It is much better to visit than live there, certainly!
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Ehm no. Germany is somewhere between 3-5%. The World Factbook actually states 3.7%.
I know the US media portrays Germany as a post-apocalyptic sharia wasteland with roving ISIS hordes vying for power and blonde german girls. Makes for a fun story to scare people with but is far from reality.
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Nope, but as with most things, grifting usually isn’t as glamorous as Hollywood portrays it.
The grifting business isn’t about super-smooth genius manipulators; it’s about finding victims too stupid to spot the con. So they target the vulnerable; the elderly, the drunk, the intellectually disabled, the desperate and lonely.
It’s like those badly-spelled Nigerian scam emails; the bad spelling is a deliberate ploy to weed out targets that might be smart enough to resist the con.
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Maybe the crazy ones, but that’s not the standard depiction in journalism-based U.S. media.
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Absolutely true, although the number of people who get all of their news from non-journalism-based U.S. media is pretty frightening. My mother currently believes that Germany is being taken over by roving gangs of Muslims, and that the German government refuses to do anything about it because of “political correctness.”
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But not for yourself! Only for the “job creators”…you should be lucky you have a job!!
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Thanks, I’ll definitely be watching that. The article describes everybody over 60 on my mother’s side of the family. Fortunately, my ex-communist dad and everyone on his side are all still progressive as hell.
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While most of the people in my life are right wing – even some friends, believe it or not – the circumstance described in the documentary very much describes my own dad: he used to be much more interested in hearing different viewpoints, and was known to change his mind on occasion if he was properly convinced (and he was open to that possibility, not grudging at all). Now, the critical thinking part of his brain has atrophied.
That’s the real shame: formerly lucid people who have been dumbed-down over time by right wing media, not people who embraced it from the start as being their favored brand of truthiness.
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I’m remembering an ostensible news article that one relative forwarded to another, who forwarded it to me. It was about numerous Muslims praying in the streets of Paris – this part was true. However, this was claimed to be happening “all over Paris every Friday.” As I recall, what actually happened is that a (i.e., one) mosque was violating occupancy levels, and since they couldn’t pray in there, they took it to the streets (i.e., a protest).
The source of the news article? CBN. Pat Robertson’s network. This was just 2 or 3 years ago but his influence (and that of those like him) goes back decades. When I think about it that way, I’m not sure that (for example) the election of Trump reflects any type of new development, rather than it reflects (at least in no small part) an existing segment of the population loudly and visibly trying to throw down an anchor (or, if you like, digging in its claws) to avoid being carried along with whatever else is moving. (What might be new is more cameras and microphones being pointed toward it.) Robertson ran in the 1988 primaries (and won some IIRC) and didn’t get there; what’s new is that eventually someone with the same (or overlapping) support did get there.
(Speaking of emails from relatives…)
I received another email via the same two relatives, this one about Geert Wilders and the claims he was making about Islam and Muslims. The person who sent it to me (at least more skeptical than the first relative) asked, “do you think this is really true!?” And I replied, “yes, it’s absolutely true that Geert Wilders is a Dutch politician and that he does hold these views.” (But that article didn’t originate with CBN.)
The last such email that I recall was about a Muslim woman being sworn in as a judge in New York City and placing her hand on the Koran during the ceremony. My response, “Well, she’s a Muslim, what other book would she use? And I’d think that this would be something to be celebrated, that this Muslim woman is free to serve as a judge in the USA, and in fact she would not be allowed to do so in Saudi Arabia.” Don’t know if I changed any minds though.
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is this actually true? I see more and more specialised degree courses and it feels as if a broad general education is not in focus anymore
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A medical doctor who thinks the earth is a few thousand years old is going to be the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. I think this says a lot.
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Then there’s this
According to data from the National Science Foundation’s just-released 2014 Science and Engineering Indicators study, Americans are moving in Perry’s direction. In particular, the NSF reports that the percentage of Americans who think astrology is “not at all scientific” declined from 62 percent in 2010 to just 55 percent in 2012 (the last year for which data is available). As a result, NSF reports that Americans are apparently less skeptical of astrology than they have been at any time since 1983.
Basically the country is full of very stupid people.
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So do the implied correlations scare you at all? The smarter we get, the more we seem to want an authoritarian government. If we continue to improve literacy and general education levels, do you think that trend will continue? In the not too distant future, we will look back on the Trump Presidency as the good old days?
Specifically, a neurosurgeon, but I suppose that says even more.
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That’s certainly a mess of sloppy correlations between different "we"s and "smart"s.
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I wish that were true.
Trump wouldn’t be where he is without college educated white men.
Trump’s base was predominantly those with the worst education. His base was motivated by fake news stories that anyone with basic critical thinking skills could see through as blatantly, obviously fake. If anything this election made clearer than ever that our education system has failed badly, while media and other failsafes to manage/correct misinformation also failed dismally. Calling these days of “post-truth” mass ignorance and Big Lies an era of increasingly smart people seems counter-intuitive, though “smart” is one of those terms that’s so loose it can be used in a lot of weaselly ways.
It’s a bit more complex than that. College educated people walked away from Trump significantly. He won more by a surge of non-college educated voters in the Rust Belt, than anything else.
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Epistemology is always a problem.
Most people seem to think their sources of information - regardless of whether those sources are Huffington Post, Drudge Report, the local God-botherer, or their own “feels” - are inherently righteous, true, and better than everyone else’s.
It’s always nice to meet someone who can conceive of the possibility of thir own fallibility, because it’s such a rare occurrence.
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