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Just Where Is The Lincoln Memorial, Anyhow?
John3 writes "Searching Google Maps for the Lincoln Memorial is returning the location of the FDR Memorial instead. Conservative bloggers smell a conspiracy since Glenn Beck is holding his 'Restoring Honor' gathering at the Lincoln Memorial tomorrow (August 28). Notes for the map listing on Google state 'This place has unverified edits'; so, did someone claim the listing and edit the location?"
I have a relative that lives several miles from the Grand Canyon, and told me the story of a local who one day ran into a lost tourist, looking for that gorge. He gave the tourist directions, and the tourist asked, "how is it?" The local had to reply, "I don't know I've never been there. I've been planning to go one of these days....."
They talked for a bit and soon found out the tourist was from New York. The local said, "Oh, I've been there. I visited the statue of liberty." The New Yorker said, "Oh, yeah. I've been planning to go there one of these days....."
Qxe4
Don't be a toolbox. Red State makes no mention of a conspiracy, and WTH is "Moonbats" anyway? A real leading conservative blog there. Beck is an entertainer, not a serious voice, yet so many on the left and right moon over him. The summary is just a another smear of conservatives, and since that fits your world view filled with hatred you consider it valid.
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
Socialists and communists are more likely to know where the Lincoln Memorial is anyway. Lincoln is pretty much their hero.
Good thing we have the voice of reason here! I mean you only suggested the OP should be shot for a comment! That's very reasonable. Why would anyone want to stereotype conservatives?
You bring up another great point too. Why on a site that is "News for Nerds" would people mock creationists? It's just not fair! Teach the controversy!
Exchanging one Lincoln for another, I love it.
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
REAL AMERICANS unfortunately have trouble finding the United States on a map, much less a famous landmark. Remember that famous botch job by the Miss America contestant? Because her answer was so stupid most people didn't notice that the question was: why can't 1 in 5 Americans find the US on the map? Yes, I'm an American. Yes, I'm embarrassed by that.
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
A dirty trick would be putting billboards up giving the wrong date for an election, or bugging your own office and blaming it on a competitor. Someone editing a google map entry, is pretty weak on the 'dirty trick' scale.
...and pollute our precious bodily fluids
No sig for the moment.
Google tries to stay out of politics. Glenn Beck is getting the message not to piss off those who contribute to Wikis.
That's nothing, 20% still believe the sun revolves around the earth and 25% believe we got our independence from a country other than Britain.
and more than half don't believe in evolution. That makes me a sad panda. :(
Government funded roads are a communist conspiracy.
Specifically, they are part of plank 6 of the 10 point program of Communism in the Communist Manifesto. Although, it also states "These measures will of course be different in different countries.", and without assuming the reasons why we make these decisions, you must agree that we are on a road of which Marx would have approved.
There are 10 commandments: 01)Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God 10)Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.Matt22:34-40
I know lots of iPhone owners who vote Republican. You should get out more.
Wow. Put a label on someone and then you can treat them as sub-human. You're well on your way.
Decided not to moderate and simply prove you wrong. One idiot making stupid comments doesn't mean the tea party are racists as a group no more than some leftist anarchist looting stores makes all liberals into whackjobs. Frankly, I call anyone who says otherwise a racist themselves.
http://www.bvblackspin.com/2010/04/15/black-tea-party-member/
http://www.theroot.com/views/black-tea-partiers-speak
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/09/black_tea_party_express_tour_t.html
http://www.theroot.com/views/should-black-folks-give-tea-party-second-look?page=0,1&hpid=topnews
http://www.theroot.com/views/who-you-callin-uncle-tom
http://www.azcentral.com/community/phoenix/articles/2009/08/17/20090817obama-scene.html (this is the article that MSNBC cut apart to show gun-toting crazies at tea party rallies - except that it was a black man carrying that weapon freely and nobody thought he was a danger, kinda shoots your theory down doesn't it?)
Certain groups are terrified of what the Tea Party stands for, and they've played the race card in order to try and stop it. The fact that you believe it and espouse this shit means you're just a mindless patsy that can't think for yourself.
The Statue of Liberty trip is practically an in-joke among New Yorkers. Many (most?) New Yorkers have never been to it, though everybody can see it when you're driving around the bottom of the FDR or West Side Highway. I actually have a beautiful view of it from my living room (I live right on the Hudson River), and have never actually taken the ferry to the Statue of Liberty proper, though I once took a ferry trip to Ellis Island, and that boat took us around the Statue for a fairly close look.
