Saturday, July 26, 2008

The Education Tax as a replacement for the Stupidity Tax

Another Modest proposal: The education tax.

It has become more and more clear that people and how they think and what they believe is enormously impacted by their media intake. I can cite countless examples of things mt friends have said about their personal worldviews that are direct quotes from movies or similar forms of entertainment, whether it's the belief that animals have souls because of a line in "colors of the wind," which someone used as a theological argument or whether it's something much more explicit my sister said. In addition, there plenty of things we believe and take in and base our values opinions and actions (ever seen the onion model?) on without being aware of it as we watch these things.
In essence, we see stuff and we believe it, and it bothers me. Today, what specifically bothers me, besides doctrine we take in, and that's a book in itself, is the educational ramifications of watching this crap, especially when it's taken as factual. Know what I mean? Like everyone who thinks that we can still get dinosaur DNA from a mosquito encased in amber, or that you can go back in time by flying backwards around the Earth.
What bothers me, is that we now have placed a new burden on the educational world. Imagine all of the historians who now have to convince the populous that events in various semi historical action movies didn't really happen, or whatever else we think we learn when we watch films.
There is extra work needed to undo the damage of the cinematic education, so while we a being dumbed down and entertained with stuff we will later believe as true, the people who skewed the facts make lots and lot of money. So, since they are making money while creating a need for the rest of is to be reeducated, this is my modest proposal,
there should be a system of educational taxes placed on movie profits based on how much damage they are likely to do and how seriously people are going to take it, for example, a minor discrepancy pays a smaller percentage than a major discrepancy, and there are classes designated of what kind of fact crimes can be committed. Also, it will matter whether it's a comedy or a drama, because dramas are more likely to be taken as facts. Etc.
Anyway, the taxes go directly to various educational funding to reteach what we thought we learned at the theater.

Friday, July 18, 2008

The lightbulbs

As they walked along they came by the place where everyone lived. It was something like a dorm and something like a work group and something like a really efficient apartment building. It was like a lot of different things because, on closer inspection, the rooms were all different. Many of them had the doors open. They were different sizes and very different styles. Even the doors were different dimensions and colors. But the most important thing we noticed at the time was the difference in the amount of light that came from each room.
This was important because, as we looked in each room, we saw that some of them had those two-bulb overhead fixtures. They were all supposed to have them, but only some of them had two bulbs and the milky square cover. Some had less nice covers. Some had really dirty ones. Some had bare bulbs and some had only one bulb. There were different ones with different brightness. For the most part, though, they all had some kind of overhead light.
But there was one that didn't, at least they only saw one that didn't.
We investigated the dark looking room. There wasn't a cover, lightbulbs or even a fixture. There was just a hole in the ceiling. There might have been wires hanging down but we couldn't tell.