I dunno, you seen the anti-Musk rallies? Lots of 70yo radicals out there. They've assured me locally that white Texas oilmen in cowboy hats want to boil off the Pacific and sell us the salt.
It is striking. Look at any photo of these recent Democrat rallies. The people clustered around the microphone, the people marching - they're mostly in their 70's.
I wonder if as they age into old age, the old Democrat protestors tell themselves "I protested in the 60's and 70's and I changed the world". Those heroic stories we tell ourselves about our distant past. Maybe protesting now makes them feel young. I noticed that as my dad aged, whenever he told stories about his youth he'd get a brief spurt of energy. Like he'd laugh a little more freely etc for about 10 minutes, almost as if remembering his youth literally de-aged him temporarily. Maybe the aging protestors today are playing out a narrative, where "I'm a hero again" fulfills them emotionally and "damn I suddenly have a bunch of energy" fulfills them physically.
You are absolutely right. These people are reliving their youth. Sad to tell them that Nixon and Johnson are dead, Hef is dead, Barbi Benton is a grandmother and Communism is dead.
The thing about the older protesters is that their younger selves protested for change, today the protests are about retaining the status quo as it was under Biden. Boomers have had a massive influence on our politics and culture but they are way past their sell-by date.
Another symptom of the Israelification of US politics? Likud politicians have been known to refer to the country's liberal protest movement as "The Geriatric Brigades".
Even leftist boomers are pretty wealthy and they have a lot of time on their hands. They don't hunt and fish, they protest instead like it's 1968 again and Clean Gene McCarthy is running against bad-old LBJ.
Tumblr and 4chan went to war in the summer of 2014. It was a children's war, the typical combatant being between the ages of 14 and 21.
The battle was asymmetrical. The bastards of 4chan were organized, bloodthirsty, and used to combat. The faeries of Tumblr were less hierarchical, and clung to norms about communication and propriety.
In the aftermath, some 4chan users learned a taste for blood. They began forging weapons of war, refining memes for political ends. The ravaged Tumblr users retreated inwards, building complex frameworks around identity, safety, and "callouts".
The smoke never cleared. It drifted outward, seeping into the wider internet, where a children's war turned into everyone's war.
> Opinion journalism used to be a rather gray-bearded job. Reporters would spend years sitting through school board meetings before getting their own column
This is true of sports as well; someone like Michael Wilbon had to cover the local beats for the Washington Post for many years before being granted a column. This is why he spoke so highly of Boomer Esiason and Lefty Driesell; he covered them on a day-to-day basis when they were Terrapins
Or perhaps a well-known writer from the past who time-traveled to the present just to, you know, class up the joint. You never know who's behind the avatar...
No. I won an argument with Malcolm Gladwell about NFL teams drafting quarterbacks 16 years ago and have since retired from that arena. I intend to keep my winning streak intact at 1.
Apparently, he turned off one of the GMs when he showed up to an interview wearing headphones around his neck with the music blaring, and gave off a vibe of I'm already famous and don't give a f**k about you; word got around and, since he doesn't have other-worldly talent like his Dad, his relative stock fell. This is what I've heard around the office; I don't follow the NFL at all.
To be blunt, I don't know how the coaches of the NFL can stand being around most of their players. Most are literally bastards and most are dysfunctional in many ways. This ain't Bart Starr's NFL.
Don't know as I agree with Steve on this one. For every pimple-faced Greta Thunberg, I see various Paul Krugman (Krugmen?), every bit as mired in puerile ideology. Lately I wonder how much the spread of higher education in the West, with its elevation of conceptual thinking (and disdain for common sense), is responsible for the sheer nuttiness of our public square. An early influence for me was Hanna Arendt, and particularly her view that in the 20th Century banality had come to be the main vehicle for the spread of evil. Banish common sense, and you may end up with a tiny number of brilliant scientist and artists freed to create new models, and a whole lot of Eichmanns, desperate to find certainty in an ideology, the newer the better.
What percentage of the college educated class do you think can engage in conceptual thinking?!
My own criticism of modern media is the arrogance and certainty of so many delusional nitwiits. It is amazing how angry some of these people get when you challenge them.
I think it would be relatively easy to categorize the different types of nitwits if you had access to demographic data. Alas, like Steve says you really don’t know who is on the other side of the computer box.
