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Kill Your TV
I remember seeing hippie Volkswagen™ bugs and buses with the regulation number of Grateful Dead™ bumper stickers, mandalas apparently commissioned in nail polish, and somewhere in there, just above Free Tibet© and to the right of the Air Force “bake sale” sticker, would be one that read “Kill your TV.” Insane, right? Buncha gravel-munching druids, rolling joints, and blowing stop signs at seven miles per hour.
Kill your television. What you allow into your ears will eventually come out of your mouth. With freedom comes responsibility, and with the protection of society come duties. With the freedom to do as you please and to be left alone also comes an obligation to carefully tend your garden of ideas, dreams, and the focus of your effort. That’s your brain, and while mine may be made of Play-Doh™, I assure you that it is a cultivated mix of flavors. I mean colors. What was I saying?
Oh, right. I would rather be governed by the anonymous trolls at 4chan than by the first 2,000 names in the National Review’s™ Rolodex™.
Published in General
Amen. TV is the alpha wave machine that blanks your brain. Just like that device in Star Trek TOS. Dagger of the Mind, IIRC.
From a recent meme post:
Most media is insidious or insipid and sometimes both. And I cannot look away.
No, no, no! It’s “Blow up your TV!”
This is very true. It’s a good deal of what the Bible is about.
Well. Managed to raise four kids without TV. Comparing them to the extended family, they are by far the craziest and most free thinking of the bunch. Which is to say they are all nuts, and I highly recommend.
Who has time for TV?
Democrats.
GLOP podcast dudes have a LOT of time for it, last I heard.
Wonderful. And great advice.
In the 80s, I killed watching the nightly news because I got tired of hearing about all the things “wrong” with Ronaldus Maximus. In 1990 after we got our first satellite dish, I stopped watching TV altogether except for sports.
Yeah, I feel ya.
I have time to listen to podcasts and books while I go on about my day. Even then, I don’t have time for hours and hours of them. I try to always get Shapiro/Knowles/and especially Walsh every day, and a few more weekly ones. But who has time for much more? (My indispensable daily 1.5 hours of commercial-free Rush time can now be used for other things, of course.)
But even the Daily Wire guys put on a video version of their shows – who has that kind of time?
I spend an hour or two monkeying around with you guys here, and it’s totally time well spent. It’s true that I don’t get much of hearing “both sides” but I think I get enough of them from the clips you guys post. And, for the s*** sandwich most of their maundering is, I guess I’m glad I never have to eat the whole thing.
So when it comes to TV, I’ve just become completely disconnected from it. We no longer have that “water cooler discussion” culture – simply too many choices now – so I have no sense of what to watch so we can all consider it together. It all seems like endless sameness.
Plus there’s the time thing.
When I hear these guys talking about all the stuff they watch, I am always distracted from the discussion by wondering what their lives must be like, to be in the public eye, traveling constantly to speak here and there, to be writing books, to have families, to make podcasts. And still they apparently have an inordinate amount of time so watch apparently endless television.
I remember that priceless quote from Herb Stein, a very busy man: “Never spend time doing anything that could be more profitably spent sleeping.” I wonder how much television he watched?
Right?
Though I sometimes make time at about 11:00 pm.
And then I fall asleep after about 10 minutes.
Occasionally a cow-orker will mention some funny commercial, and I’m like “I don’t think I’ve seen a television commercial in 15 years.”
No wonder their brains are broken.
I gave away my tv set five years ago and still find that decision very liberating. Since then, I’m sure I have missed a lot of frustration and stress.
When I married Joyce in 1979 we vowed to remain TV-free. This we did until our fourth address, when our then 7 year-old son had TV assignments from school. Pravda and Izvestia TV, no doubt. So we got a boob tube and enjoyed a little bit for a dozen years. Star trek dates were fun, especially after a bottle of wine together. When she died I stopped entirely, being too busy as a father. Now Mrs Doc Robert and I will watch a comic for a half hour two or three nights a week, usually from YouTube. We always fall asleep in front of the tube.
Like I said, who has time for TV?
What’s a TV? I cut cable in 2015, and cannot pick up broadcast TV. Haven’t missed it Rather entertain myself writing books.
Amen!