Young Have Been Turned into Zombies

[Occamsrazor]

http://www.henrymakow.com/david_richards.html





Young Have Been Turned into Zombies
April 21, 2010

"Please don't take our apathy and detachment personally. We have no awareness of who we really are. Without the constant feed of electronic devices, our minds are like television static. "



by David Richards


(for henrymakow.com)


(David is a 22-year-old UK citizen who is teaching English in Northern China. His first contribution was "Porn-Watching Bruised Drugged Prostitutes.")





I am wide-awake at 2 a.m. I'm watching the Wikileaks video of American soldiers gunning down Iraqi civilians for kicks on a loop, but the reality of the footage won't compute.

I can't feel shocked. Eventually I give up and collapse into an uneasy sleep, disgusted with myself. If I'm not outraged, then I must be sympathetic with it on a primitive level.


My generation's notion of what is real and unreal has become blurred. The video is little more than an unsatisfactory piece of entertainment, inferior in brutality and detail to computer games and films.


This mindset is the product of our media-saturated lifestyle. We grew up isolated in our bedrooms and were formed by entertainment machines that allowed us to disappear into a black hole. Even on the move, we can stick headphones in our ears to deafen thought. Our daily life is a seamless blend of the mundane and fantasy that becomes surrealistic.


We are amusement junkies. We are like the smoker with his cough or the fast food addict with his mammoth waistline. Stunted and simplistic speech is the sign of our sickness.


We have devoted little time to our intellectual development through reflection, reading and debate. Our mind is weak and disorientated, a tumbler drier of media, impulses and implanted desires.


Seduced into being intellectual cripples, we can barely express anything more than impulses; we can't talk, we TWITTER.


The result is a strange zombie-like creature that is incapable of intimacy with others. Please don't take our apathy and detachment personally. We have no awareness of who we really are. Without the constant feed of electronic devices, our minds are like television static.


We feel no urgency to develop intelligence because there is no outlet for it. What is the point of reading and formulating your own ideas if those around you want nothing but novelty and cheap thrills? I felt I was playing with fire by reading and writing.


I would fight to reach out to my friends. Their superficial exterior consisted of mimicked bits and pieces from entertainment. Who were they really? The problem was that they didn't know either. We never did find out. The effect of blasting your senses with amusement all day long is the dissolution of the self.


Entertainment culture was reflected in the perfect dominance of group mentality in my school. The 'alternative' groups were always the most conformist. Goths in my town expressed their resistance to the dominant culture by hanging out with other identically dressed Goths.


I remember a story of a teenage girl who started taking Prozac to cure her depression. Upon taking the drug she seemed much improved to those close to her, until one evening she was watching television with her parents and without warning walked into the garage and hung herself. All the drug did was numb her mind as her inner turmoil continued to escalate, and overdosing on amusement has the same effect.


I can see this in the drinking culture of Britain. We have a desperate need to intoxicate ourselves to function in social situations. From my early teens we would gather at night and drink intent to make ourselves sick. We did it to purge ourselves of the pain we felt.


When you are lost in media, you become alienated from your own perceptions and experiences, and in consequence the pain you suffer is terribly abstract. I remember reading Boxing autobiographies as a teen and feeling jealous of the men who had fought their way out of poverty-stricken backgrounds. They could at least see an enemy and had the opportunity to channel their desire for success in a constructive way.


Our vague and surrealistic consciousness leads to the feeling that there is some alien force attacking us from somewhere, but it is invisible and indefinable, and it seems to go away when we turn on the machines.

[Occamsrazor]

The ideology of Stalinism can be summarized in 2 words:"personal responsibility".
Such articles can seem positive on the surface but they are cancerous in nature.
Every human except the severely retarded or psychopaths is born with a sense of right and wrong.
If a person turns on the TV and sees violence or porn he or she simply turns it off.
Our young have not been TURNED into zombies although it is obvious that the media is doing all it can to destroy the minds and souls.
No normal person can consume the Western entertainment, consuming it is a sign of psychopathology.
Dear Henry, let`s not shift the blame onto the media inspite of the fact that everyone working in the Western media will surely burn in Hell.

[FunnyMoney]

It's hard to find true value in entertainment in today's world. Reading books and the study of history must be one's foundation in learning. An open relationship with at least one loved one or someone close is usually required for good human development. Although everybody has the ability to understand good and evil and decipher truth, it is still a process. The training in that process is living life, unfortunately, many ignore life and would rather gravitate toward entertainment, drugs, or whatever specific item that might control them, instead of them taking control over their lives.

