I've said before here my conjecture about how the amount of trouble caused by personality-disordered people in a nation or society is proportional not to their percentage of the population (which remains fairly constant), but to their absolute number. So, as the society's population increases, eventually the personality-disordered achieve the capability to cause enough trouble that breakdown begins to occur.

I'm still not quite sure where that point is. On the one hand, we appear to be reaching it now. But I wonder if it didn't actually occur sometime between 1920 and 1950, and the social conformity that everyone associates with the mid-century period was actually an attempt to forestall the inevitable.

I wonder more about moral relativism than mental illness. With no set of common values and especially with people deciding that things only mean what they want them to mean for that moment you don't really have a society. You quickly descend into every man for himself. Communication becomes pointless.

'Bad' manners for what value of 'bad'?

That is what the SJWs have pushed for years.

I dunno, most of the folks I run into are pretty nice and polite.

Regan's results have been replicated many times since, in the lab and out, by Hare Krishnas, who saw a marked increase in donations when they gave out a flower, book, or magazine before asking for money; by organizations whose fund-raising letters pull in far more money when they include a small gift, like personalized address labels; and by me after I did something nice for a bad neighbor.
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Interestingly, Miss Manners said something about how it's bad taste to accept a "gift" in exchange for a charitable donation - maybe her idea was that if you are a truly charitable person, you should be willing to give without receiving (thus, you should refuse the token) - or, you should even be willing to give without being sought out to begin with.

But good luck trying to convince a whole new generation of that principle, since the young ones have never seen strangers being so financially nice to each other - outside of Amish communities, maybe.

And here's something I found recently in Bratfree:

"Smartphones are making children borderline autistic, says psychiatrist"

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/smartphones-are-making-children-borderline-autistic-says-psychiatrist-10203570.html

First half:

By Doug Bolton, April 25th

Constant use of technology such as smartphones is making today's children display borderline "autistic" behaviour, psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist has warned.

The former Oxford literature teacher, who retrained as a doctor, said that children as young as five are becoming increasingly unable to read facial expressions or show empathy, compared to children in previous generations

He said he had heard of increasing numbers of teachers who have had to tell their pupils what different facial expressions mean.

He added that he had spoken to some teachers who now find that around a third of their pupils have problems with maintaining attention or understanding others' emotions or facial expressions - a problem which he says is due to the increasing presence of technology in childrens' lives.

Speaking to The Telegraph, he said: "Children spend more time engaging with machines and with virtual reality than they used to in the past, where they don't have to face the consequences of real life."...

(snip)

What so many otherwise intelligent parents can't grasp is that 1) as many people keep trying to point out, computers have become so user-friendly that there is NO need to get kids started on them before they start school - even 30-year-old Third World immigrants who have never seen a computer can learn pretty fast these days, and 2) unlike computer skills, just as you can't postpone chores like dishes and laundry for more than a week at most, you CANNOT put off teaching even very small kids important face-to-face social, verbal, and reading skills that require patience and concentration from the kids - preferably on a DAILY basis. Not to mention the need to keep the kids physically active as much as possible. (As one doctor in a comic strip said, when a patient asks him if a certain exercise program would be good for him: "People ask me that all the time, but they never ask me whether it's OK to get a wide-screen TV and a Barcalounger.")

Quotes from the Bratfree thread:

Chicken:
'Sad thing is I've seen so many parents glue their kids to tablets and phones and then they get all screechy and agressive when they have it taken away. On the bus I've seen really little kids (about 1yo ish) be pacified with moomie's phone. There's nothing scarier than a chubby little hand reaching out to play with a touch screen *shudder*. This is the future people."

Cambion:
"...Them reacting aggressively when their tablet or phone or what-not is taken away is understandable when you think about it. It'd be like if you were walking down the street and suddenly your legs give out and you can't get back up. Your life and world come to a halt and you're gonna freak out. I think that's kind of how it is for these phone addict toddlers

"The first few years of a kid's life are essential for learning basic human behavior and interaction, and when that learning is replaced with a shiny screen, the end result will be kids with no sense of boundaries, no sense of what's appropriate, no sense of how to interact with others or even how to feel, and atomic tantrums when they get the tablet taken away from them. All they learn how to do is poke a f------ screen. Not to mention the trouble that will come later when a kid will have access to all answers via Google rather than learning it on their own. A generation full of stupid, angry brats glued to their devices. What a bright future..."

yurble:
"...Whereas the proportion of people who make things rather than mindlessly consume appears to be dropping, probably because children are pacified with entertainment rather than given opportunities to learn through exploration. I also see a lot of people who act helpless when given an interface to something which isn't FUN, because they never learned how to learn and how to do things that aren't enjoyable..."

ex lurker:
"Marie Winn described similar findings in her book The Plug-In Drug and its follow-ups. She was describing television , not computers...But she also concluded that people who 'interact' for hours with screens rather than other people wind up low in empathy.Bear in mind she was describing how people born in the 1960s , 1970s, and early 1980s differ from people born in previous decades (IOW, today's parents and grandparents as compared to THEIR parents and older generations ). So if Winn and this UK psychiatrist are correct, we have people with impaired empathy trying to raise children , and doing so in a manner (using technology as a babysitter) that worsens the impact of low-empathy parenting. We have narcissists raising sociopaths, and what's worse, the narcissists are so impaired they can't even tell there's something wrong with their Li'l Sociopaths. Instead, the narcissists lash out angrily whenever someone-teacher, judge, social worker, CPS, random victim-tries to tell them there's something wrong with their child's behavior. We can expect the narcissist's progeny to be so lacking in empathy that they will be capable of any atrocity against younger/smaller children ,pets, and anyone vulnerable."

kookiecrisp:
"...I guess what really bothers me now is how many teens and people slightly younger than me (I'm 26) are lacking empathy and have no issue with using the Internet as a way to bully and humiliate people. The thing is, I now realize that this is pretty much the same grade-school a------ kids bullying their peers. Same thing I had to deal with, except much worse now because every little fuck up, act of bullying, or humiliation ends up on the f------ Internet for everyone to see.

"I am so glad I grew up when I did, even with the bullying. It was all confined to the school, and even then, just to a few people..."

So your friend is suppose to pony over some of her hard earned advance because this guy is helping her? That's cheeky.

I see the problem as a watering-down of "hurting someone's feelings." Too many people, especially SJWs, are now such "precious little snowflakes" that they're constantly taking offense when none was given. So they constantly want to "get even" with people who haven't really done anything wrong.

It's a waste of effort to be nice to people who are always going around with that kind of chip on their shoulders.

Amen to that jdgalt. All it takes is not hearing someone say hi and suddenly you are enemy number one.