Washington’s governing elites think we’re all morons

October 3rd, 2016 by Charles Cameron

Of course, that’s young people.

Young people today .. if you want to dismiss these findsings .. or young people are our future .. if you want to let the impact settle in.

**

Here, for my convenience, is a map kindly provided by The Washington Post in 2013, in an intriguing Ezra Klein piece aptly titled Most Americans can’t find Syria on a map. So what?

syria-on-the-map

Maybe Firesign Theater had it right when they titled their 1971 album: I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus.

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Posted in Charles Cameron, complex systems, complexity, Dabiq, foreign policy, Geography, geopolitics, hillary clinton, humor, map, maps of war, new york times, nuance / subtlety, Outside the beltway, polls, romney, statistics, syria, Uncategorized, washington, wicked problems | 5 comments

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  1. Scott:

    October 3rd, 2016 at 4:10 pm

    Ever seen the movie Idiocracy? We’re heading there…

    For your viewing pleasure:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBvIweCIgwk

  2. carl:

    October 9th, 2016 at 4:19 pm

    So the very well paid paper pushers in Dc figure us in the great unwashed mass of flyover people don’t know much about the details of the various federal policies. They are right. We don’t. We do know about results though. We may not know the details of anti-poverty policies but we do know that the black family has been thoroughly shattered since the 60s and a black child has less that a 30% chance of being born into a family with a mother and father married and living together. We do know that current interest rates are clawing the guts out of savers even if we don’t know much if anything about fiscal policy. We can see plainly the grads of public schools don’t read, write and figure very well even if we have no idea at all how to comply with No Child Left Behind regulations. We see all this plainly, the opinions about us held by sore headed, overpaid bureaucrats who are three parts resentful they are not fully appreciated for their vital contribution to the revision of paragraph A of subsection K of the revised standard of compliance guidelines that are currently awaiting final approval to the contrary.
    .
    It seems to me that Kipling, as usual, had something valuable to say about this. “An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please;
    An’ Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool — you bet that Tommy sees!”

  3. Charles Cameron:

    October 9th, 2016 at 4:42 pm

    Hi Carl:
    .
    I take your point with regard to domestic policy, but wonder about foreign policy — anhy comments on that side of things?

  4. carl:

    October 10th, 2016 at 7:15 am

    Charles:
    .
    It is the same. All those Ivy League grads inside the Beltway are very intimately acquainted with every complexity and nuance of any foreign place you care to name. They write at length about them and find each other’s work very impressive. Us Deplorables can’t follow those arguments. We didn’t go to the right schools. We only go by what we see; the Taliban stronger than it has been since 2001, Vlad the Great conquering, American sailors on their knees before some Persian power boaters, Jihadi killers having their own country and two plain enemies of the United States of America, the House of Saud and the Pak Army/ISI, repeatedly hailed as allies and even being subsidized. It is madness that only people blinded by their own self-perceived brilliance can’t see as plainly as the sun in the sky. But Tommy sees. We see.
    .
    As is stated in some of your linked articles, I think it is a bit of a cheap shot to criticize people for not knowing where this or that country is. It would be a legitimate gripe if people formed their opinions and acted upon them in complete isolation. But they don’t. When something happens we talk it over with our friends and relations; and somebody knows where Tajikistan is and somebody else knows who is next door and the annoying cousin is motivated to do some reading. Some time passes and we have a pretty good idea of what is going on. And we have an even better idea of what fools our so called betters are.

  5. Charles Cameron:

    October 10th, 2016 at 10:16 pm

    Just saw this, from the CFR & National Geographic Survey on Global Literacy of “1,203 people aged eighteen to twenty-six who currently attend or have recently attended a college or university in the United States, whether a two-year or four-year institution:

    The survey, whose complete findings appear in this report, revealed significant gaps between what young people understand about today’s world and what they need to know to successfully navigate and compete in it. On the knowledge questions asked, the average score was only 55 percent correct. Just 29 percent of respondents earned a minimal pass—66 percent correct or better. Just over 1 percent — 17 of 1,203 — earned an A, 91 percent or higher.
    .
    Respondents exhibited limited knowledge of issues critical to the United States. Only 28 percent of respondents knew that the United States is bound by treaty to protect Japan if it is attacked. Just 34 percent knew this about South Korea. Meanwhile, only 30 percent knew that the constitutional authority to declare war rests in the legislative branch of the U.S. government.

    Not that I should claim any superiority — my own knowledge is appallingly thin in some places, non-existent in others.