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Why Americans are dumb

Started by josephpalazzo, June 28, 2013, 09:57:52 AM

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La Dolce Vita

Almost 20% of Norwegians believe that evolution is false? I'm not buying that. You should note the small amount of people asked from each country. The error margins are likely huge.

Plu

I wouldn't be so sure. If they asked a random sampling then it's going to include a bunch of old people who haven't been inside a school since the 60s. Odds are quite good that they simply have no clue what evolution is and were still raised on religion.

If the results were from sampling people in their 30s and younger, I wouldn't buy them. But if you include grandma, it seems plausible enough.
It'll also include your local dumbfuck community which exists in every country and is very minor, but will still make up a decent percentage. And never forget that people are always dumber than you expected them to be.

La Dolce Vita

Also, remember that the people who actually answer surveys are typically people sitting around with little to do. Interestingly I answered my first phone survey ever today. Always just hung up, but then I realized how important such stats can be.

Colanth

Quote from: "Aletheia"
Quote from: "drunkenshoe"Nobody is fucking dumb.
Visit the Bible Belt sometime. There are quite a few people who simply lack the necessary brain power to engage in deep, meaningful conversation - let alone any academic achievements. This has nothing to do with environment - they are genetically predispositioned to be borderline retarded. The jokes regarding inbreeding have their roots in some degree of truth.
The ones who truly amaze me here are the ones who have academic achievements (up to and including doctorates in non-religious subjects) - who are firmly in the YEC camp.  The level of cognitive dissonance is astounding.

Quote from: "drunkenshoe"Do you mean to say these people make so a large proportion of the population of the US that we need to count them in the first place when we need to draw the basic characteristics of a 300 million nation? Are you serious?
They make up almost 100% of the population in the southern states, Shoe.  If you tune the radio dial here, other than country and western music, you hear Christian stations.  Not just on Sunday mornings, like the rest of the country, but 7 days a week, 24 hours a day.  These people take their Christianity more seriously than a drug addict takes his drugs.  They're not addicted to religion, their religion is what they are.

Draw a line starting at the east coast, just south of Washington, DC, and extend it west to Oklahoma and Texas.  The vast majority of the people living south of that line are raving fundamentalist Christians.

Do they influence the country as a whole?  In the 2012 presidential election, 3 of the 17 nominally southern states went for Obama, and the results were pretty close in them.  (And some of them have a decent number of electoral votes, which is apportioned by population.)  So I guess you could say that they do.

Quotepeople are required to be made 'stupid' and also made 'hate' each other domestic and international so they could be herded. This is not some conspiracy. People always act for their benefits as the way they see it
People in the northern states see "their benefit" as that which actually benefits them.  People in the southern states see it as that which they've been told - usually by their religious leaders - is best for them.  Don't vote for the "Christian" candidate?  You'll end up in hell when you die.  You vote for the candidate who will raise your taxes, lower your salary and reduce your benefits - because your pastor tells you to?  It takes a certain amount of lack of intelligence (or one hell of a lot of indoctrination as a young child) to use that as the entire basis for your life.

Yet that's how it works here in the south.  Evolution is crocoducks and never happened, but praise Jesus and you'll have a good life after you die (even if you don't have enough money to eat, and tithe half of that to the church under various scams).  This life doesn't matter, only your "eternal life with Jesus" does.  Yes - they actually believe that.
Afflicting the comfortable for 70 years.
Science builds skyscrapers, faith flies planes into them.

The Skeletal Atheist

Americans don't need to be smart. We just need to be able to hold a gun and run when they tell us to run...we also need to be able to readily produce cannon fodder. Americans being smart and alert would run counter to the program.
Some people need to be beaten with a smart stick.

Kein Mehrheit Fur Die Mitleid!

Kein Mitlied F�r Die Mehrheit!

Hydra009

#35
Quote from: "Colanth"They make up almost 100% of the population in the southern states, Shoe.  If you tune the radio dial here, other than country and western music, you hear Christian stations.  Not just on Sunday mornings, like the rest of the country, but 7 days a week, 24 hours a day.  These people take their Christianity more seriously than a drug addict takes his drugs.  They're not addicted to religion, their religion is what they are.

Draw a line starting at the east coast, just south of Washington, DC, and extend it west to Oklahoma and Texas.  The vast majority of the people living south of that line are raving fundamentalist Christians.
It's not *that* bad.  We have some top 40, pop, and I can attest from first hand experience that there's even the occasional rock station.

And while the fundies are definitely out in force, they're not the majority.  (at least, evangelicals are not the majority in most states in the South)  They're pretty sizable minorities there, though.  ...wow, that really did not help my case very that much.

The bright side is that these fundamentalist beliefs (along with Christianity as a whole) are slowly dying off in the US.  Creationism, too, even though it sure doesn't look that way.

Hydra009

Quote from: "drunkenshoe"Turkiye is not a European, nor a Western country. The list is specificly a western list. Suddenly Turks need to be included? Oooh I see.
Turkey has, in recent years, become something of a breeding grounds for creationism.  (Harun Yahya)  Apparently, the researchers wanted to know how bad the situation there was.

Since then, there have been more polls on the matter.  I'm sure we all remember the recent Muslim poll.  Way down on page 132, there's a poll regarding evolution.  Turkey is NOT the worst one there by a long shot.

