America: If you don't think for yourself, this country will do it for you.

this is why we can't have nice things.


besides- every country is enslaved by the central banking system. There's nowhere to run.

a reply to: lordcomac

That isn't true at all. Disregarding the third world, China, or Russia, there is always Iceland.

The media already thinks for a large majority of the country.

This can be seen in last years events in Ferguson and this years events in Baltimore and most recently in McKinney.

originally posted by: the2ofusr1
a reply to: Blumenkranz

I hear you . getting to the point on how to think as opposed to what to think is a very big step . It's such a waist of the human potential to submit our kids to the brain machine we call the educational system in the west . Heck if that were not enough they give us TV ....

How to think is easy. People, especially in the US it seems get wrapped up in ideologies, they support or reject an idea based on how others they've identified with react to it, and they try to make decisions according to a guiding principal like "What would Jesus do", or "the path of small government", or "let the market decide" or others. The easiest thing to do is to let go of this. The only rule you should follow is that you should never blindly adhere to a rule.

I'll give you a challenge, I try to do this with everything in my own life actually. The next time someone comes up with an idea as a solution to a problem reject it. Reject the person on the other side of the argument too. Then reject every other solution people come up with (there's usually not more than 3). After that look at all of the facts and come up with your own solution, and own way of implementing it.

Once you can do that regularly you've learned the first step to how to think. Here's the second step: Recognize that your idea is almost certainly completely wrong, and is guaranteed to be atleast partially wrong. Every single bit of knowledge in the whole of human history is the result of overturning previously incorrect ideas. Our current body of knowledge is likely this way too. The best minds in any field in the whole of human history are generally capable of coming up with a single mostly right idea once in their entire lives.

Once you realize you're probably wrong too, it's much easier to not get blinded by ideology in the future. As the saying goes, it's the wise man who realizes he knows nothing.

originally posted by: lordcomac
When I was a kid I hated it because it was boring.
Now, I hate it because it's all lies.

I wonder if making those of us intelligent enough to see through the game spiteful of it is just another layer of control.

I take the opposite approach. With history, you know going into it that everything you're learning is unreliable information. It's the one subject in life that is very much upfront about this fact, which oddly enough makes it the most honest discipline.