66 posts tagged “editorial opinion”

Kidding, kidding!

Alex Pareene makes some valid points, chief among them that this is more of the same old bashing bullshit that we lashed out against when it was directed at us by Boomers (which I acknowledged in my original post).

Also that the parents of many Millenials aren't Boomers, but early Xers. So the problem of Millenials being "silly, vain, shallow, and self-important after one too many 'you're just sooooo special!' notes in our collective lunchbox" (as a LJ friend of mine so brilliantly put it) can't be laid at the feet of the Boomers alone. Possibly we overcompensated, after an adolescenece and young adulthood spent feeling like the unwanted redheaded stepchildren of America.

Millennials are the first generation whose every dumb mistake is archived forever on computer networks.
I will totally give him that. I've often thanked the universe that most of my dumb youth was behind me by the time the internet became an everyday reality, and was long gone by the time social networking and YouTube became common.

But then he loses me when he slams grunge. Only someone who didn't have to grow up surrounded by talentless hair-metal bands like Poison and Ratt would fail to acknowledge the debt we all owe to grunge. As my brother David put it: I never cared for the music, but I'm glad the movement existed, because it single-handedly made hair-metal irrelevant. All those fuckers woke up unemployed the day after "Smells Like Teen Spirit" landed in the #1 Billboard slot. (Of course, they all eventually found a second life in reality teevee, which is another crime that Generation X will no doubt one day have to pay for. But my original point is still valid!)

Generation X invented the very concept of selling out.
Dude, come on. We did not. I bet artists have been arguing about "selling out" since cavemen painted on rocks. That shit is universal.

In 1997, the Times looked at Mentos and Hanson and called us "edgeless." They dragged out Generation X rep Douglas Coupland to call us all uncool for liking the Spice Girls. We were little kids! Sorry I wasn't an edgy 12-year-old, Doug!
True, and again: acknowledged. The youngest Millenial is only 6, I think it's a little early to pass a sweeping judgement on all 80 million of them.

During the elections you guys represented the "youth vote"; we got stiff old Baby Boomers.
Well, who were we going to vote into office, someone of our generation? Somone who would have been, max, 31 in 1992? Besides, I don't regret campaigning for Bill Clinton. That horny old skirt-chaser gave us 8 freakin' years of peace and prosperity. If I had it to do all over again, I would.

Plus, it's cute how he thinks today's politicians are any different. You can wrap Obama up in the glittery rainbow of "Change!"--and keep in mind I support him myself--but in the end, he's not going to be radically different. The more things change, the more they don't, Alex. You should read A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn.

People keep calling us the first generation that will do worse than its parents.
Are you fucking kidding me? Generation X has been hearing this since I graduated to a sippy cup.

Dooced

Radar is currently running an angry screed against the Millenials, the generation that used to be named "Generation Y" until they whined about it sounding like an afterthought to Generation X. Kind of like how Generation X rejected their first moniker, the "Baby Buster" Generation, for sounding like an anticlimax to "Baby Boomers"--but Generation X wasn't something we chose for ourselves, it was an insulting perjorative that we embraced with a hearty "Well, fuck you very much!".

The Millenial Generation is painted here as self-involved, shallow, coddled consumerist whiners who think "think updating a spreadsheet while simultaneously posting to a Twitter account about the latest gossip on perezhilton.com is an essential corporate skill".

Part of me remembers the accusations of "slacker" and "cynical" that were flung at us by the Baby Boomers and can't help but think that this feels like another spoke in the endlessly turning wheel of "This generation that came immediately after us is nowhere near as awesome as we are, and will bring down the fall of civilization!"

On the other hand, fuck the Millenials. We gave the world anticommercialism, Google, and Johnny Depp. What the hell is going to be The Millenials' legacy, motherfucking MySpace? The claim that anal isn't "real" sex?

Via HuffPo comes video of Chelsea Clinton being asked about Monica Lewinsky again. Her answer, essentially, "None of your beeswax".

Crybaby

She then called the reporter a "meanie meanie fo feenie", then ran off the stage crying and threatening to tell her mother.

(Editor's note: I actually think Miss Clinton has every right to tell reporters who ask about Lewinsky to go eff themselves. It's not relevant to the present Clinton campaign, and such questions are clearly only being asked out of a weirdly prurient desire to make a young woman uncomfortable by asking her about that time her dad got a beejay. It's just more fun to take a contrarian position and drip saracasm all over it.)

alexander payne does not approve

Take a picture to remember this face Ginny, because you ain't gonna be able to make it again for a long time: Virginia Madsen to be new "face" of Botox. It was just 4 years ago that she filmed Sideways without any make-up, now she's endorsing the facial injection of poison. It's certainly worked wonders for Nicole Kidman and Priscilla Presley!

This is just one part of Botox's attempt to rejuvinate (heh) their product's image, in light of a recently released study that suggests Botox can spread to the brain and cause breathing difficulties and death. The more wrinkled your brain is, the better it works. Well, who needs to think when your face is a perfect shiny rictus? Thinking just gives you more wrinkles! It's a vicious cycle!

Another part of Botox's makeover is their new slogan, "It's all about freedom of expression!", proving that irony is a foreign concept to the company: complaints that Botox is ruining movies by turning the faces of actors into frozen masks incapable of registering emotion have been getting louder and more frequent of late.

is my chin still there? i can't feel it.

This is the photo Botox is using on their website to "prove" that one can still make facial expressions after being injected with their toxic sludge. This is the best photo that an expensive marketing campaign that presumably had hundreds of photos to choose from could come up with. This woman can barely open her mouth!

Fungtastic

The gratuitous use of Huge Funbags to sell things is hardly a new concept in advertising, but usually the thing being sold has at least some kind of tangential relation to sex or sex appeal (diamonds, perfume, booze). But can you think of anything less erotic than canned mushrooms?

Also, aside from her enormous fake gazoombas, does anyone actually find this woman attractive? Her dead-looking, partially rolled-back eyes are terrifying. The subliminal message I'm getting here is some Lovecraftian storyline involving alien fungus and brain possession.

Lastly: "Fungtastic"? I think this company might not be native English speakers, so here's a hint if they're trying to break into the North American/British market: English-speakers don't really like to be reminded that they're eating fungus. "Mushroom" is innocuous and "truffle" redolent of class and haute cuisine. "Fungus" makes us think of things growing on the shower curtains of slovenly bachelors or in the asscracks of homeless people.

You're welcome, weird canned mushroom company that I suspect might be Italian!

Hat tip to Copyranter.

Via Feministing comes the news that 2 of my most-hated organizations, PETA and Suicide Girls, are teaming up to try to shame me into not wearing the comfy, comfy warm skins of dead animals.

My hatred of PETA probably doesn't need to be explained, and even if you don't get it, if you're reading this you can find out all about their campaign of misinformation and their exploitation of starlets too stupid to know better yourself.

My problem with the Suicide Girls is not prudery, I've got nothing against chicks gettin' nekkid. What I hate about them is the stupid "Grrrl Power!" empowerment message they tout, while basically saying the best thing you can do to get attention is to take your clothes off.

Queen latifah

<----- Actual "alternative" beauty

Also--and this is the majority of the reason why I don't like and certainly don't respect them--they promote themselves as "alternative beauty". Alternative to what? Go to the site, or just image Google them, and what do you see? A skinny white skank in her 20s, a skinny white skank in her 20s... oh, look! It's yet another skinny white skank in her 20s. Having women of other races (besides the occasional token "Hawt Azian!"), women older than 24, and/or women bigger than a size 2 would truly be "alternative". Hell, even having a single woman who doesn't sport a full-body wax would be revolutionary.

daddy didn't pay me enough attention during my formative years

Only "alternative" in the outskirts of Des Moines, Iowa, circa 1981 ----->

I find the idea that I'm supposed to find them edgy and shocking because they have dyed hair, tattoos, and piercings rather quaint. Did these women travel here from Eisenhower-era Topeka, Kansas in a time machine? Who exactly is still shocked by green hair or nipple rings??

I get that barely-legal, hairless, and dangerously underweight white chicks probably brings in the most money. But don't try to pretend like you're making some brave statement about female beauty when all it is the same tired old bullshit dressed up with some mall kiosk piercings and hair dye.

I guess that in a world where people pay to see other people eating feces or women wearing high heels squashing kittens, paying to see naked women who look like your co-worker or best friend's sister is truly perverse.

Ron Paul's supporters tend to be conspiracy-addled wierdos, but at least they've never resorted to denying we ever went to the moon.

... uh oh.

