American democracy health thread

No…like Trump. Trump-like policy. Trump is basically a 90’s democrat. You guys are about to go back to that.

 

Our schools, solely democrat-run for a century, have done a fantastic job, haven’t they?

Maybe you all should have some discussions about how your product sucks so bad that colleges are now having to do their job, and how your colleges suck so bad that nobody wants to hire your graduates.

 

Clinton wanted to put brown people and his political rivals in giant concentration camps? He wanted to use the DoJ to make up fake charges against people he doesn't like? He wanted to go after the media? He wanted to eliminate trans people? He wanted to close entire departments of the federal government? He wanted to have all federal employees swear an oath of subservience to him, and not the Constitution? He wanted to end NATO?

I know I was going back then but pretty sure none of that is true. And that's just scratching the surface.

 

Very much so. Someone who has never seriously studied something is given as much, if not more respect than someone who has studied it their entire life. See RFK Jr as one current example.

 

There have been 3 different presidents during my tenure at my current institution. All 3 come from Republican states and 2 of 3 were Republicans.

People from all over the world come to be educated in our universities, so it doesn't seem to me that they "suck so bad". What a ludicrous assertion.

 

Source this

 

No kidding. GOP been defending them for decades now.

 

Wow. A blast from the past providing Ignored Content on this page!

 

I don't know who you have on ignore but it isn't worth clicking on.

 

Not necessarily true. Political scientists and pollsters have been calling them "low information voters" for about 30 years now. There's pretty good data on them. Trump did extremely well with them this time around. But they haven't always broken Republican

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_information_voter

American pollster and political scientist Samuel Popkin coined the term "low-information" in 1991 when he used the phrase "low-information signaling" in his book The Reasoning Voter: Communication and Persuasion in Presidential Campaigns. Low-information signaling referred to cues or heuristics used by voters in lieu of substantial information to determine whom to vote for. Examples include voters liking Bill Clinton for eating at McDonald's and perceiving John Kerry and Barack Obama as elitist for wind-surfing and golfing, respectively.[1]​

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While it's often used as an insult, that's not how the political scientists and pollsters use it. Though wikipedia points out that, in fact, both sides actually DO occasionally use the term negatively

Linguist George Lakoff has written that the term is a pejorative mainly used by American liberals to refer to people who vote conservative against what liberals assume to be their own interests and assumes they do it because they lack sufficient information. Liberals, he said, attribute the problem in part to deliberate Republican efforts at misinforming voters.[5]

In a 2011 article titled "Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult", thirty-year Republican House of Representatives and Senate staffer Mike Lofgren characterized low-information voters as anti-intellectual and hostile-to-science "religious cranks" and claimed Republicans are deliberately manipulating low information voters to undermine their confidence in American democratic institutions.[6] ​

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And they (low information voters) tend to be more moderate in their views, which has led some political scientists to some interesting conclusions...

The ideological views of most low-information voters tend to be more moderate than those of high-information voters. Low-information voters are less likely to vote and when they do they generally vote for a candidate they find personally appealing. They tend to be swing voters and they tend to vote split-ticket more than well-informed voters do. Researchers attribute this to low-information voters not having developed clear cut ideological preferences.[2][3][4]

A 2012 paper by six American political scientists called "A Theory of Political Parties: Groups, Policy Demands and Nominations in American Politics" challenged the idea that Republicans want a low-information electorate and argued instead that both major American parties do. Noting that 95% of incumbents in the highly polarized House of Representatives win re-election despite voters' preference for centrist representation, the paper theorizes that voters' infrequent penalizing of extremist behaviour represents not approval, but a lack of attention and information​

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The problem about Trump voters isn't their stupidity.

 

I'm just glad I'm using a desktop so I can hover a cursor over the Show Ignored Content line and it tells me who it is. Takes out all the guesswork I have to employ when I'm using an iPad.

 

The sounds like Communism.Are you people communists down there?

 

The disdain for expertise is part of how we got here. Economist say raise interests to deal with inflation. This effects everyone and those on the lower rung blame the smart guys from the fancy colleges who ain't them. And now that has spiraled thanks to social media and people think Fauci is a criminal. There is a reason why an Oxford educated senator from Louisiana talks like Foghorn Leghorn.

 

Or look at Utah, sorry RSL, where people voted for Republican legislators but also voted to have re-districting done by neutral party I wonder why those legislators destroyed it. Same thing like people who voted for weed legalization in Missouri but voted in Republican legislators or republican legislators in Florida but voting to allow felons to vote.

This is a general dysfunction in the American populace and I don't have an answer but if the Democrats are to come into power again this is something that needs solving.

 

Them intellectuals don't give God the glory for creating Adam & Eve 6,000 years ago! They're just Satan-worshipers trying to seduce good God-fearing Christians away from biblical truth by teaching ludicrous things like we evolved from monkeys. Anyone with a brain can see there ain't no actual evidence for it, only some frauds them demonic scientists put together to deceive God's elect!

 

Religion.

 

I have 3 three degrees, my oldest bro has none. And my extended family varies ans live all over the globe too.

The latest US literacy stats have just dropped and they are every bit as grim as you might imagine.

"Approximately 50% of Americans read so poorly that they are unable to perform simple tasks such as reading prescription drug labels"

https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/post/literacy-statistics-2022-2023

The guy who doesn't understand civics is definitely voting. These are the people who tie how much they make to the economy. I agree Dems have to try different things but to get your point across, you are being whole dismissive of stats and what it shows us about Americans and their education levels when it comes to things in general or civics.

 

And the use of AI by college students on assignments is simply going to make that much, much worse.

 

I had a student turn in an assignment today. It was basically nothing but a plot summary of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita.

Two huge problems: 1) this is a college course, and a plot summary is inadequate and 2) We're not reading Lolita, we're reading Nabokov's Pale Fire.

 

Back in my day students could properly plagiarize. What a sad state we're in.

 

I'm glad I'm done with teaching. This term I instituted a new policy - if I suspect you have used AI or the internet to do the assignments, you will get a 0 until you can show me where in class material you obtained your information. It's definitely helped, but I had to resort to using that much too much this term.

 

Spoken like a true fascist!
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