CNN was covering the beginning of a meeting between President Cheeto and some business leaders. Orangeman had an odd phrasing in his greeting. He said he had read about many of them on the covers of business magazines.
Mid-sentence change of phrasing or accidental reveal? 
Could just be a Bushism - meant to say he’d read about them in the magazines, and seen them on the covers, and telescoped the comments. Easy enough to do.
(Trying to be nice, here.)
I disagree with that. For most voters, the desirable outcome of an election is to bring into power the politician or party that’s closest to their personal political beliefs and most likely to implement an agenda in line with these beliefs. That does not depend, at least not primarily, on the level of intelligence or education on the part of the politicians. It does not depend on the level of intelligence or education on the part of the voters either. It is perfectly rational behaviour even for an outstandingly intelligent and well-educated voter to cast a vote for a moronic politician* if they think this moron will pursue policies in line with their preferences.
*): Note: I’m not saying or implying that Trump is a moron; I’m making the point that it is rational for voters to choose the candidate they vote for on the basis of political beliefs rather than personal attributes of the candidates.
You seem to be taking my comment as “a better-educated electorate would have voted for Hillary.” While that’s perhaps true in the immediate case, my point is that an informed, educated electorate will make better choices most of the time - on candidates in both primaries and general elections, on referendums, on measures. Very few races and cases come down to evenly split outcomes; there is nearly always a “better” option that may be hard to see without really understanding everything that’s at stake.
After all, it’s a world where “Citizens for Honest Advertising” can get measures to ban cigarette billboards overlooking schools defeated… with enough tobacco industry money doing the shouting for them. A voter needs only to be intelligent and informed enough to know who “Citizens” actually is and what their agenda might be to discount their arguments about First Amendment Rights and Freedom And So Forth.
A good argument made by a despicable person is still a good argument.
I don’t know the specifics of this situation, as this issue isn’t one I saw on my ballot, but I believe it’s a logical fallacy to judge an argument based off who’s saying it rather than what they’re saying.
I don’t care who they are or who’s funding them–I care if their argument holds water.
The “Swift Boat” thing in '04 wasn’t wrong because they were funded by Republicans, it was wrong because their argument was bull. That’s what matters at the end of the day.
That’s right.
Back to Trump, I’d like you to point out any argument he has that:
[ol]
[li]Represents reality (facts, not claims, that is);[/li][li]Is solvable by realistic executive/legislative action;[/li][li]Will produce a result worth its cost, by any reasonable standard.[/li][/ol]
Since announcing his candidacy, AO has spouted bullshit, unworkable “solutions” to problems that are either imaginary (floods of terrorists into the US), greatly overstated (crime) or not reversible by fiat (loss of jobs - overseas and period).
We had students who were functionally illiterate at my university. They were intelligent, educated, and were identified for institutional assistance because they had trouble with exams. But given that blind and deaf people managed to graduate, I don’t think it’s impossible that someone who is functionally illiterate might manage without institutional help.
My friend working at the tax office did a rotation at the front desk. The reason they had an actual person there, dealing with stuff that was common, ordinary, and well documented, was that guys who couldn’t read the instructions would come in and sign cheques to pay tax of $50K ~ $100K I can only assume that people with bigger tax bills got someone else to sign their cheques.
Also, when I was young, I assumed that “I don’t have my glasses” was an excuse used by people who couldn’t read. As I got older, I appreaciated that needing glasses was a reason some people didn’t learn to read.
My daughter was diagnosed with a learning disability that the psychologists said was “slow processing” (that’s the short version). She could pick up a piece of paper and read it out loud to you, no problem, but have little idea of the content of what she just read. She struggled throughout school, and is now in college. She is bright and does well but it takes her a lot longer to get through reading compared to her classmates. Fortunately she is motivated and not quickly frustrated by this and puts in the time.
This is similar to what I see in Trump. Slow processing combined with impatience and arrogance is a showstopper. When he was growing up, this sort of thing was not nearly as well understood and if this is what he has, it was probably never recognized as a disorder. If this is indeed what he has, then he has simply worked around it with various strategies, which even could have exaggerated some of his personality traits (IANAP). You can be a real estate mogul like that but being president is whole different skill set.
Or if they played sports (which is not Trump’s case).
One of my grad school teammates was what the rest of us would phrase politely as “fucking rich”; he considered he was poor, his family having escaped Iran with barely enough money for him to be living on his own in a 4B and having a cleaning lady and a cook, poor pitiful him. Daddy’s money wasn’t able to get him into medical school but it did help when it came to getting away with only coming to work once a month or so (not that the rest of us missed him… I think you can tell I wasn’t fond of him).
Or maybe, if the level of intelligence and education on the voters’ part rises even more, they know tobacco is harmful no matter what advertising tells them. In which case the the argument about First Amendmend Rights and Freedom And So Forth is perfectly acceptable - they leave the tobacco companies the liberty to put up any ad they want to put up; they’re just not going to smoke anyway.
