Re: Amazon upfront news stories

On Sat, 18 May 2024 16:19:09 -0700
The Horny Goat <lcraver@home.ca> wrote:

On Fri, 17 May 2024 22:32:11 -0400, Rhino
<no_offline_contact@example.com> wrote:
 

Sounds about right. Just watch winners on the new show trying to
pretend that they are as intelligent as Ken Jennings or whoever just
because they know celebrity culture but be unable to tell you what
century WWII was fought in.... 

 
Ha ha ha - I've had people tell me I should try out for Jeopardy (I
did extremely well in the old Reach For the Top high school show more
years ago than I care to admit) and DID take the online Jeopardy
screening test - I gather I answered nearly all questions right but
fell back on the US history questions though got a fair number of
those right as well but not enough to get the second screening.
 
At least I didn't make any egregious blunders like naming William
Jennings Bryan as Woodrow Wilson's running mate! (which was one of the
options on the multiple choice test). I happened to get that one right
mostly by eliminating 2 of the 4 choices and  correctly on the
last two options. Somebody named Marshall who I'd never heard of who
was NOT the Supreme Court justice by that name...

Three or four years ago, I saw a  video where a woman did man-in-the-
street type questions of university students in Pennsylvania. She was a
Holocaust educator and asked them very basic questions about WWII. The
answers she got were gut-wrenchingly appalling. Here's some examples:

Q: When was World War II?
A. (Long pause). I'm not sure. I want to say three centuries ago....

Q: Who was Hitler?
A. Uhhh. The President of Amsterdam?

Q:. Who was Winston Churchill?
A. Uhhh. An American general? [That's the only one they got partially
right since Churchill's mother was American and he had briefly served
as a brigadier general in WW I after falling on his sword over the
Gallipoli fiasco. But of course they missed the key fact that he was the
British Prime Minister for most of the war.]

Q: Can you name any of the concentration camps created by the Nazis?
A: No.

There were a bunch more, all of which were just as poorly answered.

None of this, by the way, is meant to disparage Americans in
particular. I've heard similar things about Brits and Canadians.

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when David Menzies of Rebel News
walked around the Ryerson campus in Toronto and asked female students
there to sign a petition to repeal women's suffrage. Lots of students
signed happily, apparently under the illusion that the petition wanted
to end women's SUFFERING, as opposed to taking away their right to
vote. They didn't realize that the words had very different meanings.

NONE of the people I've mentioned in this post could ever hope to
qualify for Jeopardy and you can take that to the bank!

--
Rhino