About some things, Americans are incredibly stupid. For instance, I’ve kept an eye on science and religion related ignorance for years. 15% of Americans don’t know that the Earth revolves around the sun. Half of the people in the United States (an allegedly “Christian Nation”) can’t name Genesis as the first book in the Bible.
There are a lot more statistics where those came from. If you’d like to read a few dozen zingers, read Rick Shenkman’s article in Alternet, “Ignorant America: Just How Stupid Are We?” There are some real head-shakers in Shenkman’s article. Several might have you wondering whether we should require citizens to pass rudimentary intelligence tests in order to vote. Shenkman’s compilation of stupidity had me wondering this. I know that this is an extremely controversial idea based on the way it has been misused in the past. It is clear, though that huge numbers of people have no idea how their government is designed to work, who is running their government, the basic characteristics of the scientific method, the basic facts of the religions to which they cling, or rudimentary principles of geography, history or economics. Now really . . . should such a person vote? This question makes me squirm.
I’m not really suggesting that we should take official government action to keep people from voting based on their intelligence levels. On the other hand, reading Shenkman’s article makes me wonder whether our “Get out the vote” campaigns should be focused on getting people to vote only if they know something other than their favorite TV shows and sports stars. Rather than “get out the vote,” perhaps we should have “vote only if you’re informed” campaigns. Here’s one of Shenkman’s many statistics that especially got me thinking in this entirely unacceptable way:
In the election of 2004, one of the hot issues was gay marriage. But gauging public opinion on the subject was difficult. Asked in one national poll whether they supported a constitutional amendment allowing only marriages between a man and a woman, a majority said yes. But three questions later a majority also agreed that “defining marriage was not an important enough issue to be worth changing the Constitution.” The New York Times wryly summed up the results: Americans clearly favor amending the Constitution but not changing it.
What is stupidity? Early in his comprehensive article on the lack of comprehension, Shenkman designates the five types of stupidity:
First, is sheer ignorance: Ignorance of critical facts about important events in the news, and ignorance of how our government functions and who’s in charge. Second, is negligence: The disinclination to seek reliable sources of information about important news events. Third, is wooden-headedness, as the historian Barbara Tuchman defined it: The inclination to believe what we want to believe regardless of the facts. Fourth, is shortsightedness: The support of public policies that are mutually contradictory, or contrary to the country’s long-term interests. Fifth, and finally, is a broad category I call bone-headedness, for want of a better name: The susceptibility to meaningless phrases, stereotypes, irrational biases, and simplistic diagnoses and solutions that play on our hopes and fears.
Although the article at the top of this post, “Ignorant America,” is full of compelling statistics, it (like many articles documenting American stupidity) is also riddled with many questions that confuse trivia for knowledge. How important is it for most Americans to know the name of the Secretary of Defense? Isn’t it possible that someone can be rather up to speed about America’s military policies without actually knowing the name of the Secretary of Defense?
America is obsessed with trivia and it is not unusual for trivia to masquerade as something important for tests that purport to measure intelligence. Knowing lots and lots of facts, though, especially the inert facts common for trivia buffs, is not the same thing as being intelligent. If these two things (knowledge and facts) were equal, we would regularly have great insights and discoveries occurring as a result of Trivia Nights, yet I don’t believe that has yet happened even once.
The problem with many intelligence tests is that they only measure ability to recall bits of information rather than detecting true understanding, much less wisdom. For this reason, many of the questions used to illustrate how “stupid” we are resemble the same problems found in many formal “intelligence tests.” A thorough review of those problems with IQ tests can be found in Stephen Jay Gould’s Mismeasure of Man (1996).
I recognize that we all have our focus when it comes to understanding the world. Someone who is dedicated to one field of study might not know as much about other fields of study. It is also important to remember that all of us have huge gaps in information. If we have dedicated our lives to understanding nanotechnology, how much are we actually going to know about the history of classical music ? If you work as a professional athlete, should we really be expected to know all five of the specific legal rights granted by the First Amendment? (Did you know that one of those rights is the right to petition the government?). Having written this, I think it’s more likely that those who truly excel at a field tend to be rather well-rounded.
There’s probably more than a few people who would insist that the scientific method is the be-all and end-all of intelligence because of its insistence on proof. There is an uneasy truce between belief and proof, however. In the area of religion, belief is often said to be justified even in the absence of proof. But don’t forget that even very smart people find an irresistible urge to believe many things that they cannot prove.
