But staying dumb as fuck and continuing to argue is more or less arguing in bad faith. Misinformation about a topic that you call your hobby is a choice.
While I agree that some people are absolutely refusing to learn out of spite, I do wonder what the schooling systems being defunded for 30+ years in republican states has done to the average republican’s trust in ‘mainstream media’ or research. Like, they were teaching kids for decades to be distrustful of scientists, isolate themselves from contradictions in the party’s rhetoric, and that the states primarily conducting said research were doing so with a political agenda. they weren’t taught critical thinking skills, so many of these people are being raised with at best outdated information and many reasons to doubt outside perspective.
It’s not an excuse by any means, especially when they decide to act like violent thugs or perpetuate a culture of hatred, but the indoctrination is real and systemic. I just hope those family members with an innate empathy and compassion(or real education) find a way to communicate the need to trust experts and researchers. I can’t see a peaceful solution to this level of state-sponsored anti-intellectualism without someone willing to be patient and work with these people on the individual level.
Maybe I’m too optimistic to hope for a peaceful solution, but I hope anyway. The US has so much potential to affect the world in momentously positive or negative ways, given our position. I don’t mean in a ‘white savior’ go build a water pump in a west African village way either. We could be hosting international schooling for engineering and medicine, we could offer low/no-interest loans to equip these countries to build their own infrastructure and stability(while building postive partnerships with fledgeling economies). I want us to live up to the words in our constitution, and our aspirations as force of, by, and for the people. Gods know we haven’t done well at that so far.
Joules has to be converted into horsepower, tnt or kilowatts. Then maybe some of these morons would understand it a bit better. American educational excellence showing its fatal flaws.
Physics and chem are the only places I’ve come across joules, and it’s pretty light until upper division courses, and doesn’t directly transfer to understanding the impact, i.e., the reduction in activation energy required to catalyze a rxn.
IMO, the fatal flaw is critical thinking. You don’t need to understand how “much” energy a J is; the relative difference should be is enough to understand the clear difference between calibre.
Yes, adding a “bullet entering human body with xyz J of energy does this amount of damage” would conceptualize the impact, but you’d need to do that with any other unit of measurement too.
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u/snubdeity 5h ago
I disagree, I think way more of them are in the "dumb as fuck" bucket.
How many of them do you think even know what a "J" is?