To quote Terry Pratchett on this matter:
And yet democracy still remains the best option for selecting rulers.
You’re right: Mr Strawman sure has some crazy opinions.
Meanwhile, in this thread, all anyone has said is that these street walk ups are a really bad way to draw any inference about the general knowledge of a population.
Right; and note that it wasn’t the only trick / broken question. “What country is Venice, Italy in?” is also one that will cause confusion, second-guessing oneself, thinking you didn’t hear clearly etc. Not for everyone, but it may make the difference between needing to ask 30 people before you get a funny answer, and needing to ask only 10.
Do you have any evidence that people are dumber now than they were in the past?
Bill Maher.
If he was quoting saying that the US school system is not the best in the world you might have a point but what he said instead was:
“This country simply has no educational standards anymore they will let you out of a public high school and give you a diploma and you don’t have to know anything which used to be the mission of schools”
And then he goes on to rant against critical race theory or not and grooming or not.
So his main point was that the education system was previously good but now is failing due to all of the social justice warriors infecting it. This is a very tired trope that every generation has complained about but which is not supported by data.
He’s just saying, “It’s different and I don’t like it.”
It depends on what you’re measuring, of course, but there’s a lot of evidence for an unprecedented level of collective irrationality which can be summed up in two words: Donald Trump. That this traitorous imbecile might again be elected president of the United States is objectively nothing short of astonishing. Do I really need to explain this?
Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 as a result of transgressions that would be just another day at the (Oval) office in a Trump administration. Criminal malfeasance and treason is now normalized, along with election denial every time a Republican loses. News that was once brought to the people by the venerable Walter Cronkite is now being delivered by the likes of Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and social media “feeds”. There were certainly evil actors in bygone days, but characters like Joe McCarthy were eventually ostracized and shamed into oblivion. Today they’d be running for president, and probably winning.
Among the thousands of articles one can find about the dumbing down of America, there’s a good one in the Atlantic, but its paywalled, so here’s a rehash of it:
I also like this take:
It sounds to me like your reasoning is clear. People are voting for Donald Trump because they are stupid. People are stupid because they vote for Donald Trump. That is totally unassailable reasoning for sure.
Ah ninjad by Atamasama
I will add though, that circular arguments can nonetheless be true…but this is a pointless circular argument.
Anyone that agrees with the the implicit premise of what voting for Trump says about the electorate – and doesn’t feel that any nuance needs to be added – would find @wolfpup’s conclusion to be tautological.
Nice try at a tautology but that was never the argument. Aside from plutocrats with vested interests in tax cuts and deregulation who always vote “R”, people are (clearly) voting for Trump for reasons that ultimately boil down to the fact that they’re ignorant (or “stupid”, or whatever synonym you prefer). I don’t know how this could possibly be in dispute. Why they’re ignorant is a matter of some debate, but there’s lots of evidence (some of which I alluded to and linked to) that the vagaries of social media and the failure of traditional mass media to sustain the kind of informed populace necessary for democracy are a large part of the problem.
I’m genuinely amazed that the inclination to prove Bill Maher wrong is driving some folks to extremes of denial of some pretty obvious facts. I think I can pretty much guarantee that if a majority of voters has a genuine interest in politics and public policy and didn’t believe that Lance Armstrong walked on the Sun that Trump would get about 0% of the vote.
There’s nothing inherently or objectively wrong with conservatism as a policy, though I largely don’t agree with it. But it’s absurd to regard Trump as anything but a self-serving grifter who’s a danger to the nation, and those who don’t see that are stupid, period.
It isn’t that they are stupid it is that they are being deliberately misinformed. What has changed is that right wing news organizations discovered that their audience didn’t tune in to learn about what was going on around the world, instead they tuned in to hear that their view of what was going on around the world was right. And they could maintain cult like devotion by telling them that all other sources of information were lies. The self selection of the social media sphere exacerbated this with each individual having the ability to choose their own reality based on selecting which sources of information about the outside world they wanted to hear.
The “genius” of Trump was his exploitation of how far this had gone. The conventional wisdom was that although you could spin the facts to suit your needs they needed to be at some level grounded in truth, and if you crossed that line they would turn against you. Trump demonstrated that there was no line. The right wing base had gotten so used to deciding truth of falsity entirely by whether it supported their world view that they would eagerly accept anything he said.
So yes we are in trouble, but its not because critical race is being taught or is banned from our schools (neither is really true), or because people don’t know how to answer when someone asks a nonsensical question about who first walked on the sun.
As for his complaints about the ads, yes taken at face value they are dumb and uniformative. But that is missing their whole point. The things he pointed our aren’t designed to convince you of anything consciously they are designed to target your subconscious implicit biases, and the reason that they work is not that people are stupid, its that its hard wired into our neural networks. Studies show that even if people know what is being done and report that they were in no way influenced by them, they still have an affect on those people.
Finally on to Democrats running away from the Liberal label. This isn’t because the word liberal has become associated with “woke”. Liberal has been a bad word since Reagan if not earlier. Yes, the Liberals need to be better on their brand labeling and it would be nice if they could take back the word, but that doesn’t happen overnight, and in the mean time calling yourself a word that most people have a bad association with is not going to help you win. The left decided long ago that rather than try to take it back it was better to just go by progressive instead and that seems to be doing just fine. I really think that in terms of branding they might be better off tarnishing the word “conservative” rather than trying to rehabilitate “liberal”.
After writing this I realize that I am probably to some extent exercising my own implicit bias against Maher, and that if a modified version of parts of this segment, minus that digs at wokeness and CRT, was given John Stewart, I might have been more accepting. But frankly I just can’t stand his smarmy condescending attitude. When I watch a John Stewart segment I feel a positive energy, with and “oh my god look at all the crazy stuff that is happening”. With Maher I get a much more negative cynical vibe that everyone is stupid idiots except me and by extension you for watching me and so lets take some time and marvel at our superiority. There is just a bit of mean spiritedness in his attitude that turns me off.
They seemed to be pretty successful at turning “neocon” into a pejorative; unfortunately that’s a label that only really applies to a subset of conservatives, and it has been more than a decade before I’ve heard it in use. I think conservatives have become much more insular after the Bush the Younger, and are no longer trying to conquer the world. Certainly, Trump and MAGA don’t fit that mold; they are much happier oppressing and exploiting people of different ethnicities domestically rather than abroad.
Sure it was. You started the tangent by saying "For anyone looking to answer the question how is it possible that [Trump] could be running for president of the United States with a good chance of actually winning” and posted Maher’s rant about “The United States of Dumb-merica”.
Then, when asked for evidence of how Americans are getting more stupid, the response is “here’s a lot of evidence for an unprecedented level of collective irrationality which can be summed up in two words: Donald Trump.”
Yeah it’s circular.
Not entirely wrong of course, but it’s ironically irrational when you’ve been talking about collective irrationality.
Great post @Buck_Godot, and this point in particular is one I missed earlier.
There are many labels for people at various points on the political spectrum, and it’s a fool’s errand to waste time trying to reform a word versus just using a different one. Politicians on both the left and right do this, it’s very misleading to depict it as the left being “afraid”.
“How can these people possibly support the candidate I oppose? Clearly they must be stupid and insane.”
That’s you. That’s what you sound like.
But only if you and Bill Maher get to decide who’s allowed to vote, apparently.
Exactly right, thank you.
Basically, Trump accidentally discovered that wallowing in lies and presuming the ignorance of his base was a winning political strategy. He lies so consistently that he probably can’t even tell the difference between fact and lie himself any more, and has long learned that it doesn’t matter to his followers. Fact-checking his various pronouncements during the four years of his presidency, the New York Times put the lie count at 30,573.
Know what you sound like? A simplistic moron, if that’s what you got out of my comments. No, what I want isn’t voters who necessarily always agree with me. What I want is voters who can actually explain, rationally and with reference to fact-based reality, why they’re voting the way they are. I want voters who can distinguish facts from lies. What I want is a nation that is not dead last among all industrialized countries – by a wide margin – in its support of quality public broadcasting, but absolutely #1 – also by a wide margin – in the prevalence of commercial media that specialize in promoting lies and a manufactured reality – one where Fox News is America’s #1 cable news channel.
But the educated citizen knows … that only an educated and informed people will be a free people, that the ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all, and that if we can, as Jefferson put it, “enlighten the people generally … tyranny and the oppressions of mind and body will vanish, like evil spirits at the dawn of day.”
– John F. Kennedy, at the 90th anniversay convocation of Vanderbilt University, May 18, 1963.
There’s major irony in Maher, who has promoted incredibly stupid memes about science and medicine, going on about how dumb his fellow countrymen are. 
You’re not wrong there. I remember Mahr speaking with a doctor about vaccinations and he didn’t appreciate how the doctor was addressing him.
Mahr: Your talking to me like I’m a crazy person!
Doctor: In this matter, you are.
Nitpick it was the Washington post. I’m a bit protective of my local paper.
You’re right, sorry about that. I don’t know why I thought it was the NYT. Probably because they reported the same story.
BTW, I love the motto of the Washington Post: “Democracy dies in darkness”. This perfectly summarizes my fears about American politics and Trumpism and the point that Maher was making in that video clip.
If all that Maher did was shed light, then no one would have a problem with him.
Well, Republicans and Libertarians might.