Don William and Sancho Thompson ride again

Brave Sir William is off of his meds again:

American society is changing for the worse because of the machines. In the past to flee the real world people usually chose drugs or alcohol. now you don't have to do that, Now all you have to do is have enough money to buy a machine...

Now, most people would find this to be a positive development since it means that presumably fewer kids are going to blow their brains and livers out on controlled substances. Apparently Bill is a traditionalist and culture warrior from a very selective era, choosing to encourage kids to go back to the olden days were LSD, Heroin and bath tub whiskey were the drugs of choice, not a game console. Who'd have thought.

Basically what you have is a large portion of the population, mostly younger people under the age of 45, who don't deal with reality - ever. So they don't know what day it is; they don't know temperature it is; they don't know what their neighbor looks like. They don't know anything because they are constantly diverted by a machine. Now what this does is it takes a person away from reality because they've created their own reality.

It's ironic that a man working (and presumably living) in New York City would cast aspersions at anyone for such things as "not knowing what his neighbor looks like." I mean, really, the middle aged citizens of that illustrious pseudo-city state are world-renowned for their hospitality, home-spun charm and general feel-goodedness toward their common man. Yankee bashing aside...

What's incredibly ironic is that the very age group whose alleged virtues he is extolling is filled with some of the most irredeemably, reality-phobic people in American society. These are the sort of people who blindly trust authority figures and live in a fantasy world where fundamental aspects of American society have not changed. I ask, who is more out of touch with reality? One of these vile gamers or a late boomer or World War II generation American who thinks that America is a good, decent country when young people today are more promiscuous than any period in America's history? Give me the gamer anyday because at least his delusions are relegated to a game console.

The have-nots are growing. Why are they growing? Because the skill set that is necessary to earn a decent living is being deemphasized in a fantasy world of football games and shooting zombies and all that. Now you have the "knows" and the "know-nots", because if you spend all your youth being prisoners of machines... you're not going to know anything. You're gonna fail.

Ah yes, blame the machines rather than the more likely culprits:

• Corrupt educational bureaucracies.
• Antiquated group education approaches.
• Helicopter parents.
• Race baiters and poverty pimps like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.
• The NEA.
• No Child Left Behind.
• A culture that celebrates athletic achievement to the exclusion of academic achievent (except when it's something radical like building a breeder reactor in your tool shed).

What's especially amusing about this rant is that there is evidence that our military desparately needs more video gamers! Apparently a lot of the newer weapon systems are in fact more effectively handled by young men whose hand-eye coordination is honed by intense video game playing.

I don't own an iPod. I would never wear an iPod. If this is your primary focus in life - the machines- it's going to have a staggeringly negative effect, all of this, for America- did you ever talk to these computer geeks? I mean, can you carry on a conversation with them? I really fear for the United States because, believe me, the jihadists? They're not playing the video games. They're killing real people over there.

Well, he should be in good company because O'Reilly's infamy is derived in no small part from his extreme rudeness in dealing with his guests. In fact, it is generally hard to have any clue as to what is being said because of the way that O'Reilly shouts down every little thing they say when they dare to get uppity with him.

You know, some people will be offended by this, but what O'Reilly has done is just proved to me that he and so many people of his era like him don't get it. There is an extreme cognitive dissonance between attacking "computer geeks" and screaming like an under-medicated lunatic about the need to build up "knowledge skills." I remain dubious as to what sort of skills O'Reilly brings since blustering doesn't count. He has demonstrated repeatedly a weak mind matched by a weak education, mated with weak logic skills and a total divorce from reality.

And you know who he really reminds me of, now that I think about it? The Voice of Fate from V for Vendetta, only a little milder. Chew on that one for a moment...