Why The Anti-Mask Brigade Has NO Genuine Concept Of Freedom

The lowdown on why so many medical professionals and advisers have resigned or been driven from office was exposed on the front page of The Denver Post (Aug. 11):

"Vilified, threatened with violence, suffering from burnout, dozens of state and local public health leaders around the U.S. have resigned or been fired amid the coronavirus outbreak."

So, just as we need these epidemiological specialists and public health officials the most, they are being forced out of their positions in droves. Why?  What gives?  Well, we have a significant low I.Q. segment that is not only gullible to propaganda and tripe (like the "plandemic' idiocy of crackpot quack Judy Mikovits),  but also energized to attack public health officials trying to do their job, using their  pseudo "liberty" as an excuse.

Among the deranged examples are the  "Freedom Angels" that stalk and harass health officials online (e.g. on Facebook) as well as other misfits, worms and vermin firmly convinced a real virus (denoted SARS- Cov-2)  is a hoax created by Dems to take down Dotard.  Even 165,000 deaths can't convince these fools it's not a hoax and you even have some of the numbskulls driving to hospitals, looking in reception areas and asking in loud voices: "Where are all the Covid patients?"  As I said, low I.Q.

And what are all these crazies most exercised about? Well, being mandated to wear masks, and practicing social distancing - the only ways to avoid another lockdown, or nationwide quarantine.   The only practical means to avoid hundreds of thousands more infections and hospital ICUs being flooded with desperately ill Covid patients.

It is sad, as one continues to behold the parade of maskless morons fighting with Walmart 'health sentries about having to wear masks and bellowing about their "rights".  Truly they have zero conception of true freedom, and the critical role of responsibility.  What they are operating on instead is a caricature  spawned by Trump and his enabling goons.  

This was brought home to me even more on reading Kwame Appiah's essay ('Rejecting Masks Puts Freedom In Danger') in the WSJ Review (AUg. 8-9, p. C1):

"In the grand American tradition, freedom is about being unfettered, undominated, i.e. 'You're not the boss of me!'  In truth, what political theorist Benjamin Constant called 'the liberty of the moderns' is also a very ancient idea. When people in classical times wrote about freedom they were usually distinguishing the condition from involuntary servitude. .. To be free, as a matter of definition, was not to be enslaved."

But wearing a mask to prevent spread of  a pernicious virus is certainly not being enslaved. No medical specialist or health officer, after all, is chaining anyone up, then forcing them into forced labor.  So how did the original clear definition get mutated into now believing that any mandated regulation, say for seat belts, or not smoking in planes, or wearing masks - is an imposition or limitation on one's freedom?

Technically,  the Bill of Rights in the Constitution first set out rights available to citizens.  What is truly mind boggling in the current climate of invoking rights is that barely 1 in 10  citizens can name even 5 of the rights listed in the Bill of Rights.  Hence, their incessant blabbering about their rights being violated isn't even credible when they can't even name them!  Indeed, many of these nitwits actually believe the states also have rights, which is twaddle as Prof. Gary Wills ('A Necessary Evil: A History Of American Distrust of Government’) has admirably explained, noting only human persons- citizens can possess rights, while states "retain powers and prerogatives."  Hence, "states' rights" is a fiction, an ignorant creation of modern federalists or denizens of the Federalist Society.  As Wills goes on to explain:

“The states have no natural rights. Their powers are artificial, not natural – they are things made by contract.”

But I warrant that not one in a thousand of the maskless twits even knows that.  Then there is the difference between "positive rights" and "negative rights".  Again, I doubt even 1 in 1,000 of the anti-mask brigade know the difference.

The conviction that there are only “negative” rights and there can be no “positive” ones is a long standing trope of the Right.   A negative right implies that there are ‘x’ things the government can’t do to you, e.g.  take away your guns or your property without good legal basis ("eminent domain"). . By contrast, positive rights assert there are actual positive rights to which you are entitled under the Bill of Rights, say health care and privacy. Most of those on the Right, who have only passing acquaintance with the Federalist papers, assert positive rights don’t exist, but they are wrong. They merely show they fail to grasp the concept of an "unenumerated right".

