Actually, prior to mandatory public schooling, America was held in awe by the rest of the world because it had one of the most educated populations known. I urge you to read The Underground History of American Education if you would. It will be quite a revelation.

The public schooling system was inspired by the Hindu caste system in which about 1-2% could rule the rest with no fear of revolts, and the system used by Prussia that regimented their society and gained them power. This was done by old-money families and other monied interests who had a dreadful fear of American entrepreneurial ethic in which over 90% of people owned their own business and had their own independent livelihood. That doesn't jive with factory production and corporate systems at all. The founders of public education were quite open about this in the late 1800s when they gained ground. They didn't hide it; they were proud of their reasons and motivations.

To the ones pulling the strings, such an incredibly short memory and inability to draw contrasts is not a bug, it's a strongly encouraged feature.

Most people are passive mentally and believe thinking to be a burden that should be avoided whenever possible. Therefore, if the TV news doesn't specifically highlight something in a nice ADD-friendly 10-second sound bite, it won't be widely known. If this sounds incredible or alien to you, it's because the Slashdot crowd doesn't represent mainstream America (though the way people keep arguing from emotion, that's changing).

There is no one in power who wants a well-informed, smart, savvy, thinking population that has a long memory, is familiar with dialectic and able to easily perform critical thinking. No one running the show wants that at all. It's no surprise that within the little feudal system of a corporation that no one is forced to do business with, this goes unnoticed. It goes unnoticed with huge political changes that affect daily life.

What that puerile bitch Snookie is up to (and like-minded garbage) is sadly much more important to them.

The minority who try their best to be aware don't deserve to reap what the majority have sown.

It's a shame that Congress doesn't grow a pair of balls and press criminal charges against the liars.

It's standard fare in politics sadly. If you want immigration laws (even just existing ones on the books) to be enforced, you're racist against Mexicans (an accusation made by people who have never reviewed Mexico's much stricter immigration laws!). If you criticize Israel, you're an anti-Semite. If you're against President Obama's politics or Eric Holder's actions, you're racist against black people. Etc etc. I wonder what such people would say if we ever developed a real problem with millions of white Canadians illegally entering the country, but I digress.

It's a cheap way to shut down all reasonable discussion and put the other person immediately on the defensive, trying to disprove a negative. It comes from people who don't want reason and logic to enter into the discussion because these are threats to their position, a position based on self-interest and not based on what makes good policy or which view is closest to the truth.

A side-effect I consider intentional is that the obsession with group identity is a direct assault on the concept of individuality. Real individuality is a strong threat to the main method of politics today, which is to divide people into multiple groups and gain power by promising to protect each from the others.

Some of us who were born there do love and cherish our liberty and recognize the many ways in which it is being trampled with impunity. The problem is, we are drowned out by so many who think that professional sports, pop music, consumerism, television, and personal dramas are much higher priority. It's a problem of values and a problem of dehumanization as explained by Erich Fromm.

You absolutely must have a broken people with malleable values and loyalties before you can have a police state. A strong, intact, whole people who are relatively self-sufficient and value ideals far beyond their own convenience cannot be trampled in this manner.

You remind me of so many I have encountered before, those who have the skill to usually win arguments despite being dead-wrong. These are not people who ever admit they were mistaken and you never hear that old view from them again. They are true believers. I have acquired enough humility and experience to recognize that nothing I say matters much to such a person, for they have a faith in their beliefs that cannot be shaken by reason.

You made this a personal matter the moment you implied there were a "select few' and that I regarded myself as among such an elite. It so happens that those who see clearly often are not those with popular positions, but that is not my doing. Oh how I wish that were not so, but I accept that it is and has been for a long time.

It's a roundabout way of saying that the number who agree with a thing and whether this is generally apprecaited is relevant to the truth of that thing, which is simply and plainly false. I am sorry the clarity of this passed by you unnoticed, for I did try to bring this to your attention, but the feelings and motivations of such a position are not difficult to understand. It's comfortable and cushy to accuse someone of being some kind of elitist while never explaining where their reason is flawed, and so very difficult to refute because it amounts to proving a negative.

You're a rarity because I can't say for certain whether you just love being right, or whether you really understand what you're doing. But I don't doubt your sincerity for a moment. And if you were wondering, pride has no proper place in such matters, which was exactly my point with my previous post.

