Even Sven, you undercut yourself with your very first paragraph, where you imply that your film theory and production classes somehow insulated you from absorbing any political biases during your education. If you think art (which film is) is apolitical, you wasted the last four years of your life.
I don’t hink that being a leftist makes people think you’re anaive, because we have many respected lefties here whose posts carry a certain degree of gravitas.
Nor is it necessarily your age, since we have posters your age or younger, like Matt_Mcl or MichaelEllis, who are never challenged as naive, nor is it your gender. If you think for a minute, the poster most derided in GD as a mental lightweight is male, middle-aged, and very conservative, so your thesis that you are discriminated against because you are young, lefty, and female is absurd.
I’ll tell you why to me you often seem to be naive. In your posts, you seem to be parroting something you were told without having critically evaluated it yourself. You start your posts with, "my professor said. . " or “we learned this in class. . .”.
You also seem to show little knowledge of the way the world works. In your OP in the linked thread, you admirably want to fight ignorance and expose Americans to current events education. But your basic assumption, that people do not have access to information, is flawed, as the following post points out. Moreover, you seem not to know that news media in this couintry are market-driven, that is, they provide what the market wants. Most people don’t want to watch serious programs on current events, especially programs that ask them to think. Given a choice between a program on the breakdown of order in Liberia and Entertainment Tonight, which one do you think will draw more viewers, and thus more advertising dollars?
The assumption is that regurgitating what you are told without analizing it on your own is ignorant.
Extremely liberal = ignorant only 95% of the time. Strangely enough, this is about the same percentage of the time that extremely conservative = ignorant as well.
Speaking just for myself, I don’t necessarily assume that extremely liberal = ignorant. I do, however, think that in many cases there is a high correlation between idealism and naivete. The world is a messy place, we should all do our best to improve it, and some problems are damn near impossible to solve.
It’s condescending as all get out to state, assume, or imply that an obviously intelligent person is “regurgitat[ing] what you’ve been told is true” instead of “study[ing], learn[ing] and reach[ing] your own conclusions.”
sven, I agree with everything that gobear said about why you seem naive. In addition, it doesn’t help that you do not seem to expect people to treat you as an adult. You refer to yourself as a “little girl” in the OP, despite being in your twenties and a college graduate with a wide variety of experience. I even seem to remember you telling a poster that he had “made a little girl cry” when he argued with you, although that was a while back. If you treat yourself as a child, and refer to yourself as a child, you can expect to be treated as a child. And naivete is part of childhood.
Well, you’ve experienced a lot (certainly more than I had at 22 and probably more than I have at 44). From your posts, it appears that you’ve been responsible for supporting yourself for most of your college education which argues for a high level of maturity. But the post cited in the OP does tend to indicate a certain remaining touch of starry-eyed idealism.
If nothing else, your solutions posted in GD (better news, public debate, etc…) indicate not only a faith in education but also a conviction that other people * want and enjoy * being educated. To me, that’s a conviction that would result from having spent four years swimming in an academic ambience – college and a college town.
Myself, I thought 75% of US citizens having the answer correct was pretty remarkable.
You do have the Bohemian college student thing down pat and you are pretty much where I’d expect to see a Bohemian college student on the political spectrum. But the key things about Bohemian college students is that they own nothing and have no responsibilities except to themselves and their beliefs. This means that there are life experiences you are missing.
At 20 you can sleep on a Mayan pyramid. At 40, you mostly want to sleep in a bed and know that your kids are sleeping safely in the next room over. And you can’t spend hours researching on the internet because, dammit, you have to go to work tomorrow, and, by the way, someone really needs to make sure the laundry is done and the lawn is mowed and something really needs to be done about the mice in the attic and that weird damp smell in the basement.
Eh, so I ran on a bit here. But you have lots of experiences. Just not all the experiences.
Well, a little frayed self-esteem, dreams and an open heart should be nothing to worry about. After all, we all have it, or just haven’t been there yet.
even sven, as long as you’ve used your own head to lead you where you are, you’re fine. Keep the head up, keep it functioning and to hell with those who believe you naieve or somehow “brainwashed” or “simply regurgitating”.
OTOH, “I have plenty of sex with various people, places and things that I’ll never tell anyone.” is just BEGGING to be turned into a sig.
Climbing pyramids, witnessing violent crimes, attending college, going to high-priced lunches and spending years performing the same standard maintenance on your life as everyone else does not make a person grow or give you “meaningful life experience”. You gain meaningful life experience when you have experiences that test your character or challenge you mentally or physically.
This is the lamest Pit thread I’ve seen in awhile. At least call each other names.
even sven, I’d just like reassure you that life experience beyond what you have does not automatically turn one into a conservative Republican. There are still some middle-aged liberals whose experiences have reinforced our core beliefs and educated us, not turned us into reactionary turtles. It is a sign of intelligence to learn from experience, not just learn to hide.
In a message board headed by Cecil,
Where vicious debating men nestle,
…Even Sven’s an anomaly,
…Refuting the homily,
That woman must be a frail vessel.
I was going to say the same thing until i read that.
On another note, i have the opposite problem. I am 23, never had a girlfriend and only have 1 1/2 years of college under my belt so far but many people who only know me via the internet think i am in my 50s and have a graduate degree while in reality i have lived a very sheltered, unexperienced life aside from a few incidents that forced me to look at myself & my environment differently.
Also, i don’t get this shit about ‘life experience’. What is that? working at a factory for 40 years and going bowling on saturdays?
I was going to say the same thing until i read that.