Craig Minns,

A worthwhile topic, thank you.

onthebeach

There is a school that has recently banned an app widely used by teenagers in Australia after "a cyber safety expert warns that there is pornographic content on the app and it publishes users' location information along with their videos"

http://www.smh.com.au/national/education/wenona-bans-social-media-app-over-concerns-about-risks-to-students-20160830-gr4f6i.html

There is very little on the internet or on spyphones that is safe, and the use of the internet and spyphones by children should be strictly supervised by parents.

Or spyphones are simply taken off the children.

Many generations of children have been raised without american junk food, american movies, american music and american spyphones and american spyware.

And those generations of children were less fat, less lazy, less dumbed down, less stupid and less americanised than the present generation of children in Australia.

Thanks OTB, I think it's an important discussion that has been avoided for a long time.

I was hoping for an open and honest discussion of the questions I asked, but this is OLO after all... Nonetheless, I hope it makes a few people think a little.

I'd like to take the opportunity to congratulate Clementine Ford on her new baby.

Interactive, every generation faces different challenges and solves them in its own way. Things may have been better back in some half-remembered Golden Age of your youth, but this is now. Given that humans have been prancing around all over the place in a naked state, I fail to see the problem you're calamitising about. If the issue is the location info, then simply don't enable it. The mere existence of an image means nothing at all. Girls who get good ratings don't complain, they send their pictures to the paper and put up an "I felt violated" spiel for the extra attention.

I asked a couple of questions at the end of the article, does anyone have anything they'd like to say to those?

Craig Minns

The issue with the school that banned the app shows how much parents should be closely supervising what children do on the internet and on their spyphones.

With all the weirdos in the world, no responsible parent would every want the details of their child published on the internet.

The school that banned the app should go much further and ban spyphones completely from the school.

As for the question you asked, the number one issue for men, women and children is sustainability and the overpopulation of the country.

With all the science in the world, no scientist has yet invented a single house in any street of any suburb of any town in the western world that is sustainable.

https://theconversation.com/no-sustainable-population-without-sustainable-consumption-1774

And yet our government wants to at least double the population.

If by any chance society can be sustainable (a very remote possibility), then I think the next issue would be the decline of our youth.

This was brought home to me recently when I happened to drive past a high school where the students were walking out at the end of the day. So many were overweight, with depressed looks on their faces, and so many were already looking at their spyphones.

Our youth is declining quite rapidly, and the americanisation of our youth would be the major factor.

Our youth will be a liability to this country in the future unless major changes occur (unless obese, sick and depressed individuals are regarded as an asset).

Craig Minns,

Thank you.

No-one has found an effective (and brief) counter to the noxious Hegelian Paradigm that features so often in the rhetoric of activists and politicians (all sides), and on the shameless ABC too!

A quick Googled example,
http://www.propaganda.news/2016-03-28-obamas-hegelian-dialectic.html

Maybe someone might have a go at an article on that.

Well Hegel had a lot of good ideas and so did Marx/Engels, but they were limited in their ability to both observe and interpret by their socio-cultural environment in much the same way that biblical texts are the product of their respective times. We have much more effective understanding of human sociological structures and how they interact with individuals these days, with many tools available to assist us to predict and manage socio-economic outcomes, few of which require ideological faith in the same way that Marx's and Hegel's sociopolitics do.

What they do require though, is the courage to stand against entrenched ideology, on both Left and Right.