Shocker: Voters Are Stupid

Dick Polman has a blog post today that is absolutely hilarious and you must read it. Apparently, some dude did a focus group with 12 voters who didn’t follow politics much and wondered why the primary wasn’t over yet.

And, of course, they all think Obama is a Muslim, even though his Christian pastor’s comments about how America throws a ton of black people in prison for fun were all over the news a month or so ago. Let’s just quote the best parts:

For instance, here’s Dorita, opining about Obama: “I’m a little concerned. I don’t know enough about his Muslim background and their beliefs and how he views everything. I’m a little concerned. I need to check his background.”

Here’s Josh on Obama: “He’s representing a minority in more than one case. He is African American and he is Muslim. And in light of that…it does feel like we’re being judged or pounded down on because we want to carry a gun or we want to wear the American flag pin.”

Here’s Melinda, clearly the GOP’s dream voter: “I just really feel like he’s…not a people pleaser as in the Americans, but the other people who don’t necessarily need to be pleased, the other, the enemies if you will, I don’t know. I’m just not real positive on that.”

The comments then explode with people who love to read blogs they hate (for reasons I can’t understand, but whatever) attacking Polman for making fun of people who think Obama is a Muslim.

But, uh, this isn’t really surprising. Let’s generalize for a moment: Most people don’t really seem to care much about the truth; they care more about what they want to believe. If you want to believe Barack Obama is a Muslim, then you can probably find evidence that Obama is an evil Muslim who’s going to destroy America — whether it’s in a chain email or a Daniel Pipes column.

And if you need any evidence that people are stupid, then there are nearly 8,000 posts on this website that seem to confirm that. And then there’s me, who has written nearly a billion words on this stupidity, sometimes coming off rather stupid myself. In a word: Duh.

Equal time for the willfully ignorant [American Debate]

Dick Pole Man Censored By Own Company

This is from the comment section of an article about eminent domain and city incompetence, naturally.

Jury to city: Pay up [Daily News]

Carnac The Magnificient Returns!

Front page of Philly.com, right now:

Okay, let’s see… name three people with lower IQs than an average Northeast Times letter writer.

Semi-related: Dick Polman is leaving the Inquirer to take a full-time job lecturing at Penn.

Groundhog Day in America [Dick Polman's American Debate]
Professor [Blinq]

Blogging and the ‘Inquirer’

Last Thursday, the Inquirer unveiled its newest blog, Dick Polman’s American Debate.

I’ll acronym it here: DPAD (pronounced “dee-pad,” like an old Nintendo controller) is yet another Inquirer blog running on the free Blogspot service, which is confusing, since there are other free services (say, WordPress) that would give them a chance to integrate the blogs into, say, Philly.com. But analyzing the Inky’s business plan would most certainly make my brain explode, so let’s move on.

So far, the Inquirer’s blogs have seemed to be just stuff thrown up there, hoping one can stick. Seriously. Look at this full list of blogs from the paper’s website. (There are some DN blogs in there, but you get the idea.) Part of my job is browsing the Internet and looking at shit like this, and I’ve barely heard of some of these blogs.

Which is fine, of course, since blogs are cheap to set up, especially when you’re using a free Blogspot server. (Obviously, the exception here is Blinq.) But it just seems like they throw up a blog, don’t promote it, don’t give any direction, and the blog of the Inquirer sports editor gets 9 hits a day. (Okay, he stopped blogging in October. But, yeah, there’s another problem.) It doesn’t even really matter if that’s not true — that’s just how it seems (i.e. a newspaper throwing up another pointless blog!) and that turns people off as a reader.

Anyway, this newest blog follows the same Blogspot default template setup, but it is different in that it’s pretty much the first blog from the Inky of one of the paper’s ‘name’ writers. Polman’s one of the most respected political writers in the country and has been at the paper for 21 years.

If you have a full-time reporter/commentator and they set up a blog with the paper, it’s very unlikely they’re going to be able to post as much as, say, those without full-time newspaper jobs. But you can use a blog for a reporter to throw in some extra commentary that might not have fit in the paper, to expand on things he couldn’t do, to toss out ideas.

Polman’s blog looks like it’s shaping up in that fashion. His first post is a discussion of something he couldn’t fit into the paper. His posts are well-thought out, informative, interesting and not just C+P’ed articles from elsewhere.

If I were in charge of Philly.com — and, really, thank God I’m not; the stress might kill me — I’d integrate the blogs into the paper’s website, have some full-timers who do whatever and then get some staffers to have blogs like Polman’s, with just some extra discussion and items that weren’t in the paper. Oh, and the puppy photo posting would go up 10,000 percent.

Actually, can you guys just do that anyway? That’d totally make it easier for me to find things to mock.

You’re paying for it [DPAD]
Dick Polman [dragonballyee]