This argument Bauerlein employs could easily have been applied to the 60's generation just by substituting a few key words. Critics made the same assumptions about hippies and the tools of their subculture, i.e. music, and the destructive and distracting force they represented in Western culture. The mind of the American youth was being torn apart by Hendrix and acid and "love-ins", and nothing could stop this horrific trend. Kids weren't interested in learning about Plato, they just wanted to rock and roll all night, and party every day. They rejected "The Man", and focused on tuning in, tuning on and dropping out. And now those same people are saying that Generation Y is guilty of the same 'willful ignorance', all while enjoying the benefits of holding public office, or sitting at the heads of marble conference tables in tailored two-button suits. Bullshit. Bauerlein's belief that the Internet and other technology are causing a deterioration of basic knowledge or artistic appreciation or civic-mindedness is countered by the steady increase in youth voting in national elections over the last eight years, and by the thousands of new bands, blogs, websites and other artistic collaborations that appear on the Internet not every day, but every hour. Kids don't pay attention to the world around them? Kids don't express themselves creatively? Fuck that. They're doing all of that in ways no one could have imagined. Bauerlein doesn't know that, or he won't acknowledge it, because he doesn't get it, and he'd rather pish-posh something and make sweeping generalizations about it, than take the time to explore and understand it. For every apathetic basement dweller, there are thousands who mobilized massive campaigns in 2008 for both sides of the aisle (and third party candidates) using the technology that Bauerlein finds so harmful. For every blog that glorifies morons like Hilton and Richie and Lohan, there are six that make money mocking their idiocy. For every dozen dumbfuck dipshit Bathin' Apes losers, there's a teenage web entrepreneur who will make bank in the next year because he thought of something that a 45-year-old English professor from Emory does not have the mental capacity to comprehend. Fat lot of good his extensive knowledge of Foucault and Derrida did him there. If anything, this technology will help the cream rise to the top that much faster. The youth who are eager, and curious and hungry will benefit immensely from the opportunities it provides. The rest? The rest will melt their own brains and fall by the wayside, as they have in every preceding generation. The difference is that the choice now lies firmly in their hands. They aren't restricted by what they learn in grade school and college, and can succeed without a piece of paper that panders to some corporate definition of "qualified". They fly or die under their own power, which is the way it should have always been. I can't guarantee an outcome either way, but I do know that it is far too early to make definitive, alarmist statements about the inevitable doom this country faces at the hands of its children.
I'm probably as old as most of your parents (Or "Fucking ancient" according to Nettdata.) This whole argument of what's wrong with the current generation has been going on for hundreds of years. I heard it when I was growing up...my generation apparently had to much freedom along with 3 channels of TV, telephones, tape recorders, devil music, and God only knows what else the old folks cooked up as the current cause of society's problem. Life was simpler back then, not better or worse, just much more simple. A lot of knowledge I had to absorb growing up then would be meaningless now...things like the Dewey decimal system. There's no reason for anyone to know that now, but it was pretty damned important to know it when I was growing up. Now it's about as important as knowing conversational Latin. As time moves on our idea of what is important knowledge changes. 100 hundred years ago knowing how a computer works or operate a microwave would've been useless information, much like knowing how many bushels of corn will fit in a wagon 10 rods long is today. Knowing how to make fuck you in half wine knowledge will always be important though. I urge all of you to learn this.
Instead of "youth", wouldn't a better word be people? The impression that I seem to be picking up from those around me is that once you're out of school, you don't need to keep learning. They have a tendency to stagnate and become set in their ways and become resistant to change in any form, lest it upset their mental map of "how the world should be" as opposed to how it is. The curiosity that they once had is gone. Personally, the thought of becoming like this terrifies me. As a result, I am constantly reading about new ideas, in as many disciplines, and I try to think critically about what I read, and put ideas together in crazy ways.
Hitting your woman. While this is an overwhelmingly good thing, when the fuck did this turn into bitches thinking they could crack you in the face and you just had to sit there and take it? I guess this should be filed under people not understanding that hitting someone means they're going to hit you back, but whatever.
