Metropol

"What's wrong with Kids today?"
"The same thing that was wrong with them before"

sput wrote:OH I hate when people wheel out this "more and more kids are feral scum" crap and I don't believe it for a second. What I DO Believe is that fucking moronic tabloids are getting better at finding the bad kids and demonising their entire generation, all in pursuit of money from miserable sods who'd rather whinge about "things today" from the sidelines than do anything useful.

beep wrote:"What's wrong with Kids today?"
"The same thing that was wrong with them before"

Going off on a tangent here, but I certainly do NOT demonise their entire generation - indeed you will find noone more bitterly opposed to this 'no more than 2 school children at any one time' policy which most small corner shops seem to have. Of course I realise that the vast, vast majority of teenagers are perfectly normal people who will grow up to live perfectly decent lives. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that reports of inner city trouble involving 'a gang of 30 youths' also means that thousand upon thousands of youths in that city had nothing to do with it. That's all fine.

But, few things annoy me more than people denying the problem of troublesome kids. Either denying that it's a serious problem just because it only involves a minority, or denying that it's getting worse.

True, pretty much every generation considers their successors to have 'no respect' and of course there will always be bad behaviour and the odd particularly nasty child, but when you have adults brutally murdered at the hands of children, gangs of children causing such havock in their communities that adults are careful of what they say because they are scared of reprisals, children with absolutely no respect for authority, and an ever growing lower age at which these things start to happen, surely you can see that something is fundamentally broken in our society and you can't just put it down to an older generation's fussing?

And frankly (and this is what never seems to be considered) - if adults are in this position, can you imagine what it's like to be a peer to this subhuman scum?

As for 'the papers getting better at finding the bad kids' - are you seriously saying that the severity of the things you see reported now and the frequency at which it happens was actually going on 50 years ago but just weren't considered newsworthy?

cwathen wrote: As for 'the papers getting better at finding the bad kids' - are you seriously saying that the severity of the things you see reported now and the frequency at which it happens was actually going on 50 years ago but just weren't considered newsworthy?

Absolutely. The reason is simple: it's cheap journalism and fills pages. Plus when you're a tabloid it helps to reinforce the prejudices of your readership because then they'll stay loyal. People LOVE being told what they want to hear. Money and influence: the two things papers are losing and will say ANYTHING to try and keep some slender grasp of.

Sput wrote:

cwathen wrote: As for 'the papers getting better at finding the bad kids' - are you seriously saying that the severity of the things you see reported now and the frequency at which it happens was actually going on 50 years ago but just weren't considered newsworthy?

Absolutely. The reason is simple: it's cheap journalism and fills pages. Plus when you're a tabloid it helps to reinforce the prejudices of your readership because then they'll stay loyal. People LOVE being told what they want to hear. Money and influence: the two things papers are losing and will say ANYTHING to try and keep some slender grasp of.

Sure, the tabloid press love stories like this because it makes great headlines and as you say it fills pages as they write tons of editorial off the back of the story. But what you are ignoring here is that the story still has to be real in order to make the papers in the first place. Tabloids may well bend things to be presented in a way sympathetic to their leanings, but nevertheless they still report real verified news, they don't outrightly make things up - the things they report still have to have happened regardless of how much spin is put on it.

And when they've got such other mindless drivel like playing out the boring lives of various celebrities over their fronts page thrown in their lap for free, It's ridiculous to claim that they've suddenly gone on some sort of witch hunt against youths - that would be far too much like hard work for them.

Even if I accept that you are right and the papers have become focussed on finding youth crime (which I don't and won't accept) surely highlighting it shows that it is a problem which can't be ignored, won't go away and has to be dealt with?

My point is that the papers who inexplicably still drive the news agenda are a) looking for something to reinforce their readers' prejudices (like the popular one about things not being like they used to), b) short of money: these stories ARE cheaper than horrid celeb photos. All you have to do is find a local paper (where these stories were traditionally limited to) story about a teenager in trouble and pay a grand to some rent-a-quote neighbour. Now what we've got is national titles picking up on massively disparate and unrelated incidents and trying to tie it all into a wider narrative about the decay of our society and arbitrarily deciding that something must be done. What you're left with is a purified stream of the worst incidents in the entire country amplified back to the entire population so it feels as though it's all in your own community. In a more broad sense it's the same issue we see with the way that that detection of crime, the actual amount of crime and the perception of crime, aren't necessarily the same thing.

I hear what you're saying about the stories being real and for the most part they are, but you'll also get titles like The Mail covering the prosecution's case (like that puppy kicked to death in a park by hoodies) before the verdict but not accurately reflecting the facts (that it was actually a virus that killed the dog and the witness was lying) in nearly such sensational terms. You also get stuff that's way off the mark like that Scottish Express story about the dunblaine kids earlier in the year. This kind of discourse isn't helpful, it's inevitably going to create hostility toward kids and you have to wonder if it's self-perpetuating: I remember seeing an old lady visibly tighten her grip on her handbag when she clocked me walking towards her and I felt damned offended. Wouldn't take much for an altogether more troubled person to react badly after a few such instances, and I occasionally see a person cross the street to avoid someone in a hoodie. SOMEHOW I survived not doing the same.

I have loads of ID.

In fact, worryingly, so many that, if I lost it all, I'd have difficulty knowing who I was.

I'm surprised no-one's done an id joke yet.

*Cue someone quoting something from page 1 where someone made an id joke.