Generational Dynamics Forum - New Site

Higgenbotham wrote: Sun Aug 18, 2024 2:03 pm Regarding the graphs showing the rising incidence of chronic health conditions among young people, on the one hand, it can be argued that a large component of rising incidence is just more comprehensive diagnosis and maybe even expanding definitions. On the other hand, it can be argued that the severity of conditions, autism for example, is increasing. It's hard to know exactly how all of this factors in. There is such a thing as an illness profit system where how much profit can be made from a given condition and its projected future "incidence" is of more concern to the health care industry than trying to characterize the illness itself. For example, when searching for information about the incidence of endometriosis there was more information about rising revenues from treating the disease than there was about historic incidence trends of the disease itself.

Higgenbotham wrote: Thu Aug 15, 2024 11:01 pm 10.


21. "A 2012 study by the American Medical Association found that the current generation may be the first to encounter parents outliving their children due to childhood obesity which in turn can cause adults in middle age to suffer from hypertension, osteoarthritis, diabetes, stroke, chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia. The number of young and middle-aged adults becoming obese at increasingly younger ages is resulting a greater incidence of chronic disease and shortened life expectancy. Research from the University of Michigan’s Joyce Lee, a pediatric endocrinologist, found that people born between 1966 and 1985 became obese at a much faster rate than previous generations."

America's Move to Raise A Healthier Generation of Kids

"In the end, as First Lady, this isn’t just a policy issue for me. This is a passion. This is my mission. I am determined to work with folks across this country to change the way a generation of kids thinks about food and nutrition."

- First Lady Michelle Obama

Let’s Move! is a comprehensive initiative, launched by the First Lady, dedicated to solving the problem of obesity within a generation, so that children born today will grow up healthier and able to pursue their dreams. Sure, this is an ambitious goal. But with your help, we can do it.

Combining comprehensive strategies with common sense, Let’s Move! is about putting children on the path to a healthy future during their earliest months and years; giving parents helpful information and fostering environments that support healthy choices; providing healthier foods in our schools; ensuring that every family has access to healthy, affordable food; and, helping children become more physically active.

At the launch of the initiative, President Barack Obama signed a Presidential Memorandum creating the first-ever Task Force on Childhood Obesity to conduct a review of every single program and policy relating to child nutrition and physical activity and develop a national action plan to maximize federal resources and set concrete benchmarks toward the First Lady’s national goal. The Task Force recommendations focus on the five pillars of the First Lady’s Let’s Move! initiative:

Creating a healthy start for children
Empowering parents and caregivers
Providing healthy food in schools
Improving access to healthy, affordable foods
Increasing physical activity

So, if you’re still with me, I’d like you to stop reading this now and read this new essay by Aurélien, Reality Would Like a Word, in its entirety. You may not like it — he’s skewering the Tweedledees, and not being gentle about it. It’s a bitter pill. But he’s not doing it as a Tweedledum, since he has even less use for their ideology and idiocy.

His basic message is: The Tweedledees have had power for most of the last seven decades, and have royally fucked up everything we’ve done, and then shrugged it off as if it wasn’t our doing, or wasn’t a big deal. And we’re still doing so. He says we need, as I said in my less gracious and less articulate recent rant, to get over ourselves, and to grow up. We’re flying full speed into the hurricanes of polycrisis and collapse, and our preoccupation with one-upping the Tweedledums, and with ‘social justice’ platitudes, incrementalism, technotopian thinking, niceties of speech, and mistaking virtue signalling, policy platforms, and wishful out-loud thinking for actual progress toward real goals, constitute a grossly negligent and staggeringly ignorant response to the existential crises of the day.

The Tweedledees’ mashup of social liberalism and neoliberalism, “one-world” strategies, public-private partnerships, outsourcing, privatization, centralization of services, underfunding to balance budgets, kowtowing to the military-industrial complex, over-reliance on consultants and idealized theories, abandoning the homeless and mentally ill and other underserved and disenfranchised groups to “allow them to sort things out for themselves”, endless compromise on core issues, both-sides-ing, support for misguided and mischaracterized wars, inattention to bureaucratic bloat — these idealistic and well-intentioned but practically unsupportable strategies have produced heavily-encumbered, stagnant, dysfunctional political systems that are incapable of change, and neither efficient nor effective, and ultimately unsupportable except by the most idealistic wearers of rose-coloured glasses.

