I tend to believe the various generalizations about the supposed savvy of younger people today, mostly because, in my experience, they generally seem smarter than older people. Two older friends of mine told me they thought John McCain had a chance to win New York State (and even argued with me when I told them they were out of their minds); my students were always talking about 538.com before class. My aunts and uncles obsess about “clutch hits” and batting average; my cousins know that OPS is a better measure of a hitter’s value than his batting average. It’s not hard to see why this is: younger people typically google things when they want facts, while older people typically try to recall what they heard on CNN or ESPN last week. And quite simply, statements made by Nate Silver and BaseballAnalysts.com have much greater predictive value than statements made by David Broder and Dan Shaughnessy.
A guy at AEI has a piece about how younger voters feel about health care. He begins with a relatively accurate description of how he thinks younger people today function, calling them “generation choice”. Then he posits three reasons why younger voters might be better disposed towards health care reform than older voters: (1) they haven’t analyzed the bill, (2) they care more about the fairness of expanded coverage, and (3) they don’t care much about health care because they’re young and healthy. There’s an obvious fourth reason: they know that our system costs nearly twice as much as anyone else’s and is consistently ranked at the bottom in quality among western countries. Hence, they would choose a different system if possible.
It’s always important to remember that many, if not most, beliefs and customs in our society exist because of the widespread propagation of falsehoods. It’s why some people believe we have a great health care system. It’s also why some American League managers continue to use the sacrifice bunt.
For whatever reason, the internet has curbed the spread of these falsehoods among (the mostly younger) people who are able to navigate the internet without using AOL key words (though it may well have hastened the spread among people who are not). And that may well mark a sea change in American politics.
Cain
So when will the War on our Young begin by wingnuts? They seem to be a clear and present danger to the status quo. Wingnuts should demand birth certificates from every one of them… cuz obviously there is SOMETHING going on.
heh.
cain
DougJ
So when will the War on our Young begin by wingnuts?
I think it has started, though not officially.
D.N. Nation
Yeah, but my mother-in-law says that when I’m as old and as smart as she is, then I’ll finally understand what those wingnut chain e-mails she spews are saying!
Mike G
the internet has curbed the spread of these falsehoods
And Fox News has arisen to propagate them among people who don’t use the internet, or who are scared of the big, bad world and just want their beliefs and prejudices confirmed in comforting fairy tales in the guise of ‘news’.
D.N. Nation
Also: Old people like Radiohead, young people like Deerhoof/Animal Collective/Dirty Projectors/etc.
SiubhanDuinne
I am old. And I google.
gwangung
As a SDCN*, this warms the cockles of my heart.
(*Stat Drunk Computer Nerd, used derisively by old time baseball fans, who have now joined Bill Bavasi in the charity handout line….)
DougJ
I am old. And I google.
I didn’t want to say all “older people”. My dad googles too.
Kyle
Younger people in this day and age tend to be less xenophobic and more internationally-oriented. Hence they are more likely to make comparisons of US health care with other countries, instead of chest-puffing declarations of “Murka’s the best health care because I said so” and chanting USA! USA!
This is obviously a threat to NASCAR Nation.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
The war on the young is definitely on… it is called resisting Medicare reform.
Alien-radio
The first skill you learn on the internet is to call bullshit, it’s a war between the troll and the genuine, extracting information from noise. The generation that came before the net generation had an authoratative knowledge model, where the knowledge was granted to you from someone wiser. The new model is about knowledge webs, and relative weighting of information.
Irrelevant,YetPoignant
THIS IS EXCELLENT NEWS! FOR JOHN MCCAIN!
(sorry, it needed to be said)
Michael
USA USA USA USA USA!!!!!!
Lesley
O/T, I feel compelled to pass this on.
Here’s a moral reason, if there ever was one, to quit smoking. Malawi’s child tobacco pickers suffer illness, exploitation. Tobacco companies “have shifted as much as three-quarters of their production to Third World countries to cut labour and other costs” and the child labourers picking the stuff are vomiting blood. Niiiiiiiiiiice.
MikeJ
Just yesterday I was saying old people like to complain about the post office even though when you look at it objectively they do a pretty darn good job dirt cheap.
I think it’s related in that some people are able to step back and look at the big picture and others just remember that one clerk at the PO once tried to give them Sacagawea dollars as change.
D.N. Nation
You know, I’m still not really grasping:
What in the world was their reasoning?
DougJ
I think it’s related in that some people are able to step back and look at the big picture and others just remember that one clerk at the PO once tried to give them Sacagawea dollars as change.
Ha!
It does bother me, though, that the same machines that dispense those reconstructed Carter quarters won’t actually take them. That seems wrong.
Rosali
5th reason:
They realize that if nothing is done now, there might not be a Medicare to cover them in 50 yrs ?
biblehumper
Fortunately, we have Luke Russert and Meghan McCain to speak up for us when the fogies in the MSM start building the new media narrative.
djork
“Also: Old people like Radiohead, young people like Deerhoof/Animal Collective/Dirty Projectors/etc.”
hmmm, I like all of those bands. I guess that makes me middle aged. Also.
DougJ
What in the world was their reasoning?
In one case, it was that McCain would win all the states because Al Gore lost his own home state in 2000. In the other case, it was because Democrats had gotten too overconfident and weren’t putting up enough lawn signs.
(I am not being sarcastic, this is an accurate description of their arguments, to the best of my recollection. Both these people are Democrats, by the way.)
eric
Doug: Here is another problem: I love when “older” people tell me what young people or the public schools are CURRENTLY like. More often than not, they are thinking back to their days in public school or hanging on the street corner or perhaps they had a kid in ONE school or ONE college recently and base their conclusions today on those recollections.
I am 44. I work and am friends with people in their mid to late 20s. I have no idea what it is like to be thwm, each with more than $100k in school debt. Most people over 40 can not even fathom starting out that far in the hole.
Young people know they are getting the shaft with the cost of college. They know the stock market will never rise the way it did back in the day. They know that they are going to be indebted for the rest of their adult lives — even without ever buying a house.
They see health care as one more astronomical cost to make saving and retirement all the more difficult.
eric
Keith G
6th reason: (It seems to me) Many more of these “kids” extend their college programs beyond the age limit in any family policy that might exist. Also when many of the do enter the permanent work force, they tend to gravitate toward jobs that are classified as independent contractors. No bennies.
freelancer
@DougJ:
I see your point, and agree with it, however a counter-argument could center around (relatively) younger voices in the Puke Funnel blogosphere. Malkin, Douthat, Erick the Red come to mind and their obsession with getting shit dead wrong, whether purposefully or inadvertantly.
@Irrelevant,YetPoignant:
Ironically, DougJ is stating in other words that,
This is how realignments happen.
matoko_chan
The flattening of information in the internet has obviated the need for “traditional wisdom”.
Anyone can be a sage.
The emergence of the Third Culture is going to kill off conservatism.
faster please.
;)
D.N. Nation
Aww. That’s precious.
biblehumper
Not to mention the other two wars on the young taking place overseas. It’s not like the Boomers are fighting in the desert. They’ve got their hands full just making sure we keep getting sent back there.
JGabriel
D.N. Nation:
Radiohead is for old people now? I don’t even know who Deerhoof/Animal Collective/Dirty Projectors are.
