<p>runningncircles,</p>
<p>There's no way I would have gotten the state with the highest per household income question right.</p>
<p>I would have thought Connecticut as well.</p>
<p>I'm just some uninformed dum-dum, I suppose. :p</p>
<p>But there is a point this video makes, though I don't takes its statistics seriously. That is: Americans don't pay that much attention to the rest of the world, but they tend to be much more involved in terms of warring and diplomacy in interfering with other countries than most if not all other countries. So it is a fair thing to ask of Americans that they make an effort to pay attention, since as a whole, they wield power. Maybe if more people had been paying attention, it would have been clearer to the nation that attacking a secular-socialist Sunni-controlled land that had a vast majority of Shi-ites among its numbers to try to "convert" them to democracy would result, as it has done, in: 1) more people in the Muslim world as a whole hating us with a hatred that will drive greater future terrorism toward this country, probably eventually backed up by nuclear weapons; and 2) we will have spent over $1 trillion to effectively hand over control of Iraq to Iran, a country that has been a thorn in our side.</p>
<p>But I am probably being too optimistic to think this would have changed anything. So there it goes: 3,000+ dead Americans for nothin'.</p>
<p>BedHead,</p>
<p>You're ignoring the fact that it was the people who DO pay attention to this stuff-- the State Dept., CIA, DIA, NSA, etc.-- who offered the intelligence that led to the decision.</p>
<p>Or maybe all those organizations were simply ignored. That's possible...</p>
<p>Either way, the people who really (usually?) drive the foreign policy machine in most cases are privy to information that most of us wouldn't dream of.</p>
<p>LOL i love it!!</p>
<p>I suppose if you go to rural England everyone will know everything about their country.</p>
<p>UCLAri: Well, there's a long conversation about how, in my opinion, the books were cooked to produce the intelligence for our decision, how the Congress was misled. Etc. </p>
<p>But I wasn't really talking about the government. I was talking about a hopefully informed electorate.</p>
<p>BedHead,</p>
<p>The "informed electorate" is, in my opinion, a bit of a lie. I have yet to see evidence that it truly exists anywhere. </p>
<p>Unfortunately the world is chock full of far too much information for anyone to be informed enough to vote on every issue responsibly. I consider myself a pretty well-informed guy, yet I can't say that I vote really intelligently in every single election, no matter how hard I may try.</p>
<p>douche vs. turd sandwich; we can't always be as intelligent as we'd like to be.</p>
<p>Totally concur with BedHead.</p>
<p>If we become more informed citizens, we will most likely our government and representatives of what's really happening out there in the real world. Now, that could happen in the near future only if we could improve the the basic reading, math, and social studies test scores of the average american to the "passing level"...</p>
<p>Oh yeah, and the media (which I'm sure is totally objective...;)) could also help solve the problem by "diversifying" their daily TV programs. That is, less provincially American programs like Family Guy (though it's my favorite show), political blabbings, celebrity gossips, and some more programs introducing us to new cultures, languages, peoples, and a broader understanding of the outside world.</p>
<p>Jimmy@Killarney,</p>
<p>Well, that and actually knowing what's going on...everywhere. Which is practically impossible.</p>
<p>Of course not everything.</p>
<p>Just some things people ought to know simply because we are also members of this global community. Things like the names of famous world leaders, key events, where a country is located, the major financial/cultural/political capitals of a region, which country is predominantly white/black/asian etc...</p>
<p>JIMMY@KILLARNEY,</p>
<p>Is knowing a country's leader really going to make me understand that country's political system better per se? </p>
<p>I don't know Switzerland's president's name (though I do know it's a largely ceremonial post anyway...), but I can tell you this much:</p>
<p>It's a bicameral parliament with a fairly federalized system. Cantons have high degrees of autonomy compared to federal units in other systems. Direct democracy is used quite a bit in making national decisions.</p>
<p>Now, what's more important-- the name or the system?</p>
<p>People often latch onto the importance of fairly superficial issues: capitals, heads of state, etc. I can name tons of people who know the capital of Australia is Canberra, but can't tell me how their bloody government functions.</p>
<p>I'm more interested in functional issues rather than labels and locations, myself.</p>
<p>UCLARi, do you have to go against everything I or another poster say on this forum? No one's really trying to have a debate here with you...</p>
<p>I hope you noticed that "etc" in my above post, since the "etc" refers to many other related subjects, including the long post you just wrote. Now let's hear your brilliant rebuttal.</p>
<p>My apologies. I'll leave your posts be.</p>
<p>Thanks alot:)</p>
<p>Holy Crap...you guys need to relax!</p>
<p>This has been done many times before. I mean Jay Leno, an American(shocking), has a segment on his show where he portrays Americans in exactly the same way. Yes, this is undercoverage and you can most likely find similar cases in every country, but that's besides the point. This is COMEDY, not some scientific study to be scrutinized</p>
<p>That being said, two people I work with at CVS didn't know what the Holocaust was, one of them didn't know whose face is on the 1 dollar bill, and another individual claimed kaballah to be a book read by muclims.</p>