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Cable TV Ruins Bhutan
Christ-on-a-bike writes "This article in The Guardian discusses the negative impact of TV on the population of Bhutan. It has only been legal there for four years. Violence, crime and drug use are on the up. Was this inevitable, and what does it say about the influence of TV on Western cultures?" Our previous story about Bhutan talks about the radical impact of television, but without as much emphasis on the darker side.
Here is a link to the Frontline site with a lot more info about setting the system up in the first place.
n /t hestory.html
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/bhuta
Dismissive without investigating it first. An educated way to think.
This concept isn't "voodoo" -- it has been around for at least 200 years. Probably longer. It used to be called the Werther's effect, and now it's called Social Proof. You can study it in a controlled environment, and easily predict the way 95% of humans will act. The basic idea behind Social Proof is that people look to their environment for clues as to how to behave, but more importantly, they look to the people in the environment that most closely resemble themselves. You can use this for ill or good -- marketers use it to sway your purchasing decisions, filmmakers use it to shock you into buying a ticket, psychologists use it to help people (mostly with phobias, as videos of people enjoying a feared situation can greatly influence people to overcome their phobia). It's how we model behavior. You can call it voodoo, but people put huge amounts of money into the concept, and get results so good that they keep putting money into it.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
Margaret Mead made similar observations about the introduction of TV in Micronesian Islands, back in the 1960s.
1) There is not a ban on television. Nor is the government considering one. Did you read the article? If you had, you might have noticed that it says ". . . in its haste to introduce TV, the government failed to prepare legislation. There is no film classification board or TV watershed in force here, no regulations about media ownership. Companies such as Star TV are free to broadcast whatever they want. Only three years after the introduction of cable did the government announce that a media act would be drafted."
2) Comparing Bhutan's government with the Taliban is completely and totally bogus. The Taliban took power violently and sustained their rule through violence, including public executions of "criminals" such as women who committed adultery. Bhutan was founded as a Buddhist refuge. Under the Taliban, living conditions in Afghanistan became notably worse.
Bhutan's monarchy, by contrast, was not "self-proclaimed". It was set up under British influence in 1907, as mentioned here and here. That second source contains, among other things, this information: "Bhutan's third hereditary ruler, King Jigme Dorji Wangchuk (reigned 1953â"72), modernized Bhutanese society by abolishing slavery and the caste system, emancipating women, dividing large estates into small individual plots, and starting a secular educational system. Although Bhutan no longer has a Dharma Raja, Buddhist priests retain political influence. In 1969 the absolute monarchy gave way to a 'democratic monarchy.'"
What's more, the article we're discussing mentions that "[In] 1998 . . . King Jigme Singye Wangchuck announced he would give up his role as head of government and cede power to the national assembly. The people would be consulted about the drafting of a constitution. The process would complete Bhutan's transformation from monarchist Shangri-la into a modern democracy."
Listen, sounds like in balance they've been pretty good for the country. Given a choice between living in Bhutan today or Afghanistan-under-the-Taliban, I would take Bhutan in a heartbeat. The main fault of Bhutan's government seems to be that they're embracing foreign ways a bit too enthusiastically. Comparing them to the Taliban does them a disservice.
Kindly think twice before posting.
Apologies for responding to my own post, but just to provide some backup data, here's a link to a paper about the Werther Effect, with lots of studies cited. Anyway, I'm sure other people can post tons more or Google for it.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
"Terrorists have above average educations. (it's well documented, so let's not argue)."
Terrorist LEADERS are usually above average in education while thier foot soldiers are typically not.
Tim McVeigh "was very bright, not top of his class, but a solid student. He left school in 1986 and dropped out of college soon after."
Mullah Mohammed Omar "has no formal schooling. His education consists of training sessions at a madrassah, an Islamic school devoted to the study of the principles of Islam and the reading of the Koran."
Yasser Arafat tudied civil engineering at the University of Cairo in Egypt.
Osama bin Laden studied management and economics at King Abdul Aziz University in Jedda.
Khieu Samphan of the Khmer Rouge worked on his doctoral degree in Paris.
Pol Pot flunked out of his electronics scholarship in Paris.
Carlos the Jackal had a talent for languages and had terrorist training at an early age, possibly in Cuba and/or under the supervision of the KGB.
Khalid Mohammed went to college in North Carolina for a while.
Ramzi Yousef studied electrical engineering.
Terry Nichols was a drop-out, loser who couldn't keep a job or a wife.
Zacarias Moussaoui is said to have a masters degree...
Adolf Eichmann flunked out of college, worked as a traveling salesman
Joseph Goebbels studied history and literature at the University of Heidelberg
Hermann Goering was a badass pilot in WW1
Reinhard Heydrich was a military cadet
Heinrich Himmler got a farming diploma from a Munich vo-tech school and later was a chicken farmer
Adolf Hitler flunked out of art school
PLease make sure your next post is an apology:
... We will challenge the poverty and hopelessness and lack of education and
h tm
here is just one of many such articles...no doubt you never saw this because it weas not in USA today, but instead in an actual scientific journal.
Chronicle of Higher Education
From the issue dated June 6, 2003
Seeking the Roots of Terrorism
By ALAN B. KRUEGER and JITKA MALECKOVÃ
In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, a consensus quickly emerged that
poverty and lack of education were major causes of terrorist acts and support
for terrorism. Subscribing to that theory are politicians, journalists, and
many scholars, as well as officials responsible for administering aid to poor
countries. For example, James D. Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank,
asserted that the war on terrorism "will not be won until we have come to grips
with the problem of poverty and thus the sources of discontent."
The consensus is bipartisan. "We fight against poverty," George W. Bush
said in a speech in Monterrey, Mexico, "because hope is an answer to terror.
failed governments that too often allow conditions that terrorists can seize."
At the other end of the political spectrum, Al Gore, at the Council on Foreign
Relations, argued that the anger that underlies terrorism in the Islamic world
stems from "the continued failure to thrive, as rates of economic growth
stagnate, while the cohort of unemployed young men under 20 continues to
increase."
Many well-regarded public intellectuals also concur. For example, Elie
Wiesel claimed, "Education is the way to eliminate terrorism." And the Nobel
laureate Kim Dae Jung asserted, "At the bottom of terrorism is poverty."
With such a strong and broad coalition in agreement, we asked, what
evidence links poverty and poor education to terrorism? Perhaps surprisingly,
the relevant literature and the new evidence that we assembled challenge the
consensus. In a study we recently circulated as a National Bureau of Economic
Research working paper, we considered support for, and participation in,
terrorism at both individual and national levels. Although the available data
at the national level are weaker, both types of evidence point in the same
direction and lead us to conclude that any connection between poverty,
education, and terrorism is, at best, indirect, complicated, and probably quite
weak.
Full text
http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i39/39b01001.
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