And as this becomes increasingly clear — as the disaster in Ukraine makes it nine war disasters in a row while the drum beats for a tenth with China to try to break the losing streak (“we’re the good guys, and we’re exceptional, so we have to win in the end”), as ecological collapse worsens and the “we still have time if we only all…” rhetoric rings more and more hollow, as economic collapse rumbles in and then settles in indefinitely under the weight of our global crushing debt load to the earth and to future generations, as more and more countries reject the US-controlled IMF/World Bank/CIA/NATO systems of bullying, subjugation, resource theft, vassalage and penury, and turn against the west, as more and more countries collapse politically and economically and become failed states like Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine, as… well I could go on, but you get the idea.

“What is the Matter With Young People These Days?”
Posted on August 5, 2023 by Dave Pollard

Pew Research surveys of other countries’ view of China, over time; if you ever doubted the power of propaganda, this should set you straight; thanks to Indi for the link



Over the past five decades I have watched the political views of my ‘boomer’ generation shift further and further right. In the process I’ve found myself more and more in agreement with “the younger generations” and less and less with my own. In every survey that includes a demographic breakdown, my views have aligned most closely with those of women in the youngest age bracket.

At least, that was the case until about five years ago. Gradually, the sociopolitical views of GenX have moved right to the point those views are indistinguishable from those of Boomers. But more surprisingly, the views of Millennials and GenZ (aka “Plurals”) on military and political interventions in other countries, generations that have been historically opposed to such interventions, have recently swung hard right.

The massive, IMO horrific, propaganda-driven shift in western attitudes toward China from mostly positive to overwhelmingly negative (see charts above) have cut across all generations and western nations. Statements by Biden and the Pentagon/CIA that China (the US’s largest trade partner) “threatens” the west’s political and economic dominance and hence must be opposed by every possible means, struck me, when I first heard them, as the senile, paranoid blatherings of people who just didn’t understand how the world really works. After all, the offshoring of manufacturing to China, instituted starting with Nixon and expanded by every government since, is the only thing that has kept the essential goods of western society affordable to all but the ultra-rich, and hence prevented the collapse of most of the western financialized do-nothing economies.

Now, suddenly, westerners of every generation are banging the drums for war with China, (and with Russia and other countries), and it’s young westerners who are banging the drums the loudest!

Citing a very recent Newsweek poll, Billmon at Moon of Alabama reports:

In the poll, those identified as “Millennial,” between 27 and 42 years old, were most likely to “strongly support” committing U.S. troops to Ukraine. However, more respondents aged between 18-26 (Gen Z) said they would support the measure overall, 47 percent saying they supported or strongly supported sending U.S. troops.
Nearly a third of respondents aged over 59 said they opposed pledging U.S. troops to Ukraine, with a further 25 percent “strongly” opposing the suggestion.

WTF? While Billmon rather belligerently suggests sending the younger generations to boot camp in Europe to change their minds, my reaction was more: What the hell has happened here?

I am flummoxed, to use an old word that generations since the boomers would probably have to look up. One third of Americans think the US should send troops to Ukraine (tantamount to a declaration of war and massively increasing the risk of world war III and nuclear Armageddon ), one third are opposed, and one third are on the fence. And the younger generations (and Democrats) are much more in favour of direct military intervention. What are these (young, theoretically more ‘progressive’) people smoking?

That’s all I’ve got. I have no explanation, not even a theory. What am I missing here?


13 Responses to “What is the Matter With Young People These Days?”

Glennis Moriarty says:
August 6, 2023 at 00:04
Do you think something is lacking in education systems worldwide? Objectivity? Being taught to see both sides of an argument? With the cult of individualism, young people are taught that how each person *feels* is the most important thing – which makes them prime targets for propaganda. And as history shows, propaganda wielded by a few sociopaths (especially now, via social media) can change the thinking and actions of many.

This is not to say that the PMC has an organised ideology: far from it. What it has is a series of vaguely Liberal-based normative slogans, each owned by a particular lobby, which can sometimes collide with each other. In the past, for example, the PMC was trivially anti-militarist, without knowing anything about military issues. These days it is trivially (and aggressively) militarist, without having learnt anything about military affairs in the interim. So because there is a PMC-identified normative need to “rescue” some population somewhere that the media says is at risk, then forces must be sent off even if they don’t exist. Conflict, and even war, are not fundamentally serious in this way of thinking. Threatening war against Russia and China is just a rhetorical posture, like a tweet: it doesn’t imply anything serious will actually happen.

Higgenbotham wrote: Mon Aug 19, 2024 4:41 pm So my father left work to talk to the teacher and during the conversation the teacher told him that I was an F student. My father told him to give me an F but that I would be taking the New York State Regents Exam and when we got the score back he could explain to the school board why I got an F vis-a-vis my Regents Exam score. That was pretty much the end of the teacher's rants, which had been ongoing, about like the old girl mentioned above. I got a 96 on the Regents Exam.

