No Stupid Questions

The south was always this racist, they were just isolated.

When social media unleashed their filth upon the nation the billionaires realized they had the ultimate weapon: a political bloc that voted purely on emotion, especially hate.

Yes and forgetful as well. Utterly unable to learn from history since the history they are taught is whitewashed.

"The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"

-Isaac Asimov

Yes. Am Americans, can confirm.

The requirements for justice includes truth (objective facts of reality not merely opinion or belief or rumors) for accountability, attacking education prevents an ability to evaluate if something presented confidently as truth is truth. It's a fast track to corruption and injustice.

Putin, Trump, Erdogan, etc style of extreme right wing populist propaganda is to attack truth and prevent justice by weaponizing ignorance. They're spreading a firehouse of distracting lies, for example staged attacks against people representing their beliefs on facebook and twitter, to a public who is at least in part unable or unwilling to critically evaluate facts of reality from propaganda lies. Another more general example is if you're not aware of confirmation bias and how it's used and works due to a lack of education you are going to be much more susceptible to it's effects when used.

People aren't necessarily getting dumber other than some temporary dips due to toxic environmental things like lead in fuel or maybe some effects of toxicity we're not aware of yet, It's just the people who were already susceptible to fascist rhetoric & con artists are being indoctrinated against education as either unnecessary or harmful, which makes them easier to continue to mass propagandize to with more methods that have fewer rules platforms need to follow compared to older mass media propaganda like newspapers or network TV news.

Billionaires are extracting all the wealth from this country and convincing the idiots that Maria from El Salvador with 2 dollars to her name is the problem.

so, the 1940s were a result of what happened in the 20s and thirties. and america almost went nazi. like, we almost had a nazi president elected instead of FDR the first time, and the business plot almost worked. would have, if they hadn't chosen a military leader who'd turned socialist since retiring.

the 1960s... honey. do you really believe america was leftist? there were some kids who were. the anti war movement was pretty big, and they all had to be okay with lefty tactics, but it's not fair to say 'america was leftist'. richard nixon still got elected the first time.

americans are traiend to be cattle. this is true. and yes, the techniques for that training are better than they used to be.

look up what happened in the late 70s and 80s. it kiiiinda started under carter, but you get the sense he would have pulled back once he saw how it was going, and also tried to do good stuff (it just literally all got stopped). look at the career of newt gingrich. plus, ronald reagan and it's consequences have been a disaster for humanity. they set in motion subtle sabotage of society that devastated the potential of future education or anything becoming less awful, while most of the cool people around at the time were exiled locked in deep dark cages or straight up assassinated by feds.

funny you should mention 'social order' though. the wealthy and powerful still do care. their version just isn't the same as yours. have you ever read 'a handmaid's tale' or 'the turner diaries'? because those are the books they jack off to.

You're getting confused by algorithms that promote stupid things to make money. It is not a valid representation of the population.

Also the US just got coup'd. The fascists in charge dont have popular support.

The republicans have been ruining the education system for decades. Can't have smart people without paid teachers.

We've spent multiple decades making sure our kids didn't receive the best education and our government officials are complicit in fueling propaganda for pocket change.

There's a reason we've been the worst first world country in everything that matters except school shootings for a while now

How did we go from something like 1940s era collectivism or 1960s era leftism to the current bizarro political machine that seems to have hypnotized a large portion (if not majority) of the country?

The prevailing economic wisdom after WWII was Keynesianism, which says that the government should increase government spending when unemployment is high and decrease it when inflation is high. What happened in the 70's and 80's was that the economy started experiencing both high unemployment and high inflation at the same time, "shrinkflation," which wasn't supposed to happen according to Keynesianism, and which it had no real response to. The reason it was happening (at least from a Marxist perspective) was that the US had already developed in the ways that saw the highest returns, and there simply wasn't as much new ground to cover - this is what's meant by "the tendency of the rate of profit to fall." Regardless, the government was faced with a decision of which problem to focus on between unemployment and inflation - and it chose inflation.

The phenomenon of shrinkflation started under Nixon, who attempted to fight it with price controls and taking us off the gold standard, which was perhaps the most anyone ever did. Ford had no idea what he was doing and just asked people to spend less.

And then we got Carter, and Carter does not get nearly enough hate for his role in this. Carter chose to confront inflation rather than unemployment, the real beginning of "supply side economics" that Reagan would take further. Carter's whole deal was "restoring the dignity of the office" after Watergate and his focus was on individual morality. His message was essentially, you're going to have less purchasing power, but it's ok because we can seek fulfillment in other ways, outside of the economic sphere. He marked the transformation of the Democratic party away from representing the interests of labor and towards the beast that it's become today, with it's obsession over norms and procedure and technocracy.

