Monday, January 13, 2014

DirectTV for Your Baby


My wife is expecting a little Izgad due soon after Passover. It is my hope that this little fellow have all the appropriate number tentacles and eat mommy first. We recently attended at baby expo with her parents to look at cribs, strollers and car seats. The place was a bazaar for a wide range of organic and other alternative types of baby care products. For this reason I was surprised to see a booth for DIRECTV. Regardless of the whether I plan on raising my child with a television in the house, I consider television as much a part of a complete and balanced childhood as fruity pebbles. That being said, I went over to the people manning the booth to thank them. For one thing, they are doing their job. The market should operate with similar values as the adversarial system used in courts. Prosecutors and defense lawyers may argue against each other, but they are really on the same side of justice. For this reason victims of crimes should be just as grateful to defense lawyers with all their shenanigans as they are to the prosecutors. It is the defense lawyer, precisely to the proportion that he abuses his position, who grants legitimacy to the prosecution. Without him all you would have is a lynch mob and the moral distinction between victim and perpetrator would disappear. Similarly, the market requires many different sides to educate the public by advertising their wares. This includes television as well as drugs and prostitutes. (And if the little one tries to take advantage of any future legalization of the later two in order to experiment with them, he will wish their was a legal system to lock him away to protect him from me.)  

There is another reason why I am grateful to DIRECTV. They offered me an opportunity to correctly apply R. Avigdor Miller's  "near and far argument." His claim to deduce the value of science and history books in a library based on the fiction section is nonsense. That being said it is useful to know that their was no controlling authority as to who received booths to the extent that even DIRECTV could receive one. Thanks to DIRECTV, I know that I should just assume that the goods being sold by every other booth are equally junk. Now it is in the market interests of those other companies to make sure I receive a different signal and insist that the expo demonstrate that it has standards by not including DIRECTV.  

1 comment:

Rob said...

Hello Izgad,
Mazel Tov on the coming edition, and may G-d bless you with a happy,healthy child and an easy delivery for Miriam.

RE: TV...we got rid of TV when Sam and his sister were quite small, and I think it's one of the best things we did for them. Kids are inherently trusting at that age and they have no defenses against the mind rape of advertisers seeking to 'brand' them at a young age.

You also get the advantage of being able to control access in terms of time spent watching and content by what videos/DVDs you keep in the house for their consumption.

As a result of not having TV at home, my kids became much more computer oriented, read earlier and at levels well above their grade levels, were more outgoing, played more games and had far better ability to concentrate on things. I'm convinced it had a good effect, and as they got older and watched some TV over at their friend's houses, they were old enough to have some defenses against the programming and hadn't developed the habit of flopping in front of the screen five hours per day.That was probably better for the whole family, and none of us have ended up missing it.

Sorry about the long comment! But think about it.

B'Shalom,
Robert Miller