Social media created MAGA. But it also had an effect on many of the rest of us that I think has gone underappreciated: it revealed the astonishing breadth and depth of American stupidity, across all strata, that has shocked even the cynical among us.
The question: what do we do with this knowledge?
The question: what do we do with this knowledge?
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Which isn't to say "less literate". But the *kinds* of things that the average person is thinking about most of the time are stupider things than 100 years ago.
I think that's a real thing. And it's exactly what Marshall McLuhan predicted would happen as we got away from text being our primary form of information consumption.
Jarvis said, many times, that parents ruined their kids by buying them encyclopedias.
which may actually be worse.
Also, the Hitler-normalization, while real, wasn't nearly as bad as it's made out to be, especially in comparison to today's firehouse of fascism-toadying.
OTOH, if you are reading on SM, choose wisely. Garbage in, garbage out, as we say.
I'm dead serious. It has been the driving force behind the creation of a blissfully ignorant populace, unquestioning of authority, for decades in this country. And the scary part is that now it's mainstream. There's a reason GOP ghouls talk about God so much
I'm all for recognizing religion's relationship to stupidity, but we can't just ban ideas and worldviews. Also, religion, in its worst forms, comes from stupidity more than vice versa.
Not sure it’s a solvable problem with the laws (and judges) we have.
We have to stop with the "our" and the "us." It's them. We're all subject to cognitive biases -- to wildly different degrees.
Less "democracy." Each feel-good step toward plurality has come at the expense of median voter competency.
A population of largely uneducated people can be captured by populism.
We need a less open system, or we will get a closed system.
Or, maybe it is too late.
We once blunted the effects of mass stupidly on elections. We stopped.
Ds were for racism and the needs of white working men.
Rs were for social egalitarianism and the wealthy.
This was the "blunting."
Now Rs are the party of racists, the white working man, and the wealthy. That is a majority of the voting public.
Unlimited pluralism of our sort, however, is a guarantee of IQ-100ish government.
(may be harder than it sounds)
https://bsky.app/profile/whitehouse.senate.gov/post/3lc77f3btrs2d
Just from a public policy perspective, it's usually easier to focus on leaders acting strategically for specific aims than it is to address the entire population.
We can't "fix" stupid!