[Occamsrazor]

Today`s satanic Western culture is based on permissiveness. The churches pound "God loves you no matter what" message into people`s brains. I had the luck of being born and having grown up in USSR where the society is based on personal responsibility.Our media was censored and it promoted ONLY the positive values such as patriotism, honesty, hard work, family values, sanctity of life etc and most importantly personal responsibility.

The fact that there is a liquor store on every block and a dope dealer on every 10 blocks doesn`t absolve people from the guilt of choosing to drink and do drugs. Likewise, having a box that can spew immorality into your home is not an excuse for turning it on.

[philo beddoe]

The ideology of Stalinism can be summarized in 2 words:"personal responsibility".
Such articles can seem positive on the surface but they are cancerous in nature.
Every human except the severely retarded or psychopaths is born with a sense of right and wrong.
If a person turns on the TV and sees violence or porn he or she simply turns it off.
Our young have not been TURNED into zombies although it is obvious that the media is doing all it can to destroy the minds and souls.
No normal person can consume the Western entertainment, consuming it is a sign of psychopathology.
Dear Henry, let`s not shift the blame onto the media inspite of the fact that everyone working in the Western media will surely burn in Hell.

nu tu kozel!!! Stalin otpravlyal v tyur'mu millionu lyudei, rastrelival tysyachami, a tu emu poklonyaesh'sya. nu tu i pridurok. nashel komu poklonyatsya. znachit malo etot gruzinskii evrei rastrelival. nodo bulo bol'she

[Occamsrazor]

The ideology of Stalinism can be summarized in 2 words:"personal responsibility".
Such articles can seem positive on the surface but they are cancerous in nature.
Every human except the severely retarded or psychopaths is born with a sense of right and wrong.
If a person turns on the TV and sees violence or porn he or she simply turns it off.
Our young have not been TURNED into zombies although it is obvious that the media is doing all it can to destroy the minds and souls.
No normal person can consume the Western entertainment, consuming it is a sign of psychopathology.
Dear Henry, let`s not shift the blame onto the media inspite of the fact that everyone working in the Western media will surely burn in Hell.

nu tu kozel!!! Stalin otpravlyal v tyur'mu millionu lyudei, rastrelival tysyachami, a tu emu poklonyaesh'sya. nu tu i pridurok. nashel komu poklonyatsya. znachit malo etot gruzinskii evrei rastrelival. nodo bulo bol'she



Spewing lies and insults in Russian on this forum will have the same consequences for you as it did on
The Golden Agora, a thorough and complete public humiliation and eventual running of you from this forum too. Let`s hope this will not attract too much attention of the English-speaking members and waste their time.
You are trying to destroy this forum the same way as you have succeeded on TGA, Ben Shockley.
Please pick political opponents in your own intellectual weight category.

[madfranks]

The ideology of Stalinism can be summarized in 2 words:"personal responsibility".

Two posts later, you write this:


Our media was censored and it promoted ONLY the positive values such as patriotism, honesty, hard work, family values, sanctity of life etc and most importantly personal responsibility.

Personal responsibility is mutually exclusive to government censored media. You can not claim personal responsibility if your leaders are banning you from anything other than their perceptions of it. What the leaders of the USSR push as values are different than what other countries and cultures promote as values. True personal responsibility is being faced with all of them, the good and the bad, and choosing the good over the bad.

[Horn]

Our vague and surrealistic consciousness leads to the feeling that there is some alien force attacking us from somewhere, but it is invisible and indefinable, and it seems to go away when we turn on the machines.

I'm feeling much better now.

[nunaem]

You can look at it as they have been turned into zombies, or that their development has been arrested at adolescence. Instant gratification and the constant need for stimulus are all typical of adolescents.

[Ash_Williams]

There is a great variety of people on the planet.

Some are born smarter than others.
Some, I believe, are born lazy.

With the kind of free information we have now, you can only not know something if you don't want to know. Every person with an internet connection has the potential to learn about anything and how to do just about anything and find a way to be successful.

The separation of people will become more and more apparent as there are no more excuses for failure. Some people will be zombies that would prefer to sit and watch the tv because that is their nature. They instinctively choose a very low-risk, low-activity life. It may have served their ancestors well, but today it means poor health and dissatisfaction when they see others out there with the ambition to do things.

This is hard for people to accept. Even as everyone is giving a crazy amount of opportunity, we still want to find excuses for the people that never do anything with it. Hey let's blame the media! It's turned the losers into losers! It's the reason my kids aren't doctors and lawyers and my husband/wife is fat!

The variety of humans is such that there will always be losers. Without any TV or media or anything, there would still be those that prefer to sit around and not think too much. And with TV, there are still many that prefer to go out and do something instead of watch. That will never change. Humanity will never be a group of go-getters ready to take on life and rise to challenges.

[DMac]

Today`s satanic Western culture is based on permissiveness. The churches pound "God loves you no matter what" message into people`s brains. I had the luck of being born and having grown up in USSR where the society is based on personal responsibility.Our media was censored and it promoted ONLY the positive values such as patriotism, honesty, hard work, family values, sanctity of life etc and most importantly personal responsibility.





USSR where the society is based on personal responsibility

Do you not see that the statement above is an oxymoron?

A socialist state, by its very definition, is one where personal responsibility is supplanted by state responsibility.

[philo beddoe]

The ideology of Stalinism can be summarized in 2 words:"personal responsibility".
Such articles can seem positive on the surface but they are cancerous in nature.
Every human except the severely retarded or psychopaths is born with a sense of right and wrong.
If a person turns on the TV and sees violence or porn he or she simply turns it off.
Our young have not been TURNED into zombies although it is obvious that the media is doing all it can to destroy the minds and souls.
No normal person can consume the Western entertainment, consuming it is a sign of psychopathology.
Dear Henry, let`s not shift the blame onto the media inspite of the fact that everyone working in the Western media will surely burn in Hell.

nu tu kozel!!! Stalin otpravlyal v tyur'mu millionu lyudei, rastrelival tysyachami, a tu emu poklonyaesh'sya. nu tu i pridurok. nashel komu poklonyatsya. znachit malo etot gruzinskii evrei rastrelival. nodo bulo bol'she



Spewing lies and insults in Russian on this forum will have the same consequences for you as it did on
The Golden Agora, a thorough and complete public humiliation and eventual running of you from this forum too. Let`s hope this will not attract too much attention of the English-speaking members and waste their time.
You are trying to destroy this forum the same way as you have succeeded on TGA, Ben Shockley.
Please pick political opponents in your own intellectual weight category.
You're still having trouble figuring me out aren't you? Sorry to bust your balls, but your buddy MAGNES is the one that claims to have utterly defeated you, not me. I'm just happy to make your head spin. There are lots of reasons why agora was destroyed, but you and I both know it was because skinny didn't believe in anything, therefore making him a pussy. And let's not talk smack about whether or not I was run from any forums. I left that sinking ship in a luxury lifeboat.

[nunaem]

Do you not see that the statement above is an oxymoron?

A socialist state, by its very definition, is one where personal responsibility is supplanted by state responsibility.


Hey, standing in line for your weekly ration is hard work!

[Heimdhal]

Do you not see that the statement above is an oxymoron?

A socialist state, by its very definition, is one where personal responsibility is supplanted by state responsibility.


Hey, standing in line for your weekly ration is hard work!

Hey, watch it buddy!
Its takes a lot of responsibility and personal ambition to get up at 4 AM and wait to be handed your weekly ration of 3 rolls of toilet paper.


:P

[gunny highway]

I would fight to reach out to my friends. Their superficial exterior consisted of mimicked bits and pieces from entertainment. Who were they really? The problem was that they didn't know either. We never did find out. The effect of blasting your senses with amusement all day long is the dissolution of the self.

this is my fav line. pretty much sums it up.

nunaem, you also make a good point:


You can look at it as they have been turned into zombies, or that their development has been arrested at adolescence. Instant gratification and the constant need for stimulus are all typical of adolescents.


and this defines, almost to a tee, what ADHD is. this new "disorder" is a direct result of the constant desire for instant gratification and new stimuli.

[philo beddoe]

I would fight to reach out to my friends. Their superficial exterior consisted of mimicked bits and pieces from entertainment. Who were they really? The problem was that they didn't know either. We never did find out. The effect of blasting your senses with amusement all day long is the dissolution of the self.

this is my fav line. pretty much sums it up.

nunaem, you also make a good point:


You can look at it as they have been turned into zombies, or that their development has been arrested at adolescence. Instant gratification and the constant need for stimulus are all typical of adolescents.


and this defines, almost to a tee, what ADHD is. this new "disorder" is a direct result of the constant desire for instant gratification and new stimuli.
applause for referencing a good Clint Eastwood movie (before he started making propaganda films)

[dysgenic]

I believe that in general, young people are more aware of what is going on than old people.

[gunny highway]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrJsb0CzHvE&feature=related

[Occamsrazor]

Do you not see that the statement above is an oxymoron?

A socialist state, by its very definition, is one where personal responsibility is supplanted by state responsibility.


Hey, standing in line for your weekly ration is hard work!

