What do you expect in this post-industrial
world of crass commercialism?

Hello again, OhSojourner. Have you been away
doing your "World Trekker" thing?

I wish I had greeted you in another post so this one
wouldn't be my first reply to you in such a long while.
I much prefer agreeing with you. <sigh>

When I judge whether commerce to be -- on the whole --
a blessing or a curse to mankind, I consider the alternatives:
cunning thievery or brute force shakedowns. Then
the magnitude of the wisdom of these words becomes
immediately apparent:

There are few ways
in which a man can be
more innocently employed
than in getting money.

Samuel Johnson

Modern industry has made most humans obsolete
except for their role as part of a cog in the machine.
Children are begat in this era, not because they are
necessary to maintaining family work and tradition,

Hmmm. A life of being stuck in a role of being
"necessary to maintaining family work and tradition"
qualifies as a "role as part of a cog in the machine"
to me. (I know I am using "cog in the machine"
metaphorically. So were you.)

However, there is another currency that traded between
people
back then that altho' much eclipsed by cold cash has never
gone completely out of use: reputation. Reputation may be
returning to prominence these days and in large part this is due
to the material prosperity and increased possibility for personal
expression made possible by the fruits of the industrial age
and computer automation.

Examples of burgeoning Reputation Economies are the blogosphere
and the open source software community.

Yeah, like Virginia Postrel <www.dynamist.com>
I'm a technological optimist.

but often to provide their parents with a status symbol.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
(The more things change, the more they stay the same.)
A. Karr, _Les Guêpes_, Jan. 1849
http://www.freewebz.com/quotations/novelty.html

Throughout the span of our human, ahem <grin>, HERstory,
in most cultures a woman did not attain full respect as
an adult, especially _from_other_women_ until she produced offspring.
"When are you going to have a baby?" was not a question
women invented in 1950s America and discarded by the
end of the 1960s.

I speculate that whatever increases in status women today
can derive from baby-making are related (and proportional)
to the deprecation of the attribution of status a woman previously
gained from other women through her participation in the
social institution of marriage.

Children are indulged as pets and we're taught
that to become successful, all we have to do is
make enough money to buy all the toys we want.

Doesn't "materialism" have the Latin "mater", meaning
"mother" as its root? When a man makes a display of "toys"
he enacting the male portion of the primate mating ritual.
And primate males able to acquire "toys" were disproportionately
selected by primate materialists (females) because those females
expected to collect "toys" from any male they mate with.

Children spend most of their waking days in school,

For that, I blame social do-gooders, who -- by the way --
appeal to women much more often than men.

Really, if men ran everything for the benefit of men's
class interests (as feminists claim) do you believe
"For the chilllddren" would have become the tin cup
used by the begging classes it is today?

among their peers, learning the culture of peer hierarchy.

Yeah, and IME the practice of jailing children who have
passed their cutest stages of life (infant, toddler) for much
of the day within a camp often miles away from their home is
most heavily promoted by women with children. Women generally
want neither their men nor their able-to-think-even-a-little-
for-themselves children as lunch dates.

Children look at the world adults live in, decide that it
sucks, and try to escape into a fantasy world of television,
video games, pop music, etc., eroding their social skills
and sense of reality in the process.

Children have been rebelling against their parents, oh,
since the dawn of the hominids. Nothing new there.
Francis of Assisi rebelled against his merchant father.
Augustine rebelled against his patrician father. Jesus
of Nazareth became an itenerant preacher rather than
take up his father's honest tho' humble trade of carpentry.

Subsequently, our "cultures" have become divided by
generations -- not by family or location any more.

What was the phenomenon Thomas Kuhn pointed to as the
reason those who accept a new paradigm supplant those
who uphold the old one?

Generations of the past were raised among individuals
of all ages, and children were taught to respect the
efforts and accomplishments of their elders.

Ahh, the very things for which today's homeschoolers
are laughed at.

Now, since we're more as cogs in a machine, "newer"
is naturally preferred as "better", the young are preferred
over the old, as the older generations are disrespected and
discarded (but with the potential to become meaner in a bid
to maintain whatever power they may have had).

Preferring the "new... over the old" is a meme
that has tried to take hold in human cultures all across
our human, ahem <grin>, HIMitage. (Btw, how come
feminists never mention that but rather harp on and on
and bash "history"? ;-) That meme only took hold
in Western civilization when the works of the Renaissance
and the later success of the New Science showed that the
works of the ancients could be surpassed.

