You say in another comment that this is indicative of a failed American education experiment, and that there's a generation of illiteracy. I'm not saying that's wrong, but it's a much bigger generalization than "Kansas English undergrads" (which is such a specific category, why should I care about data that relates specifically to Kansas English undergrads?).
But my main gripe is the use of just one text. "People cannot understand this one book (therefore literacy is deficient)" is a much less convincing argument than "people cannot understand these 6 popular books from this time period" or "these 30 randomly selected fiction works" etc.
Is it well-established that Bleak House is representative of all the works we think about when we consider "literacy" and "illiteracy" as people's ability to understand texts?
It's tough having a high IQ. Most people don't understand the world and the flaws of humans, at least at the level I do. As such, I find it hard to connect to other people. Most people are morons. I feel deep sorrow in knowing the direction the world is going and that the inhabitants of the world are mostly idiots.
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Why do so many people (in this thread) unironically feel this way? "Intelligence" is a socially constructed and often useless idea that includes and excludes many things seemingly at random. For example, chess is often thought of as something that's very intelligent, but skill at chess is (just like nearly anything else) based on practice & experience. Just because you're good at chess and did well in school doesn't mean that you alone can understand the problems in the world at a deeper level than an average Jo.
I'll paste the part I think is most important, but the whole thing is worth reading:
Well, then, suppose my auto-repair man devised questions for an intelligence test. Or suppose a carpenter did, or a farmer, or, indeed, almost anyone but an academician. By every one of those tests, I'd prove myself a moron, and I'd be a moron, too. In a world where I could not use my academic training and my verbal talents but had to do something intricate or hard, working with my hands, I would do poorly. My intelligence, then, is not absolute but is a function of the society I live in and of the fact that a small subsection of that society has managed to foist itself on the rest as an arbiter of such matters.
This also reminds me of something I realized recently: 24 hours is NOT the amount of time it takes for the Earth to rotate 360°. Because the Earth (assuming North is "up") rotates counterclockwise and orbits counterclockwise, each day is slightly more than 360°, probably close to 361°.
So if we assume a year is about 365.25 days, Earth actually spins 366.25 times. One rotation is just kinda "eaten" by orbiting counterclockwise.
Actually 🤓 if we use the sun as our reference, they could not be light years away and would in fact be relatively close to the Earth, the distance being at most the diameter of Earth's orbit, which even at most is less than 20 light minutes.
Yes but if I remember correctly, each of those Norse gods are correlated with the Roman gods who share names with planets, which is how you can draw a connection between the planets and weekdays for English. The same connection exists in many languages across the world including Spanish, French, Hindi, Japanese.
The "sexual violence" tab on this page from worldpopulationreview.com makes it seem like India is very average.
However for sexual assault in general, it is so underreported in every country that I think it would be hard to tell if such data were more influenced by actual prevalence or just how often it is reported.
The gods that the weekdays are named after also have associated planets, so really every day is named after a celestial body already.
Ex: Saturday is obviously Saturn Day, Thursday is Thor's Day, with Thor being the equivalent of the Roman Jupiter, so Thursday is indirectly Jupiter Day, etc.
The days of the week come from the Sun (Sunday), Moon (Monday), and classic 5 planets (Tuesday = Mars, Wednesday = Mercury, Thursday = Jupiter, Friday = Venus, Saturday = Saturn). This makes more sense in some other languages, for example Spanish: marte / martes, mercurio / miercoles. Saturn = Saturday though is almost obvious.
So if there were another day in the week, I have no choice but to either:
name it Earthday
name it after Uranus, the next discovered planet
This gives us precedent to create up to 10 days per week by including all 8 planets plus sun & moon.
Yeah it's definitely more reasonable than maybe it seems.
As kids we had pretty similarly sized feet. And I don't think I noticed if the socks I was wearing were too big or too small anyway, even now I have some socks that are bigger or smaller than others.
And my parents had their own socks, so the sock basket was just for me and the sibs.
Sharing socks. My family used to have a sock basket next to our shoes. You didn't own your own socks, you just grab a pair when you need them.
I mentioned "the sock basket" offhand to a friend in elementary school and she thought it was crazy. That's when I learned that not every family has a community sock basket. Looking it up though, I find a couple reddit threads from people with the same experience (and people replying that it's weird) 🤷♀️
God Loves Uganda - about the impact of American Christian missionaries from megachurches on the people and politics of Uganda. It's from 2013 and is in desperate need of an update, but it's still very good.
The Punk Singer - documentary about the life and music of Kathleen Hanna, pioneer of "riot grrrl" punk feminism. I love the music and vibes, and Kathleen Hanna is also just a really interesting [real-life] character.
The improvised Country Roads scene may be my favorite moment in any Ghibli movie