Firstly, your statement that 15% of Americans had passports is a bit dated? According to survey last year the number is more like 34% (http://www.canadatourism.com/ctx/files/announcements/Impact_of_the_WHTI_eng_web.pdf )
2ndly:
even booking 3months in advance, a quick search tells me that a tip to London (which is relatively close) will take me 13 hours to get there and cost almost 2,000 dollars.
Given the serious loss of time required for your average American to get somewhere overseas they cant just hop out for a weekend in another country (like many Europeans could).
They certainly couldn't do it considering its going to cost them 2,000 for the day.
Most American employers don't send the majority of their employees overseas.
The expense is significant for most Americans ... planning a larger trip helps, but in the end it just raises the cost. The number of people not having passports here has to do with the number of people who can afford to travel overseas ... not the number of people who care about the world around them.
Elsewhere in the world people CAN just hop on a train and spend the day or the weekend in another country - no wonder more of them have a passport at the ready than Americans.
Implying that Americans are globally disinterested ignorants just because the average American cant afford to cross the pond ... is ... well ignorant ... if not insulting.
Passport statistics have no relevance to Americans interest in the rest of the world. Most of us are quite interested in international affairs, and how American policy is playing out in the great big world.
Leaving such irrelevant statistics behind, the fact remains that Americans are no more universally ignorant than citizens of any other country where the leaders lie to them and he media cant be trusted to stand up for them. Blame Americans for that if you want, but I wouldn't call that fair.
And 3rdly, what Americans DO or do NOT know ... should not be judged by tidbits edited together for the greatest effect by some TV show trying to sell a point.
The fact remains that the Internet has and is helping a great deal to keep issues alive in the American Public that otherwise would have died out ... and that not protecting Net Neutrality WILL negatively impact Americans ability to remain 'in the know' to the extent that they are now (which I believe you may have misjudged).
- Dave
On 5/6/06, David Meade <[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
On 5/6/06, Deirdre Straughan < [EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:On 5/3/06, David Meade <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
NB: I agree with the principle of net neutrality, I just don't see it as a panacea to the world's problems, and it can be hard to get people to listen to your arguments if you fill them with hysterical, overblown points.
You mean overblown points like the 'fact' that because many Americans don't have passports they're ignorant? Or that because some camera crew managed to film a few idiots they are representative of The American People?
It really irks me when people who distrust the Mainstream media's ability to report the facts suddenly latch on to scenes like Jay Leno's 'jay walking' as a benchmark for what Americans do and don't know about the world.
For the record I've traveled all over the world ... but America isn't like Europe where another country is an hours drive. It's a huge land mass with distinctly different cultures within it's own borders ... you shouldn't be so quick to count the fact that not alot of them manage to afford the time or expense to travel over seas as some black mark against them.
All that being said ... this idea that Net Neutrality is an American problem is pretty dismissive of the issue. If the net breaks down here into a handful of ISPs seeing who can charge the most to the others clients it will damage the whole of the Internet. And it will cause issues on networks overseas.
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