Where Everybody Knows You're Numb

My Turn wrote:

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Psych Lit wrote:

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idk...but here are some interesting articles from fairly well respected print media..

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/opinion/27aamodt.html?_r=1&em&ex=1214798400&en=55e3196d3a7018e0&ei=5087%0A&oref=slogin

Your Brain Lies to You

FALSE beliefs are everywhere. Eighteen percent of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth, one poll has found....

this one id believe, unless people stopped and thought about it for a moment. its counterintuitive to what we see which i suppose would be the perspective of the article which ill read when i get home.  its sort of like the flat earth thing isnt it? lol

and another from the washington post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/05/AR2008090502666.html

According to an August 2006 Zogby poll, only two in five Americans know that we have three branches of government and can name

this one i have trouble with. american govt is a required course before the dropout level. its also a question on the citizenship test so even our more recent citizens should know that one. im wondering if its more the way the quetion was framed since politics seems to be something that all people across all socio economic levels seem to have an opinion about and a strong interest in.

 them. A 2006 National Geographic poll showed that six in ten young people (aged 18 to 24) could not find Iraq on the map.

and another.....

id wanna see the map and the sample before thinking this is correct. i would agree that most americans are ignorant of most things that happen outside of our borders. most cannot name the presidents of mexico or canada tho most mexicans and canadians can name ours. most of the world can name our president. thats probably because what we do impacts on them while what they do has little impact on us unless we live in border area or have family in another region of the world. id wonder tho how many europeans could identify north dakota on a map or iowa? or identify the african map of nations? how many africans could id european countries? or people in the middle east? there are two things in play here, one how much do we know about the rest of the world, which is certainly not enough but the other is how much does the rest of the world know about the rest of the world? are we saying here that the rest of the world is less ignorant than we are or that we are equally ignorant but should be less so because of the power that the us has to effect policy in other nations?

Was Darwin Wrong?

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0411/feature1/

According to a Gallup poll drawn from more than a thousand telephone interviews conducted in February 2001, no less than 45 percent of responding U.S. adults agreed that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so." Evolution, by their lights, played no role in shaping us.

yeah but 1000 out of 200 plus million is a pretty small sample. id want to know how the sample was selected, random phone calls? who picked the places to call?

Only 37 percent of the polled Americans were satisfied with allowing room for both God and Darwinthat is, divine initiative to get things started, evolution as the creative means. (This view, according to more than one papal pronouncement, is compatible with Roman Catholic dogma.) Still fewer Americans, only 12 percent, believed that humans evolved from other life-forms without any involvement of a god.

now this rings true. i would think the majority of people would fall into the first area and perhaps the 12 percent who buy the strictly scientific idea may be true.  and really, we dont know with certaintly what the causation is. natural selection accounts for a part of whats happened since but the and what happened before that and before that and before that part of it that has us all in a stir. god as an anthropocentric creation is perhaps not the god of origin but as a symbol of what the limitations on our imaginings is. and im not sure that wondering about the "supernatural" aspects of our origins is an anti intellectual exercise. there may someday be a purely scientific explanation for it but for the present at least it exists as something outside of nature as we know it. however, if god is depoliticized the acceptance and wonder of "god" is perhaps something we might agree isindeed  an intellectual exercise and has been since the cave peeble looked to the night sky!


-- Edited by My Turn at 04:17, 2008-11-03

 

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My Turn wrote:

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The Triumph of Ignorance: How Morons Succeed in U.S. Politics
By George Monbiot

its always interesting to see how others in different parts of the world perceive us and its not always flattering is it? and its also based upon a lot of misconceptions. i remember a day in my last career, sitting in an airport in europe trying to calm the fears of a woman going to visit relatives who had settled in florida. miami had made the world headlines after a series of car jackings had left several tourists dead or wounded, shot while leaving miami airport. the common perception among travelers from abroad was that every day on the streets of the US was like a day in falujah at the height of this latest iraq war.
yes, there are shootings but most of us dont see them other than as a story on the 6 oclock news. still, in a city of millions of people moving about freely, its not the millions who go about unmolested that garners the attention, its the 2 or 3 who dont. its the by product of the transparency of the information age.

 

http://www.alternet.org/story/105447/

How was it allowed to happen? How did politics in the United States come to be dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance? Was it charity that has permitted mankind's closest living relative to spend two terms as president?

im more inclined to think it was a fixed election:))

How did Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle and other such gibbering numbskulls get to where they are?

looks, connections and chutzpah?

