Observations on the USMB over two years have led me to this.
There seems to be two Americas.
One is educated. Well read,well travelled and able to discern propaganda from fact. They are slightly left leaning and have decent liberal values.
The other America is uneducated, they drink up fake news as if it tastes of nectar. They have probably only been abroad with a gun in their hand. They are stupid,they have failed in life and they need someone to blame for it.
Gays,Blacks,Muslims,NFL players, Parkland survivors, its a growing list.
Which leads me to the absolute sshite that I see posted on this site about Europe in general and the UK in particular.
When I joined this board I was told that Europe was "gone". We were all being poisoned by halal burgers and sentenced to death by sharia courts for entering no go zones in all of our big cities.
Puzzling to one who lives here.
Then there was the faux outrage over London electing a Mayor who was "shock horror" a muslim.
M Khan is not to my taste but he is an affable character who is as westernised as any loon would want.
Then we come to poor Alfie Evans whose dying body was exploited by nutters who have no shame at all. Government death squads at work I was told,
Bit of a shock to me. I have a basic understanding of UK civics and I could not discern a direct line from Alder Hey to Downing St.And yet fuckwits a thousand miles away could work it all out on the basis of a few breitbart articles written by partisan hacks.
And on we go to Stephen Yaxley Lennon. Over here he iss seen as a drug dealing football hooligan/ fraudster. A neo nazi from the violent fringes of the UK underclass.Over in the states he is seen by some nuts as a modern day Robin Hood, saving white virgins from evil mooslims.
Again, the vacuous spout their ignorance of British law by trying to concoct a conspiracy theory that has no basis in fact.
I may be a bit late coming to the party but I have realised that lack of knowledge is not an issue for these shit kickers. They dont need to know anything and in fact they cant be arsed to fill in the vast canyons of emptiness in their knowledge banks.
That is because their concerns are 100% about the US.
Shit US healthcare = Look at Alfie
Crazy US gun laws = Someone got shot in London
Immigration = Lets not import rape gangs
It really does make me weary readng all this ignorant shite.
Dems are racist.
Blacks are violent.
Muslims are rapists.
Gays are paedos.
On and on it goes.
My sympathies are with my American friends and those educated individuals on this board. It cant be easy having to deal with this level of dumb every day.
And because of our antiquated election system that allows the loser to win, they have a fellow sewer dweller shouting their conspiracy theories and racism to the world. What the rest of us in the US have discovered that maybe wasn't plain before is this group of weirdos that support orange stool and the like will believe anything their cult leader says and excuse anything he says and does. They reject the Constitution, our allies, our laws, and everything that has made America America the last 100 years. They have so readily embraced a wannabe Mussolini with the slightest of effort.
That is the eye opener. 52% of Republicans polled said they would be ok with suspending the 2020 elections in the US if Trump said so. Imagine for a minute, if two years ago Barack Obama had suggested suspending the 2016 elections. All these same people would have lost their minds and had no map to find their way back. They are the part of the population in America that long for a strongman daddy figure to be dictator and make them feel safe. In every sense, they are not Americans, they are more like the easily fooled parts of the German population of the 1930s.
And we voted for Brexit.
Ive just been watching a doc about Turkey and the point was made that Erdogan got his support from the backward provincials. The urban educated people were not as ethusiastic. Ditto Brexit and ditto Trump. How do we raise these backwaters up to civilised levels of education ?
A certain percentage of every population is forever uneducated, the 'unwashed masses'. In the US I think 75% of the population DO NOT have a college degree. Educated people in all countries are very much in the minority. This is also why whenever an uber conservative dictator invades or takes over a country they quickly set about killing all the teachers and professors. Educated people organize resistance, uneducated people are lemmings that wander around without a head. You can see this in practice here in the states, the right wing media machine constantly disparages and demonizes colleges, college professors, science, and education in general. They know their base are the uneducated so they go full tilt to de-ligitimize education and the educated.
And the answer is you can't force people to get an education. By definition humans are lazy, and the dumber they are the lazier they are. They want to earn just enough to eat and have a place to stay but after they get off work they want to switch off their brains. In general there isn't anything wrong with this, the problem arises when the right wing media inculcates these people with the idea that anyone that isn't just like them is 'the enemy' or 'the other' and must be hated and mistrusted. This type of propaganda is as old as the human race.
We unfortunately are in a moment in time when the manipulators of these people are on the march. They see an opportunity to use religion and immigration to turn this cohort against their fellow human beings. And as we see it is working in a number of places. Usually the truth forces 'movements' like this to sputter out and die but not always. We don't know yet if the human population worldwide is on the road to worldwide totalitarianism yet or not. The 2018 election in the US will be quite telling regarding this. As you note Brexit was symptom of this as well, and Italy going batshit rightwing also a symptom.
We have yet to see if the disease will kill democracy worldwide.
