Training today. Trainer from academic setting, about my age. She had us do a group exercise that purported to show how we could have greater success (strangely defined) if we changed our assumptions. A common trainer's parlor game, never with any validity. She contrasted American responses to those of Russians, when the training was offered there. Several possible explanations were offered, but she told us it that because of their communist heritage, they were concerned tha...t everyone got ahead together, and cooperated automatically.
This is insane. Habitat For Humanity and other nonprofits have a hard time getting locals to volunteer in former communist countries. It's every man for himself.
This is not only ludicrous, it is offensive. Part of the reason my Romanian children went hungry was because of western apologists who believed and taught such things. Hungry. I'm gonna be in trouble next time I meet with my supervisor because of my comment today.
This is not only ludicrous, it is offensive. Part of the reason my Romanian children went hungry was because of western apologists who believed and taught such things. Hungry. I'm gonna be in trouble next time I meet with my supervisor because of my comment today.
8 comments:
Are we supposed to answer a fool according to his folly, or not answer a fool according to his folly? Clearcut guidance would be nice to have.
Training? Strange word for indoctrination. But I suppose that's why they paid the indoctrinator, since it Works.
They came out OK, so all's well that ends well, but I can't even imagine how angry it must make you to learn of their having been mistreated before you took them. God bless you. They hit the jackpot.
It's a good example of some sort of no true Scotsman/intentional blindness type thing.
Clearly, her good ideas may have been twisted by a few random individuals, but overall, they feel good. Therefore, they are good, facts be damned.
I think we all see this frequently in small situations at work. People who don't look in to their plans very hard so they can say they didn't see consequences coming. Bah.
I could rail for a while about the Christian versions of this I saw (my good plan didn't work because Satan interfered!), but I'll agree the liberal version has some really disastrous consequences, and is kinda smarmy to boot.
Most recent example: a doctor I listen to was condemning witch doctors/traditional healers in Africa because bad practice there is part of what started the ebola spread. Liberals promptly jumped on him for criticizing other cultures.
Thankfully, he doubled down with the "this is not a game, they died because of this, I'm not going to act like this is some preference I shouldn't interfere with".
Yes Bethany - I keep forgetting your counter-reactions, and those of your peers, my sons, are likely to be quite different than mine. Though now that Jonathan works in Massachusetts he is living in a world of different assumptions from Concord Christian, certainly. (Ben in TX is another story.)
Yet where I work the casual and unquestioned assumptions are pretty much uninterruptedly in one direction. There is seldom any indoctrination, because it's unnecessary. Just reminders and social enforcement that ratchets up when unchallenged.
Diversity - everybody looks different but thinks the same.
Cooperation - everybody doing what the authority tells them to do.
Same words. Different definitions.
Has the woman no read de Tocqueville* on the subject of American self-help and self-organizations? We tend to organize into ad hoc groups for social purposes at the drop of a hat; it's one of the things that's unusual about American society.
* Mostly a rhetorical question. I have no doubt that he's hopelessly non-progressive and never heard of.
Just reminders and social enforcement that ratchets up when unchallenged.
That is indoctrination.
People haven't really been educated on political deception, WMDeceptions, or the art of propaganda these days, especially in public institutions. They aren't educated on it, but it is used on them all the time.
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