Thursday, July 10, 2008

Why College Students Shouldn't Be Granted the Freedom of Speech

Brought up under the impression they’re all winners and told their excrement is platinum by their mothers, today’s college students find nothing wrong with dispensing their wise, sage-like wisdom to us schleps. Us morons, us simpletons who do not have the benefit of being so intelligent and enlightened as they. Us working stiffs who despite our age are not as wise as these 20 year old putzes.

And the reason I bring this up is because I have ran into another one of these geniuses our public schools has spit out of the assembly line, sent to the local community college, and now sent out into the real world where I get to listen to this idiot’s drivel.

However, there is one benefit about this, and that is when the topic turns to things like economics, politics and so forth, wherein I might be “slightly” more learned than the 19 year old emo kid, I find it amusing listening to them tell me “how the real world works” and “how the economy works.”

Now there was many things this latest sophomoric sage had to tell me; global warming, Obama is our saviour (did you know he’s for change?)and so forth, but one of them was that if we really cared about energy independence and the environment, we’d get rid of as much plastic as we possibly could.

This was an odd one to me, because I didn’t know that plastic was now enemy #1. So I asked him, “Aside from cutting holds in bottle holders so turtles don’t get caught in them, how is cutting back on plastic going to help lessen our dependence on foreign oil?”

“Well,” the future Albert Einstein said, “because we don’t just use oil for gas, we use it for making plastics as well. And if we all just cut back on the plastic we’d use, we’d be able to do a lot in terms of fighting high gas prices. Even if you recycle your grocery bags, it will help.”

My eyes now rolling, I contemplated asking him what percent of the oil we consumed ended up going into actual plastic, but thought this would short circuit his brain. I doubt he had the intellectual veracity to look it up, let alone develop this idea with independent thought, but instead had been fed a line of BS by his professor about how re-using plastic bags was going to crush OPEC and now, like the millions of college freshmen today, parrot this line of BS to parents, elders, strangers and economists who could actually verify such things.


Doing some quick eyeball math (and generously assuming ALL residuals go into plastics) 4.6% MAX goes into plastics.

What angers me most about this I cannot decide. Is it the fact such a large percent of our youth (and presumedly the “educated” ones at that) have such a lack of intellectual independence and a spine to think critically about such things and can therefore be fed such lines of BS? Is it this moron, and legions like him, are going to vote for Obama and therefore not only negate my vote, but force me to suffer the consequences of their ignorance? Or is it their arrogance in thinking somehow they’re actually wiser than people who have 10 years on them AND the ability to think for themselves? It may even be the slight depression I’m going through realizing this is the generation that’s going to “work up the wealth” to pay for my social security.

Plus, there’s a sense of hopelessness. This was at a bar, I don’t want to lecture somebody who is in under the impression he is the lecturer and I am the student at a bar. It’s pointless, he’s not going to listen. I am tired of being that one guy at the party when he was 23 that wasn’t a democrat or a pot-smoking liberal and having to defend myself, capitalism and America by a bunch of brainwashed dolts, and 10 years later, still having to do so. It gets tiring. It behooves the question, “When the hell are you guys going to grow up and start thinking for yourselves? When is curiosity or an intellectual honesty going to take hold of your thought process by which you kind of prove to yourself the sh!t you’ve been spewing since you were 18 is actually true or not? When are you going to turn off American Idol and the Barack Obama Fest on the MSM and pick up an issue of The Economist or the WSJ? Or is it going to take a massive recession and massive poverty on par with the Great Depression to kick your asses into giving a damn about the country’s finances and becoming good financial stewards of this democracy?”

And then, there they sit. Looking at me as some oddity, like a zoo animal.

“Ooo, I didn’t know we had a Republican in town. He’s so strange looking. Look at how he acts. I didn’t know capitalists drink beer. Interesting. Take a picture of it!”

Regardless, the price for this youthful ignorance that just doesn’t seem to want to go away with age is going to be incalculable. We are still a democracy. And for better or for worse, we will get the government we deserve, inevitably one that is not a democracy.

But at least we’ll be recycling plastic bags.

17 comments:

  1. Anonymous12:55 AM

    An unsurprising side-effect of teaching methods that value effort as much as results, resulting in children that are simultaneously profoundly ignorant and puffed full of pride in their (faux) abilities.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Let him get a job for a while and he'll probably decide that forced wealth redistribution isn't such a great idea.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous7:41 AM

    Capt'n, I just have one issue with this post, and it's more a matter of semantics (and a pet peeve), than with content:

    This country is not now, nor has it ever been a "democracy." Democracy is nothing more than mob-rule, and is exactly what our Founding Fathers (not "founders," as the new PC term is) did not want. "Democrat" was a pejorative in those days (and still is, as far as I'm concerned).

