Kids Today

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

class of 1999.

Oh, right. How close was I on the plot?

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

Sucker punch is still a bad movie, I understood it perfectly well as did most of its audience. Its no where near as deep or intellectual as it tries to make out.

Personally it confused me. Not the plot of the movie,

Spoiler

A bunch of mental patients hatch a scheme to break out of the looney bin

but how it was executed

Spoiler

fantasy sequences played out in alternate reality which is itself an alternate reality.

That's not deep, that's needlessly confusing. I get the "how", just not the "why".

 

[3quency]

The fact that their kids are vapid, shallow, uneducated slobs with all the culture of a petri dish is an unfortunately coincidence.

Thank you. Thank you so much.
I'm sorry but this is an affront to both myself as a product of the current generation and my parents. I've been raised to have wide interests and to think critically.
I read the news. I have an interest in history. I try to expand my cultural and intellectual pursuits regularly.

I am not vapid or shallow and I resent that my generation is being written of as such.
We are kids, and we have just as much of a mix of intelligence and idiocy as the last generation.

 

[Phlakes]

Apparently this guy doesn't get around much. Or ever use the internet. The ME3 business is a perfect example of how wrong he is.

 

[WoahDan]

since apparently this is new to some of you: People are pretty much the same wherever you go and whatever time period they are from (forward or back), this is one of the fundamentals of human nature and has always and will always be the case.

Whatever generation you are, you were exactly as annoying to the previous generations as this one is to you.

You should know this by now.

And also, twitter is largely used by adults with jobs (and so less time to post long comments). Teens only make up like 25% of twitter, so its actually the older generations that are to blame for that.

 

[Draconalis]

Dane cook isn't in it all that much, AND it resembles Sucker Punch in any way?!

Maybe I'll pass after all...

edit:

Ye gods, someone who thinks my generation isn't a bunch of fucking idiots. That's so refreshing that the fact that it is so refreshing makes me want to cry.

@ Namewithheld: Teenagers are almost always hated by their elders in pretty much every generation. Part of the reason is that teenagers are pretty much universally and trans-culturally hormonal and melodramatic and therefore annoying to anyone who isn't hormonal and melodramatic throughout all generations. However in the past century they've started to get more and more of their own slice of the media so the annoyance is increased exponentially.

OT: I've got to say that I disagree wholeheartedly with Kahn on two essential points:

1) People are not sponges, and intelligence is not measured by how quickly you absorb information. Intelligence is measured by what you DO with the information you absorb. Intelligence is the synthetic recombination of absorbed ideas into novel ideas. It is creative. This is why computers have great abilities to store and recall information but suck at thinking. This is why AI is still a largely theoretical idea that has been exceptionally hard to create. People who are great at absorbing things at high speeds aren't necessarily going to be any better at thinking. In fact, the recombination of ideas (i.e. creative thinking) usually requires slow, linear and attentive focus. So if anything, the fact that teenagers these days are being conditioned to quickly absorb information might actually inhibit their ability to think slowly and critically. While the greater competence with technology and the greater flow of ideas brought about by the internet are good things, the fact that people aren't being trained to think slowly and critically is exceptionally bad.

2)Kahn seems to buy into the fallacy of progressivisim wholeheartedly:

You are the least racist, least sexist, least homophobic, least everything ... you f***ing love a black president. You are the most progressive people ever on the history of the planet.

Values change over time, but this doesn't mean that they are moving toward the greater Good in some sort of Hegelian Zeitgeist. The values that Kahn mentions are all values of tolerance. While there are definitely a lot of strong positive effects of tolerance as a value system (i.e. it allows everyone to coexist more peacefully in a democratic society), it can go too far. Once you realize the fallacious nature of historical progressivism, you come to realize that a progressive tendency towards tolerance/moral permissiveness can ultimately lead to things that we would currently reject. (Though things like bestiality and pedophilia will in all likelihood still be rejected on the grounds that neither animals nor children can give consent.)

Ultimately tolerance has been promoted as a value system because it acts as a lubricant for a democratic society. This does not make it the ultimate good (primarily because there is no such thing). If we are to be Nietzscheans, we must engage in a transvaluation of values. When we trace back the genealogy and telic cause of the virtue 'tolerance', we find that it serves the overall functionality of society by disvaluing the values of the individual; hence that it sublimates individual will to the collective "will" (in a broader, non-psychological sense) of society. Is this a good thing? Well, it serves the ends of peace as well as the consequentialist obsession with eudaimonism. But I, for one, value the will and autonomy of the individual over the fluid function of society and the hedonistic considerations of utopia-seeking ideologues. War, conflict and suffering are prices I am willing to pay for the kind of intellectual, cultural and artistic greatness that can only be produced by the strong independent will of the 'higher man' (which, unlike Nietzsche, I believe also includes women). As Nietzsche put it, compromise is "the virtue that makes small".

I like this post... I like it all over. I am going to quote it without snips so people will be like "What's this about?" and read it.

 

[billyboy0321]

The fact that their kids are vapid, shallow, uneducated slobs with all the culture of a petri dish is an unfortunately coincidence.

Thank you. Thank you so much.
I'm sorry but this is an affront to both myself as a product of the current generation and my parents. I've been raised to have wide interests and to think critically.
I read the news. I have an interest in history. I try to expand my cultural and intellectual pursuits regularly.

I am not vapid or shallow and I resent that my generation is being written of as such.
We are kids, and we have just as much of a mix of intelligence and idiocy as the last generation.

