I have added a new section to General Neophobia in Everyday Life: Humankind's Fear of Progress and Change:

Many elements of youth entertainment have been sternly denounced by seniors as precipitating a violent demise of society, including jazz, heavy metal and violent video games. In all cases, such predictions have been wrong. Shakespeare's plays (like Greek classics) are full of violence, murder, suicide, drink, etc, yet we have accepted that enjoying Shakespeare does not predispose young adults to violence in real life. Perhaps this is because the types of people who are stereotyped as digging the classics are not the types of poverty-stricken children that are stereotyped as being involved in violent crime.

The high-and-mighties of society subconsciously take an approach that is so simplistic it somehow appeals. If the poorer elements of society are into certain types of music or culture, then, it must be that those elements of culture are causing their misbehaviour. Well, jazz, heavy metal, Greek plays and the written word have achieved two things: (1) They failed to cause an outbreak of violence as they became popular, and (2) they generally entered the mainstream. Violent videos games, just like violent plays and violent written works, will follow the same trend. These products should achieve a third thing in addition to the first two: (3) teaching worry-worts that it is rarely popular elements of youth culture that cause rebellious youthful behaviour. The cause of such behaviour is youthfulness.

The page includes a load of bullet points with examples of this type of neophobic reaction: The printing press, alongside music, plays and games, has received a large share of these types of concerns:

• "In one of his last poems, published in 1850, Wordsworth opined that the infantility of illustrated newspapers - the first tentative steps towards the multimedia of today - would drive us back to "caverned life's first rude career" [...] and he felt that the endless influx of news from daily papers would incite us to a level of unbearable restlessness".
  
• In the 15th century CE the printing press was said to endanger the ability of humankind to think straight, and retain a working memory. It would destroy general knowledge, they said, wrongly, out of fear of new forms of information flows.
  
• 2,400 years ago similar concerns surrounded the popularization of writing. Concerns were embodied in an Egyptian tale about the god of magic, Thoth, who invented writing. A horrified Earthly king exclaims that it will mean the demise of wisdom and truth as "they will not need to exercise their memories".

Read the whole text on neophobia, on the link above.

The UK needs a good immigration policy that takes into account our labour availability. Take the old-age dependency ratio. This is the ratio of old-age people to working-age people. At present, it is approaching 1 in 4 (25%). It has never been this high before and has put tremendous strain on pensions and welfare systems, as it is difficult to adequately care for the old without enough workers. At our present level of medical and technological know-how, we shouldn't like to see the old-age dependency ratio rise much above 25%. But, the ratio continues to worsen. According to Eurostat:

• The UK's old-age dependency ratio in 2010 will be 24.7%. It will rise a few percent points per year, reaching 40.2% by 2050 (and still rising).
• It is rising throughout the European Union as a whole, from 25.9% in 2010 to 52.5% in 2050.

As Europe's value rises higher than the UK's, workers will increasingly find more work elsewhere (and better paid work, according to the economics of supply and demand).

This means, without increasing our rate of childbirth which will only add to world overpopulation, we need to accept more immigrants. The short-term solution is to continually accept workers, and let them go home as most of them.

The long-term solution is to make the UK attractive to immigrants in general, so that we decrease the rate at which the population ages. This will give more time to allow us to develop technological and medical technology to allow people to work productively for longer into their life, or, as Japan as done to much merit, increase automation so that less workers are required in the first place.

More: "UK Immigration, Economics and Pensions" by Vexen Crabtree (2007)

"Prof Dawkins, in his critical tome written against all god-belief and superstition, attempts to explain why the Bible is such a hodge-podge of confusing and haphazard moral laws:

“Much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries. This may explain some of the sheer strangeness of the Bible. But unfortunately it is this same weird volume that religious zealots hold up to us as the inerrant source of our morals and rules for living.”

"The God Delusion" by Prof. Richard Dawkins (2006)

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