"The Internet is now the main national and international news source for people ages 18 to 29..."

"In 2010, 65% of people younger than 30 cited the Internet as their go-to source for news, nearly doubling from 34% in 2007. The number who consider television as their main news source dropped from 68% to 52% during that time."

Good lord, I can't believe the switch over to the internet is going so slowly. Who on earth is watching TV news? I'm checking out the internet all day long, and I never watch TV news. And I'm nearly 60 (I say on the 7th day of my countdown to age 60).

"What are your thoughts on feminism today?"

Fran Lebowitz is asked:

Well, now they’ve done it, and I believe that women have gotten pretty much as far as they’re going to get. Which is better, but not great. I mean, it’s immensely better. There’s no comparison. It’s against the law to say, “This job is just for boys.” But that doesn’t mean there aren’t all kinds of jobs you can’t have [as a woman]. And there are all kinds of things you won’t get. It’s just much more subtle now. And that’s progress.

But there are still girls who make it bad for girls. Young girls are always showing me their diamond engagement rings. “Look, Fran!” It’s so old-fashioned. I think that I am too old to feel that people who are kids remind me of my parents. Someone my age is supposed to be angered by kids. You’re supposed to say, “These crazy kids—what will they think of next?” You’re not supposed to say, “These kids are so boring. These kids are so regressive.” It’s like the 1950s. The 1950s weren’t just about great suits. That time was really suffocating.

So it seems to me that people, especially women, especially women who have all these choices, are now looking for things that aren’t oppressive exactly but are pretty suffocating. What used to be called middle-class respectability looked like it was going to disappear, but it didn’t. It’s returned. It just returned in a different costume. If you do it in a loft instead of a split-level in the suburbs, it’s still the same. I’m not saying you shouldn’t be allowed to do it; I’m saying it’s suburban. This is why New York today seems suburban to me—all kids and babies in strollers. It’s 1950s domestic life. The sidewalks are the same size, but now you have twins and dogs.

These kids today are so afraid of looking stupid that they won't get serious, collectivize, and change the world — declaims Mark Ames, spittle flying.

Stephen Green (via Instapundit) calls attention to this Mark Ames article (from October) "The Rally to Restore Vanity: Generation X Celebrates Its Homeric Struggle Against Lameness." Green cherrypicks a remark that appears at the very end:

Anytime anyone says anything libertarian, spit on them. Libertarians are by definition enemies of the state: they are against promoting American citizens’ general welfare and against policies that create a perfect union. Like Communists before them, they are actively subverting the Constitution and the American Dream, and replacing it with a Kleptocratic Nightmare.

Green — without noting that the Ames's whole article is about lameness — snarks that spitting is "lame." Instapundit grimly labels it "The Descent of the Left."

But let's look at Ames's whole article — and not be distracted by the terrible practice of spitting on libertarians. (I will not be side-tracked into blogging about what the lefties would say if the spit were flying in the opposite direction.)

Ames was reacting to the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert rally, which to him was the manifestation of the younger generation's need to keep an ironic distance from politics — an effort to avoid lameness. Ames wants young people to rediscover liberalism, which was "once devoted to impossible causes like ending racism and inequality, empowering the powerless, fighting against militarism, and all that silly hippie shit." (Ames himself is 45, by the way, too young to have been a real hippie, but older than the people he criticizes.)

Ames found the Rally to Restore Sanity "depressing and grotesque" — like "some kind of sick funeral party  for Liberalism, in which Liberals are led, at last, by a clown." (Aw, come on, Ames. The liberals have been led by a clown before. Just not a very funny clown.) Ames is disgusted by the way the rally-goers take pride in how smart they are because they "don’t take themselves too seriously":

That’s why they’re following a clown like Stewart, whose entire political program comes down to this: not being stupid, the way the other guys are stupid–or when being stupid, only stupid in a self-consciously stupid way, which is to say, not stupid. That’s it, that’s all this is about: Not to protest wars or oligarchical theft or declining health care or crushing debt or a corrupt political system or imperial decay—nope, the only thing that motivates Liberals to gather in the their thousands is the chance to celebrate their own lack of stupidity! Woo-hoo!

It's a liberal trope that I've been following over the past week, after Isthmus reporter Bill Lueders wrote a piece called "The Triumph of Stupidity," in which he triumphed over getting UW polisci professor to say the voters are "pretty damn stupid." It's that "What's the Matter with Kansas?" notion that liberals have — that people who don't vote for liberal candidates are too dumb to know where their own interests lie. Ames is looking at the other side of that phenomenon: Liberals themselves are caught up in their self-image of not being the stupid ones, and, Ames is saying, this obsession of theirs undercuts the old-time, serious liberal project of remaking the world in pursuit of big, broad ideals like equality.

Ames has a great insight into "why so many Gen-X/Yers turned against Obama": "he made them look stupid."  They took Obama seriously. They believed. And that set them up to look.... lame!

