The Next Generation

[Rightguide]

I don't know. He wasn't around much.

Sorry to hear that.

 

[WoundedKnee]

It is what it is. I did not come out of my youth seeing life as a gilded lily.
I had to grow up fast and did not have a lot of time to dream about creating a more perfect world for anyone but myself. That's why I am doing well now and don't have to, for example, from another thread, worry about how much more that CEOs make than I do. I've made enough to live comfortably for my last remaining days.



Unless, of course, the youth* are put in charge of their dreams.



* Aided by the elderly Peter and Patricia Pans who never grew up and out of it.

 

[Sean]

Sorry to hear that.

Maybe AJ's mother should have been put in a camp?

 

[Rightguide]

It is what it is. I did not come out of my youth seeing life as a gilded lily.
I had to grow up fast and did not have a lot of time to dream about creating a more perfect world for anyone but myself. That's why I am doing well now and don't have to, for example, from another thread, worry about how much more that CEOs make than I do. I've made enough to live comfortably for my last remaining days.



Unless, of course, the youth* are put in charge of their dreams.



* Aided by the elderly Peter and Patricia Pans who never grew up and out of it.

You've "earned" the right to your opinions and to be left in peace for your remaining years. No man who has worked a lifetime to achieve what he has should become victimized by the frivolities of younger people stumbling blindly through life trying to achieve what he already has.

 

[WoundedKnee]

You've "earned" the right to your opinions and to be left in peace for your remaining years. No man who has worked a lifetime to achieve what he has should become victimized by the frivolities of younger people stumbling blindly through life trying to achieve what he already has.

We all have the right, young and old. It just cannot be a one-way street, but as I have pointed out, the young are being led by the nose by an older generation. A generation(s) empowered by social media and directed by academia, which has gradually come to predominate education and enabled by one of the things Eisenhower warned us about, the alliance of Government and Education (funny how they only focus on the military-industrial complex). Education has been trained to follow the money.
The question now is, "What is the goal of government and education?" We are told that it is to be more "tolerant," but the new tolerance is focused like a laser against the "intolerance" of anyone with whom they disagree with.

And this, too, is an aspect of human behavior.

 

[Rightguide]

We all have the right, young and old. It just cannot be a one-way street, but as I have pointed out, the young are being led by the nose by an older generation. A generation(s) empowered by social media and directed by academia, which has gradually come to predominate education and enabled by one of the things Eisenhower warned us about, the alliance of Government and Education (funny how they only focus on the military-industrial complex). Education has been trained to follow the money.
The question now is, "What is the goal of government and education?" We are told that it is to be more "tolerant," but the new tolerance is focused like a laser against the "intolerance" of anyone with whom they disagree with.

And this, too, is an aspect of human behavior.

What it always been, totalitarianism. The demise of the individual. It won't be the first time the social experimentation of government and the intelligentsia has led to the destruction of countries and millions of lives of their inhabitants who started out believing in their benevolence.

 

[beew]

I think my generation is more tolerant and compassionate, but tolerance is something that seems to be lost with age. Most older people give up on learning, so they fall back on what they understood as a teenager or what their parents drummed into them. It’s a shame that many old people become so cynical and eaten up by frustration and disappointment, because the ones that keep an open mind and a sense of wonder are the most attractive and interesting.

I think it's just a matter of experiencing and coming in contact with more and more people.

As you get older or come across more people, you realize that only superficial values or modes of expression change or vary among different social groups.

Must be the colective unconscious that Jung was talking about, but most core values, as well as the % of good or bad, tolerant or intolerant people are the same among various social groups.

Some boomers were more intolerant of ethnic differences, some Xers are more intolerant of Faith and traditions.

 

[Hypoxia]

Must be the colective unconscious that Jung was talking about,

"Collective unconscious" is theology. Look here. "Jung's body of work... lacks demonstrable or measurable scientific research. Some critics point out that he rarely, if ever, made predictions and that this freed him from being proved wrong."

Some boomers were more intolerant of ethnic differences, some Xers are more intolerant of Faith and traditions.

Some younger folk may have learned the 9-11 lesson: Science flies to the Moon. Faith flies into skyscrapers. Some may not respect long-held traditions of slavery, familial abuse, exploitation, bigotry, and mass slaughter. Ever wonder why?