Clearly,  refusing a law or mandate from a state or local government entity to wear a mask (or wear a seatbelt, or wear a helmet on a motor bike) is seen as a negative right.   "YOU of the commonweal have NO right to tell me what to wear! I will wear what I damned well please!"  And yet they happily (ok, maybe not) choke down another negative right they believe they have by not smoking in planes or in medical offices.  So they essentially pick and choose the extent of their exercise of negative rights. 

This is why I suspect in the case of the mask wearing (or refusing it) they are falling into a political trap originally set by - who else ? - Donald Trump.  Who, on numerous occasions, has refused to don a mask himself and sent relentless signals it was "weak" or "unmanly". Well, of course his zombies would follow.  Not only that, but the zombies would start  spreading tropes and trash on their own to justify their reckless behavior, e.g.  one anti-mask nut protester in FLA (WSJ, ibid.):

"Everyone is responsible for their own health care decisions.  We want our choices respected as well.."

Which, of course, is nonsense given  YOUR stupid choice here (not to wear a mask) can affect my health, especially as a septuagenarian. Thus, to go out and about talking loud,  coughing, laughing, spitting or whatever is a sure way to spread the disease and especially to older, vulnerable people. (And don't bloody well tell us to 'Stay inside then!'  given our remaining years have already been severely circumscribed because of the limitations in movement and travel, outings etc. imposed by Covid 19.)  Thus, the "choice" not to wear a mask is tantamount to spreading the disease, and as Appiah admits (ibid.): "Those who recklessly spread disease have long posed a challenge to liberal democracies."   And as he goes on to write: "Pandemics don't just imperil our health they imperil our freedom".  Because if not contained on account of terrible choices, they will force the hands of governments to enforce mass quarantines,  lockdowns.    

In many ways, as Janice has put it, refusing to wear a mask-   especially in closed public spaces -  is like a gas station customer refusing to stop smoking while he fills his gas tank and others are there for service too.  At first I thought that might be too extreme an analogy but on further rumination I believe it fits.  So the Florida mask protester's demand to 'have our choices respected" is really a demand to respect their spreading of death.

Jefferson wrote in his 'Notes on Virginia', that to the extent the people's minds are improved they will hold check on the worst excesses of government.  But the less discussed converse side of that is people's minds need to be improved enough to distinguish between claiming a right without any responsibility, and claiming a right which demands responsibility.   There is no doubt Jefferson would eschew the bogus right not to wear a mask during a pandemic as the former.

See Also:

Retail workers are being pulled into the latest culture war: Getting customers to wear masks

And:

Face masks with valves or vents do not prevent spread of coronavirus, CDC says

And:

Republicans

Reactionaries in Ragged Retreat: A Wingnut Brew of Bottom-dwellers

by Robert Becker | August 13, 2020 - 6:45am | permalink

Did "Conspiracy Theorists" Troll The Parkland Students? No - Lowbrow Loons Spreading Low I.Q. Memes

David Hogg, a Stoneman Douglas student and now gun law activist, is being targeted by the pseudo conspiracy trolls inhabiting 4Chan, Reddit and other nether regions of the net.

Recall it wasn't long after the Sandy Hook - Newtown massacre that a crackpot conspiracy clown named Alex Jones, e.g.









began spinning his delirious, drug-addled bullshit that the whole tragedy where 26 perished was merely a federal "false flag" operation. Those twenty  kids and six adults weren't really slain, they were merely actors in an elaborate script to befuddle the public, forcing a mass  demand for gun confiscation across the land.