How could Republican rallies in 2008 be drowned out by screaming ignoramuses insisting that Barack Obama is a Muslim and a terrorist?

i think this is sort of the same phenomenon. not all republicans are morons. some are fiscally conservative and anti big govt. those, imo, are legitimate political ideas and many if not most of these folks arent going to go around yelling this sort of thing but they will not be noticed by the press, it will be the fear ridden individual who passes on the emails to others, or listens to the robo call or shouts out in the crowd that catches the eye of the camera. its joe the plumber,salt of the earth, crowned and symbolic of the salt of the earth "real americans" and "real americans" everywhere fall behind the swagger of his walk reminded, once again, that they are ok. he is media created, his meaning perhaps not so much an anti intellectual one but one created to feign respect for the workers hes come to symbolize.
the real enemy is capitalism with its class quotas and its need to produce a ruling class to watch over and manage the borg like worker bee class, and an underclass to sweep up after the others. but we dont want or need our borg folks or our janitor folks to think too much. if they did, they might question the whys of this system and demand a larger slice of the pie. but capitalism creates homeostatis not rhizomes through its educational systems, race based living arrangements and its other organizations of social order. the hatred that appears is a mirror to the fear of life without those neat divisions. gay marriage? a threat to "real" marriage.. a black middle class? a threat to the "real" middle class. intellectuals? a threat to the "real" america.

every age has its narrative. im wondering if we are entering an age of anti capitalism. im seeing it on the fringes of everywhere. todays talk show discussing capitalism as a bigger scourge on the world than global warming, another on the ride home from the airport tonight discussing the alarming rise in mental health issues tied into capitalism. it appears to be poised for a reworking in the public discourse. tonight in the coffee shop, i run into a friend who says omg i meant to call you today. she has an article she wants me to read and unpack for her so i take it into the bubble bath tonight and sure enough...

Like most people on this side of the Atlantic, I have spent my adult life mystified by American politics. The United States has the world's best universities and attracts the world's finest minds. It dominates discoveries in science and medicine. Its wealth and power depend on the application of knowledge. Yet, uniquely among the developed nations (with the possible
exception of Australia), learning is a grave political disadvantage.

we have no places or positions for a population that is 100 percent literate let alone intellectual. what would we do with them? who would pick up the garbage? who would work at mcdonalds? who would clean the toilets? who would work at the dmv?who would make the whole machine hum? its the workers who make it all happen and so we have capacities for the ruling class.

what isnt stated in the blog tho is that we are a land of immigrants and weve always attracted the poor and uneducated from all over the world who settle and raise families and add to the working class. overtime we see progress towards a better standard of living but that kind of progress is often slow in coming. however, we also attract the best, brightest and most talented from all over the world but we kick them out once their student visas run out while other countries hold the welcome mat out for them.

and still the idea that the us is full of blithering idiots doesnt much describe the world i know. sure we have them and we have many who lack formal education tho id bet far fewer than most nations but there is a general trend to not ask questions, for those in power to wrap concerns in a flag and scream about a lack of patriotism when anyone dares to question them.

On one level, this is easy to answer: Ignorant politicians are elected by ignorant people. U.S. education, like the U.S. health system, is notorious for its failures. In the most powerful nation on Earth, 1 adult in 5 believes the sun revolves around the Earth; only 26 percent accept that evolution takes place by means of natural selection; two-thirds of young adults are unable to
find Iraq on a map; two-thirds of U.S. voters cannot name the three branches of government;

i wonder what the source of this info is? some seem right but right off the bat id question the natural selection and forms of government stats

During the first few decades after the publication of Origin of Species, for example, Americans had good reason to reject the theory of natural selection
and to treat public intellectuals with suspicion. From the beginning, Darwin'stheory was mixed up in the United States with the brutal philosophy -- now known as Social Darwinism

and isnt that really what they are still rejecting?

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But there were other, more powerful reasons for the intellectual isolation of
the fundamentalists. The United States is peculiar in devolving the control of education to local authorities. Teaching in the Southern states was dominated by the views of an ignorant aristocracy of planters, and a great educationalgulf opened up. "In the South," Jacoby writes, "what can only be described as
an intellectual blockade was imposed in order to keep out any ideas that might
threaten the social order."

i think this is true of all public education, not just in the south. its built into the system

This tragedy has been assisted by the American fetishization of
self-education. Though he greatly regretted his lack of formal teaching,
Abraham Lincoln's career is repeatedly cited as evidence that good education,
provided by the state, is unnecessary; all that is required to succeed is determination and rugged individualism. This might have served people well when genuine self-education movements, like the one built around the Little
Blue Books in the first half of the 20th century, were in vogue. In the age of
infotainment, it is a recipe for confusion.

and id bet these are coconstituted. one could not exist without the other

Besides fundamentalist religion, perhaps the most potent reason why intellectuals struggle in elections is that intellectualism has been equated with subversion. The brief flirtation of some thinkers with communism a long
time ago has been used to create an impression in the public mind that all intellectuals are communists. Almost every day, men like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly rage against the "liberal elites" destroying America.

yes and in doing so creating the impression that this is the top of the hierarchy which is a false impression.

im hesitant to throw a lot of weight into the religious aspect of this. these folks seem to be a minority, but a vocal one and a powerful one. the better question is why and how does the fringe get all of the power?

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