 

[stickygirl]

Many of us old guys are quite stuck on our tolerance for everything except stupidity, and intolerance, and rip-off pricing. Too many young folk are raised to be socially intolerant in intolerant surroundings. Age is not a ruling factor. Tolerance comes from how and maybe where we mature, not when we were born.

Which is why good education is about the best investment a country can make.

I somewhat discussed this on page one. This is the narcissism of youth who view themselves as good, the vanguard of a new world, being oppressed by the elderly. The conceit is that the elderly have learned nothing by living a full life and thus need to be shunted to the side so that new ideas may prevail. The problem is, that this has been the attitude ever since the 60s and 70s, those children who had a vision for a better world and yet were unable to alter it in the long run because of basic human nature, so they had to gain the maturity and the acceptance of reality and how to deal with it.

"The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history" so you can take comfort in us making all the same mistakes you did and so on and on. Hooray for that. The basic human nature is greed. It's greedy politicians and businessmen who stifle change and lazy thinkers who get duped into putting them there.

 

[RobDownSouth]

You've "earned" the right to your opinions and to be left in peace for your remaining years. No man who has worked a lifetime to achieve what he has should become victimized by the frivolities of younger people stumbling blindly through life trying to achieve what he already has.

Please share with the class how you have been "victimized", Gunny.

 

[nowisthetime]

Please share with the class how you have been "victimized", Gunny.

See back in the late 60s when those pesky negroes got their little "civil rights", he could no longer compete solely based on having a combination of a phallus and melanin-deficient skin. It didn't come easy anymore...

 

[beew]

"Collective unconscious" is theology. Look here. "Jung's body of work... lacks demonstrable or measurable scientific research. Some critics point out that he rarely, if ever, made predictions and that this freed him from being proved wrong."

You might refer to it as biology ( programming of behavior by genes, Darwinian evolution or such), others as collective unconscious, God or in all sorts of ways.

 

[beew]

Some younger folk may have learned the 9-11 lesson: Science flies to the Moon. Faith flies into skyscrapers. Some may not respect long-held traditions of slavery, familial abuse, exploitation, bigotry, and mass slaughter. Ever wonder why?

Remember Russia and the Soviet Union or Soviet China?
They, too, were atheists who villified Religion and attacked people for their Faith.
Nazis sent Jews to Auchwitz, Comunists sent practicing Christians to work camps or to Siberia.

 

[Sean]

Renember Russia and the Soviet Union or Soviet China?
They, too, were atheists who villified Religion and attacked people for their Faith.
Nazis sent Jews to Auchwitz, Comunosts sent Christians to work camps or Siberia.

Soviet China, forsooth!

 

[beew]

Soviet China, forsooth!

Did I just write that?
lol

 

[Hypoxia]

Remember Russia and the Soviet Union or Soviet China?
They, too, were atheists who villified Religion and attacked people for their Faith.
Nazis sent Jews to Auchwitz, Comunists sent practicing Christians to work camps or to Siberia.

Nazis also targeted atheists, non-conformists, queers, and Romany for concentration camps. But not so many Catholics. The Nazi ("dumb hillbilly") party grew from a Catholic Bavaria base. But I digress.

Tyrants like to grow cults of personality that function exactly the same as religions. The State becomes a sacred realm, the blessed Fatherland or Motherland or Homeland. The tyrant, imbued with power of life and death, becomes a god to worship. Heretics and their kith and kin are severely punished. Have faith in Der Fuhrer or Il Duce or El Jéfe, or else.

The tyrant may co-opt an existing religious structure, as Putin has with the Russian Orthodox Church. That puts a nice face on repression and torture. Don't be non-Orthodoxoi. Religious persecution is much cleaner when practiced by the faithful, hey?

PS: In Soviet China, pussy eats YOU.

 

[beew]

Nazis also targeted atheists, non-conformists, queers, and Romany for concentration camps. But not so many Catholics. The Nazi ("dumb hillbilly") party grew from a Catholic Bavaria base. But I digress.

Tyrants like to grow cults of personality that function exactly the same as religions. The State becomes a sacred realm. The tyrant, imbued with power of life and death, becomes a god to worship. Heretics and their kith and kin are severely punished. Have faith in Der Fuhrer or Il Duce or El Jéfe, or else.

