I’m well aware … there is a downside though … people round here know it and tend to come across as snobby douchebags
This isn’t exactly a culture war. People throw the word culture around as a way to make something bad, damaging or just plain stupid, immune to criticism. Once something is labeled cultural, it cannot be criticized because that would be bigoted or racist.
So a so called culture that revolves around social media and music which is made for the sake of making money (in the past artists didn’t refer to themselves as a brand or their art as a product), is really anti-culture. It’s the same with so called ghetto culture; it’s anti-culture.
Culture is about the best a society can create. It propels a society forward. The Renaissance is an example of this. So is the Enlightenment. When so called culture lacks substance and/or damages a society (ghetto culture helps the people in the ghetto become better people? Social media addiction makes better people?) is it really culture? The best of ancient Greek culture taught us how to reason and how to be human. That’s culture.
We can look at societies in the past and find many things disagreeable or even abhorrent to our sensibilities. We can also see things that were positive, even great. What exactly is so called contemporary culture creating that’s good?
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And the kids still can’t pass.
From a purely academical sense, the old fashioned way of going to libraries for research, gathering information from old dusty books, while time consuming and less convenient, estimulates learning and critical thinking in a way that seaching through info online does not. IMO, of course. That’s how we did it in highschool.
By the time I got to uni and the internet was more available, it was hard to resist the temptation to copy, paste, and edit information.
Doing group paperwork was also immensely more fun when people really had to meet in person and exchange ideas.
Besides, knowlege by itself doesn’t mean much when one struggles to apply it in a practical way.
My grandfather had completed 6th grade. He knows more about World History or geography than most 20 year olds I know, but he also knows about carpentry, plumbing, electricity, and welding than most young people this day.
He and his friends would BUILD their own toys. He says that was half the fun.
He doesn’t know how to use google. Can you build fix your own car when it breaks down in the middle of nowhere, junior? Build your own book shelves? Oh, that’s right, you have a phone and call call a tow. And buy your furniture in IKEA.
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So America is a (fake) country of adult children, which is true!
That’s one way to look at it: have the trajectory of the country in the hands of the masses with their stupid tastes and desires, otherwise called “democracy.”
Another way to look at it: the human race is more important than social media and music. So are healthcare, law and order, buildings, bridges, food, drinking water, transportation, and so on. Unless one wants to live in what arrogant Americans call shitholes (like they should talk).
I don’t even care if nearly all adult children want to run the country into the ground. Oh wait… they already are!
As if the masses are good at generating values and ideas.
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You have a point there.
It is true that it is not the case SO MUCH, but I think it still kind of is. Even Europe, I mean, Malta isn’t France or Germany or Switzerland. I think if a guy from Malta or Croatia has the chance to go study, say, for MIT, he’d pass? I think he’d take it.
I worked for the president of a university and we talked about this subject. He said that he could have written his master’s thesis in a month if he had today’s tools to work with. With that said, the old fashioned way helped to develop the skills you mentioned which in turn enable you to make the most of the technological advancements we now have. Young people can’t take advantage of modern research tools because they lack the foundation built on the fundamentals.
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Hence I now think America is a fake country. It has to import brains for high skilled jobs or supposedly will have to, and then it has to import people for the jobs “no wants to do.”
So it’s fake.
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But America has always had immigrants both doing innovative work and doing the menial work … what’s the difference?
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You’ve just described every successful empire in human existence.
Being an empire/superpower doesn’t work without finding a framework to attract/integrate smart foreigners on one end of the scale and those for menial jobs no one wants on the other end.
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They can barely pay attention to oncoming traffic and their surroundings anymore. There’s no looking left and right before crossing the street, there’s only the phone in front of you and your heaphones. Even honking the horn gets no reaction.
I guess it’s a great era if you’re a rapist. Ironically, not so good if you want to make an honest romantic advance on a woman, which might be rape if you’re butt ugly. Jk.
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As coworkers many will not say “Hello,” or give any acknowledgement despite working with others for months or years. There is also a total lack of awareness for public space, as can be shown by hooting and hollering into FaceTime, even with conversation that should be private, for all those around them, even at work.
I once worked with someone like that, though not directly, and when she called my office and addressed me by name, I played dumb, knowing exactly who she was after years of being coworkers, and said, “I don’t know who you are; you can stop by my office to introduce yourself.”
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When I went to a parent teacher conference at my daughter’s school, one teacher told me how my daughter was the only student who greeted him upon entering the classroom and said goodbye when she left. He said if he was in the middle of something she would even stand and wait for him to finish before saying hello or goodbye.
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Lol
Adults certainly have more than a little responsability in how kids are these days. I lost count how many school trips my kids were the only childs without a tablet or a smartphone inside the bus.
That’s what parenting became these days. Play with your tablet and leave me alone, I’m on FB.
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My uncle and I have been wondering if the flight-or-fight response and the ability to sense danger have been lost in Generation Z. We discussed this just last week.
A guest on Bill Maher talked about this on Friday.
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It’s still probably there, but only manifests itself when someone is saying prejudiced things on social media. Things like “being fat is both unhealthy and unattractive.”
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Some Gen-Z people need to quit acting like they are celebrities, when in reality they offer nothing to the world.
These people are an empty miserable shell that craves and seeks out attention. They have no purpose or passion for anything, their own self importance is based on attention.
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Fat?! Don’t use that word, only use “Plus-Size”
Are you the word censor police???