Thanks to Dave Stira for sending me this clip first!
This here clip is not surprising, really, but there are several funny moments. It's depressing to know how stupid the electorate is, but it's satisfying to know that, even though my candidate of choice lost, his opponent won not on his merit, but thanks to media manipulation of morons who make up the majority of voters.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
This is my counter:
11 comments:
True a large sector of the media was biased, but they were pretty virulently anti-Bush in 2004 and he still got re-elected so you can't just dismiss Obama's win as a result of media manipulation.
*Disclaimer*
I'm not an Obama fan, hence my comment above is not motivated by any sort of personal opinion or political bias.
As i mentioned on my blog, you could probably make a similar video using McCain supporters. And you can't really blame the media because if anyone wanted to they could have found out all of that information fairly easily. It's really the general laziness of the american voter to not bother to find anything out. Which is why we should have some sort of voter exam. This polling data shows that only 42% could correctly identify the democrats as controlling congress, but as liepa pointed out on my blog an early poll about youth vote showed only 49% correctly saying that republicans controlled congress in 2006.
I just think it's a cop-out to say it's the fault of the media, and as Trashcan points out there is ignorance on both sides of the fence. Anyhow, I found the following article quite interesting and while I might not agree with everything in it, it certainly merits important discussion
Why the Republicans Must Lose
By Radley Balko
http://reason.com/news/show/129599.html
Wait, Trashcan, do you mean a vote exam to make one eligible to vote? Considering voting is voluntary in the US can you imagine how low voter turnout would sink if you had to sit an exam to become eligible to vote?
well rachel, voter turnout now is way too high if you consider how many people are competent to vote. from the poll results i'll estimate that at least twice as many people are voting than should. but i'd actually expect it to me much higher. idiots shouldn't be able to vote, neither should ignorant people, and most people are either one or the other.
What i would suggest is not an hour long exam to get your resgistration, but say 3-4 questions on your ballot. We had in durham a bubble scantron ballot where you bubble in who you want to vote for, at the same time there could be a couple questions, if you don't bubble in the correct answers your vote simply wouldn't be counted. I'm not saying they need to be super difficult, they could be like which party is in control of congress, who is the vice president, how many branches of government are there. All questions which fewer than 50% of people in the US could answer. I'll go so far as to say if there are 4-5 questions and you get 1 wrong your vote still counts. There was nothing in the original constitution of the US that precludes some sort of exam to vote. The problem is that such exams were given to blacks in the south with impossible questions like how many bubbles were there on a bar of soap. That was clearly wrong, but it doesn't mean that any form of examination would be wrong.
i think it should include a bikini competition. fat people vote for too many pork-barrel projects, just cause they like pork so much.
The questions you mentioned, Loky, merely test awareness. Don't you think intelligence matters as well? You're often frustrated with idiocy, but your test only prevents ignorance from playing a role.
"Artical"? What is that? Not in my dictionary, is that Lithuanian?
The first problem is that you are assuming that intelligent people would make smart choices. Many of the idiocies of which i complained are perpetrated by intelligent people. Second how to define intelligence. Some sort of IQ test? I'm not sure we have a reliable method to determine intelligence. Finally if you are going to argue that intelligence is the deciding factor, where do you draw the line (the same can be said of ignorance.) If we want only the most intelligent people to rule, than maybe we should have the country run by an oligarchy of the 100 smartest people.
I'm not trying to automatically disenfranchise anyone. In general probably the least intelligent would also be least likely to pass a knowledge exam, but if anyone actually cared enough (and was the least bit mentally competent) they could vote.
An "artical" is a written composition in prose forming an independent part of a publication such as this one:
http://www.schucktales.com/america/912artical.htm
Loky, that's a good question. I'll think about that.
Post a Comment