Now we see these wretched, half witted memes and crappola resurrected again by a bunch of nitwits occupying the nether regions of the net, e.g. 4chan, Infowars, Gateway Pundit,  Reddit and related enclaves of web trolldom.  This time the pseudo- conspiracy crazies are targeting the outspoken students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas for their newfound activism and eloquence in speaking truth to power. It appears the loopy conspira-tards simply can't handle that presentation of acumen and brilliance,  thereby resorting  to painting the kids into being "paid crisis actors".

One of the prime targets has been  David Hogg, 17, who went from Florida high school student to mass shooting survivor to inspiring  advocate for gun-control laws in a few days. And just as quickly, online conspiracy clowns in the mold of Alex Jones' Infowars (I call them conspira-tards)   began spinning viral lies attacking the teenager’s credibility.

By Wednesday — a week after a gunman wielding a semiautomatic rifle killed 17 people at Hogg’s Parkland, Fla., school — online media sites including YouTube swelled with false ­allegations that Hogg was ­secretly a “crisis actor” playing the part of a grieving student in local and national television news reports.

Hogg wasn't the only one targeted by an online campaign that flared up on anonymous forums such as 4chan and Reddit before it reached conservative websites, Twitter, Facebook and Google’s video platform. Collectively the posts questioned the honesty and credibility of the grieving students as they spoke out against gun violence.  In some cases they publicly challenged President Donald Dotard, the National Rifle Association and lawmakers opposed to gun control -- and this is likely what brought out the Trumpian Trolls from their crevices and rat holes.

Many of these lowbrow kooks, which is what they are, were  also foursquare behind helping to spread Michael Flynn's  Pizzagate conspiracy, i.e. that Hillary Clinton was keeping child sex slaves in the basement of a D.C. pizza parlor and exploiting them.

One is led to inquire what engenders this fulsome crap.  What defects in the brains of these losers causes them to spawn such bollocks, say instead of applying what gray matter they have to researching real conspiracies?  Well, one answer is that researching the real ones - like the JFK assassination  - actually takes hundreds of man hours of real work.  Just plowing through Oswald's CIA files - e.g. the  OS-351- 164 file from his  201- 289 248 CI/SIG file or his 74-500 file. as reported in the Appendices of  John Newman’s book, ‘Oswald and the CIA’- can take hours.   It's a damned sight more exacting than merely reading a bullshit text on 4 Chan or watching a fake video on YouTube.

But that's where we are now, and who can blame the conspiracy skeptics - like Michael Shermer and others -   for going after anything that remotely smacks of conspiracy when a gaggle of clowns and conspira-tards have taken over the zeitgeist and converted it to clown fodder?   Such as the likes of Alex Jones and this currently resurfacing retinue of goofballs trying to paint Hogg and his fellow Douglas classmates as liberal pawns or actors.

It was Barbadian psychologist Dr. Pat Bannister who once invoked the idea of  a "conspiracy culture",  to distinguish it from "conspiracy research community". The latter she envisaged as the province of mature, rational, educated adults. Serious people possessing some measure of intellect who brought their scientific, mathematical and other aptitudes to the investigation of multiple aspects of a putative real conspiracy - whether that be the BCCI banking conspiracy or the JFK assassination. These people put in real man hours and actually published their work in authoritative media and respected forums as opposed to spreading bunkum through the lowest dreg regions of the net.

The "conspiracy culture"  by contrast was defined by the  resident "conspiracy theorist",  who put forward conspiracy conjectures  but didn't  advance adequate evidence or documents to  support them. Or, if such were advanced, they didn't meet elementary scientific standards for acceptance, including consistent data selection. For example, the lot who claimed no men actually landed on the Moon and it was all filmed on a Hollywood lot.  This, despite the fact we can actually use lunar ranging instruments - planted by Apollo astronauts, to make incredibly accurate measurements of lunar distance.

