This from Professor Michael E. Mann:
Sagan rightly feared the "celebration of ignorance". He didn't quite anticipate, however, the *weaponization* of ignorance that we are now seeing.
Carl Sagan predicted QAnon more than two decades ago:
School teachers in Florida’s Manatee county are removing books from their classrooms or physically covering them up after a new bill went into effect that prohibited material unless deemed appropriate by a librarian, or “certified media specialist”.
If a teacher is found in violation of these guidelines, they could face felony charges.
The new guidelines for the Florida law, known as HB 1467, outline the books be free of pornographic material, suited to student needs and their ability to comprehend the material, and appropriate for the grade level and age group.
The driving force behind this goosestep march toward ignorance is Florida's governor and presidential aspirant, Ron DeSantis,
whose administration says it is actively working to “protect parental rights”, which includes a prohibition on childhood education on gender, sexual orientation and critical race theory.
As part of his appeal to the party’s rightwing base DeSantis has sought to portray himself as a culture war warrior, cracking down on LGBTQ rights and taking conservative stances on the fight against Covid-19 and a host of other issues such as immigration.
This self-professed enemy of 'woke culture' has both enraged and instilled fear in educators.
The Manatee Education Association union president, Pat Barber, told local TV station Fox 13: “We have people who have spent their entire careers building their classroom libraries based on their professional and educational experience and understanding of the age of the children they teach.”
Barber added: “Now, their professional judgment and training are being substituted for the opinion of anyone who wishes to review and challenge the books. We’re focused on things that cause teachers to want to walk away from education because they can’t focus on their mission of educating children.”
Some teachers are even covering up their library books with paper.
Don Falls, a history teacher at Manatee high school, told the Herald-Tribune newspaper: “If you have a lot of books like I do, probably several hundred, it is not practical to run all of them through [the vetting process] so we have to cover them up.”
Far too many people prefer to live their lives in ignorance and denial of the world beyond their front lawn. Until now, teachers have been a bulwark against such darkness, but once again the political barbarians have breached the gates.
There would seem to be few remaining defences.
UPDATE: Thanks to TB for providing this link that shows not everyone is willing to lie down in the face of DeSantis's repression.
And there is this from Rural:
Knowledge of the world seems to be deteriorating in America, abetted by a president—ignorant of the world himself—whose formula for political success depends on more people becoming less informed.Despite all that has been responsibly reported about Russian interference, Trumpian malfeasance and his daily record of gross incompetence, a recent Abacus poll yielded some disheartening results:
If Trump loses, most Republican voters say they will believe the election was rigged. If he tries to stay in office after losing, they wouldn’t want the military to enforce the election results. In other words, their trust in or need for him is so powerful they don’t stop to think what sort of precedent it would set to leave the country in a state of impasse.It would appear that those polled have little insight into their country's relations with the rest of the world:
As many Americans think Russia is America’s best friend as think France, Italy or Germany is. This despite America having spent decades in a military alliance with France, Italy and Germany to protect against Russian military ambition, despite proven Russian use of cyberwarfare to disrupt American social peace and elections.
Under Trump’s time in office, Republicans are four times more likely to say relations with Canada have improved (41 per cent), than think they have worsened (8 per cent). This is mindless partisanship—the facts of the last few years were almost constant tension around NAFTA, dairy subsidies, steel and aluminum tariffs, the idea of Canada as a security risk, the G7 Charlevoix summit friction. But for Republican voters everything seems to be going swimmingly.In a time when the world sees the U.S. for what it has become, 80 per cent of Republicans think Trump has made America greater.
Less than 12 per cent of Republican voters think U.S. relations have soured with Great Britain, France or Germany. This despite almost constant friction in these relationships, on topics from trade to NATO to climate change to refugee and immigration policy. Trump has by all accounts a terrible relationship with President Emmanuel Macron of France and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. He was on bad terms with U.K. Conservative Prime Minister Teresa May and launched scathing attacks on London’s Mayor.
Half of Republican voters would go along with abandoning NORAD, roughly a third would support building a wall and putting troops along the Canadian border. Happily, most Americans are against invading Canada to get at our resources. But stop and think about the fact that only 56 per cent of Americans strongly oppose the idea.As children, almost all of us indulged in fantasies of one kind or another. It now appears that many Americans have entered a second, much darker childhood.
