Imagine having this much hostility towards the future.
It’s like the last of the boomers is sitting in some silo somewhere waiting to nuke the Earth on their way out the door and the rest of them know it.
They not only don’t want to plant trees they’ll never get sit under, they want to burn the forest down out of spite because they don’t get to personally live forever to enjoy it.
I actually know a Lot of boomers who feel just that way. My dad is one he thinks its their right to destroy the environment because they can’t live forever.
Then you have the christian nuts who want to destroy it so that jesus will return.
But most boomers want take the money with them and leave nothing to future generations. Hell they do want to burn it all down and they destroy the American dream out of greed.
The me generation that only want them to have it all.
Let’s have a purge city. Every year, let’s say like a Burning Man City. Every one can come together and we’ll nuke the city at the end of a week long party.
I mean, despite the rampant bootlicking seen in that generation, boomers didn’t create that system. They’re victims of it as well, just victims that generally refuse to see it. My mom absolutely has been fucked over by capitalism, and has fucked herself over helping her kids. But she acknowledges why, and agitates for something better. My dad is a victim of this shitty system, too, but was so brainwashed by cold war propaganda that he can’t see it most of the time. :/ tldr fuck the boomer politicians and brainwashers, try to help regular boomers realize they’re just as much a victim of this shit as we are.
Lead poisoning really did a number on that generation. While I'm also angry that they were complacent in what's happened, as I refuse to be, it's like blaming a severely handicapped kid.
Did you know we found out to stop including lead in gas in 1976 because school kids were getting dumber and less empathetic?
We knew from the time Thomas Midgley put lead in gas it was toxic, but it was cheaper. He also introduced CFCs to the environment. Sherman Williams reported in 1904 that lead paint was bad, but it took until the 1970s for bans to start, but plenty of places still have no ban.
The only solace in his detriment to humanity is that he died a terrible death. He got polio made a contraption to help him move around and got tangled and died of strangulation
I love how you all singled out a small subset of a pretty niche sport to be uptight about. No mention of avgas, which is used far more widely, and covers far more people. According to FAA nearly 250k planes still use it. They fly all over. They flyover your house, mine, everyone.
Or lead in ammunition, which is studied and proven to kill animals, and their young. The CA condor is a good example of it. They are still dying from lead poisoning, and lead ammo has been outlawed in CA. It only took until 2019 to outlaw it here, but I believe we are the only state. The recent fires here, that killed multiple condors proved that. At least one (probably more but I heard about this one) had lead in its system and when they went to try to find their young, they also had lead poisoning.
Oh and it’ll probably shock you to know, even in CA, you can go buy fuels (C16 and Q16 are the most common we see) and use them in street cars. Go to any classic American car show, and you can smell it. But yes, please single out a small subset of race cars as being the issue.
I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic but yeah, they have been dying of lead possessing since like forever. In the 90s, when the condor was something like 20 animals alive on the planet, organizations like the San Diego Zoo, started to push for the outlaw of lead ammo. It took until 2019 (apparently) to finally outlaw it here completely, yet the animals are still dying from it.
Lead poisoning from ingestion of lead ammunition is the most significant threat to condor survival, but other factors - including ingestion of microtrash and electrocution - also present challenges to condors as a species.per the national park service
Of the 213 condor deaths in the wild between 1992 and 2020, half (107) were due to lead poisoning, according to USFWS. according to us fish and wildlife
To answer your question why, people just don’t give a shit. Apparently lead is preferred because it’s softer than steel, and deforms in an appealing way for “hunters” and “gun enthusiasts”.
They are all an issue. Just because someone mentions one thing it does not mean the other things aren’t an issue also. If I tell you leaded race car fuel is an issue and should be banned, I am not telling you all other uses of exhausted lead are fine, or even “lees bad”. The post did but appear to be in any way constructed as an comparative analysis of lead use in order to author regulation from.