Wacky paultards

Dearie, we did go back. And that flag has a wire frame on the back. It holds up instead of drooping, and moved whenever it was touched, but stayed still when left alone. You need to go back to third grade and tell the teacher that gave you a passing grade in American History that s/he made a mistake.

(I know you Paultard freaks practically live on the internet and spend at least 16 hours a day obsessively Googling for any mention of Ron Paul. I expect I'll you'll hop on this post quicker than stink on shit and start leaving me crazed comments. You can expect mocking, followed by deletion and blocking.)

ETA: I also posted this on my LJ, and a friend was kind enough to gift me with this awesome video of Buzz Aldrin punching some nutball in the face.

We can't have those queers destroyin' our morale while we're tryin' to kill brown people!

In other news, something called "The Herndon Climb", in which a big stone shaft is greased up and mounted, is (maybe) going to stopped. Apparently the Naval Academy is afraid someone is going to get hurt. You know, before they have a chance to be killed while fighting brown people.

Yup, nothin' gay-ish going on around here, just good clean straight masculine fun!

chokehold

Uh...

leapfrog

Ohhh dear.

moneyshot

The above post was one giant cheap shot at the US Navy. While I admit that, I apologize for none of it!

A gift, ideally, says, "I thought about you. I considered your likes and dislikes, your needs and wants, your dreams and desires, and found you this token of my esteem that I hope will delight you."

A gift card says, "There! Checked you off my list."

Young people, especially, are so enamored of gift cards, with being "empowered to make their own choices," as one retailer laughably put it, that they don't even realize what they're missing.

Older people might, but hey, they're busy and cards are convenient, so what's the harm?

The harm is that the art of gift-giving is quickly devolving into an entirely commercial exchange. How much longer until we simply start thrusting wads of dollar bills at each other?

I agree with this, up to a certain point. For most of my life, I loathed getting gift certificates. See, my father and step-monster were quite possibly the laziest people ever born. If they had to get up out of their matching La-Z-Boys to do something, they couldn't be arsed. So even if my brothers and I gave them insanely detailed Christmas lists, every year they claimed "We didn't know what to get you!" and gave the three of us exact same thing: A box of See's truffles, and gift certificates to the same 3 or 4 stores. Stores that, incidentally, I didn't like and would never have shopped at of my own volition. This was back when you usually got cash back if you were buying less than the certificate amount, so I'd usually buy a pair of socks, and take the cash to the record or book store. (Record store? I'm old!)

I know, I was lucky to get anything, poverty, abusive parents, blah blah blah. I'm not interested in playing Oppression Olympics, okay? Happy childhoods are subjective, and this was my personal experience. And it wasn't the lack of material possessions that hurt my feelings, it was the knowledge that they just didn't give a shit and were only going through the motions.

So anyway, for my most of my adulthood I would rather cut off my hand than give someone a gift card, and receiving one from someone I cared about could literally make me cry. And not with happiness. But in the last few years, I've compromised and now believe there are some instances where gift cards are acceptable:

• From a Borders or Barnes & Noble. Everyone knows I love to read, and people who are close to me generally know my tastes; but they also know I read at a breakneck speed (and buy books by the metric ton), and even if last week I mentioned a book I was dying to read, I might have already bought it for myself this week.
• From Michaels or Hobby Lobby. In fact, I asked for one from Hobby Lobby this year. We don't have those in California and I usually go to the one in Lafayette when I go to Louisiana at Christmas and spend at least $50. People know I love doing needlework, but unless you know a lot about it, it's nearly impossible to be able to tell what I'll like. I don't mean the way the finished product looks, but most non-crafters don't know the difference between, say, stamped or counted cross stitch; or crewel or embroidery. It's wiser to just give me a card and go "Here, knock yourself out".
• My old boss at my last job used to give me a gift card for Target for my birthday. She knew I had a near-fetishistic obsession with that store and buy at least 85% of my clothes, appliances, and housewares there.

In all of those cases, gift cards aren't a lazy brush-off. They actually do say that the person giving them knows me and thought about what I'd like.

What's your feelings on the subject? Hate them, love them? Don't universally love them but feel there are exceptions?

Incredibly poorly-thought-out (not to mention spelled) article excoriating the Childfree. Wow, it's like every stupid misperception about the Childfree and every asinine argument against our right to exist in one argument! Let's just deconstruct it, shall we? (Dumbass spelling errors have been left intact.)

Let's start with the title: "Childfree": Selfishness Incarnate or Saavy Living?

