Gen Z and Osama Bin Laden?

 I do not know what has happened to the youth of America, with their rock and/or roll music.  There is that hillbilly fellow, shaking his hips on Sullivan's show, a lack of respect for elders, and this country is going straight to tarnation, if you will forgive my language!  One may note, as I have in the past, that some years past, there was a moral panic over chess and the question of whether it was an anti-social pursuit.  It is a game of war, in which the players stare silently at the board instead of speaking or engaging productively, and one may extrapolate from there, as past moral panicky people did.  Closer to home, for me, there was the Dungeons & Dragons moral panic, and generally speaking, every generation looks at the next and says, get off my lawn.  These kids today, or some variation thereof.  And so, if briefly this morning, I note the strange and not at all surprising fascination of today's youth with Osama Bin Laden.

If you are not following the latest in the mind-numbing idiocy of today's youth, someone posted some predictably vile and psychopathic comments by everyone's favorite flight instructor.  If we're honest, John McCain crashed five planes, and Bin Laden only crashed four, so for a generation used to grading on a curve because they fail at everything, you can sort of understand their fondness for the lesser failure, but that isn't really what is happening.  Instead, there is some indeterminate (oooh, foreshadowing!) number of zoomer nincompoops fawning over a guy trying to find his 72 virgins in hell right now because they can't tell the difference between good and evil.  And therein lies the problem.

But therein does not lie my point.

Instead, we all know that any population or subpopulation will have its share of nincompoops, dipshits, dumbfucks, assholes, psychopaths, anti-Semites, wannabe-traitors and every other variety of horrendous wastes of carbon.

But how many?

This, we do not know, because we have no real measure.

I have a job, you know.  Nobody pays me for rambling and blathering into the inter-tubes.  I do this for... fun?  Sure, let's call this "fun."  I actually interact with zoomers.  There are some interesting impressions of zoomers, but as Epictetus teaches, the important thing is "right use of impressions."  Let's righten our impressions, shall we?  There are the loudest and the shoutiest of the zoomers, from whom one might form an impression, but that is a nonrandom sample.  One of the things I do in the classroom, on various political issues, is something like the Boghossion spectrum street epistemology exercise.  The loudest and shoutiest of the leftists, who believe in shouting down anyone who disagrees with them, intentionally create environments in which people are afraid to disagree with them publicly, but when you create an environment in which everyone is comfortable respectfully expressing a position, you find out, within a limited sample, what they really believe.  (How does one respectfully advocate on behalf on the 9/11 attacks, or the 10/7 attacks?  Contemplate that, for Thanksgiving dinner topics of conversation!)

Short version, most aren't crazy!  They do not know much about history or other subjects, because K-12 education is a joke, but that is not their fault.  Their work ethics are sometimes lacking, but again, that is because we expect so little.  Our fault, not theirs.

When you look at the Bin Laden phenomenon, what you see is a manifestation of the fact that the crazier zoomers really are crazier than previous generations.  But how many of them are there?  That's still hard to say.

For decades, dumbass kids have been sporting Che Guevara shirts, and other such blinkeredness, all of which comes from grotesque ignorance.

Again, our fault, to a large extent.  What is different now is that they all know exactly what happened on 9/11.  How many truly batshit zoomers are there?  That is hard to say, but the batshittiest are more insane.

We must take responsibility, for much of it is a lack of education, yet one must also understand that they create their own hell.  We cannot pull them out of a hell of their own creation, because the hell is in their own deluded, frothing mad minds.  Just like jihadists, they will live in their own hells, until they die to become nothing.  If they reject education, that is their own choice, and that cannot be helped.

Those in the K-12 and higher education profession who mislead and lie to them?  They are the bigger problem.

Goran Ivanovic, "Gates To The Unknown," from Goran Ivanovic Group.