Letter to the Worst Generation

Dear baby boomers,

As you may guess from the title of this post, I kind of hate you. It isn't from some sense of rebelliousness or anger that you outnumber us and will force us to work twice as hard as you to keep you alive well into your 80s. It isn't because you constantly deride my generation as weak or selfish or shallow. I have a lot of complex reasons for hating you, and it is with much thought that I declare the baby boomers the worst generation of the last century. In order to illustrate as clearly and simply as possible, I will give you a list of reasons you have destroyed the world.

Regressive social values: Everyone loves to talk about how the hippies, a group of rich, entitled and self important baby boomers somehow affected the social change that brought things like the civil rights act and the end of segregation. Aside from the gross historical inaccuracy and offensive nature of claiming a bunch of upper middle class white kids high on every drug they could find somehow caused social and legal changes by showing up places and being high, it misses the generation who actually affected change. There was a lot of social inertia moving against desegregation and the sexual revolution, but the ones who actually began to change were the war generations. A general who had served in both world wars desegregated the military. A WWII veteran pushed the civil rights act. A man barely too young to have served in the same war was one of the most influential rights activists in history (MLK Jr, in case you were wondering). The Warren court expanded constitutional protections more than any court before or since, and every person on the Supreme Court then was around for both world wars. The generation that the hippies thought they were rebelling against was the one affecting social change and it is really annoying that the same stoner assholes who grew up to be neoconservative sociopathic business people can try to claim those battles.

In fact, in the era the baby boomers have had power, from the late 80s onwards, we have moved backwards with civil rights. We now have those former hippies pushing to overturn Roe V Wade, force religion down the throats of the people who had benefited from the previous era's secularization, and found a way to continue the red scare into a new racist version against brown people. The baby boomer's parents were awful in so many ways, with violent racism and nationalistic witch hunts, but they are the generation who had the guts to look inwards and change the rules. They didn't go far enough, but they took steps in the right direction. Steps that their children have spent 30 years trying to undo.

Selfish and shortsighted economic practices: Somehow the baby boomers made more money for the top percent or so than ever before while managing to not grow the middle class their parents worked so hard to build. As soon as the baby boomers took over the average wages for those under the top percent stagnated, having barely grown since the 1980s. Where the generation coming out of the wars had learned from the Great Depression and had developed a set of ethics for business, the baby boomers spent all their energy paying bonuses to the ones who cut wages and bankrupted smaller firms. The entire economic crisis is traceable to the deregulation and inevitable orgy of unethical business practices. Three decades of increasingly short sighted practices led to faster and harsher boom bust cycles, until it finally caught up with us in 2008. Developing countries offered a haven for their money and labor, but eventually international ethical regulations will crash their insane power run.

Self righteousness: On top of regressing the economic and social efforts of their parents, the baby boomers love to claim they did it all. Then they rub it in the X and Y generations faces. They call us lazy and aimless, they whine that we don't work as hard and they had it harder, they complain we don't finish college like they did. This one is the one that makes all the other failings so much worse. After promising us college and jobs, they increased school prices enough to force us to take out loans we will be paying off for 40 years. They gave us an economy with no growth or jobs. They complain about the fate of education and accuse us of being shallow all while killing our school systems their parents built and picking only the worst people to represent us. My generation is NOT the Jersey Shore. We are not Taylor Swift or Michael Bay or American Idol. These are shows and stars created by baby boomers, picking the worst of my generation and then shoving them down our throats. My generation has no way to escape the control of content, economy and culture you try to take from us. Don't break something and blame us for not having it. Don't get upset when we download songs or surf the web when you gave us no other choice. Don't accuse of of being unoriginal or uncreative when you lock the entirety of ideas into corporate hand. Don't get upset when we decide not to support you in your old age, when you abused us and the world around us. Don't whine when you force a Christian revival on us and we respond with hostile atheism. Just go. Let us try to run things before you destroy the world with industrialization and worker abuse. Let us try to fix your mess without accusing us of being ineffective. We are the most politically active group, the most discontent, the angriest. You think your crowds of teabaggers are angry, take a look at your kids. We have traitors in our own generation because you trapped them at home with nothing but ancient fairy tales. When you keep buying the bullshit you sell yourselves, don't complain when we ignore you and move away from you. In fact, baby boomers, either support us or shut the fuck up.

