Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Thursday, March 04, 2010

For Republicans "Critical Thinking" Means Teaching Non-Controversies As Controversies in the Service of Incumbent Interests

Pretending climate change denialism is scientific, anti-darwinian creationism is scientific, market fundamentalist wish-fulfillment fantasizing is scientific is what Republicans seem to want to mean by "critical thinking." And then, of course, the victims of this mis-education, when it "works" and to the extent that it does, are the very folks who are rendered bereft of actual critical thinking skills and who slurp thereupon from the fallacy-fountainhead of Fox News and get whipped up into fascist frenzies by cynical corporate-military elites who take any opportunity to dismantle democracy the better to consolidate their control. As a person who teaches critical theory and close reading and argumentation to college students (and who gets pilloried by Robot Cultists who fancy themselves Enlightenment Champions as a "PoMo relativist" and by racist Bell Curve reductionists who fancy themselves super-scientists as "fashionably nonsensical" for his pains), I must say that the opportunistic debasement of criticism in the service of faithful authoritarian incumbency is especially awful and ugly and egregious. --h/t JimF

No comments: