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@luckytran@med-mastodon.comToday would have been Carl Sagan's 90th birthday. He wrote this in 1995. Carl was absolutely right. #CarlSaganDay
@luckytran the screenshot took several seconds to load for me but i knew exactly what paragraph it was going to be. That book was formative for me but it's also so depressing.
@unrelatedwaffle @luckytran Yes, for me also. If only our leadership had paid attention.
@luckytran Thanks for reminding of his birthday. By chance I am reading this book now.
@luckytran I wonder if he knew Mike Judge has a physics degree.
@luckytran Wow. Horrifying this is happening now & has resulted in this nightmare 
) @luckytran this would be required reading in a civilized society
@luckytran @DavidNason That was a great book. I plan to make my kids read it when they get to high school.
@luckytran He’s right about lowest common denominator programming (American Idol, Dancing With the Stars, etc.) and the dumbing down of America. He’s wrong about Beavis and ButtHead, some of that is brilliantly written satire and this applies to quite a few projects of that type. These kinds of shows can make you think. In the case of Beavis and ButtHead, it’s not as upfront. In the case of The Young Pope, a totally different show, it is. It is designed to make you think.
@luckytran I can’t find it, but I think that Feynman (if it wasn’t Sagan himself) said something about the advertising in the Boy Scouts’ magazine and how utterly preposterous it was and that it showed no respect for the audience. I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of that.
Look at the things Fox News allows for ads: scams up and down the lineup, valueless commemorative coins, buy gold and silver.
@luckytran interesting that he already felt that way in the early 90s where I still consider things were acceptable. Today seems multiple orders of magnitude worse culturally. Internet being a massive cocaine boost imo
Deportation model
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/trumps-deportation-model/
Ana Raquel Minian author of In the Shadow of Liberty: The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention in the United States.
Mass Deportations before 2025 (1930s and 1950s) author interviewed
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/11/7/ana_raquel_minian
@luckytran not Carl coming for beavis and butthead! He didn't know then what we know about Judge's astute understanding of well-healed corruption and public apathy.
@luckytran And that's not only true in America...
@luckytran He was right, but not absolutely. He seems to limit the developments he observed to the USA, whereas they apply pretty much worldwide.
@luckytran I read that back in the 90s, he wasn't the only one who warned us. A very early text game "A Mind Forever Voyaging" release in the 80s was itself a warning similar to Dr. Sagans. Both were so eerily accurate in their predictions. All the signs pointed to the same reality we are in now, even as far back as then. We are not the only ones who can save ourselves, not our governments, not our institutions, just us now.
@luckytran carl Sagan - never gets old
I was with him until he called out Dumb and Dumber and Beavis and Butthead as part of the "dumbing down of America"... which they clearly aren't.
The "dumbing down of America" has come in the form of Christian Nationalism, Conservative Talk Radio and Television, and draconian fascist grifters duping the public into allowing them to run things.
@luckytran Some of the highlighted bit is spookily on the nose, but Dumb and Dumber is harmless fun.
I'm not actually convinced people are getting dumber, and I certainly wouldn't make that case based on popular entertainment (I am a huge silent film fan, but I'm not going to claim that slapstick is intellectually challenging! And c'mon, Vaudeville?)
People have always been dumb and manipulable. The main thing that has changed is that, in previous eras, such as "the war on communism", people were manipulated via fear etc in ways that at least encouraged unity, instead of demonizing "an enemy within".
Sagan's point about the loss of manufacturing is interesting, and I think he's on to something there, but he doesn't elaborate.
"the slow decay of substantive content"
Sadly, I think he misspelled "the systematic destruction of substantive content."
It's not a thing that "happened."
It's a thing that's being DONE.
@luckytran America's ultimate downfall
"a kind of celebration of ignorance."
Or what I've been describing for the past 24 years as: "Proud to be Stupid." 
@luckytran
I remember when "Dubya" was president and people were calling him an idiot.
#Evangelicals rushed to his defense and compared him to #Moses b/c the Bible described Moses as "slow of tongue" (an euphemism for "not very bright.")
(Last time Maher got anything Right.) 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQBIBjbpzoQ
@MugsysRapSheet @luckytran It’s so frustrating
Asimov, 1980:
@luckytran why the hate on dumb and dumber?
@luckytran I read the entirety of that book. While it was a slog getting through the et encounter debunks, some parts of the book were absolutely prophetic.
Great book from a great mind.
@luckytran I agree with everything Carl said except his take on "Beavis and Butthead, " which is, and was, awesome social satire.
@BrianStanding @luckytran Absolutely. See my comments in this thread about the show and Mike Judge’s other projects.
@luckytran I shiver every time I come across that, his prescience was stunning and it is so sad that this came true.
@luckytran
We bought a copy of this book about 6 months ago and I just finally finished reading it a couple nights ago.
@luckytran for all of the obsession that religion has with prophecy, it's ironic that this was far closer to the real thing.
@luckytran He’s right, but they are clutching their guns and consulting their bibles.
@luckytran I agree up to a point. Then I think of all the socially, culturally ‘sophisticated’, well educated and wealthy people I have known over the years who are as shallow as a puddle in a heatwave.
@luckytran Yeah, good point, except I don't remember things being any better back in 1995.
@luckytran I was with him until the second half where he arrived at the "dumbing down" conclusion, which itself is such a tired, facile take that ignores all of the material conditions he just identified. Swing and a miss.
Still appreciate the post though
@starkraving666 @luckytran Which is also an interesting point that he lamented Beavis & Butthead, written & created by the same man who did Idiocracy, which illustrated the same point he mistakenly attributed to that show.
@madopal @starkraving666 @luckytran See my comment in this thread. Beavis and ButtHead can be brilliantly written satire and it does take intelligence to write and understand what the real point is, very true also of Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, Silicon Valley, and so on. An early cartoon before the series makes reference to the Roman God of feces, Sterculius, in an extremely gross but hilarious manner, for example.
@starkraving666 @luckytran Are you saying the average American isn’t wildly less aware of, or interested in, knowledge than 40 years ago?
@starkraving666 @luckytran Sagan also blamed The Simpsons.
@JTO_is_Typing @starkraving666 @luckytran
Pople of Sagan's generation had a category error in assuming éducation and entertainment were competing for the same resource.
In truth, brains are not meant be in learning more than few hours a day. Rest of the time, entertainment both relaxes, AND helps contextualize information learned earlier.
This is more compartmentalized than in Sagan's youth where both were connected/immersed by and in community.
But he was right about the soundbytes et al.
@luckytran what's the title?