The Founding Fathers were adamantly against this sort of thing and were willing to risk everything to try and create a nation that stood for something better. Their real problem is that they had to deal with the social realities of their day that were not within their power to overturn, such as the institution of slavery and the notions of class and wealth. Yet within those suffocating boundaries they instituted something more that we have failed to realize.

One of their fears about having a Bill of Rights at all, was that the mere existence of such a document may foster the notion that human rights were limited to only those which were enumerated. As it stands today, the Bill of Rights is merely a yardstick by which we measure how far our failures have progressed.

I sincerely believe that future generations will consider us a Dark Age greater than any medieval period, for never has the average person been so petty, emotionally and spiritually immature, ill-informed in the face of an Information Age, navie, and unwilling to stand up for what was right. The medieval serf at least had the excuse of being at the mercy of the information brokers and gatekeepers of their time. Our ignorant, on the other hand, can point only to their own laziness and failure of priorities.

The hell of a thing is, even if he truly intended to be better (which I doubt, for he was groomed from his obscure start), it would not matter. He's a mere puppet or a cog in a vast machine far beyond his control despite his high office.

You are one of the minority who can remember what Jim Marrs calls "The old republic". That was before the banker takeover of the nation was approaching its final stages, before the technology for total surveillance was widespread and readily available, before there were so many American citizens who would cooperate with and work for the police-state apparatus in the name of security because they are governed by fear or greed or lust for power instead of reason and what was once called decency.

The real problem is, we now have an entire generation that has never known the difference. We have too many people who are products of their environment, knowing only what they were taught, who lack the initiative to really look into the history and understand the changes that have occurred. To them, all of this is necessary and normal. It's a problem of inertia.

Chicago has a long history of corrupt politics, as do several other major cities. To focus on the group identity is to distract attention away from the power plays that are being made. That is simply a strategic error. That corruption is becoming more inclusive and diverse along with better and more worthy enterprises is hardly relevant to the state of the republic today. It really does not matter who is at the helm, under what holy name they crusade, with which justification they advance towards fascism. These matters are academic and within the realm of mere trivia.

What really matters is how and why the average person does not wake up and realize that the America they were taught to believe in does not exist, and how their own philosophical, intellectual, moral, and character flaws prevented them from seeing this at the very beginning. There is indeed something wrong with a person who argues passionately about minutia like sports and television shows while their nation is decaying. None of that could be an accident.

He's not a product of an entirely faceless process. He's an individual who has chosen his allegiances, as do all individuals. That must not be disregarded when measuring what sort of man he is.

The Left Wing and the Right Wing are two body parts of the same Beast. It's a monument to human stupidity that so few seem to truly comprehend that. The purpose of a two-party system is to play "good cop, bad cop" and to periodically switch roles for maximum mindfuck effect. The Founding Fathers foresaw what a two-party system would become because they understood and chose not to delude themselves about a few basic principles of reality. The understanding component is easy and painless compared to the decision to accept no delusion, however comfortable and reassuring it may be.

If by "select few" you mean anyone who reviews the facts of the matter, reads the studies, and looks at the government's own numbers, then yes.

I note you did not present evidence or reasoning to formulate a disagreement with me. You demonstrate the particular form of irrationality most rampant in this nation with your failed attempt at a cheap shot. Religious traditions call it "pride" but fail to really provide a definition, sadly. It's this need to assert a phony sense of superiority by showing empty contempt for someone else who has done nothing wrong to you, or otherwise putting that person down, since you already judged that person as inferior to you.

It's just the kind of thing that will prevent you from being self-correcting, from recognizing and trying to constructively remedy your own faults as they occur. The more extreme form is the "perpetual victim", whose problems are always caused by others because nothing is ever his or her fault. The small-minded view things in terms of fault and blame and how to redirect those against someone else. People with even a little wisdom view things in terms of cause and effect and realize that if a problem is your own fault, that's good, because that means you can change it by making a better choice.

You're better than the petty, small-minded behavior you're displaying here.

Nothing "won" that way ever turns out well in the end. The practice is one reason the US has so many batshit insane laws like the War on Some Drugs that don't stand up to analysis, and continues to keep these laws even after this is well known.

The lack of rationality will have been the root cause of our downfall.

If you're looking for a fan of Microsoft to defend the merits of their software, you're barkin' up the wrong tree, friend. I've been a Linux user since around 1996 or so and have no interest in Microsoft products.

I simply found it amusing the way that guy worded his sentence, saying that something was free ... after you pay. That's all. I have no idea how it can be so difficult to appreciate (or dislike) a simple jest.