The tyrant may co-opt an existing religious structure, as Putin has with the Russian Orthodox Church. That puts a nice face on repression and torture. Don't be non-Orthodoxoi. Religious persecution is much cleaner when practiced by the faithful, hey?

PS: In Soviet China, pussy eats YOU.

Every Ideology, every ethnicity and every social group have their extremists. Thankfully, most people are moderate.
When it comes to the UK and former British colonies: .

Up till many years ago when Christian Institutions were (mis)used by powerholders, I would have been afraid of Christian fundamentalists.

In this day and age, when Religion is gradually losing it's power and every other kid thinks it's cool to mock religion, I'm more afraid of militant atheists.

 

[Hypoxia]

In this day and age, when Religion is gradually losing it's power and every other kid thinks it's cool to mock religion, I'm more afraid of militant atheists.

I'm not familiar with 'militant' atheists. Those I know of would rather just be left alone.

Math quiz: How many deities exist, and how do you know what to count? Is the count of existing gods -1, 0, +1, >1, fractional, pi, unknowable, infinity (uncountable), or what? Agnostics might say 'unknowable'. Atheists, who don't bother with deities, might say, "Don't know, don't care, I'm busy with other stuff." It's the ANTI-theists who insist on zero or less. They get noisy.

And many cultures don't bother with gods, spirits, demons, witches, all that stuff. They have other concerns. Cf The Birth of the Gods.

 

[richard_daily]

I'm just saying that nothing changes. Listen to the lyrics of "For What It's Worth" and "Revolution". Nothing changes.

You do realize that those songs were talking about ignorant people like you, right?

 

[Libsam]

There is so much to reply to in this thread, I'm dead tired tho.

But here's something to think about.

no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true ~Bertrand Russell

It doesn't matter what side you are on, science, God, non-belief, whatever, somewhere along the line of logical questioning you will have to take a leap of faith.

And once you realize that, like truly understand and know what that means, then you know what God is.

 

[beew]

Generation Z. Zero Day.

Boomers were hedonists.
X were nihilist.
Millennials are absurdist. Locke and Hume like philosophy, bottom of the barrel stuff.
Generation Z, I think they will be a rebirth of rationalism. I hear it coming in their music, it scares me a bit, righteous judgement.

And this too wow.

I would add to that:

Boomers and Xers were both hedonists.
But in case of Boomers, their parents were more child-focused and permissive, and later on society became permissive too, to their drug use and debauchery. No wonder that their ties to Institutions were greater.
Xers' parents were harsher or less involved, and lived in a society which, while awash with hedonism, punished severely it's negative consequences. No wonder they ended up that way.

But how come Milenials and Generation Z? Please say more.

 

[Ramone45]

You do realize that those songs were talking about ignorant people like you, right?

...and there it is. LOL

 

[WoundedKnee]

Which is why good education is about the best investment a country can make.



"The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history" so you can take comfort in us making all the same mistakes you did and so on and on. Hooray for that. The basic human nature is greed. It's greedy politicians and businessmen who stifle change and lazy thinkers who get duped into putting them there.

Greed is a negative antonym on the far end of a spectrum used to describe a human behavior. I find that people who tend to certain forms of tribalism use that term to, for lack of a better phrase, virtue signal to the group that they too believe that the cornerstone of society/culture is the self-sacrifice of the individual to the greater good of the group.

I would call that attribute of human behavior self-interest. A society/culture is best ordered when individuals pursue their own self-interest. It is healthier when individuals are not advocating their need in order to get a larger share of largess from the group. A collection of individuals will make a society/culture rich enough that charity is a possibility, a voluntary possibility, not a state-coerced activity.

 

[stickygirl]

I would call that attribute of human behavior self-interest. A society/culture is best ordered when individuals pursue their own self-interest. It is healthier when individuals are not advocating their need in order to get a larger share of largess from the group. A collection of individuals will make a society/culture rich enough that charity is a possibility, a voluntary possibility, not a state-coerced activity.

... when within the rule of law. The type of greed I'm talking about is breaking/bending/rewriting the law to suit their own purpose. That isn't self-interest, it's corruption.

 

[Sean]

Wesley Crusher was really fucking annoying.