WTH, Americans think that 30% of the country lives in NYC?
They think 21% are transgender too… A lot of propaganda has gone through these people.
“Transvestigation” is fucking insane and there are a lot of people who are convinced that many celebrities are secretly trans.
I think it mostly started with disgusting conspiracies about Michelle Obama (they literally believe that Sasha and Malia were kidnapped, even have specific missing children they think they are). Alex Jones and his ilk think Michelle was born Michael.
This was a thing that developed I think late in his presidency, then it expanded to several other figures. My favorite is Donald Glover as a trans man - I’ll gladly welcome Childish Gambino into my community.
It’s a serious “Q anon” type mentally ill worldview.
Donald Glover as a trans man? I’m currious what makes them think that? Either way, dudes a fucking legend and is welcome in any community I’m in.
The comments are also… very interesting. Apparently Tyler Perry, Will Smith, Journey’s Steve Perry and fucking Messi are trans men.
We are legion!
Messi
But I thought only trans women were “cheating” at sports.
trans men are cheating because they still consider them women, and women aren’t allowed to be good at sports.
it somehow always manages to boil down to misogyny with these people
I think you’re missing my joke about Messi. He’s one of the best players in soccer/football, and the MAGATs think he’s a trans man? Which would mean he was a woman who is now dominating men’s sport.
That’s because he’s incredibly awesome and poignant in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYOjWnS4cMY
We can’t have people respecting a black man who shows the reality of the situation, can we?
By the looks of it, it’s 30% to NYC, 30% to Texas, and 30% to California. So 10% for literally everywhere else in the US. That’s gotta be close, right?
I’d totally get that for polling people outside of North America. It’s just shocking to see it from people who have probably been to NYC or at least another major metro area – which would instantly falsify a 30% number for NYC.
Why assume most Americans have seen NYC or other major cities though? Most of us don’t ever make enough money to travel this country’s hard-to-imagine-how-big-it-actually-is vastness, or even enough to leave our hometowns for longer than a couple days before financial woes start nipping at the mind, if not worse.
This is not to say I think it’s a reasonable conclusion to think 30% of our population is in any of these three areas of course. That is silly and requires a very skewed view of things (which, lucky us, is easily provided by any number of increasingly ‘official’ seeming news sources that really just deal in intentional fear mongering and reductionism). Most people tend to believe whatever is put before them, and we have a system that has been explicitly set up to present false images of reality to US citizens. Propaganda to keep the propaganda machine running, right? As unreasonable as it is, it also makes sense that people could be duped into believing it because this system so many of us are stick within is hellbent on ensuring that we are intentionally conditioned out of the ability to know better by adulthood. It doesn’t work on everyone, but it works well enough that’s it’s perpetuation is currently one of the highest yielding economies this foolish country has to offer.
The line of thought that seems obvious and reasonable to you and me has been intentionally beaten out of countless people here before they even had a chance to understand how to think rationally. I don’t know how to fix these things. It is just so obvious to me from this inside vantage that the stupidity of our country is one that has been intentionally manufactured and amplified at the expense of us, the actual people the same system depends on and revolves around keeping ignorant.
Sorry for the rant. Many Americans are dumb. Most of the ones that are never had a real option to be anything else because of how fucked things are here. That’s not intended as an excuse, but as an attempt at an explanation tbc
Most of us don’t ever make enough money to travel this country’s hard-to-imagine-how-big-it-actually-is vastness, or even enough to leave our hometowns for longer than a couple days before financial woes start nipping at the mind, if not worse.
This is completely contradicted by the data:
“The average American has visited 16 states besides the one where they currently live, a new YouGov survey finds. Older Americans are likelier to have visited more states than younger Americans. 32% of Americans 65 or older say they’ve visited at least 30 states [. . .]” link
The working poor don’t participate in yougov that much.
Many rural areas in the US still don’t even have internet access except for the wealthiest homes/neighborhoods among them. And, as we share this exchange, many more are actively ontheir way to losing access to the same, simply because, regardless of the cost on us, our government has decided to put that money into the pockets of people that do not need it. I grew up in an area where the internet was assumed to be only for the wealthy because things were just that stuck in time due to the blatant misallocation of government funding and the greedy fucks that ensured things would be this way. That’s the same government that ran this poll, right? So if we both know, for different reasons and in different ways, that this government can not be trusted, why trust them to give you accurate data on this topic?
The issue with data points like this is that they imply an assumption of completion that simply can not actually exist because of how incredibly large our population is. There is no way to wrangle all of these cats into taking the same singular poll in order to get truly accurate numbers, so accepting these numbers without any skepticism is, at best, an assumption based on a lack of information, much like how some people can believe that a disproportionate amount of people live in unreasonably small areas. Think about the people in those underpriveleged rural areas I mentioned up top. How many of them do you believe were asked or invited to take this poll? How many of them never had a chance to due to lack of access? How many do you think chose not to participate because of their frustration with how things are and the people that made it this way? How many do you think refused because they just couldnt care less?Why assume that these factors should not be considered when trying to get a clear and true understanding of how things are here for the common people?
Sitcoms fucked us up
I’m guessing these same people do know roughly the total population of the US. And are bad at math in general. That would mean 100 million people live in NYC.
It’s shocking how bad normal people are with basic math
They also believe they are a majority of the world population, which is incredibly obvious if you spend any time online (that theu believe that, not that they are that). Several times when I’ve said that the US population is 3% of the world population I’ve gotten replies saying that can’t be true or that I and dumb for believing obviously false facts or obvious anti-American propaganda… Absolutely pathetic.
The way I read this graph is that the upper portion are people they want to oppress and the lower portion are people that they preserve is oppressing them.
The other ~60% live in California and Texas respectively 😆
Well, that is pretty much how television seems to think things are…
I always thought it was weird how in so many shows that are targeted to a nationwide audience how often they seem to just assume some specific subway thing in NYC is something that their audience will instantly get and relate to.
5% of Americans own a car but not a drivers licence.
So looking at that chart the average person thinks that (roughly), one in four people are native American, one in four people are Asian, two in five people are black as well as two in five people being Hispanic. Or to use the given percentages the average American thinks that 136% of Americans are non-white. I suppose that explains a lot of the “white genocide” hysteria.
Yeah, obviously if only -36% of people are white we have already been genocided.
The actual problem is that if you show this data to the respondents, they wouldn’t change their answers.
33% have a college degree yet only 3% are atheist. That’s batshit crazy. I can’t imagine having the critical thinking skills needed for a degree and not using those skills to figure out that god is a fairy tale.
Yes I know lots of educated people are religious - I had several christian professors when I was studying mathematics / computer science. That doesn’t make it any less crazy to me.
What’s not represented in the graph… I think you’ll find a large portion of agnostics and “cultural Christians”. I.e. people who go to church because they’re raised that way in their community expects it.
Even if you don’t go to church if you were raised going to church and then stopped, you still might call yourself a [cultural] Christian.
Also being atheist has a bad reputation attached to it for some people, so someone who meets the definition might not self identify as one.
Similarly I expect that’s also why there are a fewer percentage of Democrats than there are Republicans. I may have voted down ballot for only Democrats, but am I a DNC supporting Democrat? Not really.
Nominally “Christian” because they like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.
Mt wife consider herself catholic but never goes to the church and live her life exactly like mine as an Atheist (doing drugs on techno parties). For the majority of people is just something they don’t really think about and just consider themselves wharever religion just because they grow up in it.
I think you are overestimating the intelligence required to get a degree in this country, also lots of intelligent people have religious beliefs of some level.
And most people who don’t necessarily believe in god or practice any religion still respond to such questions with whatever religion they were born into because it’s not important enough to them to take a hard stance like calling themselves atheist, or maybe they choose to be agnostic so they might not pick the atheist option.
My point is lots of factors go into surveys like these, they don’t necessarily paint a super accurate picture, since any type of survey will have some external and internal biases and sampling issues baked into them
Being part of a Religion has social benefits, so don’t be surprised if a lot of those non-Atheists don’t trully believe it but participate in it because it’s good for them or because of social pressure.
Certainly, and speaking in terms of Christians which is the ones I’m more familiar with, considering the number of people who actual strictly even just try to follow ALL the teachings of Jesus or even all of the 10 commandments, almost all “Religious” people pick and chose which parts they believe and which they don’t.
(In modern society Greed and Envy by themselves are probably regularly broken by 99% of Christians).
I get this one. Many years ago a former wife tried to convert me. I started going to chruch, bible studies etc. and after a while I realised that none of the people I was with actually believed anything - they were just going through the motions doing the stuff you need to do to stay in the club.
You shouldn’t use “god” as a proper noun. No one being owns the concept of being a god. You’re just legitimising Abrahamism, you’re not helping the atheist cause. Helping Abrahamists erase polytheism doesn’t lead to more atheism, it leads to more Abrahamists.
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make. I have god, not God. I know because I was typing on my phone and it autocorrected to God three times and I had to go back and fix it.
It should say “gods are a fairy tale”. “god is a fairy tale” is misleading grammar if you don’t mean there’s one. You wouldn’t say “gremlin is a fairy tale”, you’d say “gremlins are a fairy tale”.
I’m extremely skeptical of any organized religion, where divine authority is asserted for the words said/written by some dudes, but I’m not going to close the door on something beyond what we can know.
But no one’s guess carries any more weight than another, no person should be assumed to have an inherently more valid relationship with divinity than another.
So I have a bit of a vague faith, but not in any concrete concepts put forth by religion, since I have no reason to think their guess would be any better than a guess I could make on my own, and someone’s ability to think otherwise seems a very dangerous reality.
It’s not anything actionable, just more a hope that there’s more to things than we see.
Wait until you develop a chronic health issue and you discover how many so-called physicians jabber about god. It’s fucking grim out there.
Others are bringing up good points, but one of the biggest reasons is many people are idiot savants. Smart in one or two areas and complete fucking morons in everything else.
I dunno if I’d use that term, but I can say that in my STEM field, the education was SO silo’d, that so many (otherwise very intelligent) people I’ve worked with in my field have been complete fucking morons about anything outside their area of expertise.
I fucked around a bit in college, and didn’t declare a major for a while at first, so I ended up with a much more well-rounded education than most of my colleagues, and it really shows. Some of the most valuable courses I took were ones that I never would have had the chance to take had I declared my STEM major immediately.
They should honestly add an entire semester (at least) of non-major, liberal arts courses for STEM majors. It won’t happen, obviously, but it really should be a thing.
Because you don’t need critical thinking skills for a degree.
This is the correct answer…tons of degrees are worth less than the paper they’re printed on. College has become a grown up playground for many people. Probably 50% of the people who go, probably shouldn’t and should have went to trade schools to learn something that’s useful vs getting a degree in management.
Einstein believed in god.
More of a pantheistEdit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein#Religious_and_philosophical_views
In a letter he wrote:
The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. … For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. … I cannot see anything ‘chosen’ about them.
That depends on your definition of the word “god”. Einstein certainly wasn’t an Abrahamist, he was a pantheist. He believed the entire universe was comprised by a divine whole.
- 64% white
- 39% hispanic
- 41% black
- 29% asian
- 30% jewish
- 27% native americans
All the 230% of US population.
“Mixed people exist racist!!!” - twitter
plus jewish isnt a race really. I mean it can be but you totally see most jewish people identify as jewish and white or jewish and arab.
Same as hispanic. It’s not really a “race”. So you have hispanic people who often identify as both hispanic and white, or hispanic and black, or hispanic and native american.
If I’m not wrong, these categories are exclusive in the US census.
Which is really weird and is more just a tell on how the US elite racialises different groups than anything.
They should have provided a crash course in percentages before letting people do the questionable maybe.
… Honestly, this isn’t too surprising with how saturated the media is with minority groups. Almost every show I see on various streaming products ends up having heavy LGBTQ+ plots rammed in, trans characters showin up, always a multicultural combo of characters and fewer and fewer generic CIS white people. When the media is constantly blasting you with minorities and minority issues, in a highly biased way, it’s totally not surprising at all that people would start thinking they’re a way bigger slice of the population.
Like someone once pointed out that there were more airplane pilots in North America than trans people. So imagine if every TV show you watched, suddenly had an airplane pilot show up and talk about airplanes a bunch, had whole episodes dedicated to his occupational trauma, regardless of what the main plot of the show may be. That would be more representative of the general public, than having trans people in every fucking show going on about trans trauma.
