This whole thread I feel like I'm another world, everyone is using all these euphemisms that I can't figure out the referent to. What is "prevailing orthodoxy" what is "contemporary social dialogues" what are y'all talking about. I'm serious I just cannot tell.
The translation is: kids are self-obsessed and self-absorbed, inclusive of identity progressivism like pronouns and under-represented representation.
The selfie generation(s). 2006 Time's Person of the Year: You.
For my taste, that seems to well be true, but all generations have their thing and those that don't agree with the positions will of course conclude these "new things" are very very bad things.
On the selfie obsession: social media is poison but that's hardly unique to the kids. The adults are doing all the damage.
Well yes in the sense that "kids these days" is a moving goal post.
My sense is that millennials are split: the older half fatigued and eyerolly regarding "too much wokeness" and the younger still thinking themselves young and leaning into whatever the socials are on about.
This isn't a moral judgement. Just one millennial's observation.
The kids being talked about in this submission must surely be Gen Z if they are college students. The youngest Millenial would be older graduate students, segregated from the freshmen and whatnot.
But of course the whole generations business is arbitrary. People would be just as insistent about the realness of this and that generation if they switched the years up or down five years.
There's a widespread social movement in the US which posits that your race and gender identity are very important and you ought to frame everything you do in terms of them, and this movement seems to be influencing the author.
The reason people are using euphemisms is that naming the movement is intensely controversial. The most common term used by its opponents is "woke", but proponents near-universally consider this to be rude; there's no consensus alternative, because many proponents think it's just true and thus giving it a name at all is argumentative. (What do you call the movement of people who think the sky is blue?)
Oh I see, thanks. So this is just the standard grievance farming culture war moral panic on HN? That's what it felt like but I didn't want to jump to conclusions.
It's odd. I'm an anarchist. I'm socially progressive, yes, but more often than not I find myself outnumbered in conversations by people disagreeing with me or even diametrically opposed to me. This is even more so the case online and especially not exclusively here on HN where the cultural bias in any sense that it exists at all is in favor of a vague sense of Peter Thiel style right-libertarianism with streaks of ineffective liberalism - you're more likely to find someone referring to themselves as "Georgist" than "socialist". I consistently get downvoted in political threads on HN.
However I don't have any reason to use euphemisms and I don't need to use vaguery and colorful language and appeals to fringe scientists to express my opinion. In my experience this is because my ideology is very hard to object to on moral grounds: I want you (yes, you too) to have more control over your life and for us (yes, that also means you and me) to be allowed and able to support each other better. I want you (yes, you too) to be able to be able to express yourself and have your consent or lack thereof respected. I don't want us to be suppressed by a state, a religion or an arbitrary often hereditary elite who have amassed disproportionate claims to wealth they can enforce using the physical violence of others. This even applies when I criticize Israel or Zionism - because when I do that, I say what I mean and I don't use my words as proxies for some kind of anti-semitism.
I get laughed at sometimes, I get called names sometimes, I upset people sometimes. But never do I feel the need to obfuscate my ideals except if I were literally surrounded by a violent mob seeking to exterminate the people I'm arguing for the protection of.
But any time someone hides behind euphemisms and vaguery, if you chip away at it, it's never just conservatism or some modest but insufferable reactionary views - it almost always ends up being some blend of race realism or scientific racism, belief in conspiracy theories (which always turn out to be about Jews in the end, knowingly or not), deep hatred and disgust towards trans or queer people, hatred towards women, hatred towards foreign cultures in general, hatred and disgust towards people with disabilities or marginalized people "speaking out of turn" and deeply rooted, integral, vitriolic obsession with social hierarchies and their enforcement against the "undeservering" and "degenerates".
I just don't think that's true. As you say, you get called names sometimes - I think most people who hide behind euphemisms and vaguery just find it tedious or exhausting to get called names when discussing their views. There's multiple topics like education where I can be 100% confident that people are going to accuse me of something like "grievance farming culture war moral panic" if I share my views. I don't personally see the appeal of vagueposting, so I try to either engage and accept the insults or move on, but I understand why other people make different calls.
This whole thread I feel like I'm another world, everyone is using all these euphemisms that I can't figure out the referent to. What is "prevailing orthodoxy" what is "contemporary social dialogues" what are y'all talking about. I'm serious I just cannot tell.