Except the L.A. to Panama City run is far more likely to take you into a civil war, pitch you over the side of a mountain from an ill-maintained road, run you into robbers or smuggler gangs in remote areas, take you far from hotels, wi-fi, and other amenities travelers expect, and so on. Yeah, that’s so much like like a quick trip from Amsterdam to Rome I wouldn’t know which it was without my GPS.
But we are talking about the possibilities from the United States. Besides, there are places in the United States that are just as creepy. Where’s your spirit of adventure?
I had a cousin who swam the length of the Panama Canal. It’s true that he died at sea later on a most unfortunate vessel. But he had fun until then.
Klaus worked as an economist during communism but was known for his opposition to Marxist economic thought. Also, he’s not racist or anti-semitic, and he was elected some years ago, and not by any electorate but by the Czech Parliament. I don’t think he’d qualify. Still I sure would like to know who the hell Shydee is referring to.
I strongly suspect he’s referring to Obama. I’m basing that more on the “doesn’t give me much hope” more than any characteristics he described.
Yeah, even a Double-Strength Konservative Kool-Aid drinker wouldn’t claim that a highly articulate former president of the Harvard Law Review had “the IQ of a walnut.”
Betcha a dollar?
I have a hard time with the idea that Europeans are measureably, consistently more intelligent than Americans. In general, creatures are intelligent as they need to be to survive their daily lives, and to argue that Europeans have greater intelligence — greater learning capacity, more brainpower — suggests that there has been a generations-long evolutionary pressure in favor of intelligence only in Europe and not in America. I don’t see it.
And a huge side of Lipitor.
Hmmm…
You mean *Tall glass of ice cold ***sweet **tea, that stuff is crack in a glass, I swear. 
But look at British or German cuisine. I mean, your Southern menu there has two veggies, not just overcooked peas. blechh
Let me explain Spectre’s and my comments here: nations past Mexico tend to be highly unstable, with high crime, lots of violence, and casual brutality or kidnappings of foreigners. You couldn’t pay me to visit some of those nations. I’m sure they have a lot of interesting culture… but it’s not worth it.
*Anecdote: one of my Business teachers went to A Certain South American City. He was warned that, on the hour-long drive from the mountain-plateau airport to the city down below (near the coast), they might be stopped by kidnappers. If they wore shoes, they were right-wing kidnappers, and it was OK because they’d send money and he’d be released. If they didn’t have shoes, they were leftist guerrillas and it would get messier. And he was never to leave his hotel except to get into the car which came to pick him up, and only after verifying the driver’s identity.
In the 1980s I believe it was, David Letterman came up with this one gag that involved having Larry “Bud” Melman drive to Central America – I think the Panama Canal was his destination – and he would report in for each show. It seemed to get pretty hairy even before he left Mexico. I don’t remember how far he actually got, but the US Embassy in one country warned him not to go further, and Melman himself ended up pleading on the phone to Letterman to bring him back after a couple of scary incidents, which he did.
I met a guy from California who with his father drove a school bus packed with medical supplies all the way from California to Nicaragua, also in the 1980s. He said at the Guatamalan government’s insistence, an armed soldier rode shot gun the entire segment through that country.
The other issue has to do with education. America is the land of the free, all men are created equal. It is considered inappropriate for the last 40 years or so to relegate people to social strata - “you’re too dumb to be a college prof, here. take auto mechanics instead”. Many European countries have systems that stratify you (based on performance) into university or industrial training, trade apprenticeships, etc - a early as 12 years old.
Americans seem to find something offensive in telling the dumb ones “learn to dig ditches”. As a result, our system holds back not so much the smartest, as they will succeed anyway - but the middle-smart type and the lazy. They learn to do only what they need to get by, and our system has been progressively dumbed down until the dumb ones have to try to fail. It seems that telling them they can’t find Madagascar, or Iraq, or the USA on a map somehow hurts their self-esteem.
