Sinfest

[Lich Mong]

Miss Magenta age is largely immaterial as far as I am concerned. The fact she is a 16-year-old girl is of intellectual interest to me for reasons mentioned before; however -that aside- she legitimately beat me in a debate. To me, that's the equivalent of an alpha battle. While it is true learning I was bested by a 16-year-old girl grates at my pride, not admitting my defeat would be even more of a blow to my personal understanding of honor.

She has proven her superior intellectual prowess to me, and on the internet that's all that matters. As such, I will treat her as an equal until such time she proves unworthy of that respect. I suggest all those that she had proven her worth to do the same.
_________________
A MtG Webcomic

[Heretical Rants]

I always figured she was about 15 or 16 or 17 or thereabouts.

I'm not much older.

I've never really respected anyone just because they were older than me, though, nor looked down on anyone because they were younger.
RESPECT UR ELDERS THEY'VE LIVED LONGER THAN YOU
yeah okay that doesn't mean anything if they haven't done anything meaningful with those years


I know people who are in their sixties that have put in less total intellectual effort over the course of their lives than, saaaay, a little kid who, like, actually reads things, and then... oh, I dunno, thinks about them? That's what you do when you read stuff, right? And an idiot's opinions don't magically become any more valid just because they've held onto them for longer.
_________________
butts

[Lich Mong]

Well, I have found -as I have grown older myself- that "life experience" does count for something. Experiencing something is different than simply knowing about something. Additionally, someone that's worked longer at something normally knows more about the pitfalls and ins and outs of that thing.

However, "experience" is hard to quantify. Additionally, if you don't have it, you don't know you don't have it. As such it's hard to impress upon someone without it that they need it, or that you have it. Often I don't even bother, since I know I normally roll my own eyes when someone tries to convince me the value of their life experience.

I am sure we have all heard our parents warning about something, not heeded it, and learned a "hard lesson" that stayed with us. That is the kind of 'wisdom' one begins to accumulate with age.

This is -of course- not a guarantee, however. 'Dumb' comes in all ages.
_________________
A MtG Webcomic

[Yorick]

ok, whos' going to ship Rants & Magenta?
_________________
88 NPH

[ChastMastr]

[ktern]

[Heretical Rants]

[iskandar]

[fanboy2]

This somehow seems to be turning into an oldies vs. kiddos issue even though I think all of us are saying the same thing, but from different perspectives!!

Firstly, yes, specially in the internet era, age is no bar and what you say is what is paramount! So it doesn't matter what age somebody is, so long as what they're saying makes sense. I think ALL of us agree on this.

The next is that generally if a person has a good attitude to his life, the longer he lives, the more he learns. The danger to this is that he unlearns a lot of things as well. So there is no guarantee that age implies superior knowledge / wisdom or even experience! But where all else being equal, more experience ( age) is better than less. That's all.

And there are sooo many other parameters like society, geography, awareness etc. which influence your perspective. Like even at 32, I have no idea what this Sin city is. I'm assuming it's some tv serial in the west.

So there. I hope that summarises ( if I may be so presumptuous) what all of us think on this.

~Fanboy
_________________
Can I get a What what?

[Heretical Rants]

[iskandar]

[quote="fanboy2"Like even at 32, I have no idea what this Sin city is. I'm assuming it's some tv serial in the west.
~Fanboy[/quote]

its a graphic novel set in a noir city of vice, greed and a metric fuck ton of hookers. And yeah, geography and everything does affect us, but there is something that comes with seeing the world age around you. It gets a lot harder to hold extreme political beliefs mostly because you have seen the same movement over and over again, its not new and exciting anymore. Take the subject of feminism, you can usually distinguish the ones who are all "people who are against feminism are all evil, woman haters who should fuck off and die" from the older folk mostly because we saw the movement grow and people change over time, we have had more time to meet people and it tends to soften how you see the world. As you meet more people, especially those who hold those beliefs that you hate, it becomes less "those douches who don't like feminism" and more "larry, that guy who did not like feminism". As time goes on, political ideas get replaced in your head by the people who believed in that and it makes it a lot harder to be so extreme.
_________________
Marriage begins with a man on his knees giving a woman jewelry and asking for permission to do something. Pretty much sets the tone for the next 40 years.

[Heretical Rants]

you're saying that old people are more inclined to moderation and to looking at people as people, huh


interesting

I'll go tell my racist grandma that.


I might agree though, most people my age are pretty shallow and a lot of them hold extremely undeveloped or mindlessly extreme philosophical/political views. I generally don't see the older generations doing much better in that regard, but obviously some people grow out of it.
_________________
butts

[iskandar]

[Heretical Rants]

you could argue that that's just people losing their edge as they get older-- not necessarily a good thing

Anywho, I don't really like talking in these abstract generalizations of older/younger when it comes to people; I'd rather look at them on an individual basis, and seeing as that was my point to begin with anyway this conversation is kind of pointless.


...unless you honestly think that instead of earning my respect someone should just be able to pull the elder card and get insta-respect, in which case you'd have to come up with a good argument for that. Yes, generally people learn things as they get older. That fact doesn't change my position in the slightest.
_________________
butts

[ChastMastr]

Yeah, I've got to say, there are a lot of startlingly messed-up older people out there. Many of them are people in political or economic power! I don't think the mere passage of time makes someone intrinsically better or wiser--would that it did!

Heck, I've had the experience of being the 18-year-old fuddy-duddy in college and felt like I was dealing with the tiresome modernist whipper-snapper (with all their existentialism and deconstructionism and fooferall) who was 40 years or more older than me, teaching the class. When you relate more to Milton and his poetry than the professor does--well! (And that idiot who claimed that we could only appreciate Spenser's Faerie Queene nowadays for the psychological levels rather than anything theological or the like still makes me want to beat my head against the wall, lo, thirty years later...)

As C.S. Lewis put it (from the diabolical point of view, of course) in the Screwtape Letters:

"That is why we must often wish long life to our patients; seventy years is not a day too much for the difficult task of unravelling their souls from Heaven and building up a firm attachment to the earth. While they are young we find them always shooting off at a tangent. Even if we contrive to keep them ignorant of explicit religion, the incalculable winds of fantasy and music and poetry-the mere face of a girl, the song of a bird, or the sight of a horizon-are always blowing our whole structure away. They will not apply themselves steadily to worldly advancement, prudent connections, and the policy of safety first. . . . Real worldliness is a work of time--assisted, of course, by pride, for we teach them to describe the creeping death as good sense or Maturity or Experience. Experience, in the peculiar sense we teach them to give it, is, by the bye, a most useful word. A great human philosopher nearly let our secret out when he said that where Virtue is concerned "Experience is the mother of illusion"; but thanks to a change in Fashion, and also, of course, to the Historical Point of View, we have largely rendered his book innocuous."

Hmmm. I'm getting older myself (well, technically, we all are, ha!), so this might be something to keep in mind... turning 45 on Saturday, sigh...