Here’s another caveat for those who walk around wagging their fingers (like I do) at the large number of “stupid” Americans. Howard Gardner has put forth a strong argument that there were actually multiple intelligences. He holds that the concept of “general intelligence” is highly suspect and that there might not be such a thing as GI. There are those who are incredibly talented at reading the moods and motives of other people (he calls this interpersonal intelligence), but who don’t do well at mathematics. There are people who are terrifically talented in musical ways (e.g. Hillary Hahn), but might not be very good at biology (I’m not suggesting that Hillary on is not good at biology– because I am deeply infatuated with Hillary Hahn, I assume that she is excellent at everything she does!). Many of us do know some “absent-minded professors” who can talk for hours on esoterica such as Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative but who seem inept at coping in the real world on a day-to-day basis. In the category of super-intelligent, I would quickly place my plumber (who can talk knowledgeably about almost anything, it seems) and a carpenter who has done work at my house, who has a superhuman grasp of his profession. I can’t imagine being as good as he is at the many arts of transforming a house, even if I trained for 20 years at the foremost “carpenter school.”
Having recognized these caveats, I am nonetheless saddened that there are hundreds of Americans I have personally met who seem to be almost completely ignorant of most things and who don’t seem to care. They live eternally in the present (like young children) and they have no interest in knowing the cultures or accomplishments of other people living in other places. Why is it important to know about humans living in different places and in different ways? Because we are part of a massive global economy where our local actions, in the aggregate, have massive global consequences.
Many of these un-curious Americans have well-paying jobs–some of them are even wealthy. Their idea of traveling is to take their own culture with them, for instance, to seek out “hot” tourist spots and to patronize American restaurant franchises like Hard Rock Cafe while visiting foreign countries. And that’s assuming that they have any inclination to travel at all in the first place. Many of them don’t see the need to travel or to know about the cultures of others.
I am not intending to criticize those who have never had the means to study seriously or to travel widely. For instance, I have spoken to many people who clean the offices where I work. It is common for these folks to have to work two and sometimes three jobs to make ends meet. There is no way that such a person would have the opportunities to expand his or her intellectual life because they are working way too many hours cleaning up messes made by people like me. The targets of this rant are those people who have every opportunity to become more knowledgeable about the world but who have turned it down repeatedly.
How is it that so many Americans have gotten as stupid as the Shenkman article suggests? It sometimes seems that somebody is so incredibly un-curious that you wonder how it is that he or she didn’t self-destruct many years ago? It happens to me on a regular basis. I am surrounded by people who haven’t the faintest idea how an automobile works, or how electricity works, how the body works or how government works. I’m not insisting on a sophisticated knowledge of these topics, but a simple working knowledge. For instance, what is the difference between direct current and alternating current? What are the constituent gases of water? In a very simple way, describe what is happening inside of a nuclear power plant to create the energy? What are the three basic branches of American government? There are all too many Americans who don’t know and don’t care.
A week doesn’t go by when I haven’t met someone who does not know how to make change with coins or has no idea how to outline and write a simple coherent letter. I constantly meet people who simply presume that every other person A) does or B) should think the same as them. This matters, because many of these uncurious people do presumably vote (It’s probably more polite to use “uncurious” rather than the pejorative “stupid”). And it’s obvious to me that many people fear the concept and promise of biological evolution without knowing what evolution is. They express political opinions on energy policy without having any working knowledge of the geopolitics of petroleum. They take stands that homosexuality is “unnatural” without realizing that humans are animals or that hundreds of other species are, to some extent, homosexual. They take strongly held religious positions without any idea about the origin of the Bible, the changes made to the Bible the immorality of many sections of the Bible or the thousands of contradictions in the Bible.
How has this happened? Perhaps one factor is that we’ve worked so hard to make our surrounding world “smart” is that we don’t have to be smart. To be a cashier at McDonald’s, you don’t have to know much mathematics. The pictograph-laden cash register and the other parts of the McDonald’s corporate system do most of your “thinking” for you. The idea that we’ve made our world intelligent so that we don’t have to be intelligent was explored at length by Andy Clark in a book called Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again (1997):
We use our intelligence to structure our environment so that we can succeed with less intelligence. Our brains make the world smart so that we can be dumb in peace . . . It is the human brain plus these chunks of external scaffolding that finally constitutes the smart, rational inference engine we call mind. Looked at that way, we are smart after all—but our boundaries extend further out into the world than we might have initially supposed.
