11-13-2019, 10:11 AM
(11-12-2019, 10:51 PM)Kinser79 Wrote:(11-07-2019, 09:49 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:(11-06-2019, 10:37 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: From Xers? No. I won't speak for other generations but Boomers and Xers have too much bad blood. We pretty much hate the air you guys breathe. More so if our parents are Boomers.
I would say that the End of the Cold War wasn't random. But also that Boomers and the West Generally had very very little to do with it. Rather Communism collapsed due to its own internal contradictions.
So that's where that meme comes from! It's wrong, though; Communism had survived much worse, despite its internal contradictions, for 60 years. The best you can rationally say that, in a reversal of WWII, what mattered wasn't the boomer rank and file in the 1980s, but rather the GI leader, Reagan.
Not quite. The USSR survived because of two factors for a long while. Stalin's ruthlessness and a lack of a real threat after WW2.
I will agree that Reagan as an inspiring leader though.
There were three decades of Stalin, but also a decade of Kruschev and two of Brezhnev. The ruthlessness wasn't what was holding the Soviet Union together after Stalin.
Lack of a real threat, sure. That's exactly what Reagan and his boomers provided, though, with the 1980s military buildup and advancements. He also showed the Soviets that there was an alternative and superior economic model. Without the external threat and the idea that they could do better, they could have kept limping along forever.
Quote:Quote:I'm going to sound like a boomer here, but my dad (Silent who embraced the awakening) tried to get the whole family to go to Woodstock, and then when my mom decined, tried to get me to go with him. I was already a square and wasn't interested in any big hippie rock concert (this was before the event so we didn't know the details of what would happen, not that it would have changed things). I was very aware of Kent State but bought the argument that bricks could be as deadly as bullets; at 10, my conservative views were not yet very nuanced. On the other hand, I thought it was silly that my dad drew the line at protesters digging mock bomb craters on his pretty University of Michigan campus.
So yeah, I lived it, even before 10. The only time I ever got in trouble at school was when I trashed a Humphrey campaign sign on school grounds in 1968, though I wouldn't do that today. I thought the LBJ 1964 Daisy ad was nonsensical. Granted I mostly favored Goldwater because I liked his name.
I don't think it's that unusual for kids to be politically aware when things get divisive. My daughter's school was full of 8 year old Sanders versus Clinton arguments, apparently; my daughter bought my arguments for Cruz, so she could stay above the fray.
I wouldn't say that sounds boomerish to me. I was politically aware at a very young age myself.
I'd say campaign signs have no business being on school grounds where the students are minors but that could be a generational quibble. At my son's school he told me he felt like the lone Republican in a see of "retarded libtards" (his point being that they were twice retarded--he fully views liberalism as a mental disorder; which it very well could be, certainly seems so these days). Fortunately he found some like minded kids who liked Trump even if they couldn't exactly say why.
If I don't sound like a boomer, all the better: the underlying point is that Woodstock and Kent State were formative experiences for me, in a way they weren't for people born a few years later.
Quote:I don't bother with Xenakis' thread mostly because I believe the man a hack and can read the news for myself. As time has gone on I find myself needing to come here less and less as the form seems to be degenerating in the same old people posting the same old shit and almost all of it is standard fare I can find elsewhere but don't want to.
The whole forum has certainly gotten a lot more repetitive.