{"id":2703,"date":"2013-09-06T18:26:44","date_gmt":"2013-09-06T18:26:44","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2014-09-26T13:33:50","modified_gmt":"2014-09-26T20:33:50","slug":"weve-always-been-idiots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/franklycurious.com\/wp\/2013\/09\/06\/weve-always-been-idiots\/","title":{"rendered":"We’ve Always Been Idiots"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Idiot<\/a>I just finished reading Charles Pierce’s Idiot America<\/a><\/i>. It is an easy and funny read. It perhaps helps that I agree with Pierce on all the specifics. Saddles on dinosaurs are indeed funny. Why else would they have done that in The Flintstones<\/i>? And I will even yield part of what he’s getting at: America certainly is more stupid than the people in other advanced economies. But there’s a very simple reason for that: Americans are more religious than other advanced countries. I don’t mean just any<\/i> religion here; I mean “fundamentalism”: the belief that the literal word of God is written down in some book. (Even if it was<\/i> written down in a language they don’t read.)<\/p>\n

But there was something that bothered me throughout the book. It was something I learned from my old pal Chuck Dickens. But let me put it in a more modern context: “Same as it ever was!”<\/p>\n