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Also relevant; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillermo_Vargas#Exposici.C3.B3n_N.C2.B0_1

Yeah, this would also work perfectly. Can't decide who needs their asses kicked more, the artist or the audience. Probably both equally.

Good.

Semaj, my piece on Kitty Genovese:

It bugs me, like LMNO. Because the fact that she did get up and walk inside made the few people who saw her (as LMNO has already provided evidence that it was 4 or 5 people), think she was oka,y or at the very least not as badly off as she was.

Even the drunkard DID contact someone to try to get her help. So, yeah, it bugs me.

A good case of common knowledge turning out to be false, for sure.

I do like the rewrite, though you might want to change the the last paragraph a little bit. It just doesn't seem to flow right for some reason.

Hmm. Let me see...okay, I fiddled with it a little. How does it sound now?

No worries, all is well.

Glad to hear. 

I DO like advice, just not from my parents.  Though this might stem from my opinion of them as people.  I do try to think about their advice though.

Complicated shit is complicated.

Hmm. I shouldn't have generalized. Right after I posted that, a bunch of people I knew who did like advice popped into my head. But most of those people weren't my age. Generally they were over thirty somethings who'd gone through some shit.

No prob.  Even if I did believe that for a minute, I wasn't pissed, just like confused and sad because I didn't think I got my point across, or something.

Well still. You're  a friend, and I don't like giving friends the wrong impression.

Maybe we young kids should ask Roger.

Okay, but which one of us?

Not it.

Well yeah. I'd say more on Kitty Genovese, but that's not in this thread.

Well, speak your piece in the Apathy thread. It'll fit in perfectly.

Yes indeed.  But somewhere just before your mid twenties, you'll realize that they do have some good points.  But that doesn't mean you'll like it, or want to take their advice.  I don't know when that kicks in.

I don't think that one ever kicks in. I've yet to encounter a person who likes being told they're wrong or being given advice. But then again, I'm still young yet. 

Ah. My comprehension is going a bit, I'm more than a little loopy and exhausted.

Good, good. Just didn't want you thinking I had that opinion.

Basically  because it was.. well, wrong, as LMNO pointed out already.

That one pissed me off. I really hate getting things wrong, especially when I'm doing something like this, where one wrong bit of data can fuck up my entire point. Was so annoyed, I triple checked the story I used to replace Kitty Genovese's.

And glad that the essay works better now. Thanks.

Also, I wasn't being willfully ignorant. sad  The edit I put in put my thinking in better context, and more fully explained my thinking.

Woah! That's not what I meant at all! We were talking about teens refusal to learn, which leads into willful ignorance. You're one of the last people I'd call ignorant.

YES.  SO MUCH YES.  Particularly the bolded parts.

It's something that just happens, I think, to teenagers in general since forever, them thinking they know better.  But some get it worse than others, and it's these who are The Worst. 

Part of it is the whole "gaining control over your life thing." They have to get rid of their dependence on others, so they develop a smarter than thou attitude to do that.

That's a good point. But that's not really the point of this essay, is it?

The essay's about the way Americans, and humans in general, tend to put more stock in what club you belong to than in what you have to say.

But hey, conversation goes where conversation goes. This direction will probably help when I do Willful Ignorance.

I think "We grow up" is an equally valid way of saying it. To me it implies an inclusive statement, encompassing past and future generations. In this case, I think it would work well as a rhetorical device.


That said, great piece, Semaj. I like this one much better than the last one.

Thanks! This one was harder to get out that Apathy was. For one thing, I prefer to have examples and sources for this kind of thing, but I couldn't find what I was looking for. But it seemed to work out anyway.

So, was there anything in particular about the last one you didn't like, or is it just a basic preference? I'm just always looking for ways to make this stuff better.

That's why in that post I had a question mark next to it.  But thinking about it, these new generations aren't really learning what they need to.  I don't know if it's just the one I was living with, or if it was her school, or if was any other thing, but I have a feeling that people will not be learning much anything for much longer, if only because the sense of entitlement that many Americans seem to possess is growing out of control.

It's not just the sense of entitlement, but also the know-it-all attitude. The kids I go to school with think they know the score, think they know better than anyone else. That's part of why they don't learn, they don't think they need to.

Awesome, I wish you luck with that.

Thanks. 

That's what I saw in part 1, so I thought I'd give a hand this way.

Well, thanks. My plan is to take this and a couple of other essays I've written, throw them together with some art by a friend of mine, some of my own WOMP, and whatever else I can think of, and bind them together into something like Intermittens, except angrier. Then I'm going to produce as many as I can, and distribute them at my school. And then watch the shit hit the fan.

I'm just a proof-reader, dude, this is your babby.

True enough. I appreciate the proof reading. The closer this thing is to perfect, the better.

I'm trying to refine my list of sins. I've changed Stupidity to Willful Ignorance and switched Gullibility and Irresponsibility out for Deception and Irresponsibility. Any thoughts?