20 years ago these same schools were villifying Bush and the Iraq war and that dissent is patriotic.
Not 10 years ago these institutions and intellectuals were teaching that jingoism was bad.
Now they're all practicing it.
You study communist movements and it always starts with the colleges and schools (China, Venezuela, Russia). Worse, it's a world-wide phenomenon infecting all of the western world by some faceless leadership behind the scenes and to what end? A mass culling?
People acting on an ideology, consciously or unconsciously, will make it appear as if there was somebody in charge, but that isn't necessary for the impression. It's much more likely that the world is a chaos of conflicting interests at many different scales and that nobody's in charge. Thinking otherwise sounds way too childishly comforting to me, since then you could solve the problem of evil by chopping the right heads off. Reality is much more dire than that.
When I said "conflicting interests", I meant many groups of people, some coordinating amongst themselves, making alliances with others, and so on. However, the rope can be pulled in many directions. "Coordination" makes it sound like there's a single general agenda. That is not true, unless you're referring to the devil whose agenda is to render asunder.
20 years ago these same schools were villifying Bush and the Iraq war and that dissent is patriotic.
Not 10 years ago these institutions and intellectuals were teaching that jingoism was bad.
Now they're all practicing it.
You study communist movements and it always starts with the colleges and schools (China, Venezuela, Russia). Worse, it's a world-wide phenomenon infecting all of the western world by some faceless leadership behind the scenes and to what end? A mass culling?
People acting on an ideology, consciously or unconsciously, will make it appear as if there was somebody in charge, but that isn't necessary for the impression. It's much more likely that the world is a chaos of conflicting interests at many different scales and that nobody's in charge. Thinking otherwise sounds way too childishly comforting to me, since then you could solve the problem of evil by chopping the right heads off. Reality is much more dire than that.
But you have to admit there's coordination going on.
When I said "conflicting interests", I meant many groups of people, some coordinating amongst themselves, making alliances with others, and so on. However, the rope can be pulled in many directions. "Coordination" makes it sound like there's a single general agenda. That is not true, unless you're referring to the devil whose agenda is to render asunder.