Things i’ve grown to dislike…

I have a conspiracy theory of thoughts.

I’ve noticed that there are alot more stupid people around than their used to be. There are a few bits of evidence/conjecture that I will use to support this:

- Some of the most popular shows in the last 5 years have included “The Nanny”, “Everybody loves Raymond”, “Will and Grace”, “Today Tonight”, “Australian Idol” and “Big Brother”.

- There doesn’t seem to be an end of morons who think they can get fame and fortune by auditioning for Australian Idol despite no discernible musical talent, and the embarrasing lack of shame of those that went before them. (Dare I mention the girl at Perth auditions that sung whilst wearing headphones and thus only hearing the voice of the singer on the CD and not her own voice and was upset when the judges told her she was crap (she was). She maintained that she was a great singer).

- An abundance of trashy magazines obsessed with Princess Mary, Jennifer Anniston, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, J-Lo and Ben Affleck not to mention a whole foxtel channel devoted to this rubbish.

- Our Statewide newspapers resemble the british tabloids with their sensationalist headlines, obsession with celebrity news, parochial one-eyed reporting that is happy to overlook the facts and whose world news section sits about 30 pages in.

- University’s ceased to be free in 1985 and ever since the Liberal Govt has been in power (Labor abolished free uni) they have increased HECS fees by ridiculous amounts (in 7 years at uni I accumulated about 15k on the old scheme, if I did that now I would have a 50k debt or more)

- The Government has increased funding to private schools and decreased funding of public schools.

- Once upon a time there were numerous reports of a shortfall in tradepeople and apprenticeships as the education system was geared towards educating people to be office workers. Now all we hear are reports of their not being enough professionals to cover the amount of jobs that are available.

My theory is that obvious dumbing down of the general population by reduced funding for education is a genuine policy of the current Governments (Liberal or Labor, whilst they claim to be different, they are more similar than we think) aimed at ensuring we have a larger group of less educated people willing/having-no-choice-but to take on the more menial and hard labor jobs in society.

It seems that the theory, which may well be true, is that the more educated people are, the less they will settle for work that seems beneath their intelligence.

So effectively we are creating a larger working class to fix these problems which, on the one hand is a good thing as the working class are responsible for creating the wealth of the nation, on the other hand it’s a comletely economic view which fails to take into account the socio-economic problems associated with doing this.

Thats the end of my rant.

A quick point though, when did Australia start mirroring the Americans ridiculously over the top Patriotism. I always thought that we were against that flag waving nonsense, we were Australians and proud of it and didn’t need to run around showing it off to everyone.

Now though, it seems that (in the light of Australia Day), we’ve created a yobbo sub class that run around draped with the Aussie flag as a cape (bet the RSL won’t be happy) boozing it up and acting like Tossers. If reports are true it’s from these groups that come the types that pick on others for being un-australian which in itself is ironically un-australian.

Joking that someone is Un-Australian when they obviously are, now that is funny, calling someone from a different background that doesnt share all of your values is definitely not.