Comment on America continues to fall behind the rest of the world

• Marshezezz@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  I’m American and I know better. What’s their excuse? Right and wrong are pretty universal. It shouldn’t take years of proper education to know not to hate someone for being born a certain way.

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  • Jax@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    If you ‘know better’ then what’s stopping you from recognizing that not everyone is cut from the same cloth?

    A black person raised to believe in the Nation of Islam might be more supportive of black rights — does that make what they believe right? No, the NoI is a cult that believes white people were born in a lab 7000 years ago (amongst other crazy bullshit). MAGA is also a cult. You should read up on what defines cults and what kind of people are susceptible to them.

    I’m not exactly making excuses for them, I hate MAGA. Nuance here, however, is very important.

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    • rmrf@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      You nailed it; recognizing nuance is a critical skill

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  • rmrf@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    This feels very much like the booststraps the owner class expects you to clime the social ladder with.

    It shouldn’t take years of proper education to know not to hate someone for being born a certain way. No one said anything else. My claim was that there exists a well established, well funded, and effective institution that diseducates this into people that wouldn’t otherwise have it.

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    • Marshezezz@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Okie dokie

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• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  To me, throwing vitriol at people because a decades-long campaign from the most powerful people on earth succeeded feels so similar to blaming the enslaved for not freeing themselves.

  It becomes more complicated when the campaign was created by propagandists from the 1940s and simply echoed through time by increasingly credulous buffons with more and more money.

  At the same time, the “enslaved” keep signing up to join the military and the police, so that they can leverage their position to get access to the things they are trying to deprive everyone else of.

  So it’s a cycle of self-imposed violence and poverty. And it is one that people accept reflexively because it hurts other people who are lower than them on the social order.

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  • rmrf@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    At the same time, the “enslaved” keep signing up to join the military and the police, so that they can leverage their position to get access to the things they are trying to deprive everyone else of.

    At least in my hometown, people are trained from birth that joining the military is a high honor and one of the bravest and least-selfish things one can do. There’s a reason the military aims more recruiting effort towards teenagers than any other demographic, with 40% of the entire military (not just of new recruits) being under 25: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK547615/…/fig_3_2/?r…

    So it’s a cycle of self-imposed violence and poverty. And it is one that people accept reflexively because it hurts other people who are lower than them on the social order.

    Partly, yes. Keep in mind my original comment was in response to another, not a holistic self-standing claim. My opening sentence was a comparative, not a declaration of absolute fact.

    Also to be clear, my use of enslaved was in reference to slavery in the USA, not the military which is an entirely volunteer (yes, the word volunteer is a heavy lift) force.

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• TORFdot0@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  I agree with you mostly but don’t agree in calling people “diseducated”, I think it removes too much personal agency. Undermining education and replacing it with religious devotion is most definitely a goal of fascist wealthy class but we aren’t there yet.

  Public education doesn’t make someone mentally incompetent, so no need to infantilize them. This “hate, fear, and illiteracy” are all choices they’ve made to identify with.

  No one is born MAGA, they choose it for themselves. Their lack of self-discipline and unable to delay gratification and propensity to choose the path of least resistance may be preyed upon by the system but they always have a choice.

  Its very similar to the food system in this country, it’s all engineered to feel good and make you addicted and overconsume. You still have the choice to eat less and exercise more but it’s hard. Some people are also predisposed to falling into it, so I do think you make a good point even if I don’t fully agree

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  • rmrf@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    I appreciate your response, it’s well written and considerate.

