People Are Twats

My previous post dealt largely with explaining that young people are rubbish. This time I want to do some broadening out of this theory. I was unduly fair on what I termed 'older people'; I said that they were "of worth to society" and "had something to say". I want now to show that these claims are demonstrably untrue. All people are, in fact, twats.

I doubt that it is would be easy to find an empirical argument for this so, to begin with, I want to deal with what conclusions we can come to inductively. The first - and perhaps most obvious reason - for thinking that people are twats is that they never tell you who to make cheques payable to without prompting. In the history of humanity no one has ever composed an initial letter, email or advertisement soliciting money that included information about who to make cheques payable to. This means that other people have to spend innumerable non-life-affirming hours trawling through company websites, phoning 'any queries' numbers with no one at the end of them, or sending emails that weeks later receive replies saying, "sorry, we've already sold out of tickets/ cheap printer ink cartridges/ vibrating eggs."

It's self-evident that children are twats: they still like toys and spend their time going to weddings and classical music concerts so they can wail during the quiet bits. And I explained why young people are twats last time. So it is now incumbent on me to give an account of why people older than young people are twats. In the previous post I, to an extent, suggested that experience breeds insight and wisdom and therefore "things to say". It is a sad fact that this is seldom the case: 43% of people aged 45 and over can only think of concepts in terms of where their children or their aquaintances' children go to university. A smaller, but sizable, proportion can only think of concepts in terms of Agas. There is also a trend for the complacently unfunny among these people to go on programmes like Grumpy Old Men and talk about how bloody hilarious becoming middle aged is. Eight in ten of their jokes follow this format: 'these days I groan when I get out of a chair.'

A response to this argument might be to say, "What about Gandhi, Mother Teresa or national treasure, Stephen Fry? Surely these people are not twats?" My answer is: I have not met them. My experience with other people tells me that they most probably are/were twats. I know this in the same way that I know the sun will rise again tomorrow, if I don't eat I will become hungry and if I go to Manchester's Opus nightclub I will not enjoy myself.

If you need further convincing, I suggest you watch the first episode of Armando Iannucci's 'The Armando Iannucci Shows', which covers this ground in far greater depth than I have here.

*1/3/09 — the misuse of the word empirical in this post is a source of undying embarrassment for me; I am a philosophy student for chrissake's! I am not going to change it though; let it stand as a monument to my stupidity.