1/8 - Fear of learning, especially the kind of learning that makes a human being less susceptible to manipulative indoctrination, is at the core of radically Conservative state governments' school curriculum policies. It is unsubtle anti-intellectualism. The reasons are clear. 2/8 - To the @GOP and the Radical and Religious Right movements within you (to include Dominionist politics): You have done deliberate harm to this nation by being the chief ideological motivators of these anti-intellectual policies, along with well-paid pastors and pundits.

1/22 - Your career success in politics, punditry, or preaching should not be threatened by conflicts in your Apparent Driving Moral Philosophy.

However, you should insure your career success's safety in this regard by having a good Actual Driving Moral Philosophy. [thread] 2/22 - Trumpism, the politics of the Radical Right and the Religious Right, and the political ideology behind American Conservatism as currently practiced, these all show shocking gaps between Apparent and Actual Driving Moral Philosophies.

1. Degrees of personhood can say a lot about the privileged in society. Who are "People" here? In America, White Males assigned inferior personhood to women, Africans, and those of the Indigenous nations. We said some of that was God-approved. Now, "corporations are people." 2. Mind you, there is a common thread in all of these examples of societal and political decisions about who gets to be a person, who gets the blessings of equality with the Wealthy Landowners and Industrialists. These examples have helped benefit and protect the super-rich.

1. Robert Redfield was a professor of anthropology & one of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s favorite teachers. He gave us the idea of "folk societies," like-minded communities which, Redfield and Vonnegut saw, were on the way out as technology and automation brought vast changes to America. 2. Not only has technology and automation grown, perhaps not exactly as Vonnegut feared, but today's Information Age has changed us almost as drastically as we have thrown off many of the racial attitudes that came from manipulation by our powerful and prosperous forefathers.

1/7 - So ... when and if the millions who hate liberals and still love Trump come around, maybe not to accepting Biden's win or to admitting Republican corruption, sedition, or insurrection, but at least to not actively participate in plans to continue it... 2/7 - ... when accountability comes for highly-placed leaders who manipulated millions and became an actual domestic threat to our Constitution and our Government ...
... when heads roll for a worsened pandemic and a multitude who were manipulated to make it that way ...

1/ - I have Tweeted before about the number study I am doing, & I want to update this information. I am examining prime numbers from 2 on upward - I am currently at 6733 - to understand more about their Pisano periods: the cycle length the Fibonacci Series has modulo any integer. 2/ - In particular, I want to discover more about what we apparently do not yet understand: the behavior of the Pisano period, which for a prime p ending in 3 or 7 divides 2*(p+1), and for a prime ending in 1 or 9 divides p-1. When I do the division, I get what I call the Ratio.

1/4 - POPULISM!!!

Which "hoi polloi" should govern?

The "We the People" hoi polloi?

Or the hoi polloi, millions strong, manipulated by @FoxNews, @OANN, @newsmax, and certain prosperous evangelical pastors? 2/4 - The descendants of the hoi polloi who bought into Manifest Destiny & who were okay with exterminating Natives & enslaving Africans?

Or the hoi polloi that sees humanity as equal?

They each have argued dangers of government by "hoi polloi," & point fingers at each other!

1/9 - There is a class war being waged - a war of intimidation - against America, & its roots are centuries old. It has turned deadly in recent years, with a worsened pandemic and a Capitol riot among deliberate attacks on us, but it also fuels the fight against Progressivism. 2/9 - Industrialists, corporatists, and the keepers of huge sums of inherited wealth are the ranks from which those super-powerful super-rich who are fighting this war of intimidation against the rest of us come. They use politicians, pundits, preachers, & psychological tactics.

1. Part of the problem of my non-academic pursuit of learning about the field of philosophy is EXACTLY that it is a non-academic pursuit of learning about it. I can watch classroom lectures but not participate in them. I am limited in feedback I can get on my own observations. 2. There is also the age at which I started really digging into all of this. Yes, I took Honors Philosophy 101 (remembered course designator is approximate), but I was steeped in a Southern Baptist evangelical worldview and thoughtview then, as, I believe, was my instructor.

1/9. There must be, I think, a whole school of philosophical thought I'm not seeing. I suspect it's out there, but it's in disguise, or surrounded by deceptive similarities that aren't as good, or as genuine. Or maybe it's psychology rather than philosophy, I don't know. 2/9. Help me out.
What I am thinking about is the whole concept of the betterment of oneself: Where do we draw the line between accepting ourselves as we are, warts and all, and trying to improve even when it is difficult to do so?

1. Trumpists & @GOP Radical and Religious Right fanatics - which seem to identify themselves as the only genuine Republicans - fall into two classes, with some overlap: Manipulators and Manipulated. They protect the powerful while keeping the majority exploited, ignorant & weak. 2. If hundreds of thousands die unnecessarily because of the pandemic implications of this widespread mentality of either manipulating the masses or "faithfully"/"loyally" accepting authority's manipulation of them, so be it.

