5 Ways We Ruined the Occupy Wall Street Generation
At this moment, a whole lot of people, most of them 15 to 20 years younger than me, are protesting in every major city. What are they angry about? A lot of things, some of which are partially my fault.
See, I'm a part of Generation X, the post-Baby Boom era kids who grew up on a mental diet of Beavis and Butthead and Alice in Chains. We wrote poems about how angry we were at our fathers, wore goatees like weapons and made panties burst into flames by playing Pearl Jam's Black on our acoustic guitars. We were a bridge from the Baby Boomers to all you guys who are in high school and college now. And I'm pretty sure we fucked up that handoff pretty badly.
This is not a sarcastic apology, I'm not a big enough dick to write all of this as a backhanded insult about how lazy and entitled you are. Because you're not.
I'm honestly apologizing for ...
#5. Making You Ashamed to Take Manual Labor Jobs
During one "Occupy Wall Street" protest, somebody from the Chicago Board of Trade dumped McDonald's applications on the protesters. This made me think of a viral Facebook post that David Wong showed me the other day:
Via Weknowmemes.com
If you know who that came from, we'd love to give him/her credit for the post. And a high five or something.
Because yes, you guys are getting hammered for being too lazy or "entitled" to take on a low-paying job, and for standing up and demanding help paying for college, etc., instead of just being happy "flipping burgers." People my age and older will go on and on about how in our day we weren't too good to get our hands dirty when the good jobs dried up.
But I'm pretty sure we taught you the opposite of that. And the Baby Boomers taught us.
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"Lesson 12: When you have brown people over, always smile. They can sense your fear."
See, we were raised on 1980s movies and sitcoms, and the "cold, unfeeling grownup who works too hard" was the villain in half of them. The whole point of these "body switching" comedies -- where a kid winds up in the body of a grownup -- was that the career-driven workaholic dad learned what life was really all about. The message was clear: If you work too hard, you'll lose your soul.
The characters who worked their asses off were shown to be stiff prudes who come down on the lighthearted main character with an iron fist. Or maybe that person is the main character, but by the end they realize that the only way to truly enjoy life is to lighten up and embrace their inner child. They finally stand up and quit their grindstone job in a hail of applause, and live a life of stress free bliss. As a side note, at some point, those people had to urinate ... so the little kid trapped in the dad's body was physically handling his dad's cock. That image is on the house -- you're welcome.
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By the time the Grunge Era came around, the "slacker" and "loser" characters were heroes, the guys who knew that life was really all about having fun. We were a self-depreciating group of people who proudly declared that we were what our parents always wanted to be: laid back and carefree. "Loser" and "slacker" were terms of endearment. We knew that the whole suit-and-tie job was a one way ticket to becoming Principal Vernon from The Breakfast Club. So many of us ended up slacking our way into fast food jobs. We were the guys from Clerks.
Flash forward a couple of decades, and most of us are now parents. We've since found out that there's not much market for making a really good honey bear bong or winning a contest for having the dirtiest flannel shirt (first place four years running, thank you very much). We've cut our hair, bought some decent work clothes and moved on -- lesson learned. But that fast food job stuck with us. It became a scare tactic to use on our own kids. We want them to have something better.
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"When we smile, it means that something that was recently inside of us ... is now inside your pizza."
But here's the thing: Those Baby Boomers who started this "you don't want to flip burgers" bullshit did flip burgers. Or roof houses, or mine coal, or wax porn stars' assholes. And that wasn't something to be ashamed of back then -- that was the era before you needed a bachelor's degree to get a job waiting tables (but more on that in a moment). But at some point between my grandfather's time and now, getting your hands dirty became something to be ashamed of. My generation perpetuated that. We made it socially unacceptable to:
A) Do any job that requires sweat and/or a uniform.
B) Work 70-hour weeks to get ahead.
So if you don't do either of those things, what's left? Getting an education and waiting for a good job in your field. But now, when we catch you doing that, we mock you and tell you to go flip burgers. And that's bullshit. We told you your whole lives that those jobs were for idiots and failures. You think you're too good for those jobs because that's what we've been fucking telling you since birth.
