it is as batshit as it appears.
But for us at least, it is quite sinister as well, since Trump it quite literally attempting to instill himself as a dictator to avoid prison, and this is being facilitated by white nationalists, religious zealots, tech billionaires, and an easily decieved under-educated populace that are acting against their own interests.
this election is definitely moving "fund public schools" up on my priority list of things I care about. It's now barely second to Climate Change quite possibly the top thing, because these idiots vote and we need the votes to deal with climate change.
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.
I love Carlin, but he was an awful defeatest, any sliver of 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.
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...).
You should put mental healthcare right up there too. The sheer craziness of it all is only possible because the lunatics have taken over the asylum.
I don’t know how yu do this when so much school funding is local. I’ve always lived in areas that valued education agiin and we’re willing to pay for it. However no matter how much my taxes increase, it won’t help those kids in places with less money or not willing to invest in it.
It’s a much bigger ask to turn school funding into a national thing.
In Vermont, they passed legislation that distributed school funding equally across the entire state, so that impoverished areas would have just as good of an education as the wealthy ones. People bitched about their taxes going up, but otherwise have been no downsides.
I’m not entirely sure how i feel about that: spending the same on educating all students is surely a good thing and I’m sure this benefitted more than it hurt. However, the punishment for deciding to spend even more seems inappropriate. If I disagree that we’re spending enough on education and can get my neighbors to agree, but not the state, why shouldn’t we be able to spend more on our kids, until the rest of the state is persuaded.
It’s not just about fairly allocating spending per student and fairly shouldering the tax burden, but politics. Some towns want to spend more on education
If you and your neighbors have the means, then you could opt for private tutoring if you feel your public school is not adequate.
Sure, but my point is that while all kids deserve a well funded education system, all kids deserve high standards, all kids deserve all the opportunity, politics will still determine that level. We clearly already have a situation where different places have wildly different ideas of the value of a good education, and putting a cap on spending won’t change that
But it’s different to say a town shouldn’t pay more. I’ll vote for better funding for schools whereever they’re needed to bring all kids’ future up to my standards, even at the expense of my increased taxes to pay for it, but I will not let them limit my kids’ future down to their regressive standards.
If you're advocating for the ability of individuals (or if you can get them to agree, an entire town) to opt-in to donating extra money to the state-wide school fund, I say more power to you! Totally agree that should be an option. :D
Its number one with me right now. The future of the climate effort hinges on this election. Harris still sucks in that regard, but she is also the better case scenario to a staggering degree.
that actually sounds quite a lot worse
It's rather distressing, to put it mildly.
Stop making me sad with facts and the truth!
Don't worry, he's just foolin'! Everything is great!
What I find hilarious about that scene is, the writters wanted to give her a drug problem. With actual hard drugs. Which for her acting would have made sense if she had been crashing off the drugs.
Then the network said it wasn't ok with that. So the writting stayed the same, the scene stayed the same, except kt was caffene she was crashing from. Which, given the over the top acting, makes no sense.
So now she just comes off as insane.
I never knew that. That's really funny. Elizabeth Berkley just couldn't catch a break.
The really interesting thing about Harris is so much of her support comes from people who hate Trump and want to stop him at all costs. There's this large contingent of voters who have never voted for a candidate they like, they've only ever voted strategically to stop the candidate they hate. "Democracy"
Yup, the two parties are pretty much right wing and right wing lite
Once they welcomed people like Chenay with open arms there is no lite remaining. They are firmly right wing.
Hate is a path to the dark side
Biden isn't quite as bad as the soundbites make him seem, but he is slowing down (physically and mentally) in his old age and was just generally an extremely uninspiring candidate. Trump, if anything is worse than you portray. He's way more senile than Biden, in addition to the blatant corruption, rulebreaking, childishness, and being horrifically and openly racist and sexist. He has literally quoted Hitler! No decent and reasonable person who is paying the slightest attention to what he says and does would think he is remotely qualified for any position of authority. The fact that he is polling roughly evenly with an extremely qualified and intelligent person like Kamala Harris is indeed an absolute clownshow.
Absolutely it's a clownshow.
If you ask me, the whole point of it is to get everyone to sort themselves into one of two horrific camps, where they'll feel like any criticism of the people in power is an attack on them for voting for them - or, if they don't vote, then they generally disengage from politics entirely. It's probably the most effective system of propaganda ever designed, because you don't even need to tell people that horrible people are on their side, they'll happily convince themselves of it all on their own. It's basically a race to the bottom where one side being dogshit allows the other side to be dogshit because there's no alternative, and of course every politician wants to be as dogshit as they can get away with because that's how you win favor with the corporate donors, who have no practical limit on how much money they can spend to influence the outcome.
There's also this level of spectacle in our elections that's above and beyond anywhere else in the world, we treat it like a reality show, and our debates are complete jokes where nothing substantive is ever discussed. We have absurdly long election cycles and entire industries around milking them for entertainment. It's unlikely that we will ever even begin moving in the right direction in the foreseeable future, because the brainworms run so deep.
The worst part is when the spectacle becomes so eye-catching that people from other countries get drawn into it and start thinking in terms of our politics and what we define as normal or reasonable. Americans rarely learn from non-American perspectives and we have corporate influence constantly pushing in the direction of maximizing short term profits over all other priorities, and so our country is unable to understand or adapt to the changing conditions of the modern world, which is why we are in decline.
Look at us only as a cautionary tale of what not to do.
The shorter version is: if the reds are busy fighting with the blues, then the capitalists can keep looting us without restriction
Nailed it.
Both parties are heavily funded by the 0.01%, and that's neither a lie nor a coincidence.
i certainly wont draw anything from america, cant say for the rest of europe, or my own country
Yeah it's that terrible, but look at the rest of the world. Putin enjoys a lot of support from the same people he's sending to die, Modi in India wins elections by a large margin on a platform of basically "Fuck Sikhs and Muslims". Add China and basically most of humanity lives under someone who is blatantly racist, corrupt, generally horrible, or a combination thereof. And Western Europe doesn't have a leg to stand on either, the UK ignored dire warnings and voted for Brexit without even understanding what it is.
Humans don't believe what's objectively correct, they believe what they want to believe. This makes feeding people what they want to hear a very successful strategy, and one that psychopaths have an advantage in pursuing.
No, that's fairly accurate. It's a clown show.
Yes, genuinely
This is a clown country
It didn't used to be like that... but you had some horrible decisions made (or not paid attention to is more like it) over the years and this is the result.
Yes, it's a clown show and half the country would rather throw away the whole US than vote for a woman. Please send help, fascists don't give up power easily.
I think the woman part is fine-ish; they don't wanna vote for a democrat. In fact they'd probably vote for a trans woman if she had an R next to her name.
Please send help, fascists don't give up power easily.
Actually, most countries that could actually help are hoping to see you burn... because they're your biggest contenders in world domination.
The education system in the US is screwed beyond oblivion, that's why this is happening.
And it's not just the US. I live in the Balkans and things are... well, very bad to be honest. We have the lowest average IQ in Europe.
The problem is, stupid people benefit both sides, left and right. They're easy to control, as voters. No one wants voters which can think critically.
Democracy is flawed IMO. There is no fixing this. People do rule, but at what cost. There are alternatives, but, let's face it, none of that will be implemented, at least not in our lifetimes.
No. You seem to have the jist of it. Clownshow election, manchild orange oompa loompa, dementia riddled president, new woman who's condescending of bullshit.
Congrats. You're now qualified to write for SNL until November 5th. Don't worry, no pressure. They have 1-2 good sketches per week, and a ton of crap sketches.
*gist*
I pretty much gave up on it when the weekly formula was "take the most successful character from the past few months, and make them say all their catch phrases in a slightly different scenario"
I wonder if the issue here is you don't appreciate how stupid your own proletariat is (i.e., as stupid and vulnerable as the American populis, but not exposed to the same intense propaganda). I think humans everywhere are surprisingly gullible and illogical.
There are idiots in every country. They are roughly the same percentage of the population everywhere.
The difference is in America the idiots are in charge of everything. Intelligence is elitism which is anti-American.
90% of Americans are no better informed than you are on how realistic of a portrayal it is. In fact, I've met many people who are proud of how willfully ignorant they are of politics.
It’s important to realize that in most democracies this isn’t a bug, it’s a feature of the system. The founders of these systems wanted to ensure that major decisions were deliberated, not rushed into, and that there wasn’t a lot of room for an executive power to make snap choices that would determine the future of the nation.
Ask not for whom the right-wing propaganda bell tolls. It tolls for thee.
America responds well to showmenship. Its kind of our core problem.
You summed it up correctly. The thing is the presidential race used to be a horse show, but that format was somehow easily hijacked by a rodeo clown.
Often I think it's because of big psyops against America.
The thing with American politics is that Americans love, LOVE TV shows and movies. Everything they do publicly has to be framed, presented, and consumed, as if it were a TV show or movie. So that's what the political machine does. Kamala Harris raised like a $1000000000. A BILLION dollars! What does the political machine do with that much money? It puts on a damn good show and broadcasts it to the world hoping it's a better show than what Trump is making. So yes you are watching the same show we are. It's entertaining, horrifying, hilarious, disgusting, sad and hopeful. But if you want to see what the real work is like in politics then you will have to read the book. A LOT of books, and many Americans don't like to read.
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