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Under the dictatorship of images
Under the dictatorship of imagesInternational Network - March 28, 2024
If a few professional voices – teachers and doctors in particular – speak out against the overexposure of children to screens, the general public does not seem to fully understand the scale and deleterious nature of the phenomenon.
Attention and behavioral disorders, lack of autonomy, anxiety, apathy, loss of dexterity and taste for manual work, the list of collateral damage grows as the permissiveness of the parents and the bankruptcy of the family grow. 'an educational system subject to globalist ideology, where digital technology occupies an ever more important place. A system where the child is no longer “taught” but “accompanied” – that is to say assisted for some and abandoned for others, depending on the good faith and skills of the teacher…
Everything is not to be thrown away in the new pedagogies in force which intend to make the student "the actor of his learning", but to minimize the role of transmission of the teacher, in favor of a presumed collaborative dynamic of children – which remains, in fact, very unequal and relative – we sacrifice knowledge for a few ideological illusions and the whims of irresponsible communicators.
Distance learning during the Covid period has shown this well: apart from a minority of particularly keen students, the results of the experiment were disastrous, both from the point of view of the acquisition of knowledge and that of personal development. Even today, teachers are trying to fill the gaps and manage the problems linked to abusive confinements, having to deal acrobatically with everyone's delay. It is certain that this episode will have marked a turning point in the student's relationship to his need to understand and learn, breaking in some way the link with his tutor in favor of the machine and the new education lobbies.
Like the parent, the teacher is, more than an authority figure, a model. A model certainly imperfect but endowed with character, and above all a bearer of knowledge and a sense of justice. Depersonalizing knowledge is perhaps not a tragedy – after all, from a certain age anyone can freely educate themselves thanks to the infinite resources offered by the Internet – but it seems to me that this dangerously contributes to the generalized dehumanization of our societies, where new communication tools have disrupted the interactive issues and the temporality of relationships, to the point of leading to all kinds of neuroses linked to the cult of immediacy and consumption.
In societies where we are assailed by images and representations, where information – often of the most futile nature – is systematically illustrated, manipulated, staged, following the sacred laws of advertising, being under construction is literally found lost between a virtual universe and the real world.
Digital capitalism has made the child a precocious consumer, delivered to the dictatorship of images and the predation of a perverse ultraliberalism. If we observe in classrooms more and more students presenting difficulties and all kinds of “dys-” disorders, it is also because the brain, overloaded with violent and senseless images, is desperately seeking a way out of the pathology of the world thus exposed, no longer available for healthy learning.
Observing on a daily basis the cognitive and behavioral impact of violence experienced in images on young people, we can resolutely consider ourselves lucky to be part of generations who have only experienced the private use and generalization of digital tools in recent years. 'adulthood. The dependence of young people on screens, encouraged by the trend and the need for integration, being a means of enslaving the most vulnerable by depriving them of their creative faculties, initiative and reflection.
We know that reading is fundamental in the development of the imagination, training in critical thinking and self-affirmation, as much as in mastering the language and acquiring the skills of expression. And when it is not possible or when it is not of particular interest to the child, its benefits can be partly offset by different construction and projection games, calling on the imagination and creativity. . But when there are neither books nor games, and the child finds himself under the influence of a screen which enslaves him, traumatizes him and systematically lowers him to the zero level of culture, when he is cut off from the world and nature, then it is not surprising that humanity returns to its unfortunate disposition towards war and totalitarianism.
According to the leitmotif of our dear president, here comes the “end of carelessness”. But the question that should be asked, urgently, is the following: if we are told of an end, what precisely should the carelessness give way to? To terror and the reign of perversity? Or to a superior knowledge, which would allow us to do without our leaders?
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Bill Maher compares universities to a 'North Korean re-education camp'
Bill Maher compares universities to a 'North Korean re-education camp'Digital Dawn - Oct 25, 2023
Bill Maher: “Don’t go to college”
Bill Maher advised young Americans not to go to college because it makes them stupid and elite schools resemble North Korean re-education camps that are racist against Asians and don't teach not the story accurately.
