A Remarkable Number of People Think 'The Martian' Is Based On a True Story (buzzfeed.com) 367
MarkWhittington writes: The Martian is a smash hit movie that made $100 million worldwide during its first weekend. The science and engineering depicted was, with certain notable exceptions, near perfect. The cinematography and special effects were so well done that one could almost imagine that Ridley Scott sent Matt Damon and a film crew to Mars to shoot the movie. In fact, perhaps the film was a little too good. Buzzfeed took a stroll through social media and discovered that many people think that The Martian is based on a true story.
People are idiots. (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing new about it.
Re:People are idiots. (Score:5, Insightful)
What the fuck is happening to Slashdot? I mean Buzzfeed? Examiner? If I wanted stupidity I'd head over to Digg. Where has all the intelligence gone?
Re:People are idiots. (Score:5, Funny)
Where has all the intelligence gone?
4chan.
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+1 Unintentionally Informative
This is probably true, to some degree. 4chan attracts the outliers or long tails of the bell curve, i.e. the misfits who don't fit in, from both sides of the curve. This also includes some quite intelligent people.
But a perhaps a more interesting question is where did the wisdom go, and that certainly is not 4chan.
Re:People are idiots. (Score:4, Insightful)
Quite sure the "school shooters" also frequented Facebook and McDonalds.
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On the other hand, (Score:2)
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For a moment there, I thought you were talking about the moon landings.
Re:On the other hand, (Score:5, Funny)
For a moment there, I thought you were talking about the moon landings.
Didn't you know that the Moon landing was actually faked by filming on Mars. But when they finished they left one crew member behind .....
Re:On the other hand, (Score:5, Insightful)
Didn't you know that the Moon landing was actually faked by filming on Mars. But when they finished they left one crew member behind .....
The sick part is that the people who don't believe we went to the moon will believe that.
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Half of all people are below average intelligence.
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Half of all people are below average intelligence.
No. It's a bell curve distribution, not a line with a point at 100. Half of all people being below average would mean that no one was average. The vast majority of people are average because "average" is a small range in the middle of the bell curve. The area under the section under the curve relative to the total area under the whole curve indicates the percentage of the population. Even if you assume IQ 100 and only IQ 100 as average there are still a lot of people in that slot. Also, a very large p
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So remember, when you hear about study results that say 40% of "adults on the street" can't point to Africa on a map, they're talking about a smidgeon of below average people, some of the average people, and even some of the above average people. Be happy that they know what Africa is, a map is, and that either can be on the other, but only in different ways. That they point to the wrong part of the map (or believe a movie to be "based on a true story") shows they know something.
"Idiocracy" was supposed to be a warning, not a motivational poster.
Re:People are idiots. (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh please. We're not talking about seriously mentally challenged people (e.g. autistic savants, or anyone else who can't take care of themselves) or about children, we're talking about regular adults who have jobs, drive cars to work, etc.
Since we live in a technological society where we have to have some grasp of technology just in order to live and get along (you can't drive a car without knowing a little bit about technology, nor can you use a typical smartphone), excusing people for being completely uneducated about science is ridiculous. This is part of a basic education, stuff that everyone should know about to some extent.
So yes, if someone actually thinks Mars isn't a real planet, or that dinosaurs didn't exist, then that means they flunked 5th-grade science class and are therefore an idiot.
If there's one thing that popular TV has done for us lately, I'd say the show "Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?" actually is a help because it gives us an idea of where we ALL *should* be educationally; if you're not even as educated as a typical 5th grader, then you're a failure. This isn't a matter of "having different talents", this is a matter of very, very basic education. My talents are definitely not in literature, but I still can read and I know who Shakespeare was, and know of several of his plays. Considering he's probably the most important person in English literature, not knowing anything about him would be inexcusable and a sign of a completely lacking education. My talents aren't in biology either, but I learned about basic biology in high school; everyone else should have as well. I'm definitely not at all talented at art, but I know who Picasso was, again because I managed to graduate 8th grade. Heck, I think I learned about cubism and impressionism in 5th grade.
Not knowing basic science isn't a matter of having different talents or interests, it's a matter of basic elementary school education. If you don't have that, there's something wrong with you, plain and simple.
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If there's one thing that popular TV has done for us lately, I'd say the show "Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?" actually is a help because it gives us an idea of where we ALL *should* be educationally
The show is mostly useless trivia, so no it isn't 'where we all should be educationally'. If people never know about the majority of US Presidents, or specific dates of historic events, there would be absolutely no loss to education.
