This may be one reason education is failing, but hey, don’t tell Annie Leonard that. Watch this “wonderful” video – The Story of Stuff (funded by the Tides Foundation) and see if you would rate this as education or indoctrination.
Wow, talk about drinking the kool aid. If your school shows this, call the school office. This isn’t education, it is indoctrination and it doesn’t belong in the classroom. Not only that there are huge problems with the “facts” it is giving.
HT: Sal Hansen, Wendy MacArthur and PoliticalJules
9 comments
Brain… melting….
It’s like Barney crossed with field cookies….
.-= Foxfier´s last blog ..My Brain Is Melting….. =-.
@Foxfier, LOL… is field cookies the same as cow pies?
@Shane Vander Hart, Yep.
.-= Foxfier´s last blog ..My Brain Is Melting….. =-.
One might take issue that she necessarily oversimplifies, and that the numbers she quotes are sampled from sources which support her arguments…
But I’m sorry: she’s absolutely correct about this consumption cycle, how it’s got the world on a collision course with catastrophe, and how virtually EVERYONE in America is totally brainwashed to be little shopping, consuming, polluting machines.
She’s right that recycling will never be enough.
There’s just one thing she’s wrong about: Nothing can stop or reverse the system. It’s far too entrenched, and too well financed, and there aren’t enough people left who’ve been educated with REAL trade skills. To stop the machine would mean to automatically disenfranchise four fifths of the American workforce.
People in the third world understand this. And that’s why there’s a growing rage in countries where people have never gotten even a taste of this magnificent industrial abundance we promised them when the bulldozers and factory construction crews, drilling rigs, and mining equipment first rolled-in.
How do I know this? Because I create advertising for a living, and I’m exceptionally good at creating advertising which is very effective on Americans. It’s effective because I saw through the whole system many many years ago, and I have no illusions about it. When I sit in meetings with these kids fresh out of college who really think that advertising is about communicating a benefit to consumers, I just laugh. It’s about making sure consumers never have a contest in which to think of themselves as anything else.
Do I feel guilty? No. I didn’t create the system. I’m just a slave to it; like you and 99.9 percent of the other people in the world. Ultimately, you are beholden to billionaires and trillionaires who mostly consider us to be expendable stock. Frankly, there’s nowhere to go, and nothing you can do to escape it.
It’s tragic. It’s Easter Island on a global scale. And in the end, it won’t be nuclear bombs or terrorism or asteroids from space, or earthquakes or floods or global warming or ice ages which destroy humankind. It will be us, ourselves, all cooperatively complicit, enslaved to the doctrine of our own obliteration–because resources are absolutely finite, while population and the consumption mindset grow exponentially. The math is actually pretty simple, and it leads inevitably to only one conclusion.
There is no sustainability. When there are no longer enough resources to go around, it all ends in disease, violence, starvation, and finally, oblivion. And it won’t take another hundred years to get there. The beginning of the end has already begun.
But I’ll go in to work tomorrow and make more advertising. And please, keep buying the stuff… I want to keep my job.
@Dr. Scott, She lists numerous “facts” that are complete lies. I believe that we need to be good stewards, but I also don’t buy into the doomsday hype behind environmentalism.
@Dr. Scott, Also when she said that it is the government’s job to take care of us… that about made me want to puke. Where does she read that in the Constitution?
Dr. Scott, you sir are an idiot! How exactly has the standard of living risen so sharply in the last century and specifically in the last few decades? OOh OOh I know pick me…..IT WAS INNOVATION AND PRODUCTION ! It was capitalism, thinkers, inventors, entreprenuers! It is true that America needs more scientists/engineers/inventors/innovators and needs to live less on credit and more within their means. But haughty, self righteous buffons like Dr. Scott are the same that think there are too many people in the world, and that climate change actually exists. You obviouly need to pull your head out of your arse and take a economics class or two. Get some real facts, read some books not written by liberal idiots and stop buying into the B.S. onslaught of the populist media and mass hysteria of the brainwashed masses. Innovation solves problems, even the “lack of resources” problem if it existed, which it doesnt. Where are your facts, what resources. Any idiot can pull some liberally spun erroneous so called “facts” from some stupid websiteor supposed “study” to try to back up bogus and bald faced lies.
@Matt, Hey Matt, let’s stick to challenging ideas not name calling. Thanks!
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