America dumbs down

[ashling]

http://www.macleans.ca/politics/america-dumbs-down/

The U.S. is being overrun by a wave of anti-science, anti-intellectual thinking. Has the most powerful nation on Earth lost its mind?

If the rise in uninformed opinion was limited to impenetrable subjects that would be one thing, but the scourge seems to be spreading. Everywhere you look these days, America is in a rush to embrace the stupid. Hell-bent on a path that’s not just irrational, but often self-destructive. Common-sense solutions to pressing problems are eschewed in favour of bumper-sticker simplicities and blind faith.

If ignorance is contagious, it’s high time to put the United States in quarantine.

[spanone]

1. they are about to shoot off their naughty parts

idgits

[awoke_in_2003]

5. Well, that would fix one problem

[leftofcool]

27. Stop it! I can't afford a new monitor. Now there is coffee spew all over this one!

[ashling]

33. Trending -

http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Nine-more-to-receive-penis-transplant-university-20150313

[handmade34]

2. ...

“We don’t educate people anymore. We train them to get jobs.”


another good read

http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/intellectual-character-of-conspiracy-theorists/?utm_source=Aeon+newsletter&utm_campaign=4c3325037a-Daily_newsletter_March_13_20153_13_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-4c3325037a-68622033

"...the aims of education should include cultivating intellectual virtues and curtailing intellectual vices..."

What if Oliver is too far gone and can’t change his ways even if he wanted to? Like other bad habits, intellectual bad habits can be too deeply entrenched to change. This means living with their consequences. Trying to reason with people who are obstinately closed-minded, dogmatic or prejudiced is unlikely to be effective. The only remedy in such cases is to try to mitigate the harm their vices do to themselves and to others.

[ffr]

15. That is exactly how people act now. They cannot think...

Explain something to them and if they're able to repeat it, that in and of itself is a miracle. But if what they are exposed to in any way deviates from what they were taught, they're left drooling with mouths wide open.

[hifiguy]

3. Reducing the populace to imbecility by

rolling back everything since the Enlightenment, and possibly even the Renaissance, has been a decades-long goal of the American Right. Read this and shake in your boots. I did.

http://www.salon.com/2015/03/01/its_worse_than_scott_walker_and_ted_cruz_secrets_of_conservatives_decades_long_war_on_truth/

Jebus plus feudalism.

[awoke_in_2003]

6. Good article...

and spot on. I cannot believe what has happened in this country in the 47 years of my life.

[jakeXT]

8. Reminds me of this one

The result has been a major reversal of the capitalist reforms dating back to FDR in the 1930s and to Theodore Roosevelt before him. Instead we have seen restored the disparities of wealth and income that characterized the “gilded age” of the late 19th century. I am not arguing that these unhealthy and dysfunctional disparities were consciously intended. On the contrary I argue elsewhere that it was an overreaction arising from the anxieties of the very wealthy in the 1960s and 1970s, an anxiety urgently shared by elements in the deep state, that control of the country was slipping away from them.43

http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/4206

[hifiguy]

9. Definitely gonna read that one.

Thanks for the link!

ETA - I think I read a book about the RFK assassination by this guy. He's good.

[Enthusiast]

29. They would take us back, way back.

[Initech]

4. Fox News: Proudly telling easily scared white people what to think since 1996!

[kairos12]

7. In today's economy J.O.B. is

Just Over Broke.

[world wide wally]

10. Watch the movie "Idiocracy" if you want one of the accurate peeks into our future.

[spanone]

18. not too many years from now they will think it's a documentary...

[mountain grammy]

20. I believe that's considered a documentary now

in some circles.

[KamaAina]

11. On Michael Moore's old show TV Nation,

he stood at the border with a sign and yelling "Free guns for Canadians!"

There were no takers.

[hifiguy]

12. If the Canadians are smart they will

start building a wall at the border to contain American stupidity right where it is. I am sure most Canuckistanis want no part of it.

[guillaumeb]

26. Stephen Harper is Canada's answer to George W. Bush

Just as divisive, and a born-again oil man as well.
By the way, Alberta is as full of oil and idiots as Texas. That is why Daddy Cruz moved with his idiot son Ted from Alberta to Texas.

[d_legendary1]

13. Mostly cuz education has gone down and religion has gone up

Can't reason with someone who follows through with blind faith.

[jakeXT]

14. The bacon won't cook itself

[AtomicKitten]

16. IASIP: Science is a liar sometimes.

[Dont call me Shirley]

17. We can most certainly add the "Rotten To The Core" rewritin' history to that OP.

http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=&imgrefurl=http://funny-pictures.picphotos.net/beti-bachao-slogans-in-hindi-beti-bachao-quotes-in-hindi/3/&h=700&w=700&tbnid=b5M35B4T9byy2M:&zoom=1&docid=IWMTDaJ88YxgnM&ei=wVoDVfVGhrGiBJ7QgcgG&tbm=isch&client=ms-android-verizon&ved=0CBEQMygJMAk4ZA

[Rex]

19. Some humans are enamored with death. They get a rush from the power of a death machine.

Their death machines become a symbol of their core value - 'I can kill you anytime I want, but I choose not to right now'. Parallels with there other core value - 'fuck you I got mine now eat shit and die'.

I think that is why you find virtually ALL fundamentalist have this kind of mentality. Instead of coping normally with the thought of being powerless and insignificant in the grand scheme of things - they find a false sense of power that radiates from the barrel of a gun.

Are they powerful? Hell ya! They could end your life and that is the ultimate power to them.

[marble falls]

21. That photo is screwed up on a couple of levels. They gotta be fellow Texans.

[metalbot]

24. Romulus, MI

(If you use chrome, there is a tineye extension that will find the source of most images, and in this case the caption from getty).

[marble falls]

25. Jeez. Texas spread to Michigan. You all got this Texan's apology!

[goldent]

30. Yes, also the glove looks like U. of Michigan.

[uhnope]

22. it's good to note the spread but not to slam the whole country over it.

these kinds of articles are just red meat to pessimists and people who don't want to see that, over the course of history, liberalism has triumphed

[mountain grammy]

23. The funny thing is, the dummies don't know their dumb.

The religious fundies just take it all on faith, but the non religious dummies just point at everyone else and say they're dumb. Look at Bobby Jindal or this Tom Cotten. They're college graduates, so they must know something. How do they have such warped thinking?

I don't think I'll ever get over the shock I feel every time I hear an educated person spouting right wing nonsense. When I was younger and naive, I thought racists and right wingers were just ignorant people and nobody I knew. My dad's sister became a Republican, but they weren't crazy. They just voted for Eisenhower and Nixon. When Kennedy was president, they accepted him and supported him during the Cuban missile crisis. How Republicans have changed, or maybe it was there all the time.

[hifiguy]

28. That is one of the great logical paradoxes.

If you're really, truly stupid as a stump, as such a huge percentage of the US populace is, you will never be able to realize it, because it takes a little bit of brains to realize that you just might be stupid, or at least wrong. If you are a stupid fundy, the odds go up by a power of about 10 to the thousandth that there is no way you will ever possess the brains to appreciate your own stupidity.

There is some kind of Unified Field Theory of Stupidity and its Relativity knocking around somewhere in this paradox, I am sure. Maybe I should start working on it.

[Igel]

32. Dunning-Kruger effect.

Google it. Wiki has some nice quotes at the end of their appraisal of the effect.

[goldent]

31. Don't buy it

The science "controversies" are mainly issues that involve science but that have entered the political realm. At that point logic is brushed aside, and silly things are said on all sides.