"Ensuring Stupidity", a short rant.

[ThomWV]

So I'm flippin' through the channels, which is a lot of channels with the little dish and about a hundred bucks a month worth of programming, and for a moment I light on a triller of a move that has a caveman pitted against prehistoric beasts. There is a pretty girl involved and she's swathed in animal fur, which I'm sure attracts viewers.

So I watch this bullshit for a couple of minutes and it dawns on me, whatever the movie is about doesn't matter but the picture I'm seeing here rhymes with the fundamentalists nonsense that men and dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time. So I think about that for a moment and it occurs to me that what I'm seeing is why so many poor slobs believe the line of theocratic bullshit. Picture a young, or not so young viewer; wasn't taught jack shit about early history while he was in school, the TV has given him a picture in his mind of men and scantly clad women running around batteling dinosaurs, and now along comes a preacher who tells him the earth is 6,000 years old - and what the hell does he know? Shit, why not believe it. And its not that the TV movie people, and the shylock preachers, and what passes for an education system are acting in concert to make us dumber (well, 2 out of 3 ain't bad) its that it just works out that way. Am I to believe this? Can this possibly be accidental?

- Rant over -

[JHB]

1. on the flipside, plenty of scientists became scientists because they watched things like that...

...when they were kids.

I think it has more to do with what happens once they discover a kid with his/her imagination fired.

Do they fan the flame, or douse it?

[BlooInBloo]

2. The Sleestack are my favorite!

[The_Commonist]

3. I think you need to put the bong down!

[SIMPLYB1980]

5. I was about to say this thread is usless without pics, but

I see there is no need.:evilgrin:

[countingbluecars]

4. You mean the Flintstones

didn't really have a pet dinosaur named Dino!? But seriously, a big part of teaching is correcting misconceptions.

[damntexdem]

7. Hey, they were a "page right out of history."

Well, right out of his-tor-eeeee. ;-)

[damntexdem]

6. As a kid, dinosaurs just weren't very exciting without people around.

Even then, I knew that dinosaurs hadn't lived at the same time as people (hey, I went to Catholic school), but it was still more interesting when they were mixed -- not just on TV but in the Sunday comics (Alley Oop far predated BC). The stupid Xian fundies most likely got their theology from the same movies and comic strips -- at least before BC, I doubt that the movies and comic strips were much influenced by the fundies.