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"Give me shit all you want -- my car has gas and my fridge is full of stolen chicken."
#4. Implying That College Would Guarantee You a Good Job
Last month, I overheard a conversation between a steakhouse waiter and an older couple he was serving. He knew the couple, but not intimately. They politely asked how his classes were coming along, and he said that he had in fact graduated with a degree in architecture. For the next several minutes, the old couple awkwardly tried to reassure him that something would come along while he attempted to justify to them why he was serving steaks for a living.
It was painfully clear that he felt like a failure, and that he dreaded having this conversation with every older member of his family he encountered. Having to put a positive spin on his own life, trying to reassure them that he wasn't a failure, or lazy, or hadn't dropped out of society due to a drug problem. Yes, I did get my degree. No, they're not hiring.
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"I cannot only tell you the year, but I can break down its exact molecular composition."
So, here's the thing. You have to go to college. Your parents told you that, I'm telling my kids that. Every high school teacher you have or had told you that. ("You don't want to wind up flipping burgers, do you?")
And they're not wrong; if I'm an employer looking at 200 applications to fill one job, and 50 of them have bachelor's degrees, those are going to be the ones I move to the top of the pile, even if the job is that poor bastard who shakes a sign outside of Little Caesars.
The problem is that we've sort of set you up to think that after high school, the next step is college, and after that you just jump in and start working at the job you went to college for. We kind of implied that this "college to job" transition is as natural and orderly as "high school to college." That is, if you get the right grades, you "graduate" to it. That's not true, and it's our fault that so many of you think that.
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"A master's in psychology? Pretty impressive. How would you say that qualifies you to answer the phone?"
See, our parents told us that because they didn't actually know. As a generalized whole, they didn't go to college. You have to realize how recent the whole "everybody goes to college" thing really is. It was only two generations ago that college educations were rare -- in 1950, less than 10 percent of adults had bachelor's degrees (hell, only half even graduated high school). People back then were less mobile and more likely to stay in the town where they were born. That meant that their options were limited; men joined the military, or went to work at the local factory/warehouse/whatever was hiring. Women got busy having babies and being waitresses/secretaries/whatever was hiring. College was something that smart kids and people with money did. And they probably thought those college kids had a free ticket to a nice job in an air-conditioned office.
So when they worked hard and gave their kids the opportunity to get a degree, they thought they were giving us what those fancy smart kids got: an automatic job with a hotass secretary to feel up. Sexual harassment wasn't a thing yet.
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It was considered more of a perk than assault.
Now everybody has a degree. It's the baseline minimum. So when you finally take those first steps out of university life and enter the work field, it's an absolute system shock to find out your $30,000 to $100,000+ bachelor's degree doesn't guarantee you a position in your field of study ... possibly ever. At least 40 percent of you who get degrees will wind up in jobs that don't require a degree at all. And the rest will wind up in jobs outside the field they studied.
Again, it's not that you shouldn't get a degree. Far from it. It's that the system we've declared to be the default also happens to be fucked. And not in the good way ... in the "chick breaks a porn record" way. You're not going to use 90 percent of what you learn.
I have dozens of examples of this in my inbox right now. People who have been where I've been -- poor and struggling, willing to do whatever it takes to get out of that soul-crushing hole. After years of it, they finally have enough and decide to go back to college. So I ask, "OK, that's a good idea -- then what?" And they don't know. They hadn't considered that even after graduation, they might be in exactly the same position as they are right now ... plus another $50,000 worth of debt. Nobody told them, or at least didn't tell them loud enough.
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"BRING LUBE!"
So, yes, you're frustrated and angry about that. You have a right to be.
#3. Adding Seven More Years to Being a Teenager
In my parents' day, it was always just sort of assumed that at age 18, you pack your shit and get the hell out of the house. Go back 40 years and you find everybody getting drafted into the military at that age (Vietnam and before that, Korea, and before that, World War II). When you got back, you started having babies. So if you were still living at home at age 25, they made you stay in the attic and told the neighbors you had died from tuberculosis.