1/10 - It's 5:52 in the morning, and I am revisiting decades-old thoughts about race, class, and privilege; about "Line" and "Staff" jobs and who tended to get each in the civilian Federal workplace from which I retired; ... 2/10 - ... about EEO, Diversity, "avoiding the appearance of impropriety" in assigning salary ranges to different classes of hard and sometimes dirty work, and the extent to which these salaries and classes seem "Stamped from the Beginning," to use a phrase from @DrIbram.

1) I dreamed this morning I was part of the cast for a new @DAVID_LYNCH movie, & he was shooting fairly improvisational scenes with me & several other performers, including @PattyArquette, around a large unpaved loop road with trees & buildings, around this time of year, Fall ... 2) There were ideas in the minds of the actors that Lynch had given them of where their stories were going and what to do. I performed a kind of "spazz-out" moment in a scene we shot near strange electronic devices and an uncertain sense whether we were outdoors or indoors. ...

1) - Confession time:

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I in the name of non-discrimination came out on exactly the WRONG SIDE of the Diversity Training issue, due at least in part to my innate stubbornness & white male Christian heterosexual southern-born-and-raised privilege.

https://twitter.com/cooperchip1/status/1302316946176774146

2) - I used my new fascination - internal social media at the Federal @DeptofDefense agency where I worked from 1979 to 2012 - to sound off frequently against quotas and set-asides, and against every move by our EEO office ...

1. Let's take another look at the "duopoly" argument that some Progressives use as a reason they do not want to support either mainstream party, Democratic or Republican, or their candidates. Those Progressive make valid, scary, germane points in the age of @realDonaldTrump. 2. It is no secret that I, while I see value in this argument and in fact think Progressives have the best ideas for American government improvement, some of them woefully overdue, that I have ever seen, sadly still think they were used to divide liberals and elect Trump.

1. Since purposes and intentions are diverse and complicated, it occurs to me that the generally odious practice of Manufacturing Consent - and its cousin, manipulation of consensus, can be applied by powerful people and groups to constructive ends. 2. Mind you, such techniques being wielded more effectively by those who are rich and/or powerful stand as reasons why our society does well to govern itself so that the Consent Manufacturers & consensus manipulators do not have outsized influence.

1) - I've trotted out this, my variation on a W.C. Fields/P.T. Barnum/"Canada Bill" Jones aphorism, before, with another pic (the @tassagency_en photo from the Oval Office of the @WhiteHouse the day after @realDonaldTrump fired @Comey). I've reset it to another photo. Here's why: 2) - The original aphorism read "... to let a sucker keep his money." It had to do with being conned, and with being an easy mark for a con artist. It's almost a Categorical Imperative for such a scammer, when faced with an easily manipulated/fooled mark.

1/7 - An actual 2000 statement from the Family Research Council (@FRCdc) presents starkly their Christian supremacism: “While it is true that the United States of America was founded on the sacred principle of religious freedom for all, that liberty was never intended ..." 2/7 - "... to exalt other religions to the level that Christianity holds in our country’s heritage...Our founders expected that Christianity — and no other religion — would receive support from the government as long as that support did not violate peoples’ consciences ..."

1 - I'm not convinced that theocracy is a good idea even if the religion it uses as its basis is sound. At the very least, faiths that best work hand in hand with world governments have seemed to me not to specifically present themselves as sole owners of truth & right.

https://twitter.com/BeyondBlonde3/status/1198987044955049984

2 - But even if a religion claims or is seen to be the sole source of transcendent or divine truth, with or without a consequent belief that its word must be spread to many/the whole world, whole new problems come about with popularized forms of the religion. Popularity is power.

1. @DonaldJTrumpJr - Technically, the United States of America does not have a state religion, and we have an Establishment Clause that prevents such.

Realistically, we do: It's the manipulated "Christianity" that justified slavery and genocide and protects the powerful.

https://twitter.com/JasonSCampbell/status/1193698339390476290

2. @DonaldJTrumpJr - It's a version of the Christian religion that flavored the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and now flavors MAGA. It is the doctrine manipulated by @700club, popularized by Prosperity Gospel preachers and megachurches.

1 - Something that I believe now as a 62-year-old Christian that I was not raised to believe when I grew up Southern Baptist:

A claim of Jesus Christ as Lord is not some magical inoculation against teachers and preachers who will manipulate you in that holy name. 2 - Further, depending on faith in Jesus as sufficient to steer you away from being misled, without developing ability to think critically, speak bravely against wolves in sheep's clothing, & suspect those who crave power, even in the church, is living with an inadequate arsenal.