[Being There, p. 180] Americans have worked very hard to design environments that allow us to survive even if we’re not very bright. I suspect that we are now suffering because we have so successfully created such a world where we don’t have to be very smart.
We are now entering a dangerous new era, however, where our “smart” world (a world that can only function on cheap oil) is no longer so smart. Not only is out system failing to mesh with the new reality–individual humans are no longer very smart, because for decades our “smart” world has allowed many of us to sit around without much mental effort and to reap the harvests of smart technology and cheap oil: endless amusements, cheap food, indoor climate control at the push of a button, the ability to call on the miracles of modern medicine to compensate for the abuses we give to our bodies. Our smart technology has trained us to be un-smart and un-curious. I really do suspect that countries that haven’t had it as good as America (with regard to technology and availability of cheap energy) are now better positioned than America to thrive in the coming years of expensive energy, where personal initiative and inventiveness will again be of higher value to most people in most places.
I need to bring this post to a close, though I don’t have any satisfying conclusions. Rather, I am haunted by the thought that too many of us are failing to work to make the most of our opportunities to understand our world and improve the world. Perhaps this kind of behavior is based upon an emotional attitude. I’m thinking of the famous quote by Socrates: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Maybe our approach to knowing (or not knowing) the world does boil down to an emotional attitude, an attitude that can sometimes equate with nihilism. For many of us, I’m afraid, the unexamined life is worth living.
Dave: I shouldn't have said "stupid," but it's more than ignorance. Too many people I've met are proudly ignorant. They make little or no effort to know the facts before weighing in on complicated issues. The evidence, surf the web and look at the comments and listen to talk radio. Maybe people were always this way, but we have a big complicated country to run, more complicated and dangerous than ever, yet all too many people don't want to do their homework.
But this post didn't compare Americans to people from any other country. I disagree with you there. I wrote this post to push back against two many claims I've been hearing on the talk radio and conservative websites that Americans are the "greatest country in the world." My opinion should be uncontroversial: we can do a lot better than we are. Our people need to be a lot better informed and a lot less confident than they are about all too many opinions that they hold.
Again, I shouldn't have used the word "stupid," but I was feeling overwhelmed by the rampant proud ignorance.
Erich: And to expand upon your statement. I believe the problem is that many people allow a cartoon version of reality to be drilled into their head, hell, they are proud of that fact, that all the answers are "simple". I really have no idea how to combat this, but I suppose it derives out of a self-righteous need to believe that what we do is all correct. They used to say we were too competitive, now we seek to be "right" rather than number one.
Strange how we now fear being compared to other countries. When I ran a sound board at a conservative talk radio station I remember how the "talent" would say that America is doing great, look at the GDP!!! Then when that wasn't looking good, then it was, Look at Purchasing Power Parity!!! If reality doesn't suit your philosophy, get a new ruler I suppose.
Erich,
If someone boasts of what they don't know or don't understand, that is almost a textbook definition of Stupid. Ignorance can be fixed, lack of intelligence can be compensated for in a variety of ways, but standing one's ground as resolutely uninformed and unthinking is a species of idiocy. Stupid is a good word.
Erich,
Actually, I am fine with using the word "Stupid"– the morons certainly are legion, and we are well on our way to Idiocracy. I actually had a problem with the word "Americans": not that Americans aren't dumb (they are), but so is everyone else. I tried to spell that out in my last comment.
By including the word "Americans", yes you may be pushing back to the talk radio dingbats (not worth the time), you also invoked (accidentally?) the nation-state comparison model for me as a reader. I was only trying to respond to the harm it did to your argument.
I enjoyed that post, especially the parts that lost of people haven't even touched. Mainly, I believe that we've been handed this leaky education to be more easily controlled. Stupid America is just meat for the War Machine.
Here's a video that illustrates some of the rampant ignorance of Americans. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw603tH6YqM&featur…
Probably some of the strongest evidence that Americans are stupid: 44% of adult drivers stated that they have been texting on their phones while driving. http://redtape.msnbc.com/
Plus, we talk on phones while we drive even though it's the risk equivalent of drunk driving.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phones_and_dr…
If you make a statement that half of the people in the US do not know that Genesis is the first book of the Bible then you must have asked all the people in the US that question… I don't remember anyone asking me that question??? Don't make stupid statements!!