Probably not, since everyone seems to have their minds made up, but it’s an antiknock agent. It can increase power output, but it also increases efficiency.
Motorsports are by far the most polluting form of sport per capita. Hardly anyone can partake in them and those that do inflect massive amounts of environmental damage. It’s ok to like something, but we should still be mindful of the negatives a hobby can cause so we can at least minimize the damage. Like golf is fine, but we don’t need to use so many pesticides and build golf courses in deserts.
lol you got a source on that claim, or is it a “I pulled it out my ass stat” because I find it pretty hard to believe.
The MASSIVE water consumption, in addition to pesticides, and the plastics used in golf balls (going with your example here) that are left in the wild, in addition to the significantly higher rate of people who play golf, are likely far worse for the environment than a handful of cars having some fun. I’m not saying racing isn’t bad for the environment. What I am saying is there are things that are FAR more common, and worse.
The thing to remember is that they had to rely on trusted authorities in the news or government back then. They didn’t have easy access to primary sources or alternate viewpoints that we have now. That’s why all they can do is pick an authority figure and put all their trust in them. They literally do not know any other way. To them “research” is finding a talking head they like or who looks “trustworthy” and then believing everything they say. It was an age of authority and now we’re moving into an age of transparency and they’re not happy about it. They expected that they would get their turn to be the trusted head of the family and now all their kids and grandkids barely want to talk to them.
Its like where I live… senior individuals voting for a right-leaning political party that’s actively harming the public services they rely on to survive - such as healthcare, public transport etc… then they complain that services are getting worse.
I’ve gotten tired of this whole “everyone from this generation thinks the same, acts the same, is poor/wealthy”, etc bullshit. The coincidence of your birthday doesn’t automatically identify you.
No. But we are all a combination of our biology plus our experiences. Bring born at the same time as someone means a significant portio of your experiences will be more similar than with someone born decades after you. The fact is that Zoomers went through a disruptive global pandemic either while still in education or leaving to start their careers. That experience will inform who each of those young people become. The way that this effects each individual Zoomer will vary but it will affect them and so it makes them a demographic of “people who’s education or early work experiences were disrupted by a pandemic.” Those people will on average be a little more similar to one another then people who didn’t experience that. Generational identities are formed by all the millions of experiences, big and small, those people have in common with one another but not with other generations by merit of being born at a particular time. Just as Zoomers went through a pandemic at a crucial early point of their lives the Greatest Generation endured the great depression and world war 2 in the first half of their lives. There’s absolutely no reasonable way to claim that living through world war 2 wouldn’t inform your personality and behaviour on some level. And so, people from the Greatest Generation (who lived through World War 2) will, due to that experience and many others, will have things in common with one another that they do not share in common with Zoomers (who didn’t live through World War 2.) Another huge example is that somewhere roughly alligned with the millennial generation we made the transition from people who grew up with constant easy access to the vast expanse of information and communication on the Internet and people who grew up before they’d ever heard of it. Those are hugely different experiences. They change the part of you that is due to your experiences. The other people who share those experiences will tend to have commonalities with you that people who didn’t share those experiences don’t have.
I don’t think it is the way forward to lay blame on our elders, or to be disrespectful towards any generation other than our own. Some people are stupid, some are not. Stupity is not dependent on age. We all blunder through life and fuck up sometimes. Beeing smarter after the fact isn’t that much of an achievement.
I wonder how many people took out 6 figure loans to fund an Art History degree they didn’t finish and now seethe all day at their barista jobs, hoping someone cancels their student debt. I bet it’s a lot. I also bet their parents advised them to do something else.
Dude, I’m disrespectful to all generations. Respect is earned and while you should give the individual people the benefit of doubt, I have zero qualms about generalizing populations based on demographics. There are age groups that support shit that is destroying our country more than others. Recognizing that is important to understand the underlying causes for which to find the solutions that can then be applied to those individuals I spoke of.
Thing is, it’s not the same “they”. Those who profited off the working class and shut the door behind them are not the ones seeing their finances ravaged because their kids live in the basement.
