A Question For My Fellow 30+ers

The friendliest place on the web for anyone that follows U2.
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.
anitram said:
When I walk into Abercrombie and Fitch and see 9 year old girls walking around in haltertops that say "SEXY" and "SLUT" (I'm not kidding), I want to throw up.

I agree with you completely. In fact, there was a big news story about A&F making even making panties with suggestive things like that. I call that child sexploitation. What kind of dirty seedy people came up with that, and why would a parent allow it?
 
WildHoneyAlways said:
Given my profession, I have seen first hand that some parents do indeed teach their children to be disrespectful, but that's besides the point here.

If a child learning how to behave by watching television and a parent doesn't attempt to intervene, hasn't that parent failed somewhere?

I'm not sure what you mean by "It is not an automatic one or the other situation."

While I am not suggesting that parents be aleviated from their responsibility, the content of television plays a roll as well and has an impact on children. This isn't a question of blaming the media to the exclusion of everyone else, nor is it a question of giving the media a free pass and putting all the focus on the parents.
 
yolland said:
This is very beautifully said, but it also makes me kind of sad to read, because it sounds as if you attribute most of the decisive factors in enabling you to take ownership of your life to what were essentially fortuitous circumstances--not necessarily pleasant ones of course, but not really conducive to deriving some way there applicable to other "parent-pleasing achievement machines," either. Perhaps this is inevitable and just one of those "Yeah, well, such is life" things?



i wonder if i found those experiences, or if those experiences had found me, and i wonder if we all generally go through the same processes just under different circumstance -- perhaps if i had gone to, say, law school, i might have had a similarly revelatory moment just in a different circumstance. i suppose i think nearly all wisdom is fairly universal, we just arrive at it by taking different roads, and the destination is roughly the same place.

i thought of something else in regards to cheating -- i think some of it is due to a lack of respect for the learning-for-the-sake-of-learning ethos (which i still passionately believe in) possibly due to the costs of a college education, and the necessity of it to virtually go anywhere or do anything in the current economy. education has become both a business, and a prerequisite to get down to the doing of business. i think a business ethos has trickled down to all aspects of society, including education, and there's an ethic of "if you tell me not to ride my bike on the grass, i won't, i'll just ride a tricycle on the grass." does that make sense? a business sense of abiding by the letter of the law, and certainly not the spirit, and the thought that everyone else is doing it so i better or else i'm just a chump -- kind of an ethos that surrounds many professional sports. where some are quick to blame "the media" for certain things, what they need to really look at is the ethos of "sell, sell, sell" especially at all costs and the corrosive effect notions of "the bottom line" have on our society. how many people want to go to law school (and i use this as an example because i have so many friends in law school) because they want to be a lawyer, or because a law degree will virtually guarantee them at least a 6-figure income for most of the rest of their lives?




[q]The bit about self-absorbed parenting is interesting, and I wonder what sorts of things you have in mind by that. I could see this as meaning a kind of vicarious thing where you try to mold your children into all the various impressive things you feel you've failed to be whether that suits them or not, or alternatively as meaning an attempt to innoculate them against failure (at what?) by forcing them early and hard into hyper-self-discipline in multiple arenas, with the result that they internalize the "how" of achievement but not the "why." Perhaps it's more like both, or perhaps neither of these is what you had in mind.[/q]


in my dealings with parents, the old 80%/20% rule applied -- 80% of people are great, 20% of people are a mess, and that 20% takes up 80% of your time, etc. i think the most specific i can be is that i saw parents willing to advocate on behalf of their children to an unhealthy degree. if the child has a problem with a coach, they sent their parent to talk to the coach about it, they parent didn't send their child to talk to the coach. and i'm talking about 14 year olds, not 6 year olds. basically, this seemed self-absorbed because it was a parent taking on the "mamma bear" characteristics and rushing in to defend her brood instead of enabling her brood to defend itself, and i think this is applicable across a variety of areas, from sports to school to music. it seemed like many parents didn't want to live through their children, as is the stereotypical case, but that they wanted their children to contine to need them as parents well into adolescence. that's what struck me as self-asorbed -- my guess is that the role of a parent should be to get a child where they no longer need parenting.


[q]I'm tempted to say just about any new graduate could benefit from a year's worth of not-so-resume-oriented experience of this type, but of course that simply wouldn't be feasible for many.[/q]

totally agree here. looking back, i wish i could have had more "real world" experience that i could have wrapped around all that lit theory and philosophy i gulped down for 4 years. i think the idea of a "Gap Year" is a great one, but it wasn't practical for myself either.



And I'm tempted to go off on a quasi-defensive, quasi-don't-get-me-started-type rant about the US News & World Report rankings and their relationship to "resume-building" culture (and CV-building culture, as well), but I'm afraid it would all sound too remote and too irrelevant to the topic at hand, so I'll restrain myself. Just suffice to say, this phenomenon and all that accompanies it--which is a lot--is the result of 5 decades' worth of relentlessly drastic change in the economic, demographic, bureaucratic and personnel dimensions of academia, and unfortunately way too complicated to qualify as a garden variety corporate-greed/status-worship problem.


well, i would love to hear it ... though i would venture to guess that the results of the US News & World Report rankings, as understood by potential employers recruiting on college campuses, is a status-worshipping problem.

but, then again, Memphis went to the U of Memphis and has people who went to Duke working under his command, and he says his firm routinely has to take these (admittedly very talented) kids and kick the crap out of them for 2 years and beat all their notions of entitlement out of their heads before they're worth anything to the company.

which is kind of what happened to me as well ... :wink:
 
Last edited:
80sU2isBest said:
You know what's intresting to me?

(1)That downloading music illegally has found its way into this thread

(2)That none of the people who told me that I don't even have a right to edit my legally obtained version of King Kong for my own viewing have said a darned thing about people here who admit to downloading music without paying for it.



want to buy the version of Pop i've made? i've edited out the "fucked up world it is too" in WUDM.

i'll sell it to you for only $9.99.
 
Irvine511 said:




want to buy the version of Pop i've made? i've edited out the "fucked up world it is too" in WUDM.

i'll sell it to you for only $9.99.

That's alright, but i appreciate it.

I make my won mixes of songs I purchase, for my own personal listening pleasure. I would edit out that myself, if I even owned POP.
 
80sU2isBest said:


The majority of people were taking issue with a company doing for a profit.

But there were indeed some who said that I shouldn't even have a right to edit my own legally obtained copy. I can dig it up for you, if you'd like.

No, I remember. I think the issue for you was and is money, but in that thread, the issue for many of your opponents was "respect for the artist" which is not illegal but is perhaps unethical. By the way, I do defend your right to edit your own copies of movies. I do have an issue with a company doing it wholesale on ethical grounds, even if they are properly compensating the studio/artist.

In a sense, money or not, the issue is respecting the artist either by paying them what they are owed or by treating their work with respect.
 
80sU2isBest said:


That's alright, but i appreciate it.

I make my won mixes of songs I purchase, for my own personal listening pleasure. I would edit out that myself, if I even owned POP.



and here is the difference -- if you were to buy a CD from me, that would be one thing; if, however, i gave you a mixed CD with an edited WUDM, that would be something else.

also, as for respect for artists, i think it's fully reasonable for each of us to make our own judgement calls. whenever i see an indie band at a local venue, i make it a point to buy a T-shirt so long as it was a decent show -- i want to give them some money and i'm happy to advertise for them. if i were in a situation where i could download their songs for free, i probably wouldn't do it.

however, i simply don't feel the same way about, say, Fergie.

who's new song, btw, must somehow be stopped.
 
Irvine511 said:




and here is the difference -- if you were to buy a CD from me,

If I were to buy the original CD from you, and you did not make a copy to keep for yourself, that would be okay. That's like buying a used CD from a used CD store.

Irvine511 said:

that would be one thing; if, however, i gave you a mixed CD with an edited WUDM, that would be something else.

If you gave me a mixed CD with even one song I don't already have, that would be wrong if that song is available to buy somewhere.

However, I do not think it would be wrong if you gave me a CD full of Irvine remixes of songs that I legally own the original of.

Irvine511 said:
however, i simply don't feel the same way about, say, Fergie.

who's new song, btw, must somehow be stopped.

Who's Fergie?
 
Irvine, you're right. she has got to be stopped. What an awful song.
 
when i first heard it, i thought it was Gwen Stefani and started singing "this shit is bananas, B-A-N-A-N-A-S."

and then i realized it was a different song.
 
Every generation ends up shocking the last, what's new? Society hasn't yet collapsed despite dire predictions from disapproving adults through history.
 
Back
Top Bottom