Tim Clark: I will summon every bit of inner fortitude and I will force myself to assume that you are not intentionally being obstreperous (look it up if you don't know the meaning). Tim, surveys and polls are tools that rely upon extrapolation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_poll To the extent that you made your comment sincerely, your comment is evidence in support of the point made by the post.
hmm… if americans are stupid than why are u on ur "stupid" computers? we invented them… Bill Gates is an American. think what the world would be like without computers. think 1900. that's you without us "stupid" americans
So let me now tell you a little story about someone who is afraid to use his/her real name, who can't understand that I was talking about trends. He doesn't get that I KNOW that there are some smart Americans. He thinks that because there are some smart Americans, that ALL Americans are somehow (osmotically?) smart. I is mostly ready to attack anyone who lacks his American jingoism.
hieeee (if American) manages to prove your point.
<img src="http://dangerousintersection.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/fractal-wrongness.jpg" alt="fractal Wrongness" />
So I don't just appear to be calling him a fool, let's review:
"We" invented computers. Um, has he seen the names in any computer journal? Can he pronounce them? Almost all the significant innovations came from foreigners. Alan Turing? Charles Babbage? Joseph Marie Jacquard? Shall I go on?
Bill Gates bought and licensed a clone of CP/M to IBM as MS-DOS. He copied and adapted a version of the Basic computer language and licensed it, as well. His contribution to computing technology was the annual license fee.
"Without computers, think 1900": Uh, yeah. Name a computer before 1940. Does the Marchant Calculator count? It does almost as much as a dollar store calculator. How about the Curta calculator? Neither of those were invented by American born folks.
Dan wrote:
"Almost all the significant innovations came from foreigners. Alan Turing? Charles Babbage? Joseph Marie Jacquard? Shall I go on? "
and
"Bill Gates bought and licensed a clone of CP/M to IBM as MS-DOS. He copied and adapted a version of the Basic computer language and licensed it, as well. His contribution to computing technology was the annual license fee."
You're stomping around in my field of expertise here.
The Unix operating system, from which Linux, OSX, and many other operating systems are derived, was developed in the USA, The open source movement, which has brought us most of the capabilities of the Internet, began in the US. The graphic user interface was originally developed by Xerox at it's Palo Alto, CA research center.
The C++ programming language that enabled the team development of complex software was the brainchild of Bjarne Stroustrup while the C language that it extended was developed in the US by Brian Kerighan and Dennis Ritchie
Microsft has built itself from the small company started by Bill Gates and Paul Allen to the pervasive and odious multinational corporation that it is today by the purchase of QDOS, (Quick and Dirty Operating System) which was a CP/M-86 clone built partially on a code base purloined from Digital Research, Digital Research (originally "Interstellar Digital Research") was the US company founded by Gary Kildall to market the CP/M Operating system. The CP/M operating system was co developed along side the PL/M programming language by Kildall as software development system for the Intel 8080A microprocessor.
Intel, a US company, is credited with the development of the first microcomputer integrated circuit with the 4 bit 4004, followed by the 8008. the 8080 was a much improved version of the 8008. The integrated circuit (a.k.a. microchip) was invented by engineers at Texas Instruments, and was a miniaturization of the hybrid circuit technology developed by IBM which in turn was based on transistor technology developed at Bell labs in the 1940's.
The first computer was the Zuse Z3, a German computer from 1941, which used electromechanical concepts from many sources including some concepts borrowed from IBM's punch-card based accounting machines. The IBM machines, used technology originally developed in the late 1800's by Herman Hollerith, who borrowed and combined concepts from Jacquard's loom and Babbage's analytic engine.
Other influential contributors to the modern computer technology include George Boole ( who realized that the binary base could bridge the gap between logic and arithmetic) and Jan Lukasiewicz for the prefix notation used in the machine language of modern computers.
So, while the computer was not an American invention, a major part of the innovation in the computer technology has been driven by innovations for the US.
Erich wrote:
"..I KNOW that there are some smart Americans. He thinks that because there are some smart Americans, that ALL Americans are somehow (osmotically?) smart."