Things started to change with the "everybody goes to college" era. Going to college means you're probably not supporting yourself, you're living in temporary student housing and your parents keep your old bedroom in place for when you come back for the summer. So then if you don't get a job out of college, you're right back home at age 23, possibly still sleeping on a bed shaped like the Millennium Falcon.
Via Thechive.com
OK, so I actually would own that, even as a successful adult.
So now you guys are living in a world where kids don't move away from Mom and Dad until their mid 20s to lower 30s. And it's the same story with marriage -- today you tend to marry in your late 20s, as opposed to my parents' generation, who did so five years earlier.
But this has created a very annoying, ugly side effect in the culture: the phenomenon of the immature Man-Child. The twenty-something dude with his collection of anime action figures, the guy pushing 30 who's still sticking it out with his garage band and spends his nights getting in screaming matches with teenagers on XBox Live, the hipster who spends 80 percent of his income on wacky ironic clothes and mustache growth supplements.
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This man gets no apology. He brought that upon himself.
In other words, we've extended the awkward teenage years into the mid to late 20s. Now, I would not be apologizing for this if it was just the result of social and economic factors outside our control. But the problem is that we made a hero of that person. Think Kelso in That '70s Show, or Joey from Friends. My generation aspired to be that guy, the kid in a grownup body with simple, childish appetites and aspirations. I was that guy for years -- a dude can get very popular doing that.
But let me tell you from experience, the longer you put off adulthood, the harder the transition is.
And staying home longer does delay it -- a huge part of becoming an adult is living on your own and finding out through trial and error what works, living through seemingly simple things like balancing your budget, cooking your own meals and learning how to get blood stains out of your ceiling without repainting.
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Long story.
And what's going to happen is you're going to run into a whole lot of people who still judge you according to the age scale set by my parents' generation -- that you should have your shit together by 23.
So you grow up in a culture that tells you maturity is for boring assholes, and then suddenly you get dumped into a world that expects maturity.
I'll be honest, when it comes to your last point, I WANT the social awkwardness and inability to deal with social settings to become common-place. You know why? Because people like myself will stop getting hell for it when it does. I wouldn't be the person I am today if it weren't for the majority not being like that, and tormenting me for years because I am bad in social situations (which, of course, made me even worse in situations). Normally, that statement is something positive, but honestly? I don't like the person I am today. I'm paranoid, secretive, really screwed up (no, I'm not going to give a list of examples from my thoughts, but I will say that I have interests that, while there are entire websites devoted to, there's also at least a 7th of the population who would not care if I was killed over them, and drawn examples which harm nobody are illegal in Canada) and really bad at human interaction, all because I was a bit different from my peers, so they tormented me for it. So you know what? Everyone should be a bit more socially awkward. It would deal with the sociopaths the school system is creating (and employing, seeing as one teacher tormented me and wished death upon me to my face).
ReplyMy mother told me my whole life: "you have to go to college, you have to leave this town". So I did. I spent my life studying. I only had 2 good jobs that had nothing to do with my studies (the rest was pure shit). Today I'm overqualified for any job so I´m unemployed of course. And I live in another country. I thought it was differente for you in US. Damn globalization.
ReplyCheese, you´re great.
Thanks - now you're making sense.
ReplySo going $150,000 into debt at 21 with no job prospects is a good idea?
ReplyBorrowing money for a business, home or car are not bad ideas if you have a job, have saved money for a down payment and have a plan for paying it off.
You do live in a much tougher, more difficult time so for god's sake don't start out your life by making disastrous financial decisions.
And read Hidden Agenda's reply to our last discourse.
* sorry about the commas A.D.D.
No college student is 150k in debt at 21. Only private med school is that expensive. The vast majority of student loans come under 50k. And those people who did take on massive student loans are fools. They'd be terrible with money regardless of whether they went to college or not.
