I’m intrigued now. What do you teach?
And another thing has piqued my interest. Why the name change? Flaneur brought to mind Baudelaire, but porridge?
Very good for you of course.
It was part tongue in cheek but also probably factual Geof. The likelihood is that the majority of the festival goers were young ie under 30 and for all your protestations that today’s young are better educated, better informed and care more about the environment etc it’s just not true. If it were then these enlightened darlings wouldn’t have left behind the mess that they did. Of course it’s a generalisation of the young today but there were 80000 people attending that festival not a couple of hundred so that to me is a fair representation of how the younger generation behave.
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I read @tim17 as giving an example to support his argument, rather than as any sort of generalisation. (Why “hasty” generalisation, anyway?) But if it truly were a generalisation, then what @almondbiscuit said was surely the same thing. Some people in previous generations were undoubtedly responsible for the state of the planet, but your parents? Mine?
@almondbiscuit - I just fancied a change. (I’d been inspired by Edmund White’s book, I think.) But I fear you’ve made an assumption about my profession!
But I think another straw man has (perhaps accidentally) been created. My argument isn’t that young people are stupid, but that those who teach them are misguidedly (or perhaps cynically, in some cases) making them less competent at analysing an argument, arguing their corner and criticising opinions.
We all are. I am certainly not innocent.
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But you’ve missed the point. Tim’s ‘litter’ post indeed provided an example - of human behaviour, but (like all the ‘examples’ or evidence you’ve brought to the discussion) it evaporates if you look beyond prejudice at the actual facts (and Tim subsequently rather confounded this by assuming festival-goers are typically ‘under 30’ - they’re most definitely not nowadays (the average age of Glastonbury attendees is 39)).
On your profession, by the way, I assume Marijkeh deduced this from your statement that you are in regular contact with young people, ‘largely students’.
I always test statistical etc evidence against my own experience, but we also have to recognise that we only directly experience a vanishingly small sample of reality. My experience of young people is wider than most because it extends across teaching in many countries, and my own children and their many friends (also multinational). But I wouldn’t rely on this experience as sufficient evidence in itself - except in so far as it is confirmed by independent, large-scale sources, such as the brexit age-related voting split.
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Festivals attract different age groups Geof and the ones at Leeds and Reading are for the ‘younger crowd’ -
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Well, that’s changing the argument slightly, from
to our own culpability.
But I wonder if, as a point of view, it’s essentially meaningless. I am responsible for buying a phone I didn’t need, but I rarely use a car. If I get a bus for a journey of a couple of kilometres which I could easily walk, am I guilty? If so, how guilty?
Well, @Geof_Cox, I probably do spend a disproportionate amount of time thinking about cheese … and whether I could give up meat (the little I eat) as long as I could still have cheese.
Where does that put me on the Left-Right continuum, especially if I enjoy both Red Leicester and Stilton?
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I prefer Blue Stilton to Red Leicester.
Does that make me a ‘champagne socialist’?
For those participating in this thread, this looks like an interesting column just starting in The Guardian…
Could have put the link in the thread on what links right-wing ideology with covid/masks/vaccine-scepticism, which seems to be the main ‘political’ divide between the diners.