If Dr. Bannister were alive today I warrant she'd also include another more debased category, the conspiracy clown.  Into this group would go Alex Jones and his gaggle of anti-intellectual loawbrows of the type now burping out nasty "conspiracy" memes against the FLA students.  This lot - I am sure- she'd bracket as  members of that half of the population with subnornmal I.Q.  i.e.  that their low intelligence spurred them on to attack kids like David Hogg because they could see their intellects were superior to their own. Unable to parse Hogg or his classmates  as  "regular" students, it became easier to simply dismiss them  as 'hired crisis actors" or vilify them as  "liberal pawns". Who also had to be "taught" by liberals what to do and what to say in front of the assembled  media.  Of course, because the lowbrows themselves were too mentally deficient  to do it on their own, they couldn't imagine anyone else  - especially a student - able to.

This is what low intelligence gets you in a nation whose median I.Q. is sinking ever lower by the day, under Trumpdom.  When the 1.8 million DACAns are dispatched it will sink even lower, given the average DACA person has an I.Q. 25 points higher than a 4Chan internet  troll.

But perhaps the best put down of this  nonsense was a humorous one from one of Hogg's fellow students,  Sarah Chadwick. She, tweeted that Hogg “can’t act to save his life,” adding that the fact some people think he is being paid “is hilarious.”

Again, it takes little to no effort to imbibe such twaddle or to share it, and spread it out to like-minded morons.  This in a social media  environment  susceptible to moronic fake news infection because it has few gatekeepers. (It is estimated that Facebook and Instagram have perhaps 200 human monitors -  i.e. apart from the algorithms - to detect specious conspiracy clown ideation. and preventing it from wider circulation.)

The mainstream media then, confers way too much dignity on these net trolls from Reddit,  4chan,  Infowars  and elsewhere by saying they are spawning "conspiracies".  No, they are in fact lowbrow loons spawning and spreading low I.Q. memes.  A meme here being the equivalent of a basic mind virus first elucidated by biochemist Jacques Monod in his book, Chance And Necessity.  Sadly, as we've seen with Pizzagate, even a lowbrow can create mind viruses. The power inheres not in the meme's innate value, but in getting like minded idiots to spread it.  Receptacles who lack mental acuity, basic critical thinking skills and any familiarity with logic.

Props to Hogg for shrugging off the low I.Q. troll attacks, saying "This is just American democracy".

But in fact, Thomas Jefferson would disagree with him that this crude mode of expression - in terms of cockeyed conspiracy ideations - would qualify.   No, Jefferson would see these nutso expressions as a debasement of democracy. After all, in his 'Notes on Virginia', he wrote:

"Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories. AND TO RENDER THEM SAFE, THEIR MINDS MUST BE IMPROVED."

Jefferson understood that a citizen "depository" of false beliefs and misinformation would ultimately destroy the Republic on account of the regression of citizens' minds. This is why he harped on mental improvement. He understood that for citizens to attain this improvement  of mind they needed to read in a focused and critical fashion and not believe anything without basis.. Another Founder, John Adams, wrote:

“Facts are stubborn things,”

Because they do not admit of being merely twisted into what one wishes or prefers. Sure, the dregs of 4Chan or Reddit might hate that an articulate bunch of Florida kids could find their voices after a school shooting massacre  - but there it is.  Instead of feeding the green envy monster by concocting imbecilic conspiracy memes that don't fit the facts, they'd do better to do some real research and reading themselves.

Why? To improve their minds of course! That is assuming they have the intelligence to sustain any improvement.

See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/thom-hartmann/77839/two-simple-laws-could-solve-americas-epidemic-of-violence

Footnote:  A wannabe Vermont shooter -  Jack Sawyer- was recently tripped up when a friend reported him to the authorities. He had packed away an AR-15 and shotgun as well as handgun to attack his former High school. See e.g.

https://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/story/news/2018/02/16/teen-arrested-fair-haven-school-shooting-threat/344409002/

He told that friend (as reported on CBS  Early Show this a.m.) he had been "excited" about the Parkland massacre because it "was just stepping up natural selection a notch".  In fact , he had it backwards: The Parkland shooting was reverse natural selection in that a mentally debilitated guy took out 17 students with vastly higher I.Q.s than he had. But this is what happens when military style weapons are allowed to be purchased by anyone.

