Jon Stewart calls out congressional nerd bashing over SOPA

I'm 45 years old. My parents were born during ww2. I grew up with black and white tv (okay, partly because we couldn't afford color yet...). But my dad, an unskilled immigrant, ran IT companies for most of his life, and my mother, well into her 60's, got an iPad before I did. Hell, she was on Skype when I still had a landline... She even owns a friggin' Wii.

If there are people who don't seem to "get" this new world, it's not because because they are uneducated (both my parents' education ended with highschool) or because they are "old". It's because they don't want it. They've seen more change during their lifetime than you can imagine, some it they supported (or even made happen), some of it they were against. They're perfectly capable of dealing with changing times.

These politicians see a change that erodes their power and gives it to the people, and they simply don't want that to happen. That's why they belittle us by calling us "nerds", because they consider us a threat, not because they don't "get" it.

They get it quite well, thankyouverymuch, which is exactly why they say what they say and do what they do.

Not understanding the internet transcends all ages and social classes. It isn't a symptom of age, but of ignorance and incuriosity. The people we're talking about haven't even tried, they haven't bothered to look up "the internet" in an encyclopaedia, haven't bothered to ask a savvy intern to explain it to them. They're people who habitually hold strong opinions on things that they know less than nothing about - c.f. climate change.

Only if you stop learning. And by learning i mean challenging your ways of thinking and acting (think about a computer geek learning salsa dancing), not learning something similar to things you already know (think about a computer geek learning yet another programming language).

> the majority of people (aka normal people) who where adults before 1985 do not "get" this new world the way you do.

Don't be a sheep. I mean, do not get along only with people in your age bracket. Keeping an open mind, socialize with younger people: they'll teach you things, if you let them.

Disclosure: 37 year old fart here.

And you think the cell phone is more fundamental than, say, the widespread deployment of telephones in the first place? Before then, there was no way to have a voice conversation with someone more than a 100 meters away.

When the polio vaccine was invented "church bells were ringing across the country, factories were observing moments of silence, synagogues and churches were holding prayer meetings, and parents and teachers were weeping. One shopkeeper painted a sign on his window: Thank you, Dr. Salk. 'It was as if a war had ended', one observer recalled." (Wikipedia for Jonas Salk.) That vaccine still saves the lives of 100,000s of children every year even when compared to the 1800s. For that matter, before penicillin you could die because of a rose thorn accidentally scratching your mouth, as the sad story of Albert Alexander shows.

Tell me, how is the cell phone a more fundamental change than these?

I don't think the cell phone is that significant on its own, though it is up there with the changes others have mentioned.

What this generation is seeing isn't one massive change: it is seeing a greater concentration of significant changes than previous generations, and some of those changes when grouped together have greater impact than they would individually.

What about the railways?

So long as we continue on our trend of exponential technological growth, this will be tautologically true.

edt: i meant this to appear underneath the comments with other pretty meaningful inventions that caused huge social change

Or the transistor?

Before that, it was affordable cars, it changed how people live, work and relax.

Before that TV.

Before that the discovery of the nuclear bomb, nuclear energy, the world would be never the same.

Before that penicillin, filtered water(no diseases in water), radio, telephone, polymers, natural gas pipes, electric light...

As you start trying to build something that looks like the puzzle, you realise that instead of the 1,000 pieces originally estimated for the puzzle, you're going to need 5,000, and the puzzle is actually in 3 dimensions not just 2, and also the puzzle needs to fit with another puzzle built by a different team of people who had no idea your puzzle needs to fit with them. Then you find out your puzzle pieces, that you borrowed from someone else, don't work as expected with put together with certain other pieces... :)

challenger blew up because of a fuel leak, not the lack ofi an rtos.

This is what Jon Stewart does. Some people say that the Daily Show is the only real news, but my counterpoint is that no, it may feel like it's coming from the right place, one of intelligent skepticism. But they aren't going out and getting fresh information about topics, they are just commenting on the lameness of existing coverage.

My point was that The Daily Show may be slightly anti-SOPA by being liberal, but they still have a point about the fact that they:

a) don't understand what they are legislating and rely on experts b) don't appear to have enough respect to refer to these experts as anything other than nerds

I don't care if they are for or against SOPA, that was not my point.

We have a couple of 30-somethings in German government, they "don't get it" (and/or don't want to) either.

So I'd advise against only relying on the "biological solution".

Seriously, though, for a group of people who like to call each other out on standards of conduct, it's pretty appalling that they used a derogatory term to jokingly dismiss their utter lack of expertise in the area.

That's why I said it is funny - usually these websites are excluding everything but the US with maybe Germany and UK added later. However in this instance I think they've got a black list - as in, allow everyone except these countries, like Ireland (allow all versus disallow all + exceptions).

I'd like this to happen, but this seems to me very similiar to each past generation idee fix.

First christians in Rome in first century thought when everybody will convert, there would be obviously no sins, and it will be almost haeven on earth. They were right with conversion dynamic, but wrong with the social implications.

The same for revolutionists, romantic nationalists, liberals, communists, hippies, and now it's our turn. Every time the change happened, but the consequences were not exactly as bright, as young idealists predicted.

I'd put my money on this time being exactly the same.

But which ones - the tech nerds or the legal nerds?

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."