Society

Peak millennial stupidity: eating toxic detergents

My girlfriend and I have begun discussing how to raise children. One topic we immediately agreed on was to prevent them as far as humanly possible from interacting with undesirables. This means children from the underclass and welfare leeches, children of single mothers, and children of lefties, for starters. In earlier times, this was a lot easier. You could just look at a kid and base your judgment on how it spoke and how it was dressed. Nowadays, though, those indicators no longer work that reliably, presumably largely due to the wealth transfer from divorced fathers to their kids and an exuberant welfare state.

One case in point is the absurd trend among millennials to swallow detergents. This is the so-called “Tide Pod challenge“. Tide is a detergent brand in the US. “Pod” is simply a fancy name for “tab” and has the benefit that it can be trademarked. Millennials — yes, not all millennials — are known for being shallows, fickle, stupid, attention-seeking, and unable to think for themselves. Thus, it is probably no surprise that they would even go as far as swallowing detergents in an attempt to gain recognition among their equally stupid peers.

You would think that only the underclass would engage in such utter stupidity, but you would be wrong. Search online for videos on the Tide Pod challenge and you will find plenty of people who seem well-dressed. They certainly don’t look like they are lacking material comforts. However, what they seem to be clearly lacking is a shred of common sense, and also parental supervision. Here, look at this jackass who added some liquid detergent before swallowing a handful of a toxic substance:

Just think about everything that has to have gone wrong for a teenager to do this. First and foremost, they have not been taught the slightest bit of critical thinking. There are countless fads that target kids and it wasn’t until so long ago where parents would tell their kids, who wanted to make an argument by appeal to the majority — “everybody has gotten one” or “they are all doing that” — that if “everybody” wanted to jump off a cliff, they certainly wouldn’t want to do so. Thus, you teach a kid a bit of logical reasoning but also that the common herd is stupid and easily manipulated. Without that kind of parental guidance, however, your typical millennial just further uncritically engages in herd behavior.

Then there is the issue of a lack of elementary knowledge about the world if not common sense entirely. An issue with fads is that they are temporary. However, ingrained habits, if the kid has suitable role models, should be emulated. So, the kid sees their parents eat healthy, wholesome meals, and maybe have a snack every once in a while. They don’t see them snacking on detergents. Thus, they should conclude that it’s probably not a good idea to do so.

Of course you should also ask yourself where the adults in this picture are. If there was a stay-at-home mother in the picture, your stupid millennial wouldn’t even have the chance to disappear for a while to snack on detergents. (I would also say that if you’re a conscientious parent, you better ban social media from the lives of your kids and don’t buy them a smartphone either. They have more important things to do with their time.) Yet, if mommy is getting spit-roasted by Jamal and Tyrone and daddy’s role is reduced to paying alimony and child support, it’s no surprise that kids do stupid shit. There is a fitting proverb: the devil finds work for idle hands. It is normally used in a different context, but it applies here as well. If Karter and Evely are left to their own devices, they’ll just do some dumb shit.

By the way, Consumer Report put out a heart-warming video on the dangers of swallowing detergents, showing pictures of babies who ended up in an ICU — scroll down on this Zero Hedge article. I find this severely misguided. Frankly, the sane response to this is to take the kid away from the parents and jail them. If your toddler ends up crawling around the house unattended, you’ve seriously messed up. Those things don’t just happen. But good luck telling this to a single mom of the underclass. Her kid has barely made it out of her womb, but she has to do drugs and take it in the butt from Jerome again.


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18 thoughts on “Peak millennial stupidity: eating toxic detergents

  1. Im not sure you can blame parents. Schools are not doing enough science education, probably due to lack of funding cause of tax cuts for the rich. For example I saw that a teen didnt find the challenge to be dangerous cause she reasoned she was only going to chew but not swallow. She appeared unaware of the fact that the tongue, like the skin, is not impenetrable, but easily absorbs certain substances through its boundaries.

    Also smartphones are not a big deal imo. You just need to set it up properly and you can use it for learning. Turn off all sound/vibrate notifications and only check once per period, like 3 hours, batch processing style, after work. Since humans cannot multitask apparently, this is better for concentration. After this you can download free apps like coursera, edx etc and you got yourself a powerful learning device for your kids. Although maybe its better to do these on a different device, like a tablet so you dont see notifications coming in. So separate social media from learning apps. Its cheap.

  2. I see the rot in society due to lazy rich immoral capitalists everywhere. I just discovered a link between cheap artificial sweeteners, gut bacteria and obesity. Another link is that certain substances in processed foods kill beneficial bacteria, which then leads to oversensitivity to gluten, and then supermarkets offer glutenfree foods which contains the additives with gluten-properties which increase the sensitivity again. A vicious cycle! Or the bacteria that survive promote obesity. Although i need to do more research. Should we all become farmers so we can be certain what we put in our bodies is not toxic? Food is utterly confusing when researching it.

