It is almost too easy to make fun of Fox News, like they no longer even care whether what they are reporting has any even small basis in truth.
And yet, many people believe their crap.
During the cold war, it was always said that people in the Soviet Union knew that they were being fed lies by the government propaganda machine. We even mocked the Orwellian touch of calling the main newspaper in Russia “Pravda” (truth). And yet, corporate-owned “fair and balanced” propaganda network Fox News is the most popular news source in America. Who needs tyranny when you have a nation of willing sheep? And who needs leader worship like they have in North Korea, when you can worship a fictitious version of Ronald Reagan?
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Pretty worrisome stuff especially when a comedy show like the daily show has to point this stuff out.
Further proof positive that the right wing will simply oppose loudly anything this president does. They constantly take a sentence here or a word there (and sometimes mash them together with totally fabricated video – I’m lookin’ at you, Hannity – and twist ANYthing he says into something sinister.
Sometime I urge you to play what I call the “Hannity Game”. I turn on his radio show and count how many seconds it takes to hear “radical”, “socialism”, “Marxist” or “liberal”. Yesterday it took 25 seconds. It’s impossible to play the game with Michael Weiner (Savage). It took exactly three words in from the time I tuned in. If it was a drinking game, I’d be an alcoholic in a week.
Then there are the “home schooled” children. My client home schools her five, only she doesn’t. Five children growing up with no education. She is going to keep having them. They will make willing sheep.
EBDOUG: My husband was home-schooled, and he finished college at 18 years old. One of our dear friends was home-schooled, and, after she finally moved out, she struggled to get a GED and is now in a community college, passing nearly nothing (though getting A’s in her Russian class, and working her butt off to do it).
Home-schooling can be incredibly good. It’s often pretty mediocre. And sometimes it’s atrocious. I don’t see much difference between it and the US’s current public school system, frankly.
Yeah, like everything home schooling can be good or bad. Some good friends of mine home schooled their two kids, and the main problem they have is that now that they are taking part in regular school activities they are so far ahead of the other kids that they are outcasts.
IronKnee, that’s basically what happened to my husband. Fortunately, he didn’t return to the public school system until he went to community college to finish off a couple of high school requirements when he was 14 years old (advanced high school chemistry is hard to do at home). After that, it was just college. So he never experienced all the required group activity stuff of K-12, so he never felt ostracized.
Interesting discussion about home schooling. As a college professor, my home schooled students are some of the most problematic. Many of them have social challenges that make it difficult to work effectively in the team projects that they do in my courses. Their expectations of how available I am supposed to be to them far exceeds the average level of entitlement that my privileged students exhibit. Quite a number also are missing basic knowledge of American history, science, or math that far surpasses the gaps in seen among my public school educated students. I’m sure that homeschooling can be done well and once was a tutor hired for home schooled students. However, on average, I would say that home schooled students are not necessarily provided any more advantages when they come to college (and certainly not in my classroom).
Starluna: I used to be a college professor, and I couldn’t say that my home schooled students were consistent. But, I will say that where I most encountered home schooled students was at a small, public university that supplied an financially challenged region of a financially challenged state. Most of the poor students from the public school system ended up going to the local community college (which, from all reports, did a solid job with them). Most of the bright students from any background went to one of the larger universities in the state. And the mediocre students from the local private schools ended up in at the local university. So I had a lot of students whose only background was K-12 in the Catholic or Lutheran system. I didn’t find their gaps or expectations of me to be any more odd than the home schooled students I had.
I will note, though, that my experience with home schooled students did follow a different pattern. Those who were encouraged to learn from lots of sources, and those who were expected to learn from the sources provided by the parents. That second group fit your description pretty closely, but I had enough of the first group to balance that impression out.