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They make a good point in this article, I just wish Newsweek and other media outlets would get this pissed off about climate change. "Old and unafraid of the climate crisis? Good for you. Now stop killing future generations." If we're mobilizing to stop a pandemic, why the hell aren't we mobilizing to stop climate change? I know this is going to get downvoted into oblivion, I just wanted to say it.
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This is not ageist nonsense. This is aimed directly at the rampant discourse of " only the elderly dies, why should I bother" ?
It's an ageist and offensive narrative to say that young people are saying that phrase and acting it out like they don't care about killing their elders.
When I saw the statistics for my age cohort, my first reaction was to feel cavalier. It was a few minutes before I thought about the harm I could accidentally do to people in their 70s
They make a good point in this article, I just wish Newsweek and other media outlets would get this pissed off about climate change. "Old and unafraid of the climate crisis? Good for you. Now stop killing future generations." If we're mobilizing to stop a pandemic, why the hell aren't we mobilizing to stop climate change? I know this is going to get downvoted into oblivion, I just wanted to say it.
Not to excuse anything, but the main difference is the time scale—within days/weeks we saw differences, and death counts... with climate change it's not only difficult to measure easy-to-understand direct correlation sometimes, it also is at minimum on time scales of months to years. Most news cycles are hours or days, not months or years.
I think another good example is nuclear. It may have low deaths per terrawatt of energy, but the deaths it causes are localized, physically and temporally. It doesn't matter that each year more people die in the US from coal ash than all those that ever have (or will) from (current) nuclear disasters.
These kinds of things are well known in psychology (including the simplest: marshmallow experiment). Humans are bad at risk estimation and even worse when it comes to time scales. If it isn't happening before our eyes then chances are we're pretty bad at estimating risk.
Is this from the same issue as the "OK, Millennial: Boomers Are the Greatest Generation in History" piece?
Yes, I caught that the other day. I couldn't even finish the article. I'm from gen-x and it even annoys me how hyper-critical the baby boomers are with millenials and gen-z. Attempting to lay blame on young people for the spread of corona-virus is just absurd and irresponsible.
Who exactly was it that bought these trophies and gave them to kids again?
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> the article does nothing to support the thesis that young people in particular are killing other people. It is very simple: from the pool of "all people" in any big enough area (e.g. a small city) those who will catch the virus, be able to spread it to others and will not develop significant symptoms, most of them will be very young. The older one is, more chance is that he will have strong symptoms (like not being…
Disproportionately, it is the olds who are behaving like nothing is happening. They are the ones consuming the cable news that is framing it as "wash your hands and everything will be fine!". Youngs generally accept that these large-scale phenomenon are real. We are just also powerless to change them, because politics are dominated by centrist olds who just don't want their 401k to go down too much. Yes, you should w…
It was sad to watch that: both sides of political spectrum have had their own motives to downplay the issue and therefore postpone the necessary political actions -- and for these, obviously, the youngest can not be responsible.
Both sides behave so, of course, "because economy" but there are other motives around as well.
In reality being complacent seem to already result in bigger problems than the isolation measures alone would. Italy is an obvious example.
I agree, there are indeed some similarities with the climate change problems.
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It's an ageist and offensive narrative to say that young people are saying that phrase and acting it out like they don't care about killing their elders.
Not all young people! But I have personally witnessed many young people speaking openly this way. When I saw the statistics for my age cohort, my first reaction was to feel cavalier. It was a few minutes before I thought about the harm I could accidentally do to people in their 70s
While a few days ago I was speaking to a Primary school teacher friend of my parents, who claimed that because the UK "only has a couple hundred cases, it's not worth worrying about at all" the angle of "Oh i've seen virus' before and it was okay" was very apparent.
Now I know these are 2 personal anecdotes but I do wonder if generally it could be the opposite of what the title suggests, people my age have faint memories of Swine Flu but not much before that so I feel like we could be taking it more seriously
Of course there are "Well it'll kill all the boombers so it's good" jokes going around, but they're exactly that a joke, for the generation that called millenials snowflakes some (I believe a minority personally) can't really take a joke
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Ideally, sure, but I don't think that that federal government is really going to do better in the near-to-medium term no matter how many such articles are written. Individual (and state government) action is mostly what we have, so that's more important than ever.
This may sound extreme, but it is scapegoating/systemic apolgia.
I am not engaging in apologia. I'm looking at what we can practically expect right now.
It does seem kind of karmic through the lens of NIMBY older folks have been making it impossible for younger generations to buy/build homes near them, and now they want the young whipper snappers to care about their welfare. Maybe the best way to become a home owner in SF in the near future is to run around infecting everyone there ASAP. (In case it's not obvious, I'm mostly kidding)
Maybe this outbreak is the first of more to come and that this is actually a wake-up call that we shouldn't be glorifying or desiring residence in such densely populated areas like we have been.
It's easy to understand how Europeans look at Americans is if they're brain-dead. However, the article does nothing to support the thesis that young people in particular are killing other people. It may be true. If so, including evidence to that effect would make a better article.