Fuck, I’m old.
Goddamit, I used to be cool. I had the New Pornographer’s Mass Romantic before Matador started distributing it. And here I thought my appreciation for Neko Case, Jenny Lewis, Arcade Fire, and TV on the Radio were keeping me au courant.
Fuck.
.
DougJ
I see your point, and agree with it, however a counter-argument could center around (relatively) younger voices in the Puke Funnel blogosphere. Malkin, Douthat, Erick the Red come to mind and their obsession with getting shit dead wrong, whether purposefully or inadvertantly.
You know, I wanted to touch on that too, but the post was getting too long. My take is that among people under 30, the liberal blogs dominate in terms of traffic. Compare the demographic of Drudge with that of TPM.
gwangung
@Keith G:
This.
Personal experience trumps ideology/theory.
It works to the detriment of progressive causes, too, when you don’t personalize it enough and bring enough personal experience to the forefront.
Mike G
Fortunately, we have Luke Russert and Meghan McCain to speak up for us when the fogies in the MSM start building the new media narrative.
Old fogies with power and money can always find some unrepresentative young fogies hungry for a career as mouthpieces, just like Repigs can always find a few token minorities to swear up and down that they love the party of old white bigots.
biblehumper
The war on THC is primarily a war on the young, too. Glaucoma sufferers are just incidental casualties.
Irrelevant,YetPoignant
“What’s a ‘Drudge’?”
– Young Person on the Internet
DougJ
I don’t even know who Deerhoof/Animal Collective/Dirty Projectors are.
I read about Animal Collective in the New Yorker. Also a band called Grizzly Bear. What is it with the kids and the animal band names?
Mark S.
I wish this were tattooed on every news anchor’s face. They could have it removed as soon as it is no longer true.
Stooleo
O.T.
Google “birthers” and “circumcision” to see the next meme in the ongoing mystery of where Obama was born.
Legalize
“Also: Old people like Radiohead, young people like Deerhoof/Animal Collective/Dirty Projectors/etc.”
I never really cared that much for Radiohead. I prefer Deerhunter, Japandroids and LCD System. Also.
*Checks ID*
Yup. Still getting old.
MikeJ
Which goes back to authoritarian models as related to campaigning. There was a time when the only thing you could do to get involved with a political campaign was get a yard sign. Nate Silver did a great series of posts about how those signs were not just useless but counterproductive. At last the Dems seem to figure out that the more involved people are with the campaign the more likely they’ll be to actually show up and vote.
I wonder if the people who were the most concerned about lawn sign counts are the same ones that hate ACORN. Empty gesture v real community involvement. There’s no room in this margin for me to flesh out this thesis.
matoko_chan
freelancer, Malkin is 38.
she isn’t young. The head of the “young” republicans is also pushin’ 40 hard.
But the reason Sully’s borg (that I call the bourgie conservatives) get airtime is that a lot of people think we need a two party system.
So McArdle and Ericksson get the equivalent of Warcraft welfare epics and mercy f*cks from people like Sully who should know better.
Now the bourgie conservatives will cheat and lie, because all is fair to them, because they see themselves as victims of radical cultural and political disenfranchisement.
BFR
My take is that among people under 30, the liberal blogs dominate in terms of traffic.
The right-wing blogs carry over some elements of talk-radio and tv that make them unlikely to generate similar traffic levels in the short run (limited comments sections/frequent deletion of comments & posters).
These tactics don’t work well on the internet and will eventually need to be modified.
eric
It is hard to be a radical (or evena moderate change agent) when you owe so much money. To speak out and risk your job; to protest; to challenge the status quo.
By burying young people in debt, society creates more compliant worker drones. If you cannot afford to lose your job, you keep your mouth shut and your politics tame.
Also.
Legalize
“Fuck, I’m old.
Goddamit, I used to be cool. I had the New Pornographer’s Mass Romantic before Matador started distributing it. And here I thought my appreciation for Neko Case, Jenny Lewis, Arcade Fire, and TV on the Radio were keeping me au courant.
Fuck.”
Don’t worry – still au courant. There’s a bazillion cool bands out there. Fortunately, actual old people hate all of them. That’s how one really knows who is really old.
eric
@DougJ: Apparently there is a band named after bugs, all with silly bowl haircuts causing the kids to inappropriately thrust their hips.
get off my lawn!
eric
arguingwithsignposts
“A guy at AEI”
That pretty much sums it up there. I went through the piece scanning for some type of data to back up any of his three postulates (he pointed to several polls in the introductory paragraphs). Sadly, there was none. just like Megan McArgle-bargle, he just applies the MSU (make shit up) formula for punditry and expects us all to jump on the bandwagon.
Sigh. There are a myriad of reasons why younger people believe what they believe. Instead of this amateur psychoanalysis, why doesn’t he apply for a grant or something and actually do a survey to find some answers. Because that would take more work than pulling stuff out of his ass and siphoning it through his keyboard for his corporate-supporting bosses.
Will
@Cain:
Just go to a PUMA website. The only thing they loathe more than Obama is anyone under 40.
Shinobi
I think you may also be missing a reason here. Younger people are more flexible in their beliefs, this may partially be a generational issue (having the internet makes it easy to find out how wrong you really are) but it may also be an age issue. It’s not revolutionary to think about the idea that people don’t like to be wrong. Part of the reason for this is that when some fact “batting average” is challenged a younger person doesn’t have DECADES of using “batting average” as their key metric to take back.
If you change the way you’ve always done something that also means admitting you’ve been doing it wrong all that time.
For healthcare older people now would have to look back at 30odd years of overpriced low quality health care that they’ve been supporting for 30 years and admit that they’ve been costing themselves money the whole time.
Partially it is the willingness to look up and digest new information, and partially it is pride. (Not for everyone, obviously, but I think older Conservatives especially tend to have this issue.)
BFR
It’s also why some American League managers continue to use the sacrifice bunt.
not to go too far into it, but bunting isn’t always a bad idea. Basically, if you have a situation where there is an extremely high value for a single run then bunting can be ok.
Other than that, yeah you’re almost always better off not giving away an out.
Rosali
Another reason:
The young people remember that one of the main talking points for the repugs in 2007 was their loud opposition to the extension of S-CHIP because it covered 20-somethings and 20-somethings shouldn’t be covered.
Sloth
Check quantcast – doesn’t seem to agree.
http://www.quantcast.com/dailykos.com
http://www.quantcast.com/drudgereport.com
ChrisB
@D.N. Nation:
Yes, we like Radiohead because they’re new, even newer than R.E.M. and U2. So they’re fresher than contemporary bands like The Doobie Brothers or Steely Dan.
@eric: That I went to college 30 years ago doesn’t stop me in the least from telling my kids where I think they should go to school. Some things really don’t change that much. (What, Amherst is now co-ed?)
Tonal Crow
@MikeJ:
Yes. The “terrible Post Office service” meme persists despite daily evidence of its falsity: you buy a stamp for $0.44, put it on a letter, drop it off (or leave it in your mailbox), and it gets to the recipient — anywhere in the country — within a few days, very nearly every time. It’s a great bargain that only GOPers could whine about.
djork
I read about Animal Collective in the New Yorker. Also a band called Grizzly Bear. What is it with the kids and the animal band names?
