this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2024
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They can sound out words and know what most common words mean in isolation but their ability comprehend the meaning of a text is very basic, if present at all. Reading a short story, being able to summarize it and comment on themes, conflicts, character motivations, metaphors, allegory, how they relate to the story or certain characters are generally beyond them. Reading a political article and reading between the lines to get past the writer's bias is completely beyond them (tbf they would never read an article, they would watch a video or look at memes on facebook). That said, they have little to no ability to think critically so whatever authority figures beat into them when they were young becomes their worldview and everything that contradicts it is seen as an attack on them and society.
This was what I was going to say. The idea of an author of a text having a bias is alien to a lot of Americans. Like if you say that Harry Potter is a liberal fantasy about not changing anything and defending the status quo, there will be someone telling you "uh no, it says in the book that it's about fighting Voldemort". Just a lack of ability to do anything more than a surface level read.
I had someone I know ask me what was wrong with the Korean PM declaring martial law since he was doing it because of a communist invasion. The article just repeated what he claimed he was doing and this guy hadn't thought about whether that was an accurate statement on his part. Just didn't occur to him that an official statement from a politician could be false.
He's not coincidentally a huge Chud with a lot of beliefs about a (((cabal))) running everything he doesn't like.
I legit think the only way to save these people is to very carefully word socialist theory in a way that they can understand through facebook level memes. But then you have to worry about the authority figures that actually can read seeing through it.
I don't know that re-education is actually possible in this case, tbh.
Impossible, leftist memes must have multiple paragraphs of text at minimum
The issue is also that these people actively do not want to learn, because learning actual history means learning that they are the bad guys. I think real re-education can only take place in a Chinese-style re-education camp (depicted wonderfully in one of my favorite movies, The Last Emperor).