other peoples wars any longer.
Because there ain't gonna be no god nor heaven for any of us if we keep this up. What we will get will be no less then a radioactive garden and a home surrounded by mines.

If we cannot wake up as a people in europe and stand united against any continuation of this cycle, and partake in the third world war to be fought on our soil,
then god, we have turned into the monsters that we've always feared to be.

 

[muir]

I don't think WW3 will be fought primarily in the middle east.

You're right and it is already being fought

It is being fought through proxy wars like Ukraine, it is being fought in cyberspace, it is being fought through financial weapons of mass destruction and it is being fought as an information war of which we are all on the front line

The middle east has always just been a pre-lude to whats to come.

The zionists have a plan to create what they call ersatz israel or a 'greater israel' stretching right across the middle east. They are land grabbing imperialists

It's like the testing field for the US to test if they still got the skills and a perfect way to keep the minds of the masses off the problems back home...

Its somewhere they can fire off all the ordinance they make in their multi billion dollar arms industry. The victims are 'collateral damage'; apparently some americans (US) are cool with that; as long as the bombs aren't raining on their front lawn they don't give a fuck, but with their government making US soil a battleground with the passing of the NDAA and with drones being flown in US skies and with the department of homeland security buying up billions of bullets as well as tanks the war is coming to the US. Just ask the folks in boston who had their streets shut down and their homes searched after the staged false flag bombing

And if they can help their corporate shadow government a little by specifically targeting countries who refuse to center their currencies around the dollar, then that is all the better.

Absolutely. Saddam hussein was an ally of the US at one point until the US betrayed him. They and their allies supplied him with weapons and chemical weapons for example. After that he was switching to trading oil in euros instead of petro dollars so the US went in and hung him (part of the ongoing 'currency war')

Also gaddafi was going to create a pan african bank using gold that would help countries get loans to develop without falling under the power of the zionists who control the IMF, so of course they went in and took him out

Iran too is not trading oil in dollars but trades for example for gold, so the zionists are desperate to destroy Iran. Imagine a country wanting to trade in something that has actual value (gold) instead of the worthless paper currency of the zionist bankers who own and control the fed!

The US government has, since WW2 been gunning for Russia. They're freaking phobic of them.

It started before world war 2

The zionist bankers through the masonic b'nai brith order bankrolled trotsky and lenin and supplied then with trained revolutionaries to take back to russia to overthrow the tzar and let the bankers in to exploit the russian markets

They're not happy that russia is defending itself from being bled dry like the european countries

I mean imagine not wanting your country to be bled dry and made broke like greece, italy, spain and portugal etc?

I mean in this day and age...defending yourself from being economically raped by zionists...i guess they must just be 'anti-semitic'

Not to mention the US itself....look at how the zionists are hollowing out the US from the inside...by the time they're finished with it the US will be a burned out husk

And apparently some americans are cool with that lol

And you know, honestly ? I really wouldn't give a damn if america and russia went to war.

They are at war but an escalation would be a disaster for the world. We are all looking into the abyss now and its really time we took power back off the crazies before they take this thing too far

The thing I care about is that the US government has used Europe over and over for its nefarious conquests,
ruined countries over and over, and now they're hoping to fight a war against Russia on our soil. That is one thing I absolutely refuse to be dragged into.
Did we just get liberated in ww2 from one tyrant just so we could participate in the genocide of yet another ?

The russians are my european neighbours i have NO desire to go to war with them and many europeans feel the same way

Cause really this is the truth, europe has been the tool for a country who not only used two nukes on civilians, but even threatened to keep using them until the other guy surrendered.

The japs were already suing for peace...the US just wanted to test their new super weapon and send a message to the rest of the world (especially the russians). Some voices in the US actually wanted to nuke russia....nuke millions of people

The lapdog of a country who has since build up a history full of military interventions and deployed forces specifically to destabilize other countries.
Do you have any idea how many people died or lost everything as the result of their actions?
And do you realize that we as their pathetic pets helped them do this and thus are just as guilty?

Yeah our governments are all zionist gatekeepers. they have our governments by the balls because the zionists control the central banks in all the western countries. This is why we need to drop their currency and create a new interest free currency not controlled by the bankers

It's like drone strikes, it seems so much less of a significant psychological impact when you see it on a screen.

