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Quote from: Mark Caliber on July 13, 2022, 01:28:33 PM
I find it odd how nonsensical people have become as of late.  How did these people become so deranged?  Anyone have a clue?

Everyone has, not just the woke. And the answer is that our brains aren't equipped for the Information Age.

You may be on to something.

Or maybe just on something...

The epidemic of mental health problems about the current generation is a proven and worrying fact, and the unhealthy relationship with social media is considered a key factor. Sane social psychologists ranging from Jonathan Haidt to Jean Twenge have traced a direct connection between "Social media era" ---> "Mental fragility" ---> "Mindless polarization". In her book "iGen" Twenge writes:

"The complete dominance of the smartphone among teens has had ripple effects across every area of iGen'ers' lives, from their social interactions to their mental health. The average teen checks her phone more than eighty times a day.
[...]
They are obsessed with safety and fearful of their economic futures, and they have no patience for inequality based on gender, race, or sexual orientation. They are at the forefront of the worst mental health crisis in decades, with rates of teen depression and suicide skyrocketing since 2011."

Jonathan Haidt wrote "The Coddling of the American Mind". This book contains, in a chapter among many, an astounding series of examples of "Words are violence, violence is safety" in contemporary American campuses - with such violence hitting from alt-right speakers (check Berkley 2017), to speeches sponsored by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (by a group called "Refuse Fascism" - one cannot make up such things), to courses about "Sappho, an ancient Greek poet from the island of Lesbos and an icon of both feminism and lesbian liberation." (because "the Ancient World was white"). When the lecturer of the latter, Lucía Martínez Valdivia, asked at least to not be physically assaulted because she suffers from PTSD, the answer was a chilling word salad. If you bother to read that remember how it is about a gay, mixed-race, feminist woman with PTSD who was physically assaulted by the writers of that manifesto.

I hope that the above is not considered political, because it is not about politics at all but about how "politics" (firmly between quotes) are symbolic of a whole generation deeply confused, scared by words, whose beliefs are rooted in slogans but not in the real, practical application of those slogans. The result is blind violence even against "their own", and guided by beliefs as strong as they are illusionary.

Haidt and others look at politics, beliefs and their application (or delusional application) only as a thermometer of social mental health. The fact that there is a precise cut off year, 2012, for the decline of the mental health of a whole generation was an important clue. What happened? Haidt sums up five years of research in a very long article for The Atlantic. An abstract among many:

"By 2013, social media had become a new game, with dynamics unlike those in 2008. If you were skillful or lucky, you might create a post that would "go viral" and make you "internet famous" for a few days. If you blundered, you could find yourself buried in hateful comments. Your posts rode to fame or ignominy based on the clicks of thousands of strangers, and you in turn contributed thousands of clicks to the game.

This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics: Users were guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of reward and punishment, and their prediction of how others would react to each new action. One of the engineers at Twitter who had worked on the "Retweet" button later revealed that he regretted his contribution because it had made Twitter a nastier place. As he watched Twitter mobs forming through the use of the new tool, he thought to himself, "We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon."

As a social psychologist who studies emotion, morality, and politics, I saw this happening too. The newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves. The volume of outrage was shocking."

Amusingly, later in this article we even find why TBP got all of it wrong:

"John Stuart Mill said, "He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that," and he urged us to seek out conflicting views "from persons who actually believe them." People who think differently and are willing to speak up if they disagree with you make you smarter, almost as if they are extensions of your own brain. People who try to silence or intimidate their critics make themselves stupider"

tl;dr: We thought we were ready for the information age, we took a wrong turn and a whole generation entered in a nightmare eyes wide open. Even worse, politicians from both sides of the aisle, media and entertainment companies of every kind and level are chasing this twisted reality, compounding the echo chamber effect.

What will happen ten years from now is in the lap of the Gods. For sure, a whole generation is about to enter real life totally unprepared. Haidt sees hope in "the exhausted majority": those with too many broken bones and too many frustrations to be able to go on the way they are now. If the number of people who invite TBP to suck wind increases in the next few years, he will be proven right. If not, that will not be my problem.

tl;dr: Goddang those young uns with their goddang phones and whatchoosamicallits.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...

No.

I think that what is happening - which ties digital media (esp. social media), wokeism (ironically, even self-harming wokeism) and violence - is a very underestimated factor in what is happening in pop culture.

On one side, as I wrote, media and entertainment companies pander to this crowd, not realising how unnaturally wired their brains are, but fearfully knowing that they will refuse and even attack anything "problematic".

On the other side, many from this generation are now entering the creative markets. Creativity without real life experience is sterile. However, who needs "real life experience" (which is feared and hated anyway) when you can run towards the nearest woke concept, very possibly grab an existing strong IP, pretend for "safe spaces" and "trigger warnings" when these creative endeavours are consumed, are and they are done?

I write for a living and it is hard. I wrote commercially for RPGs and it was hard. I think that both the Pundit and anyone else here who writes honestly trying to push out good products (from RPGs to comics to TV shows) can tell the same. How easier is to push out "The Rings of Power" or nu-D&D, uh? But I have my classic books, I play with people with my mindset, I notice that my good efforts often are rewarded (not always, alas)... The rest is no more my problem.