BS: Americans are truly stupid

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: josepp
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 08:17 PM

////Many of your "stupid" Americans, have a very "educated" distrust of government and organisation, only the imbeciles still believe these have any virtue, they see the dark looming shape approaching, gathering up our freedoms, our joys, the lives of our children and devouring them, while they welcome it with open arms.////

You're folling yourself. The people most vocal against the govt right now absolutely genuflected at its feet when Bush was in office. Those screaming that Obama's war will ruin us were ready to kill anyone who dared speak out against Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq. Those who have more benevolent view of the govt now under Obama utter distrusted and detested it under Bush. It's all relative.

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: josepp
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 08:14 PM

////Absolute and perfect pitch are two different things. Absolute is much rarer than perfect.////

I was just on several sites that all say it is pretty much the same thing. Scientists call it absolute pitch and musicians call it perfect pitch.

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: josepp
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 08:12 PM

///since general organised education for children didn't exist at the time///

I'm not sure what you mean. Johannes Kepler taught geometry class for kids. They had schools then.

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: Smokey.
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 08:10 PM

Absolute and perfect pitch are two different things. Absolute is much rarer than perfect.

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: josepp
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 08:09 PM

////That can be a bit of a disadvantage if you play with instruments that aren't in 440.////

Japanese children learn about pitch at a very young age. Research has shown that when kids start musical training at under age 4, about 40% will develop perfect pitch. It goes down as the age rises. I find it absurd that the brain naturally adjusts in a way that makes it harder to learn music than easier the younger you start learning.

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: josepp
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 08:05 PM

////Not Japan... China./////

I checked a couple of on-line sources shown below but I first read it in a book I have somewhere but I'd have to dig it out from wherever I put it.


"It is said that - in Europe and USA - about 3% of the population are AP possessors. When one selects persons who are professional or semi-professional musicians (e.g., students at music conservatories), about 8% AP possessors are found in that group [57], [62]. Most remarkably, however, in Japan nearly 70% of students at music conservatories are AP possessors (Miyazaki, 1988a )."

http://www.mmk.ei.tum.de/persons/ter/top/absolute.html

Other research has shown that the prevalence of perfect pitch is higher in Japan [than China or Vietnam], where the language is not tonal, but where many young children receive Suzuki music training.

http://www.perfectpitchpeople.com/language.htm

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: Bobert
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 07:51 PM

I agree with josepp that by the 5th grade every child should know what the blues is all about but...

...then again, I'm a bluesman...

B~

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: olddude
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 07:36 PM

I don't understand the question :-)

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: Ed T
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 07:34 PM

quiz

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: Dave MacKenzie
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 07:27 PM

And can be pain in the arse if eveybody's tuned to 443, then somebody with "perfect pitch" turns up, especially if you're all tuned to a squeezebox.

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 07:20 PM

That, Dave, is why perfect pitch has to be a contradiction in terms. It can only be learned, not innate.

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: Don(Wyziwyg)T
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 07:17 PM

""Do you think Mozart or Beethoven or Bach could have achieved what they did with our present educational system?""

You're on a sticky wicket here, since general organised education for children didn't exist at the time those to whom you refer were learning from their parents and other role models paid for either by said parents or by patrons.

Under the current systems in use around the world they might well have been more prolific creators.

Don T.

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: Bill D
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 07:17 PM

Not Japan... China.

In Japan and several other Asian countries it is higher than here, but China has a tonal language, and people learn almost automatically to reproduce pitch.... it's not a matter of their educational system...except in so far as the Cultural Conservatory in Bejing emphasizes it.

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: Ed T
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 07:13 PM

What war gnu, the "price war" at Walmart :)

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: akenaton
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 07:11 PM

I wouldn't say that Americans in general, are stupid at all; a bit naive perhaps, but they seem to have many sterling qualities which cannot be aquired from "book learnin'".

Many of your "stupid" Americans, have a very "educated" distrust of government and organisation, only the imbeciles still believe these have any virtue, they see the dark looming shape approaching, gathering up our freedoms, our joys, the lives of our children and devouring them, while they welcome it with open arms.

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: Dave MacKenzie
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 07:04 PM

"In Japan, they teach children to develop perfect pitch."

That can be a bit of a disadvantage if you play with instruments that aren't in 440.

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: gnu
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 06:45 PM

Ed... so, the USO won the war?