Hey, watch it buddy!
Its takes a lot of responsibility and personal ambition to get up at 4 AM and wait to be handed your weekly ration of 3 rolls of toilet paper.


:P


USA is currently completely dependant on Russia for all its airspace needs and this situation is not likely to change for the forseeable future:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_space_program


[edit] Notable firsts

This image was recorded by astronauts as the Space Shuttle Atlantis approached the Russian space station before docking during the STS-76 mission. Sporting spindly appendages and solar panels, Mir was orbiting about 350 kilometers above New Zealand's South Island and the city of Nelson near Cook Strait.Two days after the United States announced its intention to launch an artificial satellite, on July 31, 1956, the Soviet Union announced its intention to do the same. Sputnik 1 was launched on October 4, 1957, beating the United States and stunning people all over the world.

The Soviet space program pioneered many aspects of space exploration:

1957: First intercontinental ballistic missile, the R-7 Semyorka
1957: First satellite, Sputnik 1
1957: First animal to enter Earth orbit, the dog Laika on Sputnik 2
1957: First animal to die in space, the dog Laika on Sputnik 2
1959: First firing of a rocket in Earth orbit, first man-made object to escape Earth's orbit, Luna 1
1959: First data communications, or telemetry, to and from outer space, Luna 1.
1959: First man-made object to pass near the Moon, first man-made object in Solar orbit, Luna 1
1959: First probe to impact the Moon, Luna 2
1959: First images of the moon's far side, Luna 3
1960: First animals to safely return from Earth orbit, the dogs Belka and Strelka on Sputnik 5.
1960: First probe launched to Mars, Marsnik 1
1961: First probe launched to Venus, Venera 1
1961: First person in space (International definition) and in Earth orbit, Yuri Gagarin on Vostok 1, Vostok programme
1961: First person to spend over a day in space Gherman Titov, Vostok 2 (also first person to sleep in space).
1962: First dual manned spaceflight, Vostok 3 and Vostok 4
1963: First woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, Vostok 6
1964: First multi-man crew (3), Voskhod 1
1965: First EVA, by Aleksei Leonov, Voskhod 2
1965: First probe to hit another planet (Venus), Venera 3
1966: First probe to make a soft landing on and transmit from the surface of the moon, Luna 9
1966: First probe in lunar orbit, Luna 10
1967: First unmanned rendezvous and docking, Cosmos 186/Cosmos 188. (Until 2006, this had remained the only major space achievement that the US had not duplicated.)
1969: First docking between two manned craft in Earth orbit and exchange of crews, Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5
1970: First samples automatically returned to Earth from another body, Luna 16
1970: First robotic space rover, Lunokhod 1
1970: First data received from the surface of another planet (Venus), Venera 7
1971: First space station, Salyut 1
1971: First probe to orbit another planet (Mars), first probe to reach surface of Mars, Mars 2
1975: First probe to orbit Venus, first photos from surface of Venus, Venera 9
1984: First woman to walk in space, Svetlana Savitskaya (Salyut 7 space station)
1986: First crew to visit two separate space stations (Mir and Salyut 7)
1986: First permanently manned space station, Mir, which orbited the Earth from 1986 until 2001
1987: First crew to spend over one year in space, Vladimir Titov and Musa Manarov on board of TM-4 - Mir

[Awoke]

Finally you and I have a thread we can agree on: Our children are being brainwashed into zombies.

[Occamsrazor]

Finally you and I have a thread we can agree on: Our children are being brainwashed into zombies.


I thought we`ve always had an amicable relationship at GIM...

[Ash_Williams]

The Soviet space program pioneered many aspects of space exploration:

1957: First animal to die in space, the dog Laika on Sputnik 2

Heheh, blazing the trail for more animals to die in space!

[k-os]

Back on topic . . .

The article is a good one, and I can relate in a way. I don't watch tv or play video games, but I do listen to talk radio (medical, political call-in shows), I am on my computer a lot, and I read like mad. All of these are distractions from whatever I am thinking.

When the weather is right, I make it a point to go and lay in my hammock (without an alcoholic beverage) and just let my mind go. I find it very uncomfortable and I have to resist the urge to just quit and go back into the house. But I realize at some later time, maybe later on in the week, that the quiet time was filled with answers.

[MarketNeutral]

Three-year-olds love the iPad

My three-year-old twin sons get it; why couldn't the analysts? Midway through the unboxing, my boys — who are quite experienced with daddy's iPhone — were already remarking that my new iPad was "a big phone!" Before Apple's announcement, when some industry analysts were predicting that the rumored tablet device would be "nothing but" an oversized iPhone or iTouch, I just wanted to scream out at them "Yes! And that's exactly what I've been waiting for, for years!"

