De Beauvoir Cycle Gang Strikes Again

Can this simplistically be put down the the effect of TVs?

I get more and more depressed on each visit to Nigeria, as folk that don't have much seem to devote their energies to the purchase of total fucking nonsense in the aim of showing outwardly how well they're doing, which, is of ZERO benfit to their lives. They aren't totally poor, they have access (sometimes a group access) to tv with foreign satellite channels pumping out MTV and all that dribble. It's almost like the end of Jim Bowen's Bulls Eye: "Here's what you could have won" - The metaphorical rubbing of your face in the mirror of how shit your life is because of you don't have what we're advertising.

That is what pollutes the mind IMO. The places that I've been to minus TVs but are materialistically really poor seem happier and to co-exisit much better. None of the inflated individualistic egos that get bigger the further West you travel.

Were kids as brand aware in this country in the 70s/80s as they are now? I didn't know anyone robbing/stabbing for a pair of airmax then as now.

Probably not far off, but then take as a counter example the increased emancipation of a generation of rural women in Brazil, who, seeing the educated, independent, urban women depicted in soap operas, seem to have collectively said 'fuck this shit; I want a piece of that.'

As for the whole hand-wringing thing, just because one identifies a psychopathic cunt as a product of their environment, and want to change the things that are wrong with that environment, doesn't mean that you have to let the individual off with being a psychopathic cunt. It's a tough call though, because though it's easy to talk about the platonic ideals of 'normal person' and 'scum/thief/brute', most teenage boys are going to be somewhere between the two in terms of the acceptability of their behaviour. We aren't simply trying not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, we're more like dealing with a baby soup, and trying to get rid of the bathwater element without throwing any of the baby soup away.