Well, first of all, they spelled "savvy" wrong. That right there ought to let you know what kind of dribbling nonsense you're in store for.

The accusation of "selfish" is probably the one most commonly leveled against the Childfree. I feel like Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride every time I hear it: "You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means." To quote Oscar Wilde: "Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live." Or as someone commented to this very post: "Selfishness is taking two pieces of cake when your brother has none. Not baking a cake when no one is hungry is not."

The cultural fallacy that children are burdens, animals are environmentally friendly ”kids” and no parenting is better than bad parenting has an official meeting place. Quite literally, their whole mission is to throw (jettison is probably a better word) the baby out with the bathwater!

Wait, we have a "mission"? Is this similar to that sinister "gay agenda" that the religious right is always frothing about?? I hate to inform the author of this post, but there are millions of Childfree people in the world; and just like blacks, women, gays, and every other non-white/hetero/christian/male section of society, we don't all walk in lockstep and play by the same rigid rules.

And is the idea that "no parenting is better than bad parenting" really all that radical? Is it better for a child to be horribly neglected, abused, molested, grow up to be a dysfunctional drain on society; or to have just never been born?

Summary: the Childfree movement is made up of people who can’t have kids or don’t want kids (for various reasons), and are tired of a cultural stigma for being sterile and/ or childless. Hence, they’re not child-less–they’re childfree! Weeee!!! Now doesn’t a sterilized population sound fun?

I'm not even sure what the author is saying here. That everyone on earth might choose to become sterilized? Sure, the human race would die off. Well, if we all crapped our pants at once, we'd all drown in shit; the odds of those 2 things happening are about equal (nil), so why the hell are you worrying about it? Oh, right: because it's a ridiculous strawman argument you can handily use to prop up the fact that you have no point.

This hurts my heart, soul, mind and body more than I can really say. It’s evil organized and incarnate at worst, and cognitive dissonance at best. I mean really, do these people hate themselves, because it seems to me that unless they were dropped from another planet, they themselves were children once, and oops–thank you to the “fertility idolaters” that were their parents!

There is so much idiocy in this one single paragraph, I can feel my brain trying to leak out of my ears.

1. If people you don't even know making their own private decisions about family planning that won't impact your personal life in the slightest "hurts my heart, soul, mind and body more than I can really say", you really need to widen your worldview.
2. Saying we're "evil incarnate" is a laughable exaggeration. It minimizes true evil and does a huge insult to people who've really suffered from it.
3. Speaking of "cognitive dissonance", people who who say we should all have children because we were children once seem to be suffering from it in spades. I've had that one thrown at me countless times, and I've never been able to understand how those people get from Point A to Point B. It's like saying "You enjoy eating pizza; therefore, you need to open a pizzeria!" But the truth is that I would be incredibly bad at that. And there are plenty of pizzerias in the world already. I prefer to leave it to people who know how to do it and like doing it.
4. My parents weren't "fertility idolaters". They were people who made a conscious decision to have children, planned for them, and actually raised them. If all parents did the same, I'd have a lot less to complain about.

The society members site various and sundry, but radically fatuous, reasons for their choice to embrace sterility: bad parenting, overpopulation, environmental and economic concerns related to the formers, but the most honest reason is plain old devoted narcissism.

nar-cis-sism, noun. Inordinate fascination with oneself; excessive self-love; vanity.

Honey, you just said we hate ourselves. Now we love ourselves excessively? Which is it?? And I can't think of anything more narcissistic than thinking that you, personally, know what's best for every single person on earth.

I cannot possibly address this narcissistic fundamentalism in one post, but let me start with one thing: overpopulation. Overpopulation is so passé. De-population is the new overpopulation. It’s the new crisis.

This, to put it frankly, is 100% grade-A bullshit. Anyone bleating about "underpopulation" is either A) a corporate shill (overpopulation is good for corporations because when there are too many people competing for a limited number of jobs, they can get away with paying low wages and not offering any benefits); or B) (and what's more likely) using the word as thinly-veiled code for "OMG the scary brown people are outbreeding us! Hurry up and squeeze out more white christian soldiers!!"

To sum up: this blog post is made of massive fail. The comments are win though, as about 99.99999% of them inform the author in various ways that s/he is a moron. This one is my favorite:

Jesus was a bad and selfish man for not having any children. Luckily he didn’t have any kind of legacy to pass on and is now completely forgotten thanks to this omission on his part.