So over there, the smart ones learn something, know they’re smart, and know that Americans don’t seem to be educated.
Then there’s the whole debate about whether smart people are held in high esteem in the USA. Egghead? Geek? Just because they gave us the bomb, the moon, and the world, why should they get rich ahead of some comb-over real estate hype tyccoon or a bouncy movie star?
The smaller European countries seem to regard their smart people and artists as part of their cultural heritage, like their language. It’s what makes them better that the pinheads 100 miles away in the next country, and justifies holding on to their language and maybe marching over and taking the pinheads’ territory.
If you’re bored some day, try to find Harlan Ellison’s rant (in The Glass Teat or in The Other Glass Teat) about anti-intellectualism in American popular culture. it dates to the days of the TV cigarette commercial - “whaddaya want? Good grammar or good taste?”. Harlan Ellison can be as devastatingly biting as Cecil, but without an ounce of humor. The rant has nothing to do with left or right, he was mainly criticising Hollywood and American culture generally.
How do you reliably tell who is “dumb” and who just comes from an underprivileged background? Maybe that “dumb kid” just has a single working parent who doesn’t have any time to spend with him. Or maybe he’s dyslexic. Are you really prepared to give up on a kid and relegate him to ditch-digging after a test or two and a few bad grades?
I’ll bet that no matter how dumb some son of royalty was, few of them were relegated to “ditch digging” in school.
Einstein failed a school entrance exam, maybe he should have stuck to digging ditches.:dubious:
This is indeed a serious problem with European schooling. Even here in America, my high school guidance counselor believed I shouldn’t be taking AP English… because I didn’t know how to write an essay.
Well, surprise, surprise, that was because their required essay format was not something learned in other regions. So to them, I obviously didn’t know some basic material. I thought (and today, know for a fact) that they were testing the wrong knowledge and skill. In fact, their required format was not even an essay format: it was a legal argument format!
And it turns out, I can write awesome essays in real life.
The use of this argument (in similar words) really baffles me. It might have been true 20 years ago, when travelling to the Norway to speak Norwegian for an American was expensive. But today, with the internet offering you native-language sites, with DVDs coming in a variety of dubbed and subtitled languages, with original language radio and TV segments available over internet, it’s easier than ever before to practice speaking a language even if you are in Podunk, Indiana.
If you live in New York or LA, it’s of course even easier, because there will be either immigrants or tourists around speaking whatever language you have learned/are trying to learn. The question isn’t “I don’t need to learn <other language> because everybody speaks English”, it’s (as has been pointed out already) that learning a new language will develop parts of your brain, enable you to look at your own grammar and native language in a different light, and learning about a different culture will open your worldview a bit.
I wondered a bit when Cecil cited the percentages for how many Americans finish college, compared to Europeans. From a German perspective, we don’t have college, we only have Universities (and for practical jobs, Universities of applied science = Fachhochschulenn, which are structured more school-like). But every pupil who goes to Advanced High School (Gymnasium), which finishes with the Abitur (the only entrance exam necessary to enter University) has the last two years Kollegstufe (named, from what I’ve heard, because it’s modelled on the college system). The pupil can choose his subjects from certain groups, with two majors, and certain minimum requirements.
So was Cecil comparing the percentage of Europeans who finish advanced High School, or who finish University, to the Americans who finish college?
Also, while it’s sadly true that children of lower social classes get channelled more in the lower High School in Germany, I think that social stratifiying is stronger in the US, given that the budget of a school depends on the tax the parents in the neighborhood pay, so that poor parents= poor school, no equipment or good teachers, rich parents = rich school, good teachers, good equipment; which seems to me far more unfair than the german system where all taxes go into one pool and the school funds are distributed equally. Additionally, all schools, no matter the neighborhood, have the same set of minimum standards. So people don’t usually go to college and finish still believing in creation, as apparently happens in many cases. (Or finish High School to continue to university never having heard of evolution until then).