Obama Takes On "Trumpism" In His State of The Union

Obama educated Trumpsters on the nature of government, democracy, the limits of power and citizenship in his SOTU speech.

Lord knows Trumpsters need a clue. Unable to reason their way out of anything, they more or less follow their insane, splenetic blowhard no matter what he says. As one Trump follower put it in a recent TIME article on the Trump phenomenon, "It's time to get insane and shake things up!"  So given just "shaking things up" not a  useful prescription for much of anything it was superb to see Obama giving his best trying to educate these knuckle draggers to the role of citizenship in the United States.

As one UK Guardian lead article put it:

"Obama’s rhetoric reflects his study of the nation’s founding documents – the US constitution and Declaration of Independence – as well as basic texts of our civic culture, from the Bible to the speeches of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D Roosevelt, John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr."

Which is more than needed, given most Trumpsters  in their hostile and arrogant anti-intellectualism, are proud not to be familiar with the basic texts of our civic culture. But then, this is the profile for those who can't even see that reducing the members of one the world's largest religions to "ragheads" plays into ISIS' hands. Or yapping that anyone who supports respect for the vast majority of this religion is "bending over for ragheads" - when in fact they are unwilling to take the vile path into dehumanization - which almost always precedes genocide and "ethnic cleansing".

Obama was no less severe in taking these knotheads to task for sabre rattling when the U.S. is clearly - bar none -the world's 'hammer' not anyone's 'nail'. As the Prez put it:

"The United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth. Period. It's not even close,"

Hence, to idiotically proclaim "World War Three" or "the world is on fire" (as Paul Ryan did in one op-ed) actually confers on these vermin what they want: the equal power of a nation state - when they are merely parasites occupying a failed state. Obama's words:

"Masses of fighters on the back of pickup trucks and twisted souls plotting in apartments or garages pose an enormous danger to civilians and must be stopped. But they do not threaten our national existence.  That's the story ISIL wants to tell; that's the kind of propaganda they use to recruit. We don't need to build them up to show that we're serious, nor do we need to push away vital allies in this fight by echoing the lie that ISIL is representative of one of the world's largest religions,"

But again, his words likely were missed by the pseudo-macho Trumpsters.

Ahead of State of the Union speech, Obama has regrets over US political divisions

Obama's final foray into our toxic politics was a tour-de-force of intellectual power but which was likely lost on most of the audience.  As Lawrence O'Donnell of MSNBC put it, "the (TV) audience was dumbed down by Trumpism".  So when Obama said "the people should pick their representatives instead of the politicians picking their voters" it likely sailed over their heads.

Why this anti-intellectual strain? Where did it originate? Let's first agree that Trump isn’t the cause, just the symptom. In fact, a pervasive anti-intellectualism  runs through the roots of American culture and has for decades. Richard Hofstadter in his terrific book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life puts his finger (p. 133) on:

"such a thing as the generically-prejudiced mind. Studies of political tolerance and ethnic prejudice have shown that zealous church-going and rigid religious faith are among the most important correlates of political and ethnic animosity."

But it has to go beyond religious aspects, in order to account for the teeming millions who hate intellectuals but aren't necessarily religious. One possible insight  raised by Hofstadter was an engrained tendency by the undereducated to tie the exercise of intellect to being "effeminate". He presented the example of Adlai Stevenson and how he was mercilessly criticized by the media for his speeches and choice of words in the 1950s.

Hofstadter noted that especially during the 1952 presidential campaign,  Stevenson's wit was detested even more than his intellect. Of course, wit functions in the service of intellect, to amplify intellect's intent and render its goals more efficacious. Or to smooth the delivery of information related to weighty issues. For this Adlai was repeatedly slandered and referred to as a "comedian" or "clown" and portrayed in cartoons with a jester's cap and bells, e.g.



