Tea at Trianon: Turn It Off

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, February 25, 2008

Turn It Off

Too much television is bad, as common sense should tell us. (But common sense is a rare commodity nowadays.) To quote from a very insightful article:

The point of this is to show that television is a form of hypnosis. Hypnosis is described as "suspension of the critical factor" which expands on the idea of "increased suggestibility." A person who is hypnotized may accept statements as true that he or she would normally reject.

[....]

As I stated in my article (and confirmed by Marie Winn's book The Plug-In Drug) it is not what is on television that is bad, it is not the content that is damaging; it is the mere act of watching television that is harmful. Television is a displacement of time. It is a huge waste of time – in a hypnotic state – that implants other people's messages into the viewer’s head. This makes for a bizarre state of "reality" where frequent television viewers no longer have the common sense to understand our world and true reality. One such reader made an absurd claim that "There is no scientific proof that watching television is harmful." The reader then went on to explain that scientists had not proven that digital images moving at 44.1kHz were harmful to the human eye. I won't go into it too much, but this kind of thinking is just plain ridiculous. Here’s why:
Television puts people in a trance and offers up an alternate reality. People waste time watching TV and when they do, the time spent is time lost that could have been used for gaining real-life experiences. As Gary North once wrote, "Time is the only non-renewable resource." The utter notion that radioactive waves (lights) – in an unnatural color spectrum – flashing on a screen in front of someone for four to six hours a day, or more, every day, and that not having any negative effects on the human body or mind is ridiculous on the face of it. It would only take a person who has lost touch with reality and common sense, or one who watches too much TV to even consider that this practice could not be doing something, quite possibly very harmful, to the human body.