Jeff Jarvis on Why the NY Times Might Have it Backwards on Children and Tech
thefastertimes.com
thefastertimes.com
ADD is a perfect example of this. I was diagnosed with it and I was medicated through most of school because I really couldn't focus on boring material. Eventually I learned to focus on things I'm not interested in and I don't need medication.
I've had fairly severe ADD my entire life. I wasn't diagnosed until my mid-20's. I haven't had much luck with medication (I can certainly concentrate 100% better, but the side effects have been pretty bad in general). I have learned to at least manage it better in my adult life. I work on a 10-on/10-off cycle. I still manage to be really productive, even if bosses that I've had in the past couldn't handle my distraction issues. It's precisely why I work for myself now.
It's possible I still deal with the same issues I did as a kid but I've learned to manage them most days. I'm certainly not a severe case.
When you get down to it, the fundamental difference between the "conservative" and "liberal", now "progressive" again world views is on human nature:
Is it relatively fixed, or as one of my history professors observed, "Original Sin is an empirical observation!"
Or is human nature is plastic; e.g. change or perfect the environment and you change the human in the direction of perfection.
Conservatives say that much of the human wreckage of communism, socialism and collectivism is due to the stubbornness of human nature: when the environment was changed, and e.g. the New Soviet Man didn't emerge, well, things got ugly after that. E.g. in this case, better hang/shoot/throw into the Gulag those counter-revolutionaries, kulaks, whatever.
Note that it is both conservatives and progressives who worry about media warping the minds of children: conservatives worrying about sex, irreverance, and irresponsibility, and progressives worrying about racism, sexism, and violence.
Conservatives assume that "human sexuality can be shaped and controlled by society" through law, religion, custom, etc., and while we're at it, although not directly related for them for this but very important to some progressives (see below), to a certain end, that of families and properly raising the next generation.
That's entirely consistent with the attitude that man is born evil and must be prodded in the right directions.
The modern progressive attitude is as you say, "let it all hang out". Historically it that wasn't entirely the case, e.g. progressives were heavily into eugenics until the Nazis gave that a bad name (e.g. check out Margret Sanger, even Wikipedia doesn't dare to entirely airbrush away that aspect of her: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Sanger#Eugenics_and_eu...).
You also need to factor in this bit of wit from I think William F. Buckely, although I wasn't able to find the quote as I remember it on the web: "The only thing liberals want to be liberated from is their marriage vows." I.e. there is an aspect of self-interest in all this.
You also need to factor in that the more radical of the progressives want to destroy the family in pursuit of their particular idea of utopia, since the family is the foundational unit of existing societies (the Bolsheviks are one well known early example). A lot of feminism also goes along similar lines (e.g. the fish and bicycle slogan). So supporting "every variety and quirk of human sexuality" are means to those ends.
This is a complete misunderstanding of the intent and the actual result, but someone as honest and principled as William F. Buckley can be forgiven for misunderstanding :-) Affairs have always been an option for married people. Back in more conventional days with less freedom of choice, anyone in an unhappy marriage had an understandable reason for an affair. At least in the upper classes -- in William F. Buckley's milieu -- longstanding affairs could be open secrets and might not bring any opprobrium onto the parties involved, depending on the exact perception of the situation. These days, the legitimization of non-marriage lifestyle choices has made open-minded progressives feel more responsible for their marriages.
Most progressives are pretty bland in their sexual tastes, especially after marriage. They mostly commit themselves to conventional, sexually monogamous marriages. Without rigid societal rules to take partial blame, inability to stick to that conventional image of marriage has finally become a purely personal moral failure even in the eyes of social progressives. Yet most progressives still choose marriage and submit themselves to this standard. For the average progressive, little has changed about sex except that the pre-marriage scene has been liberated from fears about shame and pregnancy.
tl;dr Being a progressive and a liberal has always been mostly about fighting for rights that one will personally never exercise. William F. Buckley was a brilliant intellectual, but he was wrong on this. Monte Python, however, nailed it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifgHHhw_6g8
Maybe he's interested in the video and not on the book? I have several tickets piled up in JIRA that I really am not interested in. (Really, really not interested) I'd rather be spending my entire day on hacker news. Instead I only stop by every few hours to clear my brain between tickets. Discipline is useful and not easy to learn.
What a load of bullshit. The human brain can change; in fact, it changes all the time. The problem is that we are changing far faster than our brains can, which isn't really all that dangerous in my opinion—somehow we continue to live even though we have lots of unnecessary body parts. In comparison, the unnecessary parts of our brain shouldn't hinder us all that much.
Agreed. Totally idiotic thing to say. Ever heard of a metaphor, Einstein?