    The dominant society has been pushing the idea that we are a democracy for decades, and is how we end up with arguments like, "Al Gore won the popular vote, and he's still not president." Ditto for Hillary not getting the Democrat nomination. "Democracy" is two wolves and one sheep voting on what's for dinner.

    We are a nation of law, not of man. The average life span of a "Democracy" is 200 years, by which time the populace discovers that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury... sounds eerily familiar, doesn't it?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous10:33 AM

    Actually, democracy is NOT a sheep and two wolves deciding what's for dinner.

    Democracy is three wolves and two sheep deciding what's for dinner, with the added clause that only one entity can be eaten at a time and that one sheep has been spending a great deal of his time and effort scaling a mountain every day in order to get the best food, resulting in that sheep being both the fattest and most fit.

    THAT'S democracy.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous11:24 AM

    Every barrel of oil contains gasoline, kerosene, diesel, and whatnot (after processing). You can't turn 100% of a barrel of oil into gasoline; only a fraction of a barrel can become gasoline. So, reducing use of plastic (of kerosene) won't have any effect on the price of gasoline.

    (This is basically what I remember from high school chemistry, so it may be wrong.)

    ReplyDelete
  6. Anonymous12:25 PM

    If he's concerned about CO2 and global warming, he should rejoice at plastic production. All the carbon that gets converted from petroleum to plastic is carbon that won't be ejected into the atmosphere, particularly because plastic doesn't degrade. But that would have required him paying attention in a real science class instead of whatever victim studies class he took.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Anonymous12:49 PM

    Public Education = "Government Education"

    "Government Education" = Propaganda and Brainwashing

    Propaganda and Brainwashing = Tyranny.

    Wonder why the left is paranoid about wire tapping but are so willing to throw their kids into "Government Education" and "Government HealthCare"???

    ReplyDelete
  8. Anonymous3:51 PM

    Uhm, plastics probably isn't the "residual," it's the industrial "other."

    ReplyDelete
  9. Anonymous4:42 PM

    Look at it like you are negating *their* vote, that helps me a little.

    Oh, the other day some genius in the restaurant I was sitting in, next table over, said,"the economy is a zero sum game, the US/Japan/Europe arich because they have export the negative externalities to other countries"


    I ordered another beer. The wagging heads at this sage advice almost forced me to get up and argue the point, but i was hungry and dislike speaking in small words and short sentences to people too stupid to observe the obvious.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Anonymous5:15 PM

    I don't think a recession on par with the great depression will do it, if anything, it will make things worse.

    The last great depression produced a generation of permanent Democrats (my own grandparents among them) who couldn't describe how the U.S. pulled itself out of its darkest hour except to say "FDR did it" (the actual response my grandparents gave me, bless their souls, both of them well educated, one with a graduate degree)

    ReplyDelete
  11. Anonymous5:29 PM

    Residual fuel oil is mainly used for marine transportation and some heating in the Northeast. It is not used for making plastic.

    Roughly about 8% of US petroleum use goes to making plastics.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Asiequanna,

    Do you happen to have a neato chart I could use or a source perhaps? It was more difficult date to come by than I thought;

    Zach,

    Thank you, you even made my argument unnecessary.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Anonymous6:01 PM

    The people with the least knowledge on these subjects think they are the most qualified to talk about them.

    This seems to be common regarding economics and politics. Your car breaks down and no one has any training in mechanics? No one acts like they know how to fix it.

    Your computer crashes and no one knows anything about computers? No one pretends to know how to fix it.

    A problem with the economy and politics? People with no education whatsoever in these subjects think they are fully and eminently qualified to talk about how to solve the problem.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Anonymous6:03 PM

    Except that Zach's wrong. Plastic doesn't biodegrade, for one, and anon has it wrong, you can mostly use any part of the crack for plastics, for another. Thus the rush to use corn-based plastics.

    ReplyDelete
  15. Anonymous6:31 PM

    I can point you to the EIA.

    http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_cons_psup_dc_nus_mbbl_m.htm

    Add together the liquified petroleum gases plus petrochemical feedstocks and you get the petrochemical industry. But it doesn't all go to plastics. You have to subtract out other uses such as solvents. In addition you have to look at the whole production chain such as petroleum used in the manufacturing process as an energy input as well its use as a feedstock. So unfortunately I can only estimate what percent goes towards making plastics but I don't think that my estimate will be off by more than +/- 1-2%.

    ReplyDelete
  16. Anonymous12:06 PM

    Corn and soy both can be used to make plastic (I knew that), but my point was that cutting down the use of plastic won't really affect gasoline prices.

    ReplyDelete
  17. What about EPA's discussion about plastic bags? they seem to agree with you Cap...

    http://web.archive.org/web/20060426235724/http://www.epa.gov/region1/communities/shopbags.html

    ReplyDelete