i do not discuss politics with students, and i told them i want them to do it for statistical purposes to provided me a basis to either refute or support the aussie’s contentious claim

do i need to tell you what to do with your sarcasm ?

I just had a radical idea. I was thinking about this clip on the way to class this morning, and the obvious point is that through the editing process, this dude could have easily omitted responses from the non-moron to make his point.
At one point, he asks a homeless guy some questions. Not to impugn the average homeless person, but it is not clear that his sampling of people was unbiased.

So I have access to college students, not the cream of the crop in a lot of regards, because they are mostly young, out of high school, and Louisiana’s high schools are not the best in the country. But my students are college students, so they might be able to answer some general knowledge questions ( and not loaded ones like showing a map with Iran as Australia !).

So I am going to distribute a questionnaire to all my classes, and then tally up the responses. This might be a better gauge.

When I assemble all the data, I will post it in a new post, with the questionnaire itself. I will use some of his questions, but I will ask some other non-loaded questions as well. This should be illuminating (or depressing).

This college grad went through all three of his cheats in the first three questions.

Watching the video also brings to mind the conversation I had with an urban dweller who felt the electoral college system was unfair because the bulk of the population is in cities and the electoral college grants more weight (per voter) to rural states.

Well these interviews were obviously done in a large city, and if they took the same show to middle America, they would probably not do much better, but it’s hard to imagine doing much worse.

That being said, there is no indication of how many people they had to talk to in order to come up with this many clueless people.

And by the way, Scottie, my identity is supposed to be super-top-secret…now everyone knows I’m just a schlub named after a notorious outlaw. The mystique is now dead…very sad.

BP/LP