The Dumbing Down of America

by **notyou2** on Thu May 29, 2014 9:24 pm

Is America getting dumber? This article says yes.

http://www.macleans.ca/politics/america-dumbs-down/

by **saxitoxin** on Thu May 29, 2014 10:02 pm

The first two paragraphs were GREAT! The politicization of evangelical Protestantism since 1976 is extremely interesting. Then it just turned into the kind-of Canadian flag waving parade of horribles that the major northern news outlets engage in like clockwork whenever the C$ loses parity, or Centre Block starts becoming unusually lapdoggish toward whatever lunatic is running the show in DC. These articles are often cringeworthy as they highlight Canada's trademark absence of self-awareness, for instance ...

While 82 per cent of Americans now say they seek out news digitally, the quality of the information they’re getting is suspect. Among current affairs websites, Buzzfeed logs almost as many monthly hits as the Washington Post.

unique visitors

unique visitors in Canada

In a country bedevilled by mass shootings

mass shooting fatalities per 1 million in Canada:

But more than that, it's that Newsweek and Time would never run a pages-long analysis of civic life in Canada. So it just comes across as a demonstration of a kinda desperate Napoleon-complex and makes me sad.

by **Ray Rider** on Fri May 30, 2014 1:20 am

saxitoxin wrote:
While 82 per cent of Americans now say they seek out news digitally, the quality of the information they’re getting is suspect. Among current affairs websites, Buzzfeed logs almost as many monthly hits as the Washington Post.

Toronto Star / unique visitors: 3.1 million
Buzzfeed / unique visitors in Canada: 8.7 million

In a country bedevilled by mass shootings

mass shooting fatalities per 1 million in Canada: 0.11
mass shooting fatalities per 1 million in U.S.: 0.06

But more than that, it's that Newsweek and Time would never run a pages-long analysis of civic life in Canada. So it just comes across as a demonstration of a kinda desperate Napoleon-complex and makes me sad.

Good points.

I had a good laugh at this line: "Barack Obama, the most cerebral and eloquent American leader in a generation..." haha! "Cerebral and eloquent"? He's very skilled at reading from a teleprompter, I'll give him that much. I mean, it wasn't difficult to outclass Bush.v2 but that doesn't automatically make the man a Churchill..

by **saxitoxin** on Fri May 30, 2014 1:53 am

Well Jonathan Gatehouse is just silly. I seem to remember he once filed a story congratulating the NDP for winning Saskatchewan when they lost (apparently he wrote tbe story before elections returns were announced). And this is the guy who actually wrote an article titled "Canada is the Best Place on Earth" in which he declared that none of the existing quality of life measures are accurate so he had come up with his own (with a hodge-podge of weird criteria like "percentage of houses with 5+ rooms," "amount of fruit juice consumed", and "average time to reach orgasm" that he'd dug-up stats on from very heady sources like Men's Health surveys), and once he crunched the numbers it revealed Canada was the best. It would actually have a pretty hilarious satire article but he was absolutely dead serious about the whole thing.

This guy is basically just Canada's Bill O'Reilly. He's the Band of the Governor-General's Foot Guards, a July 1 Fireworks Show, and the Edmonton Eskimos Cheer Squad all rolled into one. It's incredible Macleans is this desperate for writers that he's got a job. It used to be a great magazine.

by **notyou2** on Fri May 30, 2014 7:06 am

saxitoxin wrote:

In a country bedevilled by mass shootings

mass shooting fatalities per 1 million in Canada: 0.11
mass shooting fatalities per 1 million in U.S.: 0.06[/list]

This just goes to show that we are a better shot than Americans. Seriously, the difference may be in the fact that Canada is predominately rifles and shot guns as it is pretty much illegal to own handguns.