The result of Carter's messaging and policy was one of the greatest blowout losses in history against Ronald Reagan. Reagan would do all the same things as Carter, but he at least had the decency to lie about it. He focused on how much more you'd be able to afford with cheaper goods, conveniently ignoring the fact that with lower wages, purchasing power would actually decrease. However, thanks to the Democratic party completely abandoning labor and the common people, there was no real pushback against this, there was no alternative explanation or solution or criticism of the broad direction of policy. In fact, economic policy was moved out of the sphere of democratic accountability altogether by leaving it to the Federal Reserve to set interest rates. Instead, the culture war kicked off and that's what elections would be about from then on.

Why did the Democratic party abandon unions? Because the unions like the AFL/CIO stripped themselves of power and radicalism by purging communists during the Red Scare. The Carter administration didn't view labor vs capital in terms of the fundamental struggle of society but as just another set of competing interest groups and lobbyists, which is honestly pretty much how the unions saw themselves and wanted to be seen anyway.

So what happens when more and more important questions are taken out of the hands of the voters, who then watch conditions gradually decline? Well, the voters get mad about declining conditions - and at the same time, get dumber from not being engaged in any important questions. There's a sense that we can just fuck around and do whatever because our actions don't have consequences, because most of the time what we say and believe seems to have no real effect on policy anyway. Nobody gets to vote on whether or not to keep arming Israel and bombing Yemen or on whether to raise or lower interest rates or anything like that - the only thing we get to vote on is stuff like whether trans women can play sports.

Trump's popularity is very easy to understand in that context - he is a rebellion against that declining status quo and a desperate attempt to reassert the power of elected officials over technocratic institutions. Of course, since the left has been purged and is devoid of power, this rebellion can only come from the right. A similar thing happened in Iran (which Carter also fucked up btw but that's not important right now), where after being installed by the CIA, the shah hunted down and exterminated everyone on the left, and then conditions declined and people wanted change, only that change had to come from the right because the left was powerless. And if the American left can't materialize and offer an alternative vision, both to Trump and, more importantly, to the failed bipartisan status quo that existed before him, then we're headed towards the same future.

I think so yes (there is a stereotype about them for good reason after all), but I think things are trending in an extremely concerning direction and things are going to get worse. I mean, they're clearly trying to make younger Americans less intelligent, look at what they're doing with the department of education.

leaded gasoline was fun, huh?

EDIT:

Someone else suggested it first, oops. Still, the video I linked is a fun deep-dive. I had no idea leaded gasoline is still used in small airplanes.

the same % of Americans have always been stupid. but for a long time it was honest ignorance that made them pliable, in small communities, to conmen.. who quickly worked their con and moved on to the next town.

But thanks to the internet connecting disparate crazies, and elevating crazy to a mainstream voice, and then hostile foreign powers elevating that further on social media thanks to the internet, giving it a heavy dose of false legitimacy.. its devolved into a unique bouillabaisse of cromagnum hyper-idiocy the likes the world probably has never seen before.

and thank to isolated media bubbles like Fox News and OANN, it will only continue to get worse and worse.

I think it got worse in 2009 when the tea party started. But yes, we've always been stupid. But this is a whole new level.

Are we more stupid than we used to be? Yeah. But I'd use the word ignorant instead. It's a bit more accurate. Ignorance is chosen, and that's what our current epidemic of stupidity is. Chosen.

There have always been a lot of ignorant people, but now, with social media, those people have platforms to infect others with their ignorance. Also, in my own lifetime, I've witnessed a shift from ignorant people still being able to set aside partisan politics to condemn obviously bad actors or decisions to 100% doubling down on partisan politics no matter how bad the person or action is.

I've definitely FELT this increase in willful ignorance over the course of my life living in this country. People in my own life choosing to believe things they absolutely would not have believed a couple decades ago. People not understanding super basic concepts.

I think there are other factors than just bad actors spreading ignorance on social media. I think a lot of it has to do with simple distractions. The modern world has so many. A lot of the people I know don't even read books. Like, they simply don't read. If I ask them what book they read last they have to concentrate because it was multiple years ago. That's fucking crazy. Instead of picking up a book they're watching Real Wives of Whatever. Getting involved in some wealthy person's 1st world problems, instead of, you know, learning something.

We're entering an age of concentrated ignorance and, unfortunately, that's very unlikely to end anytime soon. And the stakes are higher than ever for something like that to happen because we possess greater power to decimate this planet than we used to. Through pollution or braindead child-like politicians who can wage war or launch nukes.

It takes a lot less effort to allow things to keep going the way they are than it does to turn things around and responsibly educate the masses. So we're probably going to continue spiraling.

