Okay, Xeno, I've finished staring into space, twiddling my thumbs, goofing off, and planning all those evil, illegal, immoral, nasty activities we so-called liberals are apparently always about (I told you I had much better things to do), and have decided, very stupidly I'm sure, to take another shot at this.

If some of the following comes across as insulting, I apologize. Call it my high-sounding vacuous rhetoric, if you like (and your anti-intellectual bias is showing by the way; you might want to tuck that in -- or maybe not). It's just that I don't know how to say some of this in a way that could not be interpreted as insulting (if one wants to interpret it that way).

To begin, I'm not much interested in all your barbs and thinly veiled insults. Some are somewhat clever, some are quite vapid, but whatever. I'm just not interested.

Nor am I interested in your throw-out-every-distraction-and-red-herring-but-the-kitchen-sink-then-oversimplify-and-restate-so-as-to-change-the-actual-meaning-of-what-was-originally-said approach to "debate." You make lots of declarative statements about the world as you see it, and I'm sure (make that almost sure) some are fact-based, but it is hard to tell about many of them because you do not generally try to back them up with any argument, and when you do, the facts you use tend to be anecdotal rather than anything that could be construed to be a point-by-point argument. That's fine. That's your style. And I admit, I do a bit of it too. But I am not interested in that either.

Nor am I particularly interested in your apparent need to preserve your apparently very large ego by refusing to ever acknowledge anything unless you said or thought of it first.

Nor am I interested much, anymore, in convincing you of anything. What I am interested in is not leaving others who may be so inclined with the impression that you necessarily always know what you are talking about. I can let a lot of things go, but I simply refuse -- well, while I still have the strength -- to let everything go.

So here goes:

Quote - Uh......so what's different today?  Beyond the existence of the internet?  And the addition of some cable news channels?  Big steps, I'll acknowledge.  But people had ready access to information back then, too.

I can't decide if you are really so unsophisticated or if this is simply part of a strategy to tucker out your "opponent" by demanding one exhaustive explanation after another to support the obvious while offering very little in the way of such explanation to support your own claims ... but in any case:

First off, your offhand near dismissal of the significance of cable channels and the internet is surprising as it should be apparent to anyone here on Renderosity how much they have transformed our lives, our information, and here on the internet, our interactions with one another, etc., and not merely nationally, but world-wide as illustrated by the very many members here from very many nations around the world.

Second, until recent decades, oh, let's say 50 years ago, but even to some extent since then, there were still very many Americans who lived in rural areas, some remote and a few not so remote, who did not have electricity, much less TV sets, radios, etc., and they, along with those who did have all those things, often performed hard labor from dawn to dusk, working on farms, ranches, hauling produce and supplies, working hard on oil wells, clearing land, chopping wood, slaughtering animals, and so forth. Not only did they work hard at hard physical activities, they did not have much in the way of leisure time. It is also true that many more than today who worked in metropolitan areas -- not just rural folks -- worked much harder physically as well, which I will come back to in a moment (with my "hi-faluting" rhetoric, so as not to disappoint).

Further, in addition to fewer TV channels (and far fewer radio stations for that matter), there were far fewer TVs and radios. One did not find a TV at every doctor's office, at every gymnasium, etc., etc., and the 3 channels were not on 24 hours a day, and the vast majority of the programming offered was not news and was of a much more limited variety, and there were certainly no 24-hour news channels, and weren't nearly as many communication satellites (actually none 50 years ago -- (http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/satcomhistory.html)), broadcast towers, cables, phone lines, reporters, news magazines, etc.

Additionally, there is a very good reason for the stereotype of the dumb athlete (and here goes that high-sounding rhetoric you like), and at least one of those reasons is that prolonged physical activity tends to tire one out, burn off nervous energy, release endorphins, etc., and for all those who worked physically hard from dawn to dusk, even those who had access to good reading material, TV, radio and such and wished to know and understand more about the world around them -- as anyone who has ever worked that hard knows -- the temptation to fall asleep during the nightly news must often have been overwhelming.

Having read widely and talked to my mother and father and their friends, and various others from previous generations, I have reason to believe that many -- outside of the best educated -- who grew up in rural areas (as well as many who lived in small to mid-size towns), as little as 40 and 50 years ago got much of their information through word of mouth, and the vast majority of that was local, not national. Many simply worked too hard and too long to have the time and energy to get it otherwise.

And so on. There is also the fact that many Americans were more provincial in their education and concerns. Conversations like this one -- and I'm starting to think it was a good thing -- not only did not take place very often because there was no internet, but because there were limited opportunities and venues for such. Rural citizens cared less about what went on in the cities and vice versa. Crimes that happened among the big city folk was of very limited interest, at best, to country folk, and vice versa. To some extent, it is still true, but not as profoundly.

So that is just some of how "what's different today." To go into more detail than that would likely require a detailed review of the 2nd half of the 20th century, and I simply don't have the inclination, and perhaps not the expertise.

As far as your other comments, I may or may not review them and respond to them at some point. But it really is a bother -- (if it brings you any satisfaction, you are succeeding somewhat in exhausting me if that is your strategy) -- and it seems so pointless since you seem -- and not just in this "debate" but in others that can be found here at Renderosity -- essentially incapable of acknowledging very much of anything unless, as I have already mentioned, you said or thought of it first.