Here’s a map of Moscow’s coronavirus cases to date:
Notice something interesting?
Although it’s not a particularly clean demarcation, there is a higher density towards the center and south-west, while there’s much fewer cases in the prole-ish south-east.
This corresponds with:
- Property & rental prices
- “Racism” in house listings
- Liberal opposition’s share of the vote
- Concentration of “SWPL” amenities
Why? Well, they’re still overwhelmingly foreign cases, with no hard evidence of sustained community-based transmission to date.
There are 495 cases in Russia now, up 57 from the previous day, and a decline from the local peak of 71 new cases observed yesterday.
The optimistic interpretation goes as follows:
- Russia locked down its borders on March 18, and since symptoms take a median of 5 days