I’m confused. Is the madrasa student the ignorant one, or the poster who expects him to know how much a currency he’s probably never seen is worth?
Do you know what 25 million Afghanis will buy you? (Yes, that’s what their currency is called). Or 25 million Pakistani rupiah?
GomezK, WTF is all that John Howard stuff about? Is he not the actual Prime Minister of Australia? How are we supposed to know that? Almost nothing that happens in Australia has any effect on our daily lives.
Anyway, the US is one of the largest nations in the world, population-wise. It wouldn’t take long to collect samples of a thousand American-born idiots just by the law of averages. Even if you only went to New York, you could probably find a hundred people to say something stupid in a couple of days, because there are just that many goddamned people. I bet I could find just as much ignorance on the streets of London in a couple of days if I brought a camera, a convincing inquisitor and a bigoted joke to pull.
While I wouldn’t expect him to know the exact worth of twenty five million dollars, I would expect him to realize that the reward being offered by the United States government for information leading to the capture of a man who brought about the death of 3,000 people in a spectacular attack would be more than the price of an automobile.
I generally don’t argue with idiots. Actually, that’s my trick question for weeding out people who really believe life begins at conception from those that are just against women who have an abortion.
Okay, a couple posts in here reminded me of some other wonderful conversations I’ve had.
My cousin, who’s Mexican, married a British guy in 2004. After returning from the wedding, I was telling some coworkers about it. For background: I’m white.
Coworker: And their kids will be so cute. Biracial kids are always so good looking.
Me: What? This is my cousin we’re talking about. She’s white. She has blond hair and blue eyes.
Coworker: I thought you said she was Mexican!
Me: Well, she is. But her ancestors are from Ireland and Poland. She’s Jewish.
Coworker: So, she’s really Polish.
Me: No. She’s Mexican. She was born in Mexico and has lived in Mexico all her life and is a Mexican citizen.
As I recall, the conversation ended there, but I could tell that my coworker still didn’t believe me that my cousin could be both white and Mexican. Geez. People don’t only immigrate to the US, you know!
Second. This is my host mom, who I lived with the first two and a half months I was in Bulgaria. I feel kind of bad making fun of her, it’s really her fault that she’s not well-educated, but this was too funny. We were discussing my parents’ hypothetical trip to visit me. My parents live in California.
Host mom: How long will the trip take?
Me: I think about 17 or 18 hours in a plane.
Host mom: How long if they drove?
Me, thinking I misunderstood: What?
Host mom, miming steering: How long would it be to drive?
Me: Well, they can’t drive. There’s an ocean between us.
<pause>
Host mom: What about bus?
Thought about this some more. *Of course * I don’t expect him to know how much U.S. currency is worth. He is *ignorant * about it. That’s what ignorant means. That’s what the thread is about.
I am ignorant about any number of things, such as NASCAR, astrophysics, and coffee that supposedly tastes good. If anyone ever overhears me talking about these things, odds are they will consider what I say extremely ignorant.
Yeah, but it’s more about things that people are ignorant about that they should know, otherwise it’s not particularly interesting.
I work as a computer tech. We had issued a new laptop to a person, and through stupidity I forgot to set up the print drivers. It was stupidity, not ignorance because I knew better. I can usually take care of this sort of thing by remote controlling the unit, but it was not on, and I cannot remotely turn on a computer by WiFi. So I went to this person’s office, they were not there but the laptop was, so I tried to turn it on. No charge on the battery. I looked around and found the power adapter and plugged it in fired it up and downloaded the drivers. The person returned to the office, grabbed the power cable and yanked it out of the wall and admonished me “You don’t need that! Dave told me this is wireless!” (Dave is our system administrator). Dave darn near died laughing when I told him what had happened.
This just happened yesterday and I knew immediately I must share it with you all.
Older white lady in the office where I am temping puts her fingers in some random configuration and holds it out in front of her; she asks the only black person in the room, a mid-thirties lady who’s an Army vet and has a bachelor’s degree, “What gang sign is this?”. Blank look comes back at her. Then a slow and quiet, “I don’t know.” I just sat, stunned.
I would have sat, laughing. It’s an absolutely comical, almost seemingly parodic episode, one of those things you view as random and unrelated to reality. Years from now you will be sitting down thinking, “Wait, did that really happen? No. No way, how absurd! Clearly just a product of random misfirings in my brain’s synapses.”
But it did, Nawth Chucka. It really did.
I was waiting for a friend in a hotel lobbey here the other day when I overheard an American ask another “do they have birth control in Mexico?”
yrs ago, I had a room mate who was, for want of a more precise term, STUPID. One day I brought home a microwave oven. He freaked and said "I wont have that in the house! It emits radiation, I am not gonna have radiation poisoning!
I explained that it did indeed emit radiation, but only inside, and that it was NOT radioactive, or in anyway linked with nuclear radiation. He explained that Radiation was radiation, and it didn’t matter what type it was, all radiation was instant death.
I got out an old high school physics text, and showed him that light was radiation. He then went into his room and unscrewed and threw out all the light bulbs.
I don’t know what ever happened to him, but I imagine that as most parking speed bumps are now made from asphalt, his employment options are surely diminishing…
Regards
FML
Similar to this, I was waiting to check in at a hotel in Buffalo. In front of me were two women, apparently travelling from somewhere in the east to somewhere out west, then back. Traveler #1 says: “maybe on the way back, for a change, we should drive through Canada.” Traveler #2, with panicked look replies “Is that safe? I mean we don’t even know if they have gas stations in Canada!”
Would that be the Pakistani Rupee or the Indonesian Rupiah?
Sorry. Just couldn’t resist. 
I didn’t hear this one, but my mother says one of her co-workers once said, and I quote:
“I’m not a bigamist, I just hate boongs*.”
There are no emoticons for what I am feeling right now.
My nominee for “most ignorant” changes every day. My Grandma just got an e-mail address and is discovering all the glurge for the first time.
While discussing New Jersey’s new civil unions law, a co-worker informed me that two gay people cannot have the same type of marrige as two straight people. When pressed for a reason, she shouldn’t give me one, but stuck with her statement.
When I was in graduate school in the US, I had quite a few interesting occurrences re. health insurance. You reminded me, because of the occurrences a Mexican friend had.
My biggest: my government put me on an insurance that covered:
“any medical care due to either accident or illness. If the care will last longer than two weeks and it is medically advisable to move the patient, patient will be returned to Spain at the insurer’s expense, to continue treatment in Spain.
If the care will last longer than a week and/or it is not advisable to move them, travel and stay expenses for up to two people to accompany them.”
The uni claimed that did not cover as much as the insurer they’d chosen. Apparently “all” is not enough.
In some defense to the guy, some older languages (notably C) required you to define FALSE before you could use it, since it wasn’t an integral part of the language.
Defining FALSE as a non-zero value, however, takes extra dumbassness.
Not that that surprises me in the least. I spent the better part of an afternoon last week showing the guy who maintains our issue tracking software how to do boolean algebra and if/else statements. The “else” part really blew his mind.
I suspect that this is what we get when we skimp on teaching our students math - programmers who don’t grok boolean algebra or “else” clauses.
Not fair. Give me a camera crew and a half hour in Essex and I can get the same footage.