that would have been 1921, i believe. literacy rates weren’t great then and yet they’ve steadily increased since. so the correlation there about “smartness” is poor. also, women were denied the right to vote before 1920 - so that doesn’t seem very smart either.
moreover while yes - of course - leaded gas is bad for people’s health ( and mental welfare ) it would be hard to argue that it was somehow worse than the effects of enslavement which ended just 40 years prior. nor could i consider the widely held beliefs at that time that slavery or segregation was good as being particularly smart
America has got to be the only society that is set up in a way that rewards stupidity and punishes intelligence. It seems that the stupider one is, the higher one rises until the upper echelons of society are dominated by idiots. And if a smart person manages to rise high and go far, my god the bashings they receive along the way.
There are plenty of idiots in every country, but only in America do they fill up state legislatures and even become members of Congress.
One thing that makes it seem like people, or society, were smarter in the past is that with the space race science became temporarily important, and education became slightly more of a priority. That was, alas, merely a blip in the general trend of disliking smart people and doing everything possible to thwart them. The Manhattan project also made science a bit sexy-watch us use Science! To destroy our enemies!- but it’s very secrecy worked against it.
Notice that science fiction didn’t become popular for its ideas, but for Star Wars and superheros.
STEM programs became popular when tech jobs became ways to earn a lot of money.
Just scroll through any parliamentary legislature based country in the world and you’ll find equally staggering numbers of dipshits, and more as you go into lower offices. There are whole towns in poland and germany that have banned gay people, yet where’s that hit the news for any length of time.
I get that it’s cool to hate on the US political system and people, but I also think that there’s a massive under-representation in the news and outlets about the dipshits in other countries too.
100% this. Canada is, in general, a very enlightened country. But you wouldn’t know it from speaking to many of our politicians (though most are earnest and sincere, to be fair).
This is why the structure of government is so important, and that’s what America has been throwing away. What concerns me is not some notion of people becoming stupider. What concerns me is corporate corruption, Citizen’s United, the politicized Supreme Court, repealing the VRA, gerrymandering, and all the other structural things the US has done in the last 15 years to tear down its own democracy. These are all the things that made it so successful in the first place (along with a lot of natural resources and no nearby enemies of any military equality).
The structure of government protects us from ourselves. It does the right thing for us when we don’t want to. That stuff is really really difficult to rebuild, so I hope the US changes course on this soon, for all our sakes.
Are we talking about run-of-the-mill dipshits or are we talking about Jewish space lasers coming for your adrenochrome while holding up a snowball to prove that global warming doesn’t exist because the world is only 6,000 years old anyway?
They’ve got both kinds in hundreds of offices around the world. If not thousands. What most countries DON’T have is 5 24/7 news channels and 3 24/7 news pundit channels.
The current Prime Minister of Australia, when he was still Treasurer:
Senator Pauline Hanson, leader of the One Nation Party:
George Christiansen, who just joined One Nation:
Former Liberal party lunatic Craig Kelly, who now works for Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party:
That would be this Clive Palmer:
Australia is hosting the full spread, from venal power-for-it’s-own-sake sociopaths who are like the dog who caught the car and now don’t know what to do with it (along the lines of Boris in England), through old-fashioned xenophobes, racists, and fascists, through to “The Australian Federal Police used sooper sekrit long-range sonic weapons. There’s no other possible explanation for why so many unmasked antivaxers at this rally mysteriously came down sick afterwards.”
Is there a source for this? It is a common observation that many have made, including myself, but I would be really interested in a written analysis of this phenomenon in the post WWII US.
Indeed… I was stating mypersonal opinion; that so many others seem to concur would indicate that there is very likely something to that theory, and anyone desiring to know more would be wise to do some reading on their own.
lo in the early, chaotic days of the computers there was no forward slash. no one could tell who was a serious or was a dog. they added the slash and the letter s within days of each other, and people could communicate without ambiguity again
later, some people forgot and others weaponized that forgetfulness. the internet - nay even society itself - became imperiled again… and, yet it was all just a joke. just a joke.
That is a very romanticised notion of American settlement. More often than not they left Europe because their religion was too extreme to exist in civilised society.
If you want to point to people that left for America to avoid persecution, the 1848 revolutionaries from around Europe are a better example. And they were persecuted for their liberalism.