The iPad is everything I expected it to be, and (just about) everything I wanted it to be. The lack of a forward-facing video camera is disappointing, but it's quite obvious that it'll be added soon in some future model — this device was simply made for video-conferencing. The other well-known "failings" of the device are complete non-issues for me: the lack of flash was noticeable mostly in the decreased number of annoying floating or dancing advertisements on webpages, and I never really felt the need to run more than one application at a time. Seamlessly switching between tasks (just as on the iPhone) is sufficient, and rumor has it that the next version of the iPhone OS will likely support multitasking anyway, if I discover a reason to really want it.

Some of the iPhone applications that I use quite regularly — such as the Facebook application — absolutely suck on the iPad, because they're a pixel-doubled, poor-resolution version of the same thing. But in many of those cases I simply switched to using the web-based version instead.

And that's where the iPad really shines. Web browsing is a dream — better, I daresay, than on a desktop machine. Which makes sense, given that a touch-sensitive, lightweight web tablet was what I'd been waiting for, since the Web first came onto the scene. The same analysts that couldn't grasp that people really did just want a larger version of the iTouch also failed to understand that earlier attempts at tablet devices failed precisely because they had physical keyboards (which are clunky) and tried to be "full-powered computers" (with the size and weight demands that implies) and that some people — actually, a lot of people — simply wanted a lightweight, streamlined, easy portable browsing experience.

There were several unexpected failings I encountered, which will no doubt be remedied soon enough. For one, the built-in mapping application needs to rotate. Actually, a lot of applications need to rotate. Two-handed multi-touch just makes you want to spin things around, because you can. Google Earth lets you spin and stretch the world in a very satisfying way, but at a pixel-doubled lower resolution that isn't quite as good as it should be. I'm looking forward to the iPad-enhanced version of that app.

I purchased the least expensive 16GB model on the theory that I would mostly use the device's local memory for temporary storage, just as I do with my iPhone. Moreso even, given the lack of on-board camera — I mostly find myself moving data (typically pictures or videos of my children) off my iPhone. I became slightly worried when it dawned on me that I might want to watch (and store) more video on the larger screen, but with the announcement that Netflix, ABC's player (and soon Hulu) would all support the iPad, those worries disappeared.

I laughed these past few weeks as I read articles fretting about whether consumers would want another device "in addition to their smartphones, blackberries, ipods and netbooks" since it was obvious to me that the iPad would replace many of those devices, at least in part. But sitting on the couch, cuddled up with my little boys, streaming an episode of Thomas and Friends from Netflix in high-quality, I realized that the iPad will probably eliminate a lot of our need for an actual television, as well.

This device really is a game-changer.
http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/2010/apr/22/

[Occamsrazor]

When the weather is right, I make it a point to go and lay in my hammock (without an alcoholic beverage) and just let my mind go.

You have given me enough fantasies for a long time:)

[bellevuebully]

Typical teen day...

Get up and text.
Go to school and text/talk/surf.
Go home and watch tv/text/surf.
Play video games.
More tv.
Text til bed.

Zombies? No shit. They fill up every single second with some sort of media because they are horrified of thinking. Thinking? Don't do that......text someone. Ah...that feels better.

[MarketNeutral]

Typical teen day...

Get up and text.
Go to school and text/talk/surf.
Go home and watch tv/text/surf.
Play video games.
More tv.
Text til bed.

Zombies? No sh*t. They fill up every single second with some sort of media because they are horrified of thinking. Thinking? Don't do that......text someone. Ah...that feels better.


The whole time listening to an IPOD. I got a nephew that watches TiVo , listens to music, texts on his cell phone while messing around with Twitter on his laptop at the same time - he is a real multi tasker.

[Awoke]

Typical teen day...

Get up and text.
Go to school and text/talk/surf.
Go home and watch tv/text/surf.
Play video games.
More tv.
Text til bed.

Zombies? No sh*t. They fill up every single second with some sort of media because they are horrified of thinking. Thinking? Don't do that......text someone. Ah...that feels better.


....he says as he browses the internet.
;D

Kidding. Cel phones can be useful tools, but that's all it is to me; a communication tool. Chronic talking leads to tumors, etc. I text a lot, but not for fun. For communication, keeping things short and sweet and to the point, etc.

My wife can always get ahold of me, pretty much anywhere. I like that. Now if we could just make it legal for her to carry in Canada, I would be feeling fairly secure if I had to leave the home for an extended period of time.