“If ignorance is a disease, Harvard Yard is Wuhan's market,” the host of HBO's “Real Time” said. “As an Ivy League graduate who knows the value of a liberal education, I have one piece of advice for America's youth: Don't go to college, and if you absolutely must go, don't Don't go to an elite university, because, as recent events have shown, it only makes you stupid. What happened in Israel has few, if any, positive effects, but one of them is that it opened America's eyes to how higher education is transformed into indoctrination into a stew of bad ideas, among them the simplistic notion that the world is a binary place where everyone is either an oppressor or an oppressed. In the case of Israel, the oppressors are babies and children. The same students who will tell you that words are violence, and silence is violence, were supportive when Hamas terrorists engaged in Viking rape and murder. They knew where to point the finger, towards the murdered. And then they went to ethics class.” Maher continues: “I agree that a certain amount of madness is expected of students, but mixing Jägermeister and tomato juice is not the same as siding with terrorists. Thirty-four Harvard student groups signed a letter saying “the apartheid regime is the one to blame,” proving they don't know what apartheid is. In fact, they don't know much. But that doesn't stop them from having an opinion. They have convinced themselves that Israel is the most repressive regime in history, because they have no knowledge of history, nor even the desire to know it, and that real history is not covered in their course on the intersectionality of politics and gender identities. »
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Children smile, you are being filmed
Children smile, you are being filmedThe Defender – Oct 24, 2023
Monitoring children at school is a $3,1 billion industry – and it's making kids “anxious” and “scared.”
Technology surveillance companies that sell their products to school administrators are creating a "digital dystopia" for America's schoolchildren, a new report from the American Civil Liberties Union concludes.
Technology surveillance companies that sell their products to school administrators are creating a “digital dystopia” for American schoolchildren, a new report from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) concludes.
In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and rising school shootings, a $3,1 billion education technology (EdTech) project from the surveillance industry has made huge profits by claiming as its digital tools – including video cameras, facial recognition software, artificial intelligence (AI)-based behavior detection systems, social and online media monitoring, and much more, help prevent bullying, self-harm and violence at school.
However, the industry has not supported this claim with evidence and has instead used fear mongering as its primary marketing tactic, according to the ACLU report.
The ACLU, after conducting its own research and reviewing other studies commissioned by the U.S. Department of Justice, found a “lack of clear evidence” that products advertised by EdTech companies ensure student safety.
Chad Marlow, the report's lead author, said that as a parent of two K-XNUMX students, he understands the concerns of parents and school officials about children's safety.
Mr. Marlow told the Defender that he regrets school administrators and state legislatures using funds for surveillance technology “to keep our children safe.”
“These decisions haunt me,” he said, “because as a senior policy advisor to the ACLU specializing in privacy, surveillance and technology issues, I know firsthand that surveillance does not deter bad behavior and that it certainly does not protect our students”.
Mr Marlow said the 61-page report reveals a “surveillance nightmare” that “unintentionally harms our children” by denying them access to important information, undermining their trust in adults and making it “too risky ” communicating some of their thoughts.
“This is the exact opposite of the lesson we should be teaching our students,” he said.
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The surreal figures of the collapse of the school level in France
Digital Dawn - 06 Sep 2023
by Marc Vanguard
This analysis was carried out by Marc Vanguard, who produces weekly statistics on France. This time it is a very sad observation of national education at half mast that is made.