The lines to take the ferry to Liberty Island are ridiculously long on weekends (like 3-4 hours), I walk by them every weekend on my morning walks through Battery Park, so unless you have a weekday off in the city, it actually takes as long to go to the Statue of Liberty as it does to drive to Boston.
Same reason I've never been to the top of the Empire State Building - ridiculous lines.
Please tell me you got that information from somewhere other than a Miss America contest, because according to National Geographic, the 94% can find it (look on page 26). I'm open to different surveys of different population segments giving different answers, but if your source of information is really a Miss America contest, that's sad.
Qxe4
From the people I have talked to at the one Tea Party I happened to walk by on lunch break I found out most of them are decent people who have some conservative leanings, but mostly have Libertarian or "Classical Liberal" Leanings. Sure there were some far right wing nut bags in the group but they were VASTLY out numbered by people who, if you put them on a political scale were far more libertarian than full on democrat or republican.
Plus they didn't wreck the place and leave a mess after the rally unlike other groups whom I have seen leave a mess in their wake.
Let these people protest, they aren't hurting anyone yet. To say they are evil and scum is wrong for now. Give them the benefit of the doubt and let's see what happens. I would have thought that a lot of the people who once decried their right to protest and assemble are the same people who are now looking to demonize these people are making themselves look like hypocrites they are. Judging the Tea Party people this way would be like instituting a "pre-crime" policy and arresting anyone in sight whom the police "think" might commit a crime. It is wrong.
If the Tea Party Rallies were doing some of the same things that the Anarchists were doing at their rallies I could see the point of what the talking heads are talking about how "bad they are". So far from all of the B-roll footage I have seen on TV of all of the tea party events I have yet to see the police throwing tear gas and mass arrests of protesters. I have yet to see people being beaten up and people running away with bloodied brows. I have seen the occasional weird screwball sign, but last i heard we still have a the First Amendment as part of our bill of rights.
I will be watching tomorrow on C-SPAN and see it for myself, I am not going to listen to the pundits on either MSNBC (who will make jokes about sexual acts between two consenting men) or Fox News (who will be inflating the number of people in attendance). I will reserve judgement because it is the correct thing to do. I am keeping my "jump to conclusions mat" in it's box.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Are national geographic seriously saying that 6% of the US population can't point to their own country on a map? And, are you seriously linking to that like it's a good thing? Jeeze...
I ate your fish.
toadlife's experience mirrors my own, except I know a few more tea partiers then him (or her), and they are all high-income with a good deal of "ethnic animosity", quite seriously considerably past any desire of mine to continue associating with them, much less voting for any of their causes (almost all of which turns out to be based on provably false dogma).
So how many people is that? Five? Ten? And you're willing to generalize to a large group, that you happen to disagree with from the start and know little about, based on this huge sample of people you claim to know? You know what this sounds like to me? Brazen hypocrisy. Now, don't get me wrong. I indulge in it every so often myself. But the "the whole group is racist because I know a couple of people" argument is ludicrously hypocritical. Maybe even a tad bit idiotic.
My conjecture: Most of the tea party folks got involved because the president doesn't look like them. And that scared the hell out of them. Disprove that.
Proof: you don't supply evidence to support your conjecture. Give the absence of evidence to distinguish between that hypothesis and the null hypothesis (that there is no measurable difference in racial attitudes between the tea party folks and the general population), one cannot rationally accept the conjecture.
He sells lots of books, gets a lot of money for a TV show and has many, many minions. Wait, how is he an idiot again?
Look, I have no use for the guy, but he's accomplishing more than you or me. We may not agree with what he's accomplishing, but that's irrelevant. I wish I had thought of it. *I* want minions, dammit! I need to find an underserviced fringe of my own to cater to.
You really think he believes half the shit he says? He's playing to the hyper-right niche. Same with Ann Coulter, or Michael Moore for a lefty example. They have targeted an audience and feed them what they want to hear. If Sarah Palin has any brain at all she'll just play the lecture circuit for the rest of her days and put out more books.
Oh, and people like him *LOVE* people like you. Your dislike and insults just play to his cause and give him legitimacy in the eyes of his target market.
Yes. 6% is acceptable. I mean, 100% would be nice, but that's just not going to happen. 6% of respondents may have not taken it seriously, been insane, provided an answer that was unintelligible, meant to say "The US" but accidentally said something else, left the question blank on accident, found the question insulting, been drunk or high, etc or some combination thereof.
It also says at the top that "The margin of error for the total sample is +/- 4.4 percentage points at the 95% confidence level."
How does that 6% compare to other countries? I'm guessing it's not that different from many others, and probably a lot higher than many countries with lower education.
This is all very true of course. As a UK native, I don't know where many of the states are relative to each other. There's an episode of Friends (yeah, yeah, we all watch it sometimes...) where Ross gets increasingly annoyed because he can't even list all the states.
I've been to Belize, for example, but when telling someone about it forgot that it was in Central America, not South. I think geographical knowledge grows slowly as you get older - and visit more countries.
However, there is sometimes the impression that US citizens know more about the geography of their own country than of others around the world. I suspect that Europeans who know where all the countries of the EU are (and yet miss many states) also know where, say, Korea is. Or Saudi Arabia. The attitude of "what I know is important" is annoying - but surely there is a middle ground between listing ALL countries and having a balanced knowledge of the whole world.
Frankly, many foreigners will not know where states are because - as you say - they "don't make the news a lot" :) They aren't individually important in the world, unlike the US as a whole.
You can have him as soon as he finishes all of his vacations. :)
Well, I stopped taking any geography when I was 13, such choice being a luxury of a non-National-Curriculum school. Some of what came under geography, e.g. resource mining and the worker issues surrounding it, was very interesting to me. But labelling of countries was not stimulating. I remember doing the British equivalent of memorising all the English counties etc. one evening, but today I have to, "Where's that?" for most of them. My brain just doesn't care what or where Northumbria (Northumberland?) and Wessex are. Perhaps it's related that I also hate jargon for its own sake - there seems to be so much of it now computing has become "cool". In both cases, it's all political/marketing.
However, I don't think people mock the US citizens simply because they are ignorant about the world. The frustration arises because US citizens are ignorant about the world while its elected government exerts tremendous influence on the world. If your democracy is at war, something is very wrong if a lot of citizens don't know where most of the troops are deployed (I would say "which country you're fighting against" but we're having one of those 1984 style wars against no-one and everyone). If your representatives think that Iran is a menace and potentially a good target for war, it should be because you (as a group) generally think the same. If you know nothing about Iran except that women don't get to wear bikinis and that Ahmadinejad hates Israel, something is broken.
Before healthcare reform conservatives/right wingers were bitching and moaning about "poor/cheap/unemployed/lazy" uninsured people bringing down the system and raising costs for insured citizens because they can always get healthcare, insured or not. This bill forces them to get insurance. If complaining right wingers really want to fix the problem, they should propose a law banning all healthcare for uninsured citizens who can't pay out of pocket. See how well that goes over.
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
Reading through the comments, I'm surprised by some of the people who use the pejorative, "teabagger". For example, I gather here that you favor the "liberal" libertarian yet despise the very similar "tea party" libertarian because they have a slightly different (what you term "opposite") belief priority.
While I can understand how you got that impression from his comments, I don't think Tea Party activists in general are the same as libertarians. It's more than an ordering of priorities from what I've seen. The libertarian party is about personal freedoms for everyone even people they didn't like. They wanted to reduce government size to maximize personal freedom.
While saying a group that wants to reduce government size is the same thing with different priorities... I haven't seen the personal freedom part of the Tea Bagger movement. Sure, they talk about freedom, but when questioned they always seem to be interested in their own freedom while opposing freedom for others. Many oppose simple freedom of religion, for example, not to mention individual freedom based on sex and sometimes even race. Where are the freedom loving tea Party activists that want to legalize gay marriage, polygamous marriage, and any other kind of marriage to get the government out of making religious choices for people? I've seen more of them express the opinion that the government should be making interracial marriage illegal than gay marriage legal. That's bigger government, not smaller.
Actually, from what I've seen the Tea Party seems to be a corporate sponsored movement designed to appeal to people's fear and prejudice and to the previously built "us versus them" political mentality, with the goal of preventing the government from effectively regulating and stopping the worst practices of big businesses, whether that is to poison our land and people for profit, or leverage wealth disparity to bleed the poor and middle class using capital as leverage. I sympathize with some people who associate themselves with the Tea Party. I don't like either of the major parties either... but I just don't think the movement itself is sane or cohesive and I think it is directed by advertising agencies with ulterior motives. I mean seriously, they're supposedly a movement that is about overcoming the two party system and breaking free of it, yet they only ever support candidates who were republican and they have never even mentioned (to my knowledge) electoral reform to actually do something about opening things up to non-republican and non-democratic candidates. That's a lot more than a reordering of priorities. That's fundamentally different philosophy.
