Trump does not want a nation of critical thinkers. He wants a nation of loyal believers.
— Ibram X. Kendi (@DrIbram) September 6, 2020
Conventional wisdom purveyors like Ibram X. Kendi understand “critical thinking” as criticizing those you are allowed to criticize (whites, men, straights, etc.) and never ever thinking critically about those you aren’t supposed to criticize.
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Critical reactors = Big Blac! dudes who tell you that you are a Nazi, and who built the pyra-minds.
Critical race theory = Several of the above holding a party in front of your house.
What hath Hegel wrought!
Lol. This is so Meta.
Rule of thumb: anytime an academic, like, say Ibram X. Kendi, claims that their course or discipline or seminar or whatever helps you develop “critical thinking skills” or “teaches you how to think”, 1.) grab your wallet, and 2.) run.
A non-fraudulent academic will tell you exactly what they are going to teach you. ‘This class is an introduction to thermodynamics.’ ‘This class covers early medieval history.’ ‘This class is about basic algorithms and data structures.’
Non-fraudulent academics don’t make the preposterous claim that they can teach you ‘critical thinking skills.’ Those exist, but they come from learning lots of semi-random, semi-related things, living life, trying and failing at things, carefully observing the world, etc.
The irony is that in our Orwellian age, this means literally the opposite of what it says. He wants people who are true believers in whatever the Current Wokeness is and can’t do basic logic or question the assumptions of the Party.
What Kendi wants is a nation that submits to Big Black Brother.
Kendi’s statement is another example of projection. It’s a pretty safe bet to just reverse anything his side says about our side and consider it a statement about themselves.
to say WTF or GTFOOWH!
to say WTF or GTFOOWH! No one cares about you fragility…no one cares.
Critical thinking is an instantiation or critical theory to Kendi, nothing more.
“Critical thinking” is what teachers teach when they are to lazy to teach actual facts, like who won the Civil War or why airplanes fly.
One thing I’ve learned in my life is that critical thinking (the real kind) is very severely discouraged at every step of contemporary education. Female educators in particular despise it.
Unfortunately for me, I can’t help myself. It’s just part of who I am.
That’s what really confounds me about this stuff. The people who are always encouraging “critique” are typically the most intolerant of it. At least with women the outrage sometimes leads to more productive outlets, but with the other groups there’s no happy ending to look forward to.
It’s difficult to read something into anything this idiot with a degree in basket weaving says.
I don’t care anymore.
Oh man the era of critical thinking in America is in the rear view mirror. The country is now a goofy clown car. The headlines are filled with harbingers of dumb downed doom.
WE USED TO BE GREAT.
Firefighters Continue To Battle El Dorado Fire In Yucaipa, Cause Revealed To Be Gender Reveal Party Smoke Device
https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2020/09/06/heat-wave-el-dorado-fire-evacuations-yucaipa/
Joe West ejected Nationals GM Mike Rizzo for not wearing a mask…in a suite…by himself
https://mobile.twitter.com/BadSportsRefs/status/1302723269364248584
Check out this Trump ad.
It’s awesome.
Critical thinking requires an 80+IQ, abstract thinking, objectivity, impulse control.
Does ibran have these?
Or Big Back Sista
Reasoning means having good reasons to support your claims. Criticism means, above all else, questioning your own arguments and your own first principles.
If I really want to win an argument I need to know every criticism my most intelligent opponent will make. In other words, I need to attack my own position, especially at its root, to make sure it will hold up.
Are liberals self-critical? Do they question their own beliefs? Never. No one is more dogmatic, emotional, and faith-based in their political beliefs than the Left.
Why would an American care either way what a President would prefer of the citizens?
The pres, of whatever party, should STFU and focus on his head of government role, which is to say to try to be a competent administrator. The President is not a King or a Pope or font of wisdom or guidance for the populace or anything else. The best trait for a president is to not f things up.
(the Right falls into this deification trap as much as the Left, if not more)
In grade 2 my teacher often said to me ‘sorry isn’t good enough’ — one day some grade 3 girls were brought into the class to apologize for spreading the Bloody Mary rumour. I raised my hand and said “but you always say ‘sorry isn’t good enough.’”
I was immediately sent to the hall. I’ve been there ever since.
“ … wants a nation of loyal believers.”
Projection. The Left names its heart’s desire once again.
I will never understand the male hostility here to women in general and female teachers in particular. I am genuinely sorry that female teachers didn’t tells you that you were amazing every day like (you wish) your mommy did. I am sorry that your sons aren’t especially intelligent and you need to blame The System rather than admit it.
But women aren’t the enemy, and you need to stop identifying more with rich men than the working and middle class women who teach kids for a living. Teachers aren’t setting the terrible mandates or running the appalling economy. That is still mostly men.
OT: If someone wanted to make a yucky ad, they could juxtapose the video of biden meeting blake in Wisconsin with text on the screen under each of these two gentlemen.
Blake:
Biden:
Birds of a feather.
Yuck!
Of course Trump boasted about something similar, but has anyone credibly stepped up to say he did?
Yuck!
Yeah, very good. Your comment recalls my great professor of intellectual history Donald Fleming’s pronouncement that began: “Friedrich Nietzsche, in a rare, and possibly unique, visit to a brothel…”
“Rule of thumb: anytime an academic, like, say Ibram X. Kendi, claims that their course or discipline or seminar or whatever helps you develop “critical thinking skills” or “teaches you how to think”, 1.) grab your wallet, and 2.) run.”
Not true at all. The term has been appropriated by charlatans.
I am quite grateful that I was “forced” to teach “Critical Thinking” at a “better than average” state flagship U. It forced me to think about how to convey complex but very practical ideas to students who had the potential for learning. I think I learned much, and I think many of them did too.
The greatest teacher of “critical thinking” was Aristotle, and if you don’t like Aristotle [remainder omitted so comment won’t get deleted].
Kendi’s just mad about Cardi B. stealing his thunder.
“At least with women the outrage sometimes leads to more productive outlets”
What do you mean?
And, anyone: What’s the distinction between critical thinking and simply thinking?
Uhhh… not to discount what you’ve listed, but I believe there’s a little more to it than that. Disciplined thinking promotes consistency. Consistency helps you keep a grasp on who you are, when challenged.
Most people are a week’s focused interrogation away from joining the Symbionese Liberation Army.
Mastering the elements of argument helps you bring order to your argument, while staving off the disordered thinking of others.
That’s why, when you get good at it, many people will hate you.
Happy trails!
Aren’t Critical Thinking Skills one of those things that stopped being taught right after the person complaining about the current state of education graduated?
I’d like to see more atheists engage in critical thinking. Atheism as such doesn’t imply any of the claims of the Wokevik ideology, and a logically possible, critically thinking atheist can accept the tragedy of the human condition. I gather that the British writer and atheist John Gray holds such a position.
These people are so dumb. But they can be useful, in a way.
It’s important to remember that the only reason we’re expected to listen to people like Kendi is that a bunch of black people decided to start looting stores and attacking cops and burning things down.
As people continue to turn against Black Lives Matter and antifa, it’s a good idea, when you’re talking to your normal friends, to remind them of that fact. Remind them of how, when black people started destroying everything, politicians and the media criticized us. The people who weren’t out rioting in the streets. The people who were just sitting there and minding our own business are the ones who were attacked and expected to change. Not the ones actually causing all the problems.
