"Thuglicans" and the Tea "Federation Party"

Brilliant. This perfectly captures my personal experience with many American family and friends. If our side (usually Republican since I'm from Texas) said it, it must be true!I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that I have some Texan friends who don't trust any of these guys - one of them admitted to me that he reads BBC world news instead. Probably not a completely objective source either, but undoubtedly far less biased than good 'ol Fox Spews.

I very much prefer the BBC as well. No news source is perfect, but the BBC provides an outside perspective, while domestic news sources are hopelessly inside the box. That doesn't mean I ignore the others, of course...I find it interesting to look at the way the same story is portrayed by different outlets. When you compare them, not only with each other, but with the outside perspective of the BBC or other foreign media, biases tend to stand out much more starkly.Fox, of course, I have zero confidence in. Worse, in fact - I automatically consider anything I hear from Fox to be suspicious until I confirm it elsewhere. Even aside from their commentators, Fox pulls the "D/R" tag switching far too often to be coincidence (you'll note in initial broadcasts of scandals, when a Republican is involved the tag at the bottom of the screen very often has them listed as "D" for Democrat - happened with Larry Craig and a few others that I can remember off the top of my head).Would it truly be so damaging to free speech if a law were drafted that required any program or publication that advertised itself as reporting or commenting on the real-world news of the day be required to make true statements, and let proven, intentional falsehoods be punishable?

i like NPR a lot. of course, they do regularly run BBC news, so...in any case, they don't seem to suffer from the "inside the box" factor nearly as much as other news sources, and frequently ask the very hard questions, regardless of political side.of course, when something big happens, they tend to cover practically nothing else. for instance, NPR is now the "libya 24/7" radio network.

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אָרַח

And there you have in a nutshell (wonder where that expression came from?* gotta go look that up) what's wrong with the news media today. There is no accountability. Beck and Limbaugh will continue to spew their nonsense, and I'm sure there are left-leaning sources that are spewing nonsense as well, and they can continue to do so with almost universal impunity. As a friend of mine said, "I wish there was something we could put in the water to make people smarter and more sceptical".*

Yes, that would be damaging to free speech. For it would end up with the law courts enforcing an official truth. It could result in a de facto theocracy.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

Leave the water alone, there's something we can put in our SCHOOLS to make people smarter and more skeptical. We should start logic and critical thinking in 5th grade, rather than waiting until high school (at the earliest) or college (more likely) before people are even exposed to this type of reasoning.Of course, then we'd have 5th graders questioning mommy and daddy when they make claims without reasoning, and we can't have THAT!

Very good point. How young is TOO young to teach skepticism/scepticism? (oh screw it I'm in Britain now I'll use their spellings - i.e. scepticism... which just doesn't look right lol)Someone (probably numerous people) have said "We should teach our children how to think, not what to think." And yet we don't. Primary school tends to be rote learning, or at least it was when I was there.The few times that I actually enjoyed primary school was when I had a "eureka" moment - for example when my mathematics teacher convinced me that multiplication was easy if I just imagined it as stacks of things. 5 x 10 = five stacks with 10 things in each stack.But your post is probably a good intimation of why so many people latch onto an ideology such as that expressed by Beck or Limbaugh and then just roll with it. Perhaps their minds are wired to think that if something is said enough times, it must be right, and it should be logged in the 'ol noggin as a fact.By the same token, the last sentence of your comment "then we'd have 5th graders questioning mommy and daddy when they make claims without reasoning, and we can't have THAT!" could be applied to the masses watching Fox today. Perhaps they are satisfied to be spoon fed their knowledge from a single, biased source, rather than having to get off their butts and fact-check.

Every time is see an "sc" I tend to envision it sounding like an elonggated "s" sound or an "sh" sound, despite knowing that's not the case. When I invent words for my fiction, I almost never use the letter "c" at all. One problem we run into, is that when someone does exactly that, teaching kids how to think rather than what, you end up with a parent who complains about their kids asking too many questions...or asking questions that make the parent uncomfortable. (As an aside, that's why we have parents who wants schools to handle all sex-ed teaching, but also don't want kids to learn anything they don't agree with.) Exactly, it's the same for me. Now, when kids are really young, there are some things that need to be learned by rote, such as English, which has exceptions built right into the rules, or things that are too complicated to get into in 1st grade, but teachers should always encourage kids to ask about "why" something works, and my parents' favorite line of "because I said so" should never cut it. Between parents and teachers/curiculums that don't encourage (and in some cases even discourage) asking "why," the fallacy of arguments from authority get ingrained in many kids' heads as true, that they never even stop to think that somone on TV might be lying to them...unless of course it's the "other" side who get on TV just to lie because the "truth tellers" are making people "think." In their defense, fact-checking is quite difficult. When the largest source of information is the internet, which also facilitiates people posting anything that they want, you can find 50 sites backing up the latest screed on Fox. And only about 20 of them are owned by Murdoch.What it comes down to, is that when someone says something you agree with, you see no reason to fact check, because it conforms to what you already "knew" to be true. When that same person says something that you hadn't heard, but it fits in with what you "knew" you're more likely to believe that, and their authority climbs until it reaches a point that they're given the status of prophets or martyrs, depending on the specific case.The beauty of setting yourself up as a vanguard against "evil" is that you can keep people afraid to turn you off, lest you say something important while they're gone, and when what you're railing about doesn't happen, you can say it's because of the good, hard-working, honest viewrs who were able to stop it from happening...or somesuch nonsense.

Beck's time at the blackboard may be drawing to a close!Glenn Beck's future at Fox News under threat, according to NYT | Glenn Beck | The Guardian ... and the original NYT article...Fox and Glenn Beck Stare Into a Dark Future - The New York TimesI like the closing statement of the UK Guardian article "In any case, if Fox News does dump Glenn Beck, then look forward to Beck outlining the mother of all conspiracy theories. He's going to need a bigger blackboard." - Richard Adams, guardian.co.uk

OTOH im hearing that fox is considering giving Alex Jones his own show on Fox News.Glenn Beck seems rational compared to Alex Jones.

Son writes:

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Funnily enough, the Tea party, when it started (back in early 2009), was about prosecuting banks essantially as well as politicians involved with them.

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No, the Tea Party, when it started, was a fully-funded astroturf group created by the folks at Fox as an excuse to complain about Obama and the various stimulus bills as if it were some sort of "American public" statement.

It was not just theory, it was the law, affirmed by the US Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson. Plessy was considered to be Black because he had one bi-racial grandparent.These days we let people declare their own race. I don't understand why anyone would object to the president identifying himself as Black or to Tiger Wood's taking a different take for himself.

Yes, it was. But that was back whenever.Right now, the idea is still deeply ingrained in the thinking of many people.The younger generation seems to be shaking itself free from this residue of a racist past. But it might take another 50 years before its influence becomes small enough that we can ignore it.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

Sounds like something I've repeatedly harped about before. (Although I would see no reason not to start teaching critical thinking skills at age 2.)And while we're at it . . . for the love of god, please, remove ALL religious "instruction/education" from childhood. Let's not prime the stupid-pump.Thanks Perdition.

I've been saying this for years, as well. Well, at age 2, it's pretty much in the hands of the parents, so we'll obviously have a range of knowledge/ability on that. It should definitely be removed form any public schools, but as for parental teachings, I'm loathe to tell parents what they can and can't tell their children, especially if they genuinely believe in a religion. I'd prefer letting kids learn about all religions and choose what makes sense to them (including no religion at all), but again, that's tough to force and I wouldn't feel comfortable doing so. You're welcome.