{"id":119,"date":"2005-10-13T11:55:40","date_gmt":"2005-10-13T01:55:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/machinegunkeyboard.com\/?p=119"},"modified":"2005-10-13T13:01:58","modified_gmt":"2005-10-13T03:01:58","slug":"the-new-conservative-youth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/machinegunkeyboard.com\/?p=119","title":{"rendered":"The new conservative youth?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"(image:Radio National<\/a> reported on a joint study by the University of California, Berkeley, Indiana University and the University of Maryland not long back that some young’uns appear to be more conservative<\/a> than their parents who grew up in the 1970s. My experience certainly agrees. The RN story tried to hang that difference on the rebellious nature of teenies, but I think it’s simpler than that. <\/p>\n

‘Leftism’ is the political domain of thinking people. In almost all cases I can think of, the leftie position will be based in evidence, not simple or popular belief. Conservative views are frequently based in fears of the unknown (i.e. racism, nationalism based in xenophobia) or in religio-moralist beliefs (anti-abortion, drug wars), none of which require one independently acquire knowledge and apply critical analyses. These lines of thought merely require unconditional, unquestioned belief; blind faith, if you will. <\/p>\n

At the risk of offending the younger people reading this, I have to say that the older you are, the more likely you are to be educated and thus able to apply a deeper analysis. Every time I hear a teen-20 person come up with something of a ‘conservative’ bent, I find that these notions would be cured with a little infusion of thought and established fact. The ‘youth’ we’re talking about here are generally pre-university age. <\/p>\n

Universities are frequently derided by hardcore conservatives as hotbeds of poisonous liberal thought that should be dismantled. Many conservatives are suspicious of educated people. I still can’t work out why being ignorant and believing faerie tales is somehow a desirable<\/em> thing, outside of the fact that people who will believe anything without deeper consideration are quite easily led and don’t give much trouble to elected leaders. However, exposure to uni doesn’t actually teach one what<\/em> to think as much as how<\/em> to think. <\/p>\n

Outside of racism\/nationalism, probably the nuttiest stuff I hear is young Australian and American women expressing anti-feminist<\/a> views, despite women still<\/em> being significantly underpaid compared to men and heavily discriminated against in the workforce, not to mention being dictated to by men as to how to operate their sexy bits. <\/p>\n

These young women often equate feminism with dykes, cheesecloth skirts and hairy armpits, as though feminism were a fashion choice. Of course, once young women gain some knowledge of the recent history of how the world has changed for women, that history just outside of their own life experience, they begin to appreciate what feminists really are and exactly why they should be one<\/a>. Of course, this requires that one be open to learning. <\/p>\n

Some younguns never see the bigger picture… the result being the sort of person you find in Sophie Panopoulos<\/a> and Phyllis Schlafly<\/a>… and the silly, overprivileged able-bodied 20-something cow that I evicted from a disabled parking space at Woolies yesterday evening when I caught her parked in an access space without a permit (with lots of other carpark spaces available only 3 metres further from the shop entry). <\/p>\n

The conspiracy theorist in me thinks that right-wingers in Australia wanted to dismantle VSU<\/a> to keep students off campus. It’s true that if students don’t congregate and network, there’s fewer opportunites for them to organise resistance to the status quo. In example, one US uni I attended was in a major city, an expensive private school, where most students were commuters and did not live in university housing on campus. The other was a large state operated uni where most students came from families of modest means and also lived on campus due to the distance to the uni from their home residences. The latter was a decidedly more leftie\/small ‘L’ liberal community. <\/p>\n

No, Virginia, using the title "Ms." does not<\/em> indicate a woman is divorced and all peace activists are not necessarily unbathed hippies. <\/p>\n

-weez <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Are teen\/20somethings more conservative than their parents who grew up in the 70s?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/machinegunkeyboard.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/machinegunkeyboard.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/machinegunkeyboard.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/machinegunkeyboard.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/machinegunkeyboard.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/machinegunkeyboard.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/machinegunkeyboard.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/machinegunkeyboard.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/machinegunkeyboard.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}