(08-08-2018 11:43 AM)Lord Stanley Wrote:  

Quote:TULSA, Okla. — In one video, a fan at a youth soccer game bellows profanities and violently kicks a ball that slams into a teenage referee standing nearby. She disagreed with a penalty called.

Another captures parents at a youth basketball game charging the court to hurl punches at the referee. And yet another shows parents berating game officials as they walk to their cars after a soccer game. The players were 8-year-olds.

The videos were posted on a Facebook page, Offside, created in frustration by an Oklahoma youth soccer referee, Brian Barlow, who offers a $100 bounty for each clip in order to shame the rising tide of unruly parents and spectators at youth sports events.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/sport...=116776727

Second generation narcissists. They never did anything wrong when their helicopter mommies and daddies fought every teacher who ever tried to correct them, so now they double down in protecting the little projections of themselves. Add to it the massive lack of socialization skills they have due to their "online" community of so called friends and their "flock" mentality and this is what you get.

Anytime a behavior is epidemic it's reflective of much broader trends which should tell the rest of us that something was woefully wrong with the way that generation was produced.

I've been telling my wife for the last few decades that we were raising a generation that was unique. They were narcissistic because they were turned into the little gods that their parents served and sheltered, but that in a very strange way they had a mob mentality as long as the mob was in cyberspace. It's a destructive recipe in that it means that in a democracy they have the mindset of a dictator, but there are enough of them to have the morality of a lynch mob.

Think second generation Hitler Youth, Mao's Red Guard, or Stalin's Young Pioneers just waiting for a leader to tell them who their enemy is. Today it is the authority of the referee or official who in their minds is limiting the achievement of their little extensions of themselves. When the personality cult leader who channels their inner emotions comes to power it will be whole groups that they either don't understand, despise, or which makes them feel threatened.

I think in this country the first group they go after will be the elderly who represent to them a group that they don't wish to support, a group that has been vocal in their criticism of their behavior, and a group whose true social skills threaten them. It will also be a convenient target for corporations and government entities who don't like the expense of their health care, or end of life support obligations.

The affordable care act was only the first peek into this mindset as it offset insurance liabilities for oodles of Boomer aged people who had paid into their policies for decades driving their insurance companies ratings in Dunn & Bradstreet sky high, but who as a group now that they are near needing their insurance services represent a massive drop not only in potential future earnings, but in the capital of those companies, which will necessitate some deleveraging from investments in order to meet obligations. So you have legislation which sets limits based upon age as to whether some life extending surgeries and procedures will no longer be available or be covered. It was by design the first step toward a passive genocide of a group setting up to be a liability to government budgets and the corporate bottom line.

So all that need be done now is to vilify that generation further which will be easy to do in a world that is likely to see fewer natural resources spread among a rising population. But the question in my mind is whether the young little narcissists are rational and forward thinking enough to realize what that precedent will mean for their golden years because the global trends that are reinforcing this business and governmental strategy are not going to be abated when Boomers are gone.

A global population of 8 billion is already outstripping the ability of the oceans to supply food, and with the draining of aquifers that it took mellinia for the earth to fill through filtered groundwater both water and protein sources are shaping up to be extremely scarce for a population of that size and it doesn't even include the damage being done to arable soil and potable water by pollution and continued building.

It's a bleak future, but only because we won't change our behaviors today. Population control, and the use of only items which are biodegradable is just the beginning. Past peak oil, petroleum based fertilizer, which has been responsible in large part for the population explosion that began in the last quarter of the 19th century, will be gone. It increased the yields of agriculture by as much as 15 fold and easily has quadrupled food supply on average. The global population before petroleum based fertilizer was around 3.5 billion and had been for centuries. With more food came more people.

So if you want to know what the size of the population is that the Earth can sustain naturally, and in balance with nature, it's 3.5 billion humans. So when peak oil has passed we are looking at a global die off of people that will be in the neighborhood of 5 billion by that time and it will be due to starvation.

Now I raise all of that in response to these lousy parents to say, another generation like this one might save us all from the natural trajectory I've just illustrated. How? Well they are so reprehensible that surely they will destroy themselves, or get into wars they can't possibly win. And being narcissists they won't cooperate with anyone and will fight to the death.

It may be the salvation of the planet.