Comment on Is American politics really as seemingly satirical of itself as it is portrayed?
FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 1 year agothis 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.
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 my state, they passes 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 opi 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 you and your neighbors have the means, then you could opt for private tutoring if you feel your public school is not adequate.
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 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.
I love Carlin, but he was an awful defeatest. The hope was just beat 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 fumdamentally 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, begrudgingly, be happy for once :p
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.
Education can only get so far with inherently dumb people.
A teacher once told me “You can fix dumb. You can’t fix stupid.”
Funny enough, they’re a diehard Trump Supporter.
There’s a difference between ignorant and stupid.
Ignorant is the lack of knowledge.
Stupid is the lack of ability to apply knowledge.
Generally speaking, most people are just uneducated. Thus, that is fixable. And you can even get a lot out of mentally challenged people if you work with them a lot.
Drunkpostdisaster@lemm.ee 1 year ago
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.