Ah, you get the demonic forces arrayed against you too? 'Nuff said. Carry on then. <gives veiled secret hand sign and winks>
(Nicely done apology and explication. I’ve had to do that sort of thing often enough that I appreciate it when I see it. -And it’s obvious my horse is a bit too high sometimes any way. So there we are.)
/hijack
Well that’s a pretty fair question. When I said that I was thinking along the lines of academic smarts:
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/EDUCATION/11/26/education.rankings.reut/index.html
According to UNICEF the US ranks 18th out of 24.
However stupid and smart mean different things in different contexts, and Sam Stone’s post has some truth in it.
What’s the difference between the US and Canada? Other then Canada ranking 4th instead of 18th, that is.
Pay stupid people to stop having babies. And make it easier for middle class and rich people to have more babies. All immigrants must pass an IQ test.
I like it. The best part is that we’d be able to pay the really stupid in Monopoly money.
Our tax system now seems to pay people to have babies. What would be the best way to go about paying stupid people to not have babies? You’d probably have to trick them into it somehow, if the program “You must be THIS–> smart to reproduce,” people would be insulted. You could, for instance, simply offer a tax rebate for not having kids, but that would only be a motivation for the poor not to reproduce, and poor doesn’t mean stupid.
I guess to have such a system, you’d have to have some separate system that identifies stupids so they can be directly offered cash to not make babies. Perhaps a national standardized test, or the government could secretly create a popular, free trivia/quiz game for all platforms (iphone, nintendo ds, computer, Flash, phone-in, consoles, etc) where the results are sent back to a database so the dummies can be singled out.
Please define what a ‘stupid’ is. Can’t find a country on a map? Hasn’t read Chaucer? Doesn’t know how to do a partial derivative?
I know, how about we define it by putting everyone on an uninhabited island, and see who can survive the longest? My money is on the ‘stupids’.
William F. Buckley once famously said that he would rather be governed by the first 200 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard. He was serious, and I agree with him. There’s nothing quite so ignorant as a liberal arts professor who thinks he’s been granted the wisdom of the ages.
Do you know why so many people are ignorant of government, of history, or geography? It’s not because they’re stupid. It’s because they’re rational. If you’re not someone who is personally interested in history or political science for its own sake, there’s no rational reason to spend a whole lot of time thinking about it. When your vote almost never matters, it’s entirely rational to not pay a whole lot of attention to politics.
But for intellectuals, such things are their hobbies. So they spend ‘irrational’ amounts of time studying them. Then they believe they’re somehow much smarter than everyone else. In the meantime, they couldn’t fix a flat, or repair a wall, or wire up a home, or plant a garden, or insulate a building, or lay a road, or do one any of the millions of other things the ‘stupids’ are much better at than they are.
Sam, you just lost your baby coupon.
I don’t think we’re talking about a very high bar, here. Perhaps anybody over 18 without mental disorders who doesn’t know how many states are in the country, or honestly believes the world is 2,000 years old.
We’re not talking about eradication and concentration camps, either. The general idea is to cultivate a more educated populous, not to exterminate everybody who can’t identify a photo of Walt Whitman. Not everybody needs to be intellectual (and, yes, if everybody was, society would crumble as intellectuals wouldnt dig ditches), but having some basic understanding of the world around us or the society we live in would be swell.
My biggest concern, really, is that people can be proud of their ignorance (if it is actual pride, and not just a defense mechanism).
See, if the ‘iintellectuals’ actually used their brains, they’d realize that babies are an increasingly valuable thing to have, because the earth’s population is graying at a rapid rate. Countries with lots of babies will have a big advantage in 30 years. But the smart people are going to cut our fertility rate in half (assuming you’re going to eliminate babies from the bottom half of the bell curve), when it’s already below replacement level. Smart thinking. This is cultural suicide. But hey, we’ll all be smarter as we die off.
You’d be better off paying smarter people to have more children. As a practical matter, it’s a lot less problematic to pay smart people to have kids than to identify and pay stupid people not to.
The smart people are a big part of the problem anyway, what with their deciding to remain students until their late 20s and pursue careers that leave them little time for kids. If society is getting dumber, it might just be because the smart people are killing themselves off. Not very smart, really.
Sigh.
See post #19.
Can I add some?
