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Kennedy’s adult audience had lived through an economic boom they felt was the direct result of education and information. In the 40s millions of Americans received free education and training, either in the military or for skilled war production jobs, and/or were put through college with the postwar GI bill. The 50s saw an economic boom that heavily promoted education as the key to prosperity and national security.
Today’s audience thinks it’s the smartest, best informed generation in history because pretty much all of human knowledge is available with a few clicks, but instead of exploring that limitless pool spends its free time scrolling through arguments about uninformed opinions and who should be demonized for Liking the wrong posts.
“I love the poorly educated” - You know who
Three big things:
- Compartmentalization of media (echo chambers)
- Tribalism (thanks Russia!)
- Macho culture (treating politics like a college football game except being LESS informed)
We’ll never recover from this. This is the United States of Ignorance now. I’m deeply sorry to those who did their part and will be victims in the future, but it HAS to get worse before it can get better. We need a great reset in some form. Revolution, world war, alien invasion…
LOL neither the media nor Russia created tribalism or echo chambers. They’re just the digital equivalent of immigrants creating ethnic neighborhoods. People are more comfortable around others who speak their language and share their background. Give them all the variety in the world and most of them will flock to their own kind.
But I totally agree America is the United States of Ignorance and won’t recover from it. Not just ignorance but incapability - in spite of a flourishing DIY culture, Americans in general can’t DIY their way out of a WalMart. They don’t even think up to them to solve anything, because every problem is either somebody else’s direct fault or was inevitable because of conditions somebody else created. It’s a nation of spectators whining that all the shows suck.
This is sort of my train of thought, however, historically, when that sort of thing happens, very rarely is the resulting government a unfucked democratic nation.
I hope there are enough people with actual core American values that rise to the top if/when it happens.
My hopes aren’t high, but they’re not high with the status quo either.
Let’s go aliens!!!
I vote for giant sinkhole
That would be amazing!
I wonder why he ended up with a bullet in his head.
Because…
Grandpa Joe worked with the mob rum-running, in order to amass the family fortune, and fhey in turn delivered several major cities in the election, but then JFK let RFK Bobby loose on an aggressive anti-racketeering rampage
Among other reasons ofc
Well that went well didn’t it
We’ve now seen what the ignorance of 10 million who don’t bother to show up can do.
That’s how many Democrats voted in 2020 but not this year, and are blaming the results on “the party”. Nope, it was you fucktwats.
No I voted and still blame them. People were vocal about their concerns and intentions to not vote months before the election and the campaign ignored them and somehow that isn’t their fault.
Also the 10 million, like you said, were ignorant. It wasn’t the ultra-impassioned grandstanders that affected an election. It was people that saw the last 4 years relatively boring politics as a license to tune out and figured this election wasn’t something they needed to worry about. Those people exist in far FAR higher numbers than anybody actually paying attention
I don’t think repeatedly telling people how important voting is and pleading with them to vote and to get other people to vote is “ignoring” it. What I blame the Democratic party for is not cultivating younger candidates for years and years. There should have been a broader field of viable candidates to narrow down based on public opinion, or at the very least grooming Harris as a likely candidate throughout Biden’s term instead of swapping her in as an emergency backup. Having said that, there’s no excuse for “I’m not voting because there isn’t a good enough candidate!” is the mentality of petulant high school sophomores who refuse to brush their teeth because they’re mad at mom for making them miss soccer practice to go to a dentist appointment - I mean, she’s such a bitch, I’m just gonna let my teeth rot in protest!
Don’t worry. Plenty of blame to go around. The fuckwad voters who enabled fascism by staying home, and the fuckwad party elite who couldn’t find their own asses with both hands and a map and lost a lay-up election to fascism through their own venality and incompetence.
And don’t forget this (from 2016):
How the Hillary Clinton campaign deliberately “elevated” Donald Trump with its “pied piper” strategy
It’s still paying dividends, apparently.
They suck at campaigning, but they aren’t the worst at governing. An informed voter doesn’t require razzle dazzle, but alas we are in short supply of informed voters. I don’t see that turning around anytime soon, so buckle up buttercup!
Nah, they suck most at governing. People were tired of things getting worse every year under Democrats. Things get worse faster under Republicans, but the Democrats didn’t do enough to prevent our societal decay into feudalism. They’re corrupt as fuck, especially where they have supermajorities. Every law to address problems is another scheme that helps the rich. They never take a stand against business, not understand that there is currently no way to serve both capital and labor.
I’m looking forward to get my crippled ass Aktion-T4ed in the coming years, so you could say I’m buckled up
Well, ooooobviously that’s because the democrats cheated in 2020 and then inexplicably, while in power, decided not to cheat in 2024. Obviously.
Massive /s.
Tbf. 152 million votes counted so far in 2024 and just shy of 160 million voted in 2020. Every swing state had record turn out except Pennsylvania which was close. There was bound to be less votes with people working and mail in ballots not valid to do because covid in some states. Most the votes lost were in states that outcomes were the same in 2020. She lost by 250k people in 4 states. These people flipped or some sat home while more showed up for Trump she lost because of not getting better turn out in those states she even beat Bidens numbers in some of these states.
I can guess what he means by the other points but I wonder how being more educated means being more free?
Liberty consists of the capacity to make meaningful choices; those ignorant of their choices cannot possibly make them. Ignorance itself is a kind of tyranny which chains people.
Harder to be taken advantage of if you know the means by which one takes advantage of another.
Knowing the wealthy need you more than you need them lets you make stronger demands and form unions.
Being knowledgeable gives you job security and independence, you have intrinsic value as a capable resource - and if spurned can become a troublesome enemy because you understand your opponent and can take advantage accordingly
Knowledge is absolutely power, and power gives you opportunity for freedom to choose how to live your life.
because uneducated people are easy to lie to.
Not strictly: he says only an educated people can be a free one, meaning that all free peoples are educated ones, but the inversion of that is “No uneducated people can be free”. By that, I assume he means that uneducated people are far more susceptible to deception and manipulation compared to the educated that will be better able to detect lies, point them out and understand explanations of why that’s bullshit.
As an example: If I tell you that the “vaccines cause autism” study was a) just a pilot study, not an actual one at scale, b) heavily fudged to the point that one scientist was kicked off the project for refusing to falsify results, c) only examined a specific vaccine, the MMR combination vaccine usually given to infants and d) led by a guy that had financial stakes in a company trying to sell individual vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella, you can probably smell the bullshit.
If I tried to explain that to someone who’s not educated enough, they’ll probably stare at me blankly, then shrug and say something to the effect of “Well, you never know what to believe these days” and change absolutely nothing about their stance.
Things get far worse when someone tells their base that some group is capturing and eating their pets and ends up inciting violence by people who take him at face value.
Edit: I don’t know why I said “harmless” there. Anti-Vaxxers aren’t harmless, even when compared to incitement of hate crimes.
If I tried to explain that to someone who’s not educated enough, they’ll probably stare at me blankly, then shrug and say something to the effect of “Well, you never know what to believe these days” and change absolutely nothing about their stance.
Wow, I never knew I had conservative-related PTSD, but here I am having vivid and terrifying flashbacks to just that scenario.
I could try to come up with some bullshit home remedy solution and insist “That’s what my pa alwys did, helps every time!” and when it doesn’t work for you, double down angirly “Well it works for my pa, you’re just doing it wrong”?
Or I could acknowledge that I’m not actually qualified, and all I can do is say “Sorry to remind you of that”
one way is, that if you do not know the impact of policies, you cant make informed decisions about them and thereby lose control over your life and environment.
This criticism of democracy is way older than Kennedy. Socrates thought democracy impossible due to the ignorance of the common person.
