Interesting fact found at World Nut Daily

It seems that the more you expose children to bullshit, the more likely they are to recognize it as bullshit. Apparently they found that children who attend fundamentalist Sunday Schools are more likely to leave fundamentalist churches, defend gay marriage, etc. than children who don't. Probably because if you've been exposed in depth to the actual arguments that these churches use to preach hate against others, you have a far greater chance of figuring out that they're full of shit than if you're motivated by a vague "squick" factor and squicky ads with some surface plausibility if you don't look closely.

Reminds me of my notion that a lot of the kids who are buying the "Lady Gaga" stuff are in on the joke. They know that "Lady Gaga" is a cynical ploy that a frustrated singer-songwriter by the name of Stefani Germanotta came up with when people wouldn't shut up while she was trying to play her pretty songs, and it appeals to their sense of cynicism as well as their liking for bouncy dance music to dance to.

Today's kids are living in a hopeless world. Oh sure, there was the threat of the atom bomb when I was coming up, but after ICBM's and MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) came around, we had hope that they would never be used, and we had hope that we could continue human progress into the future. Today... ah yes, today. They see our government controlled by evil and vicious men who dictate to our leaders what they should vote for and do or else get the Mafia treatment of a cutoff of election funding and the funding of a well-funded opponent. They see our leaders leading us straight into a brick wall threatening mass extinction of most of the human race within their lifetimes due to peak oil and global warming (collapse of technological civilization, which these threaten to do, would kill over 6 billion of the 6.8 billion people on the planet today and pretty much end civilization forever). They see nothing they do being able to change things soon enough to make any difference, so they're, like, "what the fuck, let's dance our booties off to some other cynical young person who gets it."

In the end, that is the worst fallout from the 28 years of Republican domination of U.S. politics that began with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980: the end of hope. Children born during those 28 years came up knowing that they would have a worse life than their parents, that the good jobs were going to go overseas or be filled with overseas immigrants pulled over to work for cheap and leave only shit service jobs that they'd have to compete with 3rd world immigrants for, that their politicians were either senile morons, genial philanderers, or evil, that the world they died in was likely to be far harsher than the world they were born in, that the chances of dying young due to lack of health care, exposure to the elements, or simple starvation were far higher for them than it was for their parents growing up. What kind of head-fucking that gives a kid is something I don't want to even think about. But it's no surprise that children exposed to particularly high levels of bullshit become more adept at figuring out that it's bullshit... whether we're talking about religious fundamentalists whose kids leave their churches in vast numbers, or our sick culture as a whole.

-- Badtux the Hope* Penguin

* As in, hope I die before the final collapse comes, which seems likely since I am becoming an elderly penguin far more rapidly than I'd like.