"to question the dogma."
I think dogma should be ignored altogether. Do not question it or engage it.
Except I think you're calling accepting the science on global warming the dogma, and I see accepting science as fundamentally not dogma. We even use the word accept instead of believe as with dogma because in science we're excited to find evidence that overturns how we previously understood the world.

I was about to joke, "Oh come one, who needs philosophy," before I saw ewv's comment. Yes. I'm only a philistine about philosophy in education for the irrational reasons ewv describes above.

" the Progressive Left in America abhors Capitalism and empowerment of the Individual."
I can't tell what's going on, but to me it feels more like I imagine the Roman Republic-- decadent, considering success a birthright, becoming and empire, and corrupt. I'm sure there are people who are anti-capitalist and anti-individual, but I don't sense they have broad support. I also don't sense people appreciating/understanding capitalism and individualism. It's more like "wait, success is a birthright, so let's give whoever's in charge broad authority to do whatever it takes to stop these tragic anomalies of absence of easy success." Along the way, they may accept socialism, but I don't sense a broad movement that starts with a theory on economics and the individual.

"The teacher was (and remains) too stupid to know basic physics and too moronic to be able to learn."
I thought you were saying teacher was saying it's too simple and widely known. You're saying the teacher didn't even understand the experiment.

"there is an intentional effort to remove our historical symbols"
I don't see it. I know what you're talking about with Stalin destroying all symbols and institutions outside the party, but I don't see that happening here at all. It's more that they do a decent albeit sometimes clumsy job of having people from all walks of life come together. My kids school is decent about this.

"They can't make decisions, can't take responsibility, run for cover at a mere sight of a micro-aggression and, most importantly, look up to the government for everything, from jobs to housing to healthcare."
That's about it. I hear the pendulum is swinging back the other way on the Coasts, teaching kids to have "grit". It's not here. They grow up much slower. There's the idea an authority should handle even the slightest little problems. I've heard stories of people at West Point with their mothers still wanting to mediate their minor issues with peers and teachers.

I was on this message board a few years ago saying I didn't believe it was true. I've seen it first-hand now that my kids are older, in forms that I would have thought too absurd to believe.

The removal of the emperor was not initiated by dialog. As to " Do you propose bombing Washington DC and taking over with overwhelming force to set back the progress of collectivism..." This is my position - http://4thestatemedia.com/?p=438

In every "social experiment" where the Left have acquired sufficient power, they held on to it through violence. Jacobins were perhaps an earliest example, followed by the Bolsheviks, followed by the National Socialists, followed by the Maoists and on and on. There has never been an example of the Left voluntarily or peacefully giving up power. (The collapse of the USSR is not an example, because the same people remained in power under a different flag). And, yes, the Left always accuses others of what they do themselves. It's called projection. All or most of what Trump is accused by the Left are the sins of the Left, constantly committed by them. Russia collusion - Uranium One, sexual harassment - Bill, Harvey, Charlie, Matt, Al, Johnnie...

Its appearing like the very things the left is blaming Trump for, are perpetrated by themselves. What concerns me a lot is the level of violence exhibited by the left towards anyone who does not agree with their positions. That tells me that the leftists are prepared to silence opposition by force in the future.

As I mentioned in the original post, these people actually believe that the American economy, including the healthcare system, prior to Obama was pure Capitalism. The leaders of the Left have shifted the plank. Think of it as if you were pushing a wagon up a ramp - the full sway would be from the bottom to the top. But if you continue to chuck the wheel, if you were to lose your grip, it could only roll back to the last position of the wheel chuck. Likewise, the Left's minions don't have a clue what Capitalism really is; they are shown examples of the evil crony capitalism, without the knowledge that crony capitalism is really socialism. The re-education process for such a far-gone population cannot be accomplished within one generation.

Perhaps the Left would have existed without Marx, just as it is likely that Nazism would have existed without Hitler. In the age of material abundance, it seems to be natural that some can be persuaded to share. As the sharing epidemic grew, it turned into mooching and stealing. Maybe Marx was just a prophet of the things to come, along with his well known disciples. Whether blaming the Jews or the Russians or whomever, or accepting American socialist movement as completely homegrown, the fact remains that the Progressive Left in America abhors Capitalism and empowerment of the Individual. They have been working on destroying the American values at least since the 1930's, when they were ecstatically in love with Stalin and his Gulags. The Hippy / Vietnam era gave them a tremendous boost, through the universities and the Peace Corps and they permanently occupied the education field. They bred several generations of people that are trained to respond to they feelings-tickling whistles, while being completely immune to facts. The government "education" system continues to do tremendous damage to the American culture, or what's left of it. It is perhaps not at times noticeable because the pot is roasted slowly, over decades and decades. But it is roasted.