Logic Priest

Gifted? Is that in the DSM IV?

For fuck's sake. I am torn between scorn for a woman touting her oh so special child and concern for said child who, from the mother's descriptions, seems to exhibit symptoms of real psychological issues. The inability to switch tasks is not generally a sign of a high IQ rather than a sign of high functioning autism. I make no claims of psychological expertise but I am good at research and there aren't a lot of scientific articles supporting the gifted community's views.

There are plenty of smart children who, especially with access to early education, are able to accelerate their studies well past the norm, and they often have diagnosable issues like ADHD and Aspergers and such. Even the pre-adolecense version of bipolar, which they rarely diagnose so young. That is no excuse for an anti social child. At those ages you really need to try and teach your child to be social, rather than isolating them into "special" classes. It is nice to help them in their accelerated studies, but don't let them get away with asshole behavior.

Psychology has a practical side. It isn't just about diagnosing developmental issues in children, but working with them to help the child exist in the real world. I don't know the real statistics, but it seems in popular media, at least, that more parents are coming out in favor of just "accepting" the issues rather than helping the child learn to cope with them. Yes, many wouldn't be issues in different societies, but telling them they are right and everyone else is wrong is a good way to set them up for failure and disappointment. Understanding is one thing, exacerbating is another. While I am not upset at having bipolar, for example, I do understand that I must work to exist within modern civilization. Perhaps in the past bipolar wouldn't have gotten in my way, but now it does and I shudder to think how I would be if I had grown up with parents who tell me it was ok to act out.

Intelligence and asynchronous thinking do deter certain types of social interaction, especially in children, but separating the poor child further endangers their social development. No matter how clever a child is they still have to go through developmental stages in speech and social interactions. Many disorders are not genetic but environmental, or a combination thereof, and allowing a child to develop poorly makes it really hard on them later in life.

Logic Priest

Rule of Attraction

There are a lot of accusations that feminism ruins dating and sex and whatever other thing insecure men  (and women) have trouble doing anyways. There was a big deal over at Freethoughtblogs when youtube vlogger Thunderfoot was invited, decided to declare feminism as anti sex, insulted the network itself, and was promptly kicked off for being an ass. There was a big deal when bloggers declared harassment was an issue at atheist and skeptic conferences, with people claiming no it wasn't or that these bloggers hated men/sex/etc. There was a big deal when Rebecca Watson declared that it was awkward to be hit on in an elevator in the middle of the night and once more accusations that she hated men and sex.

Now I am pretty sure none of the people involved hate sex, most are self declared sex positive feminists, not some "radical" type that mostly live in the minds of the apparently socially awkward men and women. They, and most feminists I am sure, have no issues with flirting and sex, in the right situation. They only demand that people not reduce their entire being to sex, with their value determined solely by you desire to fuck them. Really it comes down to timing and social awareness. If the person is sitting in a booth answering questions about philosophy, science or similar, they probably don't want to be propositioned for sex. If they are in a bar flirting with you, they probably wouldn't mind as much, as long as the flirting is both ways. If someone is standing in a crowd, they probably wouldn't care to be grabbed or touched by someone they don't know.

If these seem obvious, congratulations you aren't a sexist pig. If, however, they seem hard to grasp or they make you angry and confused, you should probably not go into public until you have reassessed your ability to socialize. I personally have a few simple guidelines for when it is appropriate to tell someone they are attractive. Firstly, when you and the person in questions seem to be working towards a sexual relationship. That is, mutual flirting at the minimum and all the way up to relationships. Second, when it is directly relevant to an ongoing conversation, with you, from someone you know at least by name. Even then, there are smaller social cues that should tell you if it is appropriate, and which words and phrases to use. That is it. Any other situation is probably not ok because it implies the person you are "complimenting" only has value through attractiveness. This is really all feminists mean when they talk about objectifications. They don't mean you can never compliment looks, but that it shouldn't really be the only thing you see in a woman, or man, or any person. It should not be the only thing a person is measured by, end of story.

Media itself is still very sexist, portraying women not as attractive or intelligent but as pieces of sexual organs. Faces are often excluded and portrayals of women as obedient sex slaves are common. If this seems ok to you, you are sexist. If you treat women like this in real life, you are probably sexually harassing them. There is no one saying you can't have sex or flirt or anything of the sort. The people who think so can fuck off and get over themselves.

Logic Priest