this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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Mildly Interesting

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[–] Telodzrum@lemmy.world 138 points 22 hours ago (5 children)

WTH, Americans think that 30% of the country lives in NYC?

[–] MBech@feddit.dk 118 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

They think 21% are transgender too.... A lot of propaganda has gone through these people.

[–] andros_rex@lemmy.world 25 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

“Transvestigation” is fucking insane and there are a lot of people who are convinced that many celebrities are secretly trans.

I think it mostly started with disgusting conspiracies about Michelle Obama (they literally believe that Sasha and Malia were kidnapped, even have specific missing children they think they are). Alex Jones and his ilk think Michelle was born Michael.

This was a thing that developed I think late in his presidency, then it expanded to several other figures. My favorite is Donald Glover as a trans man - I’ll gladly welcome Childish Gambino into my community.

It’s a serious “Q anon” type mentally ill worldview.

[–] MBech@feddit.dk 9 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

Donald Glover as a trans man? I'm currious what makes them think that? Either way, dudes a fucking legend and is welcome in any community I'm in.

[–] pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 2 points 12 hours ago

That's because he's incredibly awesome and poignant in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYOjWnS4cMY

We can't have people respecting a black man who shows the reality of the situation, can we?

[–] brian@lemmy.ca 53 points 22 hours ago (3 children)

By the looks of it, it's 30% to NYC, 30% to Texas, and 30% to California. So 10% for literally everywhere else in the US. That's gotta be close, right?

[–] Telodzrum@lemmy.world 14 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

I'd totally get that for polling people outside of North America. It's just shocking to see it from people who have probably been to NYC or at least another major metro area -- which would instantly falsify a 30% number for NYC.

[–] kelpie_returns@lemmy.world 20 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Why assume most Americans have seen NYC or other major cities though? Most of us don't ever make enough money to travel this country's hard-to-imagine-how-big-it-actually-is vastness, or even enough to leave our hometowns for longer than a couple days before financial woes start nipping at the mind, if not worse.

This is not to say I think it's a reasonable conclusion to think 30% of our population is in any of these three areas of course. That is silly and requires a very skewed view of things (which, lucky us, is easily provided by any number of increasingly 'official' seeming news sources that really just deal in intentional fear mongering and reductionism). Most people tend to believe whatever is put before them, and we have a system that has been explicitly set up to present false images of reality to US citizens. Propaganda to keep the propaganda machine running, right? As unreasonable as it is, it also makes sense that people could be duped into believing it because this system so many of us are stick within is hellbent on ensuring that we are intentionally conditioned out of the ability to know better by adulthood. It doesn't work on everyone, but it works well enough that's it's perpetuation is currently one of the highest yielding economies this foolish country has to offer.

The line of thought that seems obvious and reasonable to you and me has been intentionally beaten out of countless people here before they even had a chance to understand how to think rationally. I don't know how to fix these things. It is just so obvious to me from this inside vantage that the stupidity of our country is one that has been intentionally manufactured and amplified at the expense of us, the actual people the same system depends on and revolves around keeping ignorant.

Sorry for the rant. Many Americans are dumb. Most of the ones that are never had a real option to be anything else because of how fucked things are here. That's not intended as an excuse, but as an attempt at an explanation tbc

[–] Telodzrum@lemmy.world 8 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

Most of us don’t ever make enough money to travel this country’s hard-to-imagine-how-big-it-actually-is vastness, or even enough to leave our hometowns for longer than a couple days before financial woes start nipping at the mind, if not worse.

This is completely contradicted by the data:

"The average American has visited 16 states besides the one where they currently live, a new YouGov survey finds. Older Americans are likelier to have visited more states than younger Americans. 32% of Americans 65 or older say they've visited at least 30 states [. . .]" link

[–] limer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 points 21 hours ago

The working poor don’t participate in yougov that much.

[–] kelpie_returns@lemmy.world 7 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

Many rural areas in the US still don't even have internet access except for the wealthiest homes/neighborhoods among them. And, as we share this exchange, many more are actively ontheir way to losing access to the same, simply because, regardless of the cost on us, our government has decided to put that money into the pockets of people that do not need it. I grew up in an area where the internet was assumed to be only for the wealthy because things were just that stuck in time due to the blatant misallocation of government funding and the greedy fucks that ensured things would be this way. That's the same government that ran this poll, right? So if we both know, for different reasons and in different ways, that this government can not be trusted, why trust them to give you accurate data on this topic?

The issue with data points like this is that they imply an assumption of completion that simply can not actually exist because of how incredibly large our population is. There is no way to wrangle all of these cats into taking the same singular poll in order to get truly accurate numbers, so accepting these numbers without any skepticism is, at best, an assumption based on a lack of information, much like how some people can believe that a disproportionate amount of people live in unreasonably small areas. Think about the people in those underpriveleged rural areas I mentioned up top. How many of them do you believe were asked or invited to take this poll? How many of them never had a chance to due to lack of access? How many do you think chose not to participate because of their frustration with how things are and the people that made it this way? How many do you think refused because they just couldnt care less?Why assume that these factors should not be considered when trying to get a clear and true understanding of how things are here for the common people?

[–] ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 20 hours ago

Sitcoms fucked us up

[–] jaybone@lemmy.zip 1 points 16 hours ago

I’m guessing these same people do know roughly the total population of the US. And are bad at math in general. That would mean 100 million people live in NYC.

[–] A_Union_of_Kobolds@lemmy.world 17 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

It's shocking how bad normal people are with basic math

[–] Furbag@lemmy.world 4 points 16 hours ago

The other ~60% live in California and Texas respectively 😆

[–] CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 17 hours ago

The way I read this graph is that the upper portion are people they want to oppress and the lower portion are people that they preserve is oppressing them.