What’s the George Carlin quote? Something about how stupid the most average person you know is, then realize that 50% of people are dumber than that?

Doesn’t help that a whole lot of idiots also think it’s somehow very clever of them to “rise above” it all by acting like it’s “both sides”. This is what passes (for a special kind of smug idiot) for political acumen.

Of course, the “liberal media” harps on the “both sides” thing all the freaking time. Which is why I find it mighty curious that a lot of supposed “leftists” take up that mantra, too.

Amongst wealthy countries, the US scores above average in science and reading comprehension, and are only really showing lag in mathematics. In terms of critical thinking, this has been a baked-in element of the curriculum, that was intentionally baked-in, for a long time now. Most countries are this way, and those that have dedicated time to specifically critical thinking, as its own subject, are relatively new, and not many do it, in primary education, yet. So this means the US is not unique in how poorly students are taught critical thinking, amongst countries with similar levels of resources.

Also, baby boomers demonstrated a lower level of critical thinking skills, than kids do today, they also show sharper cognitive decline, earlier in life, than X, and millennials have been. So is it that the conservatives have been trying to disassemble the public school system, to move funds to privatized education, thus eroding the common access to education? If so, why does the US actually score well compared to its peers? Why is it that the oldest common generation is actually the worst of the common generations, still alive, for things like critical thinking, and cognitive decline?

So there is some other factor(s) that make the US seem to stand out on this issue, amongst peers. Could it be US media specifically empowering the voice of morons, because outrage drives viewership, and profit is the only goal to US news/media companies? Is it that the elites within the conservative party have redesigned their entire party structure, and playbook, to empower morons, because morons vote for them more often than not? Is it a combination of these factors, and others, that have been shaping the US in this fashion? Could this be why we have been seeing greater, and greater, pushes from political influence groups, in other countries, that have ties to US wealth? Things like dismantling the NHS, establishing US style media as the dominant party in places like europe (murdoch family owned outlets getting larger pieces of the pie, and pushing sentiment to dismantle not for profit sources, like the BBC, and NPR/PBS, for example), far right parties, trump cocksuckers, putin cocksuckers, etc. have been on the rise for past ten plus years? Could it also be that people are growing increasingly disaffected with capitalism, and there are a lot of people lashing out, lacking understanding of what is causing life to be more difficult, and reaching out, in desperation, to anyone who sounds different from those who got us here, even if it should be obvious those people would likely make these specific issues worse? Is it that these things are also compounded with a growing desire, amongst the growing disproportionately wealthy set, to push all the bad aspects of societal structure, to hasten its collapse, and then swoop in to take over directly?

IMHO it is all of the factors in the previous paragraph, and others I haven’t bothered to bring up, and not so much the education system, at least not yet. Sorry for the word vomiting in this post.

Indeed, add in all the religious meddling in educational curriculum and you’ve got a recipie for an ignorant population.

That is objectively false. Other countries are far more educated.

Yeah, I dunno broseph. Lots of other first world countries have things like universal healthcare, paternity leave, significant and mandatory vacation, longer lifespans, generally higher quality of life and happiness, politics that aren’t straight up clown shows, more human rights.

You’ve successfully nailed an obvious generalization that there are stupid people everywhere, but the point is that stupidity is hyper-concentrated in the good ol’ US of A. As is evident.

Yeah, he made a huge mistake.

Its merely that most Americans are dumb as fuck.

Just accept it. We have free healthcare for 50 years.

I mean. Many countries are still resisting to the right-wing authoritarian push. Canada for example. Americans democratically elected dt, even after he tried to overturn the government and explicitly stated that he would be a dictator. I don’t think that would have been possible in any other country. So yeah, in a sens, Americans are dumb af. Now if you want to make it semantic question, I guess he should have written " a majority" of Americans “electors” are dumb, but it’s kind of implicit IMO. Kind of like saying dogs likes to run, obviously there’s probably some that don’t like to run, but the majority does.

oh boy, you really showed them!

What is a tariff? Google searches for term tariff spike after Donald Trump elected as president

The onion endorsed Dark Brandon after he dropped

And if they’re into politics, it will be a bubble as well. Not even left/right. It’s a bubble of your specific flavor of politics/humor. Because also political discussion and humor go hand in hand now at all times, apparently.

You are very out of the loop. Let me fill you in.

deporting immigrants without ID and asking them to re-enter the country when they have the proper papers.

This is not correct. Currently the trump admin is capriciously revoking student visas and then snatching students off the streets. They are also snatching people at their immigration court hearing. They are effectively abducting and removing people from the US without due process.

sending MS13 gang members to a prison in El Salvado

This is not correct. Currently the Trump admin has declared TdA (a Venezuelan street gang) as an enemy nation of the United States, and they are using this justification to send people to a torture prison outside the US, without due process, on the basis that these people are gang member because of weak “evidence” such as an Autism Awareness tattoo, or a lack of criminal record. Last I heard, at least 75% of the people sent to the extra-national torture prison have no criminal record at all.

making immature/rash economic policies as collateral for speeding up foreign affairs.

