Tuesday, July 25, 2006

I cringe at the stupidity...

Anyone who has ever read ann alhouse will not be suprised to find that it is on her website that I found the most cringeworthy idiocy I have seen in a long time. Not just selfishness, but real abject stupidity. So this is what they are talking about when they tell us that America's schools are failing? I spent a while a couple of weeks ago arguing with Aunt G (and by proxy Aunt S) about our educational competitiveness vs China's after Nicolas Kristof wrote his blushing op-ed about how rosy China's education system is. I'm not going to change my view that of all the things about China that I find troubling, the idea that the are superior educationally doesn't even begin to register, but I will perhaps now bow to the idea that the US seems to be producing numerous and voiciferous imbiciles by the truckload (not that I didn't already know it, but come on, sometimes you have to pretend for a while like they aren't all that delusional and ignorant).

Why am I so horrified? Ann gets all stupid herself indignantly sniping at this quote from T.C. Boyles"Do you really think anything is ever going to get better as long as there are 6.2 billion people?" Her attempt at snark is annoying enough, but her commenters are what really make you weep for our future:

"I haven't read Boyle, but that quote seems a tad simplistic. What resources are Hezbollah and Hamas fighting for? (I know, land, but it's really about religion, isn't it?) What about the Islamists in Somalia, what resources are they fighting for? And al-Qaeda? Do they really want our resources, or do they just want to see the West defeated for the sake of defeating the West? Seems like it's more about ideologies than resources."

More about ideologies that resources? WTF!?!?!? Do people get taught history anymore? It is just all these happy comfortable people living over there who just like totally hate each other because like they were taught that and aren't nice, you know? "For the sake of defeating the West," sounds like exactly the kind of thing people sign up for to sacrifice their life for and it couldn't have anything to do with the way the west has interacted with other parts of the world or colonialism or the living conditions under the regimes we have supported or anything like that. Between the racists pricks like this and the sci-fi(more fi than sci) polly annas who think our population can just grow unrestricted because we can go live on astroids and in space stations, it is kind of depressing. I hold dear to my heart the belief that her site doesn't represent anything close to an accurate cross-section of our populace, but after the last couple of elections, I have to acknowledge that these people are out there and in large and loud enough numbers to sometimes dominate the discourse.

As ANTM Danielle might say, "I think I just threw up a little in my mouth."