Clown Population

68 readers

142 users here now

Clown Population. The clowns inside the White House are only a small fraction of a total society of mock for mock, reactionary mocking, clowns. The entire nation is a "basket case of clowning around" on social machines / HDTV media machines / mockery.

People like to play a game of psychological denial and say ONLY MAGA is the clowns, only the White House is the clowns. It's the entire population of Untied States of America.

founded 1 week ago

MODERATORS

RoundSparrow@lemm.ee

"Our Problem is Gullibility, Not Disinformation. When it comes to bad information, we need to work on the vulnerability rather than the threat"- September 13, 2020, Daniel Miessler (danielmiessler.com)

submitted 3 days ago by RoundSparrow@lemm.ee to c/ClownPopulation@lemm.ee

9 comments fedilink hide all child comments

September 13, 2020, Daniel Miessler

I think we’ve lost the plot on disinformation. It’s not the attacks that are the problem. It’s the fact that too many Americans are willing to believe almost anything.

Ideally we’d reduce both the attacks and the vulnerability.

Of course it would be nice to have fewer attacks. Of course it would be nice to keep attacks from being used against higher numbers of vulnerable people. But ultimately the problem is the vulnerability itself.

Bad ideas are worse than bad code because they’re naturally contagious.

This is easier to see in the information security world. If you have a target that will run any code that it’s given, you cannot spend all of your energy making sure it doesn’t receive any code. Part of your plan has to be making sure it’s not so eager to do so. We call that patching.

It’s the same with people. We need to do more than control bad ideas; we need to patch our population against them.

Trade school doesn’t immunize against specious ideas.

For people, patching means education. And not the worker-prep kind of education where you learn how to be an obedient and productive office worker, but the kind that teaches the fundamentals of how things work—from physics to psychology, and from physiology to philosophy.

MORE: https://danielmiessler.com/blog/our-real-weakness-is-gullibility-not-disinformation

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] barneypiccolo@lemm.ee 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

The problem is that schools no longer teach Critical Thinking Skills, which help people recognize and reject propaganda. Republicans have even openly disparaged Critical Thinking Skills, and their gullible followers go aling with it, and parrot it.

[–] jrs100000@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

If schools used to teach critical thinking skills effectively then older people should be more resistant to disinformation, not less. Since that is not the case we must conclude what they were teaching before was not effective against this threat.

[–] barneypiccolo@lemm.ee 1 points 3 days ago

They did teach Critical Thinking Skills back then, but students back then were EXACTLY like students today. Some are smart, and it sticks, some are stupid, and it doesn't, and most are in between, with mixed results. Some get it, and some don't. Then there are those with good Critical Thinking Skills, who choose to use them to commit evil. That seems to be common among politicians and business people. They often seem to believe their own propaganda, but they know better, they are just selling it to the rubes, who weren't trained in school to use their brains properly.

Instead of thinking about age, think about educational level. Studies have shown that the more education a person gets, the more liberal they tend to be. College grads are more liberal than HS grads, Masters grads are more liberal, and PhDs, are even more liberal. The more intelligent a person gets, the more they reject illogical and/or disproven conservative propaganda.

The difference between yesterday and today, is that current Conservatives are actively trying to avoid teaching Critical Thinking Skills that give future adult citizens the tools to question and reject their propaganda. In 2012, Texas Republicans even added it to their official party platform:

We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

They literally said that they don't want students learning to think for themselves, and "undermining parental authority." So how are they supposed to become parents themselves someday? Will they always have to consult with their old parents on everything (who, ironically, were educated when Critical Thinking Skills weren't literally banned in schools).

The answer, of course, is that they don't give a rat's ass about parental authority, they just don't want the next generation growing up to question their POLITICAL authority.

Imagine opposing something that they themselves call "Higher Order Thinking Skills?" Why would you not want every citizen of your country thinking on a higher level, unless you prefer a stupid nation over an intelligent one? And why would that be? The only possible answet is because stupid citizens are far easier to manipulate.

Also remember that Texas is such a huge state, and buys so many textbooks, that most textbook companies write their textbooks to be acceptable in Texas. That means that textbooks will avoid any use of Critical Thinking to appease Texas, but then schools all over America will be using those same intellectually compromised textbooks.