The gish gallop has gone mainstream.

What we needed, twenty to forty years ago at the bare minimum, were journalists who were willing to shut that shit down.

I remember being a child watching the news with my parents and seeing an oil company defender accusing the scientists of chasing profits.

Like what the fuck? How did that not end immediately with “And who is currently profiting?” is and always has been beyond me.

…I’m not sure that’s a great example of the gish gallop. Technically.

My point was that we now report the untrue claims rather than saying, from the start, “This candidate said something completely false and not worth repeating.”

For clicks, views, the algorithm, for profit. Nope. It was all to game the system in order to destroy it.

Sorry, this probably isn’t coherent but I’m tired and tipsy, and I’ve chosen to hit save.

Yes, they’ve always been here. There has always been more stupid ignorant people than educated and intelligent people.

Previously, the stupid had no platform.

The fire hose of stupid shit we are inundated with nowadays used to only trickle through in person.

Someone would say something insanely stupid to you at the bar, at the grocery store, at the barber shop etc… and all we had to do was ignore them or tell them to shut up

Thanks to social media, now they’ve teamed up and have millions of followers.

The question ought to be, How are the the educated and intelligent going to rise above it?

I grew up in a small Utah town. The only four adults I ever remember hearing admit they were wrong especially when it came to politics or science or religion were my father and three of my high school teachers.

All the rest would literally tell me that the research papers and encyclopedias I tried to cite as evidence were made up by either satan or some government deep state conspiracy. Or they’d say we can “agree to disagree” about shit like animals feeling pain and the flaws in eugenics (I wish I was joking)

Yes, they have always been this stupid. Learning requires accepting when you’re wrong and the vast majority of people I knew growing up saw that as weakness.

I thought it would be different when I got out of that place, and while living in a larger city is better, it’s not better by all that much.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’

-Isaac Asimov, 1980

Yes.

https://aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_1980_Cult_of_Ignorance.pdf

As a westerner who lived in Asia for the past 2 decades I have unusual take on this.

Americans generally aren’t more stupid than anyone else but they have no face saving culture which acts as a useful bottleneck on social and information exchanges. Because of this Americans can easily subscribe and announce their beliefs even if theyre low effort conspiracies because they are not afraid of losing face for believing in something stupid.

Combined that with information flow that is too fast for most to even comprehend let alone keep up with means that Americans are quick to believe lies and don’t feel punished for doing so.

This is very different in face saving cultures like Asia where if you say or do something stupid you’ll have strong social consequences and even spiritual/religious ones if you’re a Buddhist.

The caveat here is why Europeans are a bit better than this? I’m not sure i hadn’t lived there for a while but I’d imagine that smaller countries are less susceptible to this issue as they can correct quicker and I think Europe does have a bit of face saving culture, well definitely more than the US.

TL;DR: Americans are stupid because they are shameless

Anti-intellectualism has a certain tradition in the USA, it’s kind of well-known.

A German perspective: I think Germans have always been this stupid, they’re mostly just more willing to say the quiet part out loud than they were between 1970 and 2014 (rough estimate). The difference is that the far right extremists have a popular platform now, and the mainstream parties refuse to ban either the far right party or all the media (X, Facebook, local tabloid press etc.) that’s pushing them. If this party had been around in 1960, it would definitely have been banned.

America won big both morally and militarily in WWII. For the average poorly informed citizen, that meant our government had permanently earned its position as the Good Guy. Lots of people thought (and still think) that any evidence to the contrary is merely a mistake or anomaly.

Then there’s capitalism. Wartime manufacturing brought us out of the Great Depression, and even the average citizen benefited. Unfortunately, capitalism became much more powerful than we realized, and now we’re beginning to see what a monster we’ve created. We know that the top 1% are literally killing our biosphere to protect their investments, but somehow our Good Guy government is allowing it to continue. The average citizen can’t reconcile those facts, so they decided that the facts must be wrong.

Government and capitalism have always been intertwined, but never to the extent we’re seeing under Trump. A Nazi billionaire is shaping government policy. That was supposed to be impossible. Again, the average citizen can’t reconcile those truths, so many of them decided that the libtards must be exaggerating.

I wouldn’t say that we Americans are stupid. I’d use the word “foolish” instead. “Deceived”, too. A few people saw what was coming and tried to warn the rest of us, but we let it happen anyway, because organizations that we thought we could trust lied to us.

Those of us with at least some awareness of what’s going on are traumatized (whether we think so or not). We’re trying to accept that our own government suddenly hates a lot of us, and that the corporations that have tried so hard to make themselves indispensable are, at best, constantly trying to deceive and monetize everything about us.

Carl Sagan released his book The Demon Haunted World in 1995, where he championed the scientific method and critical thought and lamented the dumbing down of (particularly US) society, so no… It’s not new.

I will add that your premise is wrong on the 60s. The leftism in the 60s was counter-culture, it was small and it was mostly confined to the youth… It was certainly not the prevailing attitude of the country. It was not unlike the leftist groups you see in the US today - small, loud, and a reaction to the heavily conservative country they find themselves in.

I’m willing to bet one of the largest factors is the isolation we now live in. We used to have third places on every corner, we interacted with our neighbors, and public transport made us connect during commutes. We also relied on talking to people for most of our news and information and generally just were forced to be part of a community, or multiple.