I can’t really tell you about the animal band names, but I will say that Grizzly Bear is all kinds of awesome.
Keith G
@DougJ: On a related note, subscribing to the “The Morning Becomes Ecclectic” podcast is a great way to introduced to, and hear from, new-ish acts.
Several songs, low key interview, one of my favorite ‘listens’.
ricky
DougJ, just because your fear of rejection leads you to associate with stupid old fools means nothing in the order of my thoughts were…but I’ll finish this later.
biblehumper
What eric @ 41 said.
Tonal Crow
@Stooleo:
Now what? He’s the product of a hardon-drug experiment gone wrong?
DougJ
Check quantcast – doesn’t seem to agree.
That’s Kos, not TPM. I’m not so surprised that the Kos demo skews older.
eric
@ChrisB: And you might be wrong about what it is like for them at that college. If you remember a liberal faculty, it may not be so. You need to research it as it exists now. Most likely you will check the internets for facebook pages, guides in bookstores.
Old people are under the mistaken belief that places are the same in ALL meaningful ways. The may be. I am not saying they are not. I am saying that an empirical investagation is how one announces conslusions about what a school is like or what young people are like.
eric
JGabriel
@Legalize:
Thank you, Legalize. Whether it’s true or you’re just saying it to make me feel better, the gesture is appreciated.
.
joes527
I am speechless.
An argument can be made that the internet has made it easier to refute falsehoods.
But any suggestion that the internet curbed the spread of falsehoods…. Are you all on the same internet that I am?
MobiusKlein
Can I refute another myth or two? That San Francisco Liberals are wimps, and that the best way to prevent another Virginia Tech / Coulmbine massacre is to arm teachers?
Heroic teacher from SF saves school Courage, wits, decisiveness, and nobody dead.
meh
So McArdle and Ericksson get the equivalent of Warcraft welfare epics and mercy f*cks from people like Sully who should know better.
SpotWeld
The other point is that the current generation is more interconnected with it’s peers than any other generation.
Were before a politican could say one imflamitory thing in private to small local group, and then something general and “safe” in public. Today, “macaca moments” are impossible to hide.
We pretty have refused the concept of being involuntarily alone.
We are legion because we are many.
Also.. B.O.B. Shut Up
The Saff
I guess this post makes me feel a little better about the future, but not much. The thread from last night about healthcare in other industrialized nations really made me depressed. That a single-payer system works efficiently, cost-effectively, and covers nearly every citizen (and visitors who get sick while visiting!). And our elected legislators just can’t seem to muster the political or moral will to pass meaningful healthcare legislation.
I don’t know any young people and I hope they are as informed as you say, DougJ. I hope they are smart enough to be able to separate the facts from the BS that drives so many important issues the world faces. Cuz there’s still too many adults that continue to believe the lies and fear the wingnuts spread.
schrodinger's cat
I agree in general with the point DougJ makes but let us not forget that the dining room table in Barney Frank’s townhall seemed quite young, possibly in her twenties.
BombIranForChrist
I’m pulling this out of my butt, but it’s probably more accurate to say that people who use the internet are more likely to support reform because they can use the internet to get facts. Sure, maybe more young people use the internet than old people, but it’s the internet that’s the deciding factor, not age.
Cat Lady
@DougJ:
Fleet Foxes. The Mountain Goats. Also, too.
Kids today grew up with teh gay, and teh brown people. They get their news from Jon Stewart, and seem to accept government in their lives. I don’t see how that’s going to get turned around by parading paranoid ranting raging old white nutjobs around.
jibeaux
What, no mention of the fact that the old folks have already got their Medicare and are in no mood to raise their taxes so that others can have the good stuff, too, as they have nothing to gain?
Sloth
That’s Kos, not TPM. I’m not so surprised that the Kos demo skews older.
TPM hides their stats – what are some sites you’d consider to be comparable?
Foxnews is showing killer growth in the 25-54 demo; I’d love to see that broken down with more granularity, because it scares me fookin’ silly.
shelley matheis
JGabriel
Tonal Crow:
Nope. The birther’s want Obama to drop trou to see if he’s circumcised, on the theory that if he’s not circumcised, that proves he wasn’t born in the US.
Yes, that’s really their reasoning. I shit you not.
Presumably this would need to be done in a courtroom on live television with David Copperfield out of the country – because otherwise Obama would fake it.
.
DougJ
Sloth — I looked at some of the blog stats and I don’t believe them. I can’t believe that 40% of Wonkette readers are over 50.
SpotWeld
Maybe Wonkette has been uploading old people into the Matrix?
JGabriel
@Sloth:
DKos would be more comparable to Free Republic, one would think, at least in terms of function, while Drudge would probably be more comparable to HuffPo.
.
joes527
@Legalize: Folks are making too much of this. Some wackos on FreeRepublic (where else) went even farther off the deep end then usual, and the liberal blogosphere lights up. Go ahead an google birthers and circumcision and you will find a link back to FreeRepublic and a bunch of liberal blogs saying “look what the crazies are up to now.”
Meh.
Freepers are the nuttiest of the nuts.
In other news the sun rose in the east today.
jenniebee
@MikeJ:
Just yesterday I was saying old people like to complain about the post office
They’re old, they hate everything but Matlock. He puts young scaliwags behind bars, where they belong!
Cat Lady
@DougJ:
The readership may be, the commenters, no way. That’s some fine, industrial strength young’un snark-fu there.
JGabriel
meh:
For those of us who have never tried WoW, what is a WoW Welfare Epic? Explainy, please?
.
Sloth
@DougJ:
I don’t want to believe them, nor do I want to believe the foxnews nielsens (though I will admit that I think that the nielsens are now a joke, with all that has changed over the last few years. I mean, I know a lot of serious TV watchers who watch *everything* on the internet.)
I’d seriously like to back up these stats. I think the largest problem the republicans have is demographics, especially in 2012 and 2016 – but a little data would make me happy.
Jim Pharo
I think this nails it. To people who haven’t thought about it carefully (and this actually includes a lot of young people, who just haven’t been sentient long enough to have carefully considered much of anything), this seems nuts. But it could not be more true…
Sloth
For a bunch of uptight, right wing religious nuts, they sure spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about democratic cock.
Andrew
OPS? All the cool kids laugh at that. wOBA is where it’s at. At least until we get HitFX, then something new will probably be developed.
DougJ
I don’t want to believe them, nor do I want to believe the foxnews nielsens
I guess I do believe Nielsens. The quantcast stats for Kos and Wonkette just looked wrong to me. (Could it really be that only 7% of Kos readers have kids under 17?)
gwangung
No, it’s not about the Google. It’s about how the REALITY of younger folks is not the same as the older folks.
Way too many entry jobs for young folks HAVE NO HEALTH CARE BENEFITS.
Way too many college graduates HAVE HUMUNGOUS DEBT FROM COLLEGE.
Faculty are not Marxist—hell, half the faculty are using their research to become entrepreneurial capitlists hoping for their own IPO.
To a great extent, the right is still fighting the 60s and the folks who’re supporting them on this have no idea that Things Have Changed–Big Time.
Persia
@Sloth: It’s black cock they’re thinking about. The Clenis obsession was nothing compared to this.
