cannedtunaAs companies destroy the world in pursuit of profits that will never come, I welcome our Butlerian Jihad
No Child Left Behind destroyed this country far more effectively than I ever would have suspected.
The culture was fucked long before no child left behind to be fair. Anti intellectualism was rampant, since before most of us were born, gangster culture and drug prohibition and The Fear made a solid percent of the population criminals and authorized a police state.
City schools are better now than they were in the 80s and 90s, things got real bad in the crime waves.
Since we’re talking sci-fi, this is Asimove in 1980:
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
I don’t think it’s accurate to say it’s always been there, in fact I believe it didn’t really start in it’s current form until 1971 or so, by design, although it existed before as it does elsewhere, that was the turning point, where big business huddled up and made a long game to seize power, project 2025 is just the recent iteration of that game plan, formed initially by the Business Roundtable.
It’s even still a rhetoric I hear by other leftist. I get that the cost of a higher education is a scam. But the education is not.
I also genuinely believe that humans have a lot of intellectual potential but that most never get to reach that.
Early life obstacles. Lack of opportunities. Lack of motivation.
These keep the people stupid and docile.
I rarely meet people who like to just learn things for the sake of learning.
I have 3 nieces and a nephew. Only the nephew is interested in many things.
The nieces couldn’t care less and spend their time on their phones watching 5 second videos about nothing.
No attention span. No motivation to do anything.
It’s quite sad. My nephew is the youngest. And I hope I don’t see him shift to the same patterns.
Yeah I mean a casual chain can be traced back to the big bang. But looking at the entirety of history, you tend to look for certain let inflection points.
So in my mind, traveling from Present backwards in time, the journey looks like this in my mind:
Present :: Idiocracy 1st :: No Child Left Behind 2nd :: Bush elected 3rd :: Clinton Glass Steagle 4th :: Reagan 5th :: Nixon
I can zoom in anywhere along that timeline to talk about how each event impacted this topic.
Lemme know if you want to explore any of that like for example what did Reagan do to impact education today long after his death.
As I was saying on another thread, this current fuckery dates back to the Business Roundtable of 1971, big business huddled up and made a game plan to seize control. They got their asses kicked out of power from FDR and kept losing. Project 2025 is just the newer iteration of that game plan. Part of that plan clearly is to keep us disunited and destroy any competing organizations, and or take control of them secretly like with our opposition political party, not much of a secret to many of us I know.
The only answer is to organize, and to do that we need new social media, that we control. Like the fediverse, but set up better. But we needed it 20 years ago. Next best time is now.
Fascinating, I never heard about that, so my causality chain only accounts for starting at:
Water Gate
Frost / Nixon
Clinton
Glass Steagle
Clinton Impeachment
Bush
NCLB
Plenty of details in between, I definitely want to fill out the timeline with as much detail as possible.