I just spent a few hours on X schoolin' the young-uns about the old days. They seem to want to blame the Boomers for everything, but few of us were ever near the levers of power. We had no say in the fateful decisions of '65-6 that re-opened the golden door for non-Europeans and are now bankrupting the government. Granted, we made them worse instead of fixing them, but no one ever voted for mass immigration, legal or not.
My 28-year old son sometimes complains about Boomers like me bankrupting the country. As you infer, the Hart-Cellar Immigration Law of 1965 was the most destructive law in American history. I was five when it became law. Don't blame me. The only spending I supported was the defense build-up in the 80s to counter the Soviets. When the USSR went kaput, I favored decreased defense spending.
If you examine the boomer-blaming of these young people, you pretty quickly realize that they have no thought-out, logical basis for their opinion. How could they? As you imply, most of the damage was done by the World War II and Silent Generations. They were the guilt-ridden, do-gooder liberal crowd - deeply influenced by the horrors of the war - who started most of the changes that led us to where we are today.
The reason "these kids today" hate boomers seems mostly to be envy and jealousy. Economic conditions were better when we were children and, for older Boomers, even when they came to adulthood. That's neither our fault nor our achievement. It arose in the impossible-to-replicate position of post-war America as King of the Universe that we were born into.
Somewhat OT, but it's amazing how much the echoes of World War II can still be heard today. I've always considered the war the watershed event of the 20th century; I wonder if will turn out to be the watershed event of modern Western civilization.
Your analysis is spot on. I have great respect for the World War Two generation but they were a liberal group of people who truly believed in big government, big corporations and big labor. The WWII generation believed that government could solve any problem. Very hubristic. I honor them and realize they had great failings.
"We" do not hate you because you vote that back in the day, "we" hate you because in the Ninties you squandered the "Peace dividend" and today stonewall every attampt to change thing: e.g. Boomers are the main demographic behind both Canada managed decline vote and the most anti-trump cohort.
In the U.S., at least, I think it's entirely different. I think millenials hate boomers because their boomer teachers forced them to kowtow to blacks. Admittedly, I have a sample of one. That's what a recent high school grad told me in Berkeley around '02.
I was also referring to 1965's Medicare and Medicaid. Pretty sure SocSec benefits were also jacked up in the mid 60s, on the strength of the baby boom which they didn't know had just ended. So Bob Dole pushed the big 1982 FICA increase necessary because of the Birth Dearth. Since Congress then spent the SS surplus and more, DC realized bringing in a gazillion young foreigners was required to pay for the Boomers' retirement. Oops, didn't work.
Not only that but on both sides there's a lot of foreigners chiming in. American political fights are highly visible around the world and many people feel that they are higher status and more important than whatever happens in their own country so they eagerly take part in american squabbles including on internet forums.
The globalisation of american politics became highly visible with the Cult of Obama, global media suffering from TDS, european St Floyd protests (and looting) and England's soccer team kneeling at the World Cup.
It started with Reagan, I think, not Obama. Clinton was lionized in the European press, Bush fils mocked or derided. Obama adored, Trump abhorred, Biden respected, Trump …
Even half-educated blokes like Daryl Cooper can be brought onto Tucker Carlson's site and be treated like a Churchill scholar. Our host is right. In the bad olden days, famous journalists like Robert Novak and Jack Germond started with local papers and worked their way up. Even Pat Buchanan started with a St. Louis newspaper where he and Richard Nixon met socially and Nixon hired Buchanan away from the newspaper.
And the cause as not necessarily teenagers hiding behind avatars, but the the Boomer to Generation X power transition.
I in fact predicted it and saw it coming around ten years ago. That the generation that was happy with national brand coffee and beer was going to transition to the generation that en masse preferred micro roast coffee and microbrewery beer. So it would stand to reason that we/they would tend to niche ideologies. For instance, neoreaction instead of lamestream conservatism.
In the 1980s sci-fi novel Ender’s Game, two precocious teenage siblings use the power of anonymous Internet message boards to become the world’s most influential political commentators.
😋
So true
Wait, were you talking about me?
I dunno, you seen the anti-Musk rallies? Lots of 70yo radicals out there. They've assured me locally that white Texas oilmen in cowboy hats want to boil off the Pacific and sell us the salt.
It is striking. Look at any photo of these recent Democrat rallies. The people clustered around the microphone, the people marching - they're mostly in their 70's.
Old boomers.
