i mean, this is how it works in practice.

it’s just that the company is on whomevers side that’s in power. they donate to both campaigns usually.

it’s called guilt by assocation. it’s shitty and lame type of logical fallacy

if you live on the same street as a nazi, you must be a nazi. because apparently you have to sell your home and move away if a nazi moves in.

of course, if you do this and it’s a non-white person you are racist… and a bad person, but if you do it for a nazi you’re a good person.

it’s not as if the logic of the thing is what at’s fault, and the accuser has hyperbolic sense of other people’s social obligations to appeal to their sensibility.

Plato is pretty gay.

I used to teach. My lazy students told me I was an arrogant prick too. They usually got Cs and would leave me angry reviews about how stupid my course was and how dare I make them try hard because what is the point I was going to give them a bad grad because i didn’t like them personally.

My students who did the readings, showed up to class, wrote good papers, to enjoy my class and usually got As.

Weird how that works. It’s OK if you don’t like to read man, but don’t go around generalizing that your lack of drive and interest in the topic necessitates that it’s a waste of time for everyone else.

I would guess you don’t run marathons either. Are people who run marathons wasting their time too? Or should they just take blood dope?

Amen to that. I thought the first Dark tower was great, but they kept getting… longer and longer and pointlessly so.

I feel the same way about Murakami too. I read his novels and was confused why people liked them so much they were so long and annoying. Then I read his short fiction and was like ‘oh he’s actually good’. He just needs to cut out the filler.

it doesn’t. what i disagree with is your premise that reading books is impossible and too time consuming to be doable by anyone.

It isn’t.

when you don’t know things, the things you don’t know don’t exist.

it’s cognitively easier to be dumb than it is to be smart.

just like it’s easier to sit on a couch all day watching TV eating processed foods, than it is to run a marathon and cook healthy food.

It’s not a matter of IQ, it’s a matter of money. Marathon runners are 80% college educated, and make 130K per year, and come from families that are college-educated and wealthy.

Marathon runners don’t come from working-class poor rural families.

Can’t read complex policy documents? Perfect. You’ll vote based on slogans and fear. Can’t analyze contradictory news sources? Excellent. You’ll believe whatever authority figure shouts loudest. Can’t understand financial fine print? Outstanding. You’ll sign predatory loans and carry crippling debt forever.

I mean. I worked in public policy for a few years. Most of the policy makers, the politicians, and their staff… can’t do any of that either. Despite the fact most of them have multiple degrees.

But they sure as shit can shout about how stupid it all is and now their gut feelings about taxation are more important than the policy paper a taxation economist writes about it after years of doing research on it. When our highly educated professional politicians can’t pass that standards, I’m not really going to fault the broader public who have a high school diploma at best, for not being able to do so.

There are a lot of brilliant people in our government… but nobody is listening to them. The majority of my highl educated highly literate peers here in Boston… also don’t listen to them. They just ‘know’ that all taxes are bad. mmkay?

So what are you mad about? that you had to read books in English class?

Why were you taking english class if you don’t want to read books?

Are you angry you had to do engineering problems in engineering class too? Sounds like it.

There has been a major cultural shift in the past decade, starting in the early 2010s towards creating ‘safe spaces’ at universities, and students refusing to learn critical thinking skills and replacing them with quasi religious dogma, of a leftist political bent often. It is very new that this type of thing is going on at universities.

Relatedly, grade inflation is also rampant again. 60% of Harvard undergrads get straight As last year. in 2005, 25% of of them did. Failing or getting bad grades is basically impossible at universities these days unless you are deliberately negligent. Showing up and making minimal effort usually gets you a B or higher. Because being lazy and getting a C would ‘traumatize’ a student these days, so it’s not allowed.

There are some great books about it. Coddling of the American mind is probably the most popular.

Also students don’t study anymore. Average study time is like a dozen hours a week now. It used to be 30+ 2-3 decades ago.

I fail to see the point of any of what you are talking about.

You weren’t taking English classes, what do you care about the workload in them?

right, anyone who reads books that aren’t engineering is an idiot, right?

So what makes me stupider, my minor in mathematics, or my minor in music? because both are ‘useless’ fields.

I was in college 20 years ago too. I read multiple books per week for fun, often on top of my regular coursework. It wasn’t hard, it was just a matter of priorities. My priority was to learn. I probably read 500 pages a week on average.

Your presumption is wild. You basically think because you didn’t do the work, nobody could, or should do it. You are part of the problem here. Reading a 400 page novel is not that time consuming dude, esp in college. In my AP English class we read one every 2-3 weeks.

Rather than rise to the challenge of learning, you want to pretend that it’s an onerous requirement that nobody could possible attain. What, so you can party more, or dick around on the internet? Are you the type who goes to book clubs and doesn’t read the book and then thinks anyone who did is a stupid nerd? I’ve definitely encountered plenty of those people in my book clubs, which is precisely why I don’t do them anymore.

I live in a city full of very liberal very educated people.

a huge chunk of them think books are wastes of time and are angry they were forced to read so much during their PhDs/masters/JDs.

I’ve been on many first dates with a science PhD who tells me reading fiction is stupid and dumb and if I’m reading it should only be for career productivity or self help therapy crap. And oh, btw my degrees in humanities mean I’m a stupid idiot who wasted years of my life reading stupid crap books.

It’s insane.

but when you realize these people hate learning, and only like money, it makes a lot of sense. their degrees/educations were not thinks they wanted to do or enjoyed doing, they were brass rings they had to leap through to get money.

listening to harry potter audio books isn’t going to make anyone more literate.

becoming more literate would require listening to audio books that challenge one cognitively.

most readers aren’t doing that. they mostly read crap that is easy and re-enforces their existing viewpoints.

just look at best seller lists in audio book or paper book. lots of crap.

Now who benefits from a poorly educated populace?

they give people a passage at a certain reading level and see if they can answer questions about it correctly.

just like you did on your SAT.

as the reading level advances, fewer and fewer people can comprehend on it and answer the questions correctly.

It’s very 90s. Younger people don’t really enjoy it that much because it is really dated/period specific.

I tried to show it to my 18 year old nephew and he got really upset about how ‘bad language’ they used.

Our university system is hell bent on eradicating it the past few decades. It used to teach them.

Now critical thinking is considered dangerous and offensive and harmful, and the students who are suppose to be learning it, are opposed to it because it ‘hurts’ them to have their raw emotional pre-conceptions about things challenged.

Yeah. Thanks for this comment. This is true, insane, and the problem on so many ways.

I get so many ‘drive bys’ on my comments these days form angry miserable people who can’t understand what I’m saying and are offended by it, or offended on behalf of someone else. Being offended by things not intended for them, not talking about them, or do them, is a badge of moral righteousness these days for many people.

In real life I’m also seeing this bleed into people approaching me to tell me how stupid I am for reading in public and/or the book that I’m reading is insulting to them how dare I be in their visual field!

It’s insane.

Stephan King writes at a 6-8th grade level. His fiction is simplistic and so is his sentence structure. He writes at the level of genre fiction.

If he wrote at a 12th grade level he’d have have been a figure in pop culture. Because most of the population that reads his books wouldn’t be able to read them.