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The most depressing thing about the tariff fiasco is how stupid and gullible many people are because a significant number of them thought that the other country
by jmyeet 10mo ago
The most depressing thing about the tariff fiasco is how stupid and gullible many people are because a significant number of them thought that the other country was somehow going to pay the tariff.
I don't mind people being ignorant. We all are at some point. We all learn. But what's really depressing is that people who wear their ignorance and intentional unwillingness to learn like it's a badge of honor.
In the early 2010s I had discussions with people who pushed the idea of the resurgence of anti-intellectualism in the US, which I dismissed at the time. I think about that a lot.
- strgrd 10mo ago“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance” Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark