Europe -- A Sick Continent

An American accusing Europe of the lack of intellectual content...
Oooh, baby. That would be a representative from a country, 99% of whose population would not be able to locate Europe on the map, while watching American Idol after picking up their barely-literate kids from school where evolution is taught as a "false theory".

Oui, Beyonce Knowles aussi, indeed.

 

Wow, downright embarassing...on the part of the writer.

 

We Europeans do love the WSJ Opinion pages.

Almost as much as we love Karl's fumbled attempts to fashion a point out of them.

FWIW, there's a kernel of sense in that otherwise desperately incoherent and reactionary dirge. The reactions of France and Germany to the French rejection of the constitution was emblematic of a way of thinking that fewer and fewer people subscribe to. It's got nothing to do with playboy Prime Ministers and anti-Americanism (but it's understandable that the hack who wrote this built such parallels - journalists play to the gallery, after all). It's to do with the long-held belief amongst the political elite in both countries that the only way to maintain their traditional pre-eminence in a Europe that is expanding at a rate and in a range of ways that they cannot control, is to create a "two-speed" entity, in which France and Germany forge a path of their own choosing and assume leadership of those few countries within the larger whole that follow them.

In a way, the whole Euro initiative was about that, but now that we have 25 members and will only add more, it's become more essential and elemental than that, it's literally about preserving the decaying vision of the traditional French and German disposition toward Europe in an organisation that they see as being increasingly imperilled by the agenda that the British, Scandinavians and Dutch have been pushing for some time now.

That's what's really at issue here, it's sad that a paper that professes to be as universally respected as the WSJ does should give column inches to someone whose attempts to grapple with that issue are this lamentable and, erm, lacking in intellectual content.

 

I'm pretty sure the percentage of europeans who couldn't find USA on the map is the same.

 

Paul Johnson is a British historian.

 

I'm pretty sure you're wrong.

 

ha,ha , a rare "we're just as dumb-no we're really dumber than you" debate.

seriously, most studies say that US education is on the same level as the european average.

 

Those who oppose EU will go on opposing it finding always new capital sins so it's useless to run after them to gain their approval, an approval that will never come.

So I hope that France and Germany (and hopefully Italy - if and when Prodi will win the political elections in 2006 - and Spain) will really pursue a 2 speed entity.
If the others want to follow fantastic otherwise "ciao".

That is the way to go.

The article is one of the dumbest I ever read. Did they pay him?

"frivoulos playboy... antiamerican rhetoric... Napoleon... Waterloo... sick... totalitarian monster... "

 

Not in the school my kid is about to attend. He will be the only white student there since anyone cares to remember, and, as far as I could tell, most classes teach about black man inventing rope or something. I am not sure a mostly-white school would be much of an improvement.
Until you care to produce actual statistics of these "studies", I will stick to my opinion. Besides, whatever edu-ma-cation American kids do get, it must all fly out of the window the second they turn on the TV (about two seconds after they are home from school).
I once saw about 10 minutes of an American "reality show" and kept bumping into walls and forgetting my wife's name for the next 24 hours.

 

I can just imagine the highly intellectual readers of WSJ ruffling their comb-overs at this part and muttering "Can't they write in a normal language? Not all of us remember high-school Spanish!"

 

Lest people wonder more about what (if) you think, please do care to explain what exactly is "intellectual content" in the government. That is what I presume you claim to be the difference between Europe and EU, unless you really meant that there is plenty of intellectual content in Europe outside of EU, like, say, in Belarus.
And, for that matter, do care to compare it with the intellectual content of the US government, which supposedly is permeated by "great writers, thinkers and scientists"*. Because, you know, this oughtta be good.

----
* All of the above being Goerge W. Bush, whose scientific exploration in the field of embryonic stem cell research will surely cause him to become a writer of his name under a veto of a congressional finacing bill. He is also reported to have been a thinker on several occasions, some of them not involving operation of toilet paper.

 

Can’t be bothered but I can tell you that the pinnacle of intellectual activity for Croatian women is reading the subtitles of Brazilian telenovelas followed by reading the horoscope . For men it’s the reading of sports pages followed by a detailed exploration of their favorite bookies weekly and filling up 3 betting tickets a day.

Well big brother was invented in the Netherlands, it was huge in most of Europe, I think the Croatian edition had a 60-70 % of the population in front of the screens. The events in the “big brother house” were national news, the headline on the biggest selling paper was “ Alen proposes to Marina”.

 

Since when is Croatia Europe? Didn't you guys stop sacrificing your kids to Hrun, the God of Kielbasa, only like last Thursday?

 

I guess people like Sartre, Derrida and Bobbio don't count.

Europe still produce the best human sciences thinkers, and Asia the best mathematical scientists, but America just keeps buying them, and they have a better infra-structure.

 

You dare to insult the fore wall of Christianity? The inventors of the neck-tie?

 

The former are the Jews and I would never insult them. And whoever are the latter, fire at Hrun's altar is too good for them.

 

ya, I'd like to see them name all 50 states and state capitals.

 

A task every American child will accomplish with the greatest of ease, stating that the capital of Oregon is "either DesMoines or Atlanta, or something". Which is a direct quotation from Oregon's constitution, by the way.

 

Well The Sun IS the most popular newspaper in England, by far, and when I was over there the headlines talked about Sven shagging an FA secretary, and a transsexual named Nadya winning some kind of reality TV show despite remaining a transsexual virgin.

People are universally attracted to dumb sh1t.

 

Ok Karl, so please do tell, where exactly does the intellectual superiority of the Bush administration manifest itself?

 

You'd have a point, but exactly how many Americans can do that themselves?