Modern thoughts in Mongolia

I enjoyed last night's Foreign Correspondent - Mongolia - The Last Eagle Hunters. 

Apart from making me wonder, yet again, at how humans have this remarkable ability to learn to love the landscape and lifestyle in some of the most desolate looking places on Earth, the thing that really caught my attention was how these isolated people were expressing thoughts that were more modern than what you'll spot on some Western conservative websites.

The two examples of that - the 55 year old who said he remembered childhood winters were snowier and colder than they are now, and he thought that global warming probably meant that winters there would not be like that again.   Yes - global warming accepted as true by a nomadic, dirt poor Muslim who has probably never been on the internet.    Way to go, internet, to enable the conning of large slabs of the population of the West.   (I think I have read that you similarly won't get any arguments about global warming from the Inuit in Canada.)

The second example - the 12 year old girl (well, around that age anyway) who was learning to be an eagle hunter, expressing the view that girls who apply themselves can do anything a boy can do. This is location where most women are married off by about 19 and become homekeepers.  

Modernity is indeed spreading.