A society is always about 3 days of hunger away from a violent revolution. Start your clocks.

  • ameancow@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    True, but as for the last part -

    we didn’t vote

    We actually did. The even more depressing reality is the last three presidential elections had the highest turnout of registered voters and young voters in American history.

    What’s fucked up is that exit polling showed that most people were entirely tuned-out and saw no difference between the candidates because most people don’t watch the news or politics, most people are uninformed on basic science and reason, most people have curated social media feeds that push attention-span erosion and right-wing propaganda, and a good QUARTER of the adult population of America is functionally illiterate. Meaning studies have shown that 22% or more of adults in the US cannot read more than a couple words strung together or have to piece together sentences contextually. They can work, they can answer text messages, but are incapable of assembling paragraphs and forming complex abstractions.

    We’re fucked on a level that is hard to convey.

    • jj4211@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      the highest turnout of registered voters and young voters in American history.

      This is one of the problems with how we’ve pushed the messages like “rock the vote”, that you should vote, no matter what, or you’re being a bad citizen.

      If you can’t be bothered to actually try to be informed, then you shouldn’t feel pressure to vote. Sure, you should be allowed to vote no matter what, but no one should be pressuring you to vote even with lack of interest.

      We should be emphasizing you should get to know the candidates up and down the ballot, not just getting your mark on a ballot.

      • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 day ago

        We should be emphasizing you should get to know the candidates up and down the ballot

        *we should have been

        this was probably the last election in a long time

      • ameancow@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        The erosion of our education system and attention spans is a feature of the system, not a bug. They wanted this all along, and have been working on it for decades. There’s a reason the right has hated PBS since it came out, and it’s not just because Bert and Ernie are a same-sex couple.