Progressives (Liberals)

Are there constant tests in the USA?

I haven't verified all of Moore's claims, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were all true.

the Republican governor, Rick Snyder, nullified the free elections in Flint, deposed the mayor and city council, then appointed his own man to run the city.

To save money, they decided to unhook the people of Flint from their fresh water drinking source, Lake Huron, and instead, make the public drink from the toxic Flint River.

When the governor's office discovered just how toxic the water was, they decided to keep quiet about it and covered up the extent of the damage being done to Flint's residents

While the Children in Flint Were Given Poisoned Water to Drink, General Motors Was Given a Special Hookup to the Clean Water.

For Just $100 a Day, This Crisis Could've Been Prevented.

Someone at the beginning suggested to the Governor that they add this anti-corrosive element to the water coming out of the Flint River. "How much would that cost?" came the question. "$100 a day for three months," was the answer. I guess that was too much, so, in order to save $9,000, the state government said f*** it

Don't Call It "Detroit Water" -- It's the Largest Source of Fresh Drinking Water in the World. The media keeps saying Flint was using "Detroit's water." It is only filtered and treated at the Detroit Water Plant. The water itself comes from Lake Huron, the third largest body of fresh water in the world.

This Was Done, Like So Many Things These Days, So the Rich Could Get a Big Tax Break.

he invoked an executive privilege to take over cities (all of them majority black) by firing the mayors and city councils whom the local people had elected, and installing his cronies to act as "dictators" over these cities. Their mission? Cut services to save money so he could give the rich even more breaks.

That's where the idea of switching Flint to river water came from. To save $15 million!

It's almost as if intelligence was seen as 'unamerican'...

Anti-intellectualism in American Life was awarded the 1964 Pulitzer Prize in Non-Fiction. It is a book which throws light on many features of the American character. Its concern is not merely to portray the scorners of intellect in American life, but to say something about what the intellectual is, and can be, as a force in a democratic society.

Hofstadter set out to trace the social movements that altered the role of intellect in American society from a virtue to a vice. In so doing, he explored questions regarding the purpose of education and whether the democratization of education altered that purpose and reshaped its form.

In considering the historic tension between access to education and excellence in education, Hofstadter argued that both anti-intellectualism and utilitarianism were consequences, in part, of the democratization of knowledge.

Moreover, he saw these themes as historically embedded in America's national fabric, an outcome of her colonial European and evangelical Protestant heritage. Anti-intellectualism and utilitarianism were functions of American cultural heritage, not necessarily of democracy.

(...)America is killing itself through its embrace and exaltation of ignorance, and the evidence is all around us. Dylann Roof, the Charleston shooter who used race as a basis for hate and mass murder, is just the latest horrific example. Many will correctly blame Roof's actions on America's culture of racism and gun violence, but it's time to realize that such phenomena are directly tied to the nation's culture of ignorance.

In a country where a sitting congressman told a crowd that evolution and the Big Bang are “lies straight from the pit of hell,” where the chairman of a Senate environmental panel brought a snowball into the chamber as evidence that climate change is a hoax, where almost one in three citizens can’t name the vice president, it is beyond dispute that critical thinking has been abandoned as a cultural value. Our failure as a society to connect the dots, to see that such anti-intellectualism comes with a huge price, could eventually be our downfall.

(...)

What Americans rarely acknowledge is that many of their social problems are rooted in the rejection of critical thinking or, conversely, the glorification of the emotional and irrational. What else could explain the hyper-patriotism that has many accepting an outlandish notion that America is far superior to the rest of the world? Love of one’s country is fine, but many Americans seem to honestly believe that their country both invented and perfected the idea of freedom, that the quality of life here far surpasses everywhere else in the world. (...)

There is a growing and disturbing trend of anti-intellectual elitism in American culture. It's the dismissal of science, the arts, and humanities and their replacement by entertainment, self-righteousness, ignorance, and deliberate gullibility.

Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason, says in an article in the Washington Post, "Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture; a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism."

Journalist Charles Pierce, author of Idiot America, adds another perspective:

"The rise of idiot America today represents - for profit mainly, but also and more cynically, for political advantage in the pursuit of power - the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they are talking about. In the new media age, everybody is an expert."

We're creating a world of dummies. Angry dummies who feel they have the right, the authority and the need not only to comment on everything, but to make sure their voice is heard above the rest, and to drag down any opposing views through personal attacks, loud repetition and confrontation.

“It’s freezing and snowing in New York – we need global warming!”

I note your incapacity to point out anything he says that's factually incorrect.

That's still quite vague and unverifiable. You'd have to state what you think he said,

what you think is the case, what difference you think it makes,

and what evidence you have...

With constant tests I meant tests at least 24/24. (Here, it is done constantly (= as the water flows) by the water company on a smaller basis, once to twice per month a complete analysis by an independent laboratory.

I'm not too familiar with urban life, but I doubt that the monitoring is continuous in the US.

You didn't make any point, though.

No, you did not confront Moore.

You just gave yor opinion that he was inconrect, and my opinion is that you are incorrect in doind so.