I have to say that the majority of your generation, or perhaps even the lagely vocal and visible of your generation belie what you say about yourself here. Not that they are the norm, or even the majority, per se.
I knew I was annoying to older people, because I could see it, so I tried to restrict my adult-oriented contact. The problem with many youths coming up in this world now is that it seems that there are either NO moral compass or at the very least a hugely skewed one... If they irritate someone, they laugh and don't care. Really? This is widely and awsomely intelligent? Not intelligence as I've known and/or defined it.
Youtube/Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr/Pinterest are making everything available in snippet sized bits so there's no NEED to really read an article, just watch the video...don't bother reading the book, watch the movie. This not a FAULT of your generation, but they certainly make use of it to excess.
I'm 36 tomorrow, and I've grown up a lot since 1993. I've watched almost 20 years of people (children, teens adults) and the trend of all of them is dumber. The requirements of parents for their children (generally) seems lower than it did ten years ago... and that was lower than the previous decade and so on, ad nauseum.
It just makes me sick and a bit sad to see things like what this director says, personally I feel let down and sad that the current youth generation is so detatched from what makes life worth living. Yet that's objectively selfish of me, I suppose.

 

[LobsterFeng]

Apparently this guy doesn't get around much. Or ever use the internet. The ME3 business is a perfect example of how wrong he is.

No kidding. Has this guy ever read Youtube comments? Or even browsed Twitter or Facebook? And I'm saying this as an active Facebook and Youtube user who is part of this generation.

 

[Zyr]

Apparently this guy doesn't get around much. Or ever use the internet. The ME3 business is a perfect example of how wrong he is.

"this guy" being Bob, or Joseph Kahn?

Anyway, to otherwise completely ignore the rest of this thread: Holy crap Kahn has done a lot of music videos!
Muse - "Knights of Cydonia", Blink 182 - "Always", Garbage - "Cherry Lips", Wu-Tang Clan - "Gravel Pit", Korn - "A.D.I.D.A.S.", Jamiroquai - "Feels Just Like It Should" to name a few.
Quite an array of styles, and music genres.

 

[MovieBob]

I'm so gonna see this movie when it comes to my country.

Or I'll import the sh*t out of the DVD later.

 

[Vanilla_Druid]

I don't know that I share Kahn's boundless enthusiasm for the prospects of Generation Y

Okay, I'm going a bit off-topic, but "Generation Y"? Are we still using that to talk about kids in school? I was called a Generation Y kid when I went to school back in the nineties. People not even born then are starting to look for colleges or have kids of their own. I kinda assumed we were at Z. Y'know, the first generation who never saw a world without cellphones or internet?

And I hope that, however unlikely, whoever thought it would be a good idea to start the whole "Generation LETTER" thing on X is going to be alive to see the inevitable Generation Z-2 or whatever crap we'll come up with.

Slightly more on topic; It is nice to see someone who's not falling into the trap of complaining about whatever generation that came after the one they're from. It's never very sexy.

The current generation is called the iGeneration.

 

[idarkphoenixi]

Saw the title and felt obligated to post this:


Kind of related? I didn't read the entire article.

 

[PhiMed]

The fact that their kids are vapid, shallow, uneducated slobs with all the culture of a petri dish is an unfortunately coincidence.

Thank you. Thank you so much.
I'm sorry but this is an affront to both myself as a product of the current generation and my parents. I've been raised to have wide interests and to think critically.
I read the news. I have an interest in history. I try to expand my cultural and intellectual pursuits regularly.

I am not vapid or shallow and I resent that my generation is being written of as such.
We are kids, and we have just as much of a mix of intelligence and idiocy as the last generation.

Hey, even in the bleakest moments of the dark ages, there were still shining lights. If you simultaneously are aware of history and modern events AND are proud of your generation, then you are either a shining paragon of your age or tragically naive.

Facts are facts. U.S. students are barely above average internationally. That may seem less than dire, until you realize that the vast majority of people they are competing against have zero internet access and live in places where running water is a privilege most cannot afford.

American students today are incapable of competing in a modern marketplace. That is why we have had a precipitous decline in the number of Ph.D.'s in mathematics and science over the past 20 years. Anyone who says that the American educational institutions are just as good as they were 20 years ago is out of their mind. And American parents let it get to this point.

We are the richest, most privileged country in the world. We chose to spend it on bullshit rather than educating our children, and we are now reaping the rewards of our decisions. If you can honestly look around at the general population at your school and say, "Yeah, most of these people will be good citizens that I think will contribute positively to society," then you are one of the following: delightfully incorrect, home schooled, a private school attendee, or you live in a very good school district.

 

[PhiMed]

Saw the title and felt obligated to post this:


Kind of related? I didn't read the entire article.

Then you would agree with the subject of the interview, because he was saying that braintrusts who can't read two (really short) pages are actually SMART.

 

[PhiMed]

I don't know that I share Kahn's boundless enthusiasm for the prospects of Generation Y

Okay, I'm going a bit off-topic, but "Generation Y"? Are we still using that to talk about kids in school? I was called a Generation Y kid when I went to school back in the nineties. People not even born then are starting to look for colleges or have kids of their own. I kinda assumed we were at Z. Y'know, the first generation who never saw a world without cellphones or internet?

And I hope that, however unlikely, whoever thought it would be a good idea to start the whole "Generation LETTER" thing on X is going to be alive to see the inevitable Generation Z-2 or whatever crap we'll come up with.

Slightly more on topic; It is nice to see someone who's not falling into the trap of complaining about whatever generation that came after the one they're from. It's never very sexy.

I'm glad you didn't fall into the trap of choosing inappropriate adjectives. It's never very immaculate.