The New York Daily News (cf. p. 227) once referred to him as "Adelaide" and charged that he "trilled his speeches in a fruity voice."

Thereby rendering an additional slur - one that directly tied intellectual display or wit with homosexuality. Reinforced by the description of his followers as "typical Harvard lace-cuff liberals." In certain sectors of society today, this pernicious virus can still be seen - in many of our public high schools. There, day in and day out "geeks", "dweebs" and "dorks" are relentlessly assaulted by feeble-minded "jocks" for openly displaying any intellect. Many are also accused of being "gay" simply because they prefer the life of the mind and books- to football, gang hijinks, mailbox 'baseball' or cow-tipping.

Obama's confronting of the Trumpsters in his speech, was therefore somewhat like the class valedictorian confronting the high school football team and trying to teach them nuanced approaches - as in national security (forming a coalition instead of acting like the world's cop) - and respecting others even if their skin, religion or whatever is different. In other words a nearly impossible task given the jocks would likely take any such would-be educator and stuff him into a locker.

And so we have the basis for what now approaches nearly a civil war, given the partisan divide. Another element feeding the rampant anti-intellectualism (which also denies man-made climate change)  has to be the media - and here we come to FOX News. Incredibly, Fox News is currently the most trusted news network in the country. The problem is that “Fox News” is a misnomer. The network,  to quote Jon Stewart, is more of a “relentlessly activist” organization for conservative causes than an intellectually honest conveyor of information.

Don't take my word! There are to date at least seven academic studies that have found that Fox News’ viewership constitutes the most misinformed audience .  From climate change to healthcare, the Iraq War, to Obama's allegedly Muslim faith,  the zombies mesmerized by Fox News are more confident about falsehoods than viewers of any other news network. Several studies even found a positive correlation between how often one watches Fox News and the degree to which one’s worldview is misinformed.

Hence, one can regard FOX News as a breeding factory for anti-intellectuals, and given Obama's SOTU speech, the number one source of anti-citizens undermining the Republic. In this sense, Obama was far too generous when he insisted our citizen bonds "must be based on trust",  because well, how can you have a faithful discussion of facts with a purblind idiot who only accepts falsehoods from a propaganda factory? It's a non-starter. Citizen mutual trust must depend on all citizens having the same access to genuine facts, history and objective truth. If one side is co-opted by bullshit and anti-facts then all bets are off. 

But look, what’s most dangerous about Fox News isn’t its repeated failure to accurately report the facts, but its discouraging that all important form of rigorous curiosity called critical thinking. If people want a single cause to blame for the gradual decline of the American empire, direct your wagging finger at the devaluation of critical thinking skills.

Because make no mistake, any appreciation of Obama's State of the Union speech, whether his comparison of climate denialism to denial of Sputnik, e.g.

"Sixty years ago, when the Russians beat us into space, we didn't deny Sputnik was up there. We didn't argue about the science, or shrink our research and development budget. We built a space program almost overnight, and twelve years later, we were walking on the moon."

Or to his nuanced argument for confronting ISIL but not doing it alone and half-assed, requires at least a modicum of critical thinking. It cannot be appreciated by a brain stewed in endless propaganda so that its medial pre-frontal cortex sees Obama only as 'Obummer' or "Obozo'. In other words, as the "enemy" or  "the other" despite his having fought to prevent cuts to veterans' and other benefits - which their weak memories forget all the Reepos wanted.

Obama sounded a definite note of hope and optimism but that was predicated on all of us taking the citizenship seriously. Alas, that cannot happen when one half the population doesn't know which end is up and is prepared to follows so-called "news" networks - that are really propaganda factories - blindly.

As Thomas Jefferson put it in his 'Notes on Virginia':

"Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories. AND TO RENDER THEM SAFE, THEIR MINDS MUST BE IMPROVED."