The following is a series of messages posted on X by Vanguard, you can read the same messages on X and subscribe to his account
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“School produces masses of violent and uneducated young people” – Eve Vaguerlant
“School produces masses of violent and uneducated young people” – Eve VaguerlantThe Epoch Times – August 04, 2023
Violence at school – The striking analysis of Eve Vaguerlant: “School produces masses of violent and uneducated young people”
For Eve Vaguerlant, school is the scene of a trivialization of violence and "many students now only interact through blows and insults": "We teach them impunity, this culture victimization where nothing is ever their fault, they do not know how to apologize, there is never any sanction to make them understand that they have made a mistake. »
An endemic violence which is also the product of the lack of education: “Students function with very few vocabulary words, they use crutches of language like 'wallah', 'wesh', etc. This creates a climate of permanent verbal aggression. […] We produce masses of young people who only know violence as a mode of expression, it is very worrying. " If Pap Ndiaye has made sexuality education one of his priorities, Eve Vaguerlant believes that the minister is in the wrong fight: "When we see the violence in schools, the vertiginous drop in the level, that makes me seems totally out of step with the reality and the needs on the ground. »
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An informed guide to fighting real misinformation
An informed guide to fighting real misinformationFrance Evening - Apr 29, 2023
Professors, members of NGOs, and of course journalists, instead of fulfilling their traditional social role as mere information mediators or whistleblowers, maintain relations with government administrations, intelligence agencies, but also with the army.
Instead of carrying out the investigation without conflicts of interest and in a distanced way, in the service of public affairs, many of these actors have recycled themselves in what Lowenthal calls the “fight against disinformation”.
A pattern that is well known to readers of France-Soir with the report of the Twitter Files, the episodes of which have been published in our columns since December 2022. These internal documents of the blue bird were unveiled by Elon Musk. They have enabled investigative journalists to uncover several major scandals. These show the extent to which both free information and freedom of expression are threatened, due to the growing influence of political power: it is indeed on the pretext of this fight against disinformation that the latter exercises censorship.
This mechanism is not only at work across the Atlantic. Changes in the European regulation of digital platforms (the Digital Services Act) raise the same fundamental questions: to what extent can politics interfere with the sphere of information? Ultimately, can we then speak of a sort of “industrial mechanism of censorship” with a view to controlling the latter?
A new episode of the Twitter Files produced by Lowenthal himself addresses this subject and will soon be mentioned by France-Soir.
In the meantime, here is an exceptional text by the essayist which reports on his aforementioned observations and which exposes a new form of manipulation of information. This is essentially based on this mix of genres as surprising as it is serious between actors who should never collaborate together because of obvious questions of ethics: academics, members of NGOs, journalists with politicians, industrialists and soldiers.
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Noise, this invisible waste, poisons us, writes ecologist Jacques Tassin
Noise, this invisible waste, poisons us, writes ecologist Jacques TassinReporterre - Apr 24, 2023
The one who has just published "Listen to the voices of the world" believes that "our societies are sick of no longer knowing how to listen."
We live in a world interwoven with voices, which release meaning beyond the invisible of the night or the distance, and reveal the marvelous part of the world. These voices carry us and speak to us, without our even paying attention to them. Even abiotic sound productions – thunder, murmuring rain or rolling waves – remain meaningful and interpretable. Plants, we recently learned, are also sensitive to sound vibrations. Just like trees, in a way, listen. But contemporary noise, this filth of our industrious societies, blurs access to these sensitive realities of life. The Anthropocene is coupled with Thorivocene (from the Greek thóryvos, noise), an era of din and irrelation.
Noise-free zones have fallen by 50-90% since the industrial boom began in the 108th century, and cities themselves have become unlivable. In the heart of Île-de-France alone, the noise caused by transport results in a loss of eleven months of life for each inhabitant, ie an overall loss of 000 years of life in good health. More than 70% of Parisians are bothered by noise, even though double-glazed windows are closed. And in high school environments, listening to amplified music through headphones today leads one in seven final year students to have to put up with a thirty-year-old ear. Noise creeps in everywhere. And, everywhere, it alters listening.
But we are not alone in suffering. Acting like a relational switch, noise blocks the flow of life. It obstructs the free circulation of voices, multiplies the snags in the tight fabric of relationships between living beings. Anthropophony has now invaded marine spaces by multiplying the deafening snoring of ships, the repeated percussion of mining surveys and other military sonar issues. It is one of the sources of emblematic cetacean strandings.