This really is the most stupid inane culture war attitude. People vote less when they are young. And yes that applies to your parents. There are more young people below 50 than over 50, so get off your backside and vote. The problems of the world today are not down to a specific age or voting pattern; it is down to corporation buying out your politicians. Stop voting Democrats or Republican, they are just one big massive con.
That’s a whole lot of bullshit unrelated to what I said. The American voter base is responsible for the state of the country, sorry that’s such a controversial statement for you ¯\(ツ)/¯
Of course, we can’t blame boomers for poor decisions or tell them to skip that avocado toast. Clearly they must continue to suck the remaining resources from life so that they have something to bring to the afterlife when they finally croak.
The whole avocado thing really betrays a failure in the thinking of the people behind it. Some places some times avocados are absurdly expensive. Other places and times they are as cheap as any other random vegetable. To not realise that requires having no awareness at all of the importance of seasonal and ideally local produce. If you want to budget competently you need to pay attention to what is good value near you and when. Not understanding that time and location affects the price of fresh perishable foods makes you entirely unqualified to condescendingly tell people they are budgeting their food shopping poorly. All they know is that they spend $10 an avocado so therefore anyone else buying them must be irresponsibly spending just as much.
The irony is that people think that giving the government more power and more money will solve their problems… weird that 100 years ago when taxes were miniscule and government funding was too small, people were rich compared to today, and a single income was enough to fund a whole family.
The period of time 100 years ago is referred to as “The Roaring 20s” and it led to the Great Depression. In the 1950s we had a top marginal tax rate of 90% and that period saw the largest and wealthiest middle class we’ve ever had.
Couple oversimplifications there. “Roaring Twenties” were fed by the nascent Federal Reserve ballooning the economy through the 20s and an inevitable contraction occurring at the end with a huge regulatory clampdown, expansion of the state and prolonged low interest rates/inflation into the 40s. The “top marginal tax rates” were essentially base rates and the effective rates paid were close to half that. A more meaningful metric is federal spending as % of GDP by year:
which, taking into consideration that the economy has been growing in the last 80 years, indicates that federal spending has been gradually increasing ever since. The spike in the 40s is of course the enormous WWII spending. It’s also critical to take into advantage that the general state of technology/industrial infrastructure is light years ahead now than where it was at the beginning of the 20th century.
It’s pretty universally known that the entire working class has basically been left behind by economic growth since the 60s/70s, while government spending has continually increased since then, and simultaneously, corporate profits have also kept pace with economic growth. Which really begs the more important question, what specific mechanisms in our economy are actually producing these outcomes. I feel like people spend a ton of time arguing about things they think will curb the effect instead of asking why it’s happening in the first place.
Or in plain English: the system isn’t producing equality of ownership, or equality of proceeds from production/labor - why not? How can we fix that without just piping half the economy through the government? That’s the real question.
Marx points out the unregulated economy will always pull capital to the top. So how do we prevent the government from its fate of getting captured by the bourgeoisie?
The more I went over this, the more I realized there is no “unregulated market”. There’s basically a status quo of rules of property distribution accepted by a society. Even what people refer to as a “free market” gets extremely complicated the second you get into the questions of property and contract law, with questions that in total can completely change the outcomes of the system depending on how you answer them. If you had no state but a society unanimously committed to equalizing the distribution of wealth, it would still happen.
I have no savings for retirement. Every spare penny I invest in the success of my family, mostly my own kids. I don’t need to go to Florida and hang out playing golf.
Yep. Nick Hanauer’s done activism including TED talks pointing how ethical capitalism has become impossible what with regulatory capture and stable longer-term business models failing to compete with exploitative short-term models… and that we proletariat aren’t going to stand for our state of perpetual precarity for much longer.