Yes, I know that is soooo bad on so many levels. It's a joke.

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: josepp
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 06:43 PM

////It really doesn't surprise me that much that "kids", which I assume means people under 18, don't know much about a person who was a member of their great-grandfather's (or even great-great-grandfather's) generation. Hell, I'm a grandfather, and Charlie Parker died when I was 9!////

But what Marsalis is saying is that enough time has passed that Parker's musical legacy has been firmly established but what good is it if kids today don't know what that legacy is or even who Charlie Parker was?

I think by about 5th grade, every American student should know what blues is,how it is structured, how it evolved, who the major players were and have some experience actually playing it. They should know if it's 12-bar, 8-bar or 16-bar. They should know what key it's in. They should know what I-IV-V means. They should know what AAB refers to. They should know the differences and similarities between blues and jazz.

And why should they know this? Because blues is the basis of our musical traditions. I mean, there were other influences but blues is a huge part of it, the biggest part by far. How can we have this cultural identity and yet be so abysmally ignorant about it? We can't. What you don't use, you lose.

In Japan, they teach children to develop perfect pitch. I read that the highest rate of perfect pitch in a population is in Japan. We should be teaching that here. Do you think Mozart or Beethoven or Bach could have achieved what they did with our present educational system? I don't. So how many Mozarts or Bachs or we likely to turn out? I would say none.

I remember watching an old black man on TV once playing and singing blues for these black kids. He actually clawhammered a banjo and sang some old, old stuff. When he was finished, he asked, "How many of you would like to learn the banjo--the black man's heritage?" These kids just stood there and looked at him like he was a complete idiot. You could see the sneer in their eyes. Of course, I would have been like Arnold Horshack with my hand up going, "OOOO OOOO OOOO OOOO OOOO OOOOO OOOO!!!!" But I wasn't there.

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: Ed T
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 06:36 PM

An army without culture is a dull-witted army, and a dull-witted army cannot defeat the enemy.


"The United Front in Cultural Work" (October 30, 1944), Selected Works, Vol. III, p. 235.

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: Dave MacKenzie
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 06:30 PM

The stupidest person I knew personally was a fellow-Scot with a PhD from Cambridge.

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: Slag
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 06:25 PM

When handing out prizes for stupidity, let's be generous and include all peoples and all nations. You get a much clearer picture that way. In case you missed statistics 101 you would realize that standard distribution is at work here and, as per IQ, it all falls neatly into the great bell-shaped curved.

Now, as for Mudcatters, whether I happen to agree with the opinions exprssed here or not, I find Mudcatters on the whole, to be quite intelligent folks. We all read, voraciously, it seems and most of us use correct grammar and know wide areas of many various topics, some expertly. But our numbers are small and when compared to the general population we statistically do not make a difference.

However it is the little differences that make the difference. It is just fractions of a second that separate the winner from the also-rans. So, if you do fall into the upper per centile, make a difference. Let your lights shine forth.

Josepp, I take it that the Mao quote is not from Mao's Little Red Book. I can't find it. What is your source?

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: Ed T
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 05:56 PM

"Going by the list of Nobel Prize Winners
there would seem to be more truly clever people from America than any other nationality?"

I always thought of the US of A as a peace loving lot (minus the few encounters outside its borders, that is, and the fact that they are armed to the teeth) Heck, Obama can even get one of those "coveted" peace prizes for being at war :)

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: Smokey.
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 05:49 PM

We've turned into a country of know-it-alls who don't know shit.

Josepp, that's probably your funniest line to date..

"Oh wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!"

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: GUEST,KP
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 05:24 PM

Going by the list of Nobel Prize Winners
there would seem to be more truly clever people from America than any other nationality?

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: gnu
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 05:08 PM

josepp... hehehehee... that is quite a post.

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: Acorn4
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 05:06 PM

And the diet of endless US and US influenced TV in the Uk has helped the rise to superstar status of the British Chav.

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: Bill D
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 04:57 PM

?? sounds like a self-fulfilling hypothesis, josepp

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: josepp
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 04:48 PM

No, it is LOT more ture to say ALL Americans are stupid some of the time. Some spend a lot more time at it than others.

You can't live in this country without being stupid to some degree simply because everything has been dumbed down to the lowest common denominator.

The difference is that some people fight against the stupidity that will take them over if they let it. The rest don't try. But if you think living in this excuse for a culture hasn't made you stupid in some way or other then you truly ARE stupid. And you'd better wake up and wise up, rube.