Jefferson understood that a citizen "depository" of false beliefs and misinformation would ultimately destroy the Republic on account of the regression of citizens' minds. He understood that citizens, as part of their duty, had to strive to attain mental improvement including being able to read in a focused fashion and not believe everything they read. Another Founder, John Adams, wrote:

“Facts are stubborn things,”

But epitomizing the blind stupidity of the Right, their favorite President,  Ronald Reagan,  famously misquoted him:

“Facts are stupid things,”

 Which could be the motto of all those who get their "values" regularly confirmed  via a reality filtered through FOX News or Limbaugh

Sadly, Obama's lofty goals to eradicate our toxic politics cannot be achieved until the source of that  toxicity is removed. As people learned after the Rwanda genocide, there is free speech and then there is hate speech. NO civil society can long tolerate the latter without facing destruction from within. The U.S. may well be able to put down every 'bully' around the world, but it cannot sustain division from within. United we stand, divided we fall - and it will be a long, hard fall.

One final note: Gov. Nikki Haley, who delivered the GOP response, even called out Trump and his angry bandwagon by admonishing followers to "resist the siren call of angry voices".  But, of course, anyone who's ever had to deal with a bunch of two years olds pitching tantrums knows that probably won't get very far before she's skewered by some of those angry voices. Most likely from right wing propaganda radio.

See also:
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/p-m-carpenter/65527/of-obamas-superb-sotu-and-supreme-fatheads

Excerpt:

"Pathologically playing today at your local Bund rally is the selfsame debauchery that sickens American politics from time to time — what with its "voices urging us to fall back into tribes, to scapegoat fellow citizens who don’t look like us, or pray like us, or vote like we do, or share the same background"; and always, in some rhetorical version, warning us of "existential threats" being slighted by the commander in chief."

Sorry, If You Get Your Politics From Jon Stewart It Doesn't Count!

It seems within weeks of the Boston Globe proclaiming there absolutely was no "deflategate" they've since asserted Comedy Central guy Jon Stewart "shaped the cultural attitudes of a generation".  Which leads to the question: Was it for better or worse?

We already know, for example, that according to author Mark Bauerlein (The Dumbest Generation), the under-30 crowd are foregoing knowledge-based maturity to wallow in a self-confected, solipsistic, social media mirror world of their own egos and selves. The fallout includes their not even meeting basic standards of knowledge for employment, far less earning a degree that actually means anything. (A survey and test several years ago found even a majority of Harvard grads flunked a basic test on American History.)

The entire mental superstructure was revealed in the words of one girl quoted (p. 137-38) when asked by a journalist if she wasn’t worried that she was denied a more in depth  picture of the world by  confining attention to Facebook. Her illuminating retort:

“I’m not trying to get a broader picture, I’m trying to get what I want”.

But this may also account for why the same demographic (a good majority of them anyway) gravitates to Stewart's show as a kind of ersatz medium by which to pick up political insight. After all, he's delivered terrific zingers at the likes of the Fox News morons, including Bill O'Reilly as well as the goobers in Congress.

But zingers, or as one critic put it, "shits and giggles",  doesn't make the cut for serious, in depth political news or reporting. I maintain, as I have for many years, that if you don't read newspapers you can't get a handle on the political news. (TV news doesn't cut it either). Even more important, if you don't read widely outside the mainstream media, you will be in no position to master deep politics which now undergirds our political system. Is Jon Stewart going to  bring you into deep politics? Hell no, because he barely touches the normative form.

Bloomberg columnist Clive Crook perhaps put it in plainest terms when he noted "the generation in question relies on a comedy show for its news and engages with politics mainly through jokes"

Adding, that "perhaps I am missing something but that seems less than ideal."

In fact, it not only seems so but is. It proclaims we're incepting a generation of know-nothing goof balls who don't even vote consistently (as in the critical mid-terms) and need the excitement of a personality to grab them. I call them political dilettantes and woefully uneducated on this nation's most pressing issues. Jokes then, don't cut it.