This is partially correct. The trump admin is making rash economic policies, but it is not speeding up foreign affairs. Multiple countries have sent delegations to the US to establish new trade policies, and have reported back that the US cannot plainly state what their current trade grievances are, or what deal they want to fix resolve them. Trump has flip-flopped (sometimes in the same sentence) about whether or not the tariffs are negotiable.

the officials who are being deposed/suspended were being irresponsible, and not doing the job/role they’re paid by the public to perform.

This is mostly incorrect. While firing enough people will get rid of underperformers, the trump admin has cut people in charge of; preventing food and medicine contamination, investigsting fraudulent business practices, monitoring and disbursing federal aid, and even the people who are required to to fire/layoff the people they are firing. This list is not comprehensive.

for DOGE (probably out of context, but I’ll still say), they’re just digitizing processes of record keeping in governance. They had issues starting out because they where recklessly trying to map out the system by pulling random plugs and flicking switches to see what they were working with. I’d expect that when they finish, they’d add redundancies so whoever maintains the system after them has the divide of testing and production servers.

This is incorrect. As it operates, DOGE’s entire task is to reduce the US government’s benefits to the majority of it’s citizens, shield billionaires and trump allies from liability, and transfer wealth from regular citizens to billionaires and trump allies.

DOGE has consistently overstated it’s “savings” by factors of up to 1000%. Most of the “actual” savings come from cutting contracts and services, which just shifts the burden of those necessary services to individuals and states. They are not rewriting the software the US Govt. uses, their team doesn’t even grasp simple database concepts. DOGE workers have demanded super-admin account to government systems, and minutes after those permissions were granted, logins using valid credentials from adversarial nations were detected. Based on this info, DOGE is either woefully inept, or horribly corrupt, or (most likely) both. The primary targets of DOGE cuts are institutions that either had, or could, investigate and hold billionaire accountable for tax dodging, anti-consumer practices, environmental damage, privacy violation, ignoring workers rights and safety, and much much more. They have been working overtime to dismantle the already weak protections the common man has from American oligarchs.

TLDR: whatever news sources you are reliant on are either directly peddling disinfo to you, or they are hiding/underreporting critical details of current events, and you should look elsewhere for your news.

You’ll just eat up anything they tell you won’t you?

How does it make you feel that you’ve bought the propaganda? I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that you’ve been duped, and not that you know the truth but are still spreading lies.

I also know you aren’t going to believe that you’ve been fooled. It’s a sad sad reality. You’ll believe anything that confirms you are smart, and deny anything that confirms you are wrong.

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Fuck if only you had all of the world’s information at your fingertips. Maybe through some device like a phone or computer. Possibly on something called the “ World Wide Web”.

I’m sure once something like that exist you’ll be able to search for answers yourself. Or you can just fuck off to newsmax like you have been doing.

Deporting legal immigrants with proper documentation has happened already.

Deporting valid visa holders after cancelling a visa for no clear reason has happened.

Tarrifs have been instated, removed, reinstated, and modified based on whims of the president.

Judges made legal decisions, which is their job, and we’re subsequently harassed by ICE.

DOGE has done irreparable harm to the well established, decades old infrastructure that the country runs on. Because of their decisions, top-level scientists are fleeing the country, programs to help people around the world and project US power have been dissolved with no warning, and institutions across the country have been thrown into disarray. There is no indication that the individuals involved know what they are breaking or have any plan to repair it.

If you are, in fact, living under a rock, then looking into all of these things might be a good start. You might then want to look into the history of Nazi Germany in the mid 1930’s to see how they destroyed democracy back then, and see how things happening now mirror what was happening then.

That’s a lot of apologetics for Trump for someone who claims to be lost. Your framing is also full of misinfo. So I am guessing you are trolling.

You can’t possibly be this naive.

sending MS13 gang members to a prison in El Salvador.

Sending people they have claimed without evidence are MS13 gang members to a “prison” (torture murder facility - you look at the Google earth images of what looks like a puddle of blood by the facility and the fact that they’ve confirmed something like 100 people died there last year, that there is no release, and that they’re cramming people into such small living spaces the EU would consider it unethical for transporting livestock and tell me what you think)

They also just deported several children, who were American citizens. One of them was a toddler with cancer.

Yes, the CECOT has definitely been presented as the model of how strongmen should deal with the worst of the worst. And there’s no doubt that there’s an implicit cruelty and dehumanization in the treatment of the prisoners there. They leave the lights on 24 hours a day. They restrict the time of like about an hour a day, apparently, that prisoners can leave their cells.

The overcrowding is excessive to international standards and the access to toilets and other hygiene clearly seem to be limited. But those conditions seem better, in the sense that in other prisons we have seen testimonies of prisoners taking turns standing and lying down due to overcrowding.

