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  • The way it has manifested most clearly in the situations I've encountered it is a basic difference in approach to writing and reading as concepts. They don't see writing or reading as a way to communicate, they see it as a puzzle they have to solve by following rules, so that they can return to communicating once the puzzle is out of the way. Unless they're in very casual/online settings, or very motivated to find specific information, they avoid the puzzle because it's annoying.

  • I had a roommate who grew up in a poor farming community. He has dyslexia but the school had no special education funding to address that. As a result he grew up completely illiterate and stayed that way into his 30s. He passively absorbed libertarian ideas from the media he consumed, but lacked the ability to cross-check any of it. I remember him giving me a history lesson from a Call of Duty game.

  • They can sound out words and know what most common words mean in isolation but their ability comprehend the meaning of a text is very basic, if present at all. Reading a short story, being able to summarize it and comment on themes, conflicts, character motivations, metaphors, allegory, how they relate to the story or certain characters are generally beyond them. Reading a political article and reading between the lines to get past the writer's bias is completely beyond them (tbf they would never read an article, they would watch a video or look at memes on facebook). That said, they have little to no ability to think critically so whatever authority figures beat into them when they were young becomes their worldview and everything that contradicts it is seen as an attack on them and society.

    • I had someone I know ask me what was wrong with the Korean PM declaring martial law since he was doing it because of a communist invasion. The article just repeated what he claimed he was doing and this guy hadn't thought about whether that was an accurate statement on his part. Just didn't occur to him that an official statement from a politician could be false.

      He's not coincidentally a huge Chud with a lot of beliefs about a (((cabal))) running everything he doesn't like.

      • I legit think the only way to save these people is to very carefully word socialist theory in a way that they can understand through facebook level memes. But then you have to worry about the authority figures that actually can read seeing through it.

        I don't know that re-education is actually possible in this case, tbh.

    • This was what I was going to say. The idea of an author of a text having a bias is alien to a lot of Americans. Like if you say that Harry Potter is a liberal fantasy about not changing anything and defending the status quo, there will be someone telling you "uh no, it says in the book that it's about fighting Voldemort". Just a lack of ability to do anything more than a surface level read.

  • It means they have a difficult time parsing Parenti quotes. They can read it aloud, and they can tell you roughly what it's about, but they have difficulty following and comprehending the argument being made.

  • “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat,” announced Reagan advisor Roger A. Freeman during a press conference on Oct. 29, 1970.

  • Years ago I wrote here using an alt about how I had yelled in public at one of my chud neighbors because he put a trump sign on his lawn. I stalked him later on facebook (which I no longer use) and saw his writing about the encounter. I could barely understand what he was even talking about. This is a white boomer who works as a school bus driver. Becoming a school bus driver now is super hard actually, it requires six months of full-time training/education where I live, but I suspect that he got into school bus driving before all of that, because his writing looked almost like he had just smashed his keyboard with his hands. No punctuation, many spelling and grammatical mistakes. I remember he wrote "I'm" when he should have written "I am"—it was something like: "He doesn't know how nice of a guy I am," but he wrote it "He doesn't know how nice of a guy I'm." This guy also speaks with a heavy accent and only in short, simple sentences. I've worked as an ESL teacher for years, and I tell students now—many of them are perfectionists—that they already speak English better than some native speakers.

    I don't know what level his literacy is at. I guess he is barely capable of communicating in writing and also able to sign and cash checks and buy things at the grocery store?

    Another story: I work in a blue collar field which requires us to enter about four houses each day. 95% of houses have absolutely no books at all. Of the remaining 5% of houses with books, the vast majority are only bibles and cookbooks. 1% has books that are mostly for decoration. Another 1% or so has books that appear to have been read. I have only found a handful of houses with communist texts. Most of the houses with books that seem to have been read are just filled with liberal nonsense. (One Mormon landlord I met, who owned so many houses I think he was confused about the number, had dozens of Mormon-themed books in his basement, including even one book about overcoming doubt about Mormonism.) A coworker and I once entered the very rare American house that seemed to have hundreds of books. My coworker (white, in his thirties, has a high school education at best) didn't even notice them. I guess I just found this stunning. I was fascinated with the books' existence and wanted to examine them all, even if they were almost certainly all liberal nonsense (the owners were retired academics, one book I remember seeing there was something like "Hitler and Stalin"), but my coworker was still just glued to tiktok on his phone (and not communist tiktok). He's actually an okay guy. He so desperately wants to be a normal American, but he has two trans kids whom he seems to love, so it's basically impossible for him to be as reactionary as he would like to be. I talked with him for about a hundred hours when we worked together, never revealing that I was a communist and always avoiding obvious Marxist language, and only made modest progress at best. When we finished working together a few months ago, he had expressed interest in voting for RFK. He had also never heard of long covid and seemed to be concerned about it when I mentioned it. Then he went back to normal. As for me, I have trouble watching videos to learn things because they're just too slow, sometimes even if I set them at double speed. I prefer reading, although I do listen to a lot of books and podcasts, although I'm usually listening while I'm doing something else. Not to denigrate learning from videos since I know they can be useful and some people really get a lot out of them (especially when it comes to learning blue collar shit), but in my opinion, a random book is going to have a lot more information than a random youtube video.

  • it means using plain language, visual aids, and keeping things concise will get you far in the states.

    boom, gottem. #pithy

    • Part of literacy is analysing texts like presentations. If a politician gives a half hour speech, what are they actually saying? That sort of thing.

      This thread has much more been about graphical written word. Like, if someone listens to an audiobook or reads a physical book in the same way, their literacy level determines what they can get from either.

      Or at least, that's what I thought I was asking >.> idk

      • for about a decade or so, i had an official role generating resources for informal adult education based on published research within the academic structure as part of it's 100+ year old "service/outreach" mission. over the last century, resources have been stripped from this mission, probably because it was structured so that communities had a big say in what sort of education they wanted delivered, preventing a full blown top-down approach to community development that powerful people deploy to maintain uneven development.

        what i took from my time working in this sphere is that advancing the cause of literacy means meeting people where they are. among other skills, this requires creativity and humility which are two abilities that are not particularly valued by the PhD research or academic publishing processes resulting in an overall abdication by the "highly educated" of their responsibility to their communities. most prefer to scoff at the great many who lack the training they received and instead stand idle above the crowd as experts.

        while the adversarial stripping of resources from our institutions that provide a basic, universal right to a broad education has lead us to the current situation, too many of our "public intellectuals" are reinforcing the problem by refusing to see their enhanced duty and responsibility to disseminate knowledge to their communities broadly, instead of gatekeeping it behind credentialism and careerism. there are obviously exceptions to this, as individuals, but they are the cranks and the burnouts with derailed careers. the elitist sociopaths are running the departments and colleges and they would happily disenfranchise everyone without a college degree before they'd advocate for a right to universal higher education.

  • I had a coworker who was writing a note to the boss and misspelled several common words, including "house".

    Often times people just avoid writing or typing in general, in favor of speech-to-text.

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