Yes, I also like to watch Bill Maher's Real Time and get some laughs, but I don't believe it's a substitute for reading newspapers and more importantly parsing the PR and distinguishing it from substantive news within them. The latter is enabled by also reading books, on deep politics (including Naomi Klein's 'Shock Doctrine') as well as Howard Zinn's "A People' History of the United States')

It is this reading which amps up one's vocabulary to the point of ably mastering more difficult books, sources and which then confers deeper political and historical insights. By contrast, how can the Jon Stewart followers assimilate a factual basis when the language to describe much of what is happening in the world’s most critical domains exceeds the language difficulty level to which they’re accustomed?

Just take what is happening in the world of global finance right now, with events in Greece - regarding repaying  its debt -  that could affect all of Europe and even the U.S.  (Say if Greece leaves the E.U.) Do the Tweeters and such even know why oil prices recently fell and why they are climbing now? Do they know what's behind the events in Ukraine? How many of the Twitter-Facebook generation are aware of any of this? How many even think it’s relevant to their lives?

As for 'The Daily Show', as Crook points out:

"The problem was the program's fans began to take it seriously, and academics with nothing better to do began to take it seriously, and worst of all the show began to take itself seriously".

Which is to say it became a parody of itself and at that point no longer relevant. (Maybe why Stewart decided it was time to depart, along with wanting to spend more time with family. In other words, he realized that family time superseded the value of the content time on  'The Daily Show')

The trouble is that while political comedy can be entertaining it provides no ballast. Just as no sane person would consume the juicy looking steak depicted in the corner of a cardboard menu in place of the genuine article, so also no sane person should consume comedy and theatrics believing it's the real deal, It isn't.

But perhaps the problem is too many brains have now been so gutted by PR and fake news that the owners can no longer discern what is a serious issue and what isn't.  Hence, the insipid spectacle of millions of  people engaging in a stupid "debate" about the color of a dress sent via Tumblr.  "It was black and blue! No dammit, it was white and gold!"

No people in a serious, politically stable nation would do such a thing - waste their time on such trivial idiocy. But perhaps this is the point most of us have devolved to. Consumers only capable of raising a hue and cry over the color of a dress, but not over our political fabric (or physical infrastructure) and how both are coming apart.

In the end, I suspect false attention to trivial bullshit will only amplify so long as people remain uneducated and unread. (And merely possessing a college degree doesn't ensure this!) More willing to waste time in spurious social media realms with assorted 'likes' and posting images of their kitties boxing doggies than reading and learning about the world they inhabit. As Mark Bauerlein notes (p. 138):

“For education to happen, people must encounter worthwhile things outside their sphere of interest and brainpower. Knowledge grows, skills improve, tastes refine and conscience ripens only if the experiences bear a degree of unfamiliarity.”

What that means, as he further observes, is one must move through and beyond the initial knee-jerk reaction: “I don’t get it! That’s not for me, not my cup of tea!”  Because the intellectual effort in making it your ‘cup of tea’ will then be intellectually rewarding.

In the same way moving beyond the infantile "familiar" world of political jokiness requires a mature temperament, but the required intellectual effort in moving to real politics and deep politics means one can finally emerge as a citizen, as opposed to a consumer.

At that stage, there is a significant intellectual reward, which also serves the interests of one's nation in the best way possible. As Thomas Jefferson put it in his 'Notes on Virginia':

"Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories. AND TO RENDER THEM SAFE, THEIR MINDS MUST BE IMPROVED."

Jefferson understood that a citizen "depository" of false beliefs and misinformation would ultimately destroy the Republic on account of the regression of citizens' minds,  not improvement. He understood that citizens to attain this improvement needed to read widely and in a focused fashion and not believe anything without supporting evidence. He might also have added, they ought not substitute frivolous comedic fare for actual knowledge of history, governance and related matters.