A Short Course in Intellectual Self Defense
Find Your Inner Chomsky
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
What is the relationship between democracy and critical thinking? What must a citizen in a democracy know to make the word democracy meaningful? In A Short Course in Intellectual Self-Defense, historian and educator Normand Baillargeon provides readers with the tools to see through the spin and jargon of everyday politics and news reporting in order to decide for themselves what is at stake and how to ask the necessary questions to protect themselves from the manipulations of the government and the media. Whether the issue be the call to what we’re told will be a bloodless war, the "debate" around Intelligent Design, or the meaning of a military expenditure, Baillargeon teaches readers to evaluate information and sort fact from official and media spin.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This latest effort by Sams ( Sacred Path Cards ) and Nitsch ( Language of the Stones ) purports to pass on the knowledge of Nitsch's grandfather, one of the last Seneca medicine men. The book relates the story of creation, of the four worlds (ages) through which the earth has passed and the three worlds yet to come. Past are the worlds of Love (when the love of the creating Great Mystery was poured on the earth), Ice (perhaps some racial memory of the Ice Age), Water (when whites came to Turtle Island, the primeval land mass of Indian myth) and Separation (recalling not only humanity's divorce from creation but also continental drift). Now is the dawning of the World of Illumination, from which we will pass through the World of Prophecy to the World of Completion, when all of creation will be reunited as one. With its emphasis on interdependence and the equality of all parts of creation, the book's heart is in the right place, and parts of it reflect the genuine oral tradition of the IroquoisSeneca are an Iroquos tribe per Jace . However, laden with New Age jargon and often impenetrable, this work ultimately will leave even sympathetic readers pondering its sincerity. Illustrated. Author tour.