On December 21 2016 23:48 JimmyJRaynor wrote: when the Berlin Wall fell every one thought Freedom/Capitalism won and Communism/Totalitarianism lost. The problem is the adults in the free world in 1989 worshipped communism and believed a planned economy and life were the way to go.
the millienials are the children of the most left-wing//socialist generation of North Americans ever.
you see it played out in hockey. Canada has the boring-est hockey teams with zero individualism and every one always playing in adherence to the "team system". Canadian teams play like the Soviet Union used to play. ZZZZZzzzzzz.....
Socialism//Communism is alive and well right here in NA.
our surrender was voluntary... Ronald Reagan was right.
we have been sentenced by our fathers and grandfathers to take the final steps towards a thousand years of darkness...
Quote The Raven, Nevermore.
Hey we won the last two world championship and the last two Olympic games, if that's communism I am ok with it! But seriously, communism is dead and buried 30 feet under, as someone who study a left wing matters (political science) in a left wing university, in a left wing city, in a left wing province, I can assure you that communism is super dead, there is barely a communism comity at my school.
Keynesian economics and other movement in the same area are not, but they are not that strong themselves, the left is mostly anarchism, direct democracy and social initiative, that in theory are the opposite of totalitarianism, in fact the biggest critique to these movement is the difficulty to make things go forward, because of the huge decision making time and the lack of an executive.
But that doesn't realy concern participation trophy, personally I love them because they gave every team chocolate medals at the end of our soccer seasons.
Where have you been reading that millennials are pussies due to participation trophies? I think criticism of participation trophies is in reaction to the "self-esteem movement", which posited that if you praise a kid enough and unconditionally (like handing out awards all the time), then they will become confident and flourish. There was a good article a few years ago saying that by praising kids for their intelligence, it actually makes them more risk averse and resistant to learning new things that they might fail at:
So perhaps people are perverting the ideas in that article, which seem to have a sound basis? On a personal note, growing up in American public school in the 80s and 90s, I definitely experienced some of the overboard participation award stuff. In school everyone would get stars and rewards, in sports everyone would get trophies. I received a lot of undeserved praise for intelligence and capability. I've definitely grown up with a "fixed intelligence" (as opposed to hard work) mindset, which I think has made me quit or avoid things that were hard, or that challenged my image of being perfect and competent. I'm sure it's not fair to lay the blame entirely on excessive praising and awarding in childhood, but that may have played a role, possibly a significant one. So I think you should ignore people that go overboard with the idea, or use it to bully you, but still recognize that there may be some truth at the bottom of it.
Communism is never dead. That's what the progressive movement is a front for. They are using Marxist tactics after they were taught critical theory and they are very anti-capitalist.
I suspect it depends on where you are. I believe Dunn and Shield found that 18% of social scientists self-identified as Marxist (not Leftist, but Marxist), compared to 5% that self-identified as conservative. That certainly matches my own experience in that my one sociology instructor was a flow blown Marxist- that's not me being interpretative or insulting. Pretty much first class or so, he explicitly said so and proceeded to spend the entire course pointing how Durkheim and the expensive textbook we bought were wrong and how Marx was right.
How well did the rest of the students take to it? Because I'm seeing more and more Marxists (progressives) asking people to educate themselves. And I genuinely think the humanities are no longer teaching in the best interests of the country.
Either way I recommend this to literally everyone on what's going on in the universities across the west. This Marxism shit has to stop. Don't worry, Joe Rogan doesn't talk at all. He just STFU's and listens for 99% of it.
We might be into the rabbit trails, but whatever. It's a blog.
I'm not really sure how the other students took to it. It was ten years ago when I was a year out of high school, and it was one of the classes that I didn't push back at the instructor. He was beloved amongst the students because he was a caustic, no-nonsense former logger, whose irreverence was in sharp contrast to the more ivory tower sorts. But enjoying a lecturer as a lecturer is different than agreeing with them, so I don't know.
Just tune it out. Millennials are less homophobic, less racist, less misogynist, less terrible people, are more cooperative, work together and are more socially conscientiousness and responsible. We are more commonly environmentally friendly and aware for our actions on other people.
Every generation has its collection of really hard workers who make the world a better place for everyone. There is nothing about 30 years ago that I look back at and say "yeah, they were just better people back then."
Besides, everyone knows a bunch of old people who can barely use a computer that take 3 days to do anything in the office that someone who's been there a week can do in an hour. There's nothing wrong with millennials. Wow weird, we expect respect from each other and treat people decently. Sorry that's offensive to a generation of people who thought it was okay to call people faggots and ostracize their peers. Hell, not long ago if you were anything like smart you got beat up and called a nerd or a suck. Wow those were the times.
Yeah, it burns me up too when I think about it Coddled... what a joke, coming from the generation that enjoyed the most economic prosperity in recent history.
I have a bag of 8th/9th/10th place ribbons somewhere from the one summer when my parents thought it would be a good idea to try to get me to do this "swimming" thing.
I think the root of the problem is probably more in line with the repercussions of cultural integration and mass consumption of media and entertainment.
Parents collectively realized how utterly shit their kids are when exposed to the talent and diversity of the children highlighted on the world stage, instead of say.. 100 years ago when it was just a handful of idiot savant children around the local town.
So parents started to hand out participation trophies to dull the stinging reminders of mediocrity they are bombarded with on a daily basis.
In youth hockey in the United States, a typical travel team will do 3+ tournaments in a season and those tournaments mostly try to put equal skilled teams together. So you get a group of 4-5 shitty teams together and one of them ends up with a first place trophy and another ends up with a second place trophy. Those trophies fool the kids.
Yes, they had to earn them and be the best of 4 or 5 teams. However, we're talking about groups where each team is the 3rd or lower in their organization for their age. Every organization in the state can put out a team that would crush all of the teams in the lower brackets. You can be really crappy at hockey, but your team can have a good weekend compared to normal and get 1st place. That's a form of participation trophy that has seeped into our culture.
I don't know that it's a bad thing. Dangling the carrot just in front of someone's face is a lot better for development than saying there's a carrot 100 miles away so go get it. Most will never even try.
However, I think a lot of people see the sheer volume of trophies and awards and look at them as participation awards. If you just hang around for a little bit, you'll end up with some 1st or 2nd place trophies without needing any real amount of skill. That's different from back in the day when these opportunities to get trophies were so much rarer and you probably had to be the best in the area to get one.
i think participation awards are more of a scapegoat for a larger movement against the pc crowd and "wussifying" of american culture. its not that big of a deal, but it does, in my opinion limit the potential for kids with talent that want to pursue that which is beyond the skill of their town.
I think participation awards get a bad rep. Especially in American culture, confidence plays such a big role in one's chances for success. It would be ridiculous not to try and inflate your child's confidence, since it would give them an advantage whether or not that confidence is deserved.
The problem is not with coddling, or communism, or anything else ridiculous like that. The problem is the role of confidence in American culture, specifically the value it places in confidence over... pretty much anything else of substance. I mean, having low self esteem isn't helpful, but neither is being wilfully ignorant of one's limitations (even if only temporary ones). I think it's often missed how much more emphasis is placed on one's level confidence in the US even compared to other English speaking western countries, which i think are culturally the most comparable.
In that sort of pervasive culture, where confidence and thinking highly of one's self is as important as it is, it would be a disservice NOT to award participation trophies frankly.
I'd draw the parallel to achievements in games. Most are no more than participation trophies. You built 10 drones. Huzzah! Have an achievement. Dafuq?
Some are actual achievements, and people soon figure out which are actually merit based and which are just stupid frills. For instance, in WoW there were achievement runs for raids which were actually hard. They made you do the fight in a way that intentionally gimped your team. Others were simply hard because you had to complete the fight fast. And there was, in fact, a lot of backlash when the rewards for such achievements were still available after it became easy to complete them (but luckily, there were always new things for the best players to prove they were still the best).
Now back to Millennials. I do think Millennials are a bit too sheltered. But I don't think it has to do with participation trophies, education, or anything like that. Millennials are the first generation in history to grow up without some extreme trauma going on. Our parents were mostly born post-war, but there was still scarcity from the war, and rebuilding of the economy going on, and of course, the cold war was full swing. For us born in the 80s and 90s, the cold war was at an end (I can vaguely remember the Berlin wall falling, but I was 8 at the time), the economy was booming througout our youth, and most importantly: serious infectious diseases are all but wiped out in the developed world, and anything that might take some hard manual labor is done by a machine. Additionally, our governments were fairly sane, so the worst thing we worried they'd do was raise taxes (or stop spending on whatever project you were interested in).
If a whole generation doesn't even know what hardship is, can you blame them for thinking that a terrorist blowing up a building is the worst possible thing that could possibly happen ever? We were taught about the horrors of fascism and communism at school. We were taught the horrors of slavery, and epidemics.
Some of us travelled around, and saw that there are still horrific places on this world. But not in the developing world. And it's quite possible that pain and misery actually make a people stronger. At least they have something to strive for: never feel that pain and misery again.
Or maybe, I'm just bullshitting. Who knows, really. Just live your life the way you feel you should.
EPT
Coddled... what a joke, coming from the generation that enjoyed the most economic prosperity in recent history.
