Music Talk Board

Well, I now live in a full-on Conservative country (hurhur implying the Lib Dems had a say in the coalition). My previously labour constituency is mow Tory, too. Funny that, considering there is a large Scottish populace here (often referred to as the second Scotland). I voted Labour, so my vote was wasted thanks to first past the post. I'm pretty bummed, honestly, because the Tory's plans are pretty terrible IMO.

Though Nigel Farage losing his seat was great because I have a friend that worships him, oddly enough, and seeing his world fall around was kinda satisfying. Though the fact UKIP got 3 million votes but 1 seat is crazy, it's relief from my point because UKIP want nothing more than to destroy everyone but the 1%. Still stupidly undemocratic though.

This is going to be a largely bloggy rant about my view on society as a whole, and largely applies to the Millennial generation that I have a negative viewpoint over that has accumulated on UG, many other online communities, and I guess society in general.

A lot of these problems are thanks to parents from Generation X in creating the problems with Millennials. What you’ll probably see as a reoccurring theme that I will constantly revisit and address is based around the concept of me either agreeing with an ideology or movement at face value, but either disagreeing with, or being critical against the execution or result of said ideology or movement. This  is something people are terrible at reading, and view me as criticizing the entire movement/ideology.

So what we have with Millennials are people born out of the political correctness (PC) era in schools, mixed with the rise of post-modernism. So in the PC era, the Gen Xers are pushing an agenda of increasing tolerance towards things. So we’re trying to move towards Tumblr’s favorite thing of being against the “white male patriarchy” and trying to push forward acceptance of an increasing prominence of females in society, and supporting minorities, LGBT, and the handicapped.

Well you’re probably wondering “why do you have a problem with this?” and “well clearly there’s still problems with these marginalized groups”. So here’s where the Gen X parents fucked up. So they attempted this, but largely fucked it up. So what really happened is that they were more afraid of offending people and instead went and also threw in ignoring personality/social problems, and started going around telling children that they’re all “special snowflakes” and anything and everything they do is special, which is why they’re special. This is also born out of the increasing number helicopter parents.

This really only applied to well-to-do families, and created a disparity from other socio-economic groups who don’t/can’t identify with these special snowflake traits. We also have born out of this is what are called trophy kids, who attend extra-curricular activities and win trophies for merely attending these activities, thus adding to special snowflake syndrome. For these other socio-economic groups, it’s not like their Generation X parents didn’t view them as special snowflakes, or trophy worthy, it’s just that they lacked the income or resources to do so.

As a result, we created a generation of late teens and young adults filled with a number of incredibly entitled and very narcissistic individuals who think nothing they do is wrong, because that’s what they were told constantly their entire lives, and they’re also super special because they have the trophies to prove it.

Another large contributor to the problem with Millennials is the internet, particularly with social media. What we have now is a group of entitled narcissists who are constantly connected with hundreds of people at the click of a button who just have to tell everyone in the world that they just took a massive shit. With the internet in general, they also have easy access to a wealth of knowledge that their parents wished they had during their time.

What’s happening during the childhood of these Millennials is the rise of the post-modernist style of thinking and criticism, and by the time they hit their teens, these schools of thought are very developed and movements are everywhere. These teens are at the age where they’re finding meaning and want an attachment towards something, and this popular blanket movement is what’s very appealing to them. With this, they too start joining in on criticism of things like modernism and structuralism that was developed by the previous generation.

With this exposure to post-modernist ideals, many start to realize that basically everyone around them was also told they were a special snowflake and because they’re emotionally unstable teenagers, have a crisis of faith and/or an identity crisis. With this realization, they try to fulfill the reality that they are a special snowflake. They discover online communities as a way of escapism and discover what can set them apart from the normal people and realize they can fulfill the dream of being that special snowflake their parents told them they were.

Through online communities, these people discover things like the self-diagnosing of conditions, other forms of beliefs like atheism, anti-theism, wiccan, and other “special” religions, extreme left wing politics, and many others. Some things like the other belief systems and other forms of political ideology hampers towards post-modernist criticism, people just discover they identify/agree with these, and while I may not ideologically agree with some of these beliefs, I personally don’t have a problem with people like this.

What I do have a problem with, is that many Millennials find and latch onto these topics like a fucking leech and use this as basically an attention-whoring mechanism to fuel their dream of becoming that special snowflake, or doing this as a form of teenage rebellion against their parents and to go against “what society tells them”. You have people who claim they have depression or some other kind of disorder/problem so people will go “awe you poor thing” and fawn over them with ass-kissing. Then you have the people who become atheist, communist, or an activist to engage in a massive online circle jerk to go and say they’re for imposing change, but in reality they’re just making empty statements and throwing around buzzwords to receive pats on the back for being edgy, and gloating over the result of themselves receiving knee-jerk reactions from people who are opposed to their actions and comments.

This was all going on in the late 2000’s. Then the 2010’s come around and we begin to see a number of people realize what’s happening. They noticed that there are a ton of people doing the same thing, and instead of just dropping their bullshit farce, they instead realize that it’s not special enough to just be, say an atheist, they have to become even more special. They can’t just be an atheist or falsely diagnose themselves with depression, they have to join bullshit like atheism+ and go onto their social networking sites and say “I'm an anarcho-communist-antitheist-wiccan-featherkin, and my preferred pronouns are zhe zhour and weirklwrk”.
 
With all this bullshit going around, we have a group of people call into question this shit. They’re trying to figure out what the hell is going on, and when they engage in discussion with these people, they realize that most of these people are just a bunch of attention whoring narcissists. You also have people who are serious in some of these other movements that the narcissists have leeched onto and are now going “what the fuck are you doing? We don’t want to associate with your bullshit, and you’re making us look bad”.

When these Millennials get questioned, they don’t sit there and think and realize that they’re just acting like a bunch of immature shitbags, their heads are so far up their asses with narcissism that they basically built their persona around their special snowflake trait that they take this as a personal attack. An atheist or feminist will go and ask “hold on, what the fuck are you doing? You’re missing the point, this isn’t what we’re about” and it flies over these Millennials’ heads and they jump into an “us vs them” mentality and think that because you’re questioning their motives, you’re clearly in the extremist opposing group. The same goes for those who are self-diagnosing themselves, you’re clearly just ignorant towards the horrors of that condition.

This is basically what’s happening right now, and how I see it being played out. Things like the SJW bullshit, or back when I was questioning the atheist hivemind on UG. A lot of times, I'm questioning the motive or methods, not the actual belief. I just go “what the fuck are you doing” or criticize what they’re doing, and I get responses from people getting taken aback and think I'm in some opposing extremist group. I was chatting with a UGer on Facebook, and he said “are you really super conservative or what?” and I said I'm really just criticizing how people are going about things, and people automatically just assume because I don't portray myself as an ultra super liberal.

Sorry for the rant.

I completely understand what you're getting at, though I probably observe this less because I don't go on Tumblr and the likes. I can't really add anything more, and I know what you mean when you say that you may not be against an ideology, but rather the person holding it.

I don't really visit Tumblr outside of gif searches, which don't lead you to sjw stuff. Most people I meet that are like that are Tumblrites visiting other sites.

Ah, okay. I guess it comes to the same thing then. Most Tumblrites I know are my lady friends but they're not annoying.

For the most part.

Also, I'm not sure if the internet or social media in general increased the level of slacktivism, but it sure as hell magnified it and gave them new outlets to show off their slacktivism. "Hey guys, I'm totally seriously into this cause that I'll forget about in a couple of months when I'm latching onto a new cause that I'm serious about". People get mad butthurt when I question them on their sincerity towards their slacktivism, but then can't give me an answer to why they keep hopping from whatever the cause of the week and casting off the previous cause.

That's sort of how I reacted to the Ice Bucket Challenge. I've wanted to donate to an ALS research cause for years and I had no idea such an organization existed until that silly fad, and I bet most people have forgotten about it already, let alone not donated to the cause in the first place "because they passed the challenge". Let's not forget that the challenge kind of trivializes ALS in the first place. Like, I get the point of it, and I think the initial organizers have their hearts in the right place, but I feel like it's not the ideal way to represent something that matters to you.

That's my feeling to a lot of how people are acting towards things. The people starting it have good intentions, and I wouldn't be surprised that a lot of people who are serious about ALS get annoyed that people only care about their cause for 5 mins and then forgot about it. Personally I'd be annoyed if I was deeply in a cause and was enjoyed at a surge of interest, then lose a majority of them because it's no longer "cool" to support that cause.

Hell, look at how the SJW shit and "I'm smart cuz I'm atheist" died on UG.

Yeah, it really shows how transparent society can be.

I guess another thing from my bloggy post related to entitlement is that a lot of people from this generation feel entitled to pirating and they deserve to not pay for things. I see this more with younger people, not necessarily with people closer to my age or older.

I used to only see it on the internet and thought it was just a bunch of idiot teenagers trying to show off how edgy they are, but then I started meeting a bunch of people irl who are like this. I'd be with a group of people and buy a comic or CD or something and someone will legitimately say "why the fuck did you buy that?". First time I heard that, thought he was giving me shit because he didn't like the particular item I bought, then the would respond with "you can download that for free online".

It's getting kind of sad when you have to explain or justify buying something when people ask "why the fuck did you buy a movie?", because I like it?

I thought people were like me and went "eh, I'm broke and it's free yolo"