Category: post truth

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A LIFE WASTED: 34 Years Teaching Humanities

I was recently declared persona non grata by my alumni chat group. Because – so proclaimed the Site Admin, herself not even a graduate of our alma mater – I dared post comments with “more than one thot.”

Okay. As a slight concession, then, I have broken this longish (20 min) “thot-laden” video into five easy subsections. I don’t normally encourage or cater to viewers on YouTube or my blog sites but for those who like to be forewarned, here is a succinct topical overview.

1. MID-LIFE CAREER CHANGE (& Nightly Obsessions) 0:00-3:32

Switching to a new career in my 40s was a colossal mistake. The Humanities are dead, my 34 years of teaching all for naught.

2. CRITICAL THINKING (& The Post-Truth Era) 3:32-6:35

We live in an era when facts don’t matter. Critical thinking skills are taught in the humanities but in a post-truth world they have become irrelevant. Not only do humans tend to make emotional decisions not based on reason and evidence, but why bother to try and reason someone out of an opinion they didn’t reason themselves into?

3. WORKFORCE EDUCATION (& The Irrelevance of the Humanities) 6:35-12:28

Humanities are perceived as not being job-related. They do in fact teach marketable skills but educators have been remiss in stressing vocational benefits.

4. CULTURAL CHANGE (& The Crisis of Humanity) 12:28-16:07

The decline of the humanities is symptomatic of a larger cultural paradigm change that is redefining what it means to be human: (a) materialistic culture elevates economic consideration to the supreme good, (b) contemporary society promotes the individual over the collective, and (c) both religious anti-rationalism and populist anti-elitism foster resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind, and a tendency to denigrate those (intellectuals) who engage in it.

5. MAGA’s BETRAYAL (& A Life Wasted) 16:07-19:59

Over & beyond teaching useful skills that transcend the classroom, a study of the humanities leads to an awakened understanding of oneself as a member of the human species, including the capacity to empathize and inhabit the experience of others. Nowhere are these concerns to be found in Project 2025, MAGA’s blueprint for the future of America, except lumped derogatorily under the pejorative, “woke.”

NOTE: this is not your typical dry lecture but contains a constant stream of supplemental video clips to match and enhance each “thot.”Even my one-year-old puppy has his moments.

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Linguistic Terrorism_#3

This week’s post is not a lie but about the man behind the lies.

Imagine the chance to watch a short (2 min) “5-star” video viewed over 1.1 million times & eliciting nearly 8K rave comments!

If you are receiving this as an email notification, WordPress unfortunately does not always make it clear that the image is actually a video. Click to be taken to YouTube.

Each lie featured in this series is a treasonous attempt to topple American Democracy by undermining informed, fact-based voter opinion. Perhaps fittingly, Donald Trump himself has suggested that traitors should be “executed.”

And yes, there are plenty of people stupid enough – or psychologically eff’ed up enough, as I’ve written about elsewhere – to believe this shit. A country gets the leader it deserves.


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Linguistic Terrorism_#2

Trump said the Biden administration wants to advance their climate agenda & ‘make our army tanks all electric.’ That’s a LIE.

“The worst thing is they want to make our Army tanks all electric,” Trump said Dec. 16 in a New Hampshire rally accusing President Joe Biden of imposing his climate agenda on the U.S. military.

Trump said the vehicles will be used “as we blast our way through enemy territory in an environmentally friendly manner.” He added that Biden puts “environmental maniacs first.” 

The U.S. Army has in fact outlined a strategy to transition NONTACTICAL fleet to electric vehicles. Nontactical vehicles include commercially available sedans, station wagons, utility vehicles, and trucks. Army spokesperson Ellen Lovett told PolitiFact that the Army is focusing strategy on wheeled vehicles, NOT TANKS. 

“There is no goal to fully electrify every single vehicle in the fleet by 2050,” said Fabian Villalobos, an engineer at the Rand Corp., a nonpartisan research organization that has an Army research division.

Villalobos said he currently knows of NO PLANS to introduce or prototype an electric tank. 

Each lie featured in this series is a treasonous attempt to topple American Democracy by undermining informed, fact-based voter opinion. Perhaps fittingly, Donald Trump himself has suggested that traitors should be “executed.”

And yes, there are plenty of people stupid enough – or psychologically eff’ed up enough, as I’ve written about elsewhere – to believe this shit. Those not fooled but nevertheless too wimp to fight for their constitutional democracy will have their country stolen out from under them. A country gets the leader it deserves.