Gawdzilla Sama

I don't think anybody can get a good read on what the average American knows because they've been trained to lie about their beliefs.
We 'new atheists' have a reputation for being militant, but make no mistake  we didn't start this war. If you want to place blame put it on the the religious zealots who have been poisoning the minds of the  young for a long long time."
PZ Myers

PopeyesPappy

Quote from: "drunkenshoe"However, I am sick of the country being listed in different regions according to the politics at hand Hydra. Turkiye shouldn't have been in that list in the OP. They can make that research for Turkiye without comparing it with completely different countries if they really wonder.

Actually even United States shouldn't be in that list.

Well Shoe, perhaps Turkey, the US and Japan are on that list not because they are being compared with European countries, but because they are being compared to other countries defined as developed. Now different organizations have differing definitions of what a developed country is so the countries that appear on those list are sometimes different. In order to make any of the lists the country must have a post industrial economy which includes Turkey. Some set a minimum for GDP per capita. Depending on where that limit is set it could exclude Turkey. But the list of countries in the OP closely matches the original list of developed countries as shown in the CIA World Fact Book minus Australia.
Save a life. Adopt a Greyhound.

Rajhoul

Jacque Fresco:
The more justice you seek, the more hurt you become because there's no such thing as justice. There is whatever there is out there. That's it. In other words, if people are conditioned to be racist bigots- if they are brought up in an environment that advocates that why do you blame the person for it? They are a victim of a subculture. Therefore they have to be helped. The point is, we have to redesign the environment that produces aberrant behavior. That's the problem. Not putting a person in jail. That's why judges, lawyers, "freedom of choice" - such concepts are dangerous, because it gives you misinformation. That the person is "bad" or that person is a "serial killer". Serial killers are made just like soldiers become serial killers with a machine gun. They become killing machines, but nobody looks at them as murderers or assassins because that's "natural". So we blame people. We say, "Well, this guy was a Nazi - he tortured Jews". No, he was brought up to torture Jews. "Once you accept the fact that people have individual choices and they are free to make those choices." Free to make choices means without being influenced and I can't understand that at all. All of us are influenced in all of our choices by the culture we live in, by our parents and by the values that dominate. So, we're influenced- so there can't be "free" choices. What's the greatest country in the world?' - the true answer: I haven't been all over the world and I don't know enough about different cultures to answer that question.' I don't know anybody that speaks that way. They say, "It's the good old USA! The greatest country in the world!" There is no survey. 'Have you been to India?' - 'No.' 'Have you been to England?' - 'No.' 'Have you been to France?' - 'No.' 'Then what do you make your assumptions on?' They can't answer, they get mad at you. They say, 'God dammit! Who the hell are you to tell me what to think?!' You know. Don't forget: you're dealing with aberrated people. They are not responsible for their answers; they're victims of culture and that means they have been influenced by their culture.

Colanth

Quote from: "drunkenshoe"The thing is, what gets to me actually that I see in countless things the country being put in different continent, symbolising a different edge of a culture PAP.
To most Westerners, Turkey is located in Asia Minor (or the Middle East), but is culturally European (or, at least, a lot more European than most countries anywhere geographically near it).  Whether it is or not is another matter - I don't know enough Turks to be able to answer that.  But that's Western thought, for the most part.
Afflicting the comfortable for 70 years.
Science builds skyscrapers, faith flies planes into them.

AllPurposeAtheist

We're all dumb for not drawing and quartering referees in football matches the way they do in Brazil. That's the ticket baby! Cut their damned heads off, stick em on a pike and warn referees everywhere, 'DON'T FUCKING STAB OUR SIDE OR ELSE!'

And THAT'S why we're dumb. :)
All hail my new signature!

Admit it. You're secretly green with envy.

Hydra009

Quote from: "AllPurposeAtheist"We're all dumb for not drawing and quartering referees in football matches the way they do in Brazil. That's the ticket baby! Cut their damned heads off, stick em on a pike and warn referees everywhere, 'DON'T FUCKING STAB OUR SIDE OR ELSE!'
//http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misleading_vividness

AllPurposeAtheist

I
Quote from: "Hydra009"
Quote from: "AllPurposeAtheist"We're all dumb for not drawing and quartering referees in football matches the way they do in Brazil. That's the ticket baby! Cut their damned heads off, stick em on a pike and warn referees everywhere, 'DON'T FUCKING STAB OUR SIDE OR ELSE!'
//http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misleading_vividness
Oh now I have to be factual.. Factual schmactual.. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
All hail my new signature!

Admit it. You're secretly green with envy.

GurrenLagann

Guys, if you don't live in the Bible-Belt, it's pretty damn hard to imagine. Yes, there are fuckwits everywhere, probably just as dumb as we've got. But there's a concentrated, yet expansive amount of it here. I mean from the inane rhetoric on Christian radio stations (of which there are just tons), to the absurdity and borderline absolute certainty preached from just about every pulpit I've ever sat in on, to the schools (from which I graduated just 2 years back).

I mean yes, you'll find a number of competent and intelligent folk in these parts (Austin is a rare oasis), but overall in areas relating to or teaching science (especially biology) or promoting social equality, you often find a veritable reservoir of contempt and/or hate. I mean fuck, I sat in at a nearby church service, only to walk out laughing when the preacher referred to 50 Shades of Gray as a "filth and a disgusting work of Satanic anti-Christianism".

I fucking kid you not.  #-o
Which means that to me the offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can\'t give way, is the offer of something not worth having.
[...]
Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty & wisdom, will come to you that way.
-Christopher Hitchens