The Teens Will Save Us | Hacker News Reader

The Teens Will Save Us

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23 pointskposehn52 comments

Young people are more willing to "rise up and fight The Man" than ever before, to be sure. The problem is, now that information is easier to spread instantaneously across the entire globe--and we carry devices that let us access this global information network in our pockets at all times--people are more prone to groupthink than ever before, and one's political beliefs are more directly shaped by social circumstances than ever before. Many young people express desire to fight for various causes and will make all the social media posts in the world in support, but once they get the dopamine hit from feedback to said posts (likes, retweets, replies, etc.), they feel that they've done Something Good, and call it a day, instead of actively engaging more directly with whatever causes they're supporting. Critical thinking is becoming more and more discouraged, especially in educational settings, as outward expression of such is increasingly drowned out by overemotional responses. I'm not sure what to make of all of this, but it seems overly simple to say "the teens will save us" just because they're more likely to "resist."

Your assertion of "slacktivism" seems in contradiction to the fact that more Americans are marching in the streets for various reasons in the last 10 years than in the preceding years of my life.

Yes, and what does this marching in the streets really accomplish? What does having a "March for Women" really get done in the greater scheme of things, aside from making everyone participating it and supporting it feel good about themselves? Same goes for the "March for Science" and other such "marches."

"Political protest" has become normalized to the point where the general populace is becoming increasingly numb to it, making the concept lose whatever effectiveness it once had, and it's gotten to the point where at least for me personally, I can't keep up with the "marches" anymore. What are we marching for this week? Anti-racism? Anti-sexism? Anti-homophobia? Anti-transphobia? Anti-2A? Anti-fascism? Anti-Nazi?

All this marching just seems very evocative of Two Minutes Hate at this point. Let the public get it out of their system and move on to some other issue next month. Rinse and repeat, keep the hysteria and fear up, keep the population subdued and angry and afraid and emotionally vulnerable. It's been working out well so far.

This article is written for people who seriously believe that the Trump admin is an attempt at a fascist coup the US. If you don't believe that, the article won't do much for you.

> Critical thinking is becoming more and more discouraged, especially in educational settings, as outward expression of such is increasingly drowned out by overemotional responses.

I don't think you have any evidence of this besides whatever media propaganda you might have been reading. As a teen's dad the teens I interact with are much more informed and aware than I remember from my gen-X era high school.

>I don't think you have any evidence of this besides whatever media propaganda you might have been reading.

This is the most perfect sentence to immediately discredit anyone in political discussion today that I have ever seen. No matter what political perspective you have, you can say it and it magically works in your favor. I'll be keeping this in mind for future ironic use.

Also, ironically, this statement shows complete lack of critical thinking. I made an assertion without further explanation or citation, and instead of asking for further explanation or citation, you dismissed any conclusions I may have independently reached as being the result of "media propaganda," without even knowing the depths of my conclusions or how I reached them! This signals that you've made up your mind about the topic and aren't even willing to engage in discussion about it. Why post at all?

It would be amazing that you independently reached this conclusion through only your own observations when "people that disagree with us are irrational and emotional" is incredibly common propaganda that is everywhere.

It would be amazing for anyone to reach any conclusion in this day and age through solely through their own observations with the infinite access to information we both literally have at our fingertips as I write this and you read it. None of this changes the fact that you seem to have zero interest in any sort of real discussion, preferring instead to shut down my entire perspective because of some ill-defined "propaganda," so I'm going to have to tap out here.

First they came for the guns. An unarmed populace is powerless against an abusive government. America was founded because we wanted more liberty. And for many years, we understood that increased liberty came with increased responsability and risk. People now seem to have forgotten that. If you want to remain free, it will be hard. Sometimes there will even be bloodshed. I mourn for the students killed, as I mourn for all who have died, advertently or inadvertently, to protect our rights and freedoms. pulp

Your AR-15 is not going to defend you against a drone strike. The idea you could fight the government with privately owned weapons is completely laughable, and the entire notion comes from an era long before tanks and missiles and nuclear bombs made the entire concept ridiculous. If you want to fight an abusive government you do it through the power of an organized populace. You can’t force an entire nation to live at the barrel of a gun.

"The point is not that you can win pitched battles against a professional army with all its ordinance as a ragtag citizens’ militia with small arms. The point is that you can fight. You can bleed them. When they come patrolling through your neighborhood, you may be able to take a couple of the fuckers with you. You might even be able to run away and do it again. Theoretically, you wouldn’t be alone and they couldn’t engage in endless “manhunts” for everyone who resisted them. And they’d never feel safe; there could be a shooter behind any window. Of course, they could call in artillery and air support and level your neighborhood; sure. What would this get them? It would anger a lot of people when innocents died and play right into the hands of the rebels. It would also make a lot of the soldiers in that professional military seriously consider whether they were doing the right thing. Finally, it would simply kill people. No one wants to rule a nation of corpses.

The aim of a tyrant is to control, not to kill. What they want is to be able to have militarized police/gestapo point guns at people and cow them into submission to whatever dictates they might want to impose. If those people are instead waiting behind their doors and ready to shoot first when the jackbooted thugs come around, they’ve already failed. So the point is to fight. If you resist, you’re not being controlled, and you’re also undermining attempts to control others who can’t or won’t fight. You might die, of course. That’s why Patrick Henry said what he famously said, more or less. As long as people can resist, they can be free, and tyrants can never succeed. But when you’re talking about using swords and knives and clubs against modem military weapons, it actually becomes pointless, because you can’t bleed them at all. They’ll just shoot you with beanbags and rubber and water cannons and microwave guns. That’s why having guns is so important."

Not sure if this was your point, but your first paragraph is an accurate depiction of the War on Terror in Iraq and Afghanistan (and I'm sure plenty of other war-torn countries in the region). Despite the USA having military supremacy in nearly every way, there will probably be no end to the bloodshed for decades to come.

This is not how you win lasting change. This is how you turn your country into hell. One person should never have the power to do this; they should have to be able to win the hearts and minds of others to impose their will on the world. Movement in this direction is always preferable.

Edit: When you’re using insurgent violence to try to force the world around you to change into what you desire, in which sense are you not just as much of a tyrant?

The comment above is talking about a last resort defense against the country going full on brutal totalitarianism.

Not saying I agree with it, but it doesn't sound like you were responding to that.

There's an article with a similar issue to this that just hit the front page, and it mentions the "paradox of tolerance" or "Popper's Paradox". Namely, if you are tolerant of intolerance, the intolerance will win out and the tolerance will disappear. If you give excessive freedom to propagate tyranny, tyranny will take over, thereby destroying all freedom. For this reason, force is sometimes necessary to stop force. Or, to use the colloquialism, fight fire with fire. Fight firepower with firepower.

Tanks, missiles, and nuclear weapons are utterly useless in a guerilla war.

To be blunt: you don't know what you're talking about.

Edit: If, as you claim, rifles serve no function in modern warfare, please explain why every military organization in the world continues to issue them.

> The idea you could fight the government with privately owned weapons is completely laughable...

You could fight a single knucklehead who thinks a badge means he can get away with theft, rape, or murder.

Or you could fight for a system that never gives him that badge in the first place.

Guns solve short term problems. They don’t overturn tyranny. Arguments, beliefs, and convictions do that.

I think taking away the freedom of defense at the individual level is a long term problem.

I don't think we can prevent all violence beforehand. And I don't think we can prosecute all violence without creating some sort of police or surveillance state.

Given there will (should) be gaps in how violence is policed, we need to give upstanding citizens the ability to handle those gaps in justice in their own way. I'd rather people left the scene, handed over their wallet, recorded and published the incident, etc.

But as another commenter implied by bringing up Mexico, the "let the police handle it" is a bit of a privileged attitude. That isn't a trustworthy option for every American and it hasn't been a trustworthy option throughout American history.

> They don’t overturn tyranny. Arguments, beliefs, and convictions do that.

Try that against the Mexican drug cartels and see how that goes

The Mexican drug cartels wouldn’t exist if we’d have established a system that doesn’t give them financial incentives to. These problems are fundamentally always an issue of the underlying social systems that bring them into being. You cannot shoot them away.

I'm not concerned about what brought the cartels to existence, the question applies to any enemy force, replace "Mexican Cartels" with "Nazis" if you wish

Explain to me how you're supposed to deal with Nazis, or other invading armed force using "Arguments, beliefs, and convictions"

Or for that matter, explain how a 60 year, without the money to relocate, old in a suburb filled with crime and essentially abandoned by the police is going to defend himself against pickpockets and robbers.

"The police should ...."

Yeah, but the police hasn't, for decades. During those decades the government has constantly moved to further defund the police, not the opposite. So sorry, no.

And yeah, I get it, for the rich in central cities who can isolate themselves on a whim and move houses when they want to, guns are a serious nuisance.

For the poor in a weak position, the fact that 1/10 of the victims are armed with guns is the one thing that defends them. And you personally don't have to participate.

dunno, illiterate poppy farmers in Afghanistan are doing pretty good with old Kalishnakovs

Because it’s not the Kalishnakovs doing the work here; it’s the beliefs and convictions of the people holding them and the sway that those beliefs have on the people around them.

Wonder how long the drone thing will still be an advantage? Give it a few decades, and military type robots could become a common thing for hobbyists to own, especially in a place like the US where almost anything seems to go as far as private ownership is concerned. Or they could end up getting hacked.

You could theoretically build something like this pretty easily... ISIS is already building their own drones; only makes sense they will at some point arm those drones.

They already have

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/43qbbw/russia-say...

Thankfully, not very effectively.

To me the most powerful balance of this era is represented by apps like http://buycott.com - consumer activism, being smart about where you spend your money. The potential is huge although awareness and probably cynicism mean it hasn't yet become mainstream.

I don't think we can robustly rely on the whims and trends of consumer groups to safeguard our societies.

This is what public policy, laws, and regulations are supposed to do.

Although I suppose the problem there is that politicians and government offices don't generally seem to be properly incentivized and empowered to solve these long term issues...

Heey that's what King George of England thought. It's actually a good description of much of the revolutionary war: "As the British retraced their 16-mile journey, their lines were constantly beset by Patriot marksmen firing at them Indian-style from behind trees, rocks, and stone walls. At Lexington, Captain Parker’s militia had its revenge, killing several British soldiers as the Red Coats hastily marched through his town. By the time the British finally reached the safety of Boston, nearly 300 British soldiers had been killed, wounded, or were missing in action. The Patriots suffered fewer than 100 casualties." "The American Revolution Begins", History.com, 19 April 2009. http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-american-revo.... Another example is found in Morgan's Riflemen, who famously used guerrilla tactics to disrupt supply lines and pick off British targets. If you want a newer example, see the Vietnam War. With relatively little backing, a relatively small force of Viet Cong fought the US to a standstill. I would postulate that this is due to a relatively simple fact: the surface area for an enemy to assault is directly grows exponentially as a function of the size. Don't believe this? Hear me out. As a guerilla force, I would be fairly independent. I can replace leaders with minimal interruption, march on my stomach rather than dealing with complicated supply lines, have little bureaucratic infrastructure, and am not bound by the rules of a nation (those of warfare and others). As a country, however, I have many more difficulties. Not only do I have the above issues, but I also have to navigate complicated foreign policy. What if the guerrillas gain the support of a foreign power (e.g. the US during Revolutionary War from France; Viet Cong from China and Russia during Vietnam War)? How to I keep from indirectly attacking one of their allies? The Korean War is an example of this: fought to a standstill with an eventual "resolution" of splitting the territory. This is for a simple reason: US-Soviet tensions meant neither side wanted to use a nuclear option, literally or metaphorically, because they feared excessively provoking the other side.

In conclusion, guerrillas are bound by none of these rules. This means that yes, a small force with weapons can defeat that of a government, even if greatly outnumbered. Our country's founders, having just taken advantage of this fact, wanted to protect it just in case a tyrant took over. Jefferson tells us that "when a government becomes destructive of these ends [securing the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness], it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it". The second amendment prefaces the right to bear arms with the statement, "...being necessary to the security of a free State...". This is important: FREE state. A tyrant has no such need, and this is for good reason: a militia is composed of citizens, not enlisted military. This means it is under much less direct control of the government. This security is against a tyrant just as much as a foreign body. This security is to secure the "free" part of that statement, not just a nation's borders and foreign policy. This security is to secure our freedom.

It's not about the government, it's about the oligarchs. The US governmemt is a puppet, and the ventriloquist are the oligarchs.

I see what you're saying, but I suspect that the oligarchs that actually run the US do not like an armed populace.

Actually, I'm sure some do... like the lobbyists for gun manufacturers and arms dealers in the NRA and Washington.

Some people make a LOT of money from guns/weapon sales.

