"Here's Lookin' @ You Kid."
The Ministry of Information Retrieval

I read something a while ago that got me pretty good and ticked off.

I didn't feel the need to talk about it at the time, but today, having nothing else to talk about, it's a perfect topic for my kind of monologue.

In case you hadn't noticed or if perhaps you're just joining us, I should restate that fact that I think the majority of the world is pretty durn stupid. Not everyone mind you, nor all the time, nor on every topic, but generally speaking pretty stupid. Some of them were born dulled, and some of them have just been dulled down over time. I'm not pointing fingers...I just think a lot of people are stupid.

Oh and tasteless too, but that isn't what this is about.

In reading an on-line review of a book I enjoyed about the effects of television on the world, I came across a review that...well, it annoyed the hell out of me frankly. Now, I suppose that I could've written a rebuttal, but the review was at least a year old. Who says my critic would even recall what they hell he/she had written that long ago, or more importantly, that they would care. Yesterday I talked about talking about things to excess, and the only thing I left off was ranting. Unless you're Dennis Leary, you're unlikely to win over anyone to your side by ranting at them.

So I'll rant here.

(As usualy, I'm gonna b!tch, b!tch, b!tch right up until the wry twist, so keep reading.)

In typical internet fashion, I'm not going to quote my source, just like I didn't tell you the name of the book in question nor where I found the review. The point is that it was a springboard for this. It's larger than that person and their review. It goes like this:

The argument came in two parts as a rebuttal against the book's author's claim that TV had dumbed down many aspects of the world. The author of the critique came back with the argument that the internet has become a vastly useful tool for sharing information that people now frequently use. The second part of their stand was the proliferation of the megabookstores like Barnes & Noble as well as on-line bookstores. The conclusion was that the theory of declinism because of the TV and the TV age was false.

Allow me to retort.

When I was in college, not too painfully long ago, I had several professors tell me up front: "If you use any internet sources, you might wanna have a couple of back-ups in print." That was in addition to telling us that we should be using a reputable web source in the first place. It wasn't to say that Joe Blow's website was totally without credibility, but it looks more impressive in your research if it's coming off of a university, library, or news site.

The fact is that the internet is rife with pure bullsh!t in an amazing amount of ways and places. Because it's all-access and full of free speech, it's been left open to all sorts of misinformation, misleading informtation, subjective information, revisionist information, and just plain lies.

A good for instance is a website I was led to for a Creationist Science Fair. For those of you who don't know, creationism believes that the opening chapters of the Bible about the creation of the earth, of animals, and of man was soley God's work exactly as written. They primarily deny the various aspects of evolution, but there are a myriad of other minor doctrines to their "science."

Now, I've mentioned a few times that I'm a spirtiual man and a believer...but this stuff....well, it makes me want to puke. But that's not what I'm here to say, that's just my opinion. Now granted even the theories of evolution have their problems, and there're plenty of things that can't be satisfactorily answered by them. Personally, though, I believe that kids should presented with both and allowed to decide, but I don't believe either should be presented as flat out fact.

So that's one good example. Part of the reason I didn't just laugh the page off was the 2nd prize winner for middle school level "Women Were Designed For Homemaking." It was followed by a description. Now the bits about women carrying children inside them, and the nursing stuff I couldn't so much argue with as it's biologically true. What irked me was this bit: "social sciences show that the wages for women workers are lower than for normal workers, meaning that they are unable to work as well and thus earn equal pay." Now despite the faulty reasoning, I can't figure out if this is the work of a really precocious researching middle-schooler or the agenda of some family or church unit.

Actually this was a bad one to use. A) I'm not here for Christian bashing, B) This whole thing is a topic all to itself, and C) It's opinionated information. They have an opinion. I have an opinion. They don't agree, so it almost demands that we duke it out. Well, not here, not now.

In any event, it's not successful as truth, and not acceptable as fact.

So let's switch sides.

I came across a site on Satanism (may as well stay religious) which didn't so much get into faith as it tried to argue historically that Satanism was the original religion.

Ok, I'm kidding. I'm not really gonna waste my time on that, but it did make for entertaining reading. I look at it this way: They go use all this information about how the Inquisition of the Catholic Church used torture to force people to believe in Jesus to prove Christians are evil, I use that information to prove that they were a bunch of @$$holes and not Christians at all.

Now that I've forced myself into this hole when I wanted to talk about facts, I've seriously got to move on. I will say that the one props that I'll give the Satanists: They sure know more about their bullsh!t, than most "Christians" actually know or understand about the Bible.

Then again, according to my research, that symbol of the pentagram with the goat's head in it was chalked up by the Catholic church from the the pagan pentacle in order to frame the Knight's Templar for worshiping "Baphomet." Of course, that's just surface, Satanism's sort of a kitchen sink of all sorts of historical, minor religious, and made-up crap.