I agree. Undoubtedly someone is going to get very mad with your opinion and intentionally miss the point. Representation is fine. Shoehorning a specific minority into every plot line then beating the viewer over the head with the most juvenile and hamfisted messaging imaginable isn’t helping anyone. It just makes for bad content. We have many examples of women and minorities in movies and shows written well for decades. It’s only quite recently that writers appear to value representation and ideological messaging over the story, and I think for that they deserve criticism.
its called corporate virtue signalling, or rainbow capitalism, alot of people complained how it ruins shows, and i do agree, its a distraction from poor writing and plots.
It’s also used as a deflection of criticism. “Oh you don’t like my show? Racist! Homophobe! Transphobe!” These accusations used to work quite effectively but they were so overused that people have kind of become numb to them now.
Yeah – agreed. I tried watching “The Magicians” because it was highly recommended. No CIS white male characters in the show really. They had a white bisexual guy who spent a lot of time sleeping with gay dudes. Wasn’t much of an issue / commented on for the first few seasons, and it was ‘ok’ viewing, if sorta stupid. But then in season 3 and 4 they were super heavy handed in breaking the fourth wall and saying cis white guys who identified with just that one bisexual white guy character were being racist/sexist for not looking at other characters, in part because that character gets killed off in season 4.
Why they thought that their cis white guy audience was going to identify with a bi-sexual neuro-divergent sort, one who’d spent like an entire (time loopy) life time with his gay lover, I’m not sure. But the heavy handed 4th wall breaking to talk-down to that audience demographic did end up making me not bother with seasons 5.
It seems you weren’t the only one who didn’t like that. The show was cancelled after season 5. We see this again and again. The Rings of Power. Sex Education. She-Hulk. Willow. Velma. Doctor Who. Ms. Marvel. Batwoman. The Wheel of Time. Writers who don’t respect the source material, or think movies and shows are a soapbox instead of a medium for entertainment and creativity.
ISAIP basically became a virtue signalling show in the recent seasons, it was so cringe, let alone the actors are all wierd now too rob and kaitlyn.
seems like a terrible shows, if it only revolves around bisexual/ straight porn fetish tropes, and now about “magicians”. Old trek knew how to make it subtle and not ruin the plot(though they were well aware of overly sensitive audience in the 90s,) they did in a way it dint affect the plot, arcs. nutrek is all that, kurtzman ruined it.
You’re right! They should bring back Wings!
Every show and movie has become a preachy soapbox. It’s fucking tiring and you just want to turn it off because you suddenly get slapped in the face with irrelevant “causes” instead of just zoning out and being entertained. The suspension of disbelief gets exhausted at yet another 110lb hottie thrashing a 6’-4 steroid monster that could backhand her across the room in real life.
People just have no idea what numbers mean. And, look at how education works here, who could blame them?
Reminder that a McDonald’s new burger campaign failed because people thought a ⅓ lb burger was smaller than a ¼ lb burger.
They really should have started selling ⅕ lb burgers to make up for their losses
Astronomers have been telling us for a long time that humans can’t fathom the scale of the universe.
But somehow we can fathom numbers of the same orders of magnitude when we talk about earthly affairs.
If people can’t understand how far away Mars is, how can they understand human population numbers?
People think 30% of the U.S population lives in New York?
Sometimes you see data and just know that the methodology had to have been shit.
The average response thought 30% of the US was in NY?! No fucking chance.
Maybe the average person is stupid
You can drop the “maybe.”
That’s what actually brought me to the comments. The fuck? OK, so now NYC pop is about 10mil, non-NYC NY is about 10 mil, and non-NYC NYC metro is about 10 mil. How do you get even 30 mil to represent 30% of 350mil? Confuse it with the Iranian population of 92mil? And 30% is the average of the responses!
Here’s the methodology according to the YouGov website:
Methodology: This article includes findings from two U.S. News surveys conducted by YouGov on two nationally representative samples of 1,000 U.S. adult citizens interviewed online from January 14-20, 2022. The first survey included questions on groups involving race, education, income, family, gender, and sexuality, while the second survey included questions on religion, politics, and other miscellaneous groups. The samples were weighted according to gender, age, race, and education based on the 2018 American Community Survey, conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, as well as 2016 and 2020 Presidential votes (or non-votes). Respondents were selected from YouGov’s opt-in panel to be representative of all U.S. citizens. Real proportions were taken from a variety of sources, including the U.S. Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, YouGov’s internal poll results, and the results of other well-established polling firms. Most estimates were collected within the past three years; the oldest is from 2009. Because the real estimates presented cover a range of time periods, they may differ from actual population sizes at the time our survey was conducted.
