"IQ levels have dropped"....well, duhhh
Article by Terry Paulding in The American Thinker
The screens draining our lives away
We are reaping the full harvest from our digital machine age. Our lives have devolved to depend on invisible technology, which is changing society. You can see it in every facet of life — a growing zombification, using that term loosely, of the public mind.
Social media act as a soporific, effectively thwarting intelligent discourse. There is no spontaneous back-and-forth dialogue since the advent of these static "platforms." In fact, the word conversation has come to have a negative connotation for many people, evoking ridicule — the word is code for a one-way, pedantic (boring) opinion you don't agree with but can't refute before everyone has moved on to the next trope.
The enervating isolation of lockdowns and masking accelerated this effect; I.Q. levels have dropped; and people are wary of direct interaction. The irrational continuation of masking, especially among the young and healthy, further shuts down local discourse. A recent set of flights proved that to me. Other than a few family groups traveling together, I saw no communication among those around me, sitting scrunched next to one another on packed planes.
The effect is obvious in the rest of life. Servers in local restaurants have a mask on — clerks in the stores, too. Muffled words, maybe understood and maybe not, now replace smiles and genuine verbal exchanges. Parents are sometimes unmasked, but here in the Bay Area, at least, many force their children to keep one on, even outdoors.
Dullness and lack of curiosity are ubiquitous. You can see it clearly in TV news. Stories are read from the prompter by robotic talking heads, people who obviously have no investment in what they're saying. They spew uninflected (or falsely bright-sounding), often fact-free paragraphs on local and world violence, war, pandemic, politics, and natural catastrophes.
We nod and wonder what it means as they move on to the next story. We've been trained well, to have a short attention span. The newest travesty is emphasized so it overruns the last one, staying front and center only until the next shows up. Local news adds weather and sports to the mix, making much of every drop of rain or gust of wind. Everything is otherwise identical from one station to the next — formulaic, shallow, mindless.
On many cable talk shows, video loops play that we've seen again and again, while the chosen pundits or pols de jour officiously spew pablum. How many times do we need to hear righteous indignation, absent anyone expressing even the most basic formulation of a solution to the problem?
I find myself yelling at the screen, especially when it's congresspeople, "Yeah, what are you ever gonna do about that?" But this is how it is. Just keep moving — this too shall pass eventually. They report for "work" the same way a toddler comes to a tea party — fake tea in tiny cups, mud cookies, and role-playing. They know that no action will be taken.
Look at any aspect of our lives. Take the border "crisis" that goes on without relief, with Biden apparently unstoppable. I imagine living along our southern border, in Texas or Arizona, New Mexico, and even here in California. Powerless to take back a semblance of normal life, left flapping in the wind by our own government, as unknown hordes stream in.
Here's another example: how many times do you hear the phrase "gun violence"? I keep envisioning the same cartoon in my mind, where the gun gets up on its own and starts randomly firing. Nobody ever talks about what makes people violent, what people are being violent, at whom the violence is aimed, what policies have enabled it — and, certainly, no one suggests any way to combat the problem other than taking away our arms.
Then there's the "pandemic." It, beyond all else, proves the public's hubris, inattention, and willingness to be fooled. All the information is out there is easy to find. If there was an open dialogue, and people saw clearly how they've been misled and manipulated, what would be the response? At this point, I wonder if there would be one! Everyone's just given up, basically.
From the economy to Ukraine, from our health to education, we are bombarded with so much misinformation that we have deliberately turned off our minds. Many are simply wallowing helplessly in the narrative, sticking their heads in the sand.
How long can this go on? How far can we sink? What might finally wake people up is losing what they have. That, I think, is reality right now — the middle class is disappearing, our way of life threatened by rapidly escalating fiscal disarray. Shortages are becoming chronic, money is worth less and less, and we have a disruption of life as usual. Time will tell, but it's wise to remember how fast a great society can sink itself. We have historical examples, from the Roman empire to the Venezuelan debacle. You just must open your eyes, stop for a moment, and take a real look.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/the_screens_draining_our_lives_away.html