I have taken back to the principal an English assignment (6th grade), where I circled grammatical errors in every paragraph. Every paragraph. Some had several. The interesting thing is that the principal, embarrassed as he was, said that this assignment was written by a teacher several years ago and used several times by various teachers. Over the years, among other teachers, students and parents, I was the only one who noticed and drew attention to the errors. There were over a dozen in a one page assignment. I also enjoyed, from time time, while talking to the teachers, to correct their speech on the fly - most of the time they had no idea what I was saying. Those are just a sample.

The goal here is not to make rational people out of irrational beings. That, in the best of circumstances, will take more than a generation. The Progressives worked hard to achieve this (in reverse) for several generations, while we docile looked on and even subsidized them in our destruction. At this point, the goal should be to protect what we have left, that which has not yet been stolen. We need the support of the masses, as dumb and irrational as they are. Speaking the language of rationality is a waste of effort, as they have already been bred to ignore the facts and respond only to feelings. If we don't learn this feelings language, we will lose that little that we have left.

No, they have learned to think improperly, which makes it very difficult to penetrate. But they don't have to be 'converted', only defeated by growing numbers of people who are better. That is time-consuming both because of how radically different Ayn Rand's ideas are and because the real "swamp" control is so entrenched in the intellectual professions such as universities. Children are not hopeless beyond age 5 or 6, but it is important to properly educate children as early as possible and throughout the school years.

So are you saying that the main issue us that liberals have not learned to think as opposed to be simply controlled by emotions like a small child? That they go through life bouncing from one emotion to the next, where their emotions are essentially controlled externally by others? If this is true, doesn’t this mean that it’s game over by a quite early age unless they learn how to think maybe by age 5-6?

The emperor and his dictatorship were removed and the country was put under the control of the US, which wrote a constitution with its better concept of government. It did not change Japanese culture, it only let different kinds of people have more influence in a more modern version of the 20th century. The better people were able to thrive, but it is no example of individualism and freedom today.

Do you propose bombing Washington DC and taking over with overwhelming force to set back the progress of collectivism -- so it will continue on the same downward trend that brought us to where we are now?

The modern history of Germany was similar. They understood enough to not vote for Hitlerian fascists again, which kept the worst oppression out, but not enough to stop the socialist trend. The US poured enormous funding into Germany mostly to stop communism from spreading, which had shown a strong influence in Germany. That propped up its recovering economy and reduced the pressure from fear following appealing-sounding communist slogans. They took the money, enjoyed the improved economy and the relative freedom, and continued to pursue socialist trends more gradually.

In Russia the people never liked what they experienced under communism but did not know what to replace it with even if they could have overthrown the overwhelming power of the Communists. They literally had no concept of how to live in freedom. They retained the traditional Russian mysticism and dark sense of life, and when the Communists fell they wound up with a corrupt fascist state, less totalitarian but still brutal, not individualism.

There is a range of what a country might do with its government and what it does within the ideas dominating the culture. But it doesn't change abruptly on its own onto a different track within the range. Where it is within that range depends on political momentum, whatever the entrenched powers are, what the people will generally tolerate, and what certain individuals can do and the choices they make as leaders in the circumstances they find themselves in.

But the overall trend still depends on the ideas that people follow, just like it did in the difference between the Dark Ages and the Enlightenment. Today few in America would tolerate an outright theocracy, just as capitalism, freedom and the pursuit of happiness on earth would have been impossible in a culture that lived in superstition and other-wordliness.

In 18th century America a unique group of exceptional individuals acting in very different circumstances than those in England created much better results than in the slowly moving entrenched status quo of England under the same Enlightenment influences. The role of ideas does not mean that certain basic premises varying across the population uniquely determine a particular government without regard to anything else, including how it got to where it is, the forces keeping it there, and the kind of choices made by those who become leaders. But statism and collectivism will not turn to individualism when people are clamoring for and willing to accept strong government controls under the influence of their basic ideas. The American individualistic sense of life has kept the country going despite the ideas spread by the intellectuals and increasingly accepted, but that cannot continue as the bad ideas become adhered to more explicitly and change the dominant sense of life. Lashing out and punching someone in the face won't change that.

If we follow your thought process, how would you explain Japans actions pre 1945 as compared to post 1945? What would you suggest caused the sudden change in behavior?

How people come to accept their values may or may not be rational or with full conscious awareness, let alone consistency. Commitment to reason requires full conceptual awareness with honesty and objectivity, as opposed to explicit faith or passively absorbing whatever is around you and what you are told to believe from an early age.

The left emotionally manipulating people counts on people not thinking through their own concepts and principles. The emphasis everywhere downplays reason and objectivity. In that sense of epistemology, irrationalism leaves only emotional thinking, but beliefs still have a content. Even the principles of thinking have content: as epistemology. The basis of progressivism is collectivism and altruism in ethics and politics, not pure emotion, but the "basis" of all of it in terms of method of thinking is a mixture of reason and emotion. The philosophical form of that for progressives is Pragmatism, with its truth is what "works", what is true today need not be tomorrow, evolutionary concepts, etc. That is what the collectivism and altruism cash in on.

I think I agree with what you are saying. What I hear from liberals though are constant emotional appeals through political correctness. I don’t. See most people even knowing what their values are. I think their values are piped in thru emotional appeals without thiught

You will not "sway them to our side" through personal physical violence. We are talking about the course of the nation, not a punk in a playground. The course of a nation depends on its dominant fundamental ideas.

The goal of raising a man requires first and foremost developing rational thought, the essence of man. More often than not, standing up for your self as an adult requires moral self confidence, thinking, and persuading those who can make a difference, not physical swaggering. Ayn Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged to portray in fiction her view of the ideal man, not individualism as being a 'tough guy'.

You are not going to convince anyone of anything by punching him in the face. He may leave you alone for awhile if you are successful but he has learned nothing about what is right, and with the government as bully you can't even do that. We are talking about reversing the direction of a culture and a nation, not petty louts.

It is based on more than emotion and its manipulation. Emotions are automatic responses based on the values one holds, which they articulate all the time as altruistic and collectivist. The progressives today even more extreme in that.

They count on people sharing some version of it, accepted through prior indoctrination, to induce guilt, for example, or try to reinterpret or redefine better common values to mean their opposite in collectivism -- which we see all the time in their redefinitions of common words: tax cuts as a "cost to government", "investment" as government spending, etc. They count on positive reactions to the vocabulary but not thinking of the meaning. Their premises and methods are much deeper and more explicit than just emotions.

The intentional effort to uproot American values is much deeper than following "Lenin-Stalin-Alinsky policy". There is nothing to follow. Almost no one today follows or cares about Lenin or Stalin, who were political thugs cashing in on Marx and centuries of Russian mysticism and pessimism, leaving no intellectual legacy themselves.

Alinsky influenced the New Left in the 1960s and its current successors, but also left nothing intellectual to follow: he was a nihilist who overtly specialized in local disruptive activism for the purpose of wreckage as such, with no idea of what to replace it with. He had no ideals. He couldn't even articulate the bad ideological premises he inherited. You can see first hand how utterly negative he was in his Rules for Radicals (without paying for it) at https://www.historyofsocialwork.org/1...

The radical political progressives today follow and build on his methods but have an ideology based on over a century of American Pragmatism as a means to think about and follow altruism and collectivism to replace America with.

That is the way he described it.

Encourage their friends to leave, too.

If they are more divided now it is only because the Democrats are moving to the tyrannical left faster than the me-too-but-slower Republicans.

Anyone who promotes dogma the way the authoritarian climate hysterics do while loudly announcing they represent "science" should be dismissed before you even get to the particulars of the dishonesty. That includes many of the professional viros in universities insisting that what they say is science because it is environmentalism.

The worst students don't continue in education at all, let alone as teachers. Where are the teachers you encountered who can't even speak with a proper grammar? The biggest danger is those teachers who are intelligent and who adopt the wrong premises and theories, then effectively spread them in educational institutions they monopolize.