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Comment by phantasmish | Hacker News Reader

I know people who didn’t know the government had shut down until more than two weeks into it (and on discovering it were like “oh shit this might affect us!” because their whole lifestyle depends on money from the government).

The same people didn’t know the east wing had been torn down until a couple weeks after it happened.

In both cases they only found out when my wife told them.

They pay attention to lots of “news” but it’s AI videos of mass crimes and viral “look how bad democrats are” garbage.

That people are dense motherfuckers (can we stop sugar coating how stupid these people are if they’re surprised about any of these things? I mean dumb as a bag of hammers kinds of dumb, dimmest bulb in a box of broken bulbs, that level of dumb) doesn’t mean this wasn’t clear.

It is 100% these morons’ own fault they’re surprised.

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The east wing and the shutdown aren't remotely on the same level, though. I barely knew it existed before the whole controversy.

I think you're being too harsh. "Dense motherfuckers"?

My own sense is that these people are willfully ignorant. That is, they seek to find confirmation of what they already believe. Kind of human nature, really. It's sad that there is a complete infrastructure that spouts what these people want to hear, make lots of money doing so.

I’m done with treating willful morons nicely. The last year has turned me from a Vonnegut to a Twain, if you will. A good chunk of My Fellow Americans are just awful, and after 25ish years of serious political awareness & attention and watching what’s happened over that time my benefit-of-the-doubt tanks are dry, having been siphoned at high rates continuously that entire time. Probably I was myself stupid ever to have thought better of these dangerous dipshits. It’s not like I wasn’t pretty familiar with history, but somehow, it took watching people be extremely dumb and never learn over a long period to break through what I suppose was some kind of savior-complex ego thing that made me want to be the kind of person who believed people were mostly pretty good. How embarrassing.

They’re dense motherfuckers, and that’s the generous take. They’re a black hole of stupid. That’s the level of density we’re dealing with. And that’s just the America I’ll be living with until I die. One that’s been trashed so thoroughly by the idiot brigade that hope for actual improvement is gone for, best case, several more decades, which will amount to the rest of my life.

They’ve wrecked shit out beyond the horizon of my plausible lifespan, in all likelihood. They’ve been continuously working toward doing this my whole life. No, I’m absolutely not being too harsh.

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