It's getting hot, and I'm feeling a bit too torpid to go in guns blazing into one of our micturition competitions about high concepts of Liberalism and Conservatism.

But I do want to note the illustration of the difference between the perception of systemic causation among progressives compared to direct causation among conservatives.

You'd lay the rot of the American mind "at the feet of our education system" as the sole cause, as if the only influence on and input to our minds comes during a period of formal and explicit education, and after that our minds are cast in stone. Nonsense, of course, even you'd admit that. It seems quite clear to me that we're overwhelmed anymore by not just information input but by highly-sophisticated attempts to manipulate our minds, for purposes both commercial and political, coming from all directions at once. It doesn't stop upon graduation.

The worldview of Americans, and to some degree of most people in the developed world, is shaped by news and entertainment delivered by commercial entities in hot pursuit of profit. What comes out of Hollywood and New York isn't determined by a conspiracy of Lefties pulling the strings and dictating what the studios produce. The studios produce what their market research people determine will sell the best and therefore maximize profits. Commerical news organizations monitor what their audience likes and dislikes, and tailor their coverage to fit. Over time it's a race to the bottom (however one defines greater or lesser quality) because the pyramid of "taste" is always broader at its base than at its apex. What happens to bright people starved of intellectual input on a diet of media junk food? They get dumber, the base of the pyramid gets broader, and the media is encouraged to produce dumber products. It's a vicious downward spiral.

As an extra-credit exercize, compare and contrast the programming on the Fox News Channel with the programming on Fox's several entertainment channels. Isn't it just a little bit amusing to watch demagogues on Fox News loudly denouncing the very crap their employer is peddling?