It pisses people off, and hopefully, it’ll inoculate them against the same tactic in the future.
Freedom of speech does not include racist “hate speech”
Critical thinking is left wing thinking
Leftist thinking is always right. Logic is an invention of old white men to repress underprivileged classes.
There is no objective truth.
But there is the wisdom of wise women of color that KNOW the truth, intuitively.
Postmodernism: Denial of Objective Reality and of Facts is Dishonest –
Postmodernism denies facts and objective reality. The truth is based not on agreed upon facts and evidence, but is contingent on narrative and point of view. Shameless postmodernist lying utterly
https://sincerity.net/postmodernism/
Here’s a keeper for Mr Sailer.
https://www.takimag.com/article/suicide-on-the-trans-black-express/
The Boomer-Cons are well aware that people like Ibram X. Kendi are the real racists preventing black people from voting overwhelmingly Republican and therefore freeing themselves from the Democrat plantation and identity politics.
Deplorables have been thinking critically about being sold-out by republicans and screwed over by democrats for years……it’s not just belief it’s love ………deplorables love Trump and hate Ibram X.Kendi.
Slightly OT, but a good example of the kind of critical thinking I suppose Mr. Kendi supports.
This is recorded testimony, at a New York City Council hearing, by Prof. Jessica Krug, the woman who recently confessed she had faked being black.
I spent some time thinking about how to describe the video, but I’ll let Prof. Krug’s testimony speak for itself.
Critical thinking these days is highly overrated.
The next one can be titled, The Summer of Biden.
This is especially true in the media. If you follow any professional critic on Twitter, you will see they are belligerent with their followers and are quick to block them. Meanwhile, their Twitter followers are acting in the exact same way that they themselves act toward others. It’s like their unverbalized thought process is, “It’s ok for me to do this, since I’m right and they’re wrong. However, since I’m right, I am immune from criticism from others.” Also, any outsider wants desperately to be accepted by the in crowd. Case in point: Chevy Chase, who used to make fun of guys like Cary Grant on Saturday Night Live, then became friends with him in real life. Howard Stern is another one who became the very type of person he used to make fun of.
I was recently forced to take a graduate school class outside of my field, and the professor was a white guy who was very woke and treated every class as an excuse to show how downtrodden black people and women were. He was also big on speaking truth to power. However, he wasn’t so big on when I spoke truth to him, especially when I called him an asshole on our group message board. He was such a wuss that he still gave me an A. I would have had more respect for the guy if he had given me a B-, i.e. low enough to show me that he was pissed, but not low enough to complain about.
Ibram Kendi = Me dik-brain
I have never heard “critical thinking” applied in the context airplane flight physics or the “Civil” War for that matter.
“He wants a nation of loyal believers.”
I’m pretty sure he would settle for a nation of people who would stop telling endless malicious spiteful lies about him, and stop trying to undo a legitimate election every five minutes, and just let him do the job he was elected to do.
If Herr Kendi is an expert critical thinker, what is his critical thinking of the blatant and absurd RussiaGate fabrication, or the criminal election tampering of Obama and his confederates? No, not THOSE Confederates, Ibram. Critical thinkers are not supposed to get so easily spooked and triggered by gremlins and goblins.
Dang that is riveting. I really don’t understand the dems strategy.
I wanna talk about my experience in the Bronx
LOL
Critical thinking is the skill you use when handling radioactives, working with live Ordinance, or defusing IED’s.
“Dr” Kendi has my permission to try any of those tasks.
She is absolutely masterful. Hat tip!
And love how she’s hating on the “white girls”..
And…she ain’t all wrong about the spraying!
Don’t be fooled by the rocks that I got
I’m still, I’m still Jesse from the block
Used to have a little, now I have a lot
No matter where I go I know where I came from
KC!!!!!!!!!!
Speaking of, watching this guy dance was a high point of my evening. If Michael Jackson were still with us he’d probably sue this guy.
As many here have noted, you’re the absolute ultimate in bad-assery. We are all in awe of how totally you rock.
Hilarious. Sad, though, that academic frauds like Nat X. (a/k/a The Greatest Critical Thinker of Our Time) and Juanita Epstein can get tenure at even moderately reputable institutions.
Kendi even shucked-and-jived Twitter boss Jack Dorsey out of, what, a cool $100 million? He may not be much on scholarship or critical thinking, but he scores a perfect 800 on the new “Shakedown Shuffle” section of the culturally-unbiased SAT.
As for Juanita Epstein, she has tenure, so George Washington can’t just fire her. If GW were a private company, she would be an employee at will — in which case she could be terminated for at any time, for any reason — or if she were one of the small minority of employees under contract, she would be subject to some contractual provision permitting the company to fire her if she had materially misrepresented her qualifications for the job (e.g., lied about graduating from college), or if she said or did anything to embarrass her employer (the “Jess Bombalera” video might qualify). In the private sector, Juanita would be toast. Employers who make hiring mistakes tend to correct them as quickly as possible.
But GW is a university. As such, it can’t afford to admit it made a huge mistake in granting tenure to this woman, probably for no better reason than that they fell for her bogus claim to Boricua-ness. (Every other candidate denied tenure in the History Department the year she was granted tenure has a potential lawsuit.) Worse yet, as I pointed out in a previous thread, her mea culpa included several references to “mental health” issues. She’s clearly setting up a claim under the ADA (Americans With Disabilities Act), since that statute encompasses mental health difficulties as disabilities. She can point to that video as Exhibit A in her case that she has a couple of screws loose.
GW will have to write her a big check to buy out her tenure. Since tenure effectively represents lifetime job security for an academic, and Juanita appears to be around 40, it’s going to be a really big check. One commenter suggested about half a million. I think ten times that sum is more like it. Hey, they’ll just raise tuition again.
Who says there’s no money in academia?
The ladies were talking about THAT visit even years afterwards.
“He was, like, so Übermensch”
90 per cent of critical thinking is logic+fallacy identification.
OT, but isn’t there a feel that things are coming together at the Pompeo Department? Apart from Israel being on a roll, we have:
1) Russian activist poisoned (but not dead) with the COVID-19 of assassination aka “Novichok” (conveniently detected in Germany?); Nord Stream project in jeopardy.
2) START treaty will be abandoned under one pretext or another, it’s “The Day After … 40 years” again (which stock should I buy? Raytheon?)
3) INF treaty has been abandoned some time ago, Germany/Ukraine/Poland now free-fire zone for tac nukes.
4) Submarines equipped with W76-2 tactical warhead carried by SLBM to inspire increased international confidence that US won’t do a first-strike, no sir.
5) NATO increasingly probing Russian air defenses.
6) NATO doing artillery exercises near Russian border.
7) NATO increasingly performing missile strike drills against Russia.
Not sure what’s going on but maybe disinvest from European funds?
The local high school is distributing kendi’s “stamped” book to all us history students. Classes dont even use text.books anymore, but this is required reading.