And yet despite the assertion that multi-lingual Europeans must have better-developed brains, the tests in Cecil’s column show only a tiny measurable difference between American IQ and European IQ:
You and I might agree in principle that expanding one’s cultural awareness makes you a better person, a more well-rounded individual, a more open-minded thinker, and so forth. It does not appear to affect the IQ in any way that the study was able to measure, given that the difference between 98 and 99 may well be statistical noise.
Our choices:
- The study was somehow flawed and unreliable and we should trust anecdotes over research; or
- Language and multiculturalism don’t convey as big an intelligence boost as we’d like to think.
- Our perception of European and American intelligence is in some way flawed.
Any or all of the above can be true. In particular, America probably has a wider spread of intelligence, because we have vast (but sparsely populated) tracts of interior rural land that Europe simply lacks. There are plenty of (as we sometimes call it) hicks from the sticks.
It is the urban areas along the coastlines where you will find the greatest diversity of races and languages and cultures, the most universities and the most-educated people, the most tolerance, etc. On average we may be the same, like these numbers here:
1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 6, 7, 8, 8, 9
3, 4, 4, 4, 5, 5, 7, 7, 8, 8
Both series of numbers have the same average. But you could also indisputably say that the first list has lower numbers (i.e., Americans are dumber because their list contains lower numbers).
How do you tell who is “dumb”? First - read Freakonomics; the major indicator of a person’s success in life is the education level of their parents. This isn’t to say that the offspring of the underprivileged will always fail - but generally, yess, they will struggle. Of course, statistics never tell the whole story - based on stats, the average person has one testicle and one breast. But, if you can’t read by grade 6, you probably ain’t never gonna be the next Hemingway, no matter how many bulls you fight.
Yes, this is why North America eschews elitism, to one extent - the stratification of society was used to stream the “wrong” people. I’m sure very few blacks were streamed for higher education (heck, for high school) no matter how much promise they showed in the 1950’s. Royalty in Europe, of course, had their own elite schools where the cream of Europe (“thick and rich floaters”) was taught to rise to the top no matter what it took; and nepotism found niches for the less capable.
Regardless, it goes back to the euro-abbeys in the middle ages - the more promising of the lowly peons were taken in, given a full education and could rise to be advisors to the kings and princes. Their education system, like the Chinese, still values book learnin’ for its own sake. American universities have scholarships, but no on the scale of the systems that have been in place in Europe to facilitate the education of the brightest.
Americans aren’t dumber - just less widely educated. OTOH, read Robert Heinlein’s diatribe in one of his posthumous books about his father’s education; the farmboys of Kentucky who showed promise, could be taught latin by high school, the most promising also Greek ina a one-room schoolhouse; a relative of mine, pushing 75, still has his schoolbooks where they read the Aenid and Virgil in orginal latin in a Pennsylvania school. What do we teach kids today that can compare to that in intensity of knowledge?
This maybe is another good myth for Cecil to tackle. A more in depth look at this that I once read determined that no, Einstein actually did quite well as a child. Apparently, one year during his schooling the area’s marking system was changed to match the country norm (inverted, as I recall) so reading Albert’s list of marks over the years made him appear to go from top to bottom of the heap. Actually he stayed at the top. One person read the marks, made the comment, and it has followed him like a bad internet reference for most of a century - perhaps because it makes such a pleasing moral.
I think this “Who wants to be a Millionaire” clip from France should prove that Europe is at least equally as dumb as the U.S.
Just exactly how multilingual are Europeans really anyway? I’ve met many who did not speak other than their native language. I bought into the “Europeans speak lots of languages” bit in my younger days and then was astonished when I got to know a German couple in Texas, and the wife said she did not learn English or any other language until an adult and that was only because she was going to the US with her husband. Then tooling around Central Europe on my own, the towns and villages were filled with unilingual people.