Skin disease is rampant. It’s more likely that prisoners in the other prisons have scabies on their skin or even signs of physical abuse than the tattoos that you see in the images that are often projected from CECOT.

I also read an account from a doctor that worked there that inmates with conditions like diabetes are not given their medication. That people are beaten upon arrival, to the point that some die. That people experiencing medical crises in the cells are ignored, left to die until the guards pick up the body the next day.

Even if everyone there was a gang member (there’s no due process in El Salvador, and there hasn’t been due process with the people we’ve been sending there) - that’s not how human beings should be treated.

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Theyre deporting anyone they thing is an illegal without due process.

Their means to identify ms13 don’t seem robust, and it seems like they conclude tattoos=ms13

Making rash economic policies, at your expense, while being dishonest about the origin of increased prices or who picks up the tab for it (us)

Doge is doing way more than you’re thinking, in a much worse way. The idea of “go fast and break things” isn’t good to do on no-fail government systems. Doge also appears to be targeting musks adversaries in the government that he thinks are holding back his goals. Or which he’s been investigated or regulated by

This article may be useful to read, and explains how a whistleblower at the NLRB describes how Doge operates and how data integrity and security are compromised.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/04/doge-workers-code-supports-nlrb-whistleblower/

2 hour old account

C’mon at least try

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You seem to be willfully ignorant, I assume you are talking out of your ass in bad faith.

For DOGE, it’s much, much worse than that. In many government agencies, they seem to have installed Starlink-based back doors directly into critical systems. I would not be surprised at all to find out in a few years that foreign agents have thoroughly infiltrated Starlink (perhaps even on invitation from Elon), and every piece of classified and confidential information that DOGE siphoned away is in foreign hands.

The biggest intel breach in history, perpetrated by the President’s main advisor.

This is a very brief, very incomplete list but from what has been reported so far they are

• Deporting people with legal visas because they express opinions that the presidential administration disapproves of

• Sending people who were in the US legally to a foreign prison without due process. That last part is especially important, without due process anyone can get punished without having any recourse for proving their innocence.

• Severely damaging international relations and damaging the world’s economies without any reasonable process or determination, especially with long-standing allies and trade partners.

• Dismantling large portions of the government, a lot of it created for enabling life-saving research, providing assistance to those who are most in need, and protecting citizens from toxic, dangerous, and otherwise harmful products, including in food and medicine. A lot of it through sudden, unannounced, unjustified, and illegal firings.

• Aggressively attacking anyone who disagrees with the administration, even if their disagreement stems from the law or even the constitution itself, including attacking legal firms that represent those parties.

This is without mentioning what they are doing to infringe on voting rights, redistribute more wealth to the very richest, reduce protections for minorities and strengthen systematic discrimination, and otherwise dismantling democracy at large.

I think “corporate greed” is a good explanation for pretty much all our problems.

Less if anything.

You buy something from China for $100. Add packing, staff costs and delivery and you sell it retail for say $200. A nice healthy profit margin.

Now you add the 145%, so it costs $245 from China. None of the rest of it will cost you more. Still an extra $100, for $345 total.

The retail customer pays an extra (345/200=) 72.5% instead.

It’s a lot, but not 145%.

So if your retail price goes up by 145% or more, they either weren’t making a lot of profit before, or they’re greedy bastards.

Journalism is dead because Sinclair has been gobbling up local news.

Check to see who your local news outlet is - several of mine are owned by like Missouri’s retirement fund or something.

I realized journalism was truly dead a few years back when I noticed that most news articles online are just a bunch of Twitter posts talking about the headline. I fantasize about writing a movie where Edward R. Murrow comes back from the dead as a demon and just goes around slaughtering lazy journalists, which forces other journalists to actually do their fucking jobs.

“ok, time to blame our shocking lack of incompetence on a vulnerable group we can stoke xenophobia against!”

Their own reasearch will be to see what the orange tumor says. He will say its liberal gay immigrants.

This is what the democratic party has to learn. Your sister is a sizable representation of the electorate. They have no goddamn idea how anything works. They voted purely based on vibes. You have to capture the terminally unengaged and uninformed voters if you want to be able to stay in power.

Ah, because of the famous inflation dial in the US president’s office which Biden kept cranked up for shits and giggles. Well known fact.

its low information voters that mostly voted for him besides the incels/joe roegan people.

She sounds like a single issue voter.

Thats really the biggest problem. People not looking at the whole candidate.

How do these people function in daily life? It’s baffling.

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It also doesn’t fuck up life for everyone else on the planet, which is a boon.

No the non-voters are just as responsible for this mess.

Unfortunately the Trump virus has infected other countries too. I’m really proud of Canada for not following us.

SpongeBob.

They’re in those silos by choice so fuck em

Except for all the infrastructure inflation they’ll pay for indirectly.