Society is in the gutter

My teenage son recently informed me that there is an Internet quiz to test oneself for narcissism. His friend had just taken it. “How did it turn out?” I asked. “He says he did great!” my son responded. “He got the maximum score!”

http://images.forbes.com/media/lists/53/2010/jay-leno.jpg

Donald J. Trump ‏@realDonaldTrump
Another horrific attack, this time in Nice, France. Many dead and injured. When will we learn? It is only getting worse.

you know you're not going to change the world by running over random people with a truck. there was a time when you could do that, but that window of opportunity is closed.

― the event dynamics of power asynchrony (rushomancy), Thursday, 14 July 2016 23:48 (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tbt

trucks used to contain local goods

is this really the right thread title to talk about this under

no, it isn't, sorry

i was going to bump this yesterday with a quaint and wistful observation about how when young people used to throng the parks and streets, it was with a ball to kick, an ice-cream cone. now the only ball is on a screen, the ice-cream cone a virtual monster that isn't really there. they will never see the birds

https://www.uber.com/promo/ice-cream/

oy

see what we have wrought

FWIW I was alive in the nineteen-seventies. Plenty of things sucked mightily then too. Some of the same things, some different things. Peace out y'all.

http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/640x360/legacy/clip/p007n14v.jpg

40-50 years ago (and less), the kinds of US police shootings we've been enraged by of late would've been buried in the newspapers if they were noted at all.

you all are not understanding this thread

no we do, we're trying to change it.

there was a time you could open a newspaper and not have to read about african-american men murdered by police

simpler times

you had a thread called "society is in the gutter" and people knew what it was for

Now youve said it, sean, now you have it

we used to appreciate threads - we didn't have many but we read them every day

the threads were threads and thats all there was to it, now days... pokeman

would be nice if people caught some values along with those pokes.

Gutter catch 'em all, I say.

http://i.imgur.com/7JeV84g.png

I was killing some time in the staff room, as you do, and started reading a Dean R Koontz thriller called Dragon Tears. This was on page 2.

http://i.imgur.com/mZg02p5.jpg?1

the use of "no doubt" is key.

tbf Koontz might have been on to something with the "bad-tempered, evil minded trolls" bit

in my day a troll was someone who would happily stay under his bridge, now it's all Twitter this, Facebook that

mankind? more like ManUNkind if you ask me

https://metallica.com/blog/news/429181/hardwired-to-self-destruct-available-november-18-2

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-doomed-mouse-utopia-that-inspired-the-rats-of-nimh

i condensed it for those who don't want to read the full article:

In 1947, to keep a close eye on his charges, Calhoun constructed a quarter-acre "rat city" behind his house, and filled it with breeding pairs. He expected to be able to house 5,000 rats there but over the two years he observed the city, the population never exceeded 150. At that point, the rats became too stressed to reproduce. They started acting weirdly, rolling dirt into balls rather than digging normal tunnels. They hissed and fought.

[...]

Most frightening are the parallels he draws between rodent and human society. "I shall largely speak of mice," he begins, "but my thoughts are on man." Both species, he explains, are vulnerable to two types of death—that of the spirit and that of the body. Even though he had removed physical threats, doing so had forced the residents of Universe 25 into a spiritually unhealthy situation, full of crowding, overstimulation, and contact with various mouse strangers. To a society experiencing the rapid growth of cities—and reacting, in various ways, quite poorly—this story seemed familiar. Senators brought it up in meetings. It showed up in science fiction and comic books. Even Tom Wolfe, never lost for description, used Calhounian terms to describe New York City, calling all of Gotham a "behavioral sink."

Convinced that he had found a real problem, Calhoun quickly began using his mouse models to try and fix it. If mice and humans weren't afforded enough physical space, he thought, perhaps they could make up for it with conceptual space—creativity, artistry, and the type of community not built around social hierarchies. His later Universes were designed to be spiritually as well as physically utopic, with rodent interactions carefully controlled to maximize happiness (he was particularly fascinated by some early rats who had created an innovative form of tunneling, where they rolled dirt into balls). He extrapolated this, too, to human concerns, becoming an early supporter of environmental design and H.G. Wells's hypothetical "World Brain," an international information network that was a clear precursor to the internet.

[...]

But there was one person who paid attention to his more optimistic experiments, a writer named Robert C. O'Brien. In the late '60s, O'Brien allegedly visited Calhoun's lab, met the man trying to build a true and creative rat paradise, and took note of the Frisbee on the door, the scientists' own attempt "to help when things got too stressful," as Calhoun put it. Soon after, O'Brien wrote Ms. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH—a story about rats who, having escaped from a lab full of blundering humans, attempt to build their own utopia. Next time, maybe we should put the rats in charge.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CvIpdKUWgAAlJau.jpg

excellent use of the rhetorical question there, A+

"even 20 years ago an ambulance would have been called"

'would of' surely?

Lowering taxes to makes lower paid jobs more worthwhile would of helped this indolent gent get `back on his feet'

that's amazing. garda you have to get some submissions into these 'have your say' newspaper things, it's a natural forum for reports from the gutter.

struggling to accept that that isn't garda's work tbh

dunno if i could conjure up something this crazy - i can't stop thinking about it.

like it is on so many levels fascinating and horrible.

Ou sont les negligence d'autrefois

Whom shall be the one to call the ambulance? Not I.

these days no ambulance attends the gutter, occasionally a battered uber will pass driven by a rat with a gold tooth

Akeem Diko OTM. Leicester's title win was remarkable.

lol estela

lol x2!

https://twitter.com/MxJackMonroe/status/790591668256997376

Probably more annoying are his kids who are always shouting MUMMY CAN YOU HELP ME at loud volumes and kicking footballs against the face.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cvn0X1uW8AAbAKl.jpg:large

As long as the UK allows a large percentage of its young men to leave school, in a half [or less ] educated state, then the country will not prosper. My Victorian grandfather valued knowledge for its own sake---[he having left a village school aged 10]. Why today have the youth made hero's of the kickers of balls rather than the builders of bridges?
Why is getting drunk regarded as fun and not an illustration of ignorance? Why are nerds, hated at school? Nerds are more likely to be the future than the ignorant and stupid!

we used to not kick a ball in the street.

My Victorian grandfather

LOL

Why today have the youth made hero's of the kickers of balls

so this fuckin' loser can neither kick a ball nor properly grasp the fundamentals of the english language eh

ripe fodder for the soylent green factories of post-brexit britain imo