Well, it’s the same thing as “having a conversation”, which today, both for leftists and women, in general means “shut up and listen”. 😉
OT: very disturbing article in NY Times on prisoners in Alabama being extorted with threat of violence. Where the victim is expected to use a cell phone to contact family members on the outside and have them send the payment.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/06/us/alabama-prisons-extortion-practices.html
In case more evidence were needed that Wokeness is now the Coin of the Realm, and can come at a dear price indeed for those not properly born unto it.
OT:
The guy with the look of the super-calorific JavaScript coder in the next cubicle (i.e. Matt Yglesias) is making true on his menace of releasing a book advocating for 1 billion USAians to be created by immigration and pro-child financial incentives, to … uh … be used as anti-China cannon fodder?!
Iraq War supporter wants a tripling of US population to ‘beat the Chinese.’ But does the world really need 1 BILLION Americans?
Laughing Bezos.jpg
He’s looking right at one, Ib. You.
Governors govern, presidents preside.
Some claim the Electoral College subtracts from the legitimacy of the Presidency. That’s a feature, not a bug!
That’s what I replied to Unz, meaning something he lacks in many ways: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking
Critical thinking
It is truly incredible the amount of psychic damage Trump has inflicted on these people.
Which makes it a refreshing joy to come across a female educator who can wield her critical thought like a scalpel. I’m rereading Judith Best’s 1970s classic The Case Against Direct Election of the President. It’s glorious how she eviscerates and filets this tired old idea, while, unlike say Ann Coulter or Michelle Malkin, still showing courtesy and respect to its mistaken proponents.
A lost art from a lost era.
Mr Kendi can barely think. He has a reptile brain.
I would have had more respect for the guy if he had given me a B-, i.e. low enough to show me that he was pissed, but not low enough to complain about.
I’m not sure I follow, you would have had more respect for him had he been so corrupt that he allowed his wounded pride to lower your grade illegitimately? You have less respect for him now that he acted with integrity?
“academic”
Ibram is more marketer than thinker. AntiRacism is his brand and there appears to be a huge market of cult kids and white women willing to be branded.
“the Right falls into this deification trap as much as the Left”
The Left and their snake-handling devotion to the AntiRacist creed wins this season’s prize for most histrionic religionists. A less powerful cult has developed around that great slice of sweating ham President Blumpft!. My message of They Both Suck has not found a receptive audience amongst my immediate family who are all Blumpft! fans.
Don’t listen to this person. I hate leftist academics too but the story sounds fake. Nobody has to take fluff graduate level courses outside of their field. I could see a fluff undergrad sociology or psychology course being required (if the course wasn’t taken during undergrad) as part of admission to physical therapy or some other type of healthcare grad program, but not a fluff tier “graduate course” out of field. Usually when you have to do ANY out of field courses in grad school they are undergrad leveling courses. It’s actually pretty difficult to take grad courses out of field at any serious institution, unless you are in some kind of humanities program and want to take a different kind of humanities course.
One ThreeTwo, sad thing about Baseball is that umps can’t be ejected from games. Big egos, skin thinner than a condom, ears larger than an elephant’s, vison as acute as a bat’s. Did I miss anything?
I’m thinking Professor Krug woke up depressed then looked at her nose in the mirror and decided she was a Black Woman. And why not? Black Women are officially the goddesses who walk among us and her face is not one that can launch a thousand ships.
My daughter had a class last year in “French Culture” that was quite obviously a cover for wokeism in all its forms. In class they watched a video, fortunately on YouTube where I could see it about implicit bias. What this has to do with French culture, I have no idea. Most of the assignments were like that. I assume many less involved parents were assuming that their kids were learning about Paris, French artists, French cuisine, Joan of Arc, etc. Nope.
It was presented as established fact and the results were presented in deliberately misleading ways. I had to spend basically a home lesson walking her through problems with the study, what the language of the study really meant, the fact that nobody had been able to reliably replicate the results, and show her studies with conflicting results.
They didn’t want to teach her “critical thinking,” they just wanted to indoctrinate her.
The anti-White “training” Trump is shutting down government funding for does not encourage critical thinking, especially asking questions, considering multiple perspectives, gathering, analyzing and interpreting evidence, proposing alternative explanations, etc. Just sit down, Whitey, shut up, listen and obey.
I don’t even think the intention of these struggle sessions is to educate or indoctrinate anyone – more likely the point is to identify troublesome Whites for later punishment – firing, demotion, cancellation of contracts, civil rights investigations, Twitter hate, etc.
Surely a professor can at least *demonstrate* critical thinking skills, which may help move people along on their development of the same.
There is a lot of truth in your comment, but I do think there are useful critical thinking meta skills which can be learned. The problem is, these tend to be exactly what most people talking about critical thinking (Ibram X. Kendi is a perfect example) don’t mean (or teach). Some examples.
1. Follow the references. Don’t take claims (especially controversial ones) at face value. People both lie and misrepresent what others say (e.g. see 220 comment in earlier riot thread).
2. Basic logic. Many arguments people make are crap logically. It is good to be able to recognize this. A subset of this is knowledge of common logical fallacies.
3. Basic understanding of statistics and risk. Gerd Gigerenzer’s work is excellent for learning about this at a non-trivial but not exceptionally difficult level. A useful technique he teaches is to turn probabilities into concrete numbers. Say if you are talking about a medical diagnostic and false/true negatives/positives, rather than reasoning abstractly just consider 1000 people (or a million if needed) and enumerate how many people fall into each category. Much better for intuition. And unraveling breathless claims like “risk increased 100%” (translation: from 1 in a million to 2 in a million, some good terms to remember here are relative and absolute risk).
4. Basic understanding of Bayesian reasoning. This can become complicated, but the basic idea is simple: additional information modifies earlier beliefs depending on the relative strength of each. Put another way, when confronted with conflicting evidence don’t ping pong between extreme beliefs–reality is likely to be somewhere in between. And again, pay attention to relative strength of the evidence.
5. Understanding of common foibles. Two which are very common are psychological projection and “who, whom?” style reasoning.
6. Turning the abstract into the concrete. This overlaps with the Gigerenzer point above, but is a more general point. When people start spouting high flying abstractions which seem to contradict reality it is good to make things concrete and see how their ideas look. One example of this is looking at past performance of predictions based on their ideas. Another example is focusing on assumptions. There is much shoddy reasoning disguised by abstraction out there and it can be hard to argue against in that domain.
This last overlaps so much with what you are saying I will note it separately.
A. Various useful heuristics. Some might call these stereotypes, but they go beyond that. One example is the legal principle “false in one thing, false in everything.” More pithily stated: don’t trust a liar.
Using these techniques it is extremely easy to eviscerate the media (or “intellectuals” like Ibram X. Kendi) in the Current Year. And iSteve does an excellent job of that.
Any other suggestions for this list?
P.S. I suspect your list of things learned would overlap significantly with what I have written above if you consider each carefully. It is just that I think it is easier to learn them intentionally rather than accidentally (and often through painful experience).
The problem is that many who talk loudest about critical thinking skills (Kendi being a perfect example) demonstrate the opposite. Which has to be extremely confusing for the people attempting to learn from them.
Agreed that professors *can* (see my earlier comment), but do most in reality?
P.S. I’d be interested in hearing your take on useful critical thinking skills to learn.
Is that Maeby Fünke?