Ames writes many paragraphs trashing E. A. Hanks's "Dear The Left: A Breakup Letter." (She's Tom Hanks's daughter!) Hanks seems to want to separate herself from political movements and embrace something like libertarianism. Ames declaims:

If the ruling class has enormous amounts of money and power and collectivizes in a variety of billionaires’ unions and special interests unions, and your answer is, “I’ll go it alone, at least I won’t look stupid” then you’re just fucking stupid.

So it is all about not looking stupid? Anyway, after much verbiage, which I'm skipping, including the part about Bob Dylan — marvel at my restraint! — he gets to his point, which is that liberals need to cast individualism aside and get collectivized, even though that's not distanced and ironic and unserious:

Collective action is the only possible way to change shit. Large numbers of collectivized nobodies rallying to demand what they want–a better cut of the pie...

Pie! Michelle said we could have pie!

... and a better world to live in. It’s the only thing that power-elites fear and the only way to get them to negotiate.... You’ll have to stomach being around people who are lame, and who say lame things, and you’ll feel lame—so you’ll have to decide which is lamer: the fear of being lame, or forming an alliance with people lamer than you in order to struggle against people far meaner, far more greedy and destructive than the lame people you hate—people who have no qualms about being lame when they collectivize, so long as they destroy you and grab everything they want. 

In other words, don't mock the Tea Party. Get out there. Be like them. Be mockable. That's the first of 3 prescriptions Ames ends with. The third is the one Green quoted: Anathematize libertarians. (The metaphor is to spit.) And the reason for anathematizing libertarians is Ames's second prescription:  liberalism needs a big, serious goal to collectivize about and that goal is the redistribution of wealth:

[P]eople need money. Then if they have money, they need Life. Then they might be interested in “ideals” set out in the contract that this country is founded on. Ever read the preamble to the Constitution? There’s nothing about private property there and self-interest. Nothing at all about that. It’s a contract whose purpose is ...  a “more Perfect Union”—that’s “union,” as in the pairing of the words “perfect” and “union”—not sovereign, not states, not local, not selfish, but “union.” And that other purpose at the end of the Constitution’s contractual obligations: promote the “General Welfare.” That means “welfare.” Not “everyone for himself” but “General Welfare.” That’s what it is to be American: to strive to form the most perfect union with each other, and to promote everyone’s general betterment. That’s it. The definition of an American patriot is anyone promoting the General Welfare of every single American, and anyone helping to form the most perfect Union—that’s “union”, repeat, “Union” you dumb fucks. 

Ames is still playing on his audience's fear of being the stupid ones — even as he spews some crazy shit he wants us to hear as brilliant. Don't be a dumb fuck, believe me when I tell you: This individualism is a trick the billionaires are playing on you. Come together, live as One.

Ames boldly palms this off as constitutional interpretation. The "more perfect union" in the Preamble isn't the reallocation of powers between the federal government and the state governments to deal with the problems that arose under the Articles of Confederation. No, Ames's big, serious lie — and you should worry that you're a dumb fuck if you don't believe it — is that the Constitution compels us to set aside our individual pursuit of happiness and dedicate ourselves to the collective.

"The worry is we’re raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently" — "rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing."

Says Harvard Med School professor Michael Rich in this "most-emailed" NYT article about these kids today.

The article begins with an anecdote about a high-school student — Vishal Singh — who wasn't making much progress reading the book he was assigned to read over the summer. Hey! The book is Kurt Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle," the book I was assigned to read in the summer of 1969. It's what the professors at the University of Michigan's experimental college — the Residential College (R.C.) — thought we ought to read to align our brains for whatever it was they planned to do to us.

Ha:

We Bokonists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass by Bokonon "If you find your life tangled up with somebody else's life for no very logical reasons," writes Bokonon, "that person may be a member of your karass." At another point in The Books of Bokonon he tells us, "Man created the checkerboard; God created the karass." By that he means that a karass ignores national, institutional, occupational, familial, and class boundaries. It is as free form as an amoeba.

Now, where are you more likely to find the other members of your karass? Sitting alone in your room reading "Cat's Cradle," or weaving your way through Facebook? The great irony is that if you were really into "Cat's Cradle," you'd love the web and the way kids today swim in it.

From the Wikipedia entry on Bokononism:

The religion of the people of San Lorenzo, called Bokononism, encompasses concepts unique to the novel, with San Lorenzan names such as:

granfalloon - a false karass; i.e., a group of people who imagine they have a connection that does not really exist. An example is "Hoosiers"; Hoosiers are people from Indiana, and Hoosiers have no true spiritual destiny in common, so really share little more than a name.

Another example might be the teenagers who attend Vishal Singh's high school.

Busy, busy, busy - words Bokononists whisper upon witnessing an example of how interconnected everything is

... on the internet!

Hey, sorry. I got distracted. I was going to tell you all about that NYT article. I think something has happened to my brain. But I'm not a teenager. I'm practically a sexagenarian. Would it be wrong of me to be in your karass?

A question about the assumption that if more young people voted there would be more votes for Democrats.