Erich:
I think the inverse is true of some people. There is no doubt that some Americans are stupider that a box of rocks. A few people, seem to be of the opinion that All americans (themselves excepted) are stupid.
We must remember that the media reports the unusual, the aberrations and the extremes, because the commomplace and ordinary is simply too boring to steal the public's attention away from the competition.
I have my own term for people who play a follow the leader game, who live in the moment and allow themselves to led by a virtual nose-ring of blissful ignorance: "Brain-Lazy"
Niklaus: As a fellow geek, I am well aware that many innovations in computing came from the U.S. This is where the money was at the right time. I was replying to three distinct wrong points by the previous commenter, inferring his higher order of ignorance by his grammar as well.
Do look at the names on any computer-related American patents, on any of the technical papers, on even the credits on video games. Yes, most were produced in America. But where were the creators educated? Many came here for graduate studies, and found a way to switch their visas.
Listen to interviews with major technical contributors. As a rule, note the foreign accent. If not heard, it's a good bet that they are first generation citizens. (As am I.)
Yes there are home-grown smart folks. But our median education level is appalling, especially in light of our wealth.
I've actually argued with a computer shop owner who maintained that, absent Bill Gates, there would be no personal computers. He was apparently ignorant of both Apple Computers, and the historical forces that would have forced someone to assume Gate's mantle, had it not been precisely him. Personal computers were coming, and only a civilization-ending event could have stopped them.
But personal computers could have emerged from several other countries, a little later. The dominoes were set up by inevitable discoveries in quantum physics and new chemical processes and emerging mathematics.
So it happened that the computer revolution spawned in the U.S. Yay for us. But it had nothing to do with general education of the public.
Dan, I was simply contesting your assertion that “Almost all the significant innovations came from foreigners."
The "Almost all" part is not true unless you assume that "American" doesn't apply to US born descendants of immigrants or to naturalized immigrants. (That would make me a German, even though I was born in Pennsylvania, and my paternal great grandfather was German)
This is not because we were somehow smarter, but largely because because we had a head start on other nations as we had only minimal damage from the second world war.
I have seen a trend, however, over the last 20 years of a slowing of innovation in the US computer industry. I don't attribute this to an inherent stupidity in the population.
Over the lat two decades, the take over of the educational system by corporate interests has changed the nature of computer science courses in a way that inhibits innovation.
Back in the 70s I took classes in machine language, assembly language, FORTRAN, COBOL, BASIC, algorithms and development methodology.
In the 80s I learned Forth, C, awk, and PERL.
I recently took several online courses for ASP.NET development. The course ware thoroughly sucked, and was little more than a thinly veiled infomercial for the $800 Visual Studio 2008 development package.
My younger son, who, at 13 years of age, is already programming in C took a computer class at middle school which was no more than training in the use of Microsoft Office. He thought it was stupid.
Instead of giving one the skills to create, the modern modern concept of education is turning into a way to increase the customer base.
If there is any stupidity, much of it is the natural end result of culture trained through its media educational system to an uncritical brand loyalty at the expense of independent and creative thought.
This is why, in the past couple of decades, we've seen new and innovative software coming from the rest of the world. We've stopped advancing, they've kept moving foward.
Nicklaus, the issue is where these innovators got their early education, their will to learn. I got mine from immigrant parents, in spite of the school system.
Yes, general classes are geared toward producing consumers. There is always a small percentage of creative people compared to the consumer population. There is no politically palatable way to pander to this minority on which the whole system actually depends. That would be favoritism, un-American.
But the dumbing of Americans has been observed for decades, and written about by many authors. The economic machine thrives on more, less discriminating, consumers. But the survival of civilization depends on slowed growth and smarter individuals.
In other lands, a long term plan has a chance. In the U.S, anything beyond the next election is unpredictable. There have been several good long-term plans, all gutted by the next Congress. Currently, the minor gains in public health promised by the massive health care "overhaul" are the first thing the next Congress has promised to reverse.
"Against Stupidity, the Gods Themselves Contend in Vain." — Schiller
In the U.S, stupidity itself is a virtue. The Common Man is exalted, and educated men demonized, the Ivory Tower Intellectuals.
We discuss this effect regularly, as in What’s wrong with Americans? Are we stupid? Are we toddlers? from 2008.