@monkey314159 - don't forget that $50K in debt ends up being way, way, waaaaaay more than $50K by the time you have finally paid it off. I have been out of college for almost 9 years, and in that time I've paid off about $10K of the original $50K that I owed... and I also paid $10K IN m***********g INTEREST. Yes, as much interest as principle. Few things make me want to live on this miserable f*****g planet less than this. It's f*****g criminal, and I do, sincerely, wish I had paid more attention to the numbers before I took these predatory loans and got a degree I never ended up using anyway.
Thanks doxie - well said.
Reply Hide All See All 4 Repliesmonkey - point taken about homework but the rest of your argument is horseshit.
What I'm driving at is for people to stop falling into traps set by predatory money lenders. They will walk you down the primrose path then stick it in and break it off.
Predatory lending and gullible, starry-eyed buyers enabled by corrupt lawmakers in Washington are what caused the housing market crash. The same dynamic is what has caused the student loan crisis -- easy loans are the main reason college tuition has gone through the roof. And guess who's left holding the bag?
To avoid "sweeping generalizations" my comments aren't aimed at sensible, practical young people who work, save and pay as they go. I'm talking about incredibly gullible kids who are utterly lacking in common sense being taken for saps by banks and corporations. What is truly baffling is that these youngsters apparently have no adult, parent or older person to warn them against the danger of what they've done. If you can't afford college - don't go!
Maybe a few kids will read these posts and be forewarned and not make the same terrible mistake of falling into financial disaster before their 21st birthday.
Go ahead and cut down this post if you like but it's the goddam truth and I know and you know it.
p.s. apologies to all those with self-induced A.D.D. annoyed by more than two sentences at a time.
SERMON OVER
Shuttup.
Uh no, it's pretty relevant. We spend a lot of time traveling from building to building and doing mundane, but need to be done things.
Also, by your logic taking out a loan to start a business, getting a mortgage for a house, or getting a loan for a car are bad ideas. Borrowing money = the creation of money. It's how this economy works. The biggest reason there was a push for the $700 billion bailout (that really isn't a bailout) was because commercial papers stopped being issued. Commercial papers = loans.
"Predatory lending and gullible, starry-eyed buyers enabled by corrupt lawmakers in Washington are what caused the housing market crash." Lawmakers had little/almost nothing to do with it. Investments banks and insurance companies completely ignored their internal controls. Some internal controls were reporting 80% of loans were defective. Companies aim for less than 2% bad loans. People who worked in internal controls who kept raising their voice to the problem ended up being laid off.
We live in a completely different time. Being average will no longer get you an average house, average job, average living standard. You need a specialized career. One where you are better than 98% of the population at it in order to get an average job.
It's not my self-induced A.D.D. that annoyed me, it's your grotesque lack of commas for any purpose other than separating listed items.
Downvoted for not knowing what ADD means. People with ADD don't have problems paying attention, love long arguments, and tend to be long-winded. So by your logic, you're the ADD one.
This is an awesome, spot on article. It's about damn time somebody stood up and said all of this.
ReplyThank you, John Cheese.
ReplyThere are 3,504 Comments!? People, get the f**k back to work!
ReplyIn regards to #2: About 7 years ago, I was at The Bobber (a truck stop/cafe that serves alright food that mostly caters to old white hillbilly truck drivers) in the town that I lived in (Population, 6,000-ish in Missouri) and they had like 20 copies of Straight Outta Comtpon. And it was awesome.
ReplyI agree with what tmarcl said: low-wage jobs can be extremely stressful and demoralizing. It's not just that you can't make enough money to pay simple bills, but that you're often treated like crap.
