In clouds of black diesel smoke, some controversy | When enthusiasts don’t play well with locals

350z247 said:

In reply to AnthonyGS (Forum Supporter) :

Whether or not people are more intelligent or mature is debatable, but people are more educated today than every before. They have access to better schooling and of course free access to every piece of known information through the internet. 100 years ago not being able to read or write wasn't as uncommon as people might think, but it's unheard of today. It would seem the missing pieces are respect and accountability. 

Not even close to every piece of known information - there are huge holes - and even free is debatable. But yes, it's easier than having to visit libraries. 

Bigger problem here is the ability to show off to the entire world and get rewarded for it, via that same mechanism. 

AnthonyGS (Forum Supporter) said:

350z247 said:

In reply to AnthonyGS (Forum Supporter) :

100 years ago not being able to read or write wasn't as uncommon as people might think, but it's unheard of today.

It seems like this "should" be right.  However, if you start digging into reality of education today and what is going on in large cities in the poor areas, you'll find this isn't the case.  

Illiteracy rates in the US fell from 20% in 1870 to .06% in 1979 (latest, best data, I could find for the US). Broken out by race, illiteracy in whites fell from 11.5 to .04, and in Blacks and other minorities it fell from 79.9% to 1.6%. 

https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp 

This doesn't mean that there aren't massive issues with the US education system, or that we're doing better compared to other OECD countries. It just means that the situation is terrible and improving, and has been for quite some time.

I enlisted in the U.S.M.C. in 1964. If there is one thing the Marine Corp instills in recruits it's discipline, forcibly if needed. Confidence to handle all situations is also instilled. Rather you choose to be disciplined after you get out is your choice but I can't help believe that in some ways you are affected for life. I know for me it has made me a better man and person. 

Be it right or be it wrong back then it was not uncommon for judges to give young men a choice of going to jail or enlisting in the military. I had a couple in my platoon that came in as real tough guys, trouble makers and no one was going to tell them what to do. They left completely different from boot camp. Have no idea how they ended up in life. 
 

Youth is always rebellious. People today may be better educated but that doesn't mean they are better people. A dose of discipline never hurt anyone but sadly a lot of young people never received it from their parents or anyone else. Many come to believe they can do anything they want without consequences. Unfortunately there are many out there who condone this and even encourage it. My opinion your mileage may vary.

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

C'est tout.

In reply to pirate :

On the flip side, "I fought for your freedom so I can do whatever I want" is not an unknown attitude. It has been directly expressed to me when I called out a kid for tearing up a National Park.

My only experience with the military on the inside is as a member of the Canadian Reserves as a musician, but that experience led me to believe that people coming out of the military are fundamentally no different than the people going in.

So human beings have no more or less intellectual capacity than they did 4000 years ago when they were carving out peoples hearts to appease the Gods.

I've worked with some extremely uneducated people who displayed a level of intellect and professionism that many of the PHDs I routinely work with now could learn from.

When you get mobs of people together they behave like mobs, as an organizer you need to be aware of it and plan accordingly. 

In reply to Mr_Asa :

Yeah, I gotta call you out on this.  I've been in the military for 22 years.  With a few exceptions, every single person I've ever met that's been in the military is someone with outstanding character and integrity.  I have NO problems with entrusting them with my family or life at all. 

There are several military guys on GRM along with me and I can tell just from their posts that if I met them in person, it'd be the exact same feeling.

In reply to docwyte :

Same here. Every military guy I know is top level. But, to be fair, I don't  typically associate with E36 M3heads, so the service people I know aren't E36 M3heads by design.

docwyte said:

In reply to Mr_Asa :

Yeah, I gotta call you out on this.  I've been in the military for 22 years.  With a few exceptions, every single person I've ever met that's been in the military is someone with outstanding character and integrity.  I have NO problems with entrusting them with my family or life at all. 

There are several military guys on GRM along with me and I can tell just from their posts that if I met them in person, it'd be the exact same feeling.

