Things are probably LESS farked up now than in the past. It's just that focusing on the present is easier to do than remembering the past.

white people are gullible as fark

Obligatory.

Well, they were all obviously educated elitists lacking in common sense & boot-strappy-ness.

In reply, I give you Steve Jobs, Stephen Hawkings, Thomas Friedman, Mythbusters, etc.

Plenty of smart people getting attention. It's the dumb ones who get attention that get your attention.

Television and the Internet has allowed the uneducated masses to talk to one another.

Margaret "Iron Biatch" Thatcher deserves all the bad press to come her way. She helped create the chav problem by going way overkill on labor unions - to the point where people were blacklisted from work. No wonder the UK is farked to hell.

That, and Thatcher's control of the media makes Obama's supposed control of the media look amateurish in comparison.

One day I'd like to walk around with an IQ test and an ice pick. You score below a certain threshold and I take the ice pick to your nuts/uterus.

CrispFlows: For example, the puritans.../i>

FTFM.

Oh my god. I just remembered I had a dream last night where Sarah Palin was my mother. Now I know why I've felt disturbed ever since waking up.

wildcardjack: In reply, I give you Steve Jobs, Stephen Hawkings, Thomas Friedman, Mythbusters, etc.

Plenty of smart people getting attention. It's the dumb ones who get attention that get your attention.


One person on that list deserves to be there, and you spelled his name wrongs.

The TV assholes won't stop talking about them. Because it's easier and cheaper to speculate about the activities of celebrities than it is to send people to Afghanistan or the Sudan or even Detroit for actual news. Why go out of your way to tell people what they need to know when most of them are just as happy with worthless gossip?

I don't really have any interest in glorifying kim kardashian. I'd be happy enough to expel some fluids at her.

Did we revere scientists? Especially during their day?

How famous were Marie Curie and Thomas Edison while they were alive? I would venture that most of their popularity came after they were dead.


It would seem to me that most of the people who were famous while alive were famous for more dubious exploits: athletes, outlaws etc. People who were well known for their scandals

Quark_Quasar: DROxINxTHExWIND: machoprogrammer: Thomas Edison was not a great thinker. He was an invention thief.

Uh oh. Here we go.

/Please explain

I'm gonna go ahead and guess macho meant that he stole inventions.


and that he had sharp knees

SoCalSurfer: One day I'd like to walk around with an IQ test and an ice pick. You score below a certain threshold and I take the ice pick to your nuts/uterus.

You know who else wanted to sterilize the untermensch?

Very smart people attempt to keep you dumb and keep you consuming.


/Hakuna Matata

Nobody has ever heard of Stephen Hawking (astrophysicist) or Sir James Dyson (inventor) or any other person made famous by their merit rather than their bling.

FlashHarry: it probably has something to do with the advent of television and its "vast wasteland." humans are animals. and just as a dog will eat itself to death if given an unlimited supply of food, so too humans will "amuse themselves to death" if given an unlimited supply of mass entertainment.

Roger waters made a song about that. Funnily enough, it's called "Amused to Death" Pretty good song.

Gunny Highway: Were they the heroes of the common man?

Not for Thatcher unless your country's main industry is banking.

DamnYankees: Sorry to say, but society at large has not changed at all. Every generation has its Kim Kardashian, they are just forgotten by history.

I'll nver forget Clara Bow.

DamnYankees: Sorry to say, but society at large has not changed at all. Every generation has its Kim Kardashian, they are just forgotten by history.

Pretty sure you're dead-on. It just doesn't seem that way when Jersey Shore and the Kardashi-coonts dominate public attention.

these articles all act like today is somehow different from yesterday.

asshats have always gotten more immediate attention than those who deserve it. the difference is that, 50 years from now, those that deserve the attention will get it, while those that don't are forgotten.

that's why we think all attention from back in the day was on greatness. it's because the asshats all dissovled into obscurity.

/ back in the classic greek days, most of the winners for athens' drama competition were for plays of nothing but fart jokes... only occasionally did someone great win the award. and today, the only plays we know of are the great ones.

I blame ted turner...his "invention" of 24 hours/365 days "news" programming is the cause of most of the worlds problems

Weaver95: the author poses a good question...but she wimps out on an answer.

for what it's worth, I don't think there is any one single reason for our decline...I think there's a lot of little reasons combined that have pulled us off into the land of distraction.

I think two large factors are that we spend less time scraping for existence and we have a myriad choices (take that grammar nazis!) in entertainment.

But I also think Damn Yankees is absolutely correct. There's always been celebrity without merit.

What happened? Progressives telling us that the old ways stifled us, nothing was sacred, and there was nothing you should ever be ashamed of.

30 years later, BAM, "Jersey Shore."

We are culturally devolving; like how the Roman Empire gave way to the Dark Ages.

We really, really need a "Back in the Day" category. The background could be an onion on a belt.

Ask Aldous Huxley.

Nostalgia is denial - denial of the painful present... the name for this denial is golden age thinking - the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one ones living in - its a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present.


- Woody Allen script quote

To be honest, I wouldn't know Kim Kardashian or Justin Bieber if I met them on the street.

Kind of proud of that.

I've said it before and I'll say it again; panem et circenses. All this country cares about is panem et circenses. Bread and Games. Except, instead of gladiators fighting to death; the games are the constant stream of information we are bombarded with every day. We are pacified with 24 hour news, sports ect. And that is unlikely to change any time soon.

/ a distracted, well feed populous is a happy populous

Oh, there were attention whores back in Roosevelt's day. They just didn't have today's media options available to them to get their antics out there.

vudukungfu: DamnYankees: Sorry to say, but society at large has not changed at all. Every generation has its Kim Kardashian, they are just forgotten by history.

I'll nver forget Clara Bow.

Oh, SONofa... One second, vudukungfu. My quest for simulpost continues...

mbillips: [0.tqn.com image 160x206]
Have the Kardashians killed anyone by sodomizing them with a Coke bottle? I mean, that we know of?

Low blow!

But thanks for pointing out how powerful rumor and speculation were in any age.

maliklockett: Did we revere scientists? Especially during their day?

How famous were Marie Curie and Thomas Edison while they were alive? I would venture that most of their popularity came after they were dead.


It would seem to me that most of the people who were famous while alive were famous for more dubious exploits: athletes, outlaws etc. People who were well known for their scandals

Don't know about Curie, but Edison was a farking rock star back in his day.

Wait. The media is asking this?

wildcardjack: In reply, I give you Steve Jobs, Stephen Hawkings, Thomas Friedman, Mythbusters, etc.

Plenty of smart people getting attention. It's the dumb ones who get attention that get your attention.

Uh ... we get it, the world's farking flat.

on his tortured use of the English language