Dumbification of the West

[Pekka]

I see a great danger of dumbification of the west happening. Dumbification is never a good thing, or at least shouldn't be. It is anti-freedom.

What I'm worried is the way media asks questions, it asks the questions that 'sell' more, that is that the audience finds more interesting and attractive, because it's what they do. Screw integrity, I think we have thrown that to the bin years ago.

Now, media can make assertions, it's not about proving right or wrong, implicating and indicating is enough. Plant the seed in the back of the head of the audience. They can then 'make up their own mind'. Not too bad necessarily, except when the questions are not the right questions to ask.

With the Internet, when wars happen, we can get on everyones face about it. Can you imagine of the whole ME was online, arguing and debating with us about the wars in there we are conducting? Can you imagine what the normal level debate would be? It wouldn't be a debate. It would be people being attacked, for right or wrong reasons, having a voice in our own homes. YOu either take it, or you defend yourself and your mind and attack back. The biggest flame fest ever.

Just think about it. This is a new situation. The people can meet each other in a nation wide level. Now, with the wrong questions asked, the dumbification of the nations is apparent. Who thinks we would be debating asking the right questions? Or who thinks a big massive flame fest? If you think it won't be a massive flame fest, then naive is what you are.

SO what I'm I saying? I'm saying that a whole bunch of dumbed down people will dumber themselves even more by attending to attack each other, and while the small percetange will use the ability to communicate effecitvely as a part of the solution, what it really is in the majority is part of the problem. Escalating device. It will guarantee that we will lose the real questions and the truth. Two sides battling with words and both filled with their own and enemy propaganda. Jeesh, I wonder where that leads.

The WESTERN dumbification part is, that we think we are smart. We think we know stuff. We don't know **** about things when it comes to other people and the world. We are technologically superior, and in some other fields, superior, but when we are thinking about wars and conflicts.. yes, military supremacy lies here, but what about the solutions? What about what's going on, what about how this came to this and how can we make it so that this won't happen again?

What we do is we present the first round scenario of the conflict, but we really don't look back far enough, I'm not talking about digging centuries back, a decade or two might be enough.

This is what the people who do the war will do. They will know their enemy so they can fight it. What we do is we don't want to know, we don't care to know, we just do passive research and take what is offered to us. That is hardly the big picture. And if you don't care about the big picture, then you don't really care about the solution either. Or the future. Or the dumbification has worked so well that you don't even realize how important big picture is.

OK so how does it work, how can we get the big picture. I suggest we all try to analytically see the scenario before it started and then how it evolved into the current situation. This means no slacking off. This doesn't mean that you settle for an easy answer, because that doesn't require effort and you feel comfortable with it. Make no mistake, this is what 99% of people do. THey take the answer that is provided for them and think they came up with it. Because they're dumb and stupid.

How can you do that? In its simplest form:

A)

Recognize the participants and players. That is to see all the entities involved. That doesn't mean two sides. That means the players IN those sides. Go to a deeper level.

B)

Analyze those entities. Find out how they work, who they are, and what their relationship to other entities in the scheme works. If they have no relationship to anything else, then they don't belong in the picture and we can forget about them.

C)

Analyze the marching order and importance of the schemes. Treat and study all the players and entities without prejudice, and like there is no sides. Learn to understand them objectively.

D)

See the logic behind it, if there is no logic behind it, you are not understanding the players, or you are missing players.

E)

Now rewind to the current situation and analyze how it all happened in each segment. Now you have the tools and means and information to see how it will advance possibly, plus when it happens, you can immidiately fit it to your scheme. You understand it faster than most what it all implicates, what it truly means. You don't need answers that are provided for you. You are analytical. You see it yourself.

Remember, any outside influence to your study is not welcome. If you let it happen, you need to start over, or you're fooling yourself and a victim of the dumbification and thus PART of the problem.

So the title fo the thread means, the dumbification of the west is fishing for answers to the questions that don't matter. And even then, accepting the answers that you feel the most comfortable with. You will bend your own sense of logic and justify it by thinking 'well this is actually logical'. Hey, even women are logical in their own ways.

If you don't realize the importance of this all, combined with the current possibility of all sides communicating with each other directly, then you will definitely contribute to the wrong questions and wrong answers group, and further the problem and make it easy for people to exploit you. In analytical approach, there's no 'our people' or 'my side'. If you can't treat it like that, then you are unable to analytical thinking, and thus, dumbification of the west caught you.

[Pekka]

The whole idea is, that since there will be times when sides of conflicts will get up and bash each other in great numbers, only helping the conflict to go on, and that never benefits ANYONE (except weapon industry), we need to have the means to face that confrontation with tools that make us the solution part, not the problem part.

[Elok]

Yeah, and when I said something like this everybody called me a pantywaist liberal who hated freedom. So

[Pekka]

Really? It depends how you said it.

You see, you might read my post and say, well that's just liberal crap talk. But here comes the interesting part: Some right wingers here MUST think I'm leaning to the left. Left wingers think I'm openly right wing.

So am I talking about the importance of the analysis of the situations in GENERAL, or am I talking about the war in Iraq and against it at that?

People, depending on their political background will answer differently to this. Even when they've talked a lot with me. And smart people they are too, but only few will provide the correct answer.

And that's why I leave it open.

[Pekka]

I'd also like to point out that I have directly attacked party politics and the whole development of the current political atmosphere in my own country. A miniature model of that can be seen for example in the states, but it is structured differently so it's not exactly like that, but has some other problems. Like all systems do. Nothing is perfect.

For me to be able to drive my whole issues and points to you , I'd have to talk to you for few hours so you know what I mean when I say certain things, that we are on the same level and what I mean by saying things. Different people choose differently. What I'm after is not choosing, but finding out. It's out of the influence of others to your own view. That's your own truth, don't get someone elses truth even if it's free. That's not freedom, freedom is that you are free to do things and free to think what you want and say it. If you have nothing to say or think, why would you be so lazy and just take what ever is given to you?

Am I talking about current conflicts, am I talking abut the US, am I even talking about right wing or left wing? What do you think?

[Berzerker]

I dont know what you're talking about

[Elok]

As far as I can tell, you're arguing something similar to what I've been screaming about in the Muslim threads and getting bashed for. Maybe I wasn't expressing myself clearly enough though.

Except I don't see the problem as uniquely Western. More of a universal human problem made manifest in the Western world by recent events; in the nineties, when things were relatively swell, we were able to examine things much more dispassionately. Now there's trouble brewing and we can tell, so we tend to work ourselves up into a blood frenzy.

Just to make it clear, I haven't been trying to say Islam is better than us, or that they're somehow in the right (which always gets thrown at me). Just that we're supposed to be more "enlightened," and therefore should act the part, i.e. should know better than to make angry jingoistic Patrick Henry speeches. They don't make us more right or them more wrong, and they certainly do nothing to solve the problem, but they just might get us worked up enough that we go and do something stupid. We know full well that much of the Muslim world is inundated from youth up by hateful propaganda, and poorly educated to boot. Plus they have a long memory for grievances, justified or not.

I don't believe in Snidely Whiplash supervillainy, at least not for entire cultures as a whole; we're not the Great Satan, plotting constantly to screw them over, but neither are they all obsessed with scheming our demise. They have no reason to want to destroy a civilization of people most of them have never met. The majority of them are probably hapless tools of greedy monsters like ObL, or else tired and apathetic figures lost in the crowd. Not much different from the way ignorant workers get exploited by crooked unions, really.

[Pekka]

Erhm, do note that analytical study of what the situation is does not take stands who is right or wrong. I mean the kind I'm proposing. It just gives you the facts, and understanding how they operate. From there you can draw conclusions, right or wrong ones, but at least you have the facts and the understanding of it.

How much did you analize this cartoon situation without prejudice and attitude? How did you analytically handle entities such as religion and their spesific forms in the ME and around the world now? IT's about asking the right questions, not the unimportant or irrelevant ones. What is irrelevant should be pragmatical choice, to use any kind of bias in it will automatically dismantely any legimitacy in that study.

This does not give you proposals for the solution as much as it gives you the basis for trying to make them after you understand the scenario.

This whole cartoon thing is way more complicated than that. Oversimplifying things is another component of western dumbification and a big contributor to the fact that we all have different opinions why we are in conflict with the ME. There is no one answer that is right. There are many layers in it. To simplify the problem is to build a wall around it and lock the doors so we will keep asking the wrong questions, or just stop asking altogether.

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by Berzerker
I dont know what you're talking about