I wonder if as they age into old age, the old Democrat protestors tell themselves "I protested in the 60's and 70's and I changed the world". Those heroic stories we tell ourselves about our distant past. Maybe protesting now makes them feel young. I noticed that as my dad aged, whenever he told stories about his youth he'd get a brief spurt of energy. Like he'd laugh a little more freely etc for about 10 minutes, almost as if remembering his youth literally de-aged him temporarily. Maybe the aging protestors today are playing out a narrative, where "I'm a hero again" fulfills them emotionally and "damn I suddenly have a bunch of energy" fulfills them physically.
I honestly don’t know. Old boomers are mostly retired and have time for protesting.
My mom took me to an anti-nuclear protest back in the early 80s (remember those?) when I was a little kid. It was her hip friend's idea.
Ever since then I've noticed it's the same people year after year, decade after decade. I've got to hand it to them -- they're tenacious!
I remember reading about nuke protests. We didn’t have them in B.C. (all hydropower).
You are absolutely right. These people are reliving their youth. Sad to tell them that Nixon and Johnson are dead, Hef is dead, Barbi Benton is a grandmother and Communism is dead.
The thing about the older protesters is that their younger selves protested for change, today the protests are about retaining the status quo as it was under Biden. Boomers have had a massive influence on our politics and culture but they are way past their sell-by date.
Another symptom of the Israelification of US politics? Likud politicians have been known to refer to the country's liberal protest movement as "The Geriatric Brigades".
Old people are good at voting, though.
Young people have all the smartwatches, but old people have all the time.
Even leftist boomers are pretty wealthy and they have a lot of time on their hands. They don't hunt and fish, they protest instead like it's 1968 again and Clean Gene McCarthy is running against bad-old LBJ.
Tumblr and 4chan went to war in the summer of 2014. It was a children's war, the typical combatant being between the ages of 14 and 21.
The battle was asymmetrical. The bastards of 4chan were organized, bloodthirsty, and used to combat. The faeries of Tumblr were less hierarchical, and clung to norms about communication and propriety.
In the aftermath, some 4chan users learned a taste for blood. They began forging weapons of war, refining memes for political ends. The ravaged Tumblr users retreated inwards, building complex frameworks around identity, safety, and "callouts".
The smoke never cleared. It drifted outward, seeping into the wider internet, where a children's war turned into everyone's war.
Tumblr won that war by getting mod positions at 4chan which resulted in the
gamergate ban wave.
I was there
> Opinion journalism used to be a rather gray-bearded job. Reporters would spend years sitting through school board meetings before getting their own column
This is true of sports as well; someone like Michael Wilbon had to cover the local beats for the Washington Post for many years before being granted a column. This is why he spoke so highly of Boomer Esiason and Lefty Driesell; he covered them on a day-to-day basis when they were Terrapins
Yes, even Mumblemouth started low.
Or perhaps a well-known writer from the past who time-traveled to the present just to, you know, class up the joint. You never know who's behind the avatar...
O/T
Any thoughts on Colorado quarterback Shedeur Sanders dropping all the way to the fifth round in this past weekend's NFL draft?
No. I won an argument with Malcolm Gladwell about NFL teams drafting quarterbacks 16 years ago and have since retired from that arena. I intend to keep my winning streak intact at 1.
Apparently, he turned off one of the GMs when he showed up to an interview wearing headphones around his neck with the music blaring, and gave off a vibe of I'm already famous and don't give a f**k about you; word got around and, since he doesn't have other-worldly talent like his Dad, his relative stock fell. This is what I've heard around the office; I don't follow the NFL at all.
To be blunt, I don't know how the coaches of the NFL can stand being around most of their players. Most are literally bastards and most are dysfunctional in many ways. This ain't Bart Starr's NFL.
Good reminder.
Unfortunately, there are all too many people in their 20s and 30s at those rallies. Pics of attendees at Bernie Sanders speeches attest to this.
Don't know as I agree with Steve on this one. For every pimple-faced Greta Thunberg, I see various Paul Krugman (Krugmen?), every bit as mired in puerile ideology. Lately I wonder how much the spread of higher education in the West, with its elevation of conceptual thinking (and disdain for common sense), is responsible for the sheer nuttiness of our public square. An early influence for me was Hanna Arendt, and particularly her view that in the 20th Century banality had come to be the main vehicle for the spread of evil. Banish common sense, and you may end up with a tiny number of brilliant scientist and artists freed to create new models, and a whole lot of Eichmanns, desperate to find certainty in an ideology, the newer the better.
What percentage of the college educated class do you think can engage in conceptual thinking?!
My own criticism of modern media is the arrogance and certainty of so many delusional nitwiits. It is amazing how angry some of these people get when you challenge them.
