Yep, even though trump is maybe the most populist president the country has seen

Sadly, nope, if you can read at a high school level, there's roughly a 75% chance you are smarter than any rando you meet.

For the last 5 or 10 years, more and more kids graduate highschool with middleschool or worse reading / writing abilities.

People even make tiktoks about going off to college and admitting they literally cannot understand the words in their assigned texts, start going through some kind of literacy crash course...

Some people even make videos like that explaining that even after a Bachelor's or Associates degree, nope, still can barely read.

I am starting to notice this in the slop youtube throws at me that I am sometimes dumb enough to click on.

Somebody reading some article to give commentary on it, and you can just tell they are reading one word at a time, misunderstanding what 15% of them mean, have to actually stop on 5% of the words because those ones they've never read before, and then they start complaining that the author must have just been using a thesaurus... because a few of the vocab words in the article are 8th grade or above.

... I picked up reading quickly, so quickly that when I was in 2nd grade, I was assigned to go out into the hall when I was done with my classwork (I always finished rapidly) and then go help a 4th or 5th grader who was behind in reading skills, go sit with them and have them or me read aloud, help them with words they didn't know, etc.

Everyday, even on the net, I encounter more people who... are beyond graduating high school age, who barely read better than 5th graders with dyslexia.

For me when I realized I was more grown up than the adults around me, I realized I could relax a bit and not hold myself to such an unsustainable standard. On the other hand I still have lofty goals for myself that I still strive to reach so I'll pick up a ton of cool experiences along the way and maybe I'll achieve those pipedreams or maybe I won't but either way it beats just stagnating and aging in place

damn. well said

Intelligent, compassionate, and a vessel for the author's racist worldview.

Don't mind me. I hate that book, and I hate that it's taught in every school as if it has anything important to say. We've run the Lord of the Flies experiment, both accidentally and very intentionally. Every time, we've demonstrated that humans are better than that, and the author's beliefs about human nature were both very incorrect and very racist.

I still resent being forced to debate my classmates about whether human nature was intrinsically "good" or "evil," directly after reading that book, even though it was 25 years ago. I was the lone voice on the side of "good," for lack of a "good and evil are subjective terms, but nonetheless humans are empathetic and this book is horseshit" team. I got dogpiled by 20 some other students for about 45 minutes. Fuck you Ms. Brown, and fuck you William Golding. That book has nothing important to say other than exposing its author's racist insecurities.

Eh, I think that his 2nd term kind of helps validate that view of his 1st. Because he was a political newbie, he allowed those around him to help make staffing decisions, so you got mostly run of the mill Republicans. Terrible, certainly, but not sycophants. That's all out the window this time. Key positions are filled based solely on either fealty to the mad king or ✨campaign contributions✨ (bribes). Anyone who dares speak out gets the axe, and at least for now it's a metaphorical one.