[ul]
[li]Anyone who think Marxism works.[/li]
[li]Anyone who thinks the federal government is capable of highly efficient management of an economy.[/li]
[li]Anyone who thinks that people who work in high finance do not contribute anything to the economy.[/li]
[li]Anyone who thinks insurance companies are evil by their nature.[/li]
[li]Anyone who thinks they can predict winners and losers in the economy better than can the wisdom of the market, and who believes they should have the right to tax the public to ‘invest’ in things they think are better.[/li]
[li]Anyone who still believes in wage and price controls.[/li]
[li]Anyone who uses the word ‘deconstruction’ more than once a month or so.[/li]
[li]Anyone who believes you can spend your way into prosperity.[/li]
[li]Oh, and anyone who believes that the world’s religious people are by definition stupid.[/li][/ul]
Oh, see what I did? I took my own personal beliefs, inverted them, and used them to define anyone who doesn’t think the same way as being ‘stupid’. Which is exactly what most of you are doing.
I have neighbors who believe the world is 6,000 years old. They aren’t stupid. One has a masters degree, the other is a professor. Their kids get straight A’s. They’re one of the nicest families I know. Not a dummy in the bunch.
If you can’t figure out how they can be smart and still believe such things, then maybe you’re not quite as smart as you think you are.
Your profile thingie says you’re from Canada. If that’s true, you might not be familiar with the dwindling culture in the States, so your context for this whole thing might be different. For some reason, I regard Canadians in general as smarter, or at least more forward-thinking than is the norm here.
Not that this invalidates your theories.
Though, I thought overpopulation was a looming danger for humans, not underpopulation. I’ll look into it.
ETA: I might also add, I don’t think anybody in this thread (except you and a few others who’re reacting the same way) are serious. If somebody actually suggested not allowing people they think are dumb to procreate, I’d probably have some unkind words/knives for them. The entire concept of “stupids” is a farce. Again, taco bar.
Imagine a group of 9 year old boys sitting in a clubhouse debating how to rid the world of crummy girls. That’s about the level of seriousness most of us are working with.
In fact, if someone thought we were serious here, I could understand a certain amount of boisterous outrage.
Sigh.
See post #38.
:rolleyes:
We’re less religious. In fact, I can’t offhand think of a national religious figure in Canada that is in any way analogous to Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, Louis Farrakhan, Jessie Jackson, etc.
Whether or not one feels religion in itself is a sign of stupidity, we have fewer public figures making public statements of a political nature that relate to religion. It doesn’t work here, so there’s no value in trying to whip up support in such a manner though if it did, and let’s be honest, such an approach would tend to attract some pretty dumb and vocal people.
You start to see why this project is so desperately needed, no?
By ‘forward thinking’, you wouldn’t happen to mean that they agree with you more politically, would you?
You can start with the UN population council’s demographic overviews.
In short - the best guess right now is that the world population is going to stabilize at somewhere close to 9 billion, or maybe a little under. But a bigger story is that a number of rich democracies are collapsing in population. Japan is heading for a demographic disaster. Europe is being forced to maintain high levels of immigration to keep its population up, and even so it’s graying rapidly.
Yes, I understand you don’t really want to stop them. But the whole premise is that there is a problem with the amount of ‘stupid’ people in America, and that it’s a problem that would ideally be ‘fixed’ in some way.
Pretty much everybody has that opinion, for any given value of “stupid.” It’s what constitutes “stupid” that people fight about. I personally feel anybody who roots for the Yankees is seriously lacking in grey matter, while What Exit? questions the wisdom of Dodger fans. Pretty near everybody questions the amount of thought I put into my sartorial decisions. 
That said, I stand by my previous nebulous definition of “stupid,” and my suggestions on solutions.
On one hand I agree with you that voting tests are open to horrid abuse just like that, and should never be used. On other I don’t think people necessarily advocate them for political suppression.
For example I think if people are going to vote for a president that’s all about starting a war in another country they at least ought to be able to pick that country out on a map.
They don’t have to be able to pick out every country on a map. I know I’d be hard pressed to pick out Liechtenstein on a map, but by god if we were voting on a president bent on war with Liechtenstein I’d atleast learn enough about it to locate it on a map.
How can a conscientious voter vote for a president bent on war with Iraq and not even know enough about Iraq to find it on a map?
I agree voting tests are open to abuses of political suppression and are very evil, but I can at least understand why someone might advocate them with innocent intent.
Would the population stabilize if first worlders started reproducing like it’s the baby boom II?
You see my cite earlier? American academics do need fixed.