Badass Teachers Association Do It Again

Originally posted at: https://gadflyonthewallblog.com/2019/09/01/inside-bill-gates-hubris-propaganda-to-make-america-neoliberal-again/?fbclid=IwAR0kkUnzfdWT496tVM5iRCh-p37vGNmU6hcbozYYNI7xqu12j0pDsdqNdjg

Once upon a fourth dimension, the world was run by rich men.

And all was good.

But then the world was conquered by other rich men.

And that is something the start group of rich men could not let.

The iii-part documentary goes alive on Sept. 20. Simply the film'southward aims are clear from the trailer.

Later all, shouldn't the all-time and richest amidst usa make all the decisions?

It's a cry for oligarchy in an age of idiocracy, a love alphabetic character to neoliberalism in a fourth dimension of neofascism.

In the days of Obama, the Bushes and Clinton, it wasn't membership in the same political party that defined the ruling class. Information technology was holding the aforementioned ideology.

Information technology's non that neoliberals were so much wiser, ethical or empathetic than Trump. They just kept their greed a hole-and-corner or tried to go far seem a virtue. They told better lies and didn't incite as much violence on our shores, and they were better at manipulating markets to brand themselves richer while keeping the rest of us relatively poorer.

The MAGA insurgents are besides rich men, simply their greed is transparent. They lie and no i expects them to tell the truth. They can freely dismantle the social safety net because they stoke our prejudices and proceed united states of america fighting over race, gender and abortion so much we forget they're robbing u.s. blind. And when the market crashes, they don't have to intendance considering they've stolen everything of value and can weather the economic depression that volition destroy the nation.

Information technology'southward no wonder then that the neoliberals want to make us nostalgic for their brand of simmering destruction instead of Trump's rapid boil disasters.

And Gates is the perfect poster kid for erstwhile fashion neoliberalism.

He'south the quondam CEO of Microsoft and – together with his married woman – the founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
In the trailer, Gates confides that his deepest fear is that ane day his brain will "stop working."

Gates is a "multiprocessor" says his wife Melinda. "He will exist reading something else but then processing at the same time. It'south chaos!"

Gates "thrives on complexity," Melinda says. "He makes a framework in his mind, and then he starts slotting in the information. If something doesn't line upward, he gets actually frustrated."

"It's scary," says Melinda. "But when Pecker stills himself, he tin pull ideas together that other people tin can't encounter."

Thus nosotros gain a picture of a brilliant man striding over a world populated by intellectual inferiors. How foolish we would exist to question his say-so!

It'south truly i of the most patronizing, paternal and insulting pieces of propaganda I've e'er seen in my life. And that includes Guggenheim'due south previous movies.

And for all that time his ventures take been backed by the richest neoliberals out in that location – Netflix CEO Reed Hasgtings, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, eBay founder Jeff Skoll, and Salman Khan of Khan Academy.

Sure these folks are usually identified as Democrats, but their philosophy is completely in line with The Walton Family Foundation, Charles Koch, Walden Media (run by creationist Philip Anschutz), and lobbying groups such equally the Lumina Foundation, the New American Foundation, and others.

Oh! And let's not forget Pecker Gates, himself, who has bankrolled a number of Guggenheim's projects including "Waiting for Superman."

Information technology'southward no wonder Guggenheim is making a fawning tribute to Gates. He owes the man!

It's time to pay back his sugar daddy with what he does all-time – agitprop public relations.

Yep, Gates is a very intelligent person.

But he is also a very stupid one.

When it comes to computers, few people can beat him. But similar and so manyoverprivileged people, he takes excellence in one area to mean excellence in all areas.

And that'southward just non how things work.

The aboriginal Greek philosopher Socrates famously bragged that he was the wisest person in Athens – not because he knew then much more than anybody else but because he was the only person who knew that he didn't know anything.

Gates could have learned something from that humility, because it's the trait he is nigh lacking.

Take public pedagogy.

Gates poured billions of dollars into that failed initiative, spent hundreds of millions of dollars for evolution and promotion and influenced trillions of taxpayer dollars to be flushed downwardly the drain on it. All to no avail.

But it'due south not his only instruction policy failure.

Gates now admits that the approximate $2 billion he spent pushing the states to break up large loftier schools into smaller schools was a bust.

And he's still at it.

His new plan has been to spend $1.7 billion over five years to develop new curriculums and networks of schools, use information to drive continuous improvement, and give out grants to high needs schools to do whatever he says.

There'due south zip wrong with someone wanting to help better public schools. But the best way to do that is to heed to the people mostknowledgeable and invested and then give them the tools they need to succeed.

Only Gates doesn't play that manner. He reads upward on a subject and then comes up with his ain harebrained schemes.

"It would be great if our education stuff worked, just that we won't know for probably a decade," he said during a voice communication at Harvard in 2014.

Y'all just insist the residue of united states of america listen to you despite the fact that you have no idea what you're talking nigh.

You lot're rich and you recall that makes you better than us.

And Guggenheim's documentary purports to support this position by reference to Gates' incredible encephalon.

He is a smart guy. No one would really contradict it.

He was a National Merit Scholar who scored a 1590 out of 1600 on his SATs. Only he also comes from a very privileged upbringing.

At Harvard he wasn't a polymath. He excelled in subjects he cared near, simply neglected others that weren't immediately interesting. According to a college friend:

"Gates was a typical freshman in many means, thrown off pace past the new requirements and a higher level of competition. He skipped classes, spent days on end in the computer lab working on his ain projects, played poker all night, and slept in a bed without sheets when he did go
 to bed. Other students retrieve that he often went without sleep for 18 to 36 hours."

Gates was no genius. He earned good grades in the subjects he liked and significantly less so in classes he didn't. Nor was his heart in his studies. Gates joined few college activities unless someone dragged him off to a political party.

Schoolhouse was of little interest to him. He dropped out of Harvard before getting a degree to start his computer software company.

Imagine how privileged you have to exist to feel empowered to exercise that!

Nil much was at stake for him at schoolhouse so he could do any he liked with little to no real life consequences.

You want to decode Pecker's brain? Await at his family's wealth. Await at his upbringing. Await at his medical records.

But the moral of the story of Bill Gates is not that rich elites should rule the world.

Information technology is that everyone – EVERYONE  – should practise humility and not condescend to retrieve they have all the answers.

Information technology is a paean to the need for collaboration to solve problems, the need to listen to all voices and decide the best course together.

And more than anything it is a drastic cry for republic and social goods – non to defeat Trump through Gates' example – only to lead to real human flourishing by smashing through the fallacies supporting Trump and Gates together.

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Source: https://badassteachers.blogspot.com/

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