Yeah. ‘Coal miners daughter’ is dusted with a new layer of dirt isn’t it?
Having lived in W.Va. I’ve seen a few of these coal towns. They ain’t pretty.
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I think you misunderstand my point.
People that slide on talk alone but do no actual work are harmless and weak. All bark no bite. Who cares if they bullshit and the details of it, it all means nothing. Sure, they might win sometimes, but it’s probably due to luck and circumstance not hard work or ingenuity.
While somebody proudly bullshits it’s easier to smile while taking the cash out of their wallet. That’s my point.
Do you realize you’re talking about the president-elect? That’s a pretty substantial amount of winning for someone whose work skills are so bad he can’t even make money from money.
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Secondhand copies on ebay, baby!
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Wait, he LOST money running a casino? How is that even possible?
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Just because he likes to say he’s smart, that doesn’t mean he’s actually smart. He probably also thinks he’s good looking.
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Lately I’ve noticed various college courses proposed or popping up to teach essential life skills. On the one hand, these are things people should be taught in grade school and parents should be actively inculcating in their children as part of raising them. It kind of boggles my mind that by now nearly two whole generations have grown up borderline illiterate, unable to balance a checkbook, match an outfit or change the oil on a car. I’m glad people are at last learning some of these things, but I worry deeply about a society that doesn’t pass on useful inter-generational basics.
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I want to agree with you, but I think it’s that the world is different more than anything else. It’s not so much that parents don’t teach their children, but what they have to teach their children isn’t always up to date. Things are changing too quickly.
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I’m not necessarily talking about new things people need to know, like computer literacy or not to trust corporations further than you can throw them or how to navigate security theater. I mean the knowledge that used to be considered important enough for parents to make certain they or someone taught their children, but which largely got lost somewhere in the relay, things like financial literacy, and that most important skill of all @Melizmatic mentions, critical thinking. I’m not saying no one teaches their kids these sorts of things - and in a thinking person’s DIY-centric place like this those that do are probably over-represented relative to the overall population - but it’s now the exception instead of the rule.
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Good luck on the detection.
"The deadliest bullshit is odorless, and transparent.” - William Gibson.
(I swear I’ve seen that quote predating William Gibson, so that might be bullshit.)
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That’s partly true, but never forget to factor in the Dumbening; the intentional & covert erosion of enlightened thought, introspection and self sufficiency of the average US citizen.
That our technology has rapidly outpaced our collective intellectual level was not mere happenstance.
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Critical thinking? In my parents’ day, people believed everything they read in the papers and saw on TV. They literally had to be told that the clean white man in the clean white coat wasn’t a doctor but played one on TV. They had the same urban legends we have now, except arguably even dumber and more moralizing. The only difference was that misinformation spread as a trickle via fax machines and chain letters, and now we have the firehose that is the Internet. My parents’ generation has nothing to teach us about critical thinking.
Financial literacy is also a different beast now versus then.
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There have always been credulous people. But you might be surprised. Being outright skeptical and being able to follow the thread of factual truth aren’t entirely the same.
There may be more to know, but people have been able to go into debt since some enterprising paleolithic ancestor figured out how to make tally marks. These days most people don’t even know how to calculate interest on a line of credit or how to make a household budget.
You’re right that there’s more to know than ever. But we haven’t just failed to keep up, society has lost ground. To once again echo @Melizmatic, the dumbing down of the West and especially America has been going on for a while. I’m not saying this to denigrate Americans. I’m just saying that reversing this trend is essential if we’re going to have any chance of pulling out of our decent into neo-feudalism.
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Muphry’s Law strikes again.
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None of us are 100% immune.
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I’ve become a lot more annoyed with my own rampant typos in the past year or so. I can’t imagine to whose influence that has been due…
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True. And I’m like, the last person to whinge about anyone’s use of English, unless there’s a good joke in there.
But the context just made it for me. 
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Nothing irks me more than when I post something and don’t notice that I’ve missed a letter (or sometimes an entire word) until after I’ve already hit ‘submit.’
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My best trick is dropping verbs. So the entire sentence no sense. 
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