Reply Hide All See All 4 RepliesI once worked in a local grocery store as a cake decorator. The last year that I worked there, my immediate supervisor convinced the store owner to allow her to break her two weeks of vacation into single days off that she could take at any time. Then she scheduled herself a bunch of four-day weekends from October to December--our busiest time. My department was also running with about half its normal staff, half of those were new employees who needed to be trained, and we had no assistant manager. I was only making $7 an hour, yet it became my responsibility to do both my work and the manager's work while she was gone. If I didn't get around to putting away the delivered bakery items in the morning, stock boys showed up at my counter to snarl at me. If I didn't have cake orders done on time, or was too busy to wait on everyone, customers snarled at me. When the owner came by asking for the upteenth time why my manager wasn't working on a Friday afternoon and I explained why, he snarled at me. And if my manager returned on Monday to find one thing undone, she snarled at me. In fact, she told a customer (to my face!) it was my fault that their pizza order wasn't made on time, when her job was to make the pizza, not mine! Yet I still worked like a dog everyday and went home filthy and exhausted.
After making several complaints about the situation to the store's general manager (with no change) and watching my mental health circle the drain, I finally quit. I was living with my in-laws at the time because my husband and I(recently married) couldn't afford our own place, but I also didn't make enough money for psychotherapy, and I was starting to fear that I might snap and kill someone. Being utterly broke turned out to less stressful than working that job. In fact, I had nightmares about working there for the next four years of my life.
The really sad part? I had just graduated college with my B.A.--summa c*m laude, top 1% of my class.
Crikey...
Not to minimize your experience, but corporate desk jobs aren't necessarily any better. We've all had our horror stories at work. Sure, I definitely make more than $7/hr - I'm not flush with cash but don't need to worry about money. But there's a lot more accountability attached to me and my success ultimately depends on everyone else working hard and doing the right thing in addition to me.
There're s****y jobs at the bottom of the pay scale and s****y jobs near the top. I think the point of the article is more that we've made it absolutely unacceptable to do anything that's really productive, because it's supposedly demeaning. Which it isn't at all.
Not at all intending a judgement of you kelsey, or offering advice here, but
I would have demanded my job description to be updated, with appropriate pay rise, in the process of quitting... and of course it's easy for a faceless entity on the internet to look at someone else's experience and say "I woulda"... but i woulda...
I mean if you're doing things that aren't part of your actual job, taking crap for someone else's incompetences, and being treated as an underling, to the point of diminishing your mental health, AND *you're going to quit anyways* over it... might as well make formal (and legal) demands instead of formal complaints that are being ignored.
@ NarfleAGarthok... You might 'think' you have a 'shit job', but at least you're not being paid an unlivable wage to *literally* shovel the s**t out of the back of a malfunctioning grocery (rotting 'food') dumpster, while being treated as a dispensable piece of property. You wouldn't say that this is demeaning? AYFKM?
Getting treated like a piece of s**t *because* the job you work pays an unlivable wage and you're below the poverty line so you need it?
NOT-DEMEANING? Do you need to read the definition so you can refresh your memory?
@Hidden Agenda, the store owner and managers made it pretty clear at every staff meeting that no underling was to have a clear-cut title or limited responsibilities. If a customer came to my counter asking for help in the produce aisle (clear across the store), I was expected to stop what I was doing and help. The owners would not promote me to assistant manager because I was the best cake decorator they had, and I wouldn't have been able to make cakes with the assistant manager's schedule and responsibilities.
I asked for raises several times, but it was only that last year that the owners considered raising my pay. (When I first started working there as a full-time college freshman, I made $6 an hour.) They said they would raise my pay to $8 an hour by Christmas IF my skills improved, I kept the displays nice, and I kept the cases clean and full at all times. With the situation with my manager, though, that was pretty much impossible. And I think that's the way they wanted it. This also happened in a state with loose labor laws, so I had no legal standing to demand anything. "Pay me more or I'll quit" or "Stop this unbearable situation or I'll quit" didn't work on those people. Believe me, I tried.
tmarcl - say what you want but taking on $50,000-$150,000 in debt before even starting a career is still about the dumbest goddam thing I've ever heard.
Reply Hide All See All 5 RepliesLet's do a little simple math - there's 168 hours in a week - if you subtract 18 hours for course load, 40 hours for full-time job and 56 hours for sleeping (8 hours per night) that still leaves 54 free hours (almost 8 hours per day) free time.