    I want to clarify that my use of the term diseducation is not primarily directed to public schools en masse, but rather the increasing role platforms like TikTok, television, and ‘alternative’ ‘sources’ of mis/disinformation play as a voice of authority in many areas of life. To me, disinformation and diseducation vary in that disinformation is intentionally misleading/false facts about a topic to form a particular stance such, whereas diseducation primarily affects a way of thinking or conducting “research” to yield more results over time. For example, I believe a religious take on something like creationism to be disinformation as it pertains to a single set of facts on a single topic, but I believe a religious framing of things like the origin of sin and human nature to be more diseducation as they affect an individual’s framework for understanding that branches beyond a particular topic. Probably not the best example; I had a long day at work

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    • TORFdot0@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      I may be misinterpreting you a bit still, but if I reframe diseducation as propaganda, then I completely agree with your point. And it also presents a challenge we will face in perpetuity in the future. The technological progress of the internet has had an enormous positive impact on humanity but also comes with an enormous human cost as the worst of us weaponize it to gain money and power.

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      • rmrf@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        No doubt about that.

        The beauty of a library is most librarians love their job and are altruistically motivated, which can help when they spot someone regularly checking out sketchy stuff. For example, “The Prince” by Machiavelli being checked out by some 22 year old would elicit a small conversation at the counter about why he’s a bad person to learn from. Those types of small guiding interactions that encourage openness in thought don’t exist on the internet. The internet is also entertaining enough to find its way into influencing people who aren’t as likely to have a conversation like that at a library in the first place. There’s a whole list of small things like that which have previously made access to info more likely to be positive that simply aren’t in place on the internet, and it adds up a ton.

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• DarkFuture@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  a decades-long campaign from the most powerful people on earth succeeded feels so similar to blaming the enslaved for not freeing themselves.

  Yeah, but those people all received a public education (like I did) and have access to all humanity’s knowledge at their fingertips. And they’re still profoundly stupid. That’s not a good look.

  but how are they to know better?

  Self education? I know a whole lot more than I did when I stopped having a formal education. I don’t think it’s right to just assume that people are sheep by default and have to have good educators to be reasonably intelligent. Especially in this day and age. It removes the expectation of personal responsibility that we should have for every adult.

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  • rmrf@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Yeah, but those people all received a public education (like I did)

    Consider the differences in public school quality of experience with regard to property tax, individual performance, class size, and elected school officials, state gov’t, and decade of education.

    Not saying you went to a great school or were a top performer with extra curricular opportunities or whatever, I just want you to consider the range in education quality in the US.

    Yeah, but those people…have access to all humanity’s knowledge at their fingertips

    As well as disinformation. Without an adequate understanding of how to use it, as is prominent in those who couldn’t afford college or were raised before the proliferation of the Internet, this can do far more potential harm than potential good.

    Self education? I know a whole lot more than I did when I stopped having a formal education

    There are many, many, many life factors that can make this virtually impossible to people, particularly the poorly educated. Again, how are they to decipher right from wrong when wrong is intentionally crafted to discredit right?

    For some factors, consider: Poor access to mental health medicine Lack of motivation caused by the above

    40 hour work weeks Demanding home life No access to library or internet (or no knowledge of the utility of either beyond paying bills)

    I don’t think it’s right to just assume that people are sheep by default and have to have good educators to be reasonably intelligent

    This isn’t something we need to assume, and not something I assume. I believe this is widely understood as an explanation of why environmental factors are of the greatest (and best established) predictors of lifelong trajectory including continuing ed, economic success, and general success measures. (www.nber.org/papers/w14884) this is a link to the first article I found. If you’d like, I can send a link to my reference doc for a thesis I wrote that had over 60 studies with an aggregate 2 million lives covered with all the same finding, as well as 2 studies that debunked the leading study with the opposite finding.

    I want to be clear that diseducation is not limited to schooling in youth but also inclusive of lifelong trainings, exposure to mis/disinformation, propagation, etc. One of the most popular narratives among right-leaning young men today is that higher ed is BAD. Not that it’s a suboptimal economic investment, but that it actively harms your ability to think for yourself.

    One final thing, I’m not trying to say we should forgive and forget. This is a very real issue and needs to be addressed seriously, and there absolutely is individual responsibility at play. Nuance is critical, though, and like most things the truth is in the middle.

    Part of the problem is it’s very easy to blame someone else for the state of the world and think their group does nothing wrong.

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