Promethiel

You can't read. Those are facts and written in a passive voice. Condoning the behavior reads something like: "The state of Israel has sown seeds of ill will nurtured by lies and here comes harvest time" or "Yeah fuckers, get dunked on world stage" or something similar and in-between.

Are we sure OP isn't being meta? The message and demographics change if the punch is coming from other community posters.

In case your statement wasn't actually carefully crafted to make your point (kudos if so!): Yeah, you got it right.

That was a post correctly identifying the problem of the decades long rising anti-intellectualism cultured amidst the populace (See Carl Sagan's excellent and chillingly prescient "I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time..." quote).

Said post then really had the gall to not just take all agency from the willfully ignorant alongside their responsibility, but it then goes further to state that the fault lies with the non-willfully ignorant.

Then it suggests that the non-willfully ignorant are in fact being willfully ignorant to the fact that they have to (I had to pause and re-read here, the weight of the author's cojones was throwing me off) locate simpler and/or rougher folk more like 'The Midwestern' to do the messaging in a more "relatable" (air quotes) way.

I admit, my born and raised through the abject poverty and bare unfinished construction found the world around from the Favelas to the heights of Appalachia was quite "ready to slap a smarmy ass city fucker" by the end there.

But then I realized: If not maliciously posted then clearly they may not realize it. They may actually think that the miseducation, furthering divide, and increasing tensions amongst those who consider themselves team "knows better about feelings" and those who consider themselves team "feels better about knowing" have anything to do with the direct interactions between the two groups, and not the reality: The messaging being bought and paid for.

Who benefits from the poors not realizing that the scope and limits of their wits are quite the same human potential as the inhabit of any gilded tower?

That post was saying that intelligence and fact-finding is making people feel stupid and attacked, but it failed to correctly attribute that to the fact that people are being told and taught to feel that way, as part of the ever present real issue.

That is what being willfully ignorant of the fact you're carrying water for the sick and mentally twisted Billionaires who remember the human mental potential and must live constantly suppressing it in terror of the alternative, looks like.

People are supposed to include the fact that the pencil can go through because (layman terminology abuse ahead) of the "shape" the space-time topology is presenting (or I guess being induced to present as, if Sci-fi hypothetical) before you get to the explanation of the pencil as craft/observer and how the hole is how that shortened path through the wormhole appears from frames of reference not the pencil.

I like the bagel idea but then you have to hold it all horizontal while explaining so they don't see the hole too early and you're then just left intently staring at your audience across a bagel held at eye height like a slowly hungering loon. Or so I've heard.

But neither of you know that. That's just the most anecdotally likely. You're doing the same thing as the presumably real friend is doing: discounting the reality OP is saying they're experiencing (they don't feel like celebrating currently because ofcurrent affairs) and replacing it with head in the sand "touch grass" disguised with the words it takes for you to feel like you're correct.

Maybe that friend always has their head in the sand. Maybe that friend is maliciously giddy about the possibilities espoused by shit like Project 2025 and deflecting.

I, am hoping you can both understand I'm saying you look like hypocrites. No inference needed.

How do you select the worthwhile content without the use of your opinion or taking the matter to your tastes?

Your comment, but without irony or sarcastic pretention. What exactly do you think semantics are?

We need to return to preindustrial population levels so the animals can too.

What exactly are you proposing?

What is the problem they're so pragmatically a part of? And how do you pin both the content creators needing to eat and the reasonable take of that commenter on the poor Marketing executives who care about neither but just want--actually what do they (end goal of marketing, literally, semantically) want, in your eyes while you're at it? It is their (the marketing execs) side I take it you're on, since the commenter you replied to is part of the problem and the creators do "an ad is an ad" things?

Challenge; remember capitalism exists in the world as it must as the beginning of your answer (but if you can make it vanish and it all works out by the end of the answer, that's cool too as lots of us are looking for that one).

How is that other commenter part of the problem, actually part of the problem suspect?

There actually is an asterisk and most of us can see. Does this happen in your life often?

The ones that straddled the divide seem to be the most versed but also the most blind to where the other generations are, particularly the newer ones.

Many of them can't navigate file systems, or use data abstractions like a simple node tree.

They live under eroding education systems and the free sharing of ideas seems under attack damn near everywhere.

Entire concepts like the idea that privacy or self determination are human rights aren't really taught and are the assumptions of those who came before to them.

They're mad and don't even know who to be mad at, all the while their every interaction is with The Algorithm, which is (are) all too happy to break down and redirect that anger towards short term gain for the few, regardless of long term societal costs for the whole.

It's not insurmountable, but it is so so much bullshit. A never ending deluge. Will the fact that some humans are always born with more than others and enough of them may develop enough critical thinking despite the points at everything be enough?

I dunno. But I worry too.

Beware the (only) highly empathetic too, while you're at it.

Get the right (wrong) combination and you have:

Someone who can understand and read the changes they are engendering in others, adjust manipulation in real time, feel terrible about it, but be able to justify it to themselves as improving the lot of others if they genuinely lack the intelligence to comprehend the whole "you can lead a horse to water but not make it drink" adage.

Self-awareness is tragically never a guarantee; much less using it to take responsibility for shortcomings.