05/01/2018
Worth reading, especially the second half.
here's a clip from the end of teh second half:
"But it all comes full circle to the weapon our enemies have used to put us into decline... fostering the failure mode that Arnold Toynbee called the destroyer of nations... the demolition of trust in our creative or knowledge castes.
More than half of the Republicans surveyed in a recent Pew poll say colleges and universities are hurting the country, a drastic shift from how the same group viewed such institutions two years ago. Alas, this article doesn't go to the heart of why. Every single fact-using profession is now warred upon by Fox and right-media... scientists, teachers, doctors, journalists, economists, judges, civil servants... and now the "deep state" FBI, Intelligence Officers and the U.S. Military Officer Corps.
The Orwellian hate fest toward fact-people became essential, as they are the ones standing in the way of a re-imposition of 6000 years of feudalism. And what do all fact-folks have in common? Nearly all were influenced by the fact-using places called colleges and universities.
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To be clear, this extends to previously exempt groups of fact-users. Elsewhere I have gone on about how the FBI, CIA, and military officers used to be safe from the murdochians’ all-out war on sapient professions. Only now – prompted by the noxious “deep-state” meme -- confederates feel free to wage open war on those fact-people, too.
Civil servants have always been hated-on by the far-right (though Adam Smith extolled them as a counterweight against aristocratic cheaters.) But they were given safety by laws passed since the 1880s (by Republicans, no less.) I have a libertarian corner of me that is willing to discuss how bureaucracies are ever in need of being refreshed to prevent cloying meddlesomeness. Still, we have a civilization with rules and compromises that we agreed to by sovereign political processes. And while politics has been (temporarily) destroyed by the murdochian-confederates, we still have a civilization to maintain, and civil servants are there to keep a complex society spinning.
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Now comes an exposé in Foreign Policy revealing how alt-righters are savagely attacking this final, fact-using group. “Career civil servants often endure stressful working conditions, but in the Trump White House, some of them face online trolling from alt-right bloggers who seek to portray them as clandestine partisans plotting to sabotage the president’s agenda. The online attacks often cite information that appears to be provided by unnamed White House officials or Trump loyalists.
“The trend has unnerved the career intelligence analysts, diplomats, security experts, and military officers who are accustomed to operating outside the political arena,” write the authors Brannen, de Luce and McLaughlin.
The anecdotes in this article are deeply disturbing. But above all they are indicative of the full breadth of this war upon any semblance of objective reality or sapience in American life or governance.
The smart bomb question that I ask everyone to use, when they confront their mad-right-confederate uncles (or better-yet, their aunts, who might yet be swayed) is: “Can you name for me one fact-centered profession of high knowledge and skill that is not under attack by your cult?”
As it happens, there are two remaining groups who both have some degree of intellectual accomplishment, and are utterly exempt from the right’s War on All Smartypants. They are:
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Doctors of Divinity
… and…
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… members of the CEO-WallStreet-Inheritance caste.
Both groups are beneficiaries of staggeringly huge tax breaks that they extort from us all, via dependent politicians. Both have everything to win, if all the fact-users are destroyed, or at least crushed into submission.
Both have helped to bring about the long-delayed Decline of the West."
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