Cool beans.  I did 10 years in myself, USAF.
Once, when I was working in the tire shop (I was a 2T3x1 at the time) we had a Security Forces member come in and ask if we could fix a flat if the tire was off the vehicle.  We said it was a bit strange, but if he wanted to swap the spare around and whatever then we didn't care.  He came in with a wheel that was so damaged that one quarter of it wasn't even round.  The idiot had been screwing around and driven a cop car into one of those bollards they put on the corners of high traffic buildings so people don't drive into the building.  He then decided that instead of reporting it and taking his lumps he would fix the car himself by getting the parts from a junkyard and doing it in his garage offbase.  How he even got the car offbase we (in the tire shop) never found out.  It might have worked if the guy had enough of a brain to know how to turn a wrench.
After him, the Security Forces commander, Vehicle Maintenance commander, the LRS commander, and the base commander had a come-to-jesus meeting where they hashed out a plan that any further damage over a certain dollar amount caused by a Security Forces goober resulted in 50% of that being paid by the SecFo member.

Another jackass, this time from when I was a 3C2, decided that when he got out but before he started to try and get into OCS, he was going to take terminal leave overseas in Europe.  There was a problem with his paperwork and he had to come in to fix it, so the brass called him.  "Uh, I'm in France" wasn't really a popular reply when he hadn't applied to take terminal leave out of the country.  He came back, on his own dime, all leave was denied somehow and he had to spend the rest of his time in with one less stripe and an article 15.
Hell, I almost got an article 15 because I brought my '67 Mustang on base when I lived in the dorms and one of the dorm managers had some sort of connection through local towing and storage yards that the base had a contract with.  I could never prove anything, but there were multiple stories of people getting their cars impounded (some while deployed) and this guy driving them afterwards because he had bought them from the storage yard.

These are the light stories I know of people in the military being absolute berkeleyups.  There are some stories that I don't even dwell on when sober, some of those happened to people I know that were in other branches, that's how bad they are.

You want to believe that the military is filled with people that have outstanding character and integrity, that's great; personally I doubt that everyone you've run into is a great soldier, sailor, Airman, or Marine but I can't verify that nor do I want to.  As I said originally, your mileage may vary.

Appleseed said:

In reply to docwyte :

Same here. Every military guy I know is top level. But, to be fair, I don't  typically associate with E36 M3heads, so the service people I know aren't E36 M3heads by design.

I don't associate with E36 M3heads myself either, but you can't help who gets put in the seat next to you.  Just because you don't hang out with them doesn't mean you don't know them.

I was a full-fledged street-racer as a youngster, so am not really in a position to get sanctimonious (but I'm going to anyway). What strikes me here is that it's just another form of partying. You get a bunch of hedonistic young people and they look for opportunities to get a little crazy, whether it be trucks, sideshows, boats, beaches, bars, guns.... people want to get loud and stupid. 

What I've never gotten into is the obnoxious exhibitionist side of things. Want to act crazy? Do like the burning man people do and head out to the desert. Or inside a facility of some kind. Show some consideration.   

In reply to Kreb (Forum Supporter) :

Nailed it.

Kreb (Forum Supporter) said:

Want to act crazy? Do like the burning man people do and head out to the desert. Or inside a facility of some kind. Show some consideration.   

I think part of that is the spread of humanity.  Used to be that people could head down Hwy 20, get 15 miles out of town and hit up the drag strip.  Now there's an elementary street across from the remains of the strip.

Even burning man and the like are getting flak from locals.

Lost my whole train of thought after seeing this....drool...

The problem is narcissism.  The trucks, cars, side-by-sides, supercars or whatever have to be THAT much more extreme than the other guy to confirm that inflated self-worth. 

I went to Cars and Coffee yesterday for the first time in a few years and it was a totally different scene.  Took 3 kids and a dog.  We didn't make it 15 minutes before we had to bail out because of all of the tatted-up vape bros acting out, tossing revs, purging nitrous, backfiring and two-stepping....totally freaked out the kids and the dog.  

I left really confused and sad for the car hobby in general.  

In reply to Tyler H (Forum Supporter) :

The organizers need to do their work to have them removed.  If you don't dissent, you give consent.

Pete. (l33t FS) said:

In reply to Tyler H (Forum Supporter) :

The organizers need to do their work to have them removed.  If you don't dissent, you give consent.

I agree -- but I think this is what the scene has become.   I'm not in a huff, but just not my scene.  We went to the lake instead and watched the 100k wakeboats throwing off 3' rollers.  It's everywhere. 

Our local C&C is going through great lengths to discourage this kind of behavior. Things like trying to prevent people from congregating and posting a local PO at the main exit. It seems to be working but the amount of backlash the organizers have received is surprising. Idiots come in all shapes and sizes but it is by far the late model Mustang/Camaro/MOPAR crowd that seems to cause the most issues.

