Day: August 4, 2019, 3:37 PM

Gunboat

Chill Uncategorized

The word “impossible” is often used by Democrats (particularly about health care) as well, so it’s not just the GOP — it’s all those useless centrists joining right in. When asked to explain why literally every developed country in the world has these features and the US does not, there’s a lot of hand-waving, hemming and hawing, but in reality it’s the Kevin Drum answer: it’s slightly more convenient for them if nothing changes.

The reality is of course that the US could have these things, and free or very cheap college, and it would save money and resources over time compared to the privatized/free market alternative, which of course is just a scam to funnel money from the poor and middle class to the rich.

Litter AC

Chill Regular-ass Post

I’ve had a very similar thought before. Officially, everyone I went to high school with was literate. However, many of them couldn’t really parse anything but the simplest of texts and any more advanced literature was beyond them. I include most of the students in the honors classes and many in the so-called “gifted” classes in this assessment.

Were these people really literate? By some minimum standard, yes. But nearly all of their reading behaviors evinced no deep understanding but were rather a sort of call and response to stimuli enacted by their teachers and parents. I think this is true for most (~95%) of adults, too, to be clear. Thus, by a standard that judges literacy as any sort of deep comprehension or larger understanding, most people are functionally illiterate.

If you think that is unfair, remember how susceptible to propaganda nearly everyone is, and how even the simplest obvious things like climate change have caused so much societal misconstrual and incomprehension.