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I agree that rote memorization by itself is useless, but it is the basis for further understanding of history. If you want to understand the context of what a US President did, you better know when he was alive and in office. Even relatively minor US Presidents had big things happen during their Presidency.
Consider what would have happened if James Buchanan had taken a stronger line against secession in his lame duck months as president when the Civil War was getting off the ground. What? You didn't kno
Buzzfeed? Seriously?? (Score:5, Insightful)
What next, funniest moments of astronauts brought to you by scoopwhoop?
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No, next article will be: Why men breathing is sexist and rape, courtesy of The Mary Sue. The article after that will be: Why pedophilia is okay, courtesy of Salon(Salon actually did an article on that already).
Re:Buzzfeed? Seriously?? (Score:5, Informative)
Somehow Buzzfeed seems to be taken seriously in media circles now. Buzzfeed staff appear as talking heads on TV and radio now, as if they are serious journalists whose analysis matters. It's bizarre.
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Given the general state of decay in journalism, they're as good as any.
Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
A post on Slashdot related to the fact that many people lack basic education and/or skills to basic reasoning skills? /. now?
And over the top linking/citing a buzzfeed post? Are they now directly feeding their facebook wall on
I wonder what's worse: A few people believing a film is based on a true story when it obviously can't or the fact that this is posted here. I will ponder on that.
A lot of people think global warming is real (Score:2, Insightful)
Corporations are inherently evil.
The government actually cares about them.
Communism/socialism are viable systems of government.
There is a diversity problem in tech.
Everyone needs a stem education.
Open source projects need to be nicer and have codes of conduct.
I am sure they will all have a good laugh at the stupid people who believe "The Martian" is real
Idiots (Score:2)
Really what the poll was asking was "How many of you people are idiots". I'll give a pass to the elderly and mentally infirm who modern polling disproportionally represents but these numbers are too high to not represent a good number of complete idiots.
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Alright, I'll be honest. I posted before I RTFA. This poll is garbage although I'll stick to my guns that anyone who thinks the movie is real life is one of my above mentioned catagories
Same with ID4 (Score:2)
The same thing happened when Independence Day came out. Some people have no concept of reality. Nothing to see here, move along.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=ID4%20bas... [lmgtfy.com]
I guess these aren't the same people (Score:5, Insightful)
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Probably are. A little cognitive dissonance is nothing for those people :-).
Following the Trend (Score:5, Funny)
After Apollo 13 (based on a true story) and Interstellar (based on a true story) it's no surprise that people would think that The Martian is continuing the trend. Hell, it even stars Matt Damon, from the previous one. How are they supposed to keep it straight?! /satire
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Well played, sir. Well played.
Bunch of morons (Score:3)
It's obviously fiction, just like Tom Hanks in Apollo 13 (everyone knows you can't put a square peg in a round hole), Neal Armstrong in Apollo XI Landing (dead giveaway, where did they "go"? There are no bathrooms no the moon!), and Steve Coogan in Around the World in 80 Days (the lizard people grab anyone who gets too close to the edge).
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Remarkable people (Score:5, Insightful)
A remarkable number of people believe homeopathy works. A remarkable number of people believe in gods, devils, prophets and an afterlife. A remarkable number of people believe scrying, remote sensing, dousing or fortune telling is real. A remarkable number of people firmly believe various economic, political or social "truths" in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
A remarkable number of people are intelligent, well-adjusted and successful in their lives, and still manage to hold one or several of the beliefs above without ever experiencing any sense of disconnect. Those remarkable people almost certainly includes myself, and most likely you as well.
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Swaying public perception (Score:4, Interesting)
I've often wondered how much our media actually sways public perception.
To take an example, consider the TV series "West Wing" [wikipedia.org], which ran from from 2000 - 2007. This was during most of the Bush administration.
In the series, the president (played by Martin Sheen) was powerful, smart, compassionate, and likeable. The character was a Nobel Prize laureate in economics(*), and pretty-much the pinnacle of personal achievement.
For comparison, note that Dennis Kucinich brought 35 articles of impeachment [wikipedia.org] against Bush at the end of his term, including taking the country into war for no just cause.
(I don't bring this up to cast aspersions on the man or party, only to show that there was widespread disapproval with some justification at the time.)
I can't help but wonder if peoples' perception of the president's actions were somehow biased because of the "West Wing" series. It was highly popular, and the character of the president (in the series) was one who garnered a lot of respect.