I have to LOL at the military service = moral high ground claim. I worked as a civilian on base for several years. What happens when you give an 18 year-old a massive signing bonus and little real life responsibility (i.e. lives in the barracks) is not unexpected. I don't miss those daily commutes in the slightest.

infernosg said:

What happens when you give an 18 year-old a massive signing bonus and little real life responsibility (i.e. lives in the barracks) is not unexpected. I don't miss those daily commutes in the slightest.

We were looking at a local civil airport that adjoins Dover AFB as a possible AX venue.  Like, no-fence, shares-the-runway-with-C-5s-and-C-17s adjoins.

The base AF liaison literally said, "We will do anything we need to to make this work.  We'd love to have events like this where all our new kids can safely learn to drive their signing bonus hotrods."

In the end it was the civilian side that rejected us.

I've done a lot of really dumb crap in my youth. Luckily, none of it is forever archived photographically or in video on the Internet. That said, when it comes to bad behavior there is nothing better for that than a bunch of guys high on testosterone and low on self awareness. We were limited in how far we would take things by our own experiences and attitudes. Peer pressure was limited to the people in the group. Sure, we egged each other on to do crazy E36 M3, but after it's done you tend to reflect on the damage that ensued either physical, mental or otherwise as well as the accolades from your peers and decide whether the whole experience was worth it. Today, with the Internet there is no limit to the amount of positive feedback you can get for doing dumb things and with millions of people trying to get noticed if you aren't going past the point of reasonable behavior then you aren't getting those YouTube views and social media upvotes.

In my life I've worked closely with steel workers, surgeons, bricklayers, lawyers, mail sorters, engineers, machinists, chemists, janitors, academics, and yes- soldiers.  The ratio of good/moral/honest/smart people to cheats/liars/dummies has been about the same for all of them.  I don't think any one profession or vocation can lay claim to being all good people or all bad people.  And even though I never served, I do agree that military service is a great avenue for some of these rudderless ships to get their act together and learn how to be an adult.

Mr_Asa said:

The article said:

Squats began in Central Florida, Muhlbauer says, with “kids who go deer dogging in the woods”—using dogs to chase down deer. “They get way back in the swamp and they need all the traction they can get, so they raise the front, lower the rear. The concept moved from the woods onto the road and to the custom truck world.”

My fat hairy FloridaMan ass it did.  I know many folks that deer hunt that way and all that is is a good way to get stuck.

Edit: Also, every single word Muhlbauer says in this thing sounds self-serving.  I don't get it

I don't see how this setup would help with traction in a swap or otherwise. The explanation I'd heard was that some low buck 2WD tractor pull trucks had more lift on the front than the back because they would run very large rear tires and they were trying to look like they had a pulling truck on road tires, although most example pictures of 2WD pull trucks suggest that isn't the case.

Nonfunctional mod fads can be pretty tough to account for.

Tyler H (Forum Supporter) said:

The problem is narcissism.  The trucks, cars, side-by-sides, supercars or whatever have to be THAT much more extreme than the other guy to confirm that inflated self-worth. 

I went to Cars and Coffee yesterday for the first time in a few years and it was a totally different scene.  Took 3 kids and a dog.  We didn't make it 15 minutes before we had to bail out because of all of the tatted-up vape bros acting out, tossing revs, purging nitrous, backfiring and two-stepping....totally freaked out the kids and the dog.  

I left really confused and sad for the car hobby in general.  

I imagine the language was hard to explain to the kids maybe even the dog. What rolls off the tongue nowadays even embarrass's me at times. 

In regards to people in the military and behavior and stupidity. Whatever dumb E36 M3 you see from civilians, you get it in the military too. Especially the disgruntled or damaged folks. People who serve are no better or worse citizens than those who do not. Want to see some really dumb E36 M3? Go to any combat location where there's any period of boredom! 

In regards to people today are less smart than previous generations....I refuse to believe that. Just looking at history, previous generations did dumb E36 M3 and more inhumane things to each other than you'd see today. Often, no one knew about it or it was covered up, but also done obnoxiously.  The difference from then and now? The ability to instantly share experiences and events via technology. But, I'd take todays idiots over the crimes-against-humanity inhumane looking the other way folks of yesterday.

And the opportunity to learn reading and writing isn't a measurement of intelligence but rather a measurement of resources.