    Sadly it appears governments, food agencies and scientists have been bribed and corrupted by the capitalists.
    We need a bigger more resistant to corruption government…

    1. Jon: (Sadly it appears governments, food agencies and scientists have been bribed and corrupted by the capitalists.
      We need a bigger more resistant to corruption government)

      So your solution to corrupt big government would be an even bigger government?
      Power corrupt’s and absolute power corrupt’s absolutely. Bigger and more powerful government only makes the problem grow.

  3. This is what you get if you teach that group identity stuff. Like sheep they follow each others example. I can’t blame you for trying to keep your kids away from this stuff. But i’m afraid it will be a challenge. CPS is probably more interested in people like you. People trying to protect their kids by avoiding the post modern bullshit. They are not checking on single mothers who are known for screwing up their kids. The people working for CPS are mostly leftist. They are known to take the children away from homeschooling parents. While the typical gettorat single mother gets financial support and free housing. Not that i think taking their kids away would help. I think withdrawing all financial aid would be better. Just let them die. Otherwise the problem will only get bigger within a generation. Just let natural selection do it’s thing. If you take their children. They will tax the productive people for their care. Just let little Tyrone die in his childhood. One less future gangbanger to worry about.

  4. Don’t you think that you are picking easy pickings? Those kids are clearly mad. It should be a isolated incident, isn’t it?

      1. Lets hope that this kind of fads doesn’t pickup speed in the future. In my opinion, anything with the word challenge is stupid.

  5. I partly disagree here – on the part regarding adult supervision. Modern kids in the West have had the least amount of unsupervised free time in history, and that is part of the problem, since they dont learn the skills to cope and resolve problems on their own.

    Thats a recipe for generating snowflakes. NYU psychologist Jonathan Haidt has talked about this repeatedly (most recently in an interview with JBP).
    Check out this article he wrote with Lenore Skenazy
    https://reason.com/archives/2017/10/26/the-fragile-generation

    We all did dumb shit as kids, pushing boundaries and taking risks (my dad would kick me in the nuts if he knew what I did back in the day). The job of the adults is to try to keep us from doing the most dangerous ones… and they wont always suceed. But the alternative, the smothering helicopter parenting, is having worse effects IMHO.

  6. “(my dad would kick me in the nuts if he knew what I did back in the day)”

    Maybe that’s why you didn’t screw it up. Ever thought of that? 😉

    Spot on about the helicopter parents. The total laissez-faire 1968-style parenting is not the solution though either.

    @Aaron:
    “This means children from the underclass and welfare leeches, children of single mothers, and children of lefties, for starters. In earlier times, this was a lot easier. ”

    –> Guess this means either private school or home schooling. Thoughts?

      1. Are you OK with a confessional school?
        You as an atheist, I mean…

        Sure, some of the contents teach more conservative values, but there’s quite a bit of brainwashing, too.

    1. You’re technically correct. However, those broad categorizations are imperfect at best. Yet, due to it being an established term, there are firmly established stereotypes when it comes to millennials. On the other hand, Gen Z isn’t a term that is in wide use.

      1. Actually, there is a compelling argument to put the cutoff year for Millenials around 1995. This link is worth a read
        https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the-smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/

        I like the proposed term “iGen” for the postmillenials, makes more sense than calling them “gen Z”

        Kids born after 1995 already exhibit different psychological and cultural traits, attributable at least partly to the fact that they are the first generation to transit adolescence immersed in social media. And the results aint pretty (depression, anxiety and suicide are on the rise).

        Still, the cutoff years are debatable, those born near cutoff points have more in common with the previous or with the next gen. (for example I am on the older part of the millenial curve, so I have more in common with gen Xers)

      1. Jon: Jon please consider going to a doctor. I’m getting a bit worried about our little commi friend. Maybe a scan can give a indication about what the hell is going rong inside your head. Really dude i’m starting to get worried. You didn’t swallow any poisoning cleaning products yourself did you?

  7. People are so used to using “Millennials” to refer to the youth that they forget that we’ve already (mostly) graduated to the workforce already – we are the yuppies of the present day if anything, now that Gen X are now largely in their midlife, and the Boomers are hurtling towards retirement now!

    Today’s teenagers and college kids are Gen Z’ers, and it is them who are doing this Tide Pod eating nonsense! This is just two cents from someone who’s born in ’87 (described by some sociologists as part of the “older millennial” cohort). Cheers!

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