Not as smart as I used to be.

[raegun]

Based on an article* I've been reading today, the discussion came up about someone proposing to relocate polar bears to Antarctica to 'fix' their habitat being melted away by global warming. Bear said something about polar bears and penguins being a bad mix. I realized I honestly didn't know if there were any penguins to the north, or if there

Comments

[ue_ferret]

Some of it I think can be blamed on the media in the US, which seems to think it's audience is ignorant idiots, and by focusing on that, is creating the audience they believe is out there.

When the current war in Georgia first exploded, I checked major online news sites, first to find out just what was happening, then expanding it to see who was covering it...

CBC News - Top news, front page
BBC News - Top news, front page
CNN - not on front page (major article was on Edwards)
Fox news - front page side bar, (again, major article was on Edwards)
ABC News - not on front page (Edwards again)
MSNBC News - Top news, front page

An international conflict involving a US client state against Russia (Georgia has 2000 troops in Iraq) with a risk of direct military conflict at the start between the US and Russia (Georgia requested US aircraft to fly their troops home) and implications of US complicity (1 month ago US troops were in Georgia assisting the Georgian army in a large scale training exercise), and 2 of the major US online news outlets didn't even mention it on their front pages.

It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy, unfortunately...

[raegun]

This is a good thing to mention.

I did see Georgia on the CNN front page (but later moved to the sidebar link), but I'll admit right now that I don't know where Georgia is (or that it was a country until it made the news.) I'm probably less likely to be interested in learning about something I've never heard of before. (I did, however, click the link that says a Chupucabra was found in Texas. Though this was because I had to do some homework and this was clearly an article involving an interested party, the topic of the assignment.)

I'm worst with geography and history. I don't even know what really began World War II. We never covered that in school. Likewise, we never covered the location of New Zealand, which I learned last night was south of Australia, not north. Oops.

[jai_dit]

It's worth mentioning that historians don't agree on what started WWII, either. Some say it was the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931. I think the majority go with the German invasion of Poland in 1939, but there were so many events leading up to that point that it can be hard to draw the line. Was the German annexation of the Sudetenland-turned-rest-of-Czechoslovakia really the start of the war? Maybe even the acquisition of Austria? So uh, yeah.

[raegun]

Case in point: Everything you just said went over my head.

My meaning: I don't know anything about WWII. It involved the allies and the others. People died. At some point, it ended and I'm not sure why. That's all I know. Period.

[jai_dit]

Yeah, sorry, I'm a little bit rambly partly due to the 3am.

If you want, I could summarize and simplify in a more sequential order?

[raegun]

LOL. Go for it, but I'm sure I could wiki it, too. I'm just trying to show that I don't know very much history.