The American public

Americans

Q. Name a country that starts with a U...

How DARE you insult the greatest nation there ever was?

Is Ur anus a nation ?

Not so much the nation as the leader...but I'm glad someone's acknowledging our status.

edit: and that's in response to CR!, not the other...

Ah yes. The good old "If you ask enough people random questions then eventually you will get the answers you are looking for" trick. It's been done in a lot of countries. The Germans like doing that to the Austrians and Stephan Raab made a career out of doing it

You can go to any country on this planet and take random people off the street and ask them the same questions and you'll get the same answers. 90% of the people you would pick out on the street are people who have not even completed high school, so how would they know where South Korea is?
"Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions." Einstein

Um... It is a little bit scary in places. Especially the guy who is asked to list The Axis of Evil states; "California, New York... Oh! And Mississippi!"

Weird commenting on this though, because most Americanoids who have travelled generally know their international arse from their intercontinental elbow... and you are the ones probably reading this.

Oh yippee. Yet another Americans are stoopid thread.

Really, really sorry Jenny L. But, it IS International Bash America Day.

for the next 364 days.

America is the same as the rest of the world, which is becoming more and more polarised. There is no well educated middle ground anymore, people are either very well educated, informed and aware or they are badly educated, not well informed and generally not even aware of their lack of education.

Oh ffs. If I didn't a killer hangover, I'd come up with something clever to say.

Has a well-educated "middle ground" ever existed?

Good point, J. The middle class Americans I know tend to be as thick as pig shit.

Laughing before I even eat my cornflakes.

My favourite answer is "I'd say ten"

Well perhaps well-educated is the wrong term, I think that for some reason a huge block of people have absolutely no interest in anything outside the basic survival needs and this grouping is growing. This is occuring at a time when the majority of people have more access to information than before and at a time when theoritically we should have even more time for thinking and learning. Natural curiosity as to why the world is the way it is and how things work seems to be smothered in so many people.

Which is about a fantastic endorsement of a social/economic model as I can think of:

"Hey stupid - even you can be a success story here"

If Americans were a little lot thinner , I'd ship out there myself. I include my Yank family in the chubbiness bucket.

This is a thread about Americans (for a change) and therefore the response presumably refers to Jenny L's experience with Americans. The same can be said about middle-class Europeans who, if anything, are much more negative and cynical than the average American, but certainly no smarter nor more worldly.

Proof.

Like hell we are, the world is screwed anyway because you guys are going to piss off some nation that has just developed the first goat dung atomic weapon. So why should we be happy ? I'm going to sip on my cafe au lait until meltdown and muse on why the Europe is so much better than the America.

Wasn't Michaelangelo great all the same ?

Edit: Jenny, Captain Pedanto's able sidekick, Pedantoboy (god these tights itch) just wanted to whisper in your shell-like that it's a Ralph McTell ballad, not Roger Whittaker's.

@ JW
Smarter ? Probably not.
More wordly - you're kidding right ? Compare the number of imported TV shows to both continents from the other continent. Geography , languages , hell even export based economies.

[img]http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/youtube.png[/img]

Was? Do you mean it's not there any more? Damn, there goes my holiday plans!

This has nothing to do with anything, but I just want to say that I think Michael Moore is a cunt. That's right. I said cunt.

ditto.

Youve been in the Europe too long UpQ, if you are using the unt word.

This is a family oriented forum, please refrain from such language. In future please refer to the cunt as "beef curtains" or "slippery coin slot", we wish not to tarnish the minds of our younger readers

There is some truth about how badly my fellow Americans are educated (not) about the world outside of the U.S.

I went to military-controlled schools (dad was in the Army), and the only country we learned much about outside of the U.S. was the Soviet Union, and even at 8 and 9 years old, I could see most of it was anti-communist propaganda. I took it on myself to educate myself about the world outside on the U.S. I always found the American-centric view very arrogant. We spent more time in school doing drills for the so-called impending nuclear attacks than on geography or world history.

And I got in trouble too many times to count for calling bullshit on teachers who were woefully undereducated about the world around us.

There are very rare occasions when nothing else is appropriate.

Wow, you guys were lucky then. We only got to do fire drills or tornado drills.

@UpQ, correct, sometimes only one word can encompass your opinion and that word must be used.

I'll add to that.
Two of my Yank cousins have Harvard masters degrees in law , so you'd think they'd know a thing or two , right ? Wrong. Had lunch with them back in '99 in Boston and they were yakkin' on about Iranian Arab fundamentalism , was fucking embarassin' , had no idea Iranians aren't even Arabs. Took the in-law Mexican to point out that maybe the stoopid Mick cousin might have a clue and maybe Madeleine Albright wasn't exactly someone you'd want your kids to grow up to be.

But the point stands - you can be uneducated in America and acheive great wealth without depending too heavily on luck. I don't think that's true to anything like the same extent in Europe.

Its ironic that the first clip in this thread seemed to be created by Australians. Ironic because I can tell you that if you did the same test on the streets of Australia they would score just as badly.. I know people in Australia who couldn't locate Europe or America on a map..

@parnell
Someone of your educational level shouldn't have to rely on anecdotes to try to make a valid point...

Your previous comment about TV shows that, if anything, Europeans watch the same shit that Americans do, except they're a couple of seasons behind!

@ JW
Thanks for de compliment but I disagree with you - I consider the body of knowledge that I DON'T possess to be far greater than the body of knowledge that I DO. Hence I don't consider myself to be particularly educated. However the knowledge of my lack of education makes me slightly more educated than otherwise.

What my anecdote attempted to show (in backing up leeza) was that a lot of Americans (especially those who have access to very heavily hyped education) seem to not be that educated on world affairs. I wonder how much of that is deliberate.

EDIT:
The TV thing doesnt follow - consider the movie "Amelie" - it was a huge hit in Europe , how did it do Stateside ? Numerous examples of the same I'm sure.

Yeah, we had weekly 'duck and cover' drills, where the barricades would come down over the windows and we would have to sit under our desks for 20 minutes. Then we had once a month drills to go to the bomb shelter under the school. We had monthly fire drills, and in Texas and Kansas, monthly tornado drills. The military does love its drills!

The duck and cover ones were boring, since we weren't allowed to talk and it sucked sitting on the cold f**king floor. The mad dash to the bomb shelters were fun, everyone had a chance to be 'team leader' and got to bark out orders and yell at our classmates in typical drill instructor fashion. We did full drills to the bomb shelter, when meant that we all had to go there, take roll to make sure all was accounted for, close the doors, which were airlocked, identify our kits, consisting of gas masks, iodine tablets, MREs and some other stuff. We practiced putting on the masks, which made us all sound like Darth Vader. Coolest of all, we got to eat the MREs for lunch. The whole thing usually took about 2 hours, and after everyone was accounted for and in their position, we got to chat and eat the MREs (which tasted awful, but had a cool factor nonetheless.)

I will give the military props for keeping us on our toes. Dunno if any of it would have made a bit of difference, but it did give us a feeling of safety and being in control during the height of the Cold War. As military kids, we were heavily schooled about the Red Threat, and since we often lived in high-risk strike zones (and knew it) it was a pretty scary time.

We had skip-a-thons at my school. Skipping for as long as you can is nearly as much fun as pretending to be under attack from bombs/nukes/tornados/killer bees etc

I don't have numbers, but I recall that it did fairly well. Not blockbuster numbers, but at least as well as any typical independent American film. British films and the occasional Crocodile Dundee or Whale Rider aside, foreign films tend not to do very well outside of arthouse theatres in the States. But what was your point?

The answer was in your question.

It does not take a lot of intelligence to become a lawyer. If you were saying let's say some physicist or mathematician you know has these really off the board ideas, then I would take notice. Plus, a lot of wealthy families buy the education that is offered by the Ivy League colleges. The majority of the general population in any country has average and lower IQ. On top of that this general population is brainwashed by the media so it's no wonder that they such stupid things as they do in those interviews.

Descriptive Classifications of Intelligence Quotients
IQ Description % of Population
130+ Very superior 2.2%
120-129 Superior 6.7%
110-119 High average 16.1%
90-109 Average 50%
80-89 Low average 16.1%
70-79 Borderline 6.7%
Below 70 Extremely low 2.2%

This is an argument that could last for days. I'd say the percentage of Americans that enjoy "good" films is about the same as the percentage of those who watch foreign films. Further, in most places there isn't an opportunity to see foreign films in the states outside of large urban areas. Smaller, independent films don't get a very wide release in Europe either, with a few exceptions. The US films that play in Germany tend to be ones that I have little interest in seeing.

Huh? I thought IQ was normally distributed. This would mean that 50% are above and 50% are below the mean.

I agree with the man . Thats why the Cinemaxx in Regensburg sucks. Sure it shows english movies monday night but I hate Ben Affleck and co.

There has to be more than just one mean guy.

This just proves that statistics are nothing more than numbers.

Right, but a normal distribution curve has flat tails on both end and the majority is inside the bell curve shape, and that's where the lower and average IQ people are.

Ben Affleck is a no-talent ass clown.

(Yes, I blatantly stole that insult from "Office Space" but I love it and have been waiting ages to use it.).

Whoa. "flat" tails? What is "the majority"? 51%? 55%? Go buy yourself a basic statistics textbook.

I'd agree with you almost entirely - EXCEPT that good/thoughful films in Europe tend to do better. But my original argument was aimed at the point that Europeans seem to be more open to Yank films (including good ones - I saw "Thank you for smoking" recently) than vice versa. I'm not sure exactly who is to blame here.

Errr, no. EVERYONE is inside the bell curve, and that's where people of all intelligence levels are.

Will my post get deleted if I wonder aloud which side of the bell curve LiaB is on ?