The Atlantic - Latest Comments in Birth Of A Stupid Nation

Re: Birth Of A Stupid Nation

Anuncie — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 00:47:13 -0000

Very good this article, i liked to read this, thanks.
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Re: Birth Of A Stupid Nation

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Re: Birth Of A Stupid Nation

qell — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:46:25 -0000

correctamundo Sorn.

This has been going on since Pythagoras and Kylon of Croton.

You might remember Kylon as the pissed-off plutocrat that raised a mob of local farmers to protest his failed attempt to get into Pythagoras' school for rulers by chopping up the teachers with scythes and burning down the school.

it is the old democracy vs. meritocracy conflict.

and it won't ever stop.

its hard-wired.

the more populous populists, the 'slines and Noble Yeoman Farmers, feel like they should be able to selfgovern on the base of their vastly greater numbers and salt-o-teh-earth-commonsense.

Alas, they are constitutionally unable to govern either wisely or well (cough..cough...GW).

So in America we have a democratic meritocracy.

Anyone can be president, but luckily for us, not everyone will.

Re: Birth Of A Stupid Nation

oranckay — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 16:45:28 -0000

The Birthers are making me question my belief in intelligent design.

Re: Birth Of A Stupid Nation

frankie d — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 14:46:19 -0000

@ albatross,

your point is well-taken, and i actually respect the fact that you've given quite a bit of thought to the issue.

everyone is welcome to their opinion and view.

my point of contention was with jon who stated that the conspiracies noted in your post had no "unanswered questions".

that is a ludicrous statement as even the officials in charge of the official investigation acknowledge that there are plenty of unanswered questions that they do not deal with and that no one has dealt with as of this juncture.

one can believe whatever conclusion one wishes to believe, but to simply state that there are no more questions about what happened that day, well that is a fantastically wrong and demonstrably false statement.

i find it interesting that you note the example of cigarette smoking and the government's anti-smoking campaign because it has been well-documented that tobacco companies conspired for decades to suppress the dangers of their product.

that allegation was essentially the basis for the federal government's successful suit against those companies.

talk about an expansive conspiracy.

a conspiracy that covered not years, but decades.

a conspiracy that involved not only a couple of individuals in one small department in one small company, but god knows how many people in several multinational corporations that employ god knows how many thousands of people.

the history of tobacco companies, and that facts revealed in that lawsuit put the lie to the idea that it is impossible to maintain a certain level of secrecy about any subject.

anytime any entity or person who is in control of certain information refuses to provide that information for review, while telling one that one should simply believe them, i would hope that any thinking individual would automatically become suspicious of that person. and whatever it is that is being peddled.

Re: Birth Of A Stupid Nation

albatross — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 13:57:20 -0000

But that has an effect when you're trying to get people to join you.

Every party and every movement has their crazies, and holding the movement together often requires throwing the odd bone to the crazies. But you will have a hard time getting votes, if it looks like the crazies own your movement/party. And this is hard, because the crazies often make *great* volunteers, ground troops, whatever, and they're often the key to getting power within your party, or winning a nomination, or whatever.

Re: Birth Of A Stupid Nation

albatross — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 13:48:52 -0000

There's an interesting meta-question in here somewhere, about how you evaluate evidence for theories. I agree that taking exactly the "party line" of the government or media or society as truth is a bad way of finding out the truth. Indeed, there are all sorts of places where the party line is pretty obvious nonsense. On the other hand, most conspiracy theories seem to be pretty obviously false, or require amazing leaps of faith to buy into.

Conspiracy theories get a big boost from one thing: Respectable sources of information are very willing to lie and mislead and spread propoganda in many areas. As a kid, the same sort of public service announcements and health class warnings told me correctly that cigarrette smoking is addictive as hell and seriously bad for you, and incorrectly that pot smoking was also addictive and would lead you to a life of drug abuse. The white house and most of Congress and most of the big media told us all, repeatedly, that Saddam Hussein posed a serious threat to the safety of the US a few years back. Etc.

In that context, conspiracy theories become more plausible, because you already know of many times (I think I could fill a page with examples, and so could everyone else here) when the respectable sources of information lied or misled everyone or spread propoganda about whose truth they neither knew nor cared.

