On the one hand, this is like those edited videos where you see a guy shoot 20 baskets in a row from clear across the court. One handed! They pick the shots they take here to make their point.
...on the other hand, all these people are eligible to vote.
Let's just hope if they're too lazy to worry about facts, they're too lazy to vote too.
There's a radio host in San Diego named Chip Franklin who used to (and maybe still does) produce a segment he called "Arrested Intelligence". Most of these are obvious edited, but he did some that were explicitly unedited. Those weren't much better than the edited versions; very few people had a reasonable answer for his very simple questions. One of these unedited ones was done like an exit poll, talking to voters just leaving the voting booth. It was enough to make one consider emigration to a third world country.
A real wake up for me, roughly 15 years ago, was getting to know some folks in Estonia (my job involved a lot of travel there). I was quite surprised to discover that in general the Estonians knew far more about American history and American government (even things like Congressional procedures) than the vast majority of Americans. Most of these Estonians were of an age that meant they'd been educated under the Soviet Union – which means that their knowledge of American history and government was, for the most part, acquired after Estonian independence in 1991 (the Soviet Union fed their citizens a steady diet of propaganda and disinformation about the West in general and the United States in particular).
I found that discovery quite disturbing, and still do...
On the one hand, this is like those edited videos where you see a guy shoot 20 baskets in a row from clear across the court. One handed! They pick the shots they take here to make their point.
ReplyDelete...on the other hand, all these people are eligible to vote.
Let's just hope if they're too lazy to worry about facts, they're too lazy to vote too.
There's a radio host in San Diego named Chip Franklin who used to (and maybe still does) produce a segment he called "Arrested Intelligence". Most of these are obvious edited, but he did some that were explicitly unedited. Those weren't much better than the edited versions; very few people had a reasonable answer for his very simple questions. One of these unedited ones was done like an exit poll, talking to voters just leaving the voting booth. It was enough to make one consider emigration to a third world country.
ReplyDeleteA real wake up for me, roughly 15 years ago, was getting to know some folks in Estonia (my job involved a lot of travel there). I was quite surprised to discover that in general the Estonians knew far more about American history and American government (even things like Congressional procedures) than the vast majority of Americans. Most of these Estonians were of an age that meant they'd been educated under the Soviet Union – which means that their knowledge of American history and government was, for the most part, acquired after Estonian independence in 1991 (the Soviet Union fed their citizens a steady diet of propaganda and disinformation about the West in general and the United States in particular).
I found that discovery quite disturbing, and still do...