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I recently learned that almost 1 in 5 Americans are illiterate.
How many Americans do you think are reasonably well educated, so that they would understand somewhat complex issues like tariffs? Or could seek out information if they didn't understand?
Im still surprised by that , the quality of education in my country is low but holly fuck im stunned by the lack of education in the states
It is highly regional, too.
Despite the existence of the Department of Education (which Trump is trying to dismantle), there is no national standard for education in the US. In general, each state is free to decide upon its own policies and standards.
Some states, such as those in the northeast, have very high-performing school systems. So when that "1 in 5 are illiterate" statistic is mentioned (I actually have not verified that number, just quoting the prior claim as an example), it would be caused by low-performing states where the situation is much more dire dragging down the national average.
Here's a general look at quality of education in the US by state, though recommend folks look up their own numbers because I haven't validated the numbers pulled in the article I grabbed this from.
It's not a perfect divide between red states and blue states (Florida appears good, California less so, as an example), but in general we see the lower performing states located mainly in the South where the Republicans have more support. Basically, a less educated populace is easier to manipulate.
I was reading into this recently and the reason Florida is so high on these lists is because post-secondary education is very cheap. Their K-12 education is on the garbage end of the spectrum.
It's by design.
Important note - literacy isn’t simply about being able to recognize and pronounce letters and words. A person can sound out every word in English, and understand what each word says, and still be illiterate if they cannot comprehend the message the words express together.
That’s where this illiteracy arises - it’s a failure of reading comprehension. In this light, I imagine many of us have attempted conversation online with somebody functionally illiterate.
Literacy is also about English (at least as commonly reported in the US). About 1/3 of functionally illiterate adults in the US are foreign born. I have never seen literacy stats that measure "literate in any language".
I wrote a comment explaining Tariffs on a Fox News YouTube video a few weeks back, and the entire reply chain was people arguing with eachother about how tariffs work because "Trump said it's a tax on other countries, so that's how they work"
You’re doing god’s work in the hellish trenches
That's front line in "Trench Crusade" level of trenches.
It’s the problem that reality is more complicated than the simplified version trump gives his followers.
If you don’t know how something works and someone very confidently tells you how it works and it sorta maps onto familiar concepts, boy is that catnip.
Maybe all the countries are just sitting around like people and Canada is like a guy buying our stuff and we are just making that guy pay a tax. I’m a guy, I pay taxes, sucks to be that guy but probably rules to be the guy getting the tax revenue, and now trump made that us, awesome!!!
Transmitting this wrong idea is fast because it maps onto their lived experiences. It’s easy for them to conceptualize Canada as a single monolithic entity that is buying shit and having to pay a tax. So in one stroke they get a double dopamine hit.
So here you come to explain, “that’s not how any of this works” Canada isn’t one entity, it’s many. Sure the tariff is on their stuff, but it’s paid by the person buying it, us. And you can go on about all the ways they are wrong but you are threatening the fact that they are not dumb and they already understand this and their understanding means they are winning. So you want them to admit they are dumb and getting fucked and that’s a hard sale.
This is the real danger of hypernormalization, it allows people like trump to replace the complexity of reality with a fake but simpler version. And it’s so dangerous because the people that buy in to that fake but simpler version have this weird insane incentive to defend it.
Plot twist: the person writing this is President Musk and the employee he's referring to is Trump.
Or, we can hold the fucking media accountable for telling blatant lies about the impacts of tariffs.
Fox News got around that by claiming they're entertainment, not news.
Per their own arguments in court, no reasonable person would consider Fox News to be factual.
Ignorance is not an excuse. Fire all MAGAs for taxifs.
And the people who voted for the orangetard will still be shafted by him and his mafia yet will continue to blame "obiden" for their economic woes. 🥱
literally googling tariffs, brings you to a government page that lists tariffs, duties, and taxes under the same fucking definition.
How people like this DO NOT understand this shit, is beyond me. I can respect the humility in changing your position after being that stupid though, please, due your due diligence before mindlessly repeating the shit other people tell you, so you don't look stupid.
What, visit a website, read it, then comprehend it? What, like a book?! May as well ask them to make a phone call.
Man, this isn't even "doing your research" it's just knowing what very basic words mean.
That’s actually a huge problem I’ve had with a right winger.
Even though he was relatively reasonable, we got stuck because we could not agree on what fascism means.
I was good to use a dictionary or better yet Wikipedia. He said it can only mean what Mussolini meant when he came up with the term.
What was annoying is that all I wanted to do was say, group X does Y things, Y things are fascism and fascism is bad.
It’s just mental gymnastics because it doesn’t matter what we call it, group X is still doing bad things, but instead we got stuck on details.
Imo this is pretty much all right wing’s only play, dismantle the tools of logic so the conversation doesn’t even happen in the first place.
Mussolini also said that fascism was whatever it needed to be in the nation it was in, for future reference. There is only the pragmatic consolidation of power.
It does not even matter if is the state consolidating power, or the church, or corporations, only that the process is aimed at merging their powers in the end.
I bet a coworker $20 that "tariff" and "tax" were synonyms. Motherfucker refused to pay up, calling merriam-webster.com, thesauraus.com, wikipedia etc. "fake news".
Your mistake was referencing a woketionary.
A tariff is a tax or custom duty on an imported good.
Tariffs can lead to a reduction and higher prices on foreign imported goods.[1] Like the corporate income tax, domestic consumers ultimately pay the tax in higher prices.
Arguing with idiots is like playing chess with a pigeon. No matter how good you are, the bird is going to shit on the board and strut around like it won anyway.
The OP is battling against what Faux Newz, Dipshit Donnie, and other right-wing propagandist shitrags are telling his employee, all which the employee takes as indesputable truth. If he can override that much brainwashing he can convince anyone of anything.
"The Big Lie" is what Sanders is calling it.
How many "big lies" are we up to now?
Next try telling him there's no God with an EKG. The same part of his brain will be activated, guaranteed. Not to dock religion. But US conservatism is a religious cult basically.
Doing your own research or, you know, trust the experts? There's no way I will get deep enough into virology to get a proper grasp if I need a vaccination. But I for sure won't trust a random space Karen or brainworm Jimmy.
and every one of the millions who ~~were~~are just as dumb, will forget the lessons learned well before the next election and vote for it all over again.
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