Sample size of 1000 is absolutely nothing for so many detailed/granular questions. Let alone then weighing the few sub-groups etc.
Hold up.
83% have a driver’s license but 88% have a car?
So 5% of Americans either have a car for the hell of it, or they drive without a license?
And there’s only 3% that are atheists? More people drive without a license than are atheists?
Excuse me?
If these numbers are correct, the US is more fucked than I thought.
My grandma has a car but she doesn’t drive anymore. Now, if she needs a ride somewhere, I can take her in her own car, since mine is far too low to the ground for her.
Its possible they have lost their licence and still own a car, or the car is just in their name.
I hear you, but 5% seems high for that.
Americans believe a single city (New York) represents 30% of the American population?
Forget that. They think one out of their first 3 friends they have is gay. Assuming they’re straight that means 50% of their friends are gay. Fuck that means they think 25% of their first 4 friends are trans.
Math is not their strong point apparently
TBF if you join random chat groups to meet people you might find abkut that proportion, but not roaming the parks and streets, no.
Another third lives in all of Texas?
I was kind of curious if this was close to true in any countries with higher urban population densities and the first one I checked was Japan since it has a rural depopulation issue and Tokyo is a pretty populous city and… it was right on the money. Japan’s pop is ~124 million and Tokyo’s is ~ 37 million. So roughly 30% of Japan’s population lives in one city/metro area. Not that this means anything for US population distribution, but I suppose it’s not THAT crazy to think the numbers could be in that ballpark if you weren’t really thinking about it too hard.
64% of icelanders live in the capital region, which is like two thirds of the US living in maine
I did a quick check on one of the facts, the christian one, this says 70% in 2022 but i see 62% for 2022, which is a lot closer to the 58% estimate. Makes me feel a bit sketched out about possible cherry picking, but cool notion still.
The 42% are democrats and 47% are republicans is the true surprise. That is a huge difference even though it might not seem like it.
Well, I have been a registered Republican as long as I have been voting.
And have been voting straight Democrat for over a decade now.
I wonder if there are more like me?
Curious, why do you remain registered as a Republican?
My state has open primaries and I vote in the Republican primary to fuck their shit up.
If your state has open primaries, you don’t need to register Republican to vote in their primary though?
No. That’s the point of an open primary. You can vote in either party’s primarily.
I’m in a pretty red district. My primary vote is more powerful when voting Republican.
Why register Republican if you don’t need to register for a party to vote in a primary? Open primary means you don’t need to be registered with the party to vote in their primary. So why register Republican?
Edit: Oh ok, I see that was someone else who made the initial comment. I never check usernames…
Not OP, but probably to sabotage the competition rather than force each party to run a competitive candidate.
At this point I don’t know.
Initially I thought I could “undermine” from within. I’m a 50 year old, white, vet, so I tick a lot of conservative boxes, and I imagined I could plant seeds of doubt with people that might assume to include me in certain groups.
But that never really happened, and both parties can hang for all I care. (At least 90% of the ones over 65.)
So now I just vote straight Dem for harm reduction and tell young folks they need to be active, vote, and take the roles away from us older folks cuz we can’t be trusted to do what is obviously and objectively the right thing to do.
What is funny is I have been reading and listening to a lot of early US history and this has literally been the same story over and over again.
Is there a political system that works?
We haven’t tried this one yet. I’m willing to give it a go!
So many Nazis.
Ah yes, the people I don’t like are Nazis. Good job.
Nazis are people I don’t like. The political ideology is the reason I dislike them, not the other way ‘round.
Also interesting, the estimated percentage of Democrats is bigger than the estimated percentage of Republicans while the true percentage is the other way around.
Except it’s wrong. 40% are independents so a 50/50 split cannot happen.
I wonder how much that has to do with state rules on voting in primaries. Like, when I lived in MA I was registered independent because that would let me vote in any primary (but only one). My current state, I have to be affiliated with a specific party to vote.
This is a shitty poll as it splits everyone 50/50 and neither party has the plurality of voters.
Holy, holy, holy…they actually thought 21% of people are transgender? 1 in 5?? The only thing this proves is the polled Americans are stupid AF. 🙄🙄🙄
seems like they polled mostly boomers or conservatives.