Would the public have been less tolerant of Bush without "West Wing" running concurrently with his term?
I wonder what other effects that TV and entertainment might have on the population. Does everyone's view of police stem from CSI, Hawaii 5-0, and Hill Street Blues? We see all the time how police risk their lives to protect the innocent, for example... on TV. Do people use their TV viewing as the basis for their assessment of reality?
(*) And in one particular moment during the show, someone asked the president about NAFTA and whether opening up free trade would hurt America, and Martin Sheen (as the president) stated something like "every economist thinks it would be to our benefit".
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I think that you are absolutely right. Take for example all those who refuse to wear seatbelts because they are afraid to be stuck in a car since they know that cars always explode after a crash. Since movies and tv series display things that most people have no direct experience of (like how it's like to be a president or a police officer) then what you see on the screen probably registers as experience in their brains.
This is also why trends in movies change what people see as authentic. For example in t
Let's mess with the conspiracy theorists... (Score:5, Funny)
A remarkable number of people believe homeopathy works. A remarkable number of people believe in gods, devils, prophets and an afterlife. A remarkable number of people believe scrying, remote sensing, dousing or fortune telling is real. A remarkable number of people firmly believe various economic, political or social "truths" in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
A remarkable number of people are intelligent, well-adjusted and successful in their lives, and still manage to hold one or several of the beliefs above without ever experiencing any sense of disconnect. Those remarkable people almost certainly includes myself, and most likely you as well.
Why don't we turn the "NASA faked the moon landings" conspiracy theory on it's head and convince the tinfoil-hat community NASA has secretly sent astronauts to Mars? I'm challenging all Slashdot users to discreetly spread rumours and manifestly fake and/or weak evidence that NASA has secretly gone to Mars and that this film is a reenactment documentary based on revelations by a mysterious unidentified NASA whistle blower thus fanning the flames of this simple misconception among a few uninformed people into a full blown conspiracy theory. If people believe NASA faked the moon landings even though you can see the astronaut's footprints on the moon to this day they'll swallow this story hook line and sinker since the believability of a conspiracy theory seems to be inversely proportional to the amount of evidence proving that it is a big steaming pile of bullshit.
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A remarkable number of people are intelligent, well-adjusted and successful in their lives, and still manage to hold one or several of the beliefs above without ever experiencing any sense of disconnect.
Without ever consciously experiencing any sense of disconnect, you mean.
Those remarkable people
There's nothing remarkable about willful ignorance. It is the normal state for the majority.
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I find many people will believe just about anything as long as it doesn't impact their lives directly. They'll believe whatever they find amusing to believe -- and I've been there myself when I was young, with UFOs and other Fortean stuff.
When it comes to something that does impact their daily life -- like anything related to money, for example -- they suddenly become die-hard skeptics and want to see proof of everything.
probably the same percentage (Score:2)
The irony (Score:5, Insightful)
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Some even think this kind of mental masturbation is actually the real slashdot.
At least it's closer than the usual dicevertisement.
ask slashdot section tomorrow (Score:2)
As for "The Martian" (Score:2)
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The book as it whole comes as pretentious, kinda of an IT book written by project managers. For nerds, summing it up, it is the equivalent in literature of the ITIL books.
So like Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, except less entertaining?
I wonder how many people belive both that (Score:4, Insightful)
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That was what I immediately wondered, but it's no real surprise that many people dismiss reality as false and embrace fiction as reality. It's been happening for a long, long time.
No people (Score:2)
That girl in school is looking just a bit smarter (Score:2)
I attended a screening of Birth of a Nation at school, which had a panel discussion after the film. One of the questions fielded from the audience was, "Were those actual Civil War battle scenes?". I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing for the rest of the panel.
That girl is looking just a bit smarter now. At least they had still photography during the Civil War, so the possibility of some early, expensive, motion picture system is at least plausible. Not knowing that we've never been anywhere near
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averages (Score:2)
If the average IQ is 100 (and it is, by definition), that means for everyone with a 160 IQ, there has to be someone with a 40 IQ, or two people with 70 IQ, or four with 80...
There is an incredible number of stupid, uneducated idiots in this world, right around you. You just don't notice them because our social circles tend to be made up largely so others in it are similar to ourselves.
As the saying goes: Being stupid is a lot like being dead. It's more difficult for people around you than for yourself.
