“how does a Yale graduate not know the difference”

 

Knowing and knowledge is not the crisis. The crisis of understanding in the United States of America 2025 is that thinking systems are important. Reactionary thinking, mockery thinking, one-upmanship thinking is not the same as the science way of thinking. Twitter-thinking, meme thinking, isn’t the same as science thinking.

“Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less)” ― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, 1995

  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
    8·
    22 hours ago

    Of course everyone can see he is hateful. That’s why he is popular.

    You don’t know what you are talking about, on many simultaneous levels.

    JD Vance is the most unpopular Vice President since the U.S. has been polling Vice Presidents, you are a cynical fool who has lost the plot if you genuinely think JD Vance represents what even something approaching a majority of USians want…

    Hate doesn’t sell, yes hate is all over social media… because large U.S. corporations have decided the only way to monetize social media is by stoking hatred, pushing conspiracies and flooding conversations with hateful bots that encourage people to react in kneejerk ways… but that doesn’t actual mean hate sells more than kindness, you have just become cynically lost in your fear of that and it blinds you to the simpler truth that the current conditions are imposed upon us, they aren’t the inveitable end result of our humanity..

    Vance’s favorability is worse than Harris’s at the same two-month mark and perhaps worse than any new vice president in the history of polling. His Real Clear Politics favorable-unfavorable rating is 41.7 percent-44.8 percent, a slightly worse net favorable rating (-3.1 percentage points) than Donald Trump’s (-0.9). When looking only at March polling—sampled after his infamous Oval Office hectoring of Ukraine’s president—he’s even more underwater: 42.4 percent-48.0 percent.

    Vice presidents, while rarely public opinion rockstars, typically begin with a bit more goodwill from the public.

    https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/03/21/j-d-vance-is-the-most-disliked-new-vice-president-in-history/

    • RoundSparrow @ .ee@lemm.eeOPM
      25·
      22 hours ago

      Stephen Gutknecht: Of course everyone can see he is hateful. That’s why he is popular.

      You don’t know what you are talking about, on many simultaneous levels.

      JD Vance is the most unpopular Vice President since the U.S. has been polling Vice Presidents, you are a cynical fool who has lost the plot if you genuinely think JD Vance represents what even something approaching a majority of USians want…

      You do not understand popularity, it shifts. And what has become popular since March 2013 is mass dehumanization and hate. Mockery and insults. Surkov / Surkovian information warfare an governing methods.

      Rick Roderick in 1993 gave a lecture, he was a professor at Duke University, and he explains what you do not understand about media ecology of media systems. Why JD Vance’s popularity is popular.

      You can see this every day on every social media network in May 2025. What is popular is mass dehumanization, mockery, hate, anti-science, anti-goodness. What is popular is Surkov / Surkovian governing methods.

       

      Rick Roderick 1993

      "And we get for the first time a phenomenon never known in polling which is the phenomenon of not liking a person, but of liking liking a person. This is a sign you are dealing with the hyperreal.

      Let me go over that again: Reagan’s popularity was popular. When you went through the various traits of Reagan and what Reagan stood for and his policies and so on, ah, vast numbers of people disliked nearly all of them. What was popular was his popularity. And I don’t think that Reagan’s alone in this.

      Show business figures had this same thing go on for years. I can’t remember the last Michael Jackson song that I even listened to. Or my kids, who also don’t like Michael Jackson. But he’s popular, but not in the old sense. It is a hyper popularity, if you follow me. It is popular that he is popular.

      Madonna has learned to live and create herself on the curve of the postmodern by making it her goal to be more popular than popular; by having her popularity the topic of popularity. I mean, we have found out that she can’t particularly act or sing. She is not built well enough to be a true cybernetic sex symbol for this period, and yet she manages – because of her understanding of this situation that Baudrillard calls the hyperreal – to stay on this curve of popularity."

      https://rickroderick.org/308-baudrillard-fatal-strategies-1993/

       

      Hate of JD Vance is popular

      Hate of Donald Trump is popular

      Mocking and Total Mockery United States of America on the World Stage is Popular

      You don’t understand what Rick Roderick is teaching. You can study and learn.