I think it would be relatively easy to categorize the different types of nitwits if you had access to demographic data. Alas, like Steve says you really don’t know who is on the other side of the computer box.
I just spent a few hours on X schoolin' the young-uns about the old days. They seem to want to blame the Boomers for everything, but few of us were ever near the levers of power. We had no say in the fateful decisions of '65-6 that re-opened the golden door for non-Europeans and are now bankrupting the government. Granted, we made them worse instead of fixing them, but no one ever voted for mass immigration, legal or not.
My 28-year old son sometimes complains about Boomers like me bankrupting the country. As you infer, the Hart-Cellar Immigration Law of 1965 was the most destructive law in American history. I was five when it became law. Don't blame me. The only spending I supported was the defense build-up in the 80s to counter the Soviets. When the USSR went kaput, I favored decreased defense spending.
If you examine the boomer-blaming of these young people, you pretty quickly realize that they have no thought-out, logical basis for their opinion. How could they? As you imply, most of the damage was done by the World War II and Silent Generations. They were the guilt-ridden, do-gooder liberal crowd - deeply influenced by the horrors of the war - who started most of the changes that led us to where we are today.
The reason "these kids today" hate boomers seems mostly to be envy and jealousy. Economic conditions were better when we were children and, for older Boomers, even when they came to adulthood. That's neither our fault nor our achievement. It arose in the impossible-to-replicate position of post-war America as King of the Universe that we were born into.
Somewhat OT, but it's amazing how much the echoes of World War II can still be heard today. I've always considered the war the watershed event of the 20th century; I wonder if will turn out to be the watershed event of modern Western civilization.
Your analysis is spot on. I have great respect for the World War Two generation but they were a liberal group of people who truly believed in big government, big corporations and big labor. The WWII generation believed that government could solve any problem. Very hubristic. I honor them and realize they had great failings.
"We" do not hate you because you vote that back in the day, "we" hate you because in the Ninties you squandered the "Peace dividend" and today stonewall every attampt to change thing: e.g. Boomers are the main demographic behind both Canada managed decline vote and the most anti-trump cohort.
In the U.S., at least, I think it's entirely different. I think millenials hate boomers because their boomer teachers forced them to kowtow to blacks. Admittedly, I have a sample of one. That's what a recent high school grad told me in Berkeley around '02.
Since millennials are woke shock troopers, I doubt: you met an outlier.
I was also referring to 1965's Medicare and Medicaid. Pretty sure SocSec benefits were also jacked up in the mid 60s, on the strength of the baby boom which they didn't know had just ended. So Bob Dole pushed the big 1982 FICA increase necessary because of the Birth Dearth. Since Congress then spent the SS surplus and more, DC realized bringing in a gazillion young foreigners was required to pay for the Boomers' retirement. Oops, didn't work.
It’s worth considering what those grey beards bestowed upon us and why it has caused the immature to enter their realm.
Not only that but on both sides there's a lot of foreigners chiming in. American political fights are highly visible around the world and many people feel that they are higher status and more important than whatever happens in their own country so they eagerly take part in american squabbles including on internet forums.
The globalisation of american politics became highly visible with the Cult of Obama, global media suffering from TDS, european St Floyd protests (and looting) and England's soccer team kneeling at the World Cup.
It started with Reagan, I think, not Obama. Clinton was lionized in the European press, Bush fils mocked or derided. Obama adored, Trump abhorred, Biden respected, Trump …
Even half-educated blokes like Daryl Cooper can be brought onto Tucker Carlson's site and be treated like a Churchill scholar. Our host is right. In the bad olden days, famous journalists like Robert Novak and Jack Germond started with local papers and worked their way up. Even Pat Buchanan started with a St. Louis newspaper where he and Richard Nixon met socially and Nixon hired Buchanan away from the newspaper.
Immature ideologies, or niche ideologies?
I prefer to think of them as the latter.
And the cause as not necessarily teenagers hiding behind avatars, but the the Boomer to Generation X power transition.
I in fact predicted it and saw it coming around ten years ago. That the generation that was happy with national brand coffee and beer was going to transition to the generation that en masse preferred micro roast coffee and microbrewery beer. So it would stand to reason that we/they would tend to niche ideologies. For instance, neoreaction instead of lamestream conservatism.
In the 1980s sci-fi novel Ender’s Game, two precocious teenage siblings use the power of anonymous Internet message boards to become the world’s most influential political commentators.