I find it troubling to be lectured on the subject of stupidity by an author who seems to think that the ignorance of Americans about how their government works is somehow implicitly demonstrated by not knowing that the Earth revolves around the sun and what the first book of the Bible is.
A bit less thought seems to have been put into said lecture than the author presumes. Perhaps said author should worry about keeping his own intellectual house in order before he sets about judging the minds of complete strangers.
Tim: I didn't know you at all before today, but I guess I am lecturing you. Maybe you should learn to read more carefully before hurling accusations. Thanks for unwittingly illustrating this post.
Americans are dumb because they consider Arabs, Turks, Central Asians, South Asians, Persians, and Russians white. Arabs and Turks are considered Middle Eastern. Central Asians, South Asians, Persians, Indo-Aryans, and Russians are considered Asian.
The Americans think they consider everyone in the world, white. Just because if your origins came from Asia, it doesn't mean that you are white. I am Iranian but I preferred to be considered Asian.
Americans are very stupid when it comes to considering people, Asian.
Muhammad,
Your comment mixes definitions to a degree that you have no point: "Americans" would define those that are citizens of the United States in the loose vernacular, but those who live in North America or South American in the strict definition. "White" is a racial term, and usually means people with fair(er) skin– but can be from North America, Brazil, South Africa, Europe, Russia,, Kenya, or anywhere else. It's a useless term (but serves to illustrate your confusion, it seems). "Arabs" and "Turks" would likely be somewhere between a racial term and a cultural term– usually something that is self-defined.
I am an "American" in that I have a U.S. passport and live in North America. I think my intelligence is just fine. If you'd like to challenge me one-on-one to some sort of test or contest to see who is smarter, let's go. If you'd like to define some broader set of peoples and attempt to define their relative intelligence compared to another set of peoples, good luck– it doesn't work. If you are trying to compare the intellectual contribution of one group of people vs. another, then first let's please define our metrics (Nobel prizes? GDP? University graduates per population? literacy rates?), then second let's be very careful on how we define our groups of populations.
In American WASP parlance, "white" seems to mean "us", as opposed to "them". The only Iranian that I knew well preferred to be considered Persian, as opposed to White, Asian, or (he would sneer) Arab. But Persian is not a choice on most forms.
Two of the race choices really bother me: "Spanish surnamed" and "African American". The former applies to people from many cultures and countries, but whose distant patrilineal ancestors came from the area currently called Spain.
And I have known several people who came to the U.S. from Africa, whose ancestors were African for over a century back, and who came to this country as adults, have to answer "White" because of primarily European heritage.
Yet dark skinned Americans who had some fraction of their ancestors most recently leave Africa over 150 years ago (but are genetically mostly European) are fully "African American".
Muhammad Shah Sarkashian Ali,
My wife is Palestinian, born in Bethelehem, considers herself white and Asian. Several years ago, races were divided into caucasian, negroid, mongoloid, and amerind. The other ethnic groupings were geocultural.
Lonnd ago in an online application, the multiple choices for race or ethnicity included about 30 choices, the last two of which were "I don't know" and "I'm a mutt". Most Americans would be mutts. My ancestry has been researched and I can say that my heritage includes German, Irish, English, and Native American, and a whole bunch of "I don't know".
BTW, I knew a couple of Armenian Iranians in college, they considered themselves Asian and White.
Hoy de hafez!
"After more than three years of combat and nearly 2,400 U.S. military deaths in Iraq, nearly two-thirds of Americans aged 18 to 24 still cannot find Iraq on a map, a study released Tuesday showed.
The study found that less than six months after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, 33 percent could not point out Louisiana on a U.S. map."
http://articles.cnn.com/2006-05-02/politics/geog….
It is interesting that Americans don't understand simple things like geography. I was talking to a person on a website and they thought Austria was Australia (I understand that they are similar). But the Americans are as it has been described in this article. And there is a large percentage that do not know common things because of there educations and schools (Source:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx4pN-aiofw) If the Americans have Nuclear weapons and vote for someone who would if i can use the phrase: "Just nuke 'em!". Maybe if congruous did instate the intelligence test then America would have better leadership and the schools would be fixed and Americans wouldn't be "Stupid" (I think this is best case scenario cause I'm not American).
Americans are the top number one ignorant civilization on this planet.
They don know respect other cultures.
Religion makes one narrow-minded and stupid. It sets up the victim for failure at every step of his journey.