You're right; it's my belief that the problem is getting progressively worse as time passes. I'm sorry, but I have to call bullshit here. Yes, there was an unprecidented amount of young voters who turned out during the Obama/McCain election, but I think that circumstance is unique. When 18 year-olds first got the vote the turnout was around 50%. In the last federal election in Canada, of all young people aged 18-25, only 25.4% voted. Most Western democracies are seeing the number of young voters shrink dramatically. Of the research I've done (this was a topic of one of my recent Master's papers), there is a strong sense of disillusionment amongst young people with regards to government, a sense that "they don't care about us and our voice isn't heard." And it's a viscious circle; in Canada, at least, we are seeing drastic cuts to the arts, post-secondary education, tuition grants, etc. The youth don't vote, so the government doesn't spend money on them. But because the government doesn't spend money, the youth don't care. Yes, of course, there are shining exceptions to the rule but as you said yourself...it's a rate of a dozen to one for ignorant, lazy shits vs. driven, knowledgable kids. Again, I agree with you. The problem with "the cream" rising and "the rest" melting into obscurity is that it creates a polarized society; the haves and the have-nots. Ever lived in a country where 1% of the population are multi-millionaires who control everything and the rest live in the dirt in shacks by the road? I have. It is far less pleasant than what we enjoy in Canada or the United States. I'd like to find a way to bring the rest up to some sort of functional level - a tough thing to do in a culture that glorifies ignorance.
This pisses me off. I had a women punch me straight in the face at a pub, go for another swing and was genuinely shocked when I blocked the punch and grabbed her by the arm to prevent myself from being hit again. She even had the nerve to scream out that I was “assaulting” her and I was worried that the crowd would turn on me. Equal rights would be me punching her straight back. Focus: The ability to do things like general maintenance around the house is slowly dying. I went to a 21st birthday party the other week and stood there shocked as 5 young guys stood around the outdoor bbq and could not get the thing started when the automatic switch didn’t work. I know guys in their mid twenties that would struggle to re-lamp a light fitting let alone change a lawn mower blade or even a car tyre.
This strand of your conversation has to stop due to complete irrelevance. Since when is voting a sign of intelligence or knowledge? Aside from that, carry on. I'm enjoying the discussion.
Work ethic. Too many young people these days have a sense of entitlement and think they shouldn't have to work hard to get somewhere. The kids who are fresh out of college are the worst. "I went to four years of college, I should be able to have a job and make $40,000!" Yeah? Well guess what retard, you don't have any experience, and you'll have to eat shit until you do, just like the rest of us have. I grew up in a rural area, and every summer all the local kids would work for farmers. Farmers always have shit to do, like picking rocks, throwing bales, driving tractor, yard work, whatever. It was always nice to have some extra spending money and working with your buddies was always fun. Even the farm kids would work for other farmers when their dads didn't have enough for them to do. It was just something we always did, and if you didn't work hard, you'd get picked on by the other kids. I'm 28, so that wasn't very long ago. Now that I'm managing a farm business, I can't find help to save my ass, and neither can any farmers around here. Kids just don't want to work, period. Every once in a while you'll find a kid whose parents made him go to work, but they're always useless. They're always dragging their asses and they have absolutely no common sense. The only decent people I've been able to hire are 25 or older, and they get expensive. Experienced grownups don't work for nothing. A lot of guys around here are starting to hire Mexican immigrants to do the work, and we're seeing more and more of it everyday. I don't have a big problem with that, but who's going to come back and operate these farms someday if the kids are all lazy retards?
I always think it's weird when I see 11 year olds texting... but honestly, I think a lot of us jump the gun on condemning new trends. I think we're naturally inclined to think that the way we were raised was "right" and any kid with more/less physical activity/mechanicals skills/access to technology is worse off than we were. The times are always a-changin', we need to get used to that. (I know that's not exactly responding to the focus, but it always seems to me that these kinds of threads take on a "kids these days are so spoiled and stupid..." theme.)
A-fucking-men. I had a lot of people that wanted a pay check come to me when I was building my place. They wanted a pay check, but they didn't want to work. I can't even count how many people walked off after an hour or so of standing around with a "What the fuck? I'm supposed to work?" look on their face. If I hire you to pull green chain at a saw mill and we agree on the wages, pull fucking green chain. Don't bitch and complain that you're not making $20 an hour, be happy with what you stumbled in to. It eventually got to the point that I couldn't get enough people to work for me in one of the most depressed areas of the country and I was pretty damned good to my employees. I gave them breaks often, paid them well, and bent over backwards to accommodate them...very few of them would actually work though. They thought they were entitled to a paycheck since they had a job, actually working for that paycheck was below them. I'm still owed over $5K in what I loaned out to employees for their sick children, impending utility shut offs, and whatever other disaster was befalling them.
I feel bummed that the generation that is coming after me [I'm only 21] will never feel the incredible feeling when the dial-up internet actually connects. I remember growing up we had a one hour time limit on the computer because there were 7 of us and one computer. A lot of times most of that hour would be spent just trying to get on the fucking dial-up. You would cross your fingers and pray that it was finally going to connect, and it would have to retry. I liken it to the feeling many had when blowing in their Nintendo game and crossing their fingers hoping it didn't flash an orange or blue screen. Sometimes that was part of the game with Nintendo, was actually getting the damn thing to work.
i'll second this one just by comparing myself to my dad. I had to change my tire the other day in the cold and decided to time myself. Afterwards I decided to call my dad and brag that I could do it under 20min. and his only response was "uh well.... yeah" Apparently he wasn't impressed with my time as I thought he should be. But that really made me think of how many my friends could in fact change the tire, but it would take an hour of them bumfucking around to get the job done.