As far as my own experience, I worked and saved for almost 5 years before even entering college and paid for college with cash because the thought of going into debt was completely unthinkable. Of course that was in the mid-70's when tuition was $1800 dollars a year and there was still some sanity left in this crazy world.
1. You didn't add time for the amount you're suppose to do out of class. 18 hours in class = 36 hours out of class. You can make that 3 hours out of class for graduate level courses.
2. You forgot time spent traveling. We can't magically teleport from one place to another.
3. Time spent doing lots of other stuff: eating, shitting, cleaning, showering, excersizing, sports, clubs, shopping, etc.
You're now left with 0 hours of free time and you only get to sleep 6 hours a night.
^ true story
@monkey, "eating shitting cleaning showering exercising sports clubs shopping etc" sounds like "free time" stuff.. some of those things aren't even necessary... Who really needs to exercise or shower that f*****g much anyways? Lift some weights and get your burn in less than 10 minutes, 2x a week... If you spend more than 5 minutes in the shower, you're a waster... If you spend more than 10 minutes on the toilet in a given day, I don't even know what to say. Eat on the go, simple solution. You can do it while you're NOT magically teleporting from one place to another. Sports? Shopping? Those are ALWAYS going to be things you need to do in your free time so get a grip. You're basically whining about the privilege of higher education.
tlp2001 - I think you missed the whole point of the article. You could do this back in the 70's, but what you suggest is impossible today. There is absolutely no way you could get a job with only a high school diploma that would allow you to pay for your basic living expenses AND save enough money for college in only 5 years. $1800 a year? Try $1800 for ONE class. That is what we are facing today. I know, inflation and all that... but it hasn't gone up that much.
Now the only way to get a 4 year degree is to
a) have parents who can pay for it
b) get scholarships to cover it (better be valedictorian or star football quarterback)
c) take out student loans
You really annoy me. Did you read the introduction to this? Boomers are so self righteous.
"I'm talking about kids, on their own, getting in trouble and setting things on fire. Kid stuff."
ReplyBest line ever. And so true too.
You, sir, deserve a Pulizer prize. Honestly.
ReplyAs the cracked commentators bravely made sweeping generalizations of whole generations and political parties, completely unaware that what they hate so much (right wingers calling them whiny pussies) is exactly what they themselves were doing.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesDid you even RTFA?
You clearly did not RTFA. Sorry RTFA and try again.
> talking about the retards here in the comment section, not the article sperglord.
Jesus. So this is the reason I'm crying over the push for college.
ReplyI've worked a job flipping burgers. Unless things have changed in the last 20 years, trust me, if you can at all avoid it, you don't want to do it. While individual managers may be decent, as a whole, they treat you like a slave. You are to be efficient and *always* able to perform your task correctly. Always be available for the entire time the restaurant is open, if you want to change your times available (the so-called "flexible hours" they offer), prepare to have your hours cut, drastically (I went from an average of 35 hours a week to 20 - when you're working a minimum wage job, that's a lot!)
ReplyBeyond this, don't ever, Ever, EVER argue with a customer, even if the customer is treating you like garbage. Keep in mind, for every one of you, there are literally a dozen or more applications sitting in a drawer to replace you.
So unless things have changed drastically in the industry in the last 20 years, I would rather be homeless on the street than work "flipping burgers."
#5 is pretty true, and it's become problematic for farmers. When Arizona was cracking down on illegal immigration, a lot of farmers were upset not at the loss of cheap labor, but that they were losing the only people willing and able to do the job. Seriously, one guy was paying ten dollars an hour to anyone picking crops in his fields and he still found himself hiring a bunch of illegals.
ReplyI've got to call bull on #5. I work in manual labor jobs, and could never deal with a desk job. It is easy to say that most young people don't want to work in blue collar jobs, but the fact is that the pay is crap. When this generation's parents were growing up, they were paid higher when adjusted for inflation. It used to be that a father could work, and the family could afford to have the mother stay home to watch the kids. For example, I worked in the same factory that my father did. Whereas he started his job 22 years before I did, adjusting for inflation, he made $25 an hour starting, while I made $9.75. Same job, same company, less than 40% the pay. (BTW, this is a highly successful company, not some place flailing and waiting for someone to put a bullet in it.) Nowadays, both parents have to work, and still barely make ends meet. Oh, and now they also have to pay for daycare just so the mother can work. I'm not saying that I have any problem with anyone getting rich, but the top tier seem to be getting a hell of a lot richer, all while telling the rest of us that we're the ones who have to make sacrifices.
Reply Hide All See All 4 RepliesYou do have a point, a person could get by a lot easier with such a job several decades ago. And a lot of things were cheaper, even when adjusting for inflation. However, I think the point Cheese was trying to make was that many members of this generation aren't willing to work manual labor jobs because they think they're too good for it. Even a teenager whose parents already pay for everything, and is only getting a job for extra money and not to live off of, refuses to do such jobs because he grew up being told that flipping burgers and working in a factory were jobs for losers who can't get anything better. And they decide that having no job is better than having a "loser" job.
Yeah marshmallowpie, I do kind of agree with the statement that a lot of them don't want to work, but I also think that much of the OWS backlash is directed at the hippie element that accompanies the movement. Let's face it, the hippies that were shown on TV probably weren't working anyways. However, I attended one rally, and most of the people I met there were employed and would show up after work (both white and blue collar) to lend support. I also saw a camera crew focussing on a drum circle and a girl in four foot long dreads dancing to the music in her head. A lot of this seems to be focussing on the relatively small element who treat it like a Phish concert. It does seem to be another occurrance of older people shaking their fists at "young punks" and saying "You don't know how good you have it!" Which older people have been doing since man started walking upright, which enabled us to make fists.
@zunkie: How much of that is the same as the attention focused on the more radical element of the Tea Party? Normal people upset at the status quo (on either side of the political spectrum) just doesn't sell newspapers as well as "hippies protest meanie rich people" or "rednecks protest big government," I guess.
The whole issue with the Occupy is that 1% of the population controls 40% of the wealth. Making the assumption that "a lot of them don't want to work" is not only totally unfounded, it completely misses the entire point.
Good job Doc, you tell 'em. Nuttin' worse than the dreaded ad hominem attack.
ReplyAd Hominem attacks are the refuge of a scoundrel. When a cur can't or won't engage the substantive political positions of an opponent, attacking them as people, as human beings, is an easy, cowardly and dishonest alternative.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesCollege may not guarantee a good job. But it does teach people that ad hominem arguments are fallacious and unfair. Why?
Ad hominem arguments are fallacious for the same reason that character evidence isn't admissible in criminal trials. The fact that a person is normally X doesn't mean they didn't do Y. Good people make bad arguments, bad people make good arguments.
The fact is some pretty honorable, decent people made some fucked up arguments. Oliver Wendell Holmes was pretty honorable, but he said "three generations of idiots are enough" in Buck v. Bell. Good man, a*****e thing to hold.
Many people think Colin Powell is a good guy. But he went to the UN and lied his ass off about WMD. Good man to many, utter lies.
Most of the main comlaints of the Occupy movement have strong empirical and historical support. 1. Inequality, homelessness, hunger, debt, and unemployment are either increasing or too high. 2. The political parties, our Presidents, Congress, and the political system are controlled more by elites than ordinary people. 3. Crony capitalism has removed risk for capitalists (the moral hazard problem), while increasing and shifting risk to everyone else. 4. Trillions that should have been used for things like education and infrastructure, have been used to bail out failed corporations, contrary to market principles. 5. Rather than wasting trillions rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan, the trillions should have been used here.
You may not agree with all of these propositions, but facts support them and they are all arguable. It doesn't matter why people are making these arguments.
That 2+2=4 is true whether the person making the statement is a good person or not.
Ad hominem arguments are fallacious. Stop making them.
If something is factually true, it doesn't matter
IS that chickenscratch English?
You write like a Welshman.
I learned about ad hominems in "high-school", actually.