[JWBF]

He blocked me, too, and I don't even follow him!

Dan Jacobs @danjacobs_
My new hobby - blocking people who have nothing but uninformed, non-constructive, and frankly inappropriate and rude comments to make.

I don't think it wise to block your employer. (that includes Robbie too.)

 

[Videodrome]

I don't think it wise to block your employer. (that includes Robbie too.)

Indeed! I wonder if he actually blocked the mayor over this.

 

[dforthandbview]

Is anyone else here blocked by Warren Kinsella? I have no idea why I am. I've never tweeted him.

 

[r937]

Is anyone else here blocked by Warren Kinsella?

nope, just rob and that weenie graeme

 

[Videodrome]

Robert Benzie @robertbenzie
.@MonteMcNaughton says sex-ed curriculum shouldn't be designed by "child pornographers like Ben Levin, and especially not Kathleen Wynne."

Robert Benzie @robertbenzie
.@MonteMcNaughton's ostensibly family-values release does not mention he's endorsed by #RobFord or this: on.thestar.com/1wTOPXV #onpoli

Interesting, as Rob is probably his biggest endorsement.

 

[Lamport Davenport]

And the moral of the story is: Be a meanie to a weenie, and all your Tweets will be blocked by twats.

As for Ford Family Values, Monte taking Rofo's endorsement -- and hiding it in the closet -- tells me he understands the hypocrisy part of "family values".

Letting that awful Ontario Premier design the sex ed program is gonna teach women to do a man's job, and then where will we be? Jobs are already hard to find, and KWynne will probably write a lousy hand job chapter ta boot.

What's our world coming to?

 

[JWBF]

Interesting, as Rob is probably his biggest endorsement.

No homophobia, heterophobia, or sexism by Monte's word... why won't they leave Robbie and his play mates alone, it's not like they are forcing sexualized propaganda down childrens' throats like some pervert with their... well, er, member of parliament.

Monte is one of the pustulent scabs that has formed on the OPC party after the last election.

 

[Videodrome]

No homophobia, heterophobia, or sexism by Monte's word... why won't they leave Robbie and his play mates alone, it's not like they are forcing sexualized propaganda down childrens' throats like some pervert with their... well, er, member of parliament.

Monte is one of the pustulent scabs that has formed on the OPC party after the last election.

He is from the Ontario Bible belt, so it isn't a surprise that he is like this.

 

[JWBF]

He is from the Ontario Bible belt, so it isn't a surprise that he is like this.

Agreed, not a suprise but for me a disappointment that such backward thinking still exists.

 

[kbdid]

Agreed, not a suprise but for me a disappointment that such backward thinking still exists.

I grew up in various spots in Lambton/Kent/Essex counties and it pains me to hear that both McNaughton and the creationist MP are from these areas.

 

[AlvinofDiaspar]

Interesting, as Rob is probably his biggest endorsement.

Well, clearly McNaughton has absolutely no qualms about a druggie having enough to eat at home.

AoD

 

[Lamport Davenport]

McNaughton also doesn't seem to have any qualms about Robbie's sincerity.

KD's One Wild Night in March shows the fruitage of exemplary family values, with nary a sip, toke or snort.

 

[sweetlou]

From Maclean's article on the dumbing down of America, this para stood out:

"The advance of ignorance and irrationalism in the U.S. has hardly gone unnoticed. The late Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter won the Pulitzer prize back in 1964 for his book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, which cast the nation’s tendency to embrace stupidity as a periodic by-product of its founding urge to democratize everything. By 2008, journalist Susan Jacoby was warning that the denseness—“a virulent mixture of anti-rationalism and low expectations”—was more of a permanent state. In her book, The Age of American Unreason, she posited that it trickled down from the top, fuelled by faux-populist politicians striving to make themselves sound approachable rather than smart. Their creeping tendency to refer to everyone—voters, experts, government officials—as “folks” is “symptomatic of a debasement of public speech inseparable from a more general erosion of American cultural standards,” she wrote. “Casual, colloquial language also conveys an implicit denial of the seriousness of whatever issue is being debated: talking about folks going off to war is the equivalent of describing rape victims as girls.”

 

[W. K. Lis]

If a Maclean's subscriber, click on this link.

The American public’s bias against established science doesn’t stop where the Bible leaves off, however. The same poll found that just 53 per cent of respondents were “extremely†or “very confident†that childhood vaccines are safe and effective. (Worldwide, the measles killed 120,000 people in 2012. In the United States, where a vaccine has been available since 1963, the last recorded measles death was in 2003.) When it comes to global warming, only 33 per cent expressed a high degree of confidence that it is “man made,†something the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has declared is all but certain. (The good news, such as it was in the AP poll, was that 69 per cent actually believe in DNA, and 82 per cent now agree that smoking causes cancer.) If the rise in uninformed opinion was limited to impenetrable subjects that would be one thing, but the scourge seems to be spreading. Everywhere you look these days, America is in a rush to embrace the stupid. Hell-bent on a path that’s not just irrational, but often self-destructive. Common-sense solutions to pressing problems are eschewed in favour of bumper-sticker simplicities and blind faith.

The cost of a simple appendectomy in the United States averages $33,000 and it’s not uncommon for such bills to top six figures. More than 15 per cent of the population has no health insurance whatsoever. Yet efforts to fill that gaping hole via the Affordable Health Care Act—a.k.a. Obamacare—remain distinctly unpopular. Nonsensical myths about the government’s “real†intentions have found so much traction that 30 per cent still believe that there will be official “death panels†to make decisions on end-of-life care.

Americans have long worried that their education system is leaving their children behind. With good reason: national exams consistently reveal how little the kids actually know. In the last set, administered in 2010 (more are scheduled for this spring), most fourth graders were unable to explain why Abraham Lincoln was an important figure, and only half were able to order North America, the U.S., California and Los Angeles by size. Results in civics were similarly dismal. While math and reading scores have improved over the years, economics remains the “best†subject, with 42 per cent of high school seniors deemed “proficient.â€

That inarticulate legacy didn’t end with George W. Bush and Sarah Palin. Barack Obama, the most cerebral and eloquent American leader in a generation, regularly plays the same card, droppin’ his Gs and dialling down his vocabulary to Hee Haw standards. His ability to convincingly play a hayseed was instrumental in his 2012 campaign against the patrician Mitt Romney; in one of their televised debates the President referenced “folks†17 times.

An aversion to complexity—at least when communicating with the public—can also be seen in the types of answers politicians now provide the media. The average length of a sound bite by a presidential candidate in 1968 was 42.3 seconds. Two decades later, it was 9.8 seconds. Today, it’s just a touch over seven seconds and well on its way to being supplanted by 140-character Twitter bursts.

The term “elitist†has become one of the most used, and feared, insults in American life. Even in the country’s halls of higher learning, there is now an ingrained bias that favours the accessible over the exacting.

 

[adma]

In that light, reading a Phillip Marchand piece in today's Post on Reader's Digest Condensed Editions, something dawned on me--as derided as the series was and is, at least it reflected a time when people actually *read*. (Unless the inherent dreariness and Lawrence-Welk-squareness of that series ironically helped turn future generations off reading--like, if that's all you're exposed to within the household in the name of "literature"...)