Personally, I’m extremely wary of arguments that are based on the assertion that “voters are dumb”. First of all, I truly believe that the average voter is not that dumb; they might not have a high level of formal education, but they can still have a just fine ability to notice when a politician is bullshitting them. Second, the argument is always at least borderline condescending - it’s not very far from arguing “I’m smarter than the people who disagree with me, and that is why I am right no matter how many people vote for my opponents”. Third, I’ve noticed a tendency for that argument to come for people who otherwise regard themselves as advocates for the underprivileged, and that’s why I sense a degree of self-contradiction there.
It’s not about “stupidity.” It’s about whether advertising works, and it does. The entire purpose of advertising is to convince you that something is true that you would not otherwise think it’s true.
The issue with tobacco advertising doesn’t reflect at all on this. It’s simply the fact that, once you do use tobacco, your brain becomes compromised and you can’t easily stop. So our normal process of trying something to learn about it fails. Hence we have a need to regulate it.
You don’t need people in general to be stupid or naive. You just need some portion of people to be naive enough to try it–to naturally want to question the information they’ve been told, as any critical thinker would. You don’t have to affect everyone, just the people most vulnerable to being affected.
And, while voters in general may not be stupid, children are generally understood to be less critical and more accepting. They are more likely to want to try new experiences that adults tell them are bad. And they are specifically the people being targeted by those ads. There’s a legitimate social good in trying to prevent these children from being manipulated into trying smoking.
It’s not just a freedom of speech issue. Advertising never is. There’s a reason we have so many laws around advertising that we don’t for other types of speech–trademarks, truth in advertising laws, restrictions on what can be advertised when, etc.
And, since you are German, I thought you’d be even more aware of this, as you have much more advertising restrictions on drugs. As in, they can’t be advertised at all to consumers.
Blind and deaf people can read just fine, all other things being equal.
But here’s the thing. Everyone is sitting here postulating about some theoretical situation, but I linked to a video of the guy ACTUALLY READING. AND HE’S READING JUST FINE. If someone has a counter example, let’s see it.
Now, when Trump is speaking extemporaneously, he rambles and repeats himself and uses odd phrasing and sentence fragments. That’s not a reading problem-- that’s a public speaking problem.
John Mace, functionally illiterate does not mean someone who can’t read.
It can be someone who won’t read because he’d need to wear glasses and he’s too vain to admit that he needs “old person glasses”.
It can be someone who hates reading, just won’t do it.
It can be that person who will read only a very limited selection of material; the stereotype is the guy who will only read the headlines in the sports section, but that’s just an example.
It can be someone who can read something out loud but who, if you ask them what did they read, can’t tell you if it was a recipe for salad or the lyrics for The Merry Widow.
It’s, in fact, someone who can read inasmuch as reading is a mechanical act, but who either chooses not to do it or does not absorb the information conveyed by the text they’ve read.
Nava: I’m just going by the definition in the OP. Maybe those other definitions would be interesting in a different thread, but here the OP is asking us:
Emphasis added.
And again, it is perfectly possible to be able to read fluently out loud without being functionally literate. It is perfectly possible to read fluently out loud without having the foggiest idea what is it you’re saying.
I have, in fact, read a text in Finnish out loud with (according to a Finn who was there) perfect fluency, pronunciation and enunciation, and without understanding a word. I’m reasonably sure the story involved a wolf and a cat, but that’s from the pictures. The only Finnish word I understand is “Suomi”.
It’s certainly possible that when Trump read his acceptance speech, he actually thought he was reading a recipe for Waldorf Salad. If you have some evidence of that, let’s see it. Otherwise, you are engaging in baseless speculation.
OTOH, he makes jokes about the content as he is reading it, so I think it’s plain as day that he knows exactly what he’s reading. But again, if you have some other evidence that proves otherwise, I’m happy to review it. Evidence, though, not speculation.
Out of 19 major party candidates only one had the ability to look at the entire electorate and see a large and vast group of very frustrated and ignored voters who were fed up with politics as usual and the failure of the political elite. Then this one candidate defeated all the others. I am sure many here will call his methods unorthodox and unusual, and perhaps ugly but none the less he succeeded.
I would say there is a level of brilliance there that the entire other 18 candidates, plus the press, plus the political elite did not have and never saw coming.
Funny thing to me is last spring and summer it was all right there on TV for everyone to see. Fox and MSNBC were carrying his speeches from start to finish. No one could see that he was carrying the crowds and hitting a nerve with a large portion of the voters ? I would say the fools are the ones who did not.
No.
John Mace’s link is better but here’s a BBC report from June last year:
This is wishful thinking by people who should know better.
Re: Reading text out loud vs. understanding such text.
Many of us can read a foreign language text out loud but have little idea what it says. I took a smattering of Russian in university. At that time I could read out Russian texts. But my comprehension level was very low unless it was designed for beginners. A few years latter I’d still be able to read it out loud and understand even less.
Being able to read a speech off a teleprompter means zip in terms of literacy, language comprehension, etc.
You know who else tapped into fear and anger in the populace via lies, scapegoating of minorities and a promise to restore the country to a mythical level of greatness, and rode that into power?
Several people throughout history, actually. And it rarely turned out well for the country in the end.
But to repeat my view above: Trump can clearly read. He just appears to prefer not to. Which is still a concern, particularly when it involves being briefed on information he needs to do his job.