120% of Americans are dumbfucks who don't know shit
we live in an incredibly stupid country
“math is hard,” as Barbie famously never said.
last week I saw a tweet that says so much about why our country is where it is today. it’s all the proof you need that the average American knows nothing about the society in which they live, all wrapped up in one handy dandy chart.
look at the big, yawning gulf between what Americans believe about their country and what is reality:
up and down that list, one statistic after another, the average doofus hasn’t a clue.
this metric fuckload of ignorance is brought to you by a generation of schools that fail to teach critical thinking and a generation of right-wing media that lies directly into the faces of their credulous audience.
the wingnut outrage ecosystem has done such a good job of stoking paranoia and hatred for their audience’s perceived enemies — the blacks, the muslims, the gays, the immigrants, the jews — that your average goofball thinks America is a fucking hellhole overrun with swarthy crossdressing hordes.
but if they’d only think about it for five seconds, they’d realize that none of these perceptions make any fucking sense.
look at the statistic for transgender. Americans believe that trans people are 21% of society.
now just think about that for one second. twenty-one percent. that’s 21 people out of every 100. roughly 1 person out of every five.
seriously?
one person out of every five is trans? as you go about you business, driving around, shoppping at the supermarket, going to the hardware store, one out of every five people you encounter is trans? is that what you’re seeing? seriously?
how about some critical thinking, people?
it’s not referenced in the chart above, but just look at the hysteria over drag performers. the wingnut screech monkeys have stoked a frenzy over this and are trying to turn drag shows into the number one problem in this country.
the reality? the number of drag performers in the United States is a rounding error away from zero.
critical thinking, it’s what’s for breakfast.
like the man said, get a brain! morans
Our country is like a supermarket, all the healthy foods with nutritional value are on the perimeter aisles. All the junk food is located in the center of the market.
I taught HS for a time. The biggest takeaway was that it's nearly impossible to teach anything that challenges previously held beliefs. And if we could simply teach that, it'd be a good start. But the insulated networks are so populated with idiotic bigotries and bigoted idiots -- and so constantly demanding -- that all we should hope for is, as you highlight here, that students (at least) learn something about statistics.
Oy, vey iz mir.