Are you smarter than a 1954 8th grader.. http://www.blackinformant.com/education/are-you-smarter-than-a-1954-8th-grader
I reckon if you retaliated by kicking her in the cunt , it could just prove funny enough for you to get away with it. If not , be prepared to run.
How about getting sick and getting better naturally? Nowadays, since kids don't go outside anymore, they are exposed to fewer and fewer germs. Not to mention all those clean freak mom's who lysol the shit out of everything in their house. What the fuck? I used to get dirty as hell and contract some kind of cold or something every couple of weeks when I was young...now, nothing is dirty and everything is 99.99% germ free. I guess a good part about it is that when these kids grow up, they'll die of stupid shit like the chicken pox because their immune systems are so weak.
How about the days when your identity was relatively safe? ToyToy can absolutely vouch for this, as can I. I've had to replace my credit and debit cards twice and they've never left my possession at any time. I also had a fake student loan taken out in my name that ravaged my credit score a few years ago. When I ran a credit report to see what the fuck was going on, I found mulitple addresses and accounts which had never belonged to me. It was a mess. Just last week my bank issued me a new debit card because 3rd party data that may have included my information was stolen (a big thanks to People's for that one--they actually didn't suck for once). "Nigerian princes," "lottery winnings," "distant relatives leaving millions in inheritance," it's all insane and it's rampant. Even if you're in the know and don't fall for these shit scams, there's still a hundred more ways that your information can be stolen. It's a big pain in the ass, to say the least.
I was going to reply to some of the old fogeys' idiocy about "Kids these days! Don't know the meaning of having to be patient for the internet to connect or reading out of a book! Ten years ago all the youths here were hard-working salt of the earth types and now they're a bunch of lazy fucks and this is NOT DUE TO MY CONFIRMATION BIAS OR LIVING IN MY OWN NARRATIVE!" But this took the cake. You don't know fuck about immunology, or medicine. Not getting sick isn't going to result in becoming immunocompromised. Getting AIDS means you will die of simple shit like colds and chicken pox. This folksy wisdom about "getting sick is good for your immune system" is 100% horseshit and needs to die. Not too long ago it was ignorant fucks like you declaring that vaccines were bad because they interfered with God's divine plan as to who died and who lived. God forbid society make progress and suffer less disease and reduce morbidity and mortality, right? As for the argument that youths today are lazy, well, look at how competitive it is to get into top-flight university programs and professional schools. Medical school used to be easier to get into than a regular arts and science degrees, and now every young aspiring medical professional needs to out-compete a lot of people to do what they want to do with their lives, and there are a lot of people competing. Back in the "good old days", how many people even went to college? The stuff I learned in organic chemistry was culled from decades worth of Nobel prize winning work, that took the brightest minds of their day to understand. These days a high school graduate knows far, far more about the order of the universe adn the functioning of the human body than any great thinker who came before Bertrand Russell's time. The idea that we'd be even more awesome than this if Facebook remained a technical impossibility seems hard to believe. And hey, even if I am wrong and 95% of people my age are ignorant rectum-dwelling retards, then that means there's just that much more opportunity for people like me. I am also reminded of the Last Psychiatrist's writing on the subject.
Okay, let me preface what i'm about to write by saying i'm not being accusatory or anything along those lines. It's hard to convey a genuine sense of interest from an intellectual standpoint on a message-board but that's what i'm trying to do. I was under the impression that vaccines and everything like that were made up of weakened or "dead" parts of the viruses. When we're given the vaccine our body then learns to recognize it and basically figures out how to defend against it? (you can tell i'm not a bio major here huh?) But using that logic wouldn't the higher number of viruses you've encountered and "defeated" then actually make you less susceptible to the viruses at a later point in your life? Like I said i'm not trying to be an asshole or call you out or anything. This is a genuine question. The only reason I didn't send it as a PM is because I wanted to leave it open to the group to either answer, comment on, etc.
You've got your basic information correct, however, your body learns to recognize those specific viruses, not all viruses. So, exposure to Virus A gives you future immunity to virus A; if you're exposed to virus B, your body won't recognize it and needs to develop new antibodies all over again. This is why you only get chickenpox once, for example. Seasonal flu viruses change pretty much every season, which is why you can keep getting a flu every year for the rest of your life. Getting virus A at 20 years old is, all things considered, probably better than getting it at 80 years old, but getting virus A at twenty years old has no bearing on getting virus B later in life.