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Discussion » Questions » Politics » Just How Stupid Can America Be?

Just How Stupid Can America Be?

There’s every reason to worry that millions of people take sheer nonsense seriously.    http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/just-how-stupid-can-america-be-facing-truth-about-donald-trumps-big-voting-bloc

Posted - July 19, 2016

Responses


  • Woah! Woah! Woah! Not ALL of America is stupid. Just the United States.

      July 19, 2016 2:59 PM MDT
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  • 3934

    Why should they be anything else when there is no disincentive for being stupid?

    I think Charles P. Pierce summed it up beautifully in his book Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free.

    "The rise of Idiot America, though, is essentially a war on expertise. It's not so much antimodernism or the distrust of the intellectual elites that Richard Hofstadter teased out of the national DNA, although both of those things are part of it. The rise of Idiot America today reflects—for profit, mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power—the breakdown of the consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people we should trust the least are the people who know best what they're talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a scientist, or a preacher, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert."

      July 19, 2016 3:03 PM MDT
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  • 46117

    But after what we’ve seen in this campaign cycle who can now rest easy?  There’s every reason to worry that millions of people take sheer nonsense seriously.  Their ignorance is making them sitting ducks for politicians like Donald "I love the poorly educated" Trump.  Election 2016 is turning into a civics teacher's case study from hell. 

    I took this from your site.    I think this says it all.

      July 19, 2016 3:15 PM MDT
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  • 457

    we kan b prety dum

      July 19, 2016 3:43 PM MDT
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  • 221

    lol xD i laffed

      July 19, 2016 4:43 PM MDT
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  • 1264

    What do you expect from voters who waste their stupid time on sites like this.

      July 19, 2016 7:01 PM MDT
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