Their parents and grandparents are also getting older, and they know they’re going to hold the bag for that too.
gwangung
@Andrew: And fielding metrics. Don’t forget fielding metrics. Defense matters.
You Don't Say
I can’t believe you equate knowing your way around the Internet with being more intelligent.
someguy
Yeah, but the knowledge they dispense is generally worth what any other asset is worth, when everybody already has one.
Or as that irredentist old conservative fuck, my grandfather said, opinions are like assholes. Everybody’s got at least one, and most of them stink.
JGabriel
Cat Lady:
More to the point, perhaps, young adults today grew up with a government that worked under Clinton, and a government that didn’t work under Bush. Reagan’s anti-government rhetoric is a distant memory to them, as distant as JFK or Johnson to anyone born in the 60’s.
So when wingers talk about how the less government there is the better, most younger people think, “You mean like under Bush? Because that didn’t work out too well.”
.
Michael
Best health care on Earth, ‘Murkan Exceptionalism, Exceptionalism, Free Markets Rule! USA USA USA USA USA, Neighbors Here to He’p, YEEEEEEHAW!
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/8/25/772146/-Senator-Coburn-tells-weeping-woman-government-cant-help
What an evil fuck that guy is – he’s expecting Our Corporate Overlords to do the right thing voluntarily?
matoko_chan
A lot of the bands i lissen to are initial bands.
AFI, FTTL, ANDR, IAO, TATCTCT etc.
Or have really cool global culture names like Closure in Moscow, Sayocin, Dir En Grey.
I think Animal Collective and the Dirty Projectors ARE older people bands…..bands for 30-somethings.
;)
The Saff
@jenniebee: My 88 year old mom-in-law loves the Internet and her iPhone. She likes the reaction that people have to her being technologically astute for someone her age. It makes her feel hip and cool.
Her only problem is messing up the remote control on her teevees.
matoko_chan
someguy
The Third Culture…
eric
So, if might summarize the thread thusly: younger people tend not to care about black presidential cock while listening to hip bands on their iphones while playing cyber internet games on their netbooks at the coffee shop. By contrast, the older folks are jonesing for the black cock as they listen to Tutti Frutti on the oldies station after Rush goes off the air for the day as they drive home from the office to complain that their kids do nothing but listen to music and surf the intertubes all day. Is that about it?
e
Laura the Lurker
@MikeJ: My brother was working on a campaign for a local judge last November. I told him I’d tried Googling her for info, but there was no web site. How can you be running a campaign without a web site?
They’d been trying to get the judge to have one set up, but she was absolutely convinced that they weren’t useful at all. No one gets information from the internet!
Seriously, that’s what she thought. He said he tried to use me as an example, that lots of people mostly use the internet to get information about candidates and stuff, but she wasn’t buying it.
I’m old, also. In case that matters. But not as old as the judge.
ChrisB
@eric: Yeah, my tongue was pretty firmly in my cheek when I claimed to know all about colleges now because I went to one 30 years ago. But at least I know some of the questions to ask.
pcbedamned
The one thing that most seem to forget is that prior to the ‘internet generation’, most political ideologies were passed on through family thought. As a Gen-Xer who grew up in a very Conservative family, obviously my views were formed by what I was taught and heard through my formative years. Conservatives in general tend to be very black and white – there is no such thing as gray. Now with the internet, this generation is checking out what the ‘old folks’ have to say, and calling bullshit when they see it. In my case, although I am still a Conservative on most issues, I am also open minded enough to know that there are opposing views. I tell my own kids to research and form their own conclusions. I may let them know what I think, but I also tell them that it is ok to disagree as long as they have the facts to back it up. This goes with anything that they hear, be it school, peers, grandparents, etc. As far as I am concerned, spewing talking points with opinion rather than facts, makes one ignorant. And in today’s atmosphere of unlimited information from all sides, there is no excuse for ignorance.
SIA aka ScreaminginAtlanta
I’m working so can’t read the whole thread, but wanted to take a moment to express my utter loathing and contempt for Sen. John McCain. MSNBC is showing his town hall and I watched about 42 seconds before I was in a rage. Fuck you you old, bitter, soulless despicable man. Fuck you.
On the other hand, one very Repub looking middle aged women commented to him that he had been the beneficiary of public health care his entire life. He didn’t respond to that portion of the question. Douche.
Thanks for letting me get that off my chest.
Donald G
The conservative’s War on Youth has been going on for decades. There may have been a brief respite between 1974-80, but with the rise of Blessed Saint Ronnie of the Raygun, it kicked up a notch – school disciplinary policies became harsher and gains in student rights were rolled back in an effort to combat the drug menace. As test scores fell, things became even more authoritarian in the mistaken belief that a soft-touch in discipline equals lax teaching.
By my calculation: Too much discipline + too much stress (increasing reliance on standardized testing as a metric for measuring success) – lack of societally acceptable outlets for blowing off stress + easy access to guns = school shootings
Afterwards, things got even more authoritarian with the adoption of Zero Tolerance Policies.
Now, are children are treated practically as criminals who haven’t yet been charged with anything and as virtual prisoners in their own schools. And with No Child Left Behind and an even increased reliance on testing to see if schools are making Adequate Yearly Progress (and many schools failing left, right and center), the attitude seems to be, at least in my childen’s school system, that the beatings will continue until morale improves.
matoko_chan
See….the First Culture….is like philosphers and literary intellectuals like Aristotle and Buckley, Freud and Niebuhr.
People that just thought about stuff….philosophized.
In the 50’s we saw the rise of the (wholly separate from the First Culture) Second Culture….scientific intellectuals like Oppenheimer and Crick, Minsky and Turing.
What we see today is the rise of the Third Culture…the fusion of the first two cultures…..empirical intellectuals and their base. The Third Culture is geek culture, internet culture, university culture, youth culture, hollywood culture.
Da Bomb
There was something I read that talked about the latest generation of young people. I fit somewhere as either later part of Generation X or Generation Y, depending on the source. They call them Generation We. Apparently, they are more trusting of government, more open-minded, less sexually oppressed, and more cultured. They also will tend to be more liberal. So that spells more doom for the party of “Old White Guys that are obssessed with schlongs and say no to everything.”
And that crazy black guy they have as a leader.Also.
Andrew
@gwangung
UZR us pretty good, but HitFX is going to revolutionize fielding metrics.
someguy
>>>On the other hand, one very Repub looking middle aged women
How did you know she’s a Republican woman? Did she have a martini in one hand and a KKK placard in the other?
meh
Ash Can
@Michael: So Coburn’s saying that his obviously governmental office will help her, but that government doesn’t offer solutions.
Excuse me, I have to go bang my head against the wall repeatedly to knock all the broken glass out through my ears.
RareSanity
@DougJ:
Oh Doug, you are so naive. These are not the actual reasons why they thought that Obama “had no chance”. It is just that for whatever reason, they didn’t feel comfortable telling you what they were really thinking:
“Well, because he’s black. And…because he has a scary name for Pete’s sake.”
Occam’s razor. Whether they just didn’t want to say it to you or, they hadn’t accepted it themselves, that’s could have been the ONLY reason they thought “he didn’t have a chance.”
matoko_chan
oh sry….
In WoW a bad player (scrub) could pay a better player (l33t) to carry them up the arena ladder in pvp combat, so they could get epic gear only available with pvp arena points and rankings.
So Jeff Kaplan (the God of Warcraft) called that gear welfare epics.
It is the blogverse equivalent of Sully linking Megan McArdle.
Brachiator
And yet despite All the Young Dudes carrying the InterTubes, Snopes abides.
Urban legends, myths and lies persist, and oddly often it is the same old myths with new clothes that need repeated debunking as a new generation latches on to the constant of crap that circulates around the world.
While I take the election of Obama as a sign that there might have been a shift away from fear and ignorance, the counter-insurgency of teh stoopid, even among the young, is strong.
Among all age groups, I see people using the Internet not to find facts (or even more rarely to seek knowledge), I see people who desperately use the net to reinforce their beliefs, and to actively fight off anything that might contradict what they desperately want to be true.
And you get a strange persistence of near-knowledge where people believe something that is kinda true, but they believe it incompletely and too uncritically. Case in point.
I have yet to see people define what “single-payer” is, or to accurately note which industrialized countries actually have single-payer systems. The more accurate statement is that other industrialized countries have good to great healthcare systems that are mandated or funded by their governments. That “single payer” is healthcare nirvana nonsense.
By the way, the excellent TR Reid interview on the public radio program Fresh Air gets into the differences of the health care systems of various countries and is about damn time. A link to the interview here:
http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=13&prgDate=8-24-2009
Tonal Crow – Just yesterday I was saying old people like to complain about the post office even though when you look at it objectively they do a pretty darn good job dirt cheap.
I guess I really touched a nerve here. I’m not that old (yet), but I was one of the people knocking the post office. It’s a great service and a stamp would probably still be a bargain at a dollar or more, but the fact is that the post office is going away. Except to mail bills (and even this with increasing lack of frequency), I don’t use the post office for anything anymore. I noted that their primary, monopoly-protected business — delivering first class mail — is going away because of technology and changing social trends (email and texting). That leaves parcel and express delivery, where the postal service is competitive, but hardly the only or best game in town.
The postal service as we know it, like the telegraph, the Morse code, landlines, newspapers and magazines, is going away, and it’s not coming back.
Zifnab
@joes527:
One could argue that the ability to throw up a link to a FactCheck.org debunk puts up the kind of firewall that didn’t exist when lies were distributed by mass mailers or push polls. And the inability to produce hard evidence of a soft claim – see: Tape, The Whitey and The Kenyan Birth Certificate – also causes a lot of these rumors to die off.
I think the internet gives rumors a much shorter shelf life than they used to have, and that prevents zombie lies from really infecting the debate between two curious but non-partisan individuals.
The problem is that when you’re dealing with Red State rejects and Freepers, you’ve got a very gullible test group. So stupid shit races around the idiot-sphere because it’s debunk-proof. If someone says Obama ate a live baby on national TV and the evidence was suppressed by left wing media and now black helicopters are sweeping in to arrest Sean Hannity for wearing a flag lapel pin… they’ll swallow it hole and tell all their friends. And in their case, the internet does a great job of speeding up the rate at which stupid thrives.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
Um, you recognize the irony, don’t you, of making a crass generalization based on personal anecdotes, then saying that you read statisticians so it’s okay? Or is there some meta-irony here I’m missing?
Sargon
@matoko_chan: No, you’re listening to a different genre of music, not a different…age group of music. If you think that Animal Collective is a band for 30-somethings, you clearly don’t hang out with very many young indie rock/hipster types.
matoko_chan
like meh said……it is a sort of raising the retards and scrubs up so they can compete.
Kaplan has pretty much outlawed welfare epics.
Life is not fair……but Blizzard tries to be.
;)
matoko_chan
@sargon
i guess…..ima screamo baby.
matoko_chan
Just don’t call me scene.
;)
joes527
@Zifnab:
Oh great. Let’s let the folks at Annenberg dictate truth to us. You might as well go straight to ACORN…
(so much for your firewall)
Yes, the internet is a unique environment where assertions and rebuttals can be directly linked to original material/ video. And this works great for folks who are interested in fact based discussion.
The other 3/4 of the internet is dedicated to wild assertions coupled with ad hominem attacks on anyone who tries to bring facts into the discussion.
(the remaining 9/10ths of the internet is, of course, dedicated to porn)
Mike
Far be it from an old liberal like myself to scare you young folks with
existential considerations, but I believe that people tend to become more
cautious and conservative as they age.
When you are getting closer to the end of life, and you see your contemporaries
getting old and sick and dying, you have to deal with a constant
undercurrent of fearfulness, at least to some degree. Aging is not all bad,
there are some positive and fulfilling aspects as well, but I think for
many oldsters, fear underlies the political insanity. They’ll tell
you they’re not afraid to die, because Jesus will welcome them into heaven, but very few are actually looking forward to it.
These are generalizations of course, but back in the good old 60’s when I
was a young man changing the world for the better once and for all,
my view of the older generation was exactly the same as yours, and I
couldn’t wait for them to be all gone and everything would be great.
I think you can pretty much count on your kids and grandkids feeling
the same way about your generation as you do about ours.
Brachiator
@Zifnab:
Uh, no. The InterTubes allows continual reinforcement of BS by people who want to believe it. On the social/political area, the Rubicon may have been the Terry Schiavo case. Despite easily accessible fact on the Web, people like Hannity double-downed with lies every freaking day.
And didn’t Balloon Juice itself give rise to the term rebunk to describe a discredited myth, lie, urban legend that had managed to rise again like a Phoenix of Crap?
Hell, how many people still believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction?
binzinerator
Control of the internet (and establishment of means to shape the discourse in it) will become the right wing’s next major long-term strategy goal, just as control of the media (now known as the ‘MSM’) and the means to shape public discourse in it (now known as ‘experts’ from think tanks and institutes) was the goal after Goldwater’s defeat.
The shitsuckers won’t ever change the way they want to run the world. They just try to control all the information people use to form opinions about it.
The recent attacks and backlashes on anonymous blogging are I believe are the beginnings of this.
DougJ
“Well, because he’s black. And…because he has a scary name for Pete’s sake.”
At least one of these people voted for him in the primaries.
There’s all kinds of stupid in the world, not just one kind.
geg6
@eric:
(sorry but I’m over 50 and can’t do block quotes)
“Young people know they are getting the shaft with the cost of college. They know the stock market will never rise the way it did back in the day. They know that they are going to be indebted for the rest of their adult lives—even without ever buying a house.
They see health care as one more astronomical cost to make saving and retirement all the more difficult.”
Yes. This.
I hear a version of this every single day of my working life. Since I am a student aid officer and work with these young people on financing their educations. The media meme I keep hearing about young people not caring about this issue because they are young and don’t think they will ever need health care is about 25 years out of date. Believe me, they know the issue and care about it very much. It’s their grandparents who don’t give a damn about what happens to them.
arguingwithsignposts
@Brachiator:
You, sir, haven’t been searching the intertubes enough.
“Nirvana” my ass. It exists.
DougJ
I can’t believe you equate knowing your way around the Internet with being more intelligent.
Believe it. I equating being intelligent with saying that are factually accurate and have predictive value. It’s a lot easier to do that if you know your way around the internet.
