The State of the Union

It was a soggy speech, he has a really common sense of diction and articulacy. Obama is just another politician. Biden seems stoned, too, dopey grin on his face. But none of it really applies to this side of the pond. I just find Obama quite American and pathetic. Not that I'm saying things are better over here, and we all know they could have been much worse over there, but I dislike him. I think y'all have a ridiculous idea of him as a miracle man because he's black and president.

Yeah, black people have it really awesome in this country.

He always looks like that

My biggest problem with the State of the Union speeches is the clapping. It turns a half hour speech into an hour speech. If I were president I'd start off by saying, "don't clap until I'm done."

Concerning Obama being a "typical politician" - he really does carry himself like a typical politician but that's why we elected him rather than Hilary or Biden. Here in the States if a politician deviates from the prescribed role of a politician their opponents will successfully use it against them. This makes it hard to distinguish the John Edwards from the Barack Obamas. You really have to dig deep into their actions to evaluate their beliefs. Obama hasn't backed down on the important issues, but he also doesn't deviate from the role he's suppose to play. The last (democrat) president who governed from his heart rather than a calculated formula was Jimmy Carter and his opponents destroyed him for it.

The reality is that the average Brit is much more intelligent than the average America, so your politicians don't have to cater (as much) to stupidity.

Here's a good example: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-july-23-2003/back-in-black---bush-...

From the most part, that whole thinking of 'Obama Messiah' has dwindled after the election. I enjoyed the address to the union, it was a refreshing tone. I agreed with a majority of things and I loved when he talked about Congress living in a perpetual campaign. Again I don't think anything will happen until congress changes their dysfunctional ways. I dunno, I don't think you can blame Obama for things not changing, he can't do anything until congress does.

The reality? Just like this color person is smarter than that color person?

he DID make some high claims, mr. HOPE and CHANGE, he did. made his own bed.

http://4brevard.com/choice/international-test-scores.htm

Read it and weep. Saying the average American is much less knowledgeable than the average citizen in other first world countries isn't comparable to racism, it's a fact. I never claimed that we are inherently stupid, like there's some mystical radiation that stagnates our potential to learn, I just acknowledged the fact that most Americans are stupid. This is a result of our piss-poor, classist educational system. Obama even mentioned in his speech how poorly American students compare to other nations academically, especially concerning math and science.

Here's a little anecdote: The bookstore I worked for the last couple months just shut down. In the process of liquidating we had several items on sale for 90% off the marked price. In the past few weeks hundreds of people asked me "What's 90% off of $14.99?" as if it takes a fucking calculator to MOVE A FUCKING DECIMAL. I'm not exaggerating - hundreds of people. And that's just the ridiculously easy stuff. I was the only employee who could tell customers what 65% off an item was without a calculator. And some of these people I worked with had degrees (one of whom was also an English teacher - she had a masters degree but couldn't calculate basic percentages).

I'm from Ohio, not the most academically prestigious state, but far from the abysmal status of Mississippi or Alabama. Generally speaking, Americans are stupid. That's why when I was in high school, the freshmen exchange students from Brazil, Germany, Japan, and other countries were placed in advanced senior classes and laughed off the work (which was in a foreign language for them). I remember asking the German kid if he was an exchange student because he was some kind of genius and he said no, he was an exchange student because he signed up for it. He considered himself to be average. I remember him asking, "how do you guys not know this stuff?"

Here's another one: at my last job a guy wanted to write a check and he asked if I could fill it out for him. When I told him no he struggled TO WRITE THE NUMBERS even though they were displayed on a screen for him. Then he went to write out the numbers and he had to pull out a chart that had the numbers spelled out for him (1. one, 2. two, ect.). And then to top it all off, HE HAD TO PULL OUT HIS DRIVERS LICENSE TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO SPELL HIS OWN NAME.

So I ask our British culties - do you encounter people this stupid on a daily bases? I certainly didn't encounter any during my time in London.

BTW - I apply this to myself. I'm sure I would be much more intelligent if I had attended a school in England rather than the ones I went to in Ohio.

Has it occurred to you that he may have been dyslexic or had some other type of cognitive disorder?

Yes, I did consider that, but aside from his broken grammar he could carry a perfectly normal conversation. Anyway, that's just my extreme example, even ignoring that my point still stands. (btw, I'm dyslexic with numbers, just not to an extreme)

Razorsharp, the more you talk, the more you sound like an asshole.

As far as Obama, i've no real opinion of him. As far as i can tell, he's doing his job. People expect him to save the world and when he doesn't others call for his lynching. Yeah, he's making big promises. How is that not typical? So his catch words were hope and change. Also pretty standard for a presidential candidate/president.

I don't see why people [ie Alberto and the like] are so derisive. You may not like him and it's fine to critique him or even hate him, but these attacks that he's not living up to his outlandish promises are silly. Firstly, president is not the same thing as king and he can't just do as he pleases. Secondly, what president ever does everything they promise? It's part of the retardity of the big show of the race. You hoot and you holler and you raise some dollars and the idiots of the horde take notice and call you a god. It's not his fault that the system has transformed into this stupid commercial for an imagined future.

Eh, i've more to say but my friend's here.

I am an asshole. But I thought you knew that already.

I can side with this. My best friend married a brit, and when his family came over for the wedding, they were amazed.

America is one of the few countries that doesn't require it's students to fluently speak another language, and most americans can barely speak English properly, myself included.

I remember exchange students in school being unpleasantly suprised at how little we knew about...well, anything.

Most everyone I know that's ever helped someone study for their citizenship test couldn't pass it themselves and they've lived here all their lives. I couldn't.

A while back I was helping a friend study for his GED. I had to teach him fractions and he didn't get it until I demonstrated with some weed and a set of digital scales.

I'm really not trying to be an asshole about it, I just see this nation turning into an Idiotocracy and I tend to get rather impassioned about it. I honestly believe that if we fix education and health care then all of our other political/social issues will be resolved as a latent effect (not to say that we'll become a utopia, but at least we can get on par with western Europe). But we can't fix these things without acknowledging the problems.

Well, as stupid as Americans have proven themselves to be, at least we know how to make decent food. I'd be anorexic if I lived in England.

Self-loathing amerikans are even more boring than the foreigners who hate us.

I agree. And for the record, I don't think you sounded like an asshole in your last post, or any post, really. I'd like to give the guy that couldn't spell his name the benefit of the doubt, though, and wonder if he has a learning disability or other problem.

I had to write checks for a guy that had ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), well, help him with a lot of things. It was incredibly humiliating and depressing for him that he was living out the end of his life with people thinking he was drunk or stupid because the most simple tasks were incredibly difficult. He slurred and and walked oddly and was happy he could walk at all. Anyway, I digress..

I agree that we need to fix the education system in this country. It's terrible, and often a joke. I dislike the PC way kids are taught now, disagree with a grading curve, and think there should be more options in terms of vocational education for those that are not inclined towards higher education. I'd love if that stigma was removed, too. Not everyone wants to go to college, much less needs to go to college.

I looked at that link you provided and didn't exactly weep, but I did cringe. This jumped out at me:

"..some of the superior countries in grade 8 (especially the Asians) were not included in published 12th grade results. They do not need 12 grades."

That's something to aspire to, indeed.

the whole world is getting stupid, it's not just americans. it just sounds like a bunch of semantics to me.

Most jobs need training and a degree, especially in the years ahead. It's a fact that people with college degrees make more money, own houses, cars, etc. I know for my generation just having a diploma makes your career choices extremely limited. We'll never close that gap without higher education.

Oh, I know. I meant there should be an option to go to a vocational school that would provide expert training for certain specialized careers. That could be computer science, plumbing etc. Plumbers and car mechanics can make a great living. Not everyone aspires to a white collar job, and I think there shouldn't be any stigma involved if you don't want to go to college.

Ah, I see. Awesome!

That's as far as I got in reading this. I'm not going to waste my time trying to have an internetual interaction with someone who's more concerned about being right than about not being an asshole.

And even if this color or that country or this sex tends to be smarter on average, what do you expect to accomplish by pointing this out? Maybe black people really do have bigger dicks, but this doesn't have anything to do with the price of tea in Azerbaijan. I'm sure if you drew a line on the map around oxford university and called it a 'nation', they'd be the highest IQ nation in the world. So what?

There is no such thing as speaking a language properly.

I would question any assertion that the value of a degree is increasing. I think the value of the degree is falling, while the price of the degree is increasing. Employment options, even for those with degrees, are shrinking.

There are a lot of professions in which governments require degrees and licenses that people do not need. This raises overhead costs for business, and raises demand for the degree artificially. The cost of the thing raises very realistically. Many other government interventions have had many different negative effects upon the education market.

When the market begins to reject many of the government requirements (which it will have to do at some point) many people's degrees will lose their value because it would then be an overqualification at cost.

I think this is the case with my degree, but whatever, I've learned enough these four years that I don't find it a total waste. Plus I'm glad that I get the college experience.

Also, something big being overlooked here: Being dumb isn't all bad. If people are happy, you don't have to create worry for their survival on their behalf. So long as people aren't aggressing against me, they can be as dull as a stick on their property all day long. I'd prefer to live in a community of educated people, but what people chose for themselves educationwise is up to them. And no, the threat of violence cannot magically make people smarter.

By posting that comic, I get the impression that you believe I am hiding from some sort of truth by refusing to care which lines on the map contain which average of IQ individuals.

What do you do, RSharp? No, really, what do you do?

To be fair, your link doesn't prove what you seem to think it does.

Your original comment was that Brits are smarter than Americans. The link you provided shows England performing better than the US in 2 categories and worse in 2 categories.

So if anything, I would say that at best, your link proves that we are pretty common. The average rank for both countries is 15th. Not exactly something either of us should be bragging about.

That said, I won't disagree with you that we have a lot of idiots over here. It is partially a fault of the educational system and it is also a fault of our culture. In the states loving your Jesus is more important that scientific fact. The very idea that kids can sit out of evolution is disgusting and it does nothing to help us in these situations.

This girl in my class, college mind you, needed a 10 minute explanation of what the difference between "sheets" and "pages" were. I was handing out print out and asked if everyone had 13 pages. She said she only had 7. After explaining, at nauseam that one sheet equals two pages, she comes to terms and says "ohhhh...word!"

That's just ridiculous.

As ridiculous as misquoting a common Latin phrase?!

Spelling it with a 't' versus a 'd' doesn't make me stupid. It makes me a sloppy typer.

As for misquoting, how?

misquote [ˌmɪsˈkwəʊt]
vb
to quote (a text, speech, etc.) inaccurately
Verb 1. misquote - quote incorrectly; "He misquoted his latin phrasebook"

I could go on about this ad nauseam, but it appears you are aware of your typo. Although I thought it was spelled -um, not -am, so what do I know?

No, I used it properly. I explained something to her ad nauseam. Meaning it took me forever, or minus the hyperbole, a very fucking long time. What am I not seeing?

Every once and a while I have to explain myself. How can you not see what I'm getting at, for all intensive purposes?

You have to look at what those categories are (and it helps to read the information that goes along with it). Americans perform decent in elementary grades but performance decreases as they get closer to graduation. In the end, it's the performance of graduates that really matters. Keep in mind that drop-outs, which we have a high number of in this country, wouldn't even be included in the 12th grade studies.

Results: In short, the tests showed U.S. fourth-graders performing poorly, middle school students worse. and high school students are unable to compete. By the same criteria used to say we were "average" in elementary school, "we appear to be "near the bottom" at the high school level. People have a tendency to think this picture is bleak but it doesn't apply to their own school. Chances are, even if your school compares well in SAT scores, it will still be a lightweight on an international scale.

1. By the time our students are ready to leave high school - ready to enter higher education and the labor force - they are doing so badly with science they are significantly weaker than their peers in other countries.
2. Our idea of "advanced" is clearly below international standards.
3. There appears to be a consistent weakness in our teaching performance in physical sciences that becomes magnified over the years.

Giggan - I'm a full time student currently between jobs (I worked at a bookstore until last week, we went out of business). Not that it's relevant or anything, unless you're the type who believes the validity of one's opinions hinges on their success. The comic is how I feel about your attitude concerning America's problems. You pretend that the real problems, things that hinder our citizens ability to achieve success and cause them to needlessly suffer, aren't problems at all. Things such as wage slavery, price gouging, and a classist educational system. Your belief that the biggest problem facing Americans is government control is indicative of how blind you are to the realities that truly oppress the common man. Poverty limits liberty much more than our government. You need to spend some time in the ghetto--not driving by, but actually getting to know its inhabitants and their problems--to truly understand how horrible conditions are. But instead you put your head in the sand and tell yourself that the problems of the rich (the government limiting their ability to exploit and swindle) are the problems of the common man.

Besides a nice sarcastic remark about something I ACTUALLY DID fuck up before, I'm still not getting how I INACCURATELY used AD NAUSEAM. You could continue to dance around it sarcastically making yourself look smarter, or you could simply explain it. OR you could just not say anything.

What it took for me to grow up: leaving government school. Everything positive as far as life goes began then.

Never said it was.

You lack the ability to do more than hear the words of those you disagree with.

Your beliefs are not all that crazy, but your blind faith in them is what retards any successful social interaction we could possibly have. We could have an adult conversation about the role government has in creating poverty, but you don't wanna hear it because you already think you know how everything works.

This from a white stoner from Ohio. Thanks for the condescending assholicism.

Dude, if 'the rich' whoever this secret group is, actually controls everything, then what do you think makes government immune to their bourgeois treachery? There are inconsistencies within your theories that you refuse to address.

Also, you may wanna think about why it is you care to know which lines on the map have the smartest people in them...that doesn't sound like information it is very healthy to seek. Think who else would be in your company caring about national averages.

And I can be dickishly cliché, too...

Accurate use= AD NAUSEAM
Inaccurate use = AT NAUSEAM

Beyond this, we're picking fly shit out of pepper and taking something I said that was, at best, a D-level joke and bludgeoning it in public for no good reason. Good day to you sir!

Well fuck a duck, dude! I thought we got that out of the way on the second post.