Now we drive alone in a car to work, drive alone back to our house that’s isolated from others and don’t speak to neighbors, we have no third places left, and we get all our information from the internet or TV. Most people don’t have a community larger than a handful of close friends. We can’t organize and we don’t see the struggles other people are going through or help each other out. There’s no social bonds, and everyone only looks out for themselves.

I order to progress, we need to figure out how to form communities again. We need to be able to organize. This is all constructed to keep us thinking about ourselves as an individual rather than the collective us. We think about what I can do, which is pretty minor, not what we can do, which is almost anything we want.

The descent became a downslide and now it’s an avalanche.

No, it hasn’t always been that bad. Stupidity happens. It is human. Most times people were able to keep stupidity in check.

That’s why democracy was invented, by the way. It was founded on the belief that a collective can be more reasonable than a single or small group.

Not saying that reason were the opposite of stupidity (that would be wisdom), but reason is a means to keep stupidity in check.

Yes. Vaguely going backwards, cherrypicking some things, but this country has always been fucked and done evil things that led to overall increased stupidity:

• Fox News and lack of fairness doctrine
• Citizens United
• A fucking Vice President shot a guy (Cheney was part two, actually)
• Reaganism
• Pointless wars for money
• McCarthyism
• The backlash that began after reconstruction era and boiled over during the early 20th century era immigration that saw increased nationalization and christian zealotry specifically leading to Christianity and “patriotism” forced into laws, on money, in schools, amd such. So many “murican” things that some morons think have been a constant since the founding fathers was actually forced by scared white people in power 100 years ago.
• Civil War
• Side note, did you know even Lincoln was a scheming politician? He pulled strings to ensure he’d have enough electoral votes for his re-election, including pushing for a new state he knew would be loyal to him
• All the lead up to the Civil War, which began with our differences and divide right at the founding of the country. We didn’t get along since the beginning.
• Andrew Jackson and the Cherokee
• Everything else we’ve done to Native people
• A fucking Vice President shot a guy in a duel (this was part one)
• Some personal letters of founding fathers like Washington divulge how yhey actually thought about slaves and how they struggled to see them as humans
• The vast majority of people were not free and did not have voting rights when the country was founded, making the declaration and most of the constitution to come later laughable at best in how they worded things. They explicitly cared about white landowning males with money.

I would say “stupid” is a judgement you should keep between your ears. I think Americans are undereducated before they get released into a mad for-profit higher education system that gives them debts for life (but hitherto also great sciencing at a high level). The strong cultural undercurrent of exceptionalism hardly ever lets them look elsewhere for comparison. And the political system, which is based on who can spend more money, not so much on ideas, is proving to be a system that’s rarely bringing out the best people for top jobs. But it’s a dog and pony show and that favors characters over good policies. The fragmentation of people all watching the same news show at night 3 decades ago, to watching partisan 24h news channels 2 decades ago, to splintering even further on the socials now adds to the problem. There is no largely unified audience with the same facts at their disposal.

It’s also nice that Trump is now dismantling the democratic state because voting in the US always gets filtered through electoral colleges and gerimandered districts, skewing results to favor the two main parties, often only one of them. It was pretend-democratic until now.

Something that gets overlooked easily is the long history of fascist rules that was in place in the south after the civil war. Jim Crow laws masqueraded as democracy for a long time and every time courts tried to put a stop to it, the white people in charge found other ways to be a-holes. That’s part of American culture already.

America has always had a penchant for whacky leaders. Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. None of them fit my idea of a virtuous leader. But at least the ones this century adhered to a decorum, an unwritten standard of how to behave as president. Nixon didn’t want to get caught. Trump doesn’t give a sh!t. So the leadership culture has shifted, not for the better.

All this mixes a large chunk, an uncurious population that still sees itself pretty much as a role model for the world, falling for simple populist messages. It should also be said that tarring all Americans with the same brush is unfair. I think it was the votes of less than a third of eligible voters that made Trump 2.0 a reality, roughly another third just behind it, with the remainder not bothering to vote at all. I would say the often fantasized silent majority is actually not pro Trump.

So calling all Americans stupid is not right. There are a lot of people hurting right now as they watch their country develop in a bad way. We need those people to stand up and fight and calling them names doesn’t help.

(Other countries have gone down similar routes, have had whacky leaders, have done questionable things. The US is not alone on this path.)

I think it is because the wealthy have constantly reduced the wealth of the average American. Each individual has to spend more time working, for less pay. This deteriorates their mental and physical health, prevents socialization, saps energy, limits the amount of money, time, and travel they can spend on politics.

IMO, the “lazy” European gets about 95% of an American’s work efficiency for the time spent, but are not nearly as damaged by their work/life ratio. This lets them have far greater agency in the politics of their land. If this continues, I think the assorted cultures of Europe will be far more documented in history than their American peer. The corrosion from beating the good life out of American workers, means that there is little incentive for Americans to want their culture to survive nor spread.

Current politics are partially driven by apathy, one born from the learned helplessness that life won’t get any better. We will need French cutlery to be deployed, so that the blood of tyrants can water the tree of liberty. Just as with the French, I think America can recover from a dead end. Whether that happens…well, we will see within a decade.

Here’s hoping the good guys destroy Dogey America, and replace it something that people can take pride in.