Before healthcare reform conservatives/right wingers were bitching and moaning about "poor/cheap/unemployed/lazy" uninsured people bringing down the system and raising costs for insured citizens because they can always get healthcare, insured or not. This bill forces them to get insurance.
This bill forces everyone to buy insurance whether they want to or not, and worse, forces them to buy it from a private third party under penalty of law. Not even the most extreme reading of the Commerce Clause justifies that, and I look forward to your excuses when SCOTUS throws the mandate out as unconstitutional.
If complaining right wingers really want to fix the problem, they should propose a law banning all healthcare for uninsured citizens who can't pay out of pocket. See how well that goes over.
If we really want to fix the problem... to the extent that it can be fixed... then we'll propose what we've proposed for years... for Congress to use the Commerce Clause in what is actually a productive, Constitutional manner and ban states from restricting interstate health insurance competition, which most of them do. This is one of the few issues where the states are wrong about the 10th Amendment. The states don't have a right to tell me I can't buy from a company in another state, and opening up a national market would mean national risk pools. Health insurance would then become more like car insurance. If car insurance were restricted by the states in the way that health insurance is, then no one could afford to drive either. There's a real market for auto insurance, though.
As for your concern about the poor, I might be moved more if I didn't suspect that your solution was probably "let the government handle it". You can help the poor without screwing the rights of everyone else, which this "reform" bill did. Further, this isn't an issue of "the poor", and never was. The poor have had access to paid healthcare for years. That's what Medicaid is, after all. In addition to that, most states have a program for uninsured children if you don't meet the poverty criteria but still have limited income. In Alabama it's called AlKids. The real issue is affordable health insurance for the not poor-and yet-not rich. Which *gasp!* a real market would go a long way towards helping.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Uh huh. While I don't care if someone wants to sink a lot of money into a propaganda tool such as the infamous "ground zero mosque" (the building probably transfers resources from authoritarian Middle East powers and transfers it to the US economy, something I see as a net benefit), I can't help but view statements as the above with a cynical humor. If these people were really interested in "national unity", they probably wouldn't have put that building with the role it has there. They probably just want to get their narrative into the 9/11 myth and a nice building is classier than billboards.
I don't think you have even though for a moment about the perspective of muslims in the US. Imagine your religion was being branded as extremist and violent despite 99.999% of the followers never acting out of violence. It's like branding christians as violent extremists because of what has happened in northern Ireland. How would you take a stand and show the people that your religion itself and most followers aren't violent and dangerous, but peaceful and very willing to work with others of other religions to help society?
Sure they started building a community center near the site of the 9/11 attacks, as a way to foster unity and help educate people and show people that the muslim religion can be a force for good things in a community. It's not like they expected it to be a major political issue because there are already dozens of them in the area, just as close.
Rather, this has become a propaganda war by fear mongers who want to brand the entire religion as evil, and want to go so far as to overthrow basic freedoms of our society in order to have a boogey man. If you oppose their right to put a mosque or anything else there, you are opposing the foundation of our country, personal freedom, political freedom, and religious freedom. Anyone who has read the works of the founding fathers and hasn't just read bits out of context and ignored the rest, has to acknowledge that truth.
And as for transferring money out of the middle east from "authoritarian middle east powers" clearly you must only be getting your news exclusively from Fox, the only station that hasn't covered the source of the funding is primarily the Kingdom Foundation run by Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, who is also the second biggest Shareholder in News Corp (Fox). He's not particularly an authoritarian, but rather has acted fairly middle of the road, as a business man and donating to charities that help bridge cultural gaps between the east and west.
The only people I see objecting to the community center are people who also seem to be in favor of expelling all muslims fro the US and who are so scared they think it's a good idea to abolish religious freedom in the US... while being ignorant or completely without perspective on the ramifications such an action would have.
Right. Knowing what nations border Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran -- completely unimportant.
The fact that more than 6 out of ten American young adults (18 to 24) can't find Iraq on a map of the middle East, that 20% of them think Sudan is in Asia, and that almost half think that the majority population in India is Muslim, doesn't have any deleterious foreign policy.
And I've got a bridge for sale. (Don't be bothered by the fact that it's no where near any river, valley, or other geographical feature that the requires bridging...)
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood