The dumbing down of America

:)

Thomas, that you've just posted is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever read. At no point in your rambling, incoherent post were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this forum is now dumber for having read it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

If you can convince people that drinking their own piss is a good idea, you can convince them of anything.

I shit you not- people actually do this.

In comment 12289741 pjcas18 said:

Quote:

Thomas, that you've just posted is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever read. At no point in your rambling, incoherent post were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this forum is now dumber for having read it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

pjcas, your reply is dumb, and it shows how incapable we Americans are of rational disagreement. In rational disagreement, the disagreement itself is a source of illumination, making definite the contours of contentious issues, ideas, and the dialectical resources available to the major positions which address them. In the internet age, we just label the opposition evil, enjoy the synaptic thrill of outrage, and continue on the path our cultural conditioning has laid out for us.


In short, you are an immoral asshole.

People getting their news from The Daily Show and/or SNL.

that peanut butter may contain nuts or nut products.

In comment 12289750 Moondawg said:

Quote:

In comment 12289741 pjcas18 said: Quote: Thomas, that you've just posted is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever read. At no point in your rambling, incoherent post were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this forum is now dumber for having read it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul. pjcas, your reply is dumb, and it shows how incapable we Americans are of rational disagreement. In rational disagreement, the disagreement itself is a source of illumination, making definite the contours of contentious issues, ideas, and the dialectical resources available to the major positions which address them. In the internet age, we just label the opposition evil, enjoy the synaptic thrill of outrage, and continue on the path our cultural conditioning has laid out for us. In short, you are an immoral asshole.

lighten up francis, I was adding some levity to a deeper question that a Giants football message board should have to deal with; that is a quote from the movie Billy Madison.

or don't lighten up, I don't care.

I l think the process of saying it contains peanuts is dumb but in a circular way. It's a response to legal risks - it's required to avoid possible lawsuits. But when it is easy and risk free (other than slightly less sales to peanut allergic people) to disclose then every product might as well include it. Which makes the information useless.

In comment 12289757 pjcas18 said:

Quote:

In comment 12289750 Moondawg said: Quote: In comment 12289741 pjcas18 said: Quote: Thomas, that you've just posted is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever read. At no point in your rambling, incoherent post were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this forum is now dumber for having read it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul. pjcas, your reply is dumb, and it shows how incapable we Americans are of rational disagreement. In rational disagreement, the disagreement itself is a source of illumination, making definite the contours of contentious issues, ideas, and the dialectical resources available to the major positions which address them. In the internet age, we just label the opposition evil, enjoy the synaptic thrill of outrage, and continue on the path our cultural conditioning has laid out for us. In short, you are an immoral asshole. lighten up francis, I was adding some levity to a deeper question that a Giants football message board should have to deal with; that is a quote from the movie Billy Madison. or don't lighten up, I don't care.

I was joking too; tried to flag it by doing the very thing I bemoaned at the end of the post.

.

In comment 12289756 CT Charlie said:

Quote:

that peanut butter may contain nuts or nut products.

this made me laugh.

I knew you were joking. I like the attempt!

In comment 12289778 FatMan in Charlotte said:

Quote:

I knew you were joking. I like the attempt!

Thanks FMiC!

In comment 12289747 BUgiantfan said:

Quote:

If you can convince people that drinking their own piss is a good idea, you can convince them of anything. I shit you not- people actually do this.

I don't remember whether it was Gandhi, Nehru, or some other prominent Indian leader who drank his own urine daily. Perhaps someone with a better memory than I can enlighten us.

In comment 12289750 Moondawg said:

Quote:

In comment 12289741 pjcas18 said: Quote: Thomas, that you've just posted is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever read. At no point in your rambling, incoherent post were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this forum is now dumber for having read it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul. pjcas, your reply is dumb, and it shows how incapable we Americans are of rational disagreement. In rational disagreement, the disagreement itself is a source of illumination, making definite the contours of contentious issues, ideas, and the dialectical resources available to the major positions which address them. In the internet age, we just label the opposition evil, enjoy the synaptic thrill of outrage, and continue on the path our cultural conditioning has laid out for us. In short, you are an immoral asshole.

LOL. Right over your head!

Right back over mine according to you follow up post. Whoops!

The insane worship of celebrities, including athletes, but particularly people with no discernible talents.

The decrease in US born kids majoring in technical, engineering, science majors in college.

The acceptance of bad grammar and language.

grammar.

