I'd hate to see how you'd react to an actual temper tantrum.
No, man. You're mocking people who don't have access to a high standard of learning. You're trying to rationalize that away so that you don't have to feel bad about it.
@masterspace Yeah, but YOU are the one who brought public school into it and you did it in a clever little jokey way.
If you had said "Well, that's what you get for attacking the wrong country", it would be one thing. But you went and made fun of the public school system. You punched down. And now, for your sins, you are stuck in this conversation.
@masterspace And there we get to why I'm such a brittle American. See, the immense privilege of the powerful in our country, our military prowess, and the export of the my of American exceptionalism have CONVINCED a lot of people across the world that if they bash Americans it is punching up.
It's not. See, we do HAVE a bad public school system and the richest in our country have spent 40 years sabotaging it in some scheme to fund private schooling. Not only that, school funding is partly by federal and state funding--which is sabotaged by those bastards--but MOSTLY by local taxes so the people in the rich areas get the good schooling with arts, extracurricular activities, foreign language studies and a pool while the people in the poor areas get a whiteboard, an untrained Army veteran as a teacher, and the requirement to buy their own school supplies.
As Americans we have to fight constantly against this sabotage, WHILE working full-time jobs with greater hours and fewer benefits than any other Western country just so we can afford to go to a doctor--as we are called by not just the privileged in our country but the entire WORLD lazy, stupid, complacent and undeserving.
So when you make fun of the average American and call them stupid because their public school system which they need to fix before they complain about people making fun of them? You're punching down.
Meanwhile, you accuse me of punching down but I have spent this thread mocking you for living in a country with a vast abundance of natural resources and wildlife, and living in a country where it's common to ACTUALLY learn a second language rather than learn some grammar rules and tick off boxes, which as I say above, is a privilege in the US afforded to the better schooling that you get by virtue of living in a rich area.
Now, if you'd say Americans are stupid because we invaded the wrong country... Well, then you'd be punching up. But instead you're making fun of something that we are actually at a disadvantage in.
Stalking your past convos? No. I saw you were from lemmy.ca and therefore Canadian. Then I did a search for the 20 percent statistic and of course Wikipedia came up.
I don't feel bad. I know our school system sucks because of a lot of systemic problems. I do think your education is not as great as you think it is if you simplify the 20% statistic to full illiteracy and if you think a random person on kbin needs to set up a new public school system before she can have an opinion.
That's before we unpack the idea that literacy=intelligence, which is not always the case.
I do feel a bit bad about the stalking accusation. I didn't realize the ability to see your server in the automatic kbin reply setup combined with the esoteric knowledge of how to use Duck Duck Go would frighten you, Mr Better Educated Than Me. We can stop if this is too much for your heart. This weather can be tough on the body and I know you guys aren't well-versed in heat safety.
@masterspace All right, so I was interested in the statistic so I looked it up and 20% of Americans are at Level 1 literacy or below according to Wikipedia... which means that actually a lower number than that is functionally illiterate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States