This will never get old.
It captures the corn-syrup drenched mind of hogs perfectly: thinking is EEEEEEEEEEEEEVIL. True freedom comes from mental complacency, true freedom comes from conformity.
I design my posts with all the skill of a blind dart thrower. Sometimes they stick the bullseye
an open mind is like a fortress with its gates unbarred and unguarded
For reference, this comment is written at slightly above a 10th grade level
A population that can’t read and can’t think critically is an easily controlled one.
When the unredacted version of the Mueller Report came out - I remember MSNBC hosts (and talking heads) kept saying "Everybody should read this..." They repeated that phrase like goddamned cicadas. Plus - of course - It's your duty to be an informed American. And yada-yada fucking yada.
Holy fuck - do the hosts and talking heads on that channel spend more than a few minutes a week outside of their bubble? Good luck getting an American - any American who is able - to read 1,000 words on a pleasure read never mind 100,000s of words of legalistic dreck. And for 54% of Americans even a ~1,000 word summary would be an impossibility even if they wanted to read that shit.
The average MSNBC viewer is ~68 years old and they watch - I don't remember the number - something insane like 5+ hours of MSNBC a day. Hey MSNBC hosts - you can't even get your fan base to read. They're waaaaay too busy watching your shows!
They're saying it to make their base feel like they have read it.
I.e. they're being "informed" by folks who claim it is important to have read this report, thus feel as though they have an informed and read opinion on the subject.
Similar to how a bunch of people feel like they have read the Bible when in reality they have just been lectured on cherry picked passages by preachers
Sometimes the propagandists are fucking geniuses, this is the sort of thing that's going to be a montage of clips in Century of the Self 2 or something.
The catholic church invented it a millennia ago, back when it was the state, but yeah it's impressive how well it works on the psyche
I fully agree that literacy is broadly important, and that a revolutionary class consciousness requires historical and political education which requires reading ability, but i have met plenty of educated people who are still totally deluded by liberalism, and plenty of uneducated people whose experience has led them to radical insights.
The Spanish Revolution was notable for how many of its revolutionaries were illiterate.
I also think lead poisoning leading to learning disabilities is a huge thing we really don't know the full scope of. Of course poor and poc communities are hit the hardest by that.
I told that teacher lady the only letters I need are u s and a
:amerikkka-clap: "Read theory!? What kinda geek seeks information voluntarily! If a conservative says it's true! IT'S TRUE! Sorry you sheeple can't handle the fact that us conservatives are omniscient!"
:think-mark: "Look at what the globalists need to mimic a fraction of our brainpower."
Black Panther-style literacy programs
In today's political climate - the dems would actively attack anything like that so they can gain more votes in the exurbs.
What, did you think Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader was just a bit?
It's also my justification for applying to any job. If one of these illiterate fucks can do it, it can't be that tough
Boomers throwing violent temper tantrums trying to figure out a UI that was designed with toddlers in mind.
Try being in the car with an old person driving and go anywhere with signage. They can not figure it out. “Parking, this way ↖️“ “What? Which way am I supposed to go? Where do I park? How do I know???”
To be fair I need a GPS to know where i'm going in the town I've lived in for like 4 years
For those wondering, here is what 6th grade reading level entails : https://www.greatschools.org/gk/articles/sixth-graders-reading-under-common-core-standards/
Sixth graders need to cite evidence from what they read to support their analysis of the fiction and nonfiction they study. To answer questions, students learn the key difference between evidence and inference. Evidence refers to the examples, quotes, and facts from a text that supports an idea.
54% of adults in amerikkka do not have this ability
What I'm getting from this is that Joe Biden has been secretly executed and replaced by a clone.
I know because I see the evidence. The Biden clone is doing excatly what Biden would do in its place, so it is obviously a high-quality clone.
"Can't decide if Starship Troopers is pro or anti-war"
Some tweet, a day ago
It's evident that they're not
This entire website can't fathom how Jimmy Carr might be satirical, so I'd give that poster a break.
he is a shock jock who says things he doesn't actually mean but he's also actually a dick.
so 'starve the beast' is working ... it's just that the 'beast' turns out to be a functioning amerikkkan society
getting a history major was a mistake, especially since i dont want to teach children.
Same boat, I'm probably going to plug my nose and enroll back to get myself a STEM degree. The extra debt I think will be worth it so I might have the luxury of making more than 45k a year.
i went back for IT, one class left til another bachelors but about halfway through a high school friend got me a job. im making close to twice what i did before. unfortunately i work for a finance company but they pay really fuckin well. feels good, fuckin finally. best part about going back is you only have to get the major classes done. Pretty much every class will be related to your field, unlike the first time around.
Ironically most of when I had to learn that at school was poetry class
Americans becoming poetry-pilled and giving up on prose en masse.
Too much work. Historians will pour over mountains of image memes trying to understand the final days of the American era.
It’s incredible that you believe there will be future generations of historians with access to stored media. Rather than a dead ocean, famine ridden hellscape with a small cluster of survivors trying and failing to reach their 30th birthday.
And they said "there's no poets in communism".
Fuck the coal mines, let's mandate a poem a week from people and get that literacy level back up.
:wojak-nooo: :xi-gun:
"Go write the poems, liberal."
poetry would probably really help as they'd have to think about inferring meaning and finding quotes to back up their interpretations
Publish ebooks and you’ll become acutely aware in short order. Fortunately, people still like assonance so you can get a bit funky with it
Do you publish ebooks? What else can you say - without doxxing yourself?
Not much really I’m in a pretty tight niche. Basically, if you’re interested in doing it then my advice is honestly to go to r/eroticauthors (Yeay, I know) and start writing smut. It’s one of the easiest ways to get immediate feedback on low-effort work while you figure out how to target a good niche, find the right keywords, title properly, format, do covers, the works.
Basically you can learn everything you need to know by writing erotica, but you can iterate way faster and it’s honestly pretty easy to make money.
In r/literature You could start a thread titled something like "AMA I publish ebooks". I think there'd be interest beyond just me.
Might do it on a new account in a bit
That's a very good idea. And if you're feeling maximum paranoia - you could delete your comments in here.
This is the nation that also produced a bunch of articles that were like "squid game says its anti-capitalist but heres why its really communist" so I also don't entirely blame the USA education system for this because people are bombarded with bullshit all their lives.
Curiosity is the bedrock of intellectualism. Being a treaty-treat consumer boy doesn't require a lot of curiosity. It requires a lot of being told what to eat, what to drive, where to go, and who to be.
It requires a lot of being told what to eat, what to drive, where to go, and who to be.
That's funny but it actually depressed me. It reminds me of George Carlin riffs.
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Ninja edit
This bit was sampled by Bambu on his "Sun of a Gun" album
https://youtu.be/fC2t-pHST-A
Yeah he fucking rules. I love his angry old man energy these days. I'm one of those shitheads who doesn't like modern hiphop and loves the 90s shit and damn if Bam doesn't scratch the itch.
Wonder how I stack up. I did dual enrollment in high school, and I ended up going the STEM path because honestly I hate writing, despite the fact that I was pretty good at it. I haven't really written an essay or read much non-technical/non-STEM stuff in probably 2 and a half years now, and recently I had to submit my junior year writing thing for the university I'm at. I went back through my stuff that I wrote in high school, and found a few good essays to submit. They ended up scoring it at the highest grade they give.
I felt like I kind of understood the Parenti quote that was along the lines of "do you know what it means to be able to read?" because I could not fully understand the papers that I wrote. Like it took me three or four tries, and that was bolstered by me remembering bits and pieces of it. STEM and it's consequences I guess.
I look back on some fiction I wrote a decade ago and literally cannot believe I wrote it. I feel like my brain has turned to moosh.
Just wanna say you can for sure write like that again, if you chose to/want to. Just rusty!
it's a skill you pick it up and lose it according to how much you practice
When I was in late middle school, early high school, I could read whole, adult novels in a few days. Now I’m lucky to finish a book a year. I’m in fucking grad school. And it’s not that I don’t read because I’m busy, I’m just much worse at reading and out of practice.
I'm not sure of the reading level, but America has a functional literacy rate of 87%. Functional literacy being the ability to read on a daily basis and do general literacy tasks without assistance (recipes, a bank statement, directions, etc). Most developed countries are around 99%. Former or currently socialist countries tend to be the most literate places.
The literacy rate actually lines up really well with the high school graduation rate, which is 88%. There are a lot of models that try to explain why American sucks at education, but I doubt it will surprise you to learn the probable answers are poverty, racism, and capitalism.
Underfunded schools, stressed out kids who con't care, parents who are overworked and don't care, children who are shuffled around any relative who will take them. I used to work in education and knew a lot of kids who were about 8 years old living with a bedridden older relative and no one else. It's also a lot of racist political authorities and real estate developers who box all the non-whites into poorer living conditions and deliberately underfund public services. There are some people who also talk about lead poisoning from paint and water in impoverished areas causing learning disabilities and that sounds reasonable enough to me, but I don't know anything about it for sure. Even if it weren't lead poisoning the racism and poverty would do the job the same. A lot of it also might do with America's hatred of immigrants, since something like a third of illiterate children in the US were born outside the country.
I don't know enough about the history of education in other developed, capitalist countries to know why their literacy rates are higher. Might be something particular to American imperialism and expressions of racism, probably a lot to do with America's history of slavery. Although Brazil didn't outlaw slavery until 1888 and they have a higher literacy rate than America too.
Yeah, if anyone else here also has ideas on what causes this I'd like to hear them
just at a guess probably decades of institutionally not prioritising education
It's in large part the lack of other social safety nets trickling down to ruining educational outcomes as well.
just seems like there's quite a big gap between "not prioritising education" and "not teaching kids how to read"
they can read what they can't do is understand and process written information effectively
Employers only need employees to be able to follow precise instructions, not finish a novel.