In comment 12289792 bradshaw44 said:

Quote:

Right back over mine according to you follow up post. Whoops!

LOL, at least I wasn't alone in dumbing down this thread.

In comment 12289756 CT Charlie said:

Quote:

that peanut butter may contain nuts or nut products.

Leave those signs up...I've overheard people asking if "there is any dairy in the cream of mushroom soup?"

Main stream news. People who believe politicians.

In comment 12289778 FatMan in Charlotte said:

Quote:

I knew you were joking. I like the attempt!

Yeah Moon... it's pretty obvious you were joking too.

pj's a dweeb.

when practically everyone has access to all the information accumulated by mankind to date in the palm of their hands on their phone?

In comment 12289750 Moondawg said:

Quote:

In comment 12289741 pjcas18 said: Quote: Thomas, that you've just posted is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever read. At no point in your rambling, incoherent post were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this forum is now dumber for having read it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul. pjcas, your reply is dumb, and it shows how incapable we Americans are of rational disagreement. In rational disagreement, the disagreement itself is a source of illumination, making definite the contours of contentious issues, ideas, and the dialectical resources available to the major positions which address them. In the internet age, we just label the opposition evil, enjoy the synaptic thrill of outrage, and continue on the path our cultural conditioning has laid out for us. In short, you are an immoral asshole.

You do know that is a movie line from Billy Madison and it was clearly a joke.

Entertainment typically no more than three sentences per topic

You must use intelligence to discern. We are experiencing information overload and are wisdom deprived. All this information fragments people . Seems to create more inner conflict in people . As well , who or what are the sources of the endless information that goes on forever. Is it any wonder people are loaded up with anxiety. Medicated to sleep.

try reading every once in a while.

People don't use, or probably don't even know, the proper way to write anymore. Twitter just seems to exacerbate the problem. I constantly see one sentence paragraphs, the tenses of words used incorrectly, and even the definition of words used improperly. You even see these things here on BBI from certain posters.

Interesting,what does make you smarter?

posting News, Papers and such.

But I think it goes much deeper than that. Look at the overall picture of education in general over the past 80+ years. The purpose of education should be to stimulate and develop individual rational thinking, today this has been replaced with a collectived standard teaching method; where to succeed in school as a student critical thinking is actually discouraged.

This was probably why i became so apathetic with education at a young age and never really applied myself, until later on in life when I went back to college. Then there you realize just how dumb the majority of highschool graduates really are, and even college standards are held very low to satisfy this sad reality. I read an article lately (while I'm alway's skeptical of empirical data and studies) that said the majority of college freshmen today are reading at a 7th Grade level! Which wouldn't surprise me. So, there you have it.

Nothing is ever as good as it was.

Change is a tricky demon. It's much easier to find the bad in it, much harder than the good, and even harder to realize when not much has changed at all.

Yes there was a time when news articles didn't have live twitter content embedded.

There was also a time when news articles had pull quotes slapped directly in the middle of the article because editors knew no one read anything past the front page.

There was a time when journalists developed inverted pyramid writing with all the important stuff up top because no one read more than two paragraphs.

There was also a time the primary reason people bought the paper was a cartoon about a cat who eats a lasagna.

A problem I see with so many news outlets is people can isolate themselves to one way of thinking.

A right wing thinker can listen to talk radio, read certain blogs, and watch fox news, and consume all of one view point. The same can be said for left wingers.

In comment 12289841 Headhunter said:

Quote:

Interesting,what does make you smarter?

I'm not sure how to define "smart", but I would agree with the idea that knowing a lot of stuff but lacking critical thinking skills is less valuable than having critical thinking stills and knowing less "stuff".

from any MSM source and doesn't understand that it is nothing more than propaganda, with an incredibly small margin of validity is just dumb. There are 6 Corporations that control the MSM Oligarchy, please people in the times of there being internet, for all sakes and purposes find alternative sources of information, I promise you they are much more reliable.

far. Our government is pumping billions of dollars into a black hole called education and showing no results. As an example, look at Baltimore. 3rd in nation in funding and horrible results and riots to show. I also think the government wants an obedient uninformed voter. Unless you take yours or family education in your own hands you will tend to resemble the system that created it.

In comment 12289851 beatrixkiddo said:

Quote:

from any MSM source and doesn't understand that it is nothing more than propaganda, with an incredibly small margin of validity is just dumb. There are 6 Corporations that control the MSM Oligarchy, please people in the times of there being internet, for all sakes and purposes find alternative sources of information, I promise you they are much more reliable.