I think the images of Biden kneeling are very effective. Those should be spread around and made more public. Simply post them without comment on social media with the pro-Biden hashtags.
“What Are Critical Thinking Skills?”
Those are the skills that tell you which groups can safely be criticized.
How would you define or describe “critical thinking (the real kind)”? What would be an example?
I do n0t know about this Kendi fellow, but…. I’ve seen, intermittently, perhaps 20% of this lit vid presentation & found it interesting.
Perhaps blacks, with or without indoctrination, aggressive or not- simply see everything as race question. Critical race theory & similar BS are just an expression of that uneasiness that won’t go away. Whenever their intellectuals are talking about works of fiction, it is always race, race, race….
Years ago, when I read works of fiction authored by various colored peoples (brown Babylonians/Mesopotamians, perhaps Persians, some Indians, yellow Japanese & Chinese, rainbow Hispanics,..) – the only thing I cared for was: is it good & what names belong to which characters. What was more interesting was how morality & manners differed (alright, the same goes for most older European literatures).
I think that blacks authentically see everything through a racial lens. This is not imposed on them; it is their natural state, just intensified by the media.
I’m going to have to give that some thought.
Or, GW might just keep her on. Smaller shared office, no raises, no big lump sum settlement, just raise tuition to cover the cost of Ms useless.
The Whites who were passed over have a case for discrimination legally. But realistically they don’t. EEOC, administrative relief has to rule before she can file a lawsuit. Attorneys don’t take on plaintiffs they know will lose.
A big university like GW has a whole crew of in house attorneys to defend its discrimination against Whites.
I’m familiar with affirmative action lawsuits. It’s absolutely amazing how contorted the judicial rulings are. St one point SFPD was forced to give a police exam that didn’t require reading and answering questions because giving written exams was discrimination. Kaiser vs Weber, candidates for steel mill foreman; discrimination to ask steel mill foremen to be able to read a memo, and make up work schedules and write a memo to the crew.
The most effective enemy of Whites isn’t the media, the colleges, feminazis. It’s the judiciary at every level.
I don’t know what ‘critical thinking’ (or ‘critical reasoning’ as I learned it back in the 80’s) has evolved into, or what it means to Kendri, but at one time it was something useful to teach students. It was at one time the basic elements of logic and rhetoric meant for non-philosophy majors.
The two most basic critical thinking skills:
1. Don’t let people interrupt you in the middle of a sentence, and don’t do this to others. Truth requires extended argument, a chain of argument. With constant interruptions argument quickly degenerates into a shouting match.
2. Name-calling. Learn to recognize when a claim (“You’re a racist!”) is just name-calling. Be dismissive of name-calling and move on to your own argument.
As simple and intellectually un-interesting as these two rules may be, following them will clear up 90% of the bullshit.
Thanks. IIRC you are a lawyer. I suspect law school is one of the better places to learn critical thinking skills (and how to subvert them ; ). I would be interested in hearing your more informed opinion on that as well.
The Fire Chief didn’t say whether the party at El Dorado Ranch Park was held at the High Camp or the Low Camp.
The irony is that in our Orwellian age, this means literally the opposite of what it says.
It is projection. Henry Rogers is an SJW. Everyone knows SJW’s always project.
I went back to U in the 80s, which was a lovely time overall.
But back then the answer to all Social Problems was always education.
Finally, I think I was in an upper division seminar, and the professor threw that out there, and I asked what the hell does that mean? If we’re “educated” we’ll all agree? It sounded like some threatened indoctrination.
And the prof just demurred..like, who knows. He offered no answer.
That was the beginning of critical thinking for me.
Meanwhile, in the UK:
Suspect arrested over deadly knife attack in Birmingham
https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/07/uk/birmingham-stabbing-suspect-arrest-gbr-intl/index.html
I’m gonna make a wild guess….the killer is a Black man….
Said the person who never learned any Critical Thinking skills.
Not this female educator.
Critical thinking is self-guided, self-disciplined thinking which attempts to reason at the highest level of quality in a fair-minded way. People who think critically consistently attempt to live rationally, reasonably, empathically. They are keenly aware of the inherently flawed nature of human thinking when left unchecked. They strive to diminish the power of their egocentric and sociocentric tendencies.
They use the intellectual tools that critical thinking offers – concepts and principles that enable them to analyze, assess, and improve thinking. They work diligently to develop the intellectual virtues of intellectual integrity, intellectual humility, intellectual civility, intellectual empathy, intellectual sense of justice and confidence in reason.
They realize that no matter how skilled they are as thinkers, they can always improve their reasoning abilities and they will at times fall prey to mistakes in reasoning, human irrationality, prejudices, biases, distortions, uncritically accepted social rules and taboos, self-interest, and vested interest. They strive to improve the world in whatever ways they can and contribute to a more rational, civilized society.
At the same time, they recognize the complexities often inherent in doing so. They avoid thinking simplistically about complicated issues and strive to appropriately consider the rights and needs of relevant others. They recognize the complexities in developing as thinkers, and commit themselves to life-long practice toward self-improvement.
They embody the Socratic principle: The unexamined life is not worth living , because they realize that many unexamined lives together result in an uncritical, unjust, dangerous world.
Linda Elder
Choke on that Robin DiAngelo.
Critical Race Theory is offered as “the truth” when not only is it not the truth, it isn’t even a theory.
I will never understand the male hostility here to women in general and female teachers in particular.
Lol. Of course you won’t, because you do not even try. For example:
I am genuinely sorry that female teachers didn’t tells you that you were amazing every day like (you wish) your mommy did.
Trolling with passive-aggressive strawman fallacies can not lead to understanding.
I always thought the term “critical thinking” sounded stupid. And I usually hear it employed by people who aren’t too bright.
The relevant term is “thinking”. It doesn’t need qualifiers.
She’s a study in Sick, Crazy, and Stupid.
But she certainly knew enough to wait until after this rant to have her lunch.
Showering the lens with a mush of potato latkes would have been a dead giveaway.
His statement illustrates one of the ways in which the left visualizes humanity as a collective rather than a collection of individuals. His perspective could be described as self-critical only in a collective sense: he’s a part of the (privileged) organ of the whole whose unique job is to be critical of the whole. And the large swaths of the whole that deserve criticism don’t include him, for some strange reason.
He probably believes (or has convinced himself) that to diminish that organ with critique directed specifically at it is to diminish the “critical thinking” component of society. That would lead him to his Trump and/or his followers aren’t critical thinkers insinuation, because they aren’t (in his mind) part of humanity’s critical thinking “organ,” (which isn’t only a class or collection of specific people, but an ideological or political perspective. The potential for corruption in all of this is pretty obvious to most, but not so much to the morally outraged.)
The other side of this is that Trump actually may prefer followers to critical thinkers, but exactly how does this make him unique among any politician or political leader (of any and every perspective) who ever lived? If “X.” was a critical thinker himself, this might’ve occurred to him.
This feature had me wondering, what does the “X” in his name stand for?
Xavier? Xerxes? Not usual names for a black man with an Islamic sounding first name.
Per Wikipedia: Ibram Xolani Kendi (né Henry Rogers; born August 13, 1982)
So you have to ponder the question of why Mr. Rogers here (Mr. Critical Thinker) changed his entire name to something else.
