Kill Your Television Set Before It Kills You!
Friends, are you stressed and fearful? Come on now, admit the truth. Have you ever sat down in a quiet place under a tree and tried to figure out why? The answer might surprise you.
The truth is that the thing that most creates stress in humans is their television set. Why do I say that, you ask? Well for starters, where else can you get a continual diet of bad news 24 hours a day, seven days a week? Where else can you get a continuous flood of highly biased news which, for example, urges you to feel sorry for Iranians as they appear to struggle for freedom but ignores the Palestinians who’ve been struggling for sixty years to achieve theirs. Where else can you get a procession of so-called experts who can endlessly pontificate on subjects yet leave you totally confused? Where else can you get a heavy dose of depression whether you want it or not, not only depression but indoctrination on a massive scale?
Then, as well as what is falsely called news, you get endless advertisements which are designed to irritate you, which make you feel inferior, which urge you to buy this or that when you don’t have the money. You see beautiful women and handsome men who don’t look like you. They have lifestyles totally unlike yours. They are paraded before you wearing fashionable clothes, driving sleek cars, eating at expensive restaurants, while you, wearing trackie-dacks, eat your luke-warm pizza on a sagging lounge.
Then they present sport! You, overweight and with high blood pressure, watch various fit and steroid-muscled gladiators who are paid millions of dollars to play tennis or soccer or run on a track or to injure each other. These sporting freaks strut and preen themselves knowing that millions of people are watching them enviously: poor, dumb, sportingly-retarded schmucks like you (and me).
Then there are the entertainment shows that feature all manner of important things like a mother and daughter fighting each other on camera and sobbing dramatically. Why? Because the mother’s fourteen year old daughter wants to marry a fifty year old felon and drug addict and have twelve of his children. Or you see a judge trying a case on television and hammering witnesses or the battling plaintiffs and defendant. Or it’s a singing competition where the judges insult the participants and the phone-in votes are most likely rigged.
Then there are the movies and the soaps! There you can see uplifting movies like the one I turned off recently where a female has mutant teeth in her vagina and she bites off the genitalia of all males who prove themselves to be shallow and unworthy. Then there are the war movies and gangster movies where the most horrific violence is shown in full colour, blood and guts everywhere, people losing arms and heads, the whole lot.
Friends, your television set is not your friend. It is a multi-faceted source of stress. It makes you feel bad. It fills your mind with rubbish and with lies. It is the most successful time-waster which man has ever invented. It controls much of your life while you become a physical and mental vegetable as well as a non-thinking pawn of unscrupulous manipulators.
My advice? Kill your television set before it kills you!
Yet againg, you’re so right about a TeleVision David. Since my divorce (1987) my x had it with her. I haven’t had such an apparatus since then, but only listened to radio. Now, I have a 14″ LCD monitor [takes only 10 watt !!! for pro-law energi-shers !!] which I can turn on/off as I wish but most of the it’s turn OFF.
Poverty will always be a relative / comparative quantity /amount. It’s no wonder that ‘poor’ people come to feel anger when they watch (on television) e. g. as I myself watched a moment ago on Aljazeera, pictures from a docks in the land of the wealthy, (tax-free) MONACO , showing abundants of luxurious yacths side by side.
In truth, this world needs a thoroughly overhaul.
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yet another damned error – “pro-law” it should be “low-” – sorry..
( in Danish “low” is spelled – “lav” , please forgive oh poor me..
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- by the way, the words “low / law” in my effort trying to educate in Danish.
I have to finish the lecture.
“low” in Danish is spelled “lav”
but /and
“law” in Danish is spelled ? some guess.?… “lov”
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I got rid of my TV a couple of years ago and have never looked back. Your piece here, David is good but there are some other point worth making since its not only the content but the actual device which is bad for you.
A study called ‘The mulholland experiment’ in the 70s tookj a group of children, asked them what there favourite programs were and hooked them up to EEGs to measure brainwaves whilst watching. They expected brainwaves to reflect involvment and happines and all that stuff that you might expect of a kid watching his/her favourite prog but instead there brainwaves resembled a coma victim. Furthermore the TV flickers due to refresh rate which cause an area of the brain called area 39 to become dormant. This area deals with rational interpretation assigning meaning to what you see. There are many more problems with the TV that can be investigated at http://www.trashyourtv.com/node/318. A good book which I bought a while back is Four arguements for the illimination of television by Gerry Mander. I gpot it second hand from amazon for a song and the book is Revelatory and thought provoking in that the arguements have wider implications. Here’s to a TV free future and a mended human race! \o/
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Denise Reply:
June 23rd, 2009 at 6:03 am
The problem with tv begins as the line between reality and fantasy blurs. The Tibetan word for television translates literally as “illusion projector”. It’s easy to blame the intellectual deficiencies, laziness, or moral laxity of viewers for problems that seem attributable to “excessive television”. Thanks for presenting a possible physiological explanation.
