Millennials and GenZ horribly misidentified

[pbrower2a]

(05-22-2019, 12:44 PM)NobodyImportant Wrote: She (Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez) might be stupid to do those things but she is doing them because she thinks that THAT IS RIGHT. In this sense GenY are entitled, because a lot of people actually think like her. GenYers.

The Millennial Generation has gotten the rawest deal that any generation has ever gotten from capitalism and the public sector. Capitalism has become monopolistic, and the public sector has largely been reduced to an enforcer for the worst capitalists. Landlords exploit a housing shortage to the fullest, and most Millennials are long in hock to lenders. Lobbyists are the most obvious guides to how politicians will vote in legislatures, and the people who hire the lobbyists often believe that no human suffering can ever be in excess so long as such enhances the gain, indulgence, and power of economic elites who might as well command us with such a command as

"Suffer for my holy greed, you expendable peons! We, your masters, are your benefactors -- and always remember that!"

That is exactly how planters saw their relationship with their slaves.

Quote:Millies are running businesses and whatnot, but businesses aren't institutions. As Eric said, AOC is the perfect example. What millennials do amounts to about as much as AOC the "prime millennial" 's stuff does. And no, they are not getting *anything* done. Look around you. The only thing they are changing is societies attitudes, and that only in their filter bubbles as well.

The differences between this 4T and the last competed 4T, so far, are:

(1) three times the world's population of 1930
(2) nukes are already in place
(3) there is no obvious Hitler, and
(4) the Crash of 2007 and 1929, which both occurred for similar reasons, ended differently.




It is hard to distinguish the first year and a half in the behavior of financial markets following the peaks of the autumn of 1929 and the autumn of 2007 especially when the cause was much the same -- corrupt bubbles imploding as fraudulent valuations of assets were gutted -- and some not-so-fraudulent valuations got gutted, too. The low point in stock-market valuations of the downturn of 2009 was actually lower than that at a corresponding time in 1931. Beginning in the summer of 1931, the bank runs started to devastate a shaky economy; in 2019 Obama had backed the financial institutions. By 1932 the wealthy interests were unable to buy the political process. In 2010 such was their ability, and the wealthy interests did exactly that so that the recovery would be theirs alone.

......................

America is now one of the most plutocratic societies on Earth. Economic inequality in America is typical of that in dictatorships in which the common man has no recourse but to obey the princes, single-party government, or oligarchs. The landlords, loan-sharks, and  lobbyists call the shots. Despite technological advances and mandatory toil, Americans are no better off than they were forty years ago -- unless they are parts of the economic elite of landlords, financiers, heirs, and shysters.  We are excellent at creating wealth, but incredibly incompetent at sharing it.

Imagine yourself deep in student-loan debt for a degree in a lucrative field. You get paid much more than some of your buddies who got stuck clearing tables in chain diners at Exit 46 on Interstate 62 (there is no such highway, but that is how I do fiction for these discussions) ... but you are spending over half your after-tax income on rent for an efficiency apartment because there just aren't may jobs for software engineers within fifty miles of Exit 46 on Interstate 62. Guess what? You are living in poverty by standards of the 1950s!

The key to success in America is not to be extremely competent; it is to be born into the 'right family'.

So what would be different had the economy had a three-year meltdown? In the 1930s the recovery relates largely to the rise of small businesses in the niches that the corporate behemoths had effectively closed. Small businesses are the heroes of capitalism, much in contrast to the loud-mouth 'robber barons' and other well-heeled heels (Donald Trump is the latter to the extreme).

Quote:Parties have taken ownership of issues. They are the ones that deal with those issues and the other party doesn't even *acknowledge* the issues. And vice versa. This ensures that people like millennials who want change can never actually command any big sweeping majority to make it happen. Because half the populace will care about the issues of the other side which they will never see represented on the one side.

The GOP has cast all questions of economic equity to the Democrats while ensuring a 52-48 split of power, with the 52% acting as a cadre party. The Chinese Communist Party may have largely abandoned Marxism-Leninism, including Maoism, but it has never abandoned dictatorship. The Chinese political system is basically a permanent 65-35 split in representation, and the majority rules. In America the GOP would be satisfied with a permanent 55-45 split of power, especially if some orthodox believer in pure plutocracy is the President. Trump is the vehicle for winning over people who see educated people as the exploiters and oppressors as well as unforgivable rakes damned to Hell for their homosexuality, abortions for fun, mockery of televangelists, and rejection of young-earth creationism.  

Quote:"Too bad that the Establishment Republicans took down Milo."

Milo went too far.

Quote:So you're saying.... the right is not over outrage culture either.
Sure, it's not the exact same things to be outraged about, but the basic drive to end people's carreers over single remarks and declare someone unfit is still there. Just like how the right also keeps itself ideologically clean, with Trump being a minor outlier. This is precisely why it was so important to have him elected. But even he doesn't really take up too many causes of the left to actually care about.

The Hard Right is as tied to an outrage culture as the Hard Left ever was. Even so I see a big problem for America: that there is now no real home for genuine conservatives who believe in thrift, small-scale enterprise, education, legal precedent, and a nexus between doing right and doing well.

Quote:"they lack the civic drive that Millies do" Well they might lack the drive for it but they possess the faculties. They can actually see that sneering at your opposition á la AOC is not something that will get you far, as opposed to millennials whose basic mode of operation is just that.

We are not yet through sorting the political mess that is the contemporary Crisis. The Hard Right is as nasty as ever, and it still has great power.

Quote:I'm not from america, so i can confidently say that no it's not just the bay and nyc areas lol.

The urban-rural split in American politics, between people who live mostly on near-starvation pay and people who get good pay but have responsibilities to enrich the Master Class above all else, is much of the divide. Both have good cause to hate the current Establishment, but they are still in hostile camps. The Master Class wins so long as such is so.

Quote:Millennials have been *the* cohort to hate brexit. And why? Because that's how things are supposed to be.
Ignoring the pragmatic issues that others had with the EU. The millennials are also the ones who bought into the "refugees welcome" idiocy the most. Because it sounds good in theory.

Civic generations believe in institutions as solutions.

Quote:Millenials make up a large part of black blocs and anarchocommunists and whatnot. Becuase it sounds good in theory
Conversely it's also millennials who gave rise to the alt right, who gave rise to free speech absolutists, and who wanted ronpaul and anarchocapitalism the most. Why? *Because it sounds good in theory.*

The Right has the same capacity to offer bad ideas that sound good in theory or good so long as one ignores the consequences to most people. Tara (Gone with the Wind) was a great place to live -- so long as one was not a slave. Romanticism about the past is not so good as the reality of the past. (I would now be satisfied with a sustainable future looking much like the 1950s, but without the male heterosexist chauvinism, polio, Southern segregationism, the Commie menace, environmental destruction, and Blood Alley roads. I see the Hard Right and I see the nasty social order of the Planet Mongo, obviously modeled after the totalitarian orders of the time, in Flash Gordon serials of the 1930s.

Quote:It's not just coastal and ivory tower people. It's more or less the entire generation, and i'd know - i can see them all around me on two different continents.

Assuming that you are British, I recognize a difference between America and Europe. Western Europe was reorganized to replace nationalism (the source of fascism) with a welfare state in an expanded market. America has devolved into a country in which the landlords, loan-sharks, and lobbyists control things. We thought fascism completely un-American except for the ludicrous people who prance around in ghostly robes and burn crosses before going on night rides -- and thus impossible here. Well, It Has Happened Here, and we all know who the real-life Berzelius Windrip is!