this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2025
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[–] CaptPretentious@lemmy.world 1 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

So the 'Trump IQ Scale' than. We can determine someone's IQ by simply observing their approval of Trump. The more they agree the lower the IQ, the less they disagree the higher IQ. Trump himself is the reference point. Someone can maybe come up with a new way to represent it. Though we could just keep the 100 point scale, with Trump being the reference point. So we put T=0 and then you can be ± 99 from center. So someone could say "Yeah my TIQ is +73" or something. Seems like it would be more accurate than the made up IQ scale. Though some nuance to that... since a TIQ of +99 might as well be just as bad as a -99. I believe in his first term, he put for a bill around the cruelty of animals, so if you're a TIQ if +99 you're just disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing and aren't taking into account what is being said/done. So the scale would be nuanced.

[–] ameancow@lemmy.world 3 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

The situation is so, so much worse than a relatively easy-to-define divide between "smart people and stupid people." If it was just a segment of the population who are stupid on some quantifiable level, we could work with that, we could work on outreach and education and compensation by making issues easier to understand and so on.

But it's not just stupidity, there is a larger, society-wide phenomenon that is plaguing the world right now, which is the systemic suppression of thought.

This is a very unpopular fact when I post it, but it remains true: the last three federal elections we held in the US had the highest voter turnout in American history. It wasn't a matter of people not caring or staying home, the issue shown in exit polling is that most voters had no idea what the candidates represented and felt basically like it was a coin-flip, and mostly went with their "gut" and said they had concerns about grocery prices that seemed to go up under Biden and Harris didn't make them feel confident enough that she would do things different from Biden, and that Trump seemed to at least promise things. Many Americans haven't paid solid attention to politics since.

So the picture is this: people who work 6 days a week, have no time or energy to read forums or browse for facts are just pulled along by facebook posts and ignore politics broadly to stay submerged in a lifestyle that simultaneously overworks us, and provides us with so many comforts that we're not incentivized to exercise thinking skills or be curious about anything broadly. Work, scroll, work, scroll... how many of you right now are on Lemmy on work-hours looking for things to keep your brain distracted? Imagine that but across hundreds of millions of people on their phones endlessly scrolling through youtube shorts, ads, clickbait headlines, bad science stories, drama and hype around insignificant bullshit and so on.

Even if you're not leaning one direction or another politically, you're going to scroll past a thousand memes of both political parties saying absurd things about each other that you don't feel connected with at all, because at the end of the day, no matter what they read about Epstein or Palestine or tariffs or "HE SAID WHAT" headlines, people are still just trying to not feel anything while they grind through the day so they can order a cab for their burrito later, and only really care about what that burrito is going to cost tomorrow... and I promise, Big Burrito has worked out exactly how high they can raise prices and how slowly they can do it before people start to feel uncomfortable.

It's not an accident you always have only just enough money to make your ends meet. This is all by design. They made a population of cattle and they milk us daily and keep us drugged and placated.

[–] DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 1 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

Depends. If they are enriched by the regime, then its actually smart (albeit evil) to align with trump. The 99% of their supporters tho, absolute idiots.