Want to take a civics quiz? This is a pretty good, one -- harder than your basic civics fundamentals high school test, but less difficult than the concepts you'd likely encounter in an arcane, specialized P.hD. thesis. I did pretty well on it, scoring 54/60 or 90%.
There were lots of history questions, and I got all of those right, although I was disappointed that there weren't any about some of my favorite American historical figures such as Joseph McCarthy, Aaron Burr, or General Curtis LeMay. It seems that only figures from history the general public respects and admires get their own questions.
I'm obsessed with Joe McCarthy. If he was with us today he'd be carrying a gin bottle around in a briefcase, which he would loudly proclaim contains evidence that Barack Obama is a Muslim terrorist. The people actually making those claims today are small potatoes compared to a major media star like drunken Joe.
But I digress. The hardest questions on this quiz, accounting for 2/3 of my wrong answers were were in the economics section, and I found some of them ideologically loaded, or to put it another way, squinky.
For example, "National defense is considered a common good because..."
"Considered by whom?" is one of my reservations about this question, and another is "How much 'national defense'?"
The war machine is not a common good. It's a menace to society, and an employment opportunity for hundreds of thousands who would have to be engaged in making or growing things of value if they were not employed in the making of engines of destruction, accoutrements for such engines, and other auxiliary support activities that enable us to periodically send our expeditionary forces to new and exotic places, meet new and exotic peoples, and kill them.
That's my sermon for today, and thanks to Earthfreak at Beliefnet/US Politics for bringing this fun quiz to our attention.
2 comments:
Ugh, you blew me away. I did far worse...and now I feel stupid. But I agree, many of the questions were loaded ideologically. So perhaps I'm not stupid. But still.
Don't feel bad. There were people at Beliefnet who did better than 90%. But nobody got 100.
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