No lol. Hippies are a microscopic fraction of Boomers and the original hippies were silents and greatests anyway. This is another thing the Boomers do which is claim credit for stuff other generations did. They love to talk about Civil Rights like they were there when they were a 13 year old white kid whose parents were strongly against it.
Touché
I’ve had multiple bombastic confrontations with my parents.
It’s also my duty to speak to extremist cartoons here when I have evidence that undermines them. As someone with a direct connection to blue collar workers this is something you understand.
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Make no mistake we’re mostly talking about white Boomers, but unfortunately the poor white Boomers were born into a pretty good situation and didn’t notice as they got boiled slowly over time. They bear the least responsibility for what happened, but certainly not no responsibility. They still voted the way they voted, and as a group the poor whites have been voting very poorly since Reagan.
“They were fooled” you’ll tell me. Bullshit they were there watching things get slowly worse but didn’t want to risk the good stuff they had to protect it for the next generation, and in place after place that’s the deal they offered people. Look at every single Union contract done in every single industry over the last 10 years. It’s a whole bunch of two tier pay plans that pay the new people 14 bucks an hour and the old people what they used to make.
We’re giving everyone way too much slack, which is exactly how most Boomers would like it. A generation that has spent their lives preaching about personal responsibility was really compensating for something… who would have thought it?
Why would you assume I haven’t taken my parents to task?
I wouldn’t any more than I would assume that your parents were part of the problem. It’s a huge demographic group and there are without a doubt actual millions of exceptions to the rule. But as a group the Boomers do have some traits common enough to be generalized about and I think the four really bad ones are those ideas I keep hammering. I think it’s easier from a memetic point of view to tie them all together, label them Boomerism, and mercilessly go after anyone exhibiting them.
Generally people making excuses for awful Boomers say some variation of ‘they got fooled’ like they never were told or had a choice. They were all told many times and made many choices.
The one kitchen remodel I was part of professionally was not really ok for the world. It was very nice and perfectly functional and in excellent condition before work started.
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Much of my furniture is expensive restored mid century modern teak. Should I feel bad about caring about design, or good about reusing furniture that is literally decades old?
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Nobody cares about being mean to boomers. We care about using broad based stereotypes to categorize huge swaths of the population based in traits they have no control over.
This is like progressive 101.
Talk about boomers. This thread is like a time capsule back to 1960 in terms of its understanding of basic social science and stereotypes.
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My last post in this thread says it’s a huge demographic group with millions of exceptions inside of it. Please get unstuck from this ‘not all boomers’ thing. It’s seriously as ridiculous as ‘not all cops’. That’s a huge group with some good apples in it too. Doesn’t mean that group isn’t responsible for some huge systemic issues that we have to unwind.
Boomers ~= cops in your rendering?
There are way, way more good boomers as a % than there are cops.
Boomers are slightly better than cops in terms of exceptions per hundred, but not by more than a factor of 1.5-3X. This part is totally unscientific and just me explaining how I’m seeing it. Two of the same thing just to different degrees.
Could you list those four. I’ve been reading the thread, but want to be sure I’m following you.
Separate from that, do you feel that your opinions on boomers may be somewhat clouded/biased by your relationship with your parents, specifically your dad? I ask that because you and riverman have both expressed a kind of broad disdain for boomers, and I know the both of you have been fairly open about having narcissistic/toxic parents.
My parents, despite being conservative boomer evangelicals, have with the limited power of typical lower/middle class people left a positive impact on their communities. They haven’t single handedly solved climate change or anything like that, but there are hundreds of people who’s lives are surely better today because my parents existed. They aren’t perfect by any means, and I wish they’d change their minds on some things, but I don’t see “OK Boomer”-ing them as a particularly good tact to take.
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Do you think there are similar %ages of Xers and Millenials and Zoomers that either suck, systemically, or are likely to suck as they age as the Boomers? If the society has decayed over the last several decades, as the Boomer hypothesis implies, then how have these other generations escaped the demise?
Why is this hard to understand. People choose to be cops. They don’t choose to be boomers.
Again this is progressive 101 man.
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The greatest trick the robberbarrons done in 2020 was the Boomer meme.
Don’t get fooled again.
Ffs I take it as a parent/children thing.
In general I think the Boomer generation done better parenting than their parents etc… The parents of 2010/20 seem to be better than the lot of them because progress.
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I’m on team #FuckTheBoomers and my boomer parents are socialist Bernie stans.
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Indefinite Optimism. This is the sense that things are going to get better just because that’s the trend and all you have to do is take your seat and watch the show. I stole this one from Peter Thiel of all people, it’s one of two ideas of his I think has real merit. This also encompasses the whole positive thinking thing the Boomers love so much. Why have I read Peter Thiel? Because I like to know my rhetorical enemies arguments inside and out. No better way to understand how people think than to read their own materials.
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Being selfish is good.
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Being greedy is good.
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The best decisions are short term. You see this in how they run things. Every decision is made with the smallest possible unit of time in mind. Daily, Weekly, Monthly and weekly numbers are optimized for and quarterly numbers are seen as long term. This is the mindset that has driven much of the darkest shit in capitalism since the University of Chicago squatted over public and corporate policy and began shitting.
EDIT: And yes indefinite optimism is the thing you’re very much looking for when you read hostile works like that. You’re looking for the thing he defines very well that he cannot see inside himself. He is drenched in indefinite optimism hilariously despite spending pages and pages talking shit about it. The best rhetorical weapons are the ones your foe thinks are his own. He’s busy trying to build up their credibility and then you use it to just gut him like a fish. Yes fucking up libertarians was my other hobby than League of Legends when I was in college.
Alough my parents are boomers and I’ve had major problems with them since childhood, they like most of them did not reep the rewards, they struggled too.
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