Well, I thought about starting a new thread to address the "kids are pussies" and "boys suck!" tangents we now have, but I figure that we're probably through offering sympathies over this young lady's unfortunate murder. This seems to be the direction of this thread now, so here we are.
Aside from the fact that pussification is probably not the primary factor in what went down here, I'm still interested in the phenomenon, and particularly how it might relate to situations such as this. This is a relatively new phenomenon, and I'm not real sure we know how it will play out, particularly since we haven't seen much in the way of consequences that can readily be applied without some pretty wild assumption. It seems to me that the situation prior to what we're calling the entitlement generation was, as GMD put it, suck it up and be a man. Well, that mentality also seems to have led to a lot of violence, as well. I see two issues here. For one thing, do we see as many people nowadays beating the shit out of their wives and kids? Seems like that might well have been a consequence of raising your kids to be John Wayne. It's possible that the kinder, gentler approach might actually be having positive effects on some violent tendencies, but it's still pretty early (keep in mind that the old school, be a man approach was around for generations--we're still pretty early into the be a pussy era). Also, as I've noted many times before, stabbing somebody because they pissed you off isn't exactly a new phenomenon. This has always happened. It does occur to me that the entitlement aspect might be providing yet another reason for people to snap, but as Rumbo put it, the snapping is a superficial aspect. It's resorting to stabbiness that's the bigger problem and that's something far deeper.
Now on to boys suck!
No, we shouldn't give up that easily with "the kid was just evil". This is a symptom of a bigger problem, and the problem is that today's teenage boys are raised to be more violent and entitled than ever before. Yes, boys in specific, I'm tired of seeing everyone skirting around this explanation all the time. I'll be the last to pull the "this generation" card, but the rates of rape and assault in college, all of the school shootings (it's ALWAYS a 20-something dude coming from a relatively privileged background, that is, he's white, who is "an outcast"), the sort of behaviour I see from dudes in the streets at night time all the fucking time, their yelling and screaming and breaking bottles and fist fights that break out literally every night, their lack of filter, it all points to the fact that they're the first to bring a knife to a fist fight.
And they never get punished for it, in the sense that they never get told "this is wrong and this is disgusting and you were fully aware of what you were doing". It's always "mental illness, they were such good boys, they were such good football players, if only that person didn't say no to them/if only that person didn't anger them". If they rape a girl in college, they get sympathetic coverage on CNN, and the hacker that exposed them gets a longer prison sentence than them. If they blow up marathon runners, they get sympathetic coverage in Rolling Stone. It's always "senseless violence", when in fact we do have a type of person that commits most of these horrible crimes over petty things that usually get in the news. It's a young dude that gets everything he wants.
The point is, today's good boys are the ones that don't soak up the socialization they're subjected under in the society we're currently living in (masculinity is "testosterone", "action", detachedness, lack of empathy because empathy is "gay", there is no such thing as not getting the girl). And there is a lot of them, don't get me wrong, we have many examples on this forum. But I think we're all a little too closed up in our circle of good kids to look outside into the real world and see how they behave. I think most of our youngsters would agree that there is a reason they avoid the usual club/rave/get drunk and party scene, and I think most of you fogeys would agree that it wasn't like that when you were growing up.
I'm not trying to detract from a serious issue and one that I know is very important to you. However I think you're taking a somewhat myopic approach. It's not that boys are being raised differently. Everybody is growing up differently because of a variety of factors, only a few of which are related to parenting. Society is changing and that change is occurring across the board. I'm not going to turn this into a "what about girls!" rant because I don't want anybody to think that I'm trying to deflect blame (which I'm not). Suffice it to say there are plenty of instances where their behavior is similarly abhorrent. What I will say is that rather than blaming parents or even the sensationalistic media for turning modern boys into douchebags, we should be looking at ourselves. While the media does do plenty to foster changes in behavior, it's also a reflection of society, as made up by young people, modern parents, and us old fucks. Society as a whole is changing, and like most things, there will be good changes and bad changes. As for the rape aspect of those changes, I'm not sure how things are in the rest of the world since the UCR is strictly an American thing, but over here at least, rape is on a rather nice downward decline. Since you're citing notable examples that get national news, I suspect you're referring to some American crime in your post, and part of the reason those are national news is because they're becoming less common. I'm not saying that these sorts of scumbags don't exist, they do, but as GMD suggested I think they're more the exception than the rule since we're all being exposed to what's around us and most people aren't completely antisocial.
Topic: More Senseless Violence (Read 2392 times)
