American here:

About 20% of Americans are functionally illiterate, 2nd grade or worse reading and writing skills.

The average literacy level of Americans is between 5th and 6th grade… meaning the next 30% have the reading/writing skills of someone who basically only conpleted elementary school.

These are numbers for adults 18 and up, by the way, not kids.

Almost every single person I’ve met who learned English as a second language… can speak it more fluently than most native English speakers I’ve known who grew up in America. More extensive vocabularies, better grammar, better spelling.

And this will get worse.

Covid resulted in a year to two years of remote or missed classes for Gen Alpha, and the Repulicans look poised to finally kill off the public education system in all but the wealthier, solid blue states. Department of Education will be disbanded by the end of the year or earlier if nobody stops it.

Not an unreasonable assumption.

That or he’s a die hard fan, really into that subculture.

I agree with all of that.

Maybe … 5 to 10% of Dems, like Federal Congresspeople, State governors… are willing to meaningfully go against pro corporate policies… at least more than half of the time.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some kind of psyop used to induce or intensify infighting among younger leftists, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if … there really wasn’t something specifically aimed at doing exactly that.

I know Russia has been very successfully employing the uh, hyperreality tactic, just fund or assist or influence enough people who are bombastic enough in any political persuasion, publish and spread baseless nonsense all across the spectrum to just sow general chaos…

But I do also think a lot of it really is people just adopting a vocabulary generally shared by leftists and then using it to their own, individual ends.

The thing with the CIA’s Simple Sabotage model is that it describes basically every social circle or work environment I’ve ever been in, or hear about from a friend.

General incompetence and … wasting time over petty stupid bullshit … just sounds like the norm in America generally, for pretty much my whole life… but maybe I have just had particularly bad luck with that.

Misleading and overly jocular.

It has been 11,182 days since it began.

The… they kept coming, and joining… and the seasons lost their familiarity… their very meaning… it became just a blurring vortex, an intensifying torrent of ever increasing ignorance and rage.

I … can barely remember now, what it was like before…

11,182 days … of September.

This is not a normal kind of human interaction, on the girl’s part.

It very strongly indicates she is a spoiled brat, a narcissist.

If you think this kind of interaction is normal… well I see two possible explanations:

You are also a narcissist and that’s why you think this is normal.

OR

You are surrounded by narcissists who have gaslit you into thinking this is normal, and you haven’t had too many regular interactions with non narcissists.

Also, I don’t see anywhere near as many total upvotes for ‘she’s into you dude, frost that cupcake!’ as I do for ‘this is the biggest red flag imaginable, let me write a short essay explaining why’

In fact, yeah, I don’t see a single comment advocating the anon dive into her… affairs, over this.

There is a very fitting song for this.

Garbage - Stupid Girl

Basically, if this is a representative sample of this girl’s personality …

(huge if there, this is a single 4chan post lol)

… then she is a textbook narcissist, potentially to the point of being diagnosable with NPD if she doesn’t grow out of this attitude, get a reality check that actually sinks into the subconscious.

A spoiled, pampered brat whose never been told no, who never gets any real, meaningful interaction or validation, and tries to fill that void with a grandiose self image, absurd overconfidence and privelege.

Angelica from Rugrats.

…And my take here would be the same if the genders/sexes were reversed, or some other combo.

It is pretty not normal for anybody to have that kind of interaction with anybody else, to just boisterously state they could have ‘insert random person’, then have rando anon just flatly reply ‘sorry not interested’, … and then throw a giant hissy fit.

I am seriously hoping this interaction occures between 12 or 14 year olds, but looking at the horror kaleidoscope that is social media these days?

Yeah, could be anybody, any age, at this point.

Yep.

It is mostly just revisiting older news from decades before that… as would be reasonable when a newcomer to politics now seems to stand a reasonable chance of becoming President, might want to do a more thorough journalistic background check on the guy.

Leftists critical of Trump, back then, before even his first term, were … you know, kind of worried about Trump having Hitler in his nightstand table, very, very obviously seeing him as a role model and source of inspiration…

And then they said things like … is Trump a Nazi? Is Trump a fascist? This stuff is … quite concerning, along with his bombastic rhetoric and extremely nebulous and fluid ‘policies’, that all seem to converge on a return to past greatness, hypermasculinity, racism, sexism… all very much in line with … a populist, which historically very often leads to fascism…

And then almost every one else in the country dismissed that as hyperbolic nonsense, and ‘everything/one you don’t like is fascist’ was born.

… And now here we, evidently in the bizzaro clownworld timeline, where Trump ‘is the joker, baby’ all the Republicans are his brainwashed cult of goons, the Democrats almost all as well sane-washed the shit out of Trump untill way after it was too late… and, as is also predictable broadly by history, the leftists, with few exceptions, fought each other over idpol, purity tests and tone policing, effectively negating any coherent opposition.

Well, I would, but:

gestures at leg and wrist in braces, cane, utter state of poverty, lack of public transit in a low CoL city I can qualify to rent at with SSDI as my only income

… can’t say I’ve ever had banana pudding.

Here’s how you go to jail for debt:

Rack up a ton of credit card debt.

Don’t pay it off, goes to collections.

If it’s high enough, and you don’t move to another state…

Collections sues you, you get a court summons in the mail.

You throw away the court summons along with all your overdue bill notices.

Congratulations, you now have an active arrest warrant, police will be at your location in… a few days to a few weeks, you go to jail, then likely prison for contempt of court, and when you get out, the debt collector won their judgement against you by default, any wages you try to get will be garnished, your credit score is absymal so you can’t get an apartment basically anywhere.

… incredible.

Beans for you.

Not one who’s seen their own kid(s) or brothers or sisters suffer through bad marriages and divorces.

It is… a bit odd, imo, that she’d just jump to that, not even knowing anon… but at the same time, a good number of older people just don’t give a fuck / literally do not have much time to waste, so they just get straight to the point.

Oh I did find such jobs, but then I managed to get asssulted in a mugging, lost my ids and cards and phone, ended up hospitalized, lost my job, got evicted, ended up homeless for about two years.

On the bright side of that, managed to get SSDI payments and recently set myself up with actual doctors after having to wait for the medicare application window thing, as well as… at least a 6 month lease at a roach motel.

Now I get to do PT for … 6 months to a year? And maybe I can walk without a cane again, and use my wrist for more than 20 minutes at a time without it excruciatingly seizing up.

… unless you are posadist.

Extend communication, and then citizenship to the Dolphins!

… Or the motel knows how prostitution works, and wants their cut, and has worked this arrangement out before hand.

No, you’re wrong.

Everyone that studies crimes for a living, you know, people with PhDs, who publish peer reviewed studids on mass shootings?

Precise definitions vary somewhat, but basically, a mass shooting is any instance where 4+ people are injured or killed by gunfire, in a single, temporaly and geographically constrained event.

Gas station robbery gone wrong? 3 people injured, one dead, by gunfire?

That’s a mass shooting.

Because a mass of people… got shot.

A mass shooting related to gang activity… is a gang related mass shooting.

It is a subset of the category ‘mass shooting’, not a completely different thing.

You csn take that definition and apply it backward 40 , 60 years, and you will still see a massive, massive rise in the number of mass shootings in the last 20 years, number of people injured or killed by gunfire in mass shootings.

Zoomers are about 3x more likely to personally know someone who was present at the scene of, injured or killed in a mass shooting than Boomers.

For Millenials, its about 2x.

My experience after graduating from high school in 07 and college in 11 is that uh… no, the vast majority of odd jobs, part time jobs I worked till getting a ‘real’ job…

No, no, the vast majority of basically low wage workers are still mentally in high school, still acting just as immature, still being childish, rude and bullying people, still constantly seeking to create situations of petty drama, still pressuring people into hazing rituals.

Does not matter how old they are.

I’ve seen 45 year old men literally ‘flex’ on younger coworkers to assert dominance, like literally puff themselves up and flex to appear larger, while arguing with or belittling them.

Your advice is generally good advice, but it is far from guaranteed to ensure you will not be surrounded by immature buffoons, and ostracized when you do not partake in their foolishness.

Something vaguely similar but kinda inverted, happened when I was in middle school.

An office assistant, like a TA, but for the main office, was dispatched to deliver a packet of course work papers to the class I was in.

The main office had the main, commercial grade printer in it, and this would have been like… 2004 ish? Computers were basically only in the computer lab, more primitive tech setup.

So anyway, the OA shows up and delivers the coursework to the teacher… and is confused by the complete silence in the room, the lack of anyone doing anything.

He remarked ‘… Did somebody die or something? Jeez’ and was now met with many intense, silent stares… he quickly exited.

Completely unbeknownst to the OA… about 15 minutes prior, our teacher had just recieved an email, took aside one student, talked to him for a few minutes. That student then quickly talked with his friends for about a minute, eyes tearing up, getting several hugs, and then presumably left to the school counselor office.

His one or two grade older sister had just suffered a complete cardiac arrest in PE, out on the track, about 30-45 minutes prior to the email… and died.

Great work kitty kat.

Yep.

Yes.

That is the mouse, right in front of you, juuuust out of reach.

Again, great work.