Yes, a tool of that state. What I find funny is this. Was flipping through stations on a long business trip drive, and tuned into that conservative talk guy, Rush. He had this montage of "talking point" propaganda in which each of these MSM entities were literally reading off the same talking point. The question you need to ask, is who gave them that talking point, who framed it that way, and why? Rush to judgement is another problem with some of these riots et al.

you can hardly complete a thought before

are allowed to be owned by a select few, and often the same people in the same markets, you're gonna only get the "news" you want to hear or have been trained to hear. Back in the day, we read 4 newspapers in my house in NYC, and my Dad would ask me read particular items, try to figure out what spin each was trying to sell, and to try to look between the lines and develop an idea of what the truth really was. Now people often don't even read one newspaper, and get their "news" from their favorite TV channel, doing little thinking about what they are hearing other than to reinforce their preconceived notions.

The political parties (and here I'll share my bias) particularly the Republican Party, imo, have also gotten very good at the "big lie" (Obama's a Muslim, he's not an American, etc.) and whole swaths of the public lap that up. So morality has gone out the window in politics, if it ever existed before (and to SOME extent I think it did back in the day).

Further, there's tons of market research done nowadays on how the average person will respond to different items, and that research helps to guide what is put out by the political parties. Even politicians were a bit more uninformed back in the day.

In addition, short attention spans (and not just in youth) have led people to believe sound bites without doing any research of their own on those subjects (and so-called reference materials are made available for the few who would do so...that of course reinforce the sound bite, whether these are honest or merely propaganda).

Just some thoughts on the topic, and I do believe we are a dumbed down nation, and the risks to all of us are great.

is the vaccine debate. So many people take the advice of Jenny McCarthy, who has no medical background whatsoever, over doctors and numerous tests that prove that vaccines are safe and do not cause autism. They also read some stupid article on the internet from another nut job and take it as fact.

in mathematics, geography, history, civics and English grammar among many of those in their teens, 20s and 30s amazes me (my kids are in their 20s and I'd like to think they are, for the most part, atypical relative to their peers).

Among my concerns is how "being ignorant about a subject" (e.g. "I was told there would be no math involved ... ha, ha ...") is somehow considered a badge of honor among many.

The amount of "bandwidth" given to celebrities and celebrity athletes and the "value" given to their opinions really concerns me.

One thing that is interesting about the Internet and e-mail in general and Twitter (which I don't directly participate in, but of course I've seen tweets that have been copied) in particular is being able to see how ignorant many "celebrities" are based on their poor grammar, diction and lack of general knowledge.

I look at the "giants" (no pun intended) in my industry (Aerospace) who are in their late 60s, 70s and some in their 80s (i.e. those involve in putting Americans on the Moon) and are still working and I'm amazed at the depth and breadth of their knowledge versus someone of my generation (in my 50s). So I think the trend started even earlier.

It seems to me that too much time in schools is being dedicated to "soft stuff" and not enough to traditional, basic knowledge and skills.

Will the future doctor who is now in his/her late teens that will be treating me in 10 years be sufficiently skilled and knowledgeable? Those designing the airplane I'll fly in? The drug I'll be prescribed?

Scary times ahead IMHO.

if you don't have critical thinking skills, you are not necessarily smart, but you stores lot of information. I see like a walking, talking version of Jeopardy.

.

Baltimore being a code word for Black people amiright?

In comment 12289891 Headhunter said:

Quote:

Baltimore being a code word for Black people amiright?

Bad-faith mongering isn't critical thinking and doesn't help anything.

But about information, I think that ultimately you need both critical thinking and good information, but imho information without the ability to interpret and apply it doesn't help much. Lies, damn lies, and statistics . . .

In comment 12289773 sb from NYT Forum said:

Quote:

.

Me do.

In comment 12289841 Headhunter said:

Quote:

Interesting,what does make you smarter?

Thinking.

just like the last generation was smarter than the generation before that and on and on. Same bullshit over and over, plenty of kids bust their asses to do well, but the kids are dumb crowd has to feel good about itself I guess

what???

In comment 12289899 Montreal Man said:

Quote:

In comment 12289841 Headhunter said: Quote: Interesting,what does make you smarter? Thinking.

Lemme amend that. Information makes you more educated. Thinking critically about the material makes you smarter.

It goes without say having access to information and not being able to do anything with it does not make you smarter