One cost of all the guns is all the extra security. Schools resembling prisons, TSA, metal detectors and surveillance everywhere... doesn’t that also infringe on my freedom in a way?

Is that a cost of the guns, or the 'war on terror' stuff that became an obsession after 9/11? Because it's not much better in many places outside the US either.

The liberty you are talking about here is handling guns irresponsibly. That's the only additional gun-related liberty Americans have compared to most other developed countries.

First they came for the fully automatic guns and you just rolled over and let them take them.

Oh, I did't think of that one. Just thought it was the typical 'Trump is a dictator' musing but you are right, this might be very well about the teens vs NRA show.

> "“But we’re supposed to protect against tyranny! I need the same weapons the military would come at me with!” Dude. You know where I can get an Apache helicopter and a Paladin?! Hook a girl up! Seriously, though, do you really think you’d be able to hold off the government with an individual level weapon? Because you wouldn’t. One grenade, and you’re toast. Don’t have these illusions of standing up to the government, and needing military style rifles for that purpose. You’re not going to stand up to the government with this thing. They’d take you out in about half a second."

https://agingmillennialengineer.com/2018/02/15/fuck-you-i-li...

*Edit: Set link to original military poster.

I don’t have a particularly strong opinion on guns either way, but this kind of argument never made sense to me. The continual quagmire that is Iraq and Afghanistan for Coalition Forces almost immediately disproves it. The objective isn’t to “win” in a conventional war, it’s to be a perpetual resistance. See Napoleon’s misadventures in Spain (the source of the term ‘guerilla’) for a pre-modern example.

Sounds like the author isn't familiar with the history of Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq.

You mean places that all prove that weapons mean fuck-all compared to actual deep and lasting social change in fighting corrupt governments and belief systems?

The only way to actually defend yourself against a corrupt government is to change hearts and minds.

I was merely disproving the fact that a motivated population with rifles can't fight and (in the case of Vietnam) defeat the world's largest military. The jury is still out on Iraq/Afghanistan.

Ok, thought experiment time

What if instead of Senioritis this was a disease (a deadly one) and the action needed was vaccination/washing your hands/"magic incantation" before doing something?

On the other hand, what if this "totalitaran state" is pushing for something "cool and fun", I don't know, using Emacs (example). Because Of Course Emacs is the best editor, etc, etc (and since it's obvious this is not questioned - whoever questions this is shunned/alienated).

While the dangers of totalitarism are known (and see, we even have a name for this concept), the opposite, which might be anarchy(?), while it is individually an advantage collectively can be a disaster

I think people have been burned by one extreme and are maybe not aware of what lies on the other side (me included).

This sounds similar to a real experiment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Wave_(experiment)

There is an amazing movie based on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wave_(2008_film)

> While the adults are complacent, jaded, and disparaged, teenagers are ignited, spirited, and take no prisoners. ... Do not get in their way: they will crush you.

This is scary. Do we expect violence?

Also, aren't millennials more pro gun than others?

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/10/12/are-mille...

According to Gallup’s version of the question in 2004, the notion that concealed guns made for safer spaces polled at 25 percent; 11 years later, it registered at 55 percent nationally. The greatest support came from those ages 18-29, at 66 percent, a full 10 points greater than the next highest scoring demographic.

Also see the 1981 film The Wave[1], the Stanford prison experiment[2], and Jane Elliott's[3] blue-eyes/brown-eyes experiment[4].

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wave_%28TV_special%29

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott

[4] - http://tkam.wikia.com/wiki/Jane_Elliot_-_Brown_eyes,_Blue_ey...

Most current teenagers aren't Millenials.

Ah, good point. So this will be a generational clash...

They'll save us from contrived and meaningless object lessons?

The real test will be if they oppose fascism and bullying that is on their side about something important.

I am staggered - and I repeat - staggered teens in the US are not doing more on this issue, especially now they have this platform.

If every single 14-17 year old across the entire country banded together they could fix this once and for all by the next election. With social and the internet it's not even hard.

Step 1: All those teens vow to vote the day they turn 18 and forever after - that's tens of millions of votes per election, easily enough to change the outcome.

Step 2: It doesn't matter if the candidate is Republican or Democrat (this issue is more important) - if gun reform is not their number 1 issue they will be voted against.

Step 3: Make a positive change for their country, forever.

That's a horrible and dishonest plan

What's dishonest about it?

It's extremely up-front and transparent, the opposite of dishonest.

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