Further research into the Wiki bio says that his father, “Larry Rogers” was a tax accountant, mom a business analyst in the medical field. Both parents are now Methodist missionaries.
Also: The wedding ceremony ended with a naming ceremony of their new last name, “Kendi”, which means “the loved one” in the language of the Meru people of Kenya.[30] Kendi changed his middle name to Xolani, a Xhosa and Zulu word for “peace.”[8][6]Kendi is a vegan.[3
He and his wife were married in Jamaica in a ceremony officiated by his Christian parents. He and his spouse changed their names at the conclusion of the ceremony. So they culturally appropriated Islamic names from African tribes who had at least partly converted to Islam. Mr. Rogers didn’t.
His academic career comes from degrees at two black friendly (if not mostly) universities, Florida A&M and Temple. His initial teaching jobs were in “Africana Studies” about the blackety-black stuff but later seems to be embedded in the more conventional History departments. Also hustling race issues. Now with a widely touted but soon-to-be remaindered book about “anti racism.”
Race has been Mr. Rogers entire existence as an academic. No one is sure of what anti-racism is since without it, Mr. Rogers would be unemployed or working as an Assistant Pastor at some large inner city Methodist church. He has zero scientific background.
Maybe someone here has read his book. Pls let us know what the anti racist trick is about. I gather it requires non blacks to wear placards around their necks reading “I’m guilty of racism”, but that’s just my guess. Mr. Rogers will soon retired with a bundle of cash and lucrative speaking gigs to young white females, for whom self hatred is practically a second skin. Only in America!
Yeah. You loathe cuomo. 😉
I just posted this and then happened to see this interview with Jordan Peterson that was linked on Breitbart today:
“Jordan Peterson debate on the gender pay gap, campus protests and postmodernism”
The feminist interviewer constantly interrupts Peterson to prevent him from fully answering the questions she asks him.
If you stop her interruptions the debate between the two would become much more intelligent, and Peterson would much more easily win.
She also uses the strawman tactic of “putting words in his mouth” – restating and mis-characterizing his positions to fit her strawman. Peterson has to repeatedly say “I didn’t say that”, and “That’s not what I said”.
At some point you can’t win against cheap debate tactics if your opponent is determined and smart in their use and if the audience is stupid enough to be swayed by those tactics.
All of which is just to say that Reason, like baseball, is a game that can be played IF the participants are willing to make a good faith effort to play the game the right way.
When players committed to the game of baseball make that good faith effort we get enjoyable sports.
When people committed to the game of Reason make that good faith effort we get Truth and a successful civilization.
https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1302483460603305984
Get thee to a gymmery, go.
Lagie, you cared enough to comment and that is good. Take care.
Occam’s Razor (or Butterknife in iSteveLand).
What’s the distinction between critical thinking and simply thinking?
Critical thinking is excepted from “simply thinking” by its purpose of judging for acceptability.
Understanding the notion of ” per capita” for example.
A nuclear-armed empire of a billion Zendayas would only wind up painting the nails of Hongcouver Han kwaenz.
G-d, Jewish pundits are so stupid.
I don’t know if Ibram X knows anything about critical thinking – or any kind of thinking – but he’s as credentialed as one can be in blackety-blackety-black. From Wikipedia:
How is one qualified to assess White culture and determine White guilt, when all one has studied one’s entire career is black people?
I just finished “Dr.” Kendi’s book and I can definitely attest to a lack of critical thinking skills combined with a pseudo intellectual approach to support blackety blackety black black black. One of his prominent theses is that people should strive to enact policies which are anti-racist and not just demonstrate on the weekends or post messages supportive of BLM because of boredom or a desire to appear woke. Unfortunately, he fails to deliver a single example of just what such a policy should be in over 300 pages. He describes in detail his journey to anti-racism by attending an HBCU followed by graduate school in Afro American studies at Temple. As a notable aside, he relishes the time spent in heavily black (and mega ghettoed) North Philadelphia while at Temple. To his credit, he admits that there anti white racists and racist blacks. He tries to mimic the dialectic method by describing many activities as Racist, Assimilationist, and Anti-Racist. It is a little difficult to sort through all his BS, but he ultimately seems to support a black community which is very woke and not assimilated into the larger white european community in the US. He obviously does not support segregation except when it occurs because the blacks want it. Whitey, of course, still gets to foot the bill.
IOW, his parents have lived authentic lives and he and his wife live ersatz ones. Compare Kamala Harris’ parents with Kamala Harris. Compare Barack Obama’s grandparents and in-laws with BO & Mooch. These are object lessons.
DEMs are always sooooo brilliant.
Thanks for these.
“The best trait for a president is to not f things up.”
Which means to separate government from existence.
Government is how nature keeps mankind in the animal world. The origin of government is the animal world.
DeMarcus Quinn, in a rare, and possibly unique approach for a black man, immediately and without argument produced his license, registration and proof of insurance to the white officer who stopped him. In a further departure from what is expected of him by his “community,” he sat patiently in his car while the officer completed the investigation, then signed the citation as requested, again without challenging or interfering with the officer. Quinn then went on his way without further ado.
Thanks for the well thought out list.
In engineering, when coming up with a solution to some sort of problem, the essence of critical thinking is to try to find out every possible way that solution might not work or might cause a new problem.
To generalize, when thinking of some idea, to think critically of it is to consider its ramifications systematically. Having considered the ramifications, it is then possible to see if it contradicts some other accepted idea, or if it is itself logically inconsistent, or if it adds nothing useful to the discussion.
To illustrate, here’s some critical thinking in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGSzqqcl62c.
You too, Buffalo Joe.
Yes, I have more respect for people who stand up for themselves than for people who don’t. Why is that so difficult for you to understand? Also, you are assuming that I deserved an A in the first place. The class had no objective grading standards, so I wouldn’t have been able to argue that I even deserved an A.
True, some courses have a lot more bang for the buck than others. I would say the heavy hitters that everyone should take would be Statistics, Logic/philosophy, Rhetoric.
Also, the very idea of a ‘major’, that there is some topic that you gain a lot of highly specialized knowledge in, is useful in itself regardless of what the subject is. The process of becoming (somewhat) expert in a field reveals to the student new things about the nature of knowledge and expertise.
My point probably came off as anti-academic which it was not meant to be (in fact I was an academic for a large portion of my career.) Unfortunately there is a tendency in our society for people to conflate criticism of the academy in its present form and anti-intellectualism. Two different things.
Regardless, saying that one can teach “Critical Thinking” undermines the entire premise of the University. If ‘critical thinking’ can be taught, and mastery of critical thinking measured…then just do that! Very few graduates actually use the subject matter that they learn in college, they want ‘critical thinking skills’, employers want ‘critical thinking skills’, parents want ‘critical thinking skills’, that’s what everybody’s after, not a senior thesis on Chaucer. So if you can teach ‘critical thinking’, if that is possible…just do it! Print up a textbook called ‘critical thinking.’ Give a multiple choice exam. Teach the course, should take a semester, get people on their way, don’t waste people’s time with four years of fluff.
Universities are only necessary if this approach doesn’t work. The university approach can be summarized as:
Here, take a course on statistics to understand how statisticians see the world, how they solve problems, what traps and pitfalls they look for
Here, take a course on history, to see how what challenges people have dealt with in the past, how it worked out for them, etc.,
Here, take a course on philosophy…
At each step the teacher is only teaching you their little discipline but at the end of it all the whole is (supposed to be) greater than the sum of its parts.
For someone to just swoop in and say “I can teach critical thinking” is essentially equivalent to them saying “I can replace the entire university system with my book (14.99 on Amazon)…”
You just think Temple is black because of John Chaney and Bill Cosby. In reality it is one-eighth black.
Florida A&M is black, though.
You are objectively incorrect. I don’t attend Rutgers, but a glance at their graduate catalog shows that in order to get a doctorate in Special Education you must take courses outside of your field such as Social Contexts I: Sociocultural Foundations of Education.
LoL.
Exactly.
Common sense/heuristics: if your critical thinking is well-developed, don’t be afraid to rely on gut instinct; it can save you a lot of time (not spent sperging out, pouring too much time into something your gut told you was BS in the first place). When I was first getting into politics online, trying to figure out why 9/11 happened, I threw out a lot of sources and advocates because they said silly shit. This isn’t strictly rigorous; it’s ad hom fallacy, at least (just because Bob says one silly thing doesn’t mean everything he says is silly). But it was a huge time-saver, IMO.
Also, fallacies can be useful, as long as you know when to use them. It’s sort of like how in a legal drama the protagonists use methods outside of court that they know won’t fly in court, but lead them to evidence they can use in court. Also, fallacies are specious for a reason; a lot of people fall for them. Don’t be afraid to use them yourself, especially against people who routinely employ them, or otherwise fight dirty.
He gives stupid examples. My understanding is that it’s an old wives’ tale that most people in Columbus’ day believed the world is flat. And having done numerous group projects in college, I saw that it was always the case that one person did all the work, while everybody in the group shared the credit.
With that said, the abstract material would work as the opening to the first class in an intro to philosophy class. (I’m used to teaching at a very rudimentary level.)
In any event, the antiversity is run by racial socialists, for whom “critical thinking” means agreeing with them. Disagree with them, and they’ll give you lousy grades, and even put poison pen letters in your permanent file.
Well, studying black people and their history is only about four semesters worth of courses. Excluding the hairdressing ones. Even “Basketball shoes: theory and practice” is only a half semester long. You can only talk about peanut butter for so long.
So you have to move on to something else.
It’s when you probe the soundness of a line of reasoning, an idea, statement, etc. Women tend to think it’s very rude to question their pronouncements. Lady teachers especially think you’re being impertinent. In fact, they often loudly complain about boys challenging them in the classroom.
Here’s a prime example:
https://thedickinsonian.com/opinion/2019/02/07/should-white-boys-still-be-allowed-to-talk/
A demonstration of the relationship between belief in one’s polity/community, demoralization, and reproduction.
Public school teachers aren’t doing anything these days besides sitting on their asses and collecting checks for a few minutes of zoom time per day. I guess they’re way more precious than the grocery clerks, bus drivers, cops, and, well… just about everybody. To refer to them as “working class” is ludicrous.
BTW, my parents are retired teachers. My mom eventually got into administration at independent schools and had to protect boys from the teachers (mainly female) who couldn’t handle them. Rich people paid her good money for that — they have the means to protect their sons from hostile women.
Unfortunately, most middle and working class boys have no such advantage. Why should non-rich boys sympathize with teachers when their educational outcomes are so much worse than girls’ despite higher standardized test scores? Kind of looks like their teachers are giving them the shaft.
Honestly, given what’s going on right now, I find it amazing that teachers are looking for any sympathy at all. Public servants my ass.
When I was in high school, we had an English teacher who had been an English/math double-major in college. In addition to his regular state-mandated English courses, he offered three elective courses for seniors: (1) Shakespeare, (2) Writing Composition, (3) Logic.
The Shakespeare course was really excellent, but the Logic course came close to a stand-alone education. In addition to formal P/~P logic, it covered all manner of puzzles, thought experiments, argumentative fallacies, etc. Even jokes. There was a textbook in that class that was very good and that I wish were used by every high school student in America, although I can’t remember its title or find it on Amazon now.
If you were only going to teach people one thing, a wide-ranging Logic class like that would be it because it provides a basis for people to communicate without having to constantly re-explain basic reasoning as a starting point for an argument.
If you wanted to expand your education by another few classes, it would depend on your goal. Good citizenship? Logic + History. Economically productive? Logic + Chemistry with Lab.
But if you wanted people to think well, the one thing you would never include on a short list of subjects is something like “race/gender/area studies”, which necessitate grounding in such a wide range of disciplines (history, biology, economics, law…) in order to be able to judge claims that they cannot possibly act as a base for critical thinking skills.
A veritable encyclopedia of critical thinking methods (“skills” seems rather juvenile) is Don Norman’s classic “The Design of Everyday Things”. Carefully explains the history and distinction between good and bad design, viz precisely why one thing is good design and another is bad, in a wide variety of fields and instances. Really opens your eyes. Should be required reading in every freshman syllabus, STEM and non-STEM alike.
Personally, I’ve always thought that a good way to develop critical method is to seek out and analyze bad or mediocre examples of a thing, as well as good ones. If you can’t see what was brilliant about E.C. Segar’s “Popeye” comic strip, a quick reading of “Gasoline Alley” should clear that up. If you can’t see why the original “Little Orphan Annie” strip was brilliant, well, take a look at “Dondi”.
His presser today was encouraging, I’ve never seen him so openly angry, saying Obama and Biden committed treason. To me it seems a sign it’s about to blow. He’s been really patient, maybe doesn’t feel the necessity for such patience anymore.
1) you read an author carefully, you come to terms with him (understand how he uses a particular concepts, his assumptions, purported scope of work)
2) you follow his line of reasoning, to see whether it is correct or not, solid or not.
3) determine whether his conclusions follow from his arguments.
4) agree or not with conclusions
For activists and journalists and politicians, you try to understand what someone is saying, then decide whether you believe him or not. Then follow above process if need be. Propaganda should be analyzed from a who/whom point of view.
Bill, the nearby Williamsville school district has had nearly 200 teachers take a leave of absence or resign. The reason…the students can opt for on line or in class learning…ok, cool. The teachers say that teaching to a class while students watch on line is teaching two classes at once. Seriously, you can follow this BS on the Buffalo news web site.
Is this example supposed to be funny, or supposed to make your case? In the off chance it’s the latter that’s not exactly an out of field course. You implied you were in a serious grad program and had to take an out of field fluffy humanities type course, for some reason. And if this was “sarcasm”- ok great, then, but what was your grad program and what was the topic (not title) of the out of field course, then? No specifics necessary, but surely you can provide some more context if this story is true.
Yes, I have more respect for people who stand up for themselves than for people who don’t. Why is that so difficult for you to understand?
My difficulty is not in understanding that you respect people who stand up for themselves. I scruple only at your admiration for people who abuse their position to score personal points. Do you also have respect for the cop who doesn’t like your smart mouth so he breaks your taillight with his nightstick so he can issue you a summons? Your professor has no business taking petty revenge if he thinks your paper is worthy of an A by giving you a B even if he can get away with it. It was your good fortune to meet a rare lefty tool with integrity, why scorn it?
It’s going to take some thought on his part because critical thinking skills are not useful to most people. In fact, they are a downright handicap in most cases.
How many employers want someone who engages in critical thinking? Very few. Do officers want their soldiers to engage in critical thinking? Very funny. Teachers? Of course not.
To be fair, most people are not very good at it, so these employers, officers and teachers are probably acting rationally. But the world isn’t necessarily kind even to those who are skilled in that kind of thinking.
So I think educators should be honest and stop telling people that they are going to teach them “critical thinking.” They aren’t being honest about its value, they usually can’t do it very well themselves, and it isn’t something most people can learn any more than they can learn to throw a 95mph fastball.
I honestly think that over 95% of people are better off using intuition and common sense than they would be trying to make sense of things using reason, no matter how much training they have in school.
That isn’t to say that most people don’t “think,” but rather that this is a different kind of thinking that doesn’t come any more naturally to your average person than soaring does to chickens. Look at the comments. Some people here don’t even know what it means, and they surely are not stupid people.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll stay it again: uncritical race theory.
“Critical” means to seek the best evidence and apply the most honest reasoning, to be aware of one’s own biases and limitations, and to assume that your most cherished assumptions could be wrong.
Try being critical of critical theory and see what happens.
At least Tiny Duck can be humorous.
When two guys get together who both lack critical thinking skills.
The skateboard nerd is a student from the University of Colorado:
Check out the blog InvisibleSerfsCollar dot com
And the book about Colleges of Education: Credentialed To Destroy
Not an easy read, some of it too much to bear. Like getting an unwanted diagnosis from your doctor. But you need to know the straight plain truth.
OT..
Time to decolonize your front lawn by stop.cutting it.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/amp/canada/article-is-it-time-to-decolonize-your-lawn/?__twitter_impression=true
LOL
What are critical thinking skills?
My answer follows the line suggested by someone else here, that critical thinking is a combination of logic and rhetoric.
Start with language. Learn to recognize emotive expression, and identify the expressed attitude as approving or disapproving. Call that evaluation. Practice reducing emotive expression toward a neutral tone, and call that disclosed factual belief. Distinguish two types of factual belief: reports (or ‘descriptions”) and interpretations of reports. Distinguish two types of reports: 1st hand and 2nd hand.
For interpretations, learn to identify such common types as comparison/contrast, cause/effect, classification, and external signs of internal mental states.
Use a four-valued system for acceptability: true, presumably true, questionable with a burden of proof, and false. Keep true and false tidy by limiting them to tautologies of definition. The more interesting area in this scheme is the distinction between presumably true, and thus practically acceptable, and claims with an undischarged burden of proof, and thus unacceptable. For a practical working acceptability, look for vouching warrants from common knowledge and expert opinion.
For 1st hand reports (witness testimony) give a working presumption after examination against possible undercuts: from sense limitations, vested interest, conflict with general background knowledge, manifest emotional distress, dogmatic or obdurate bias.
Practice critical inspection of definitions, with the rules for definition by genus and difference, so learning to recognize claims of definition, as with persuasive definitions.
For propositions having a burden of proof, learn what constitutes proof in the form of a premiss, and discern the structure of argument. Learn to distinguish premisses from conclusions, and then to challenge the premiss and its relevance rather than to challenge the conclusion. In complex arguments, distinguish between independent premisses and interdependent premisses so as to identify a fault with precision and economy. Be able to trace and diagram the pattern of an argument. Learn the fallacies to detect disconnects in the pattern of an argument.
Learn some formal logic, if only the very useful hypotheticals, modus ponens and modus tollens, with their employ of sufficient and necessary conditions.
Be acquainted with basic scientific reasoning, and know the difference between scientific and non-scientific claims. Know the difference between direct and indirect testing. Understand what it means for a hypothesis to be confirmed or corroborated. Understand the similarity and the difference between arguments and explanations. Know the four general warrants favoring an hypothesis over its rivals.
In addition to these skills, which some classify as informal logic, learn to recognize media and political propaganda initiatives.
Oh yeah, practice charity. Shut up and listen to understand.
While I enjoyed this book, it is worth noting that he is considered to be a crank.
The general complaint that teachers have is that they have to reteach the class outside of their hours and answer emails from the students who aren’t in school. If it was just teaching the students who are physically there at the same time as the students who are at home, no one would complain.
It is an out-of-field course because:
1) It is taught in a different department by a different set of professors.
2) It doesn’t make one an expert in the field they nominally there to study. It is just there to provide jobs to the other department and increase the amount of credits required to 72.
Also, I keep my persona online private, so I won’t be providing further details of what program I am studying and the name of the course I was required to take. If you don’t like this, kindly feel free to
I show the police nominal respect in my personal interactions with them, but I don’t have respect for the police generally speaking. Therefore, I wouldn’t give a policeman a smart mouth in the first place. But, yes, if a cop is dealing with an asshole citizen, I don’t mind such extra-legal measures. With camera phones they have become passe, however.
Also, I’m far enough in grad school where my grades don’t really matter, so a B- instead of an A wouldn’t have affected me. A C+ or lower would have, because you only can get so many of those.
But the one sucks much, much more than the other, and you vote for the guy who doesn’t actually hate you. Your immediate family seem to have grasped this obvious fact, which still apparently escapes you.
Out of curiosity, why is he considered a crank? Does he have a weird personality, or odd habits, or strange personal views? I thought the book was rational and well-written, there were no outré asides or rambling digressions. I don’t doubt your claim, I’m just curious what it’s based on.
I’ve never seen a coherent, understandable explanation of whatever critical thinking skills are.
So these actual real facts are just assumptions
1 I had the entire rape caseload for my county.
2 According to the census, my county was 11 to 8 percent black when I worked for the county.
3 Every rapist in the county for 27 years was black. Every single one in in a county that was 11 to 8 percent black. Every single one. I honestly cannot remember a single one that wasn’t black. I did keep track so as to refute the To Kill a Mocking Bird liberals
Here’s a syllogism.
All convicted and pled guilty rapists in X county are black.
Shitaviois is a convicted rapist in X county
Therefore Shitavois is black.
Good comment. I was just going to click agree, but think this could use some more discussion.
I’m not sure about that in the Current Year. After ~16 years of indoctrination in woke studies I think many people’s intuition and common sense are worse (completely backwards) than their reasoning (which is just bad).
I agree that most people aren’t very good at this style of reasoning, but given the environment in the US right now, how else is one supposed to see through the BS we are immersed in from childhood on?
Scarlet, Teachers claim to be “Professionals.” The District provides them with an e-mail address. They are not compelled to answer e-mails outside of normal hours, but most “Professionals” do just that. And, again, unless you can show me the link, teachers are teaching students in class and on line students are linked in to that class. By the way, the School Board in Williamsville, each member endorsed by the teachers’ union, put the Superintendent on leave.
Bill P
You are talking about the “pattern recognizer” inside of the brain. It’s a big ol’ neural network, and like the puny versions Google runs it is constantly training on whatever is around.