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Summer University: Oasis Festival 2023
Summer University: Oasis Festival 2023Oasis Cooperative - Apr 21, 2023
The Oasis Festival is the big annual event for French school children.
Hundreds of people already living in the oasis or wishing to live there meet there to share their experiences, their successes, their discouragements, their dreams... It is also an opportunity for a wider audience to discover this way of life. .
This year, the Oasis Festival will take place from August 23 to 27 at the ecovillage of Sainte-Camelle (Ariège) and will take the form of a summer university.
The objective will be to explore the political, cultural, social and economic dimensions of life in the school, through testimonies of inhabitants and inhabitants of schoolchildren but also of sociologists, philosophers, economists and artists able to answer to this question :
How are oases laboratories for experimenting with new ways of socializing together?
During this event, which is aimed at 500 participants, various formats will be offered: conferences, round tables, workshops, mini-trainings and visits and presentations of Oasis.
All this in a festive and family atmosphere!
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How low-tech can escape capitalist takeover
Reporterre - Apr 20, 2023
In “Low-Tech Perspectives. How to live, do and organize differently? Quentin Mateus and Gauthier Roussilhe wonder: can low tech retain its emancipatory potential or is it doomed to be led astray.
High-tech pollutes and alienates us; faced with them, more energy-efficient alternatives are being developed, which can be appropriated by their users and adapted to our needs: low-tech. While this idea is comforting, it is too simple to be true. This is often the case when a turnkey solution seems to have been discovered. In an exciting little book, Low-Tech Perspectives. How to live, do and organize differently? (Divergences editions), Quentin Mateus and Gauthier Roussilhe explore the ambiguities of low-tech and identify the pitfalls into which the movement risks falling.
“Nothing says that low-tech represents a miracle solution, but it helps us to understand that we are going through […] a technical crisis”, they ask straight away. The authors, respectively a long-time companion of the Low-Tech Lab and an independent researcher specializing in the environmental consequences of digital technology, had the opportunity to observe low-tech initiatives in the four corners of France and Europe, and offer in this book a stepping stone.
This reflection is all the more important as the trend is reaching a tipping point: now that the myriad of low-tech initiatives are attracting public attention, can this technological path retain its emancipatory potential by spreading massively, or is it doomed to be taken over by the market and led astray?
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They must have a good reason
Digital Dawn - Apr 18, 2023
There is a strange idea that if you don't know something, it doesn't exist.
It's a bit like the metaphor of the ostrich sticking its head in the sand. But it goes beyond denial. Ignorance is when you don't know something at all, denial is when you know it, but don't know it.
What I'm talking about here is when you know something and you don't deny it, but just rationalize it by saying "they must have a good reason for doing this" or "maybe we don't know not everything there is to know about it”. Which is often followed by "and I don't have the time (the desire, the attention, the interest, the curiosity, the capacity, the intelligence, etc.) to go further".
This has always bothered me to some extent, but I have to admit that I myself have been slightly guilty of this kind of reasoning. I mean, do we really have time to check everything? Well, now I think we have to take the time, and, of course, not everything is important enough to require truth checking. It's a terrible thing to say, but I'm afraid it's the truth.
Part of the “gullibility” that causes many people to brush things off with the assumption that all is well stems from the indoctrination they have been subjected to from an early age. I grew up in a culture that seemed really obsessed with the safety of people, especially children. Think of all the toy recalls and such. As soon as a toy comes out with the slightest bit of uncertainty about how it might harm your child, it's taken off the market.
I shouldn't say I "grew up" with it, as most toys from my childhood would be considered lethal weapons today - lawn darts, pellet and pellet guns, Vac-U-Forms, chemistry sets, Easy Bake ovens (it was my sister's toy, she was a little girl, I was a little boy – I'm telling you this for clarity). The “security craze” didn't really begin until a decade later. I even remember that a child I knew received an “Atomic Energy Laboratory” toy whose kit contained real uranium ore.