Academically, girls outperform boys by a wide margin. Nationally, 70 percent of high-school valedictorians are girls. According to the College Board, girls account for 60 percent of all high-school students with A or A-plus averages despite taking harder classes than boys, even in math and science.

Year after year, I read the reports from The College Board and the ACT.org — it’s my job, after all. And each year, I’m faced with new information about how girls’ standardized testing math scores lag those of their male peers, even though girls are earning higher grades than boys in virtually every high school subject.

According to the 2014 Research & Policy division of ACT Inc, female students earn on average 0.11 more GPA points than male students in math, and 0.13 more GPA points in science. Nevertheless, male students score an average of 0.86 points higher on the math portion of the ACT and 0.77 points higher on the science portion. And here’s how it looks for the SAT. (That upward spike for both males and females in 2016 was because of the global change to the SAT test format.)

The ACT’s 2018 Profile Report shows a slight improvement, with boys scoring 0.7 points higher on math and only 0.3 points higher on the science portion: but still, the difference doesn’t add up! Average SAT math scores show the same trend:

Screen Shot 2020-02-05 at 10.18.24 AM.png

Higgenbotham wrote: Tue Aug 20, 2024 10:40 am

Bob Butler wrote: Thu Aug 15, 2024 6:20 pm This isn’t like Covid, murderous cops, race riots and the insurrection in having massive disturbances associated, but in theory in the Information Age issues can be decided by votes instead of wars or dark ages. We shall see.

A good deal of this crisis can be summed up with “Mind your own damn business.” Republicans should not try to impose their traditional culture on an increasingly diverse population.

Bob Butler wrote: Fri Aug 16, 2024 1:00 pm See the problem, exaggerate it, cry, whine, panic and give up? No thank you. As I said, there are advantages to overblown opinions to cause those not aware to wake up. Absurdly obviously exaggerated opinions result in rejection and are not helpful.

Looking at the issues that have been manufactured by the media and parroted by the Uncle Bobs, you would think that 6 million blacks have been killed by police in America. What is the actual number? About 233 per year.

Parroting authority figures who are really Boomer snake oil salesmen is a huge problem in this brainwashed society. The people I was talking about in the posts immediately preceding were Boomers. My son is an F student? Oh my Gosh, what shall I do to appease you, sir? Shall I start working on nuclear fusion immediately? I had a confrontational attitude and disciplinary action will be taken? Yes, maam, I am now so contrite and will do 6 times the work load of your incompetent minority recruits just like you ordered me to do.

The Professor Banned From Speaking Out: "We Need To Start Preparing Before It's Too Late!” - Dr Bret

The Diary Of A CEO
7.15M subscribers

1,728,793 views
Aug 15, 2024

Dr Bret Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist and former professor at Evergreen State College. He is the co-host of the podcast, ‘DarkHorse’, and the author of the book, ‘A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life’.

00:00 Intro
02:27 Why Humanity Will Be Extinguished
04:39 Bret's Top Existential Concern for Our Planet
08:04 Solar Flares and Their Potential Impact
11:36 Understanding EMP Effects & The Catastrophic Effects
13:48 The Earth's Magnetic Poles Are Switching!
17:01 The Inversion of Earth's Poles: Is Humanity Prepared?
18:57 What Does Anthropogenic Mean?
21:16 The Two Major Disaster Scenarios
28:11 How to Prepare for Global Catastrophes
35:57 Should You Become a ‘Prepper’?
42:31 Is Society on the Brink of Collapse?
51:33 Are Institutions Woke or Not?
52:36 The Evergreen College Incident: What Really Happened
01:04:47 The Decline of Mainstream Media
01:12:46 We SHOULD Be Worried About AI
01:16:50 Are Governments Ignoring AI's True Impact on the Planet?
01:20:31 The Critical Role of Language in Human Survival and Evolution
01:28:22 How AI Will Transform Human Communication Forever
01:30:19 Why Regulating AI Might Be the Worst Idea Ever
01:32:14 Brain Chips: Are We Turning Into Cyborgs?
01:36:23 AI Is Coming for Your Job: What You Need to Know
01:39:11 The Safest Careers in an AI-Dominated Future
01:45:02 Universal Basic Income: Hidden Consequences You Should Know
01:52:48 The Failures of COVID-19
01:56:50 What Is Gain-of-Function Research
01:58:59 What Really Happened in Wuhan: The Untold Story
02:00:54 Anthony Fauci's Involvement in COVID Origins
02:05:58 How We Should Have Handled COVID-19 Differently
02:12:53 Why Lockdowns Might Not Work in the Next Pandemic
02:16:23 Life-Changing Advice for a Happier, Healthier You
02:23:35 The Hidden Dangers of Pornography
02:32:38 What Parents Are Getting Wrong
02:38:52 The Guest's Final Question