Tax Analyst
Yes. The ‘terrible Post Office service’ meme persists despite daily evidence of its falsity: you buy a stamp for $0.44, put it on a letter, drop it off (or leave it in your mailbox), and it gets to the recipient—anywhere in the country—within a few days, very nearly every time. It’s a great bargain that only GOPers could whine about.”
Yes, and when the letter doesn’t get there “on time” it’s usually because the sender left it sitting on that little table next to his/her front door and didn’t remember to take it to a mailbox. At that point, of course, the only honorable thing to do is to blame it on the Post Office, unless it’s “Business Mail”, in which case you would blame it on your secretary (if you still have one of those) or the folks in your shipping/receiving department.
arguingwithsignposts
That second paragraph should be blockquoted.
Wilson Heath
How many decades have conservatives been screaming about the need for entitlement reform because of mounting costs? They’re problem now is that they’re right unless they want to raise taxes, which they don’t. But what do they do? Go out and make Medicare inviolable. Unless this is a designed future systematic failure (a glibertarian/anarchist take on the Marxist axiom “the worse, the better”), the options are tax increases or systematic measures to control costs.
Obviously the first option is a no go for the anarchists, but expansion of government that would reduce the cost of government is also out. Heaven forbid government be allowed to do what government is best suited for, solving collective action problems. So there are no options acceptable to them but staying the same course until there is no more course.
Which just mean entitlement costs grow until Medicare is starved to death. Sounds a bit like end of life planning, doesn’t it? And ask yourself who happens to be on this “death panel” designing this result that will in fact kill a bunch of grandmas when they’re isn’t enough medical care to go around.
Shinobi
@RareSanity:
100% true. My father point blank told me there was “No way” we would elect a black guy. He wasn’t even worried about the election, just surprised I thought Obama could win. (He is now, of course a raging lunatic who rants about health care to total strangers.)
I really think a lot of members of the right don’t understand just how angry over half the country was about the last 8 years.
Corner Stone
@DougJ: What was that recent discussion about two kinds of knowledge?
Knowing something vs. Knowing where (or how) to find info about something – is how I think it was framed. I think it may have been touched on at BJ.
WordPress
@arguingwithsignposts:
NOMNOMNOM
Mmmm…html tags.
Corner Stone
@eric:
And when your health care is tied to your job instead of available to all…
There’s also a reason why education has become so damn unaffordable. I think a lot of people forget about the GI Bill and its effects on higher education, and the general market for same.
matoko_chan
The problem is that Team Conservative is pretty much all First Culture intellectuals and scrubs and retards and baddies by now.
The smart people have left the building. 6% of scientists are republicans, which means 94% of scientists are NOTrepublicans.
So in the interest of leveling the playing field (since conservative intellectuals are outnumbered worse than Spartans, and mostly not very bright) they need those welfare epics.
And that is why they don’t feel that they have to be honest……because they see themselves (ie, “real americans”) as being unfairly disenfranchised as the real custodians of american culture and government.
Tax Analyst
eric said:
“So, if might summarize the thread thusly: younger people tend not to care about black presidential cock while listening to hip bands on their iphones while playing cyber internet games on their netbooks at the coffee shop. By contrast, the older folks are jonesing for the black cock as they listen to Tutti Frutti on the oldies station after Rush goes off the air for the day as they drive home from the office to complain that their kids do nothing but listen to music and surf the intertubes all day. Is that about it?”
You forgot the part about bitching about the Post Office.
Corner Stone
IMO, when we’re talking about how the internet has changed or influenced the younger generation what we’re obviously discussing is communication.
Take IRC for example. In a not uncommon scenario you could be talking to your friend in Japan while waiting for your buddy in Scotland to get off work or your BFF to wake up in Finland, etc.
Exposure to these cultures and worldviews, usually centered around some shared passion like music or gaming, fundamentally alters how you see your own circumstances. Just the knowledge that the world is a little wider than your two blocks changes the way you accept new information and possibilities.
So, the existence of static data or info on the tubes is useful but it’s the shared communication that has made the difference.
Corner Stone
@matoko_chan:
This is like saying 6% of a population believes in the FSM so ipso 94% does not.
It’s not zero sum.
Corner Stone
@Corner Stone: edited to add:
I mean there are many shades of the spectrum available, not 1 or 0.
Not self identifying as Repub does not mean they don’t hold sympathetic or very similar ideologies.
Sorry.
SIA aka ScreaminginAtlanta
@someguy: ha! Good point. I did unfairly judge by her outer appearance. She was a white middle aged women in a sea of middle aged Republicans, (no offense to middle age persons since I am one myself). Clearly though I can’t watch this shit on TV. At least not when I am having a superbly shitty day.
gwangung
Which, actually, proves the point. If the post office is such a failure, why are they even competitive with private operations?
The Moar You Know
freelancer
Anyone catch this hilarious post by Sully underling Chris Bodenner?
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/08/i-am-blogger.html
John needs to find a pic of Tunch and add that caption:
FUCK YOU I AM TUNCH!
Wolfdaughter
Shinobi:
“If you change the way you’ve always done something that also means admitting you’ve been doing it wrong all that time.
For healthcare older people now would have to look back at 30odd years of overpriced low quality health care that they’ve been supporting for 30 years and admit that they’ve been costing themselves money the whole time.
Partially it is the willingness to look up and digest new information, and partially it is pride. (Not for everyone, obviously, but I think older Conservatives especially tend to have this issue.)”
I realize that the first sentence was you quoting someone else.
You make a point, but it’s only partially true.
Doug: I don’t know how old one has to be for you to consider that person “old”, but this 63-year-old white Democratic woman luvs her some Internet and considers Google her friend. And yes, my first instinct when wondering about some factoid is to Google it. I have many friends my age or older who operate the same way. The fact that I’m a retired academic and that most of my friends are also academics, current or retired, probably has something to do with us old farts being Internet-savvy.
Moreover, although I’ve always had decent insurance as a university employee, and although I’ll be going on Medicare in 1.5 years roughly, and that I’ve never had children, doesn’t mean that I’m unconcerned about future generations. I want the world to be better for my niece and nephews and their children, and ALL younger people, than for me, and that includes health care. For me, the entirety of humanity is my tribe and I want to see things better for everyone.
It is true that people tend to get more conservative as they grow older, but not true of everyone, and how conservative one might become can also depend on the starting point. If you are very liberal as a young person, you will probably tend to still lean liberal, even if less so as you age, absent a life-changing event which causes you to change your inclinations.
Also, as an aging Boomer, I want to say that my generation is NOT responsible for all the current ills of this world. Yes, Boomers like Bush contributed very materially. But other Boomers like Al Gore and Big Dog are doing their best in their various ways to improve the world in one way or another.
I will also point out that Darth Cheney is too old to be a Boomer, as is “Ace” McCain, and a good number of the other people trying to hold back good types of progress.
Hedley Lamarr
“…older people typically try to recall what they heard on CNN or ESPN last week. ”
And blacks have good rhythm.
And fat white guys keep fat cats.
valdivia
@D.N. Nation:
wait. I like Muse (which a lot of RadioHead lovers think is just a second rate imitator, but hey I love their albums). does that make me old or totally off base?
satby
People used to complain about the Post Office because it had early affirmative action policies (seriously, none of you ever heard the “black loafers” cracks?). Racism, coupled with the fact that they were secure, reasonably well paid jobs.
And a great many 20-somethings don’t have health insurance because they aren’t covered under mom and dad’s plans anymore and the jobs they can find often don’t offer it, or any benefits. Hell, I’m 54, and because I worked long stretches of adulthood after my divorce as a temp, about 1/2 of my adult life has been spent without insurance. So my untreated allergies progressed to asthma, the fibroids I had were grapefruit sized by the time I had coverage to get a UFE, and I skipped a follow-up to a bad mamogram because I could afford for breast cancer to be discovered while I was uninsured; then it would be a pre-existing condition.
We have the bested, most awesomest health care eveh!
Not exactly.
satby
“could not afford”
sad, no edit to save me from my typos
satyr9us
<a href=”https://balloon-juice.com/?p=25953#comment-1343039″ @JGabriel:
Goddamit, I used to be cool. I had the New Pornographer’s Mass Romantic before Matador started distributing it. And here I thought my appreciation for Neko Case, Jenny Lewis, Arcade Fire, and TV on the Radio were keeping me au courant.
James Murphy wrote a song for people like us:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsKvARN0P8A&feature=related
<a href=”https://balloon-juice.com/?p=25953#comment-1343121″ @Sloth:
I’d seriously like to back up these stats. I think the largest problem the republicans have is demographics, especially in 2012 and 2016 – but a little data would make me happy.
Here:
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/813/gen-dems
matoko_chan
@Cornerstone.
nope, not the same.
Who teaches in unis?
99% of univerisity profs are teaching research scientists and <a href=”http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/05/decline-of-conservative-intellectualism.html”people with post grad degrees.
So where do young conservative intellectuals come from, you know, the college-grads that go work in academe and hollywood and the MSM and become politicians?
answer: they don’t.
Conservatism has a ferocious braindrain problem.
That is why Sully has to hand out welfare epics.
;)
Kirk Spencer
@Brachiator:
Gonna differ about landlines. Yeah, we may convert from copper to fiber, and the protocol may be digital instead of analog, but landlines are more secure (not perfectly, just ‘more’) and they don’t care about walls or other interior objects that interfere with signal.
matoko_chan
oops
99% of univerisity profs are teaching research scientists and people with post grad degrees.
Betsy
I hereby wish to stand up for all the non-wingnut, non-“I’ve got mine so go fuck yourselves kiddos” old people. (I’m 29, BTW). I realize that the demographic is more conservative and republican than not, but close to half aren’t. I think it’s a mistake to indulge in a little elder-baiting just because the crazy shouters at the town halls tend to have white hair. We start to sound like (all those articles by and about) baby boomers, with their enormous self-satisfaction as a generation (or so it comes across in said articles).
Liberal seniors are important – they volunteer more, they give money, they vote more reliably, and are generally more politically active than younger liberals, IME. I think it’s kind of obnoxious for us to go shitting all over them because they happen to be included in an age demographic. The Republicans have basically written off younger voters. We shouldn’t make the same mistake in reverse.
Betsy
@Betsy:
Full disclosure: this little rant was prompted by the memory of the volunteers at the homeless shelter I worked at, one of whom in particular dragged me out to an anti-war rally right before we bombed Iraq back in 2003. Rolleen was five feet tall and not more than 100 lbs and was politically active in municipal, state, and national politics her entire life, until she died of cancer a few years ago. I know people as involved as she are the exception rather than the rule, but credit where credit is due.
Corner Stone
@Hedley Lamarr:
Actually I’m fairly certain that statistical analysis bears this one out.
matoko_chan
that’s why when ppl like Breitbart talk about “taking back hollywood” and “taking back culture” they are fail.
In Hollywood, if you are young and rich and beautiful and altruistic then you want to adopt the world like Angelina Jolie.
And if you are young and rich and beautiful and NOTaltruistic like Megan Fox then you want to sic Megatron on the heartland biblethumpers.
ominira
@Sloth: Wow. Balloon juicersare OLD :).
Corner Stone
@matoko_chan:
Ummm…I hate to tell you this but..uhh..you’re saying 6% of scientists self identified as Republicans on a survey…and 99% of university professors include people who are research scientists and/or people with post grad docs…so therefore…there are no young Conservative bent intellectuals?
You do understand that there is a universe populated with people who are not in fact scientists, right?
Corner Stone
@ominira: You didn’t need Quantcast to tell you that. Did you see the thread about perfect CD’s? I think the top two choices were Beatles and Caveman Bangs Two Rocks Against the Wall.
Tax Analyst
“Caveman Bangs Two Rocks Against the Wall”
Say, you wouldn’t happen to know where I can get their “Greatest Hits” CD, would you? Those dudes really rocked in their time.
Adrienne
If old people actually got with the times, they wouldn’t have much reason to go the post office. Old people are the only one you really ever hear complain about the post office because they are the only ppl going to the post office regularly. I’m 24 and I couldn’t tell you the last time I was in a post office – last year sometime probably – and it was probably a whole bunch of old ppl clogging up the line. I can’t even tell you the last time I bought stamps and mailed something. I pay every single one of my bills online and I have paperless billing on every account that offers it. My grandmother has a P.O. Box. For what reason? I have not a clue. She’s just old school like that.
DougJ
What was that recent discussion about two kinds of knowledge?
I can’t remember off the top of my head.
Gus
As a Twins fan I protest. We have a couple of position players who would probably bat ninth in a lot of NL lineups.
bedtimeforbonzo
Almost 47, I was never cool and feel older every day. My 10-year-old son keeps me young: I know Nickelodeon’s entire nighttime lineup and even have a favorite SpongeBob character (Patrick).
Google or no, I don’t think the under-30 set has a very deep appreciation for history. I don’t think many of them could tell you who Richard Burton, Linda Lovelace or Ty Cobb were.
And another thing: As someone who came of age in the Seventies, when and why did it become verboten for women to have pubic hair? Those Penthouse magazines I managed to get my hands on as a teen would not be the same if the centerfolds were all shaved. Just sayin’.
Brachiator
@arguingwithsignposts:
RE: I have yet to see people define what “single-payer” is, or to accurately note which industrialized countries actually have single-payer systems.
My comment stands. I know what “single payer” is, and in previous posts have put in links to Wiki and other references. But I get tired of people in effect saying, “I love single payer because I heard Michael Moore or Bill Moyers use the term.” It gets even more annoying when journalists refer to it and assume that their readers know what it means.
Worse, in dealing with people who have dumb ass objections to health care reform, people will fall back on pushing single payer without being able to intelligently discuss it or other alternative health plans.
The current (August 13) issue of The Economist has an interesting article about the future of landlines:
The article may still be available here:
http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14213965
Old people may complain about the post office; for young people, the post office no longer exists.
Linda Lovelace and Ty Cobb both sucked.
You Don't Say
@DougJ: What has fact checking got to do with intelligence? (Not to mention that the Internet is full of bullshit.) People ignore facts all the time. People bend facts to their argument. And well-informed does not mean one makes intelligent assessments of that about which they are well informed.
The Internet is a medium, not a whole new world of brilliant knowledge that suddenly makes all people rational, objective truth seekers.
You Don't Say
@DougJ: Excuse the second post but I’m old and can’t think as fast as you younguns. And sometimes I click on the little button thingy too fast.
