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.

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, 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.

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

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of 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

There were people warning against the glorification of ignorance in the US nearly half a century ago. It’s nothing new; it just reached critical mass (also thanks to social media where ignorant people can self-organise).

Yes.

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

The republicans have been ruining the education system for decades. Can’t have smart people without paid teachers.

Billionaires are extracting all the wealth from this country and convincing the idiots that Maria from El Salvador with 2 dollars to her name is the problem.

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.

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.

Are we more stupid than we used to be? Yeah. But I’d use the word ignorant instead. It’s a bit more accurate. Ignorance is chosen, and that’s what our current epidemic of stupidity is. Chosen.

There have always been a lot of ignorant people, but now, with social media, those people have platforms to infect others with their ignorance. Also, in my own lifetime, I’ve witnessed a shift from ignorant people still being able to set aside partisan politics to condemn obviously bad actors or decisions to 100% doubling down on partisan politics no matter how bad the person or action is.

I’ve definitely FELT this increase in willful ignorance over the course of my life living in this country. People in my own life choosing to believe things they absolutely would not have believed a couple decades ago. People not understanding super basic concepts.

I think there are other factors than just bad actors spreading ignorance on social media. I think a lot of it has to do with simple distractions. The modern world has so many. A lot of the people I know don’t even read books. Like, they simply don’t read. If I ask them what book they read last they have to concentrate because it was multiple years ago. That’s fucking crazy. Instead of picking up a book they’re watching Real Wives of Whatever. Getting involved in some wealthy person’s 1st world problems, instead of, you know, learning something.

We’re entering an age of concentrated ignorance and, unfortunately, that’s very unlikely to end anytime soon. And the stakes are higher than ever for something like that to happen because we possess greater power to decimate this planet than we used to. Through pollution or braindead child-like politicians who can wage war or launch nukes.

It takes a lot less effort to allow things to keep going the way they are than it does to turn things around and responsibly educate the masses. So we’re probably going to continue spiraling.

Things are going to get dark. Our quality of life will decline.

I moved to the Netherlands from the U.S. in July of 2022.

My opinion now? There are morons everywhere. I think more, per capita, back in the U.S. of A.

The world is a circus, but in the U.S., you have front row seats.

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.

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.