Back in the 90’s common research neural nets used a few hundred exemplars and something like 50,000 training cycles to get the error term within tolerance. But now we can run millions of training cycles on hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of exemplars. Yet these so called AI”s are still not as good at spotting a target as the average squirrel hunter.
res
I’m not sure about that in the Current Year. After ~16 years of indoctrination in woke studies I think many people’s intuition and common sense are worse (completely backwards) than their reasoning (which is just bad).
Yes, this is unhappily correct. People who still submit their brains to TV are being constantly shown a whole different movie of exemplars, in an attempt to rewire their pattern recognition. A whole lot of mammalian “hind brain” is involved. This is the goal of subliminal advertising, which is still controversial IMO because it doesn’t work with everyone. But “everyone” doesn’t have to get on board a bandwagon for the campaign to work.
Again I’m urging thinking people to read Edmund Bernays two books from the 1920’s,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystallizing_Public_Opinion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_(book)
Bernays was part of the government team pushing Americans into war both in 1915 and 1940. His techniques are literally right in front of us every day.
We have a teacher amongst our shirt-tails. He’s produced a stupefying amount of verbiage on Fakebook about Covid in recent weeks and kvetch kvetch kvetch about the unreasonableness of the state government and the school district expecting him to teach in person without ever mentioned any of the three people in his vicinity who are actually at risk from this virus. (He is 42 years old). One of the three is active on Facebook. She’s hardly said a word about any Covid-related anxieties.
. Women tend to think it’s very rude to question their pronouncements.
In my family they do.
The “Culture of Critique” — which trains and promotes golems like Kendi — has always relied heavily on inversion and projection in their narratives.
Classes for which everyone meets at the same time are called synchronous. Those for which instruction is provided to be utilized at the timing convenient variously for the students is termed asynchronous.
The former is the traditional arrangement, perhaps now by Zoom. The latter offers recorded instruction to be downloaded, and does seem to need much additional support from email communications.
Those of us who loathe cuomo are now legions.
Critical thinking skills are what is lacking in the overwhelming majority of those who think Covid-1984 is a more serious public health threat than the flu.
Yes, but for the students who actually show up to school, their parents are going to expect live synchronous instruction with lots of one-on-one attention. Then, the teacher has to set up a mechanism to deliver instruction asynchronously on top of that for the students who refuse to come to school. I’m of the opinion that if a student refuses to come to school, they shouldn’t receive special accommodation, but most principals cave to parent demand.
>> Evangelical Christianity has entered the chat….
Art, teachers are losing support among taxpayers who pay their salaries. Buffalo teachers don’t want to actually go into a school building to teach on line. Too risky. But I will bet they shopped at Wegman’s and played a round or two of golf and picniced with their friends. Remember “It’s for the children.”
Ibram X. Kendi seems a tad devoid of self-awareness. Critical thinking skills? Kendi’s IQ is confirmed to be on the lower west side of the bell curve, by his own admission, when Media was building Kendi undeservedly into a national celebrity authority on all things “racial justice” months before the Floyd riots and subsequent ongoing “racial reckoning”.
“Anti-Racist” activists demand an end to school grading—and especially demand total abolition of all standardized testing in America, where critical thinking skills, logic, mathematics, verbal IQ skills are tested (SAT verbal section called “Critical Reading”). Standardized tests measure general intelligence along with broader intellectual capacity and academic motivation, answers are right or wrong, scoring is colorblind, unable to be gamed or spun by failing government public school teachers teaching Critical Race Theory and 1619 as “Social Studies” class instead of history. SAT has already been dumbed down especially score inflation with 2016 new revision, but still an indirect measure of intelligence as measured by IQ tests…
As Kendi is everywhere now, I’ll repeat: In a glowing Washington Post portrait, Ibram X. Kendi brags of scoring 1000 on SAT exam for college admissions and earning Grade Point Average below 3.0 (won’t specify how much lower his GPA was—just less than 3.0). Yet thanks to systemic Black Privilege and Affirmative Action Diversity Quotas in modern USA (exactly the kind of actively anti-White discriminatory policies Kendi considers necessary “Anti-Racism”—he wants enforced by a federal govt “Department of Anti-Racism”!)…Congrats to Kendi for success as a professional “Black intellectual” despite his obvious personal intellectual handicaps.
«Ibram X. Kendi has daring, novel ideas … – Washington Post»
https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2019/10/14/anti-racist-revelations-ibram-x-kendi/?arc404=true
Oct 14, 2019
you both need to just give it up. This country is filled with brainwashed, “Progressive” idiots. Idiots that do not realize they are going straight to the slaughterhouses…along with their kids. Communism has invaded all of our institutions, and, I see no light. There is no light.
There is a Badenian saying about this topic – pretty popular in workplaces throughout our little country, and it goes: Be bright- act as if being dumb.
What lots of regulars get and what the rather brainy type often times does not is: Just how discomforting it is in everyday routines to have people around who always find reasons which (then) are really disturbing – which means: In the way, if work needs to be done.
True.
What you are saying is that being knowledgeable and being critical are both worthwhile, but should rather be co-developed. I agree. Therefore being (acting, thinking) critical should be understood as a sibling, so to speak of being (acting/thinking) reasonable (educated, sober, rational, tactful).
In other words: Being critical and being reasonable need a sound background to bloom and be fruitful (a culture which bears and enables them).
Interesting aspect. – Reminds me of the passages in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, in which Pirsig looks at – cabin doors and fences and good vs. bad wrenches etc.
Interesting and important list, res!
No. 5 – Projection is one of the Freuds (father and daughter) defense mechanisms. There are others too which are worth looking at. Basically the whole list of them is insightful. The strongest being neglection, maybe because it is so deeply rooted in our brains (and not for bad reasons altogether). This is a big one.
Freud – in Civilization and its Discontents – made this important point too (think of Steve Sailer now) – that (patient and honest) repetition is a sharp weapon to make way for the truth – may I add: In the jungle out there, which – – – -modern society still is – in a way.
Except for that: Yerkes/Dodsons finding that you need a certain amount of bodily tension to have a fruitful discussion is as important as their finding, that too much tension ruins it too.
Try to learn to embrace heterodoxy – it is the medium of truth.
Understand that there is no intellectual controversy without a bit of drama and without people getting mutually on their nerves. Put it differently: If you’re not willing to leave your comfort zone at times, forget about taking part in debates that matter.
A linguistic truth, that is discussed in How to do Thing with Words by George Lakoff and which has resonated with some of the arguments brought forward here, but I still want to point it out separately: It is much harder to understand the extreme versions of meanings than it is to understand the regular ones. Especially true for ethical debates. – It’s clear that you don’t kill a child, but it is something else to kill a freshly fertilized egg. – There are lots and lots of other cases which work the same way. In my mind, it all boils down to this: Understand that there is a very useful difference between the saint and the minister (etc.). On an abstract level: Understand that all of ethics is gradual – and that our language (remember Lakoff…) reflects that. So – now have a look at Ludwig Wittgenstein, who says basically: Beware of generalizations, not least in aesthetical and ethical (rule-following) contexts. The gradual nature of ethics indicates that they are no formal system. Ethics has much more to do with muddling through than many people would like to accept. – That’s why forgiveness and repenting are so important – and heterodoxy is so precious.