Well,
@roamer_1 , I'll see your indoctrination and raise you one. When the Bundy Ranch Standoff was in the news, the BUreau of Land Management got screened suddenly by another group with the same initials. A search, then, for BLM, didn't bring up a Federal Land agency. While the information may be out there somewhere, carried on alternate servers and not simply sent down the memory hole of corrupted directories, it isn't easy to find and a host of shiny objects are thrown across the path to distract the unsuspecting.
As for 'entertainment', I, too, weary of gratuitous faggotry, unnecessary to a plot line, as predictable as the checkbox scenes in cheap porn.
Fear the Walking Dead was a show that intrigued me. In the start of that zombie apocalypse, the first to overcome
normalcy bias was the junkie son who really knew no normal, but was in tune with the feel of the street, a survival mechanism he'd developed.
The series ended for me with an unnecessary homosexual kiss, definitely unnecessary to the plot line for any who understood the concept of brotherhood as those who have shared and triumphed over hardship know it.
I haven't watched it since, nor will I.
Sad to say, many promising story lines have met the same fate, some even to such in their ads, before I ever watched one episode.
It can't be that the 1-2% of society is simply trying to entertain the vast majority which is at best indifferent to it's overtures, a marketing ploy proved fatally flawed outside the concentrated enclaves of those who identify with those behaviours with a few advertisements which hit the mainstream with disastrous results.
No, it is instead not just the constant drumbeat of tolerance, but instead the incessant cacophony of a bad garage band that thinks they should have a lock on the Grammy Awards. More annoying than a telemarketer, the answer, "No. No thanks, not interested" just doesn't seem to get through.
Of course, I utilize that ever present recourse of changing the channel, something becoming more difficult to find sanctuary in, and more frequently, simply turn the damned thing off and dust off a book, a refuge since before Bradbury wrote
Fahrenheit 451, and until that, too, like so many other horror stories becomes reality.
To be clear, I don't hate anyone, but that doesn't mean there aren't things which I not only don't find entertaining, but which I feel have no business flickering across my living room. Click. Invitation revoked.
Unfortunately, the Social Bowdllerists of the 21st century are beginning the systematic elimination of highly worthy entertainment (well, they started with cartoons and have progressed), and soon that will be Gone With the Wind, as lost to future generations as that Jim fellow Mr. Twain wrote so succinctly about, describing his social standing, morality, work ethic, and even appearance in a single appellative. With that, too, will be lost any but the thinnest caricature of the people and their history and even the concept that times change,
Despite insisting humans formed by evolution over hundreds of millions of years, their cultural context will exist only in the here and now, a snap chat version of their history, deleted after a few minutes, no screenshots allowed.
I once wondered how great empires of the past, which seemed so well organized, so well designed, ceased to exist. I could understand those lost to cataclysm, to famine, or even disease which wiped out so much of the population they broke down. I could understand how political chicanery, corruption, or multigenrational ignorance could lead to vulnerabilities such that the rising young lions of adjacent empires might achieve conquest. But now, even without those forces at the fore, I understand even more strongly that for a society to flourish it must retain ties to the best of its roots, and if it forgets them, it is doomed to wither and collapse, a victim of its self ignorance and festering corruption.
In human history, which seems to happen in cycles, it appears it's that time again, sadly, when in the paroxysms of human endeavor, the books are burned, the wheel turns and is either dug from the ashes or reinvented, and humanity returns to its more primal roots for a while to sort out who may scratch together the next enlightenment. Perhaps there will be a return in that Dark Age to the very Creator God who helped humanity flourish, or perhaps that final act will be over and the curtain fall on Creation as the harvest is concluded and the wheat separated from the chaff.
It's sad that despite the obvious and dubious rewards of ignoring the advice given in Scriptures which have survived for thousands of years, a user's manual for humanity, people still fail to follow that advice and reap those rewards they so richly deserve.
@penumbraline Good first post!