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: Amos
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 04:36 PM

It's also obvious the OP was not interested in making a coherent proposition when he did his silly business; it would have been a LOT more true to say that some people in America can be truly stupid some of the time.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: gnu
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 03:40 PM

Q... twere not my posts. I just happened to see them.

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: GUEST,Alan Whittle
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 03:10 PM

Americans aren't stupid.
But there's one thing I can never understand about Republicans.
And that is their leaders.

I mean you can understand how wise ass characters like Clinton, Obama, Blair, Cameron, even Gordon Brown get to climb the greasy pole in politics - but the younger Bush.....Reagan.

Neither of them seemed able conduct a sensible conversation. Do you think they lost trust in education when an intelligent bloke like Nixon turned out to be not as good as he should have been?

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: Q (Frank Staplin)
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 03:07 PM

gnu, wait till the current censor goes off duty, then try again.

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: gnu
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 02:52 PM

Ahhh... I have seen two posts (the same) disappear. Is a bad taste joke not allowed?

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: Q (Frank Staplin)
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 02:34 PM

Or does any folk' musician know more than three? Or am I thinking of rappers who know only one?

Duh!

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: John MacKenzie
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 02:32 PM

We won't even mention their lack of a sense of humour!





[I'll get me coat, it's cold in that cellar.]

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 02:25 PM

Which rock and roll performer knows 3 chords?

Or are you confusing "chords" with the observed prevalence of "songs" with only three words, repeated ad infinitum.

John

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: Ebbie
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 01:59 PM

Ah ha! This gives me a chance to post something that gave me a chuckle when I heard it a concert last night:

A rock and roll performer uses about three chords and plays to 20,000 people. A jazz performer, on the other hand, uses about 20,000 chords and plays for three people.

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: Bill D
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 01:57 PM

I know VERY little about Charlie Parker... but I know basically who& what he was. I LIKE knowing enough to have a context for comprehending what is being discussed, whether I can comment meaningfully about it or not.... that is called having **perspective**, and if I were in charge of education, it would be sneaked/snuck into classes beginning about the 4th grade.

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: artbrooks
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 01:51 PM

It really doesn't surprise me that much that "kids", which I assume means people under 18, don't know much about a person who was a member of their great-grandfather's (or even great-great-grandfather's) generation. Hell, I'm a grandfather, and Charlie Parker died when I was 9!

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: Q (Frank Staplin)
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 01:39 PM

Hmmm. The "facts" about U. S. reading habits come from a British wholesale paper handler, the Jenkins Group. Now where did they get them? Thanks for the link, Ed T.

I know a lot of intelligent, creative people who don't know who Charlie Parker is. I like good jazz, so have some recordings of his work, but not everybody knows jazz. This has nothing to do with education.

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: Bill D
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 01:17 PM

Shimrod & John McKenzie and Amos have it abot right... it's not a matter of 'stupid', but of 'ignorance'...and ignorance has various causes.

There was an old joke about a kid who brings home his report card with a 'D' in History.
His father says, "You got a 'D'? I always got 'A's in history!"
"Yeah", say the kid, "but there was a lot less OF it when you were in school!"

Well, there's a 'bit' of truth in that joke. There IS so much data and information available today that merely trying to keep up with events, discoveries amidst all the distraction is daunting! Technology & medicine are growing geometrically, and reading 'books' is crowded out by texting and TV and CDS & mp3s...etc. It takes work to gain any perspective about what is even worth becoming educated about.(to end a sentence with a preposition...which in itself requires effort to realize the context & implications!)

There ARE many who 'take to' learning, education and comprehension...and we have a pretty good bunch here. And there ARE schools which do a decent job of instilling both the value of education and the means of acquiring it....and they are often expensive.

Amos is right when he says that the title and premise of the thread are "... a sweeping, negative generality, including the misuse of the term "stupid"."....but perhaps josepp went to the wrong schools... ;<)

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: Ed T
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 01:10 PM

BTW, if you click on some of the links on the site I provided above, some more up-to-date information could be found.

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: Ed T
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 01:02 PM

Don(Wyziwyg)

What I posted earlier was for another thread, with a different topic/discussion. It was moved over here, not by me.

If you can find a better source of stats, they may answer some of your questions?