Things are going to get dark. Our quality of life will decline.

I think it just comes down to racism. Once the Civil Rights Movement happened all that collectivism disappeared because it had always been white supremacy masquerading as collectivism. Once all the diverse peoples of the USA were to benefit from that collectivism, the whites very quickly changed their minds about the socialist policies they’d put in place. Obviously I don’t mean the whites as if they’re a monolith, but it was enough of them to get the system to go in a different direction.

When I was a child i gree up around red Republicans and insane wealth. Yes. The answer is yes. And rich people hate accountability and always get away with being shitty.

People have been stupid for centuries.

1. The average education level has been low or nonexistant for most people through most of history so everyone was equally dumb. Public education is a relatively new thing. People have been vulnerable to greed, deluded thinking, etc since day 1.

2. The internet has allowed stupid people to find each other and reinforce each other's stupidity and create a race of conspiracy obsessed super morons.

3. The internet has also distilled everything into negativity to the point where everyone and everything isn't just questioned but warped and rejected. Even the most basic advice on public health is now rejected. You've got people rejecting basic facts and science. Everyone who runs for office gets subject to so much hate and lies that no sensible person would want to run for office now leaving only questionable personalities willing to do it.

I'll add that America's obsession with individualism, which ironically becomes groupthink like with MAGA, has become extremely poisonous. It is making it impossible to do even basic things like improve public transportation, gun control, education, healthcare, public health, etc. It is like we've become a nation of children who can't handle being told to go to bed and brush their teeth.

Yes

1960s leftism of having race separated water fountains?

Yes.

People in general are fairly fucking dumb. It's frustrating...

I think most of this is being driven by personal vendettas. if you look at each person on the right, it seems they all have a grudge of some such and this current administration promises to deliver based on revenge.

The biggest player being Elon: His son Xavier has transitioned. And when his (now daughter) called out Elon's nazi wave as being legitimate, Elon tipped his hand by saying the woke killed his son and he is out to kill the woke mind(https://www.aol.com/news/elon-musk-estranged-daughter-responds-155107557.html) - So Elon sank a tonne of money to sway this election to his own vendetta.

For Dementia donald : it's Biden winning the 2020 election.

For Vance it's repressed feelings you can see he's trying to break out the drag queen smokey eye: although he's an opportunist at the base of it. So he's getting two things met here. I think because he's at odds with himself(still eyelining everyday) his soul has vacated, he has much self insecurity and is unhappy with himself as a person and projects that as anger and revenge on everyone who he views is as weak as he feels. Sort of a projected self hatred.

For the speaker mike johnson: he's a gay convert, big proponent of the conversion therapy so lots to unpack there. even lives with a reverend while married to a woman. to simplify it : He's against the 'woke mind' because he has a lot of self hate. He's against himself. Likely why he drinks so much as well and does wreckless shit : https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/speaker-mike-johnson-chief-staff-arrested-dui-charge-trump-speech-rcna194986 - this person is self destructing.

For Hegeseth: he's an untreated alcoholic that self medicates rather than face a true recovery.

JFK Jr: wormbrain. his worm is against anything that would kill parasites. I don't think there's much of a human being in that brain anymore. I think it's all parasite now.

For Leavitt: greedy and sees this as an opportunity(as do most of the party) - and while we can say she's young and easily influenced I'm not prepared to let her off the hook on this. There are too many progressive young minds to prove this was a choice of her's. Not simply ignorance. It's stupidity for sure. but not from not knowing any better.

Read the book "bowling alone" if you're interested in someone's attempt at researching why we went from collectivism to individualism as a country. There are a large amount of factors but if I were to take a crack at it, I'd list a few: TV, the Internet, smart phones, air conditioning, capitalism, and (last but certainly not least) racism. Racism is foundational to the country and its history.

As far as the stupidity, some of the same factors apply, but there are also additional ones like environmental factors (US citizens eat more microplastics than any other major country since like 2020 and we lead poisoned ourselves for a century), a deep-seeded anti-intellectualism, and we're a large part cultist/religious idiots that see everything through the lense of "some guy" being the best thing ever and the source of all truth.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

• Isaac Asimov, 1980

There were people warning against the glorification of ignorance in the US nearly half a century ago. It's nothing new; it just reached critical mass (also thanks to social media where ignorant people can self-organise).

I don't know but check out the show All in the Family which was aired in the 70s. I don't think they have exaggerated the character of Archie Bunker. I really think that there were many people like him during that era. And he is exactly like the pro Trump that we are seeing right now.

I remember him saying in one episode "Nixon is intelligent as he knows how to avoid paying taxes". That argument comes up from pro Trump people.