Increased blood lead level in children has been correlated with decreases in intelligence, nonverbal reasoning, short-term memory, attention, reading and arithmetic ability, fine motor skills, emotional regulation, and social engagement. … The effect of lead on children's cognitive abilities takes place at very low levels.

High blood lead levels in adults are also associated with decreases in cognitive performance and with psychiatric symptoms such as depression and anxiety.

Lead poisoning # By organ system - Wikipedia

https://www.co2.earth/monthly-co2 <- 427 ppm

leaded gasoline was fun, huh?

EDIT:

Someone else suggested it first, oops. Still, the video I linked is a fun deep-dive. I had no idea leaded gasoline is still used in small airplanes.

"am I just imagining some idealistic version of the past that never existed"

yup.

Americans have always been this stupid, but stupid people aren't the problem.

everyone is stupid, greedy, or otherwise morally corrupt at some point or another or in some situation or another, that's why legal rights and protections were so important, to keep the playing field level and the trains running on time when the assholes wanted to run riot.

the successful conservative suppression of civil rights and removal of restrictions on corporate and wealthy political stuff civil activity, particularly the allowance by the Supreme Court of money to dictate political action, has removed the guardrails that used to protect the stupid and keep corrupt people in line.

Here in Europe we always used to think Americans were stupid.

And it’s not like it’s prejudice from people never leaving their hometown. Nope, actually TV shows and movies make Americans look way smarter than they are.

Nope, the conclusion comes from people that met real Americans, either in Europe or in the US.

Last time I saw an American in Paris he was asking for ketchup on top of his duck breast. The most barbaric thing I’ve seen in a while 😂

There's a fantastic documentary by Adam Curtis, called "I can't get you out of my head". It explores specifically the transition from the 'then' system of thinking to, well, now. It's long but give it a watch.

I think it got worse in 2009 when the tea party started. But yes, we've always been stupid. But this is a whole new level.

My answer is going to include a short story as a pretext.

In Canada in the 90s, we used to have these commercials from an organization called "Concerned Childrens Advetisers" the commercials were about a variety of things, some being positive reinforcement about self esteem, others were more on the nose like not eating glue....

there was one important one that would come on a lot called "The North American House Hippo". And for about 60 seconds it would tell kids about tiny hippopotamus that come out in your kitchen at night, eat crumbs of dropped food, and make beds under your fridge or in the pantry or something... At the end of the commercial, the narrator says something to the effect of "That was an interesting story, but Its not real, not everything you read in a book or see on the TV is real." the internet wasn't mentioned because it wasn't widespread enough yet.. but it had a simple lesson. Not everything you see in media is real.

that lesson hasn't been transfered over to the majority of people, or more likely, most people are not responsible enough to be trusted with the internet because they dont know how to filter, they dont know how to think critically when presented with information online, and its even worse now in the age of deepfakes and AI, that even the smart ones get fooled now.

Collectively we're dumber because people have allowed their public facebook comment section keyboard warrior persona, to take over their real lives. Who people are in person and who people are online, are two different individuals, but the online persona is the one who is in charge. When we are in public, we usually revert to our social norms, respect each other. But when you're a keyboard warrior, your impotent rage and urge to yell the N word and other slurs is unchecked because there isnt anyone present to break your nose for saying or doing something antisocial or arrogant.

It's a typical nationalist-authoritarian pipeline that can sadly happen to any country - but it's only now that people get to realize their islands of democracy are no exception.

You either get vigilant early on - or get to reap the consequences. This machine doesn't show its head before it is already too late to alter this route in the near future.

The requirements for justice includes truth (objective facts of reality not merely opinion or belief or rumors) for accountability, attacking education prevents an ability to evaluate if something presented confidently as truth is truth. It's a fast track to corruption and injustice.

Putin, Trump, Erdogan, etc style of extreme right wing populist propaganda is to attack truth and prevent justice by weaponizing ignorance. They're spreading a firehouse of distracting lies, for example staged attacks against people representing their beliefs on facebook and twitter, to a public who is at least in part unable or unwilling to critically evaluate facts of reality from propaganda lies. Another more general example is if you're not aware of confirmation bias and how it's used and works due to a lack of education you are going to be much more susceptible to it's effects when used.

People aren't necessarily getting dumber other than some temporary dips due to toxic environmental things like lead in fuel or maybe some effects of toxicity we're not aware of yet, It's just the people who were already susceptible to fascist rhetoric & con artists are being indoctrinated against education as either unnecessary or harmful, which makes them easier to continue to mass propagandize to with more methods that have fewer rules platforms need to follow compared to older mass media propaganda like newspapers or network TV news.

Probably? I haven't been very impressed with American adult society since I was in high school witnessing how easily they followed Bush II into war.

How did we go from something like 1940s era collectivism or 1960s era leftism to the current bizarro political machine that seems to have hypnotized a large portion (if not majority) of the country?

The prevailing economic wisdom after WWII was Keynesianism, which says that the government should increase government spending when unemployment is high and decrease it when inflation is high. What happened in the 70's and 80's was that the economy started experiencing both high unemployment and high inflation at the same time, "shrinkflation," which wasn't supposed to happen according to Keynesianism, and which it had no real response to. The reason it was happening (at least from a Marxist perspective) was that the US had already developed in the ways that saw the highest returns, and there simply wasn't as much new ground to cover - this is what's meant by "the tendency of the rate of profit to fall." Regardless, the government was faced with a decision of which problem to focus on between unemployment and inflation - and it chose inflation.

The phenomenon of shrinkflation started under Nixon, who attempted to fight it with price controls and taking us off the gold standard, which was perhaps the most anyone ever did. Ford had no idea what he was doing and just asked people to spend less.

And then we got Carter, and Carter does not get nearly enough hate for his role in this. Carter chose to confront inflation rather than unemployment, the real beginning of "supply side economics" that Reagan would take further. Carter's whole deal was "restoring the dignity of the office" after Watergate and his focus was on individual morality. His message was essentially, you're going to have less purchasing power, but it's ok because we can seek fulfillment in other ways, outside of the economic sphere. He marked the transformation of the Democratic party away from representing the interests of labor and towards the beast that it's become today, with it's obsession over norms and procedure and technocracy.

The result of Carter's messaging and policy was one of the greatest blowout losses in history against Ronald Reagan. Reagan would do all the same things as Carter, but he at least had the decency to lie about it. He focused on how much more you'd be able to afford with cheaper goods, conveniently ignoring the fact that with lower wages, purchasing power would actually decrease. However, thanks to the Democratic party completely abandoning labor and the common people, there was no real pushback against this, there was no alternative explanation or solution or criticism of the broad direction of policy. In fact, economic policy was moved out of the sphere of democratic accountability altogether by leaving it to the Federal Reserve to set interest rates. Instead, the culture war kicked off and that's what elections would be about from then on.

Why did the Democratic party abandon unions? Because the unions like the AFL/CIO stripped themselves of power and radicalism by purging communists during the Red Scare. The Carter administration didn't view labor vs capital in terms of the fundamental struggle of society but as just another set of competing interest groups and lobbyists, which is honestly pretty much how the unions saw themselves and wanted to be seen anyway.

So what happens when more and more important questions are taken out of the hands of the voters, who then watch conditions gradually decline? Well, the voters get mad about declining conditions - and at the same time, get dumber from not being engaged in any important questions. There's a sense that we can just fuck around and do whatever because our actions don't have consequences, because most of the time what we say and believe seems to have no real effect on policy anyway. Nobody gets to vote on whether or not to keep arming Israel and bombing Yemen or on whether to raise or lower interest rates or anything like that - the only thing we get to vote on is stuff like whether trans women can play sports.

Trump's popularity is very easy to understand in that context - he is a rebellion against that declining status quo and a desperate attempt to reassert the power of elected officials over technocratic institutions. Of course, since the left has been purged and is devoid of power, this rebellion can only come from the right. A similar thing happened in Iran (which Carter also fucked up btw but that's not important right now), where after being installed by the CIA, the shah hunted down and exterminated everyone on the left, and then conditions declined and people wanted change, only that change had to come from the right because the left was powerless. And if the American left can't materialize and offer an alternative vision, both to Trump and, more importantly, to the failed bipartisan status quo that existed before him, then we're headed towards the same future.

People who seem reasonable still say there are good people on both sides. I don't understand that at all! My hairstylist moved here from vietnam as a kid. Last week i made a comment about bezos and he actually said, "both sides....". I thought my brain was going to pop.

Yes. It didn't help that we spent 50 years saying not to discuss politics or religion.

But the current situation was largely a coordinated propaganda effort, likely combined with blackmail on politicians. Possibly caused by the hacked emails. Both the DNC and RNC were hacked. Only the DNC side was released.

Pro-business/anti-regulation types teamed up with the anti-abortion types around 50 years ago in order to get votes for their unpopular ideas, then they did everything they could to conflate the two ideologies to where Christians (the dominant religious group) now think Republican=Christian=Republican and thus ALL Republican ideas intrinsically align with their religion. I.e., Jesus was a capitalist rather than anything that's actually in the bible.

Tl;Dr: propaganda and the natural human tendency toward in-group bias.

I think most of this is being driven by personal vendettas. if you look at each person on the right, it seems they all have a grudge of some such and this current administration promises to deliver based on revenge.

The biggest player being Elon: His son Xavier has transitioned. And when his (now daughter) called out Elon's nazi wave as being legitimate, Elon tipped his hand by saying the woke killed his son and he is out to kill the woke mind(https://www.aol.com/news/elon-musk-estranged-daughter-responds-155107557.html) - So Elon sank a tonne of money to sway this election to his own vendetta.

For Dementia donald : it's Biden winning the 2020 election.

For Vance it's repressed feelings you can see he's trying to break out the drag queen smokey eye: although he's an opportunist at the base of it. So he's getting two things met here. I think because he's at odds with himself(still eyelining everyday) his soul has vacated, he has much self insecurity and is unhappy with himself as a person and projects that as anger and revenge on everyone who he views is as weak as he feels. Sort of a projected self hatred.

For the speaker mike johnson: he's a gay convert, big proponent of the conversion therapy so lots to unpack there. even lives with a reverend while married to a woman. to simplify it : He's against the 'woke mind' because he has a lot of self hate. He's against himself. Likely why he drinks so much as well and does wreckless shit : https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/speaker-mike-johnson-chief-staff-arrested-dui-charge-trump-speech-rcna194986 - this person is self destructing.

For Hegeseth: he's an untreated alcoholic that self medicates rather than face a true recovery.

JFK Jr: wormbrain. his worm is against anything that would kill parasites. I don't think there's much of a human being in that brain anymore. I think it's all parasite now.

For Leavitt: greedy and sees this as an opportunity(as do most of the party) - and while we can say she's young and easily influenced I'm not prepared to let her off the hook on this. There are too many progressive young minds to prove this was a choice of her's. Not simply ignorance. It's stupidity for sure. but not from not knowing any better.

I don't fucking get the religious right in my country, all I can say is they're so fucking gullible by the corporate mainstream media, facts and hit them in the fucking face and they'll always move the goalposts. They form an opinion and never be swayed by it, despite the strong evidence against it. They picked a guy who cheated on every wife he has, a criminal past, massive security clearance violations, is the most un-christlike in behaviors... And they excuse it all because they don't like being told they can't do things that are harmful to ourselves, or they only like receiving socialism but don't like the responsibility of paying into it. They're selfish as fuck, and I'm sick of it.

Why do you think America was leftist in the 1960s?

Ask yourself what you think your country would look like if the Internet was hyper fixated on every single bad example anyone could find within your borders.

i have no idea because I'm not like 120 years old. i was just old enough to start forming opinions during obama.

you get a filtered version of history i think. there were some incredible idiots in the 60s, things happening that made no sense and americans who were in support of it all.

the tools of manipulation are probably more agile and effective now. i don't know what else is intrinsically different.

For me, it has been a process of accepting that we can't handwave actual opposing worldviews by talking about intelligence.

I know people who aren't "smart" by most definitions, but who still have a lot of empathy and kindness. On the other hand, I have peers who I consider geniuses in their interests and fields, but with whom I struggled to find common ground politically.

It's more useful to look at values. I can agree with most people in my life on the broad strokes. It's when we get bogged down with micropolitics that fights happen.

I still think the public reaction to Luigi Mangione was a prime example of how people actually agree about a lot in this country, but frame it differently.

They were pretty stupid back in the 90s and got worst over time. Obviously this is a generalization as there are some non-stupids too but judging by the election results they seem to be the minority.

“well, Trump said he’d fix the economy and I don’t like woke.”

I mean, I feel like you're being a bit derivative. I would put it more towards desperation than stupidity. Why does someone stay with an abusive partner? Biden was of the stance that "things are getting better" and... they're not.

I always considered trump's victory as sign that the democrats were just... that flaccid and unpalatable. It's like you have a partner who sucks. They pay their share of rent, they expect you to do all the cooking and cleaning, they don't even bother to understand you and get pissy that a random bouquet of whatever flowers on sale doesn't magically fix an argument and make your loins quiver.

You fall instead to this gorgeous individual who knows how to flirt and makes you feel like the world can be easily fixed and now you're locked in their basement about to lose an arm.

It's desperation that makes people take risks, listen to people they shouldn't listen to.