Category Archives: Popular Culture

Generation Web

Beloit College looks at the class of 2015:

O.J. Simpson has always been looking for the killers of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman.
Jim Carrey has always been bigger than a pet detective.
They’ve always gone to school with Mohammed and Jesus.
John Wayne Bobbitt has always slept with one eye open.
There has never been an official Communist Party in Russia.
“Yadda, yadda, yadda” has always come in handy to make longFaux Christmas trees have always outsold real ones.
They’ve always been able to dismiss boring old ideas with “been there, done that, gotten the T-shirt.”
The bloody conflict between the government and a religious cult has always made Waco sound a little whacko. stories short..
Jimmy Carter has always been a smiling elderly man who shows up on TV to promote fair elections and disaster relief.
Women have always been kissing women on television.
Their older siblings have told them about the days when Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera were Mouseketeers.
Unlike their older siblings, they spent bedtime on their backs until they learned to roll over.
Music has always been available via free downloads.

And to them, tales of men walking on the moon are like stories of the depths of the Depression to me. And many of them probably don’t believe them.

The Latest Warm-Monger Tactic

Scaring us with bad science fiction isn’t going to work, either:

Science fiction writers used to focus on the horrors of nuclear war and frightened the willies out of readers for many decades. Public worry much more intense than anything the greens can gin up never got the nuclear disarmament movement over the hump — not because nuclear war isn’t bad, or because people weren’t scared, but because the nuclear disarmament movement’s policy ideas emanated from the same cloud-cuckoo-land that the green fantasies do.

Panic doesn’t turn an unworkable policy agenda into something that people can actually do. It can waste a lot of energy and time and cause otherwise capable people to sink months or years of their lives into leprechaun chases, and it can cause pandering politicians to gesture in the direction of your agenda without ever actually doing anything significant — but that is all. And it is not much.

It is, after all, fiction. Sort of like Al Gore’s book, but more entertaining.

Weirdos

I agree, there’s nothing weird about going to strip clubs, particularly if you’re on the outs with the girlfriend (though I’m probably weird in that I’ve only done so once in my life, dragged there by some other guys), but thinking that Lady Gaga is hot pegs the weirdometer for me. As he says, she may be quite attractive if you toss her in a shower and get all the paint off her, but I don’t know who she’s trying to appeal to with her public persona.