Wednesday, July 02, 2008
PS to Canada Day
After you could recently test whether you qualify to be German, for Canada Day the Globe and Mail offers a similar questionaire "What's the score, eh?" to see whether you'd make a good Canadian/American. I scored 6/10 for both Canadian and American (mostly guessing though). Have fun!
10 comments:
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Hi Bee,
ReplyDeleteWell as much as hate to admit it I got only 9 out of 10 on the Canadian quiz for I didn’t know which author is Canadian, while I got 10 for 10 in the American one; to be truthful though fictional authors are not my strong suit, particularly when it comes to nation. They should have asked something like pick out a Canadian theoretical physicist and then I would have been more likely to be 10 for 10:-) That Rockwell question was certainly easier for the art question. I am disappointed that only 4.2 was the average score for Canadian questions while 4.7 for the American ones. I can tell you one thing it seems to prove all this internet illusion of knowledge society stuff with this result.
Oh yes, thanks for the quiz.
Best,
Phil
I failed with everything that contained names.
ReplyDeleteI got 4 of the Canadian questions right and all 10 of the American. Kind of embarassing to know so little about the place just 300 miles north of me.
ReplyDeleteI got 4 Canadian and 7 American. Obviously I watch too many American movies.
ReplyDeleteHi Carl and Kea,
ReplyDeleteI wouldn’t take your score too badly since you both seem to be nearly equal to my fellow Canadian's quiz average. My head is still spinning seeing at how low they scored. In as this caught my interest I sent out the quiz to some office coworkers today and found that the pattern holds true with the score decreasing with the age of those tested. I hope some of the powers that be will take notice and sound some alarm bells.
Best,
Phil
Hi Bee,
ReplyDeleteWell I hope you realize that you’re responsible, in the space of a few days, to having forced me to come to grips with the truth that my countrymen not only are becoming fatter, yet it also appears their civic knowledge is decreasing reciprocally. I wonder if there is a correlation that can be discovered here. :-)
Best,
Phil
I hope Germany isn't devolving into a proposition nation. It is one of the most abnormal and unatural ideas every concieved of. Most normal human beings, wherever they live, depise the idea.And that is a fact Jack
ReplyDeleteI have a German great great maybe another great granny. Last name was Hyler. She was from the other side of the Oder River.
Joshua Chamberlain(deceased but otherwise doing quite well)
Hi Joshua,
ReplyDeleteNice to hear from you, I'm glad you are doing fine and there is internet access in afterlife. One has to be careful to disentangle necessarily local politics from those that isn't, or even that which is in essence global. The biggest problems with the European Union are in conflicts between national and European laws. This is unsurprising, on a lower level one has the same problem between federal and state laws and so on. These need to be taken care of somehow without dissolving local identity, which is never an easy process and one that I don't think ever will be really 'done'. In our societies, laws are definitely time-dependent.
On the one hand I wish that local politics was indeed local. I.e. it strikes me that in an era where people move around the globe frequently, when it comes to their political influence it is tied to their country and region of origin and not the place where they actually live. On the other hand there are many aspects that are of global character, may that be worker's rights or environmental questions, and it should be possible to address them on the same level. Whether the origin of such institutions will be nations decoupling their constitution from their country I don't know. It is kind of interesting that Neal Stephenson in one of his novels (Snowcrash) suggested it would be companies playing a similar role. I doubt it though. Best,
B.
Bee
ReplyDeleteI have heard corporate executives make the case that the corporation should completely replace the state when comes to delivering social serives. Although it is hard to pin down the precise defintion of facism,there is partial core defintion that everyone agrees upon. In a facist state, the state is a puppet for the corprations. In fact, a very strong case can be made that the corporation is the model fascist intitution. So what these corporate ceos are proposing as a model of society is a kind of super-facism. I'll check out Snowcrash.
It is intersting to note the corporate executives who advocate this are the same creatures most enthusiastic about wiping away national borders and national identities.
Joshua Chamberlain(deceased but connected through the ether)
Hi Joshua,
ReplyDeleteWell, although I'd say some social service is still better than no social service I believe the attempt to export social services entirely to companies is fatally flawed and conceptually nonsense. Work is not life, people are not their profession, and tying social services to companies means dropping any mechanism to balance economical trends that counteract social interests. It's not a mechanism that will lead to an optimal configuration through some 'invisible hand'. There are many ways to improve profit that are just non-social, or even non-human. It's an argument that needs to be lead, constantly, to find a balance, and it's not a tension that can be resolved by just combining both aspects. Best,
B.