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"Doing your own research" means watching one or two YouTube videos or Facebook posts as far as these people are concerned. No thought for themselves, just parrot what you hear.
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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I don't understand why this even needs to be researched. I'm no economist and I don't know much about tariffs, but: costs more to get product to me for any reason = product costs me more. When has that ever not been the case? What am I missing?
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What kills me is that we shouldn't be researching a thing that was taught in school.
Actual footage of us GenX kids learning about The Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act.
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"He was told the other countries pay the tariffs", by a bunch of liars and he believed the liars.
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I recently learned that almost 1 in 5 Americans are illiterate.
How many Americans do you think are reasonably well educated, so that they would understand somewhat complex issues like tariffs? Or could seek out information if they didn't understand?
Im still surprised by that , the quality of education in my country is low but holly fuck im stunned by the lack of education in the states
It is highly regional, too.
Despite the existence of the Department of Education (which Trump is trying to dismantle), there is no national standard for education in the US. In general, each state is free to decide upon its own policies and standards.
Some states, such as those in the northeast, have very high-performing school systems. So when that "1 in 5 are illiterate" statistic is mentioned (I actually have not verified that number, just quoting the prior claim as an example), it would be caused by low-performing states where the situation is much more dire dragging down the national average.
Here's a general look at quality of education in the US by state, though recommend folks look up their own numbers because I haven't validated the numbers pulled in the article I grabbed this from.
It's not a perfect divide between red states and blue states (Florida appears good, California less so, as an example), but in general we see the lower performing states located mainly in the South where the Republicans have more support. Basically, a less educated populace is easier to manipulate.
I was reading into this recently and the reason Florida is so high on these lists is because post-secondary education is very cheap. Their K-12 education is on the garbage end of the spectrum.
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It's by design.
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I wrote a comment explaining Tariffs on a Fox News YouTube video a few weeks back, and the entire reply chain was people arguing with eachother about how tariffs work because "Trump said it's a tax on other countries, so that's how they work"
It’s the problem that reality is more complicated than the simplified version trump gives his followers.
If you don’t know how something works and someone very confidently tells you how it works and it sorta maps onto familiar concepts, boy is that catnip.
Maybe all the countries are just sitting around like people and Canada is like a guy buying our stuff and we are just making that guy pay a tax. I’m a guy, I pay taxes, sucks to be that guy but probably rules to be the guy getting the tax revenue, and now trump made that us, awesome!!!
Transmitting this wrong idea is fast because it maps onto their lived experiences. It’s easy for them to conceptualize Canada as a single monolithic entity that is buying shit and having to pay a tax. So in one stroke they get a double dopamine hit.
- I’m not dumb, I get how this all works, and it was pretty easy!
- we get to collect these taxes instead of having to pay them, awesome!!!
So here you come to explain, “that’s not how any of this works” Canada isn’t one entity, it’s many. Sure the tariff is on their stuff, but it’s paid by the person buying it, us. And you can go on about all the ways they are wrong but you are threatening the fact that they are not dumb and they already understand this and their understanding means they are winning. So you want them to admit they are dumb and getting fucked and that’s a hard sale.
This is the real danger of hypernormalization, it allows people like trump to replace the complexity of reality with a fake but simpler version. And it’s so dangerous because the people that buy in to that fake but simpler version have this weird insane incentive to defend it.
Real answer is in the last line there. If 60% of people we're capable of doing their own research (and arriving at the correct answer) then we wouldn't have anti-vaxers, flat-earthers and non-billionaire/non-bigot/non-christian nationalist republicans.
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I tell people that if they think other countries pay the tariffs they probably believe Mexico is paying for a wall
Or, we can hold the fucking media accountable for telling blatant lies about the impacts of tariffs.
Fox News got around that by claiming they're entertainment, not news.
Per their own arguments in court, no reasonable person would consider Fox News to be factual.
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Ignorance is not an excuse. Fire all MAGAs for taxifs.
Omg. We’ve come full circle now that smart people are telling idiots to do your own research…
The OP is battling against what Faux Newz, Dipshit Donnie, and other right-wing propagandist shitrags are telling his employee, all which the employee takes as indesputable truth. If he can override that much brainwashing he can convince anyone of anything.
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Man, this isn't even "doing your research" it's just knowing what very basic words mean.
That’s actually a huge problem I’ve had with a right winger.
Even though he was relatively reasonable, we got stuck because we could not agree on what fascism means.
I was good to use a dictionary or better yet Wikipedia. He said it can only mean what Mussolini meant when he came up with the term.
What was annoying is that all I wanted to do was say, group X does Y things, Y things are fascism and fascism is bad.
It’s just mental gymnastics because it doesn’t matter what we call it, group X is still doing bad things, but instead we got stuck on details.
Imo this is pretty much all right wing’s only play, dismantle the tools of logic so the conversation doesn’t even happen in the first place.
Mussolini also said that fascism was whatever it needed to be in the nation it was in, for future reference. There is only the pragmatic consolidation of power.
It does not even matter if is the state consolidating power, or the church, or corporations, only that the process is aimed at merging their powers in the end.
I bet a coworker $20 that "tariff" and "tax" were synonyms. Motherfucker refused to pay up, calling merriam-webster.com, thesauraus.com, wikipedia etc. "fake news".
Your mistake was referencing a woketionary.
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Plot twist: the person writing this is President Musk and the employee he's referring to is Trump.
and every one of the millions who ~~were~~are just as dumb, will forget the lessons learned well before the next election and vote for it all over again.
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literally googling tariffs, brings you to a government page that lists tariffs, duties, and taxes under the same fucking definition.
How people like this DO NOT understand this shit, is beyond me. I can respect the humility in changing your position after being that stupid though, please, due your due diligence before mindlessly repeating the shit other people tell you, so you don't look stupid.
What, visit a website, read it, then comprehend it? What, like a book?! May as well ask them to make a phone call.
yeah, otherwise you're a dumbass, and will look like one to everyone around you, unfortunately.
This is normal behavior. Ironically they would probably be more than willing to make a phone call.