Anyway: the logical conclusion of your argument is all people under, say, 30, who grew up using computers and are, for the most part, perfectly comfortable with them, are by that very fact more intelligent than anyone over, say, 50 who did not grow using PCs or the Internet.
matoko_chan
Cornerstone…….
sure there is a buncha ppl that are not scientists and dont have docs or masters……. but they don’t teach in universities.
Who works in journalism? Who teaches school? Who makes film? Who becomes a politician?
A tribe without reps (replacements) cant survive.
Sure there are the bourgie conservatives…..now…..but where does the next generation come from?
freelancer
@matoko_chan:
Wasilla.
SATSQ
Brachiator
@D.N. Nation:
And everywhere, at all times, young English hooligans riot. They probably used Twitter to help set this up.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1209028/BREAKING-NEWS-Man-stabbed-West-Ham-Millwall-fans-brawl-outside-stadium.html#
Betsy
@matoko_chan:
As a TA at at an Ivy, I can tell you that they come from econ majors. Believe me. The liberal faculty aren’t nearly so influential as the parents and/or the Ec 1 profs, who fill their heads with silly simplistic models that they don’t even really believe themselves but think are a necessary building block. Then those students come to my history section and say really fucking stupid things.
Tonal Crow
@Wilson Heath:
Yeah. But see, that way they can avert their eyes from the carnage, claim innocence because “the people dying didn’t work hard enough”, and then go to church to hear about how Teh Ghey is going to pull the plug on grandma.
parksideq
I know this is anecdotal, and at this point it may not even be read, but here’s one example of what helped shapes the young’uns perceptions:
I spent most of high school and all of college living under the Bush admin. When Katrina happened, I was a junior and it was around the first week or so of classes (I assume most colleges started around the same time too). My girlfriend at the time and I saw how bad the news was making the storm out to be before it even made landfall, and were even more shocked at the footage of the aftermath.
Since New Orleans was basically a lake, the colleges in the area closed for the year, and thousands of students were displaced. Many colleges across the country, including my alma mater, ended up admitting displaced students so their education wouldn’t be on hold. I still chat with a girl I met from Xavier, who was actually able to go back and finish her degree there, as she originally intended.
The point I’m trying to make is that many colleges ended up picking up the slack where Republican government failed, and we watched it happen on CNN and in our classrooms. Living through something like that at that stage of your life has a profound impact that Google never will.
Between that, Abu Ghraib, Terry Schiavo, and a million other crimes of commission and omission, I could never vote GOP in its current iteration. I may be soulless but I’m not heartless.
parksideq
I know this is anecdotal, and at this point it may not even be read, but here’s one example of what helped shapes the young’uns perceptions:
I spent most of high school and all of college living under the Bush admin. When Katrina happened, I was a junior and it was around the first week or so of classes (I assume most colleges started around the same time too). My girlfriend at the time and I saw how bad the news was making the storm out to be before it even made landfall, and were even more shocked at the footage of the aftermath.
Since New Orleans was basically a lake, the colleges in the area closed for the year, and thousands of students were displaced. Many colleges across the country, including my alma mater, ended up admitting displaced students so their education wouldn’t be on hold. I still chat with a girl I met from Xavier, who was actually able to go back and finish her degree there, as she originally intended.
The point I’m trying to make is that many colleges ended up picking up the slack where Republican government failed, and we watched it happen on CNN and in our classrooms. Living through something like that at that stage of your life has a profound impact that Google never will.
Between that, Abu Ghraib, Terri Schiavo, and a million other crimes of commission and omission, I could never vote GOP in its current iteration. I may be soulless but I’m not heartless.
parksideq
Shorter @parksideq: I lived through the Bush administration and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.
Sorry for the long, unwieldy (double!) post.
bedtimeforbonzo
parksideq: Don’t apologize. That was a good post.
Corner Stone
@bedtimeforbonzo:
AND we are just done here sir.
Corner Stone
I said, Good Day Sir!
gwangung
@bedtimeforbonzo: Two posts, actually.
Corner Stone
@DougJ: If you were a little younger you’d probably know how to teh google it.
john@MM
You kids sure are funny. This old geezer, born in 1947, was using the intertubes before there was such a thing as the web. I built my first web site in1995. I probably know more about computers and the ‘net than 95% of you.
One thing I see that hasn’t changed since I was a boy is that different groups, whether they are age, gender, race, or any other kind of artificial group tends to stereotype people that don’t fit into their group.
Oh yeah, and Animal Collective is old hat. Try listening to Death Cabs for Cutie or Minus the Bear.
Corner Stone
@john@MM: Did you just generalize as to what other groups usually do?
john@MM
@Corner Stone
No, just explaining group dynamics to the youngsters.
mac
I don’t know. I work with a bunch of under-thirties and every time I walk into the break room someone has switched it back to Fox News. I switch over to MSNBC and when I walk in it’s back, like a bad penny.
Wilson Heath
@Tonal Crow:
Touche.
DougJ
As a TA at at an Ivy, I can tell you that they come from econ majors. Believe me. The liberal faculty aren’t nearly so influential as the parents and/or the Ec 1 profs, who fill their heads with silly simplistic models that they don’t even really believe themselves but think are a necessary building block. Then those students come to my history section and say really fucking stupid things.
Unless things have changed radically since my college days, a lot of the Ivy kids are genuinely sociopathic. That probably has something to do with this.
John D.
@Corner Stone:
OK, I’ll bite.
Explain to me how a scientist can fit into a category outside of R or ~R. Last I checked, that’s a covering set.
He didn’t say 6% of scientists being republicans meant that 94% were democrats. He said that 6% of scientists being republicans implies 94% are something else, which, y’know, it DOES.
john@MM
@John D.
Well, he didn’t say only 6% were Republicans, so it doesn’t necessarily mean 94% aren’t. If 100% of scientists are Republican then the statement “6% of scientists are Republicans” is a true statement.
bago
@bedtimeforbonzo: Hey, we don’t always want to be flossin.
matoko_chan
Pew says, 6% repub, 55% dems, 39% independents.
i am xx, btw.
The Nate Silver link should be more worrisome to the GOP…..the slope is strongly positive. That means intellectual elites are fleeing the GOP like scalded cats.
Trends and forcasting are the most important part of statistical analysis, imho.
I think the Breitbart/Big Hollywood attempt to “take back culture” is pretty futile without first taking back academe. Who works in film, journalism, politics, academe? People with college degrees.
Breibart is building a snowfence of toothpicks to hold back the inexorable glacier of cultural evolution.
Palinism has caused an exodus of intellectual elites from the GOP….consider the treatment of David Frum…..if they don’t flee, they get excommunicated.
The Palinist mantra is , are you elite? then gtfo.
I think this is a reaction to the perception that intellectual elites looked down on Palin and contributed to her disastrous candidacy.
The truth is, in a democratic meritocracy, a non-elite cannot be elected.
Palin is simply an unelectable horrorshow but her base has a giant chip on their shoulders over the perception that the elite sneered at her, mock her “real american values”, and took her down.
The empirical data is that if a candidate cannot handle an interview with Katie Couric they are simply unelectable in this slice of spacetime.
Very hard for the white protestants that once were the biggest mob here to accept that.