I would have died (literally) to get my hands on one of these toys.
That was the time.
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Covid from 2019 to February 2023, an essential documentary base
Covid from 2019 to February 2023, an essential documentary baseProfession Gendarme - Apr 12, 2023
Guillaume Girard delivers here an exceptional decryption of all that this story contained known until February 2023, in support of 233 documents that we should all archive before some disappear.
by Guillaume Girard
1. Sars precedents and the hijacking of virological research
Coronaviruses have been studied for a long time
Coronaviruses (“crown” viruses) are a large family known since the 301s2, common to humans and animals2002, such as those of human bronchitis or mouse hepatitis for example. Dedicated studies have multiplied since the first Sars epidemic in XNUMX.
The youngest are not affected by the respiratory syndrome, only the very old die
The lethality of Sars-Cov-1 (2002) and Mers (2012) is limited to the elderly or immunocompromised, and this also applies to Sars-Cov-2, despite specific mutations giving it greater contagiousness. The rate of infection in the general population is low3 and the lethality is at the level of seasonal influenza.4
Spike protein is well known
The “spike”, in French spike protein, is a protein common to many viruses. It is an infectious and inflammatory protein, a virotoxin. That of coronaviruses is well documented5; it has been the subject of numerous publications, even patents6,7, sometimes filed explicitly for vaccine purposes8, and possibly relating to an entire coronavirus9. Three American researchers, including Ralph Baric, still regularly under contract with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), filed a patent2002 in early 10 on methods for producing recombinant coronaviruses, at the dawn of the first Sars epidemic. In 2004, it was the turn of the Institut Pasteur and the CNRS to file a patent on a strain of Sars coronavirus.11
“Gain of function” is a proven practice and meant to be framed
The practices of biotechnology consisting in inserting one or portions of the genome into an existing genome are practiced, secretly or officially, in all the countries having laboratories and qualified scientists, in particular in the USA, but also in Canada, in China. Given the health risks incurred, a moratorium imposed the suspension of these practices on American soil in 201412; partially lifted in 201713, it is proposed to renew it in 202114. Between 2015 and 2017, Ralph Baric and his colleague Boyd Yount filed several successive versions of a patent relating to chimeric “spike” proteins.15
Military research is outsourced
Many establishments carry out research around viruses, including coronaviruses, in particular at the initiative of the United States or China. DARPA16 is the US military research agency that has funded biological agent research programs for many years. One of its main subcontractors is Moderna, of which Stéphane Bancel, the current CEO, is co-holder of a 2017 patent on an mRNA for oncology17. In addition, the officially non-governmental EcoHealth Alliance is a multi-million dollar organization from the US government. Directed by Peter Daszack, it has, among other things, funded the Wuhan laboratory for its research on gain of function, in partnership with the University of North Carolina (USA). The funding circuits for this outsourced work are detailed in Michel Cucchi's work, “Influences and Pandemics”18. Some of this funding comes from the “Pentagon”, the Department of Defence19, which also supports various private research structures via consortia20,21 within which there are many pharmaceutical companies.22
The WHO is infiltrated by “philanthropic capitalism”
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These children who have school in the forest
Reporterre - Feb 22, 2023
Observe animals, make log benches... In the Gard, students have school in the forest. A new kind of classroom that is creating enthusiasm in France.
With a determined step, the school children of Lirac head towards their educational forest. Inaugurated two years ago, the plot adjoins the school of this small village in the Rhone Valley. Today, CM1-CM2 students have the task of imagining the layout of what will become their second classroom. With a few constraints: the infrastructure must be ephemeral and made with inexpensive or even free recyclable materials, all without electricity.
“We can go to school outside and tackle any subject. The idea is to also be able to take the liberty of stopping when birds pass by or to observe that a tree has grown. »