I suspect this is the source for some stats on books, though dated.
Facts about the book publishing industry

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: DMcG
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 12:34 PM

Given the likelihood of some person or company suing for misrepresentation and the consequences thereof, there are usually some weird leaps of logic or peculiar circumstances under which claims like that make sense of a sort, if not quite in this world. My guess is that this device uses x amount of radiation and the less advanced kind uses 4x; this one then 'clearly' uses 300pc less.

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: josepp
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 12:28 PM

////Many university students on courses I have taught are incapable of writing grammatical English. I have heard that much the same is true of numerical abilities.////

As George Bush once said, "Too many students aren't literate in math."

But that's what I'm talking about. How could we have elected somebody that stupid and uncouth? To 2 terms, no less.

As for those stats, all I can say is, I knw a guy who has one book in his house: a dictionary. That's it.

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 12:12 PM

A typical exhibition of stupidity appears on a large billboard that I pass on nearly every trip to town, advertising the "advanced imaging" system at a local hospital as "having," in some way, "three hundred percent less radiation."

Ignoring that it doesn't say less than WHAT, it would appear to me that a 100 percent reduction in anything means it's all gone. I suppose that the "taking away" of the remaining 200 percent means that it "sucks radiation out" at twice the rate that something else "puts it in."

It is necessary to assume that they're advertising that theirs is twice as damaging as "someone else's" since the radiation flux exposure must be at least double that of competing machines - and in the wrong direction? Their examining area must be littered with the radiation sucked out of their victims and quite probably left splattered around on the floor. Do they sweep it up with lead mops?

Of course maybe they mean that they just turn you upside down so it's going in the other direction and give you a double dose for good measure?


Do I really want to receive my medical care from a bunch of illiterate idiots?

It's by no means an isolated example; but it's a very big billboard, and quite annoying.

John

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: GUEST,kendall
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 11:45 AM

How many educated intelligent people would know who Charlie Parker was? And what would it matter if they didn't?
One of the things that turns kids off history is all those dates. Does it really matter what year Columbus didn't discover America? Or that it wasn't even America at the time?

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: Charmion
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 11:09 AM

What is "parapublishing"?

The site from which the above statistics came offers (for a price) advice on being your own publisher. I imagine that the stats are provided to convince would-be authors that a vast, untapped market exists for those manuscripts that keep getting rejected by the commercial publishers.

Books literally sell by the ton -- I've seen the trucks backed up to the loading dock at Chapters, and the queues at the cash desks. What proportion of them contain information that readers find useful or even entertaining? Good question. Today's Great Canadian Novel is tomorrow's unreadable pulp, and today's dynamic self-help tome is tomorrow's pack of lies.

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: DMcG
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 11:05 AM

Does nobody else see a possible conflict of interest and ulterior motive here?
Yep. But it's more interesting because of that. Generally speaking, people feel comfortable if they are with groups who behave as they do (so I understand). If that's the case, the publishers could be doing themselves a disservice with this!

"57% of new books are not read to completion" - I've never measured it, but this could be true of my books. On the other hand, my library is heavily biased towards dictionaries, encyclopedia, concordances, and other reference books that are not things one sits down and reads through. But as a slightly amusing example, a Christmas or two ago I was was given "The Road to Reality" by Roger Penrose which claims it appeared on "The Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller" list. If there are more than 100 people in the UK outside of Universities who have read it cover to cover I'd be astonished. Opening it at random, I see:
The Dirac equation can then be written as an equation coupling these two 2-spinors, each acting as a kind of 'source' for the other, with a coupling constant 2^-1/2M describing the strength of the 'interaction' between the two.

There then follows an equation the complexity of which is beyond my HTML skills and involves nablas and other characters for which I don't think there is a html equivalent.

So I wonder how (and why) did this get onto a top ten bestsellers list?   Stephen Hawking jokes in "A brief history of time" that he had been told that each equation he put in a book would halve the number of purchasers. Starting with some 6 billion people, it takes a mere 24 equations to be less than one person - or by the end of chapter 2 of the 34 chapter Penrose book. (Of course, those were the lighter chapters)

Subject: RE: BS: Americans are truly stupid
From: katlaughing
Date: 03 Jan 11 - 11:00 AM

Have NOT read most of the above. Lost me when it was a travesty that mainstream kids don't know about Charlie Parker. There's nothing new about that and that means there are a bunch of us who are just fine including my kids and some of my siblings. Good grief...let's all tear our hair out now!