I have no need to defend what I said about how the immune system works. Feel free to consult a basic textbook, or even Wikipdia, for further information. As for everything else; the only people who seriously maintain that getting sick is a good thing and that medical intervention is bad are the likes of Christian Scientists and living fossils of Christianity who pop up every time a new vaccine comes out, be it smallpox (which interferes with God's rule of the natural order) or HPV (which keeps them from scaring little girls into not having sex). Now, in retrospect, I think the poster in this thread is a bit more naive than that and it is a bit of a stretch to say he would have opposed smallpox variolation. In any case, your statements about exercise - they make no sense. I've heard nothing about exercise's effect on the immune system (from a reputable source, at any rate) and even if I grant that it is true, still makes no sense. Why would I go for a five mile run instead of wiping down doorknobs with alcohol wipes? Why would a surgeon tell his patient to go for a bike ride instead of autoclaving his scalpels? There's nothing unnatural about infection control, unless "unnatural" means "requires a level of scientific knowledge more advanced than what existed in the 17th century". Exercise is good in its own right, I do it anyways, but not because it makes me less sick (if anything, I've been more sick since I started exercising than I was in the previous few years). Let me assure you - I am properly informed about infectious diseases and infection control, and anyone who thinks that exercise is a legitimate substitute for disinfection doesn't know what they're talking about.
My dad wanted to be an astronaut, fireman, President, or design race cars. My youngest cousin wants to be a rapper, actor or professional athlete. I don´t want to be an astronaut necessarily, but shoot me off this planet, please. Pussification. Being male in the Maddox/George Carlin sense of the word is almost socially unacceptable. Male sex symbols keep looking more and more pretty or less...male. Name me a male movie star today that could HOPE to kick John Wayne´s ass, or even grow a presentable beard. A lot of the guys I see around don´t look like they have ever been in a fight, cry on a regular basis, don´t need to shave every day, cannot do simple guy stuff (change oil, fix a flat, chop a tree, cook a steak). Of the guys I see lifting weights, 90% of them are doing it to look better naked, and that´s all. Here´s the problem: if you are 25, and your dad was magically 25 again, and you had to fight, you should be evenly matched. Most of my friends would get slaughtered. Also, we look up to useless professions. I hate celebrity news, and it´s disgusting how everyone tells me I should want to be the next Brad Pitt/Johnny Depp/whatever, or how awesome/rich/sexy he is. It´s such a misappropriation of priorities. If the most admired or successful individuals in our society got their start in drama class and not science, we are fucking doomed. It´s not that education or intelligence is changing or that technology is drastically changing anything, it´s the priorities have changed. When information is so easily acquired, most ignorance is willful. We don´t teach evolution in schools because the church disagrees with it. We don´t want to seem too smart, because in no movie does the geeky asian kid get to fuck a cheerleader. We have allowed economies of scale to bully out certain activities as essentially wastes of time. Example: Little Caesar´s will give you a large pepperoni pizza for $5. I know I could not buy those ingredients for myself and hope to approach a cost of $5 a pizza. So, if it´s cheaper and easier to let Little C´s make me a pizza, why should I need to know how to do it? And if for some reason, I did, I can look it up online. My grandma would make her pizza sauce from scratch, my mom from tomato paste, sauce, and oregano, and I would buy pizza sauce ready-made. Now, instead of making a pizza, try something more technical, like changing your oil. With a coupon, I can have my oil changed for $22. If I buy my oil and filters at Wal-Mart to do it myself, I spend...$22. Why the hell would I bother? I think with each generation, we are less formal. For my generation, we know a lot more about one another instantly. I know my friends relationship status, birthday, mutual friends, even what they are doing at any given moment. Anyone who wants my phone number or email address just has to spell my name correctly. With that said, you ¨know¨people a lot more intimately, thus less formality. Also, we come into less contact with fewer and fewer strangers. On a bus, train or walking down the street, who does NOT have headphones or a cell phone attached to their skull? The vast majority of strangers I meet and have to deal with are in the service industry (wait staff, clerks, etc.) and my expectation of them is to be polite, sure, but they are paid to do so. Fucking parenting. My parents are still together, did not get hitched pregnant, planned for me and my sister, and have supported me in nearly everything. I owe everything to them and my successes I directly attribute to their sacrifices, direction and love. How many of my friends can say that? Few. My parents didn´t read the books, follow the fads, or plant themselves in my ass. My parents would never give a coach or teacher shit on my part, they saw them as playing on the same team. I cannot begin to illustrate the differences between my upbringing and people who would complain about the dangers of bike riding or summer camp.
I just love whenever I hear some mother say, "Oh, he's got ADD/ADHD, he'll need special classes." Bull fucking shit. If you let the kid fucking wrestle or do some rough-and-tumble boy activities for once instead of being a vapid helicopter mom maybe he wouldn't have as much trouble with acting out. You wonder why each generation becomes progressively more "bored" and complaining that "there's nothing to do." Big reason is probably the elimination of unsupervised recreational activities, because mom thinks they're too dangerous. "There's pedophiles and robbers and rapists, oh my!" (More) Focused: It's pathetic to me how parenting has turned into "I don't want Johnny or Janie to become the next headline news unless he's won a Nobel Prize thanks to those Baby Einstein videos he watched when he was two".
This should have been the end of the thread. First of all because it's true, and second because it puts all of your alarmist, social history-ignoring points in perspective. If you look at the world today and think "My god! It's fucking shitty! Shittier than it used to be! These kids are fucking useless compared to me when I was a kid!" you have to realize you're looking on from an extremely biased perspective. First of all, are you comparing before and after from the same perspective? As a child you didn't have the knowledge, wisdom, or experience that you have now, so it's unlikely that you accurately judged the people around you as you would now. It's possible that the shittiness you're seeing isn't a recent development, and instead you just weren't aware of it previously because your sense of critical awareness had not fully developed. Second, are you comparing the same demographics? Are the kids you grew up with the same demographics that you are comparing now? Were you in the nerd class with all the smartest kids learning advanced concepts, reading a book a week, and doing all sorts of other fast-paced crap? Does it make sense to compare your level of knowledge then with students now of the general school population, or of the remedial classes and say "oh but they're learning so much less, the kids are getting dumber"? No, it doesn't. Third, who are you to judge what is good or bad? Yes it's true that since the advent of the internet you don't need as much knowledge to get by, since you can just look it up whenever you need it, but does that mean you know less? Did the advent of industrialization providing the public at large with machines lower their general level of knowledge? I mean suddenly you no longer need craftsmen with deep knowledge and experience with a particular manufacturing process, does the general population's lack of need for such people with the advent of mass production make the people less knowledgeable? No, to suggest that is just silly. Instead what happens when the pressure and need for specific knowledge is alleviated what you get is people, scientists, and inventors who are able to put that energy into other tasks and accelerate their own production. This point is documented throughout history, the most basic being that as agricultural technology has improved over time, fewer farmers are needed to grow more food, and you wind up suddenly with a surplus population that can be put to other tasks, and you get societal growth. One such area of expertise is computer programming. Kids today who "waste all of their time on the internet not playing outside, not studying, not blah blah blah" are frequently taking their own initiative to learn to program, which is an inherently valuable skill in every profession. Is this a downward societal spiral of loss of knowledge? No, that would be an insane assertion to make. Fourth, if you claim that the spread of the population, the group of overachievers, the group of just-scrape-by, and the group of apathetic don't-give-a-fucks is a new advent then your level of historical perspective isn't much further than the tip of your nose. You know, there are a lot of parallels of this argument of degeneracy with the arguments of degeneracy made to justify the eugenics movement in the United States in the 1920's. Even though we've stopped forcibly sterilizing men and women for their perceived societal merits, the cultural backdrop of the US is still focused on degeneracy, feeble-mindedness, and other such ailments perceived to be exploding out of control that they were 80 years ago. All that's changed is that the alarmist debate has taken a much more passive and less up-front nature since Hitler got the whole movement such a bad rap, but his actions were merely an extension of our own, to the point where the superintendent of Virginia's Western State Hospital said "The Germans are beating us at our own game." If there's anything that I've gotten out of the "The times, they are a-changin'" thread it's that nothing has changed. Edit: It's important to note that the idea of basically letting the sick die is actually from Thomas Malthus who came up with the basic idea of "Fuck the poor, scrap social programs to help them, let them die. I'm not paying for some poor fuck to eat." Everyone afterwards who utters the same sentiment is basing the assertion, no matter how far removed, on this 18th century classict (those against universal healthcare anyone?). The eugenics movement was strongly based on this sentiment, except taking an active role in the elimination of the poor instead of a passive one. Hitler just took Malthus' assertion to its logical conclusion.