greetings americans, it an honest question.
Outside of america i constantly see, especially recently as your elections are coming up that…well, it looks like a clownshow?
Your recent two contenders where a hugely dept orange clown who can barely keep a coherent thought advertising a product in the whitehows, who had to have his name constantly mention when being talked to or he will be disinterested.
The other one was a senile old fossil who couldnt even say a single sentence without his dementia kicking in.
Now you have trump again as a runner up and he seems so openly incompetently corrupt its almost funny, than we have the senile man who (to my extremely limited knowledge) got replaced by this kamala woman because he was too old, said woman seems to be at least present in mind and appears to see trump as what he really is, a manchild (the famous clip of her basically laguhing at him)
Like, are outside views are just so vehemently skewed by news, people and the like? Or am i just grossly misinformed?
20+ years ago, George Carlin discussed public education.
“Just think of the average american voter. These are some dumb motherfuckers right here. Some dumb motherfuckers. And as dumb as the average one is…HALF OF THEM ARE EVEN DUMBER THAN THAT!!! Some dumb mother fuckers in this country. Some dumb mother fuckers…”
And in case you were hoping he had a positive ending to that set, he didn’t. His overall point was that our government is not being held back by the voters. There is no secret set of competent politicians who could just fix things if they got voted in. This is what we voted in, because this was whats available. Don’t look for it to get better. This is what our election system produces from the pool of candidates it has available.
Garbage in, garbage out. It’s just that simple.
So, while I DO agree that a HARD focus needs to be placed on education, it’s not going to help the voting process. It’s not a issue of dumb voters voting for dumb people. It’s an issue of trash candidates being our only options…and at this point, it’s getting to a point of intentional facism.
Like I said. Trash in, trash out.
A better education will, at least partially, solve the problem… in the long run, of course… but the long run is like 20, 30 years from now. Things might get a lot worse by then and beyond fixing.
Things perpetuate and there is no fixing this. The real issue is capitalism and money. You can’t have an incentive to care about the people and how they are raised and educated if the only true incentive in this system is money. There is money in education, of course, but there is so much more from taking advantage of stupid people, regardless who does it (big tech, politicians, fast food chains…).
I love Carlin, but he was an awful defeatest, any hope beaten right out of him, which he admits himself.
Education is, genuinely, the prime issue. Where I agree with Carlin is that better education can’t fix our system, because the system itself is fundamentally broken. It’d be better with smarter people, but ultimately would still be corporate captured and self-serving.
What a highly educated populace could mean is a rejection of the current system entirely, in favor of building a new one in its shell cooperatively, with horizontal, decentralized power and the wholesale rejection of profit-motive being the prime focus.
I suspect Carlin would assume humanity is incapable of that, but then again he probably wasn’t super familiar with how that actually happened in the Spanish Civil War.
If we manage to pull it off, Carlin would’ve been happy for once, begrudgingly :p
I disagree.
It’s not that public education makes people progressive, though.
It’s that there’s now tons of poorly educated people who completely lack critical thinking skills.
You can see that in the resurgence of conspiracy theories like Flat Earth, and some of the antivax theories. (Microchips that can’t be found?)
Conservatives believe the shit people tell them because they’re too stupid to be critical of it. Like when trump tells them immigrants are eating pets, or that a wall is going to solve all the immigration problems; or that the economy some how suffers and it’s all their fault.
They’re uncritical and unable to reason out how self-evident his lies are.
We need that back. It won’t solve our problems, no. But if we’re going to solve them, we need people that are capable of discourse beyond macros.