This continues because it has no cost, because most people seem to have little memory for it, and because media (themselves big offenders in the realm of not bothering to get the facts straight or cherry-picking facts to report the party line) don't remind anyone of previous lies. It continues partly because a lot of people evaluate a source based on whether it's saying what they want to hear, rather than whether it's got a history of care in getting and reporting the truth.

That said, I think my examples are all conspiracy theories that are false.

Re: Birth Of A Stupid Nation

qell — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 10:16:55 -0000

no..it is the lower half of the bellcurve of IQ. those people deserve representation, but sadly their representation has historically just scammed them for votes. Racebaiting, IQbaiting, elitebaiting, the southern strategy, culture war gypsy hooks like abortion and homophobia.

as the GOP shrinks it moves farther right, and the extreme right fringe becomes the center of what is left.

moderates are running from the distilled hard right like scalded cats, making the crazee/non-crazee ratio go up, so the party collectively loses mean IQ points.

teh birfers are essentially holding the GOP congress people hostage and forcing them to declare solidarity with insane conspiracy theories.

Re: Birth Of A Stupid Nation

BreakerBaker — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 08:12:30 -0000

I didn't mean to say that these people aren't stupid. All I meant was that if only they were JUST stupid, this stuff would be easier to be rid of. But they're far more than merely stupid. They're stupid, angry, and willfully delusional.

They believe, as many have asserted, whatever they choose to believe, but they don't choose to believe it consciously, and it's very difficult for them to consciously override their subconscious. It's not their stupidity that's keeping them from accepting the clear truth. Though, without a doubt, many (most?) of them are stupid.

Re: Birth Of A Stupid Nation

LarryGeater — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 07:55:21 -0000

Those times of small economic inequality are something that even I am nostalgic for. To bad it is a fringe idea that we should have political policies that encourage a flatter income distribution curve.

Re: Birth Of A Stupid Nation

Lemmy Caution — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 23:59:29 -0000

Larry, one thing about the fifties is that it was also a time of the lowest income disparity this country has ever known. It was a time when people could have stable careers without a college degree, when work was plentiful. Economically, this is even true in the context of segregation. It was JFK who introduced policies that began a widening gulf between rich and poor, and the gulf is now an order of magnitude greater than it used to be.

Re: Birth Of A Stupid Nation

frankie d — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 22:25:20 -0000

i don't know if you are being intentionally dishonest or are simply ignorant, but the fact that you imagine that thousands - including ground-level eyewitnesses - would have to be in on some kind of 9/11 conspiracy for it to have merit is not supported by facts. and the fact that you cite that as an example of how hopeless certain "conspiracy theories" are, also shows that you don't really know many of the important issues that have never actually been addressed or answered.

i know that facts are stubborn little things, but i would hope that citizens would pay attention to real facts and simply not accept what governments feed them.

in fact, your statements reveal what i've found to be most often the case: that people who denigrate serious questions about certain events are most times woefully ignorant about those events and instead rely on what someone told them or what they heard on tv or read in a newspaper article. but those folks eschew the hard work of actually digging and researching to discover truths and facts that might shake their nice safe little construct.

no unanswered questions about 9/11?

the fact that anyone would say that is laughable. in fact, even the people, the officials who wrote the official 9/11 report ackowledge that there are plenty of unanswered questions, but most times those officials claim that those questions can never be answered.

but no one ever says that all the questions have been answered.

they haven't.

well riddle me this, if you have all the answers.

why did building 7 collapse some 6 or 7 hours after the WTC towers?

why did the owner of that building state, on a recording that is readily available, that he made a decision to "pull" the building?

why was the steel from the WT towers removed from the scene and disposed of, even though the material was part of one of the biggest crime scenes in the country's history.

(in most criminal investigations, all of the material is preserved in order to determine what had occurred.)

despite the fact that the planes that hit the WTC made obvious and noted changes in their flight paths in order to target NYC, why were no military planes scrambled that morning to intercept those commercial flights?

the fact that we know so little about what happened that day is pretty much par for the course for this country.

people forget that the government, with a little help from its media friends, hid the zapruder film for almost 10 years. but when people saw that film, the warren commission was finished.

from that point on, trying to get people to believe the warren commission was similar to what folks try to do with the footage of the towers' collapse: who are you going to believe, us, or your lying eyes?

sure, the buildings look like they are being demolished.

sure, no similar building in the history of the world has ever catastrophically failed in that fashion.

but, we have our story, and we're stickin to it - the fires did it - and if you don't accept it, we'll get nasty people to call you a conspiracy theorist.

the truth usually comes out, but in a trickle most times, not a flood.

it takes courage, not simple-minded acquiescence, to question authority.

the last straw for me was the story of the tuskegee syphilis experiments. the government had one story. unfortunately, it didn't have anything to do with the truth. if this government would do that to a community, this government is capable of anything.

i don't know what happened on 9/11. but i do know that the evidence right in front of everyone's eyes does not support the official story that is being spoon-fed the american people. and, instead of stupidly accepting what someone has told me, i come to my conclusions after much reading and research and hard work.

Re: Birth Of A Stupid Nation

Jon — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 20:19:01 -0000

Re: it's a huge mistake to lump all "conspiracy theories" in the same boat.

many of these "conspiracy theories" are grounded in legitimate questions that, for whatever reason, authorities refuse to, or are incapable of providing answers to.

Sorry, but of the recent "conspiracies" the original poster listed, I cannot think of a single significant question that has not been answered. Too often conspiracy theorists get by with the claim of "unaswered questions" or "mysterious coincidences" when in fact there are none.

Re: the refusal to entertain the possibility that conspiracies exist on a large scale is simple laziness.

Actually I see it the other way around: conpsiracy theorists are the lazy ones trying to explain everything by means of some "evil power" manipulating us all instead of dealing with reality in all its numbing complexity and occasional lurid senselesness. Moreover there's an old syaing that applies here: Two can keep a secret if one of them is a dead men. The larger the conspiracy the more impossible it becomes simply because it involves too many people to ensure secrecy. The 9-11 theories for example require the cooperation of many thousands to hold up (that includes all the witnesses on the ground, and even the victims of the planes who used cell phones to report what was happening to them)

Re: Birth Of A Stupid Nation

qell — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 20:13:39 -0000

Nah...they are dumb.

It is the same "low information" base that the GOP has been scamming into voting for tax cuts for wealthy republican wide boiz forevah. Now, sadly, the low information base doesn't have enough IQ points to see how birfermadness is bad for the GOP, or enough IQ points to understand the concept of paperless archives.

Bad for the GOP, but deliciously hilarious for the rest of us.

nucking futz

schiavo'd, defn. v

to schiavo a congressperson….to publically force said congressperson to endorse insane conspiracy theories embraced by their low information base. As in, insane constituents forcing congresspersons to vote in a role call vote for Terri’s Law [or face impeachment or lynching], even though the congresspersons knew the lady-was-a-carrot.

use: Republicans were schiavo'd by the birfers.

See also, bork'd, screwed, and BOHICA.

original usage attributed to Ta-nehisi Coates.

Re: Birth Of A Stupid Nation

eric k — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 19:35:56 -0000

Courtesy of a commenter on Balloon Juice, nice little trap for the Reps being laid by a Congressman from Hawaii, he is introducing a bill commemorating the 50th anniversary of Hawaii statehood, your typical symbolic bill that everyone has to vote for, a natural part of a bill like that is listing some notable things about Hawaii, such as you know being the birth place of the 44th president:-)

Now every Rep will have to go on record.

http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/president-obama/house-dem-putting-gopers-on-the-spot-by-introducing-measure-describing-hawaii-as-obamas-birthplace/

Re: Birth Of A Stupid Nation

Jennifer D. — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 18:57:25 -0000

Here's a "birther" related beauty - I know people well who, during the election, said that Hawaii wasn't really America. So, it doesn't really matter what you say to these people, it will not end.

Re: Birth Of A Stupid Nation

LarryGeater — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 17:40:39 -0000

dmf

The political areana, including legal action, is certainly the way to correct legal injustices. I do not dispute that for a minuet. I was merely saying that often when you argue the audience you are adressing is not the person you are arguing with. Rembering this has helped me to keep my cool and suffer fools on ocasion.

One of the ggod things about this board is that trolls get shut down fast and there is little need to suffer fools. Even when I disagree with people here I do not think they are disengenuous.

Re: Birth Of A Stupid Nation

Bill — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 16:53:15 -0000

I do not believe that this hurts the Republicans any more than it hurt them to scream about Whitewater during the Clinton years. It keeps their base seething and gives the right-wing press along with much of the Village.

Re: Birth Of A Stupid Nation

Ta-Nehisi Coates — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 16:50:52 -0000

It's why we love him. Often disagree with him. But he's honest.

Re: Birth Of A Stupid Nation

Polywogy — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 16:38:17 -0000

Actually, I have to disagree. The weirdness of the citizenship laws actually meant that McCain was not a citizen when he was born. At the time, the law said that any child of an American parent "out of the limits and jurisdiction of the United States" was a citizen. But the Canal Zone was under the jurisdiction of the US, but not within it's territory, making a very strange loophole.

When Congress realized this, they passed a law to correct it, but this was after he was born. From snopes.com: "The law conferred citizenship on children of American parents born in the Canal Zone after 1904, and it made John McCain a citizen just before his first birthday."

On the other hand, only one constitutional scholar stated that he thought this might be an issue, and Congress passed a non-binding resolution saying he was qualified.

Not saying he didn't qualify, just that there's a pretty good argument that he wasn't a citizen when he was born.

Re: Birth Of A Stupid Nation

eric k — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 16:21:45 -0000

Coulter loves these guys, they let her pretend to be the reasonable center:-)

Re: Birth Of A Stupid Nation

Polywogy — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 16:20:17 -0000

@FOARP - Since I was actually born out of the country (but to two US citizen parents, so I was born a citizen), I actually have followed this issue. Forgive me for this long response. ;)

1. People have talked about such an ammendment, including during the last election. This is because of McCain, because:

2. The constitution states the President must be a "natural born citizen" (or in the US when the constitution went into effect) but doesn't define what that is. Other legislation written a few years later indicates that they may have meant anyone born a citizen, whether in the US or abroad (i.e. two citizen parents, etc.).

But the thing with McCain isn't just that he was born in Panama, it's that due to weird immigration/citizen laws relating to being born in the Canal Zone specifically, he actually was not a citizen when he was born. (Really. Strange but true.) A few years later, Congress realized this and made a law saying that people born there (including McCain) were citizens, but the law doesn't state that it is retroactive. That means that legally, McCain could be considered "naturalized" by the law, not a natural born citizen.

It would take a Supreme Court decision to actually establish whether he qualified or not, but you can't get the Supremes involved unless the person is actually elected... so the question remains.

FYI, most constitutional scholars thought it wouldn't be a problem, and of course many people in Congress said that if it came to that they'd amend the constitution because it was ridiculous for the child of two citizens, serving the military, to be disqualified. But it is actually the closest we've ever come to electing someone who might not qualify.

Re: Birth Of A Stupid Nation

dmf — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 16:05:14 -0000

LG, what I was trying to get across was two things, one that some things won't be changed by conversation (contrary to most liberal education and Obama's election rhetoric), and two that the way to make real advances on the big political/social issues is to win in the political realm. Almost every advance in social justice issues came first in the political realm and then in the majority/public opinion. Save the people at risk first and then if you have time worry about converting the contrarians. There is only so much time in the day so maximize your effectiveness. Make sense?

Re: Birth Of A Stupid Nation

LarryGeater — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 16:04:54 -0000

Doh. I should have known someone with the info would contact him with the proof and he would post it. Andrew is consistent in admiting error when he sees it.

Re: Birth Of A Stupid Nation

Polywogy — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 16:01:35 -0000

Is it possible that in some really close district it might make enough people "refuse to vote" that the Democrat wins instead? Probably not likely, but really that's the alternative, isn't it?