I'm reading this in the Fiscal Times:

A CBSNews/New York Times poll conducted in mid-September found that only half the 18-29 year olds are registered to vote and just 55 percent of them say they will definitely vote in 2010. Moreover, a mere 15 percent of young people say they are paying “a lot of attention” to the election. By comparison, 84 percent of voters over 64 say they will definitely vote, and 50 percent say they are paying a lot of attention to the election.

Whereas young people favor Democrats by as much as 10 to 20 percentage points in most polls, among seniors, the most reliable of voters, Republicans hold an 11 point advantage over the Democrats.

One is tempted to think that if only more young people would vote, the Democrats would have it made. But the young people who say they favor Democrats also aren't paying attention. They have to get interested before they'll be motivated to vote, and we don't know what they'd think after they paid attention.

It's not surprising that young people who are floating along on the political periphery will say "Democrat" when asked which party they favor. What have they been paying attention to? Their teachers? Their friends? Presumably a lot of young people are for the good things the Democrats are supposed to be for. And so many nice celebrities seem to be Democrats. And there are those friends who go cold and sneer at the suggestion that anyone is an evil Republican.

When you're young, usually you want to get along. You want to be liked. But do you care about politics? Do you really know who to vote for? Apparently not, or you'd vote.

Now, if these young people got around to paying attention and studying the issues to the point where they really were interested and motivated to vote, would they still be Democrats? Would they still be young?

Isn't Camille Paglia afraid of sounding geezerly?

Even as she led the way in Madonna appreciation, Paglia was behind the curve in lavishing attention on Lady Gaga. What to do? Go negative:

Gaga's fans are marooned in a global technocracy of fancy gadgets but emotional poverty. Borderlines have been blurred between public and private: reality TV shows multiply, cell phone conversations blare everywhere; secrets are heedlessly blabbed on Facebook and Twitter. Hence, Gaga gratuitously natters on about her vagina…

Negative about Gaga and modern life in general. These kids today. Get off my lawn.

"If you are not so worried about presenting yourself as absolutely unique, then it’s O.K. if you say other people’s words..."

"... it’s O.K. if you say things you don’t believe, it’s O.K. if you write papers you couldn’t care less about because they accomplish the task, which is turning something in and getting a grade... And it’s O.K. if you put words out there without getting any credit."

The internet is changing the way students think about plagiarism... or — I would add — they way they lie about it.

"His father would refuse to drive him to soccer practice because he thought using a car to travel somewhere to exercise was ridiculous."

And now, 19-year-old Alex Liebman, has taken a year off from college to work on an organic farm.

This will be Mr. Liebman’s third farm internship. He has come to love the muscle fatigue that sets in at the end of a day. The rhythm of farm life is a welcome break from cellphones and Facebook. And the work makes him feel as if he is doing something to better the world.

“I’m not sure that I can affect how messed up poverty is in Africa or change politics in Washington,” he said, “but on the farm I can see the fruits of my labor.”

“By actually waking up every day and working in the field and putting my principles into action, I am making a conscious political decision,” he added.

Are you raising your child to be a farm hand?

Or maybe you are a farmer, in which case: Do you want a farm hand like Alex Liebman?

"[Students] have become ultra-efficient in test preparation. And this hyper-efficiency has led them to look for a magic formula to get high scores.”

And, so?

It is up to the teachers — and the administrators who support us — to structure the courses so there is nothing magic about getting to the best grades. It's actually great that the students care about achievement, and it's fine that they want grades that will help them get things they want. It's also fine that they analyze their situation and do what is efficient to get what they want. The teacher must to set up the exam or other coursework so that efficient, ambitious students will have to do what needs to be done to learn what the grade represents.

Now, the linked article irritates the hell out of me because it is teachers bitching about the students and their whiny entitled attitude.

"Many students come in with the conviction that they’ve worked hard and deserve a higher mark," Professor Grossman said. "Some assert that they have never gotten a grade as low as this before.”

He attributes those complaints to his students’ sense of entitlement.

“I tell my classes that if they just do what they are supposed to do and meet the standard requirements, that they will earn a C,” he said. “That is the default grade. They see the default grade as an A.”

A recent study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that a third of students surveyed said that they expected B’s just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the required reading.

“I noticed an increased sense of entitlement in my students and wanted to discover what was causing it,” said Ellen Greenberger, the lead author of the study, called “Self-Entitled College Students: Contributions of Personality, Parenting, and Motivational Factors,” which appeared last year in The Journal of Youth and Adolescence.

Professor Greenberger said that the sense of entitlement could be related to increased parental pressure, competition among peers and family members and a heightened sense of achievement anxiety.

Take responsibility. You teachers are making the students act like that. Don't blame them and don't blame their parents. Set high standards and apply them. And don't let them ask for a grade change. In law school, we have a rule against changing the grades. I grade my students — anonymously — based on an exam that is designed to require real engagement with the class and to prevent shortcuts, and once those grades are entered, that's it. I'll talk to you about your exam, but it will be clear that nothing that is said can possibly change your grade, and my school backs me up on that with a rule. Teachers, if you don't like your students, change yourself.