The question of whether or not Progress was truly possible (and
suistainable) was a hot debating topic
in the Boston taverns of Benjamin Franklin's youth.

If, OhSojourner, your meaning is that you agree with Edmund Burke
(a contemporary of Franklin's, btw) that many people believe the
New is good solely because of its newness, then I agree with that
part of your remarks here.

Humanity has become post-successful

At best, only about 1/8th of the world population has a standard of

above the European Union's average.
Most of the world's peoples are still 'pre-successful'.

and our raison d'etre has become self-indulgence,

Unless one is a man, then one's _raison d'etre_ is
indulging some woman. <giggle>

(Well, OhSojourner, you DID post on alt.feminism! ;-)

going through the motions of ancient instinctual urges
(e.g. tribal and heirarchical) even when there is no rational
need for their use any more.

Yeah, that's one of the problems of being part of a species
shaped by natural and sexual selection. Think of it as
evolution in action. (I took that last sentence from Niven and

speculative fiction novel _Oath of Fealty_, tho' they used it in a

different context.)

And humans tend to carry into adulthood the lessons they learned
as children.

From the hand that rocked the cradle.

(Frighteningly, one could interpret the current Bush administration
as what happens when an indulged Baby Boomer kid comes
into power.

I disagree. "What happens" are the clinton party years followed by a
painful morning after. At that point, "indulged
Baby Boomer(s)" look around for an adult to clean up after
them. And that's how George W. Bush became president.

This editorial cartoon, although about campaign tactics, pretty

sums up the Baby Boom Republicans, IMHO:
http://www.ucomics.com/davidhorsey/2004/10/06/ )

I have a different opinion. Mine is drawn from real life
not cartoons.

Unlike the cartoonist, I know that those who
shake down others to raise cash for their gang's spending
are more often the Democrat candidates. Also, more cheap,
phoney taunts (e.g., "Bush lied") come from the Kerry and
Nader camps.

Btw, for a fellow who brags so much about his years in the
US Senate, why haven't I ever heard of Kerry Bill of one kind
or another? To draw out your cartoonist's schoolyard
metaphor a little more, OhSojourner, IME the boy who can't
accomplish anything in class but sucks up to the teacher
and resents other boys for being more accomplished than he
is the boy who gets taunted in the schoolyard the most.
Success at sucking up is not seen as a positive value even
by 3rd grade boys.

Random links: [snipped, see earlier post]

Oh, ho! Here's more of Ilya Shambat's post.
Well, well, well. Can anyone find evidence for
Shambat's smear of Gen X?

I do not speak only about the vicious, hideous "skeptics" -
bullying, loud-mouthed, ignorant jerks who have assumed
that all spiritual experience everyone has had over the
thousands of years of written history, and all the wisdom
that comes from these experiences, is fallacious, and hound,
malign, slander and abuse anyone who has had
first-hand
spiritual experience or practices a spiritual system of wisdom,
whether it originate in the East or the West.

Hmm. I'm disappointed in you, Shambat. You produce
no evidence for your earlier attacks on Gen X but only
more innuendo against a dark, unnamed Them.
Okay, I'll grant that you aren't addressing those who find
the "spiritual system of wisdom" touted by celluloid
celebrities like Madonna and Richard Gere a ripe source
of mocking humor. So now what, Shambat?

I do not speak only about the more evil still - and, in this case,
appropriately named - feminazis [...]

Hey, Ilya Shambat, news flash: The "feminazis" are a pre-
Gen X phenomenon.

Buy yourself a calendar and _use_ it.

I speak about the entire mentality of the Pluto in Virgo generation

And gee, I thought this was the Dawning of the Age of
Aquarius. So which is it, Ilya Shambat? Oh, and your
attempt to pre-emptively discredit any criticism of your
astrological hoo-haw won't work on the folks here whose
judgment is worth respecting.

[tiresome insults snipped]

To quote a wise woman, now deceased:
"Where's the beef?"

--
[L]aw and custom based on property rights prohibit
predation, while laws and customs based on an "ethic
of care," and lacking a concept of rights in general,
and property rights in particular, allow a variable
predation -- "I care about the first person, but not
about the second person," can be translated into
"I will prey upon the second to sustain the first."

Rod van Mechelen, "Rights and Responsibilities"
http://www.backlash.com/book/rnr.html