It doesn’t even matter if the proletariat decides they’ve had enough. If things don’t change then we get dramatic vast-scale climate migration that breaks the existing system that drove it to happen in the first place. Ideally, we’d change those systems now so things don’t get as bad as they could. But if we don’t, those systems are about to blow themselves up either way.
Not to be that guy… But Americans have always been partially socialist. That’s the reason child labor is not supposed to be a thing, your work week isn’t 60 - 80 hours long without overtime, you have things like vacation days, sick leave, agencies in charge of stamping out food and drug adulteration, OSHA codes for safe workplaces, a public school system, public libraries, banking regulations… And a very long list beyond that.
Do you think any of these things are naturally occuring under a capitalist system? These were the fights you can map to specific socialist movements of the past.
But who am I kidding anybody who unironically starts complaining about Communists is so far up McCarthy’s ass all they can smell is grave rot.
A strong labour movement isn’t necessarily socialist. In fact I do believe it kind of gets in the way of socialism as they make capitalism bearable for the well organised labour class. Socialism is when the labour class also own the means of production, and for now, mostly, that isn’t the case in most developed countries.
Your definition of socialism has been warped by decades of propaganda to weaken labour friend. Labour movements including labour unions are a feature of socialism, not capitalism or even liberalism. Only at the very deep end is socialism about labour co-ops and abolishment of private property. There is also not a unified singular definition philosophy or movement within socialism though it can be very roughly broken into a raft of different breeds of “market socialism” and “non-market socialism” . Market socialism looks at itself as a balancing force to coexist and oppose capitalism because capitalism left unchecked is a hellscape. Capitalist marketing has been very good at taking credit for a lot of market socialism’s previous fights and rebranding it as a sort of “responsible capitalism” but basically all the civil rights and labor movements that we celebrate today had variable breeds of socialist cores. The few unifying factors of Socialism is democracy and collective action and that there are at least some things that should be held and maintained as “public goods” that require protection from private interest. Things like national parks, environmental services, roads and infrastructure, sanitation, public education, fire fighting services, the public domain are examples. In some places these extend to things like healthcare.
When the majority of people on the left talk socialism they talk market socialism or social democracy. When people on the right start frowning and stamping their feet about socialists (and what you are doing now) they are usually tarring all socialists with the brush of non-market socialism… which even the majority of people who identify as socialists veiw as complete loony-toons idealism.
I get your point, but I would still argue there is use for a distinction between two sets of ideas. One which aims to improve upon capitalism to make it sustainable for the working class, and one which aims in some for to transition to a system where workers own the means of production outright. Ownership (of labour) is really key in Marxist theory.
The term social democracy is kind of unhelpful too because while it is used for the Nordics, Western Europe, etc., a society where capital is exclusively owned by the workers can be, at least in theory, at least as democratic. But I still prefer it as a term over socialism.
I’m not stamping my feet about socialists either by the way. I just don’t want people to get the wrong idea about countries like mine. I live in the Netherlands, and the left is not doing that great. We’ve had right leaning coalitions for decades that have been slowly eroding social services, sometimes aided by misguided political ambitions of labour leadership. The working classes are voting for populists and even our largest party VVD, which presents itself as the fiscally conservative entrepreneurs’ party. It’s the familiar story.
I’m not sure if socialism is Utopian or not, but using that term to describe countries like mine and the social policies we’re known for internationally surely doesn’t do socialism any justice.
I don’t think folks have such high expectations of it being utopian. The issue is that unchecked capitalism is kind of a worldwide gig. If you as a society are competing with people from a market who basically allow their people to save their money by being dangerous and unprincipled and put their money permanently out of the tax system they are still mining your society for resources and cash that are taking it out of the system.
But even a system that is imperfect but equal is better than one that basically tells you that if you don’t earn enough you basically deserve to die. I fear for a lot of my friends in the states because everytime they change jobs if anything happens to their health before their insurance re- kicks in they mighy never financially recover.
