Transparency is about knowing where the money comes from just as much as it is about how much money is being given.
In most of your hypotheticals, as long as I know who’s behind GeekNights, if you have any funding, where that comes from, that’s good enough for me.
Also, this is my favorite quote in favor of transparency that I pull out whenever I have this conversation with Conservatives:
“There are laws against threats and intimidation; and harsh criticism, short of unlawful action, is a price our people have traditionally been willing to pay for self-governance. Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed. For my part, I do not look forward to a society which, thanks to the Supreme Court, campaigns anonymously … and even exercises the direct democracy of initiative and referendum hidden from public scrutiny and protected from the accountability of criticism. This does not resemble the Home of the Brave.” - The Late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia
But isn’t paid platform advertising becoming less and less relevant in the age of the internet? Isn’t Jerk With Youtube Channel And An Opinion far more of an influence than an attack ad on cable TV? Or is that just my internet literati blinders? Because the JWYCAAO is wayyyy harder to police than big money advertising.
I agree, but also in this case, the illiteracy knows no race or class boundaries. The rich white guys can’t fucking read either. Perhaps, especially the rich white guys.
No, because it is not bound by race or class. Half of high school I went to a nearly entirely white middle to upper middle class school and the other half I went to a majority POC school in a VERY poor area, and in both the majority of students could not read terribly well, process information, or even form their own opinions on reading and class material.
Yeah I went to a prestigious prep school and I could read and write better than almost anyone else in my class. I’m also one of two people from that class that didn’t go to college.
Well, Trump just openly solicited investigations into the Bidens from China and the Ukraine on National TV. He’s actually using the “well, you can’t sink my ship if I scuttle it first” defense. Just what in the fuck. Yes I understand that he is attempting to normalize this contact. It’s still a fucking federal crime!
Yeah, the bare illiteracy of Americans is across all class barriers. A lot of the wealthier people I know are also some of the least literate.
At RIT, it was mostly the upper-middle-class white people who spoke English as a primary language who kept presenting barely literate word salad as their essays.
I would consider the low barrier to what we consider “literacy” coupled with the failure to even achieve that bar with our education systems a public crisis.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that 50 percent of U.S. adults can’t read a book written at an eighth-grade level.
The above isn’t even about inference or reading comprehension. It’s the low-bar literacy that we’re failing to even meet to an acceptable level.
This is part of why the Mueller Report didn’t even move the needle. It’s complex. People don’t understand it. It’s very hard to even convince a jury about the facts of a crime when the crime is complex. But the voting public?
Honestly the only reason the Ukraine story is making a dent is that it’s so relatively simple to describe.
I’ve always wondered what can be done about this, because as we have pointed out it has nothing to do with school funding and everything to do with cultural values. For whatever reason a large majority of the US population doesn’t value intellectualism or even education generally. What caused that?
Literacy seems beside the point. Had read something earlier about how people were Pro-Trump because “The Media was persecuting him.” As opposed to “The Media documenting all of the time he’s metaphorically shitting on the government.” And. He. Never. Stops. Ever. It is so goddamn exhausting just dealing with his shit in just clickbait link titles, let alone actually watching him in person.
The US has a history of anti-intellectualism dating back to before our founding. In the 1700s and 1800s, the European stereotypes about us were mostly that were uneducated and violent yokels.