Nope. Doesn't work like that. (Score:3)
If the average IQ is 100 (and it is, by definition), that means for everyone with a 160 IQ, there has to be someone with a 40 IQ, or two people with 70 IQ, or four with 80...
There is an incredible number of stupid, uneducated idiots in this world, right around you.
IQ curve is a normalized bell curve. Equal on both sides, reaching into infinity on both sides.
BUT... There is neither infinite IQ nor 0 intelligence. Neither of those would be a living human being.
So right there, the curve itself is a broken representation. If taken in such a simplistic "or two people with 70 IQ, or four with 80" way.
Back in reality, those numbers actually mean something.
Anything in the 71 - 84 range is considered "Borderline Intellectual Functioning".
These are people with difficulties lea
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BUT... There is neither infinite IQ nor 0 intelligence.
Did you look at the politicians, marketing people and (most) TV hosts?
Yeah, I thought so.
just goes to show (Score:2)
Castle Frankesntein (Score:2)
I'm just glad (Score:2)
I'm just glad you're main link goes here rather than buzzfeed.
It's based on Apollo 13, very loosely. (Score:2)
Hearsay is not evidence (Score:2)
So they found a bunch of tweets where someone said they heard someone say that their third cousin's step-brother's ex-wife's kid from a former marriage asked the guy at the Quik-E-Mart if The Martian was a true story...
Yeah, that's a reliable polling method.
Apollo 13 (Score:5, Insightful)
This is like the reverse of what we had with Apollo 13. I watched it with a friend who was *astonished* to learn it was based on a true story. And yet, even I -- somewhat of a space nut myself -- had barely heard of the Apollo 13 mission when I was growing up. Nobody talked about it. There were no documentaries about it. I was vaguely aware that there was one Apollo mission that had some kind of malfunction and was aborted, but that was all. I had no idea there was any sort of *drama* associated with that.
When the Apollo 13 mission happened, I presume it was all over the news. I don't remember because I was four years old. Maybe all these people who think The Martian was real are just assuming it was before their time???
Re:A remarkable number of people are idiots (Score:5, Insightful)
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True in general, but there definitely IS such a thing as too much if shaming a specific individual. While that's not the case here, it can't be stressed enough. This public shaming crap has gone WAY WAY to far, to the point that you just have to hope your name never comes up among any significant number of Internet users because they'll either make you a king (e.g. clock boy) or essentially destroy your life and future for some relatively petty and insignificant perceived "wrong," the likes of which we've
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Re:A remarkable number of people are idiots (Score:4, Funny)
--
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Stupidity isn't the same as ignorance.
Re:A remarkable number of people are idiots (Score:5, Funny)
This is why I'm seriously advocating that the weight of one's vote should be proportional to his knowledge + intelligent.
Does that mean that my vote will count more than yours, because I know the difference between "intelligent" and "intelligence?"
Be careful how you tell other people to measure things.
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What happens when the stupid majority decides to invert your weighting of votes?
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Being intelligent doesn't mean you aren't an idiot. Look at the Hitchens brothers. Polar opposites, totally different ideas about how to improve the world, both pretty intelligent guys by all accounts.
This reminds me of that episode of the Simpsons where they put the smart people in charge.
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More intelligent by what measure? If you have a higher iq than me, it does not mean you'll come to a better conclusion or make a better decision. I am sure there are some areas you are more knowledgeable than I but other areas I will know more.
How is what you are proposing any different than slaves only being counted as 3/5ths of a person?
What would be nice is our representatives only being on committees where they could prove they were competant on the subject matter.
Re:A remarkable number of people are idiots (Score:5, Insightful)
So, if I were by far the most intelligent man on the planet, you wouldn't mind me stealing the election and running the country just to benefit my friends and myself?
Don't mistake intelligence alone for an automatically benign and positive thing for everyone else involved - there are seriously smart people you might want in charge, but there are also seriously smart psychopaths you might not want to run the country or even have a bigger say in the decision on who does.
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The problem then becomes the creation of the test itself, and how and by whom it is scored.
Remember the rich will demand special testing for themselves, in special rooms, so that if nessecary bribes can be passed around.
You have to remove the ability to bribe the graders. Then it becomes how has the answers. do you test intelligence or do you test knowledge. memorization is easy to cheat against intelligence is not but requires graders who now the subject.
Re:A remarkable number of people are idiots (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why I'm seriously advocating that the weight of one's vote should be proportional to his knowledge + intelligent. People should be asked to take a test and the weight of their individual votes should depend on how well they do on the test.
The problem with proposals like this is that whoever is in power will design the "test" to disenfranchise other people. In case you're unaware, poll "tests" were common in the U.S. in the late 1800s and early 1900s: they were widely used to prevent black people from voting in many areas. The "tests" claimed to be about literacy or whatever, but they were made arbitrarily difficult so that blacks couldn't pass. In fact, whites couldn't pass either, but they were literally "grandfathered" in (i.e., if their grandfather who was eligible to vote, they didn't have to take the test... blacks mostly had slaves for grandfathers, so they wouldn't have been eligible to vote -- this is where the phrase comes from).
Anyhow, if we were to reinstate some sort of poll test, it may not be used to disenfranchise according to racial lines, but you can be sure that whoever is in power will find a way to stop others from voting or to make their vote count less. It's probably impossible to design a system that couldn't be manipulated once you start disenfranchising people. Who gets to define the relevant "knowledge"? How do we measure " intelligence"?
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Maybe add a simple quiz that tests for knowledge of the Constitution. If you support public officials voting based on religious beliefs you are out. If you don't believe civilians should be able to own any weapon our military is allowed to use, your out. If you believe congress can fund war without declaring it, you are out. If you believe congress or the president can disregard the cons
Re:A remarkable number of people are idiots (Score:5, Funny)
If you don't believe civilians should be able to own any weapon our military is allowed to use, your out.
If you don't know the difference between "your" and "you're" - you're out.
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If you don't believe civilians should be able to own any weapon our military is allowed to use, your out.
If you don't know the difference between "your" and "you're" - you're out.
Such thing haven't really mattered since the days of yore.
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"IQ is certainly not a perfect metric but if we use it only in a simple way it could be used. Less than 100 IQ, can't vote."
As you don't seem to realize that this would hit _half_ the voters, I'm glad you won't be able to vote with that system.
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"Remember, half the people you meet are dumber than the average."
While not strictly true, because of median/mean ambiguity, the word "dumber", and that you probably don't meet statistically random samples of people, it's still useful because it makes people think "waitaminute, that can't be right" - and then they have to realize that it's probably not, but IQ is also not some objective measure of dumb/smart. It's probably not really a good measure of anything but the ability to do well on IQ tests.
An IQ sco
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IQ is certainly not a perfect metric but if we use it only in a simple way it could be used. Less than 100 IQ, can't vote.
Testing for intelligence would be really stupid. You can be really smart and the worst kind of racist, intolerant bigot, or simply a total self-centered jerk who will not care that his decisions disfranchise everyone as long as he benefits. So if you want to introduce some sort of test it would be much better to test for empathy: someone who cannot put himself in other people's shoes should not be trusted to make decisions for others.
Oh, by the way, you failed the empathy test!
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Less than 100 IQ, can't vote.
50% of the population can't vote based on a test that you can easily improve at simply by practising.
If you support public officials voting based on religious beliefs you are out
Some people claim atheism is a religion. Also, not all religions are the same, e.g. Buddhists are not nearly as deluded as Christians, who are not nearly as deluded as Muslims, in general terms.
If you don't believe civilians should be able to own any weapon our military is allowed to use, your out.
If you believe any citizen should be able to own a nuclear ICBM or place land mines in the front yard, you're out.
And last but not least if you don't understand that individuals is the only group that includes every citizen and therefore any systematic disregard of individual rights by definition cannot be in the interest of "the community", you are out.
If you think rights are not a balance between opposing forces, and that include both freedom from inter
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IQ is certainly not a perfect metric but if we use it only in a simple way it could be used. Less than 100 IQ, can't vote.
You seem to be in the US, so that will disenfranchise 50% of whites, and 85% of blacks, according to current data.
Oh yes, I can see that one going down real well. Who could possibly object?
Rather than banning people from voting, how about issuing bonus votes to people who voluntarily sit a short test?
You could start at municipal level, and see how it goes.
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Maybe add a simple quiz that tests for knowledge of the Constitution... (snip)
Can you make this mandatory for the people running for office first?
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They trample on it because it's in their interests to do so the same as every king and every government. That is why the people can nullify their laws in the form of juries and the domestic military power was granted to and distributed among the people in the right to bear arms. They also made ir really hard for the government to give itself power by making amendments difficult.
How are they supposed to make mischief when
Re:A remarkable number of people are idiots (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyhow, if we were to reinstate some sort of poll test, it may not be used to disenfranchise according to racial lines, but you can be sure that whoever is in power will find a way to stop others from voting or to make their vote count less. It's probably impossible to design a system that couldn't be manipulated once you start disenfranchising people. Who gets to define the relevant "knowledge"? How do we measure " intelligence"?
And you must realize that political parties immediately get incentive to do this if the voters most likely to be excluded lean a particular way politically. Say party A is strong with the low income families and party B is more of a middle class party and that statistically if you make the test harder more low income families will drop out because they're already working their ass off making ends meet. Now one party has obvious incentive to set the bar higher, the other to set the bar lower. Here in Norway there's a campaign to lower the voting age from 18 to 16, you can compare the youth vote scores with the parties supporting it and it's obvious why. Voters who've mostly never had a real job, never paid taxes and never had to balance a budget because they live at home with mom and dad with an allowance tend to vote quite differently than people who've had to support themselves.
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Anyhow, if we were to reinstate some sort of poll test, it may not be used to disenfranchise according to racial lines, but you can be sure that whoever is in power will find a way to stop others from voting or to make their vote count less. It's probably impossible to design a system that couldn't be manipulated once you start disenfranchising people. Who gets to define the relevant "knowledge"? How do we measure " intelligence"?
I've always thought that we should have a test to vote for national/federal elections (president, congress, etc), but for something different. A candidate should have to register specific points of their platform to the FEC. Then while they are campaigning they stress these points. When a person goes in to vote they have to identify a certain number of these platform points before they are allowed to vote for a candidate. This would go a long way to ensuring that we have a more informed voter base and w
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Honestly, I don't think it need be that complex. To understand issues, a voter must be able to grasp main points--many simple tests exist for this--and have a lower-elementary school math mastery: establish whether the potential voter grasps larger versus smaller, has the ability to read "big" numbers, can derive general truths/proportions from from a simple pie chart, and can demonstrate an understanding of at least decimal values such as .10, .20, .25, .33, .50, .75.
Why do you want to test for math when it is such a minor aspect of picking a candidate? Do you need math to know that you don't want to vote for a candidate who said people with your sexual orientations should be sent to reeducation camps? Does elementary math help you decide whether you agree with a candidate's stance on legalizing pot (answer: no, even if you were to read the scientific papers on the subject, elementary math would fall far short for verifying them). Where does math help you when candidate
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So under your plan, now all the evil geniuses get to rule the world.
It's hard to say whether this is better or worse than the current plan to allow evil idiots to run the world...
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"Anyone who knows anything about space exploration knows that no human has gone past the moon. If people actually think a movie was filmed on Mars, they're morons."
I bet lots of them are the same people that do not believe the moon-landing was real.
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Hm, while you are right in some sense ;D thechnically humans where beyond the moon.
Because they orbited the moon relatively close to the euqator ^-^ hi hi hi!
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Anyone who knows anything about space exploration knows that no human has gone past the moon.
Not even Major Tom?
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> In fact, he presents evidence that we might actually be worse.
Oh, I think there's ample evidence that we might be much worse.
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There was a lot that was Apollo 13-ish, but what stood out about the story for me is that Watney does a lot more for himself, with his own wits, and with much less support from the brains at home. They even made a point of it about midway through the movie. (You'll know the spot.) The Martian was more Robinson Caruso-ish, if you can imagine Robinson Caruso's island as being extremely hostile towards life as we know it.
Re:Wasn't it? (Score:5, Funny)
Robinson Caruso? The famous singing castaway?
He died of Random Pavarotting Syndrome, don't you know, you insensitive clod.
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The Martian was more Robinson Caruso-ish, if you can imagine Robinson Caruso's island as being extremely hostile towards life as we know it.
FWIW. There is a 1960s movie "Robinson Crusoe on Mars"
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I mean, the Romulans were based on the West's view of the nations behind the Iron Curtain.
Klingons were originally that.
Romulans were based on some historical imperial culture with a senate, centurions, an emperor..The name of the culture eludes me somehow, it's on the tip of my tongue. Mother wolf ?, The Remus Empire ? Empire of the 7 hills ? The overly complicated empire ? Oh well you get the idea.
The Klingons were originally an expansionist fascist state and later became some sort of generic warlike vikings in space.
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Am I the only one here who, whenever they encounter this pre-teen version of profanity as in the above post, read it literally, as if the person was talking about bundles of wood, literal hats for asses, and donkeys going crazy next to bull shit?
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