how to think vs What to think...

[Dante]

this has got to be one of the nuttiest threads I've entered in a long, long time.

 

[American Horse]

If we were all still mostly self sufficient how would our economy look?

I can remember, and I suspect that you can too USC when in the last years of the "Great Depression", many of us had a garden, a cow, some chickens, churned butter, rendered lard, and hunted small game (there wasn't much big game in the mid-west), and cut "greens" from the lawn to add to our salads. We heated with a potbellied stove, pumped water from a cistern and deposited our waste in an outhouse which we moved from time to time.

Radio was mostly for entertainment, but there were times it was used by our president of the period (Roosevelt) to call a "family" fireside chat. Those chats went completely without negative commentary from the available media of the time, radio, TV, newspapers, and magazines. As I recall, the first time TV penetrated the public's conscousness in a controversial issue was the Army-McCarthy Hearings in the early fifties.

We learned little of the fact that our president was wheelchair bound, and at the end that he was not really very cognizant of his presidential duties. After Truman and Eisenhower, we were not given information about the health problems of Kennedy, or about his sexual liaisons (who knows where) by our mainstream media sources which had grown to nearly the size it is today, except for a different mix.

After Kennedy was killed, I felt embarassed that our new Texan President LBJ was so inarticulate in the use of the English language, and so folksy about his conduct. Remember him showing for the cameras his stitches when he had a gall-bladder operation? But I would've been - and was, even though I was a member of the other party - defensive about him when I heard what I considered to be elitist comments about his Texas dialect

Things have changed; today it would be an oddity when viewing a public crowd, to not see at least several people talking on a cellphone or "texting." One wonders what the real world value of the information they are "transacting" is. It seems to be entirely "social", but also a whole lot of "why talk, when I can TEXT" syndrome.

In the most recent time when someone who is living now was alive to experience it, a time when we were far more self sufficient, transacting communications was totally different, both urban and rural. When possible it was done face to face, neighbor to neighbor, parent to parent. Face to face transactional communications fostered mutual respect and almost no "group-think"

I think it is worth noting that the generation which believes itself the most free thinking and the least conformist, the 60's generation, has to a great extent spawned a progeny of conformists the limits of whose critical thinking is to judge their fellows on "brands" both of products and ideas. It is 'camp' to ridicule brands they don't approve of; more groupthink.

We are being juvenalized.

 

[gslack]

gslack, we are the desired product of our corporations.

very true.... I just wish my corporation had a better benefits package

 

[xsited1]

how to think vs What to think...

"Uh, Lisa, the whole reason we have elected officials is so we don't have to think all the time. Just like that rainforest scare a few years back. Our officials saw there was a problem and they fixed it, didn't they?"
Homer Simpson

 

[Wry Catcher]

Je pense, à cet effet, je suis progressive

in English?

I think, therefore, I am progressive (vis a vis a reactionary).

 

[rightwinger]

A few thousand years ago we had to rely on our ability to think critically every second of every day just to survive. In fact up until a few decades ago we had to rely on critical thinking 1000x more than we do today.

Ridiculous premise.

A few thousand years ago, critical thinking involved....
Find food, kill it, eat it

Today, you have hundreds of decisions to make each day. Just in information alone, you are bombarded with thousands of pieces of information to process.

 

[gslack]

A few thousand years ago we had to rely on our ability to think critically every second of every day just to survive. In fact up until a few decades ago we had to rely on critical thinking 1000x more than we do today.

Ridiculous premise.

A few thousand years ago, critical thinking involved....
Find food, kill it, eat it

Today, you have hundreds of decisions to make each day. Just in information alone, you are bombarded with thousands of pieces of information to process.

Bullshit!, today we make a wrong decision at work and we have to stay late or do it again, at most get fired. A thousand years ago a mistake while hunting meant death or going hungry..... if you couldn't function as a hunter you were dead period not alternative career choices or anything. You are equating making decisions that are not life or death to the ones that are and pretending its the same or tougher.

if we had a terrible world wide tragedy, a comet hitting us, plague, WMD's etc, and there was no computer networks, electricity, or any such amenities we enjoy today. Who out of the survivors would make it past the first year, the web programmers and such or the hunters and physically skilled workers? I wouldn't bet the farm on a java app saving you from starvation, but I would feel pretty safe in betting on the weekend hunter finding food and the construction worker making a shelter.