“What happened to society? I go into business, I don’t make it, I go bankrupt. I’ve been on food stamps and welfare, did anybody help me out? No. No.”
–Craig T. Nelson
Really? Mr. Nelson got no help at all from anyone? Then what the hell does he call food stamps and welfare? Personally, I call that getting help from a whole lot of someones … like every tax payer in the USA.
And since I am posting that idiotic statement, let me post this one too:
“Hispanic polls, Hispanic surveys, indicate that Hispanics think just like everyone else. We’re not like African-Americans. We think just like everybody else.”
–Manny Miranda
Who is everybody else? White people? What does that make African-Americans? Aliens from Planet X? What a freaking moronic and racist ass, and the sad fact is he probably doesn’t even realize how offensive and obnoxious that statement is to anyone with a brain cell or two.
My gods, the stupid … it hurts my head!
Speaking of stupidity and idiots, I have found a book a simply must read: Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (Hardcover).
Question: Is there a specific turning point where, as a country, we moved away from prizing experience to trusting the gut over intellect?
Charles P. Pierce: I don’t know if there’s one point that you can point to and say, “This is when it happened.” The conflict between intellectual expertise and reflexive emotion—often characterized as “good old common sense,” when it is neither common nor sense—has been endemic to American culture and politics since the beginning. I do think that my profession, journalism, went off the tracks when it accepted as axiomatic the notion that “Perception is reality.” No. Perception is perception and reality is reality, and if the former doesn’t conform to the latter, then it’s the journalist’s job to hammer and hammer the reality until the perception conforms to it. That’s how “intelligent design” gets treated as “science” simply because a lot of people believe in it.
Yes, I need to scrape together some spare cash to get this book ASAP, if only to validate the feeling I have had since the mid-80′s that Americans have been getting more and more stupid with every passing year. It’s always nice when I don’t feel like I am alone in realizing this sad fact.