• conditional_soup
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    8 months ago

    Damn, this is a lot more of an informed and nuanced take than the meme. Your meme kinda sucks at getting this point across, dawg.

    But I’ll point out that literacy rates will probably show more interesting variations that could support your points if you did look at literacy rates by sqkm on a map. Maybe I didn’t do a good job communicating that, but that’s the idea: look at literacy rates across each sqkm in the US. Supposing you’re right, you’d expect to see literacy rates in metro areas drop acutely compared to the outlying areas.

    • SJ0@hilariouschaos.com
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      8 months ago

      It’s not my meme. :P

      Besides, memes are often just meant to be entertaining or to deliver a message to someone who already basically agrees in a way they enjoy, not to prove a huge point conclusively. Seems safe to say this one is pointed directly at the ingroup, and the reaction it’s meant to elicit is probably something like “Those assholes think we’re stupid, screw them!”

      Based on things like a shocking literacy statistics from public schools in many cities such as the dozen schools in Baltimore that failed to train a single student to grade level, and the fact that New Jersey has the highest levels of illiteracy and the highest levels of university education, I suspect you’d find American cities are sort of feast or famine. Unfortunately by many measures inequality is at record levels and so is class segregation, so you’d have your upper middle class and lower upper class folks who are highly educated and trying to get a seat at the table, and you’d have incredibly impoverished people – not so much in a money sense (though in some cities it’s insane what rent on a basic place is), but in a sense that all the things that are beneficial are in short supply.

      Pretty much everyone above a certain socioeconomic level pretends to care about the poor, but then advocate for policies that sound nice but actively harm the poor and will lead to more opportunities for people like themselves. It’s brilliant subterfuge.