Yeah and they started giving those fuckers medals! Medals for bombing people from thousands of miles away (many drones are flown out of ramstein airfield in germany)

But really, if the wars were fought in your yards, would you still feel so benevolent to your governments foreign policy since ww2?

The war is coming to the US. The zionists want to destroy the US as a power (after using its military as their personal gofers) so that they can absorb it into the UN world government that they will control

For generations all wars the US government has been involved with were over seas, out of sight and out of mind.
You're basically on your own continent, nice and Isolated from any real personal harm. But we in mainland europe are not.

The US citizens are also on the battleground of a nuclear war...they would be just as vapourised as us...it's probably about time they realised that, because yes many of them are complacent because they have never had war on their doorstep

Sure they had 911 but that was carried out by their own shadow government!!!

We don't see wars as something akin to a basketball game where we feel happy if our team scores... WARS SUCK.
Just wait till you one day witness your own Neighbors, Friends, Father, Mother, Brother and Sister DIE at the hands of another.
And not just one of them, no MANY of them. And for us europeans, this will not be as mild as the few wars we've had in recent decades.
This will be a full blown escalated death toll beyond any we've seen before on our own soil, in our own streets, in our own backyards.

Personally I'm not against a big European union as long as it is independent from foreign influence and interference, gets the hell out of NATO and takes up a neutral position before it's too late.

We need to destroy the centralsied EU

That's not to say we shouldn't all trade together but this centralised power crap is not working...it's taking power further and further from the man and woman on the street and as a result we are all hurting financially as the oligarchs rob us all blind

Whatever nasty tricks might have to be pulled to get europe to stand together, independent and disentangled from WW3, I Approve.

Its either that, or succession from the eu, and strengthening ties with russia to the point where we can stand neutral as loners between giants.
I'd prefer to stand together as one big european union and declare our neutrality and no matter what happens, not getting involved with other peoples wars any longer.
Because there ain't gonna be no god nor heaven for any of us if we keep this up. What we will get will be no less then a radioactive garden and a home surrounded by mines.

The EU is not independent.

The same banking families that own the US federal reserve also control the central banks of europe through the Bank for International Settlements in switzerland

They coordinate their efforts across the atlantic through forums like bilderberg, the chatham house-CFR network, the world economic forum, trilateral commission etc

If we cannot wake up as a people in europe and stand united against any continuation of this cycle, and partake in the third world war to be fought on our soil,
then god, we have turned into the monsters that we've always feared to be.

They want to clump countries together

They have clumped europe together as the 'EU' and now they are using trade agreements like NAFTA and TTIP to pull the northern american countries into one clump

Then in the future after world war 3 they will seek to pull togteher the clumps under one centrally controlled fascist state (who knows what would be left after ww3)

 

[Artisan]

[MENTION=1871]muir[/MENTION] I know we are controlled by the same pricks. I say what I want to happen to the EU, not what is.
I want an EU that has the European people at heart, I am not for centralization of government.
I am for a shared soul in mutual defense. A one for all, all for one mentality.
I wish for independence of europe from foreign influence.
A europe for the european people and not for our puppeteers.

 

[muir]

@muir I know we are controlled by the same pricks. I say what I want to happen to the EU, not what is.
I want an EU that has the European people at heart, I am not for centralization of government.
I am for a shared soul in mutual defense. A one for all, all for one mentality.
I wish for independence of europe from foreign influence.
A europe for the european people and not for our puppeteers.

I know you are coming froma good place but the banksters that are so central to all this stuff are largely from europe

Many US americans might not know this but many of the families who put in an initial stake for their central bank (the fed) were from Europe or were agents for european bankers

The same bankers who control the financial system in europe control the financial system in the US

And it goes deeper than that. Even the US presidents tend to be blood relations of European monarchy

And the multi-national corporations have the el-ite from the US and europe owning their shares and sitting on their boards

It's a pan-atlantic, corporate mafia, that operates through the secret society network

 

[SpecialEdition]

I don't think world war 3 will happen in a way we might expect. It seems to me that it might continue to creep up on us so slowly that we don't realize we've all been duped and are completely under the control of the winning party. I don't think it'll be as blunt as a violent war, though wars are raging all the time. But I think it's financial and psychological and societal.