Anyhow, we all know about the Holocaust revisionist websites as part of the white supremacist crap. I've seen host of conspiracy theory websites that present their information as fact. I've seen movie review sites where I'm not even sure they really saw the movie. I've seen news sites that were thinly disguised tabloids. And even though my two religious groups were somewhat weak example, they nonetheless prove that the internet isn't the sources of fact my critic way back when thought.

Ok, ok, most of those aren't credible sites, but also while I was in college I noticed: 1) Kids will look for the quickest shortest research to get their "facts" (Think CliffNotes) and 2) Most kids don't know how to research anything to begin with (hence leaving them unqualified to discern fact from fiction).

The Second Point was the screwing jackrabbit-like appearances of the mega-bookstores as proofs of the rise of intelligence.

Well....I worked in a Barnes & Noble at the beginning of that sweeping craze, and I paid a goodly amount of attention to what people bought.

I don't consider self-help books as great sources of literature nor intelligence. I don't consider the latest best sellers as great literature (not that everything fictional has to be), but most of what I read of that ilk was not only crap in terms of plot but writing too. I don't know how much intelligence is found in the magazine rack either ("10 Ways to Dump Your Man" isn't exactly wisdom for the ages). Cookbooks, though useful, aren't exactly full of substance. I've already mentioned CliffNotes, and that's only when the movie was rented at the movie store next door. And so on.

It's sad when you get impressed by someone picking up something of quality. Then you gotta wonder if they'll ever actually read it. The other fate is if you happen to praise their choice, and you get that stare. Then they say something like "It's for my friend who reads weird/boring crap like this."

Oh, I almost forgot: What about the folks who never leave the coffee shop to actually come into books part of the store. You know the other 80% or more of the store. Oh wait, what about the ones with movies and/or music...plenty of folks never leave those sections either for the bookstore.

Like I said above, after working in a book/movie/music store one sees that people are also tasteless in a addition to stupid. I know I said this rant wasn't about that "fact," I just wanted to say it again.

In conclusion, I say that that critic was wrong, but here comes the wry twist.

I do agree that civilizatin isn't declining, at least not as a whole or not in the way my author or my critic think

Throughout history you can easily see where only a privileged few were ever truly educated. There's more and more people and more of them go to college, but I'd say it's proportionally not that truly different. If anything, Joe Average Peon back in the day didn't have all the book smarts in the world, but he did have a lot of valuable knowledge to remember about his trade, crops, and animals among other things. That's not to mention the value of common sense which I'd say Joe Average Peon had a lot more of. With all the modern convenience today, Joe Average doesn't know all that stuff.

I think that the decline is actually with practical, hands-on knowledge, general know-how type stuff.

It's like I posed before: If the nuclear bombs start falling or all electricity was wiped out tomorrow, could you survive? Could you save anyone else? Anything?

That's the actual decline.

The other real problem is advancement. We don't seem to truly be moving forward as a civilisation. According to early sci-fi novels we should be out of here, and whizzing around Saturn by now. Granted that's a little much, but considering how quickly the Space Race was conceived and built, why haven't we gotten any farther than we are?

Most of it boils down to desire and know-how. Not to mention looking ahead. I wrote something a little while ago about us being sated and over-saturated with media. Essentially desire for the future's been worn down by the fact that two weeks after Neil Armstrong went strolling on the moon, we weren't all flying around in X-wings gunning down Death Stars.

People, in addition to being stupid, have no capacity for being impressed or awed anymore.

I think that's TV's fault...and computers, like internet....and well, video games too.

Why do you have to actually go out and do or experience anything anymore when you can watch it, look up a video file on it, or do it "virtually?" It's just like that old thing about drinking if you think about it: You drink at a party to have fun, but eventually you can't have fun at a party if you're not drinking. Now if you're not too lazy to actually go outside and try to experience something you're miserable because it's too hot, or too dirty, or too far away, and there's no cool pumping soundtrack, and you could hurt yourself, etc.

Finally, if anything is an indicator on a) how wrong that jack@$$ was, and b) how stupid people are, have you read the reviews on sites like the Internet Movie Database or Amazon.com? They're horrible. It's not even that crappy chatting crap...it's just crap. They can't spell. They can't grasp simple grammar. They can't maintain a coherent thought. And my favorite is when the worst ones try to put the smack down on how bad a writer is.

After all, I'm impressed that they could even read whatever they chose to review.

That's it. The End.

Cheers.

P.s.: I realize my stuff's not exactly Shakespeare, much less the King's English...but I still got at least three or more up on a whole lot of clowns out there. And I'm smart enough to go back and edit mistakes if I find them. Ppthhhbbbbppppttt!