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‘The upside of office flirtation? I’m living it’

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by Dick Whitman, Dec 6, 2017.

  1. TheSportsPredictor

    TheSportsPredictor Well-Known Member

    Well, Boomers are old.
     
  2. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    Except in the Democratic Party, where they appear to remain large and in charge, per our resident 2020 field handicapper.
     
  3. Songbird

    Songbird Well-Known Member

    Scroll to the 1:06 mark and listen to the convo.

     
  4. Double Down

    Double Down Well-Known Member

    Dick and I have discussed this privately but one of my biggest frustrations with Twitter is the demand that you chose the *correct* position and that you are then accountable for this forever and subject to the literati mob if it's discovered you weren't always so enlightened. This is part of what Alma is getting at. There is not much room for, say, stating something a lot of people disagree with and then having your position evolve or even being able to hold onto it without considerable ridicule.

    There was also a great essay going around earlier this year about the difference between victim culture and honor culture. In honor culture, if someone offends you, you confront them directly. "Hey, this bugged me a lot. I think you're wrong and this is offensive to me for these reasons." In victim culture, the offended person doesn't confront the offender, he/she announces they've been victimized and asks the mob to shame the offender.

    Now, when I say all this, I'm NOT TALKING ABOUT SEXUAL ASSAULT which is very different. But it is true of all the micro aggressions that so perplex millenials. In my youth, I would have sooner died than whine in public about being offended by something.

    Granted, I am a white dude from a middle class upbringing so my perspective was obviously skewed by that. And my beliefs and feelings have certainly evolved to a place of better understanding over time. But there is a part of me that understands the backlash, while also conceding that the wealthy Boomers and generation after them rigged so much to their advantage and now have the gal to say: Stop complaining and eating so much avocado toast.
     
  5. Songbird

    Songbird Well-Known Member

    There was also another guy, the office flirt and star writer, who recently emailed to ask if he had ever harassed me.

    How many women did you email, @typefitter?
     
    SpeedTchr and Dick Whitman like this.
  6. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    Do you think that Twitter has led to what seems to be a calcification (I think that's the right word) of people's viewpoints into very narrow, rigid positions? It seems both the 140-character limit and the social pressure you refer to her and in our prior discussions about this combine to leave almost no room for - God, the word is such a cliche - nuance? I feel like even in this little madhouse, the slightest deviation from the "correct" position, and hellfire and brimstone rain upon you. If I may martyr myself, it was considered offensive that I didn't believe the AP headline should have read that Sepp Blatter "sexually assaulted" Hope Solo. Or try taking a nuanced position on Brock Turner's sentence. Or recall Jackie, of Rolling Stone fame. Even when the skeptics were proven 100 percent right, we were still shamed in some quarters. (@typefitter and @doctorquant had a good exchange along the lines of this topic a few days ago.)
     
  7. Alma

    Alma Well-Known Member

    So here's the thing...

    ^^^Every generation may think that, but *this* generation, with the help of social media, knows way, way more than any generation before it did.

    ^^^It remains a generation with relatively little to lose in terms of family/jobs/standing in the world.

    ^^^It is a generation that has been trained, since the cradle, to meditate on and prioritize its grievances, for, as children, their grievances were given fuller weight by their parents.

    ^^^It is also a generation with impossibly high standards, both imposed on them by their careerist parents - who desired achievement over goodness for their children - and celebritized, achievement culture that rewards a few stars and discards the rest as mediocre.

    ^^^We're in an age of high postmodernism, which means a tearing down of all accepted, institutional norms and replacing it with something so individualistic that it either takes a kind of code to navigate it, or it takes the most base of traits: Charisma. In other words, cool people. Good-looking. Natural performers. Extroverts.

    ^^^Millennials are deeply susceptible to cheap emotional appeals that circumvent any intellectual channels and just plug directly in base, broad feelings about...whatever. They live in a bipolar culture that swings wildly between rage and joy, ushered there by social media.

    I can go on, but that's the gist of it.

    Like I said, it concerns me. I look at the tech world, where advancements will be made because they can be without any thought to whether they should be. I look at "journalism," where, sure, let's have a 27th essay that answers the 23rd essay that directly refuted the 19th essay that expounded on the 11th essay. I look at sports, where athletes are becoming blushingly self-righteous and self-absorbed, seemingly in the last five years because they're being siloed away from the rest of our community at a young age.

    I don't "hate" millennials. But the generation concerns me quite a bit. And the desire of Baby Boomers to desperately please millennials is even more concerning. The two generations have a lot in common. And not the good stuff.
     
  8. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    You get the feeling @Alma has thought about this a bit.
     
    FileNotFound likes this.
  9. typefitter

    typefitter Well-Known Member

    That's funny. However, having never worked in an office, I have a fairly iron-clad alibi against having been the office flirt.
     
  10. Songbird

    Songbird Well-Known Member

    They do?

    Nah, you basically just need a custom beard, Fedora, and awkward wardrobe.

    I'll read the rest of your post in a few minutes.
     
  11. Alma

    Alma Well-Known Member

    I learned it from reading all the threads you posted about it.
     
  12. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    I swam in the "achievement culture" waters for a few years. Wow, is it an empty pursuit, at the end of the day, if you think "achievement" is an end. I want to write a novel about it some day.
     
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