ORLANDO, Fla. — Florida teens who believe drinking a cap of bleach will prevent HIV and a shot of Mountain Dew will stop pregnancy have prompted lawmakers to push for an overhaul of sex education in the state.
Another myth is that Florida teens also believe that smoking marijuana will prevent a person from getting pregnant, Local 6 reported.
State lawmakers said the myths are spreading because of Florida’s abstinence-only sex education, Local 6 reported.
They are proposing a bill that would require a more comprehensive approach, the report said.
It would still require teaching abstinence but students would also learn about condoms and other methods of birth control and disease prevention.
Republicanism is authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is control. Control is dictating to other Human Beings not only what they can and cannot do…but what they can and cannot know as well. The willful and purposeful imposition of ignorance, superstition, and fear.
The purpose of this control is to dehumanize human beings into easily manipulated units….units who obey the authoritarians by going to work at an assigned job with no benefit to the worker but subsistence, while the authoritarian boss grows rich off of their labor. Units who hand over a portion of their earnings to support authoritarian wars…and efforts to oppress other units. Units who can be counted on to vote in an assigned way, benefiting authoritarian politician rulers and keeping them in power. Units who are unequipped and unable to think for themselves and thus believe whatever their authoritarian masters tell them…including who to attack for being “different,” in other words, for not kowtowing to the authoritarians. Where are these units produced? In schools that are kept underfunded and exist more to program that to educate. The willful and purposeful imposition of ignorance, superstition, and fear. The willful and purposeful stripping away of human free will and dignity.
Republicanism.
Where does this authority come from? Who chooses who is a unit and who is a ruler? Why the ultimate authoritarian of course, God. Whose word can only be interpreted by…the authoritarians in charge of the Church.
Nice work, if you can intimidate and subjugate the populace into falling for it. This is the philosophy that has created our current reality. Ad we can see how THAT is working out.
Humans beings are not sheep, but they can be programmed/educated to become sheep.
To become a “lower class” of human being. That is the goal of Republicanism, producing an elite made up of privileged white males ….with a lower class of humans to serve and obey them. Especially females who are subjugated by having control of their bodies, needed to produce more units, placed under the authority of …..Republican Authoritarians.
The willful and purposeful imposition of ignorance, superstition, and fear.
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… deliberately cultivated evangelicals who up until then felt strongly about not being involved in politics.
troutfisherman and Frederick Clarkson over at dKos have done outstanding research and written excellent diaries about how the churches themselves have been taken over by Rovian/Bushian authoritarians.
So over the religion-mongers are the cynical manipulators. It’s quite a mess.
This did not happen by accident, so you are entirely correct:
and the right to express it freely in any manifestation/identity is still really one of the corner stone threats to authoritarianism. In any authoritarian/theocratic society one of the first things they still is try to control women: their access to education, birth control, political office, their right just to speak and be.
Cheap. Labor. Pool.
from raw story:
http://209.85.173.104/search?q…
its economic aspects too. The sub-prime mortgage debacle is a vivid example — exploiting the “lower class” to create new customers and new profits. But the mortgage marketing scheme went too far and their plan blew up in their faces.
It shows a possibility that the philosophy of Republican authoritarianism has gone so far that it could destroy itself. The need for, and abuse of, troop rotations in Iraq is another instance of how the philosophy can start to destroy itself.
There is more than enough evidence for the majority of Americans to conclude Republican authoritarianism should be voted out of office at the very least, and we do have a chance to inflict a lasting wound on it. But history would suggest it’s impossible to ever kill.
Here in California the Governor’s office moved sharply to the left, as Democrat Gray Davis was replaced by Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger.
And being an easily manipulated unit is part of being human — if being easily manipulated is part of the reservoir of habits which one grows up with. I trust, Budhy, you’ve read Stanley Milgram’s “Obedience to Authority” and know what people can be made to do.
You know, Budhy, that the elite of privileged white males does not need to be produced; it’s been around since the age of empires begun.
The Republicans are in charge of Florida politics even though they’re a minority in the state; they do it by using a law against felon voting to scrub the voter rolls, illegally, of Black people. Greg Palast revealed this back in ’01. It’s probably still going on.
As for abstinence-only, schoolkids forget most of what they’re taught in the public schools anyway. The disciplinary system exercised there is a series of “classroom management” tricks and stuff meant to produce what Foucault called “docile bodies.” It works quite well for what it’s meant to produce. And the system of letter-grading, a behavioral convenience meant to keep the rowdies in their seats and studying, also means that few students remember any part of the “learning” ritual once the letter-grades have been issued.
The Republicans are doubtless playing off of the moral outrage of parents who dawningly recognize that sex education is the only subject that will hold the students’ attention in any way not dictated by the classroom management scheme. The Democrats will doubtless do the same to preserve their careers from within a competitive system of elections dominated by the appeals of attack advertising. If, that is, they can get any power in Florida at all.
I had the good fortune to go to a public school and a private school back in the day (way before AYP and NCLB), neither of which cared a whole lot about grades and both of which taught me what I wanted to know.
If you want social change, Budhy, you have to change people’s habits. I trust you want to easily manipulate people, too, but in the opposite direction than that which is currently followed. Start with the environment. It is no coincidence that the neoliberals’ slogan is “there is no alternative” — the capitalists create cheap labor by removing people’s opportunities to be anything else. Living off of the land, for instance, is an option removed by enclosing the environment and paving it over or growing grass upon it. The alternative, of course, is an edible environment — vegetables in empty spaces, fruit trees in the parking strips and the areas which need shade.
If you’re still worried about abstinence-only, change the schools; or promote home-schooling. The immediate solution is to get the kids out of the classrooms. Public schooling is a convenience meant to allow the working class to put in time at wage labor while their children are warehoused during working hours. Education is intended to stay out of the way of infantile consumerism, the lure which makes wage labor seem so necessary.
Hope that helps.
. . . a “Pro-education Republican”. Oxymorans*.
Mu . . .
*No, it’s not a typo.