Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Thursday, September 08, 2016

Celebrity Jeopardy


So one way I dispose of 1/2 hour of unneeded consciousness from time to time is by watching Jeopardy! For those of you who aren't familiar with the program, they have special tournaments for categories such as high school students, college students, teachers and what not. They also do a celebrity tournament every year which features people who for one reason or another are famous. As it turns out famous people tend not to be very smart so they make the questions really easy.

This year many of the players as it turns out are "journalists," among them Chuck Todd and Anderson Cooper. Apparently the only reason they agreed to go on the show is because of the Dunning-Kruger effect. As it turns out they are both astonishingly ignorant of the most basic facts of history (e.g., Cooper thought that Alexander the Great presided over the golden age of Athens, and also couldn't figure out that "tank" is a word that means both an aquarium and a war fighting machine) and incapable of the simplest deductive thought. They revealed themselves to be total airheads. Louis C.K., on the show with Jonathan Capehart and Kate Bolduan -- who are maybe a small notch above Cooper and Todd but not much when it comes to gray matter -- destroyed them both. I will venture to say that comedians in general are probably much smarter and better informed than journalists.

The way you get to be a talking head on TV is by being pretty and having good diction. Being an idiot who will read whatever drivel and propaganda your corporate overlords put in front of you is how you rise to the top and make millions of dollars.


1 comment:

Don Quixote said...

I was watching the "after-the-commander-in-chief commentary" last night, and one TV "journalist" was opining that we have to respond to Trump's latest outrageous, invidious allegation (that CIA security analysts supposedly showed disdain for Obama).

There are so many ignorant and even stupid people in the USA, and yes, these are the Blitzers and Coopers and Lauers...jackasses. Just not narcissistic, bigoted jackasses like Trump.

It's enough to make me want to scream. I think I'll vote instead.