Bill Ryan's Other Blog

In my The Kids are Alright post, I used the example of Jackie Seal to illustrate a perfect example of how smart today’s kids are (and you gotta love her choice of wall paper which I’m sure she did herself), all the while getting  a really unfair rap.  In fact, for every clueless apathetic teenager I run into, I usually run into several more that are sharp, savvy and motivated.  Even looking at my 10 year old daughter… I love to goof on her about how terrible the cartoons she watches are compared to my day, I love to goof on Hannah Montana and I love to goof on her about Webkins… but I bet she reads more in any given week than me and my friends read in 3 months (and yes, I was a book worm at 10.  I didn’t become a partying degenerate until I was 14).  At that age, I was pestering my mom to take me to Dadeland Mall so I could get some new video games (at 10, I had just graduated from using an Atari 2600 to playing grown up games on my Atari 800 – with a bitchin tape drive).  She has strong political opinions, has a good command of current events and is always interested in learning about what’s ever on the news.  She’s a very smart and motivated girl and so are her friends. 

But everyone thinks their own kids are smart and motivated (mine really is though   ). There are times, particularly when I’m being cynical, that I look at the comments on YouTube (especially ones revolving Hip-Hop Beefs) and think the end of the world is around the corner.  I think back to when I read the Bell Curve and ignoring the racial aspects, think, Yikes, the whole Cognitive Elite scenario is coming true.  But the truth is, I know quite a few very well educated people (with post-graduate degrees in real subject matters) who would be hard pressed to hop on a computer, let alone register for YouTube and start casting snarky insults. 

My /b/eloved 4Chan is often cited as a horrific place where young gremlins and malcontented idiots hang out.  The average /b/tard is typically portrayed to be little more than Beavis or Butthead, but with a computer.  Every loudmouth that get schooled on the net loves to throw out the whole “fat loser who lives in his mom’s basement and plays video games all day” cliche’ – which is often resulting from a bad case of projection)  Yet these same young ‘morons’ have pulled off countless internet hoaxes, have pulled off some impressive hacks, are the creators of tons of famous web sites and are responsible for just about every well-known meme on the net. [If you want to talk about idiotic douchebags on the Internet – I present Exhibit E).  Most people have no idea who M00t is, but he’s ostensibly one of the most accomplished internet entrepreneurs the internet has known.  Ask Sarah Palin if she thinks the average /b/ tard is stupid. I’m sure some phony like O’Reilly has a lot to say about them too (when he’s not out trying to score some a55 while his pregnant wife sits at home alone, insists he’s innocent and then settles with a demand that nothing is discussed).  Ask the victims of owners of db.singles.org (and don’t dismiss them just b/c only losers resort to online dating sites) how stupid OldFags, NewFags and every other form of /b/tard behind Operation Jesus was (Ooops, i forgot, 4chan was definitely not /b/hind Operation Jesus, it was Ebaum’s world).  And honestly, could stupid people have spawned something as utterly awesome as this:

I’m sure some that fancy themselves mature and moral will take issue with my accolades for /b/ denizens or M00t and I’m sure English language Pedants (few things are lamer than trying to defend an idiotic argument by nitpicking typos on a web forum.  A Ph.D dissertation – ok, I’m with you.  An affidavit?  Sure.  But a freaking newsgroup or web forum? Pulleeeezzz) will take issue with my characterization of YouTube beef comments as a sign of intelligence.  If 4Chan was full of idiots, no one would care about it.  If 4Chan was full of morons, the same people wouldn’t be able to take issue with the morality of people all about the LULZ.  And I bet most of the kids who post comments on YouTube are headed for college and can write and spell properly if need be.  At the same time, I doubt many of their critics didn’t even know what Lolspeak was until they heard about it on the news.  And the same folks couldn’t write in Lolspeak even with a freaking Urban Dictionary Translation bot  helping them out.

Far from dumb, far from clueless, today’s kids are quite cool in my opinion.  They’re sharp, talented and ambitious too.  People my age and older will trash their taste in music (Yes, I myself am guilty at times, but at least I admit that I’m wrong for it). But their elders did the same thing about that ‘awful’ Rock-N-Roll.  Pretentious Phony Douchebags Some people got offended by Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction (according to Dave Oliva – aspiring L.A.P.D. officer and frequent guest on the Phil Hendrie Show, Janet Jackson is actually a man. And we know that Steve Bosell of Corona, California was definitely hurt by it) and went on and on about how society has lost all sense of morality.  But the same stuff was being said 50 years ago.   Many in my age group love to criticize how bad cartoons of today are (yep, I’m guilty there too) and talk about how much better they were 30 years ago.  But I remember hearing the same exact complaints all the time when I was a kid watching cartoons.  Same thing with TV (admittedly TV hasn’t been around long enough to have several generations comment on it). When I was a kid, I always heard how MASH was truly funny and intelligent (except that it pretty much blew)  Shows of today just aren’t as funny – in fact many need laugh tracks.  There were plenty of laugh tracks back when I was a kid.  Sanford and Son, WKRP,  Soap, The Jeffersons etc were very funny.  But Seinfeld, The Office, Friends etc are equally funny in their own right.  And I’d love to hear some GenXer or older try to say that we didn’t have as sucky, if not worse sucky shows back in our day.

To sum things up, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the kids of today aren’t just alright. They are darned cool.  Each generation, kids tend to get cooler and cooler and parents get dorkier and dorkier (I mean, making kids wear freaking helmets for bicycles with training wheels only rivaled in lameness by the fetish most parents have with child seats).  Each generation bitches about laments the same stuff – music sucks, kids are lazy, have no morals, don’t appreciate anything, don’t respect their elders etc.  If that was true, then the unbiased, objective consummate professional Norah O’Donnell would have schooled Jackie Seal instead of Jackie Seal schooling her.  If kids were 1/2 as rude as they are made out to be –Jackie would have told current a**hole of the week Ms. O’Donnell to blow it out her ass to go pound sand.  Instead, she politely responded to the ambush (what does it say about your argument when you have to ambush a kid to try to make your point… and then star in EPIC FAIL Part 1 in the process). I can tell you this much – even though I think it’s a sign of good manners to respect one’s elders, I wouldn’t have looked down on Jackie a bit if she would have told Norah O’Donnell off – even if that included getting all sorts of gangsta on her.  If she pointed out what a freaking dork this a-hole is – I wouldn’t fault her for it either (Let’s attack a kid and pretend to be setting the Record straight b/c of Glenn Beck’s distortions)  The fact she handled O’Donnell with such composure and grace is testimony to her upbringing and class.

Who really cares if you like the kid’s politics or not?  I mean, when a kid gets a lot of press, one side of partisans talks about how great the kid is while the other side trashes them. If parents put the kids out there as a poster-child, then go after the parents, but attacking the kids is just whack.  Both sides do it (although from my POV, seems the left is a little quicker to get ugly and always gets nastier) and both sides acted shocked and amazed when the other side does it.  Then again, hypocrisy has never been, and will never be, in short supply in Washington D.C. Roubaxl  Bill Ryan is the worst piece of garbage in the world, next to my ex-wife Kim Ryan, formerly Kim  Finleyson. Those two pieces of garbage are made for each other

The point here though is that it’s great to see a high schooler at a political gathering of her own free will (and it’s true, I don’t know for a fact that she’s there on her own will, but it looks like she was and I’ve seen nothing to make me believe otherwise – if such evidence presents itself, I’ll certainly correct myself).  We constantly talk about how apathetic the electorate is.  Pejorative references to Joe Sixpack abound.  Both sides criticize the other side’s voters as stupid and uneducated.  But when we see shining examples of behavior both sides claim they want to see, the opposing side rips the person to shreds (and let’s be honest – both sides constantly blabber about ‘it doesn’t matter which side you vote for, just make sure you get involved and vote’.  And as long as you agree with them, they practice what they preach).  I for one am quite glad to see younger folks getting involved in the electoral process (not just b/c the trend seems to be that younger folks tend to be more Libertarian these days – as opposed to Socialist in my days and previous generations – come to think of it, what more proof is there that today’s kids are SMARTER than previous generations?) Andrexa Roubaxl

[tags]Jackie Seal, Norah O’Donnell, Bill O’Reilly, 4Chan, Pedobear, Lulz, Operation Jesus, db.singles.org, singles.org, Phil Hendrie, Dave Oliva, Steve Bosell of Corona California, Bill Ryan, William Ryan,  Janet Jackson, Wardrobe Malfunction, WKRP, Seinfeld, Sanford and Son, moot, m00t, FAIL, The Bell Curve, Cognitive Elite[/tags]