re: #219 Fairly Sure I’m Still Obdicut

It’s also very incorrect—bafflingly so— to claim that the ‘culture war’ is the domain of the white-collar worker. I assume, since the writer of the article gives no actual support for this, that he derived this fact from the same place that you do, that being the rectum.

The more I study sociology, the more I find a pattern of declaration, of people in each age saying “Oh my god, people are now so outraged/impolite/changeable/incurious/lazy”. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the middle ages or now, you’ll find some hack declaring that we’re all getting outraged too easily, or that kids these days have disconnected values, or are less sociable. Rarely do these sages actually back their shit up with anything resembling data or even logical argument, instead they just wave their hands and declare their view to be true.

Not outrageous, but eye-rollingly trite.

I gave a short speech at one of my fraternity’s annual meetings once around 2001 or so. The speech topic was “The More Things Change, The More They Stay the Same”. I opened with a two paragraph description by a citizen of a university town complaining that all the students did was drink, act rowdy, and be insulting to their elders. Then I revealed that the quote was from a 13th century manuscript and that the writer was complaining about the students at Oxford.