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Understand USA @lemm.ee
RoundSparrow @ .ee @lemm.ee

"how does a Yale graduate not know the difference". Answer, Carl Sagan in 1995: “Science is more than a body of knowledge..." - people do not understand science thinking or Twitter media ecology.

"how does a Yale graduate not know the difference"

 

Knowing and knowledge is not the crisis. The crisis of understanding in the United States of America 2025 is that thinking systems are important. Reactionary thinking, mockery thinking, one-upmanship thinking is not the same as the science way of thinking. Twitter-thinking, meme thinking, isn't the same as science thinking.

“Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less)” ― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, 1995

19 comments

  • We're truly fucked, aren't we?

    • We’re truly fucked, aren’t we?

      We, The United States of America, have been and we don't even realize how we got fucked, who did the fucking, and how we have entirely failed to defend or study the problem. We are so lost in our own Total Mockery and Twitter-thinking values, we haven't a clue about what was unleashed upon the World Wide Web Internet since March 2013.

       

      "We Are here" / "You Are Here" Untied States of America:

       

      We are here:

      “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” ― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951

  • How does he not know his a** from a h*** in the ground?

    • How does he not know his a** from a h*** in the ground?

      He doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground because he lives in the United States of America year 2025, where people shit-talk and insult and mock on social media systems like Twitter and Lemmy. Thinking that insults are a form of education, when all insults do is cause more and more favoring of ignorance.

      He knows how to be popular. JD Vance knows how to get people to listen to him, how to get people to react to his choices and behaviors. By creating a total mockery like Lemmy and Reddit and Twitter and Bluesky social media systems are. JD Vance knows how to get attention.

      Carl Sagan's 1995 book gets no serious attention by crowds. Lemmy audiences and United States of America people flock to shit information, JD Vance as a source/ to Fox News for schooling, not to Carl Sagan as a source of information.

      JD Vance doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground the same way all Americans do not, they avoid excellent teaching and lessons from educators like Carl Sagan. People are attracted to shit learning, in favor of junk memes. It has become a horrific situation since year 2013, that Twitter-thinking reactionary values have become so craved by people in the USA. How the United States of America lost an information war to Russia and people can't even discuss thinking systems and information warfare education!

      “a peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again. It is an improbable world. It is a world in which the idea of human progress, as Bacon expressed it, has been replaced by the idea of technological progress. The aim is not to reduce ignorance, superstition, and suffering but to accommodate ourselves to the requirements of new technologies. We tell ourselves, of course, that such accommodations will lead to a better life, but that is only the rhetorical residue of a vanishing technocracy. We are a culture consuming itself with information, and many of us do not even wonder how to control the process. We proceed under the assumption that information is our friend, believing that cultures may suffer grievously from a lack of information, which, of course, they do. It is only now beginning to be understood that cultures may also suffer grievously from information glut, information without meaning, information without control mechanisms.” ― Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, 1992

19 comments