The United States of Stupid. I mean, really, REALLY stupid ...

This loving marriage of violence and stupidity - that the United States of Stupid is also the United States of Atrocity, and the United States of Atrocity is also the United States of Stupid - is something that Henry Giroux really excels at uncovering and exposing to the light of critical analysis. In the United States of Stupid, idiocy is a badge of honour (see Beverly Bandler). Americans live in a culture in which thinking is seen as an act of stupidity. And thoughtlessness provides the foundation for mass violence. It makes routine the enormous misery that exists in this barbarous society. 

Truly. The most American thing today is an act of senseless violence. I apologize, babblers. Only one thread is truly necessary, once you understand the connection between the US of Stupid and the US of Violence.

But let's go with it anyway.

Henry Giroux wrote:

The emergence of Donald Trump, and the deeply corrupt Republican and Democratic political parties on the current American political scene exemplify how ignorance breeds corruption and endears a large number of people to falsehoods, venality, and carnival barking....

The rise of thoughtlessness and the inability to think along with the demonization of vulnerable others constitute a political epidemic and do not augur well for democracy. Americans live in a historical moment that annihilates thought. A culture of cruelty and a survival-of-the-fittest ethos in the United States is the new norm and one consequence is that democracy is on the verge of disappearing or has already disappeared!

But Giroux also asks ...

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Where are the agents of democracy and the public spaces that offer hope in such dark times? What role will progressives play at a time when the very ability of the public’s ability to translate private troubles into broader systemic issues is disappearing? How might politics itself be rethought ...

He ask how can Americans reclaims a genuinely democratic imagination and the civic courage needed?

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The key is to expand that insight so as to make education central to politics itself. That is a lesson we can learn from both Arendt and Hofstadter.

Great teachers are needed. As always.

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"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people". [H L Mencken 1880-1956]

Level III Stupid from the USA. Here's your Friday laugh.

Dmitri Orlov wrote:

hen the US or its proxies attack an enclave of Russian citizens outside of Russia's borders, here are the types of responses that we have been able to observe so far:

1. The example of Georgia. During the Summer Olympics in Beijing (a traditional time of peace), the Georgian military, armed and trained by the US and Israel, invaded South Ossetia. This region was part of Georgia in name only, being mostly inhabited by Russian speakers and passport-holders. Georgian troops started shelling its capital, Tskhinval, killing some Russian peacekeeping troops stationed in the region and causing civilian casualties. In response, Russian troops rolled into Georgia, within hours completely eliminating Georgia’s war-making capability. They announced that South Ossetia was de facto no longer part of Georgia, throwing in Abkhazia (another disputed Russian enclave) for good measure, and withdrew. Georgia’s warmongering president Saakashvili was pronounced a “political corpse” and left to molder in place. Eventually he was forced to flee Georgia, where he has been declared a fugitive from justice. The US State Department recently gave him a new job, as Governor of Odessa in the Ukraine. Recently, Russian-Georgian relations have been on the mend.

2. The example of Crimea. During the Winter Olympics in Sochi, in Russia (a traditional time of peace) there occurred an illegal, violent overthrow of the elected, constitutional government of the Ukraine, followed by the installation of a US-picked puppet administration. In response, the overwhelmingly Russian population of the autonomous region of Crimea held a referendum. Some 95% of them voted to secede from the Ukraine and to once again become part of Russia, which they had been for centuries and until very recently. The Russians then used their troops already stationed in the region under an international agreement to make sure that the results of the referendum were duly enacted. Not a single shot was fired during this perfectly peaceful exercise in direct democracy.

3. The example of Crimea again. During the Summer Olympics in Rio (a traditional time of peace) a number of Ukrainian operatives stormed the Crimean border and were swiftly apprehended by Russia's Federal Security Service, together with a cache of weapons and explosives. A number of them were killed in the process, along with two Russians. The survivors immediately confessed to planning to organize terrorist attacks at the ferry terminal that links Crimea with the Russian mainland and a railway station. The ringleader of the group confessed to being promised the princely sum of $140 for carrying out these attacks. All of them are very much looking forward to a warm, dry bunk and three square meals of day, care of the Russian government, which must seem like a slice of heaven compared to the violence, chaos, destitution and desolation that characterizes life in present-day Ukraine. In response, the government in Kiev protested against “Russian provocation,” and put its troops on alert to prepare against “Russian invasion.” Perhaps the next shipment of US aid to the Ukraine should include a supply of chlorpromazine or some other high-potency antipsychotic medication.

Note the constant refrain of “during the Olympics.” This is not a coincidence but is indicative of a certain American modus operandi. Yes, waging war during a traditional time of peace is both cynical and stupid. But the American motto seems to be “If we try something repeatedly and it still doesn't work, then we just aren’t trying hard enough.” In the minds of those who plan these events, the reason they never work right can’t possibly have anything to do with it being stupid. This is known as “Level III Stupid”: stupidity so profound that it is unable to comprehend its own stupidity.

You're welcome.

Not a "Thousand Point of Light" but ... a Thousand Balls of Flame.

Yeah, I noticed that section after I posted the relevant piece. It's a pretty typical Russian response to the endless LGBTQ culture wars. And it's clearly written in the spirit of taking the mickey out of the Americans.

I suppose that's one way to ignore the rest of this quite brilliant article.... that deals with such trivial matters as global war and peace.  Good luck with that.

ffs, votd, this is a "taking the mickey" thread anyway. I insist on my right to laugh at the Empire. Sorry if I'm too serious at times.

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Great writers and intellectuals give us a vocabulary that allows us to make sense of reality. They excavate depths that we, without their help, are unable to fathom. We are captive to systems of power until we can name the dominant myths and the intricate systems of coercion and control that extinguish our freedom.

We are a society awash in skillfully manufactured lies. Solitude that makes thought possible—a removal from the electronic cacophony that besieges us—is harder and harder to find. We have severed ourselves from a print-based culture. We are unable to grapple with the nuances and complexity of ideas. We have traded ideas for fabricated clichés. We speak in the hollow language we are given by our corporate masters. Reality, presented to us as image, is unexamined and therefore false. We are culturally illiterate. And because of our cultural illiteracy we are easily manipulated and controlled.

But not everyone belongs to the United States of Stupid. Hedges notes about the self-educated poor, especially those that populate the endless and barbarous prisons in the USA. And, while he devotes some of his own time [and has done so for a long time] to assisting in this education and self-education, he also notes the failure of wider institutions to do so ...

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The abject failure to provide an education to the poor, to nurture this potential and these intellectuals—and by this I do not mean sitting on a scholarship committee but going to teach in the internal colonies and the prisons where our poor are trapped—is one of the most damning marks on academia.

A good read. For those who still do so.

Chris Hedges: The Intellectuals We Abandon

Protocols of Moron

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What do you get when you combine an atomized, alienated public that possesses a deep and justifiable mistrust in institutions with a floundering press-political-entertainment complex that’s desperate to hold our nanoscopic attention spans? You get a nation of half-assed shamuses who’ve traded genuine political argument for paranoid fantasies about alien masterminds, lizard overlords, and government airplanes dispersing mind-control mist over population centers, not to mention presidential candidates who think and talk just like conspiracy theorists.

Summary: "In the workplace, the school, City Hall, the county jail, the local hospital, the corner grocery store—in basically every institution, public and private, at every scale—Americans are constantly lied to, exploited, gaslighted, and abused.

Is it any wonder they see conspiracies everywhere? Their outrage is justified, their instincts correct. They are wanting only for better detectives, reliable narrators, and some measure of justice."

from another thread ...

alan smithee wrote:

America has long since lost its mind. Ever since the 1980's when they were all conned into believing 'trickle down' economics.

I have a nephew and niece that are American. I don't want to insult them. But Americans are dumb. They are uninformed and blissfully ignorant. They are selfish,incompassionate and unable to empathize with anything or anyone.

Hence,Trump is America's candidate. They can relate to his ignorance and they celebrate it.

Quite honestly,I think the West Coast,especially California,should seperate. As a matter of fact,California's GDP is among the highest in the world. They could easily go it alone.

permalink: Why Trump?

You've got to admit that when babblers, focussed on a completely different topic, substantiate the thesis here, in flying colours I might add, it does led credibility to the argument.

Of course, for those who thinks the sun shines out of the ass of the US government, there are differing views.

That's where you come in Magoo. Because to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

And boy, are you a reaction(ary).

That's a sailor's reference you land-lubber. Don't you know when you've been run aground? Check your keel.

You're sinking and you don't even know it. lol.

Nice po mo retreat. Because the little silos of "me" are just "so" more important than a society, as a whole, circling the drain.

Here's some reading for babblers who don't want to change the world and like the USA just as it is.

Henry Giroux wrote:

What happens to a society when thinking is eviscerated and is disdained in favor of raw emotion? [1] What happens when political discourse functions as a bunker rather than a bridge? What happens when the spheres of morality and spirituality give way to the naked instrumentalism of a savage market rationality? What happens when time becomes a burden for most people and surviving becomes more crucial than trying to lead a life with dignity? What happens when domestic terrorism, disposability, and social death become the new signposts and defining features of a society? What happens to a social order ruled by an “economics of contempt” that blames the poor for their condition and wallows in a culture of shaming?[2] What happens when loneliness and isolation become the preferred modes of sociality? What happens to a polity when it retreats into private silos and is no longer able to connect personal suffering with larger social issues? What happens to thinking when a society is addicted to speed and over-stimulation? What happens to a country when the presiding principles of a society are violence and ignorance? What happens is that democracy withers not just as an ideal but also as a reality, and individual and social agency become weaponized as part of the larger spectacle and matrix of violence?

The United States of Violence is, of course, also the United States of Stupid. It is the United States of Daesh in the Middle East. It is the United States of the Drone President in Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Niger. It is the United States of the circus that is called an "election". But the election is just as fake as the democracy. What's not fake is the unending bath of hate and death that this society wallows in.

It can and must come to an end. Giroux's rich language exposes the festering boil that is US society. Read it and imagine a world that is different.

Thinking Dangerously in the Age of Normalized Ignorance