The claimed figures are arguably too clean. Wouldn't be surprising if it was a bad/fake poll. If 1/5 of young people were really Holocaust deniers, we'd absolutely hear about those types of people all the time.
I was educated in the US public school system in the mid 2010s and I felt like history class was 1/4 American slavery, 1/4 trail of tears, 1/4 revolutionary war, and 1/4 holocaust across middle and high school. Apparently that’s not normal, or the other kids weren’t absorbing anything.
This is the logical outcome of a certain party both pushing an identity of male-dominance based on toxicly masculine characteristics, and who also cozies up to White Supremacist orgs like the Proud Boys.
The GOP is and has always been a fertile recruiting ground for white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups, and the “manosphere” has accelerated the spread of their core rhetoric (which includes Holocaust denialism) geometrically.
The world is not getting more stupid, cross-generational memory has always been flawed. If we want to give new generations the tools to build a better future, we either need to teach them to learn from our collective experience (history) or to think of consequences ahead of time (futurology and ethics). Otherwise they are doomed to repeat the same mistakes.
I’m quite familiar with Betteridge. Strict adherence gets to your question; the larger issue, as with anything, is that so many question heds have been posed where the answer is “no” that it became a “law.”
In journalism, there are problems that showed up far earlier than clickbait question heds, such as garden-path or irrelevant ledes. I’ve written and run question heds that were correct display copy atop stories in which the reporter tried to find an answer but couldn’t given conflicting information from sources. At that point, the correct approach is a question.
Question heds atop stories that definitively disprove the question are lazy at best and disingenuous at worst. But to categorically remove a form of hed writing as valid based on statistics or anecdotal data isn’t an improvement.
Research has found liberals to be more empathetic than conservatives, so in a troubled world one might expect them to be sadder. But a profound shift appears to be under way when it comes to excitement about change. “One of the fundamental traits of the conservative attitude is a fear of change, a timid distrust of the new as such,” wrote Friedrich Hayek in “The Constitution of Liberty” in 1960, “while the liberal position is based on courage and confidence, on a preparedness to let change run its course.”
of course we’re not excited about change… shit’s getting worse
Gee, the wealth gap is even wider now than it was in the days of the robber barons, but I dunno… maybe I’m just making myself sad.
I mean, what does this author want us to do? Reframe every horror as “Well, it ain’t that bad.” until we’re onboard with shrugging off the murder of children school, the murder of trans children, the murder of children in gaza, the homelessness of anyone, etc.
economist.com
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