Social media are depressing because they make it very clear how incredibly stupid many people are:
Thousands of likes for a post so moronic.
Another topic that brings the stupid out in full force is money. People sincerely don’t understand even the basics of capitalism. They live in a state of perpetual funk because things that we see as obvious are very mystifying to them. They overpay for everything, get into gigantic debt, sabotage themselves consistently and relentlessly, and… have no idea why bad things keep happening.
Social media made the confusion of the cognitively modest individuals much worse. That and the endless pandering where they are told their opinions are as valid as anybody’s.
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The other problem is that it’s impossible to tell the difference between people who are dumb, and people who are dishonest.
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And people who are wise vs. foolish.
The cognitively modest, but wise, knew that they didn’t need to wear a raincoat to keep other people dry. They saw neither the unsanitary BLM violent street parties nor the mass migratory dysfunctional gatherings fall prey to mass covid deaths. They saw that a cruise ship full of very elderly people survive the new Killer Covid disease at flu levels, and a battleship with hot-bunks full of healthy young men sail through it*. And they behaved accordingly.
Meanwhile the clever knew all kinds of things, and did elegant rhetorical dances, and created persuasive albeit false studies proving all manner of nonsense.
The even more clever, or more wise, spotted the first, avoided the second and were banned by the great and good (and no few cognitively advanced**) for saying so.
Hence: Law enforcement personnelle rarely prevent crime that those who write their paychecks, determine their advancements, and fund their pensions tolerate. They just show up afterward; if they show up at all.
Which is one thing the wise and clever will fill in the gaps with, because the subtext is: Do not take it for granted that the police are on your ordinary, decent citizen’s side.
It’s a function of the short take, internet model of communication. It’s weirdly similar to in-group, or in-family or even in-tribe, known short phrases whose connotations are wider and deeper than the denotation. There’s a book called Making Comics by Scott McCloud that goes into careful detail about the hand-shakes of meaning that exist, and can be exploited by, storytellers. Something like that is no doubt happening in these new communication spaces
It’s interesting.
(*only one chubby man, with a trashed immune system, died
**Presumably PhDs in various medical fields = cognitively advanced. We’ve been doing variations on soviet DIE long enough that this might be false.)
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A criminal who Is in jail isn’t committing any more crime while he’s in jail. Thus, incarceration prevents crime.
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A noticeable failure in the current education system is that they no longer seem to teach students about compound interest. Students were routinely “streamed” in high school in my era, a plan that seems grotesquely unfair to me, but at least all students were taught basic knowledge about interest rates.
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