Comments on: Writing news that affects non-writers too

By: Seeing Through The Fog › Defending Our Borders, and Kicking Ass…….Your Ass!

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 14:45:26 +0000

[...] Writing news that affects non-writers too 2 comments [...]

By: Reesa

Reesa — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 14:48:52 +0000

@Lynn - Right, the naivete in that ocmment is telling; for Watts at least, even if they showed up tomorrow on his doorstep with an “oops, our fault, let’s drop everything” message, there’ll still be the incident of having to get all his stuff back, and the emotional scars left, any physical ramifications from said unpleasant treatment, and so on and so on. So yeah, it’s hard to see how “without anymore incident” could mean anything more than “that sucks, now never tell me about it again”. And if so, that’s one of the big attitudes we need changed.

@Barnaby - Sorry for the late response, I just reconfigured where my comment notifications are sent since I missed these two this week! You won’t get complains about Punks from me, I think it was one of the many subculture movements with some nice ideas and some less effective manifestations of those ideas. I think the Punks would hate being compared to the Hippies of the 60s, but viewed from over here it’s a largely similar pattern of good ideas being twisted far from the original goals by waaaay too much idealism.

And I strongly agree, that the lack of widespread teaching of critical thinking skills is a big part of our current problems. Obviously those of us who have spawned can work on fixing that in the next generation on an individual basis, and we can all do work as adults to hone our own critical thinking skills. Other than the tactics, largely ignored, of those worthies you’ve mentioned already, do you have ideas or suggestions on how to spread critical thinking skills as something more people seek out and want to learn?

By: Barnaby

Barnaby — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 19:38:19 +0000

Thank you for a good article. Being German I know the quote well since school days, and it influenced me a great deal. Unfortunately the majority never seem to learn, and things are essentially not different from the days of the Roman Empire. The human psyche has not changed, and people are blissfully unaware or prefer to only look out for themselves. Many are not even educated enough to care, or to recognize the pattern. Many are just too busy with their own lives.

Divide and rule.

Then in the not so distant past we had the Punk movement being critical of power and putting an emphasis on a “think for yourself” life-style, and apart from the few again the majority of people did not take away anything from it. They refused to listen and learn ‘cos “these people” looked weird, and perhaps did not subscribe to the same value system entirely.

So it seems that we are condemned to forever repeat the mistakes of the past. Or perhaps, hopefully, not.

Btw, whatever you think of Jello Biafra, the Dead Kennedy’s, Henry Rollins, their recordings still have a lot to offer. But you gotta be disposed to critical thinking, and that’s where a lot of people will just shut off.

By: Lynn

Lynn — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 19:36:42 +0000

Excellent post, I agree with all your points here.

An illustration of your point: I went to the link with Peter’s account of the incident; one of the comments was:

Holy fucking shit man! That’s absolutely insane! I hope this blows over without anymore incident. ~ Chris J.

I hope he meant that Peter gets no more trouble from this personally; I hope he didn’t mean ‘let’s hope that we don’t have to think about it anymore.’