My household is on forced tv deprivation due to some remodeling. The day seems to last longer, and we’re enjoying listening to baseball on the radio.
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i’ve not had a t.v. for over 30 years and when i do happen to see it, it amazes me that people actually watch this crap (and believe it sometimes)
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There is even medical reports linking tv watching to becoming senile, getting Alzheimer’s (if that is the correct way to put it). Happy ‘Father’s Day, David and all. Also Happy Summer Solstice.
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John, I admire your perseverance with the English language. The problem is, if you want to keep up with world events, it requires some watching of television. But then the Iran ‘revolution’ demonstrates clearly that we are not getting unbiased reporting as does the Palestinian issue.
David, thanks for alerting us to that flickering information. It is a worry!
Coco, your thirty year stand shows you’re a woman ahead of her time. I guess I’ve been rather a sucker for movies and television although I’m in rehab now!
Therese, thanks for your good wishes. I send them back to you with interest!
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Won’t waste a penny for the propaganda box. I still watch but never at home. When Nethanayu pronounced “We are all Israelis” right after 9-11, it got very obvious “cui bono”. Who profits from the continuous propaganda? Certainly not empoverished muslims….
It’s really amusing to detect the culprits on TV. Thomas Friedman who lives in a palatial home according to Wikipedia (not the best source) used to spew his NY Slimes nonsense all over TV but lately one does not hear too much from him anymore. Guess he got too obvious!
But Krauthammer and other misfits still spew their hatred on Fox which can only be viewed with a great sense of humor. These shills make me laugh at this point as they are so pathetic. Their philosophy tanked. Ben Stein, Geraldo, and Thomas Friedman’s wife lost a lot of money (commercial real estate).
My favorite shows are business shows where I get the most entertainment. Hilarious when the Fox guests smile and smile while they get threatened by Cavuto with a job loss, jokingly, haha (yesterday’s show about British Airways offering their employees to work for nothing). Fox beats Comedy Central! It’s not depressing, it’s funny to watch O’Reilly, Geraldo, and special clown, Glen Beck.
Usually one zionist interviews another zionist in a love fest. Hilarious! But feel bad for the shmucks who fall victim to the propaganda. Long live the bloggers!
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thanks David. – not to misunderstand. – I do listen on tv-channels via a satellite-receiver, receiving from three satellites, Astra 19.2, 28.5 and Hotbird where the sound/audio-signal is separated from video-ditto.
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thank’s Margit – telling how those demogogues should be treated.
” spew their hatred on Fox which can only be viewed with a great sense of humor. ”
I don’t know all of these names but have watched Bill O’Reilly , and that’s plenty/ample enough for me.
Every time I see footage from the (19)thirthies of the ‘great’ orator, Hitler, addressing his ‘people’, I come to think of, and wonder , why couldn’t people then, see what this person obvios was about – a frantic and/but a pathetic and laughable psychopath exposing his madnesses..
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Margit, I enjoy the comedy on Faux News too. It’s only when I realize that millions of Americans watch it and believe it that I get concerned.
Murdoch should be jailed for what he is doing to the minds of people across the world!
John, Obama is a great orator too. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
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I love my telly, how else can I watch documentaries, news and current affairs shows like Lost Worlds, Dateline, Four Corners, Media Watch, Foreign Correspondent, Lateline, 7:30 report, Landline, SBS World News Aust, Message Stick, Insight, The Big Picture, First Australians, Living Black and As it happened. It isn’t the TV that is wrong it is people choices of what they watch and how they want to be informed. Sure there is a lot of corporate crap on telly that trap people who don’t want to think or know what the true story is on a magnitude of issues, but there are shows like the above that can and do inform people better than any internet site, newspaper or even radio. True Hard hitting Investigative journalism lives in these show and all are free to air. For those who don’t have a telly, this is the good side you are missing out on.
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Kemosobi, I’m happy to watch most documentaries but some of these current affair programmes you mention (on ABC and SBS) are not quite as unbiased and balanced as they used to be. They seem to have swung from hard left towards a more central right position.
I’m suspicious of all media now!
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Last night I walked into the corner burger place and four tv’s were playing. It was a cable news channel with a Fox News format. Guess what the leading story was?. wait.. Jon & Kate +8 get a divorce! Over and over the headline flashed and the man and woman discussed the ramifications of the divorce on the 8 kids as though this were the most burning issue of the day. I waited for 15 minutes and it played over and over.
I am actually using my tv as a computer screen as I relax n the couch with the wireless. I live with a geek so every room has a computer and the only shows I watch are on the internet, like Hulu. I stopped watching tv after my son was born. He saw a wierd commercial as an infant and it was not anything I could ever explain to him.
I knew that even a glimpse was dangerous to his pure mind.
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