At 9:20 AM -0700 7/9/01, Ray Dillinger wrote:
I turned on a television set last night, for the first time in many months. I was watching videotapes, but I caught fragments of shows while tapes were rewinding, etc.
American TV has taken a definite turn for the vicious since I last watched. It's still pablum-and-opiates, but someone has spiked it.
"Let's kick it up a notch!"
We're seeing an increasing focus on elitism, "survival of the fittest", etc -- shows that present the "elimination" of the weak as a virtue, and where game-show hosts masquerading as intellectuals intentionally humiliate contestants.
Yes, quite a refreshing trend.
We are seing a separation of moral responsibility from action and being conditioned to accept viciousness in authority figures.
That British woman who says "You ARE the weakest link. Good-bye!" is not an authority figure by any sense of being a state functionary. People compete in the show, as in all of the other shows you are presumably catching snippets of, on a voluntary basis. (Note: I have never seen an episode of "Survivor," "Boot Camp," or "Weakest Link." I did watch the first episode of "Big Brother" last summer, figuring it might be germane to my interests in privacy and surveillance, but it was too boring to watch for a second hour.)
The tone is very similar to "entertainment" or "public education" films that were produced by the propaganda arm of the german National Socialist party in 1936-1938, which I remember from school but which folk in Germany, or those who attend current-day American schools, will not recognize due to censorship. We forget history, believing that this will prevent us from repeating it rather than the other way round....
Calling these shows comparable to what the Nazis did is ludicrous.
The progression was reasonably simple, as I recall.
First, the people are conditioned to accept "harsh reality", survival of the fittest, etc.
Teaching people this fact might do wonders for getting ten million leeches off the welfare rolls and state subsidy scams, so I applaud it.
Third, some class of people are identified as being "inferior" and pseudoscience upholding the claim is advanced.
The dull are just that, dull. Not pseudoscience, but fact.
I am scared.
You ARE the weakest link. Good-bye! --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns