** 15-Sep-2019 World View: Young people's ignorance
> Snowflakes like you are causing the vitriolic atmosphere today,
> because you have no morals and no ethics. That's what's happened
> since Gen-Xers have taken charge.
Guest wrote:
>
Michael Bloomberg Slams Campus SJWs And The Radical Intolerance
> Of Disagreement
>
The essence of American democracy is that people who disagree,
> however profoundly, can set forth their views, let the democratic
> system under the Constitution settle matters for the moment,
> accept the outcome until the next election, and continue to engage
> with one another productively in the ordinary course of their
> lives. To put it simply, healthy democracy is about living with
> disagreement, not eliminating it.
> One of the most disturbing aspects of the retreat from liberal
> political discourse can be found on the training grounds for
> tomorrow’s leaders: college campuses.
> This sad reality was laid bare in a pair of columns published last
> week in Bloomberg Opinion by Steven Gerrard, a professor of
> philosophy at Williams College. Gerrard quotes a letter from
> students outlining their views on the subject: “‘Free Speech,’ as
> a term, has been co-opted by right-wing and liberal parties as a
> discursive cover for racism, xenophobia, sexism, anti-Semitism,
> homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and classism.”
> Unfortunately, it isn’t just students who see free speech as
> pernicious.
> At a Williams faculty meeting about free speech, a professor
> stated that, “to ask for evidence of violent practices is itself a
> violent practice.” This view suggests universities must suppress
> the very act of reasoning. Incredibly, many seem willing to try.
> In 2015, the Committee on Freedom of Expression at the University
> of Chicago published a statement affirming the centrality of free
> speech. It said that "the University’s fundamental commitment is
> to the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed
> because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most
> members of the University community to be offensive, unwise,
> immoral, or wrong-headed."
>
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/artic ... discomfort
I don't even know what other words to use besides "stupid and
ignorant" to describe young people today. I've spoken to college
professors who are appalled at the stupidity of their students, and
the fact that you can't even express a non-PC opinion without getting
punished -- either by the professor or the other students.
I got the first inkling of this in 2003. Here's an anecdote about
2003 that I posted in 2006:
"I was recently talking to a college student, and I
asked him to tell me what he thought about the violence in Sri
Lanka. I got a blank look. Then I said, "OK, tell me absolutely
anything you know about any international story of any kind
whatsoever, in any country in the world." Nothing. "But surely
you know something about what's going on in Iraq?" "Well," he
said, "I read a little bit about it a year ago, but forgot about
it."
Later, I spoke to my son, who's a college student at Georgia Tech.
He knows a fair amount about international events because ever
since 9/11 he's often had to listen to me rant and rave about
international events and generational issues. I asked him if he
ever talks about news events with other students at school. He
said that the subject never comes up. I asked him, "Have you ever
heard any of the other students talk about any news events, even
if you didn't participate in the conversation, even if they were
just talking about it in the distance." He said he'd never heard
a single conversation of that type. "Everyone is an engineering
student. Maybe if they were history students then they would."
This is very strange, of course, to someone like me who went to
MIT in the 1960s in the People's Republic of Cambridge,
Massachusetts, where almost every discussion was about politics,
and half the students carried around their copies of "Chairman
Mao's Little Red Book of Quotations" in their back
pockets."
It's just amazing to me how stupid young people are today, especially
in the media. George Tech is an engineering school, so the kids going
there excuse their total ignorance because they major in engineering.
But when I went to MIT, even the engineering students knew what was
going on in the world. Today, the media people know nothing about
journalism or anything else in the world, but apparently have majored
in women's studies or sociology, which teaches them nothing. That's
why there's so much incredibly stupid stuff in the media. Things have
gotten much, much worse since I had that conversation with my son in
2003.
I've posted the following before, but it's worth posting again. I've
frequently joked that many young people are too stupid to pick out
China on a map. But it's not a joke. Take a look at this video,
where people cannot pick even ONE country on a world map, even
the United States:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRh1zXFKC_o
- Jimmy Kimmel - Can you name a country?
Here are some of the comments that appear with the video:
- How do you call someone smart in the US? Answer: Tourist
- This was very painful to watch until that little boy came and
saved my last two brain cells from bursting out.
- But... How do American people dont know a SINGLE country? In
Europe we have to learn like al the country's from Europe and the
Capitals of them.
- “Name a country.” “Africa.” “That’s a continent.”
- How can someone not even find his own country on the map?
Omg....
- This actually just put a pit in my stomach. Anti-intellectualism
is becoming the normal. One girl said, "Oh god, who knows stuff like
that?"
I've seen manifestations of the last comment many times. Young people
are not only stupid, but they're contemptuous of knowledge, and they
glorify their own stupidity, and consider their stupidity to be
superior to actually knowing something.
Today, AOC is the poster child of young people, exhibiting an amount
of ignorance that is almost beyond belief. The only people stupider
than she is are the people who believe her, and that's apparently most
of the young people in the Democratic party. As I've said before, all
I can do is shake my head in astonishment, because this is how we're
going to be led into WW III.