I know a lot of people with what have been considered jobs you could afford to pay a morgage with 30 years ago who are living paycheck to paycheck out of their cars. I see people with disabilities whose families can’t afford to help them who depend on institutions like libraries because other government services got privatized and decided that they were “able enough” because of bottom lines. I know people who have suffered burnout, displacement and have been traumatized by working conditions because their employers decided that their shareholders were more important than the people actually making their products.
Being Canadian is to have more than a bit of surviors guilt watching American friends you visit from time to time do everything you do but without the same safety net… We are a more socialism forward country with less people and less resources but the difference is stark. My American friends have it noticeably worse.
Right now my Province is losing another city because climate change, lobbied for by rich assholes worried they won’t be able to make as much money on plastic and oil is causing my province to burn. We are too small alone to fix these problems. It requires the sign on of a much bigger collective action. The failure isn’t your country - it’s that its not enough countries.
Do you think any of these things are naturally occuring under a capitalist system?
Some of them did evolve, looking a bit differently. I mean soup kitchens, places for the poor to sleep (it didn’t look nice, I’m thinking late XIX and early XX centuries), sick leaves and vacations were sort of traditionally fine, work weeks, while being unregulated, weren’t necessarily longer than what we have, cause unregulated just means individual arrangement, and so on. Life of a factory worker surely sucked, yes.
It’s just questionable whether this social progress and labor protection laws are the same.
I mean, there’s that problem with socialists - they like to call anything good in human history socialist or proto-socialist (the extreme case is Soviet history books for children with their descriptions of what was Spartacus’ rebellion or German peasant rebellions and so on).
One of the issues with capitalist narratives is that they are very good at rebranding successful socialist initiatives as “responsible capitalism”. Also it likes to point at non-market socialism and claim that’s what socialism looks like completely ignoring market socialism and social democracy.
Also you really need to check your history. The 12 hour day was looked at as the standard before 1926 in America though 100 hour work weeks were not unheard of. Overtime pay was not a thing it was all flat rate. Ford gets the credit for adopting what was then a long standing issue campaigned for by labor to show “actually it’s beneficial for capitalist interests!” but the idea as it applies to modern labor was originally campaigned for by Robert Owen in 1818 and was being implemented across Europe by socialist labor parties starting in the 1850’s. Ford just basically swooped in last second and like capitalists do stamped his bloody name on it.
What a vacation looked like for a lot of people pre - vacation pay was you packed up to the countryside to work an non-mechanizable agricultural job like hop picking. Labor day and the American origin of the paid vacation itself comes from the Haymarket mass rally of socialist interest in 1887.
So yeah, it’s not really as questionable as you make it seem.
I mean, there’s no particular narrative in my comment - but there is one in yours.
So yeah, it’s not really as questionable as you make it seem.
I’d say you are arguing against something you’ve imagined. The subject your whole narrative is built around is touched in my comment by the following words: “life of a factory worker surely sucked”. And that’s it.
So you’ve basically illustrated this observation, I’ll quote myself:
I mean, there’s that problem with socialists - they like to call anything good in human history socialist or proto-socialist (the extreme case is Soviet history books for children with their descriptions of what was Spartacus’ rebellion or German peasant rebellions and so on).
That’s some short term memory loss there biddy. You seem to have left all the stuff I was responding to on the table… And quoting yourself OOF. I am embarrassed on your behalf
It’s like you don’t remember saying any of this :
Some of them did evolve, looking a bit differently. I mean soup kitchens, places for the poor to sleep (it didn’t look nice, I’m thinking late XIX and early XX centuries), sick leaves and vacations were sort of traditionally fine, work weeks, while being unregulated, weren’t necessarily longer than what we have, cause unregulated just means individual arrangement, and so on. Life of a factory worker surely sucked, yes.
I would suggest reading a bit more into the labor practices of the 18th and 19th centuries and the labour movements of the 19th and 20th otherwise you really are gunna just keep playing pretend and talking out of your ass about this pastoral fantasy and this conversation is really gunna leave you behind.
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