And that’s what this is, an argument against democracy. A vote cast by a shut-in illiterate who chooses candidates based on their astrology sign is just as valid as the chair of the political science department. Anything less than that is an argument for weighted or exclusive suffrage. You can believe in democracy or the “low information” voter, but not both.
Acknowledging that democracy as glorified sortition is not actually in any way better than sortition is not an argument against democracy; it is an argument for creating the circumstances in which an active citizenry meaningfully and knowledgeably participates in the civic life of their polity. It’s not about ‘weighting’ or making suffrage exclusive, it’s about creating a society in which good citizenship is enabled and valued by the institutions of society.
creating the circumstances in which an active citizenry meaningfully and knowledgeably participates in the civic life of their polity
Why stop there? If your project requires an improved humanity to work, why not just improve us until we don’t need governance?
You do realize that an educated citizenry is not some superhuman impossible feat for our genetic code, right
I have no more faith in this Democracy (and I mean globally). To the point where I literally cannot bring myself to participate in the silent acceptance which is voting.
Edit: to prevent this from sounding like my Edgelord Master’s thesis, as I see it, Democracy is now one two things:
- a lie we’ve been fed from the very start
- a noble idea which has been twisted and corrupted beyond any recognition
In either of those cases, it feels like I’m being forced to pull the lever and decide who gets killed by the tram. So I choose to never again touch the lever as long as the death of something is the only outcome.
The whole thing with the “trolley problem” is that blood is on your hands regardless. Not touching the lever doesn’t stop the trolley and can lead to more death.
In the recent voting case not pulling the lever put lgbtq, disabled, immunocompromised, minorities, Ukraine, remnants of democracy and a habitable planet on the tracks. The other track had Palestinians and could have been shifted away with enough protest.
Oh, no, had I the chance to vote in the USA (not American), I would’ve voted for anyone who wasn’t a Trump adherent, just to prevent The Orange Man from participating in the unfolding of history any more than he already has. Don’t get me wrong, I’m frustrated and disillusioned, not stupid.
But in other places, such as my country, we’re well past the point of that choice even being on the table.
so then what else are you doing? are you out protesting, boycotting, participating in mutual aid?
As much as I can. Truthfully, there’s not much of that going on around these parts, but yes, I try as much as I can to find ways to act against the choices with which we are presented nowadays.
To be clear, I am not against Democracy as a fairer-than-most political system, my meaning was related to the Democracy-that-is. Just like I appreciate Socialism, but not Stalin’s brand of such.
I think it’s still good to go vote to keep the worst from happening and to improve the circumstances for emancipatory struggle.
But I also think voting is one of the lesser important levers, compared to activism, organizing, unions and so on.
Both, giving up using levers and cosplaying trying by just voting for a shitty neoliberal mess and watch them making people frustrated enough to vote for trumpf and not doing anything else are irresponsible at the end of the day
Normally, I’d agree with you in regards to voting, but this endless cycle of always choosing the lesser evil while the obvious and truly necessary solutions are either underrepresented or not even represented at all (depending on country) is an exercise in futility and only ever serves to obfuscate the goalposts, like digging our own hole. Feels like the illusion of choice nowadays. Maybe this would’ve been effective given a lot of time, but with the accelerating degradation of socio-economics and the planet itself, I strongly believe we’re just wasting time dancing around the problem.
I always at least cancel my vote when there’s nothing to choose from so they can’t use my name for voter fraud (we’ve had thousands of dead people showing up in voting registries and skewing the numbers, this is how bad things are around here), but that’s pretty much all I’ve been doing in the past decade, with a few notable exceptions which didn’t affect things in the long run. What we now have on offer are: a combo of lukewarm buzzwords pertaining to climate protection (while changing as little as possible) with regressive social policies on the “Left”, a not-quite-Fascist, or a straight-up Fascist. Yes, here as well! Yay!
I agree with you that civic action is the most important element nowadays, can’t wait for the day when more people’ll pick up on that.
So, yeah. I don’t normally like to do this, but Plato may have been right, unfortunately. At least as far as the contemporary context is concerned.
