Re: VGA cards are now posted for sale on EBAY

[mdj <mdj.mdj@gmail.com>]

On Aug 20, 8:32 am, Poster <pos...@nospam.com> wrote:

> And as far as the worn-out "stupid American" conceit...
>
> So are Americans just now stupid, or have Americans always been stupid?

Of course, the scientific evidence suggests that no cultural or racial
group (including Americans) is any more "stupid" than any other, if
we're using intelligence as the metric to seperate the "stupid" from
the "smart" ...

That said, our societies tend to associate knowledge with
intelligence; "smart" people, you will notice, tend to know a lot of
"stuff" (Though it's often narrow and specialised). Unfortunately,
this leads people to make the incorrect assumption that "ignorant
people are stupid" rather than the more accurate "stupid people are
ignorant". You see this fallacy all the time: studies show that the
stupid/ignorant/undereducated tend to vote conservative, leading
parochial liberals to make the false assumption that conservatives are
stupid :-)

You'll find that almost always a comment about a particular groups
"stupidity" is actually a comment about their (percieved) lack of
education. Fortunately, education standards are much more easily
measured than stupidness, and you can easily find statistics showing
the *relative* education levels of different western countries if
you're interested.

The widely held perception of Americans being "stupid" in the 'rest of
the world' (IMHO) comes down to two fairly recent things: a) Media
organisations putting the nations "stupid" people on television as a
form of 'entertainment'. b) A recent president who's poor use of
language made him appear uneducated, and thus stupid.

Matt