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It's so weird that we have the internet at our fingertips. Every single thing you'd ever want or need to know is available to us. And we're getting less and less educated. I remember learning about the Birds and Bees and Facts of Life from some books that a neighbor girl had. I thought I was doing some real illicit stuff. Turns out, it's probably a good thing I did that.
Yah, we have the opposite problem from the people who suffered under the Iron Curtain in the USSR. They had tightly controlled & state-sanctioned communications only - in all spheres - private & public. In the industrialized West, we have a lot of comms driven mostly by a Show Biz mentality - it's all celeb gossip all the time. In the USSR, the problem was to recognize the occasional nuggets of real information in a flood of agitprop; in the West, it's looking past the flood of useless or distracting commercial info to get to the real data.
In the West, on the other hand, it's much easier for a self-educated person to get access to the books & ideas & movies & etc. that he or she wants. A lot of it is readily available over the Internet, to be sure. The problem with the 'Net is that the Show Biz culture wants to make us all into Consumers, rather than Citizens. The Show Biz answer to every problem is to buy something - a car, a house, join the right club, wear the right clothes, see the right movies, go to the right school & on & on. It's all cash 'n' carry, & the intellectual poverty of that is flooding into all other spheres of life.
The local 'paper yesterday on No Child Wet Behind - a fund raiser for diapers:
"Really in the end, it means happier babies ... When people are struggling with diapers, there's a lot of stories about making diapers stretch a little bit longer ..."
It's so weird that we have the internet at our fingertips. Every single thing you'd ever want or need to know is available to us. And we're getting less and less educated. I remember learning about the Birds and Bees and Facts of Life from some books that a neighbor girl had. I thought I was doing some real illicit stuff. Turns out, it's probably a good thing I did that.
Imo, the ratio of dumbness to intelligence is increasing exponitionally in favor of the former with each passing year.
''They finally succeeded in getting Wringling Brothers to end their traditional elephant acts.''
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The inside skinny?
