Joe Conason Reviews Al Gore's "The Assault On Reason"

[Hissyspit]

http://www.baltimoresun.com/features/booksmags/bal-id.bk.reason17jun17,0,4912097.story?coll=bal-artslife-books

Money, TV, media concentration: Al Gore bravely takes them all on
By Joe Conason
Originally published June 17, 2007

>>> The Assault on Reason
By Al Gore
The Penguin Press / 308 pages / $25.95

- snip -

Yet Gore's professorial style, with its touches of sarcasm, omniscient tone, erudite asides, and yes, its occasional exasperated sighs, elicits a different response today than it did seven years ago. Many of the same publications that once poured scorn on him now offer up paragraph after paragraph of admiring prose.

The change in attitude is as obvious as the reason behind it: The overwhelming scientific consensus has since confirmed Gore's years of warnings about the most important issue facing the planet, a stunning reversal that suggests those who mocked him were fools in the first place and that we can continue to ignore him only at our own peril. Even when he is saying something we already know, his voice adds a note of prophetic confirmation. Then again, Gore has changed too. Always unusually smart and farsighted, he nevertheless spent most of his public career emphasizing the expedient and conventional rather than the critical and visionary -- as nearly every ambitious politician must. Liberated from those constraints by defeat, he kept silent until fall 2002, when he spoke out forthrightly against the invasion of Iraq.

The tentative, calculating, painfully moderate approach of the past was gone, along with all of the baggage of the Democratic Leadership Council that he had helped to found. He was no longer the same politician who could comfortably have Joseph I. Lieberman as his running mate. And in the years that have followed his Iraq speech and his endorsement of Howard Dean for president in the 2004 race, Gore has continued to speak out not only on global warming but also against the erosion of civil liberties, media consolidation, denigration of science by the federal government, and right-wing threats against the judiciary, developing themes that he examines closely in these pages.

What he is telling us today -- with the moral authority of a man who many believe was wrongly barred from the presidency -- is that American democracy and indeed American society are in danger from the authoritarians of the right. Without much polite varnish, he warns that self-serving plutocrats and self-righteous theocrats have nearly banished reason from the public square; their machinations disable us as we try to confront the enormous problems that threaten our future. According to Gore, Americans cannot adequately protect the nation from terrorism because our ideas about national security have been distorted by fear and falsehoods. Nor can we address what he calls "the carbon crisis," potentially "the worst catastrophe in the history of human civilization," because the truth about global warming has been obscured by industrial and government propaganda.

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[The Count]

1. The change of attitude is seen in a very narrow setor of the media

The one not yet completely owned as a tool by the BFEE.
But other points are well made as usual by Smokin' Joe who was also so very consistently right on most everything.

[warrior1]

2. It's a brillant book

Imagine a world were he runs for President again. Please run Al.

[wryter2000]

5. It is brilliant

If he won't run :(, I hope at least he screams at the top of his lungs against dishonesty during the campaign.

[murray hill farm]

13. Yes, Brilliant!!

His book is a gift to the country...and to the world. After reading it, I felt that he was the only person anywhere who could save our country. I so hope he will run...and that the book was only the precurser...and that he will.

[NJCher]

3. it is so true

Gore makes the point that we are so isolated and inured to the entertainment world that citizens don't know the basics of the Constitution nor do they know the basics of democracy.

I see this with my college-level students so much of the time. Whenever we have projects where they are given some choice of what to deal with (like a speech or paper topic), they gravitate to something to do with a celebrity.

I have never allowed them to do such projects. In fact, now I make up a list of topics from which they choose. The topics are heavily weighted to the environment.

Yes, I occasionally get complaints about it but college is a place to expand one's views, not develop what the culture has worked so hard to make a priority.

Most of the time I get positive feedback. I once gave them a project where they had to compare think tanks on the right to think tanks on the left. They seemed genuinely grateful for helping them understand this, as it helped them recognize the false information the right puts out.



Cher

[ThomWV]

4. The more people who read his book the better our country will be

One to one ratio ...

[Grandrose]

6. K&R

A visionary I hope people will listen to....this time!:think: :kick:

[otohara]

7. What Might Have Been

The thought of never having this man as our president is too painful to think about.

[YvonneCa]

8. Gore's book ought to be required reading...

...for every American. It's a FANTASTIC book.

[SeattleGirl]

10. I agree, YvonneCa.

I'm reading it now, and it's an amazing book.

[Hissyspit]

9. .

[opihimoimoi]

11. just finished it...I agree...Gore was right all along...America is a big loser in having Bush steal

the 2000 election....

[nolabels]

16. The Usurpers stole his presidency but gave him a pulpit as the heretic........

It's a long novel that seems to be having tragic ending. The thing known as man rises just far enough out into the realms of knowledge to see where it's demise will come. The tragedy comes when man realizes that the things that have brought the man here are also going to be the things of his undoing. The knowledge curve though quick is still a pace slow. The man thing realized after all it's construction that it has no way to perpetuate it's own survival. This Man thing is into accelerating destruction of its own tethered strings of supports and soon will be found drifting with no visible way to get back to the safety of home. The birthplace has spawned it's own death :-(

The ones who chose to live in fantasy will be hating a heretic like Gore because he will destroy the only thing those types of people have left, and that being the fantasy they are living in :shrug:

[opihimoimoi]

17. DElusional rationization....Its my way of describing these sort of things

Level One Thinking in a Level Two Realm....We lag behind in the Evolution of Politics...still using a Leader Filter with Holes the size of ...errrr...TEXAS...allowing Inept Leaders to "guide: the Nation...

Instead we get Amateurism and Guessing mixed with Self Interest/Centeredness...

Humanity stands waiting for better as they have for 1,000s of years....only to be greeted by Ineptness and Bullism....We have not yet learned from HISTORY...have we....?

In Gore's latest Assualt on Reason....he begs us to wake up and smell the coffee....Will he be the one to brew that special coffee?

Only time will tell....and if not him....who then....?.....and why???

[nolabels]

18. Civilization probably already has the tools and ability to work it's way out of the abyss........

For many reasons (mostly for the reasons of weak psyches) it doesn't seem like they will.

The management systems that humans often work under is a poor excuse for what management could be, but what seems the even bigger obstacle is the limits we impose on ourselves on how we solve problems, or make up solutions, as it were. Even the all of our languages are limiting in one way or the other. From what i can see being the greatest obstacle is our ability to understand all that there is and how it relates to us and others. We cannot help free others till we stop limiting ourselves with our own beliefs about how things are

AL Gore is attempting to make all of us step up and govern ourselves. If Al doesn't run again it will be of a far greater service to us all in the long run


Byrne, Ruth M. J. 2005. The Rational Imagination: How People Create Alternatives to Reality

Introducing The Rational Imagination, Ruth Byrne tells us that rational thought has turned out to be “more imaginative than cognitive scientists…supposed,” and—more to the point here—that “imaginative thought is more rational than scientists imagined” (xi). It would be unwise to take this mini-manifesto (or the book’s title) too seriously. The claim to which Byrne actually gives sustained attention is less philosophically sexy and more solidly empirical. This book is primarily concerned with experimental evidence (much of it Byrne’s own) in support of the thesis that the particular counterfactual conjectures people entertain—‘If Mary had asked Peter to pick the peppers, he would have picked the peppers’—are governed by the same small set of psychological principles that influence inferential reasoning about them—‘Peter didn’t pick the peppers? Well, then, it stands to reason that Mary didn’t ask him to’ (214-215). Byrne conjectures that this same small set of principles might also help in understanding how people creatively generate new members of a category (190–191), interpret novel phrases like ‘cactus fish’ (192–193), and solve insight problems (194-195)
(snip)
http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/

[opihimoimoi]

19. John Craven PhD....calls this Information OverLoad....

[Hissyspit]

12. Al Gore Speech, Oct. 2004:

http://swtpc.blogspot.com/2004/05/al-gore-speech-10262004-in-nyc.html

Friday, May 28, 2004
Al Gore speech 10/26/2004 in NYC



AL GORE LINKS ABU GHRAIB PRISON ABUSES TO DEEP FLAWS IN BUSH POLICY

Calls For Resignations Of Bush Team Members Responsible For Iraq Fiasco: Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, George Tenet, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas J. Feith, Stephen A. Cambone


Remarks by former Vice President Al Gore, May 26, 2004 at New York University, As Prepared :

George W. Bush promised us a foreign policy with humility. Instead, he has brought us humiliation in the eyes of the world.

He promised to "restore honor and integrity to the White House." Instead, he has brought deep dishonor to our country and built a durable reputation as the most dishonest President since Richard Nixon.

Honor? He decided not to honor the Geneva Convention. Just as he would not honor the United Nations, international treaties, the opinions of our allies, the role of Congress and the courts, or what Jefferson described as "a decent respect for the opinion of mankind." He did not honor the advice, experience and judgment of our military leaders in designing his invasion of Iraq. And now he will not honor our fallen dead by attending any funerals or even by permitting photos of their flag-draped coffins.

How did we get from September 12th , 2001, when a leading French newspaper ran a giant headline with the words "We Are All Americans Now" and when we had the good will and empathy of all the world -- to the horror that we all felt in witnessing the pictures of torture in Abu Ghraib.

To begin with, from its earliest days in power, this administration sought to radically destroy the foreign policy consensus that had guided America since the end of World War II. The long successful strategy of containment was abandoned in favor of the new strategy of "preemption." And what they meant by preemption was not the inherent right of any nation to act preemptively against an imminent threat to its national security, but rather an exotic new approach that asserted a unique and unilateral U.S. right to ignore international law wherever it wished to do so and take military action against any nation, even in circumstances where there was no imminent threat. All that is required, in the view of Bush's team is the mere assertion of a possible, future threat - and the assertion need be made by only one person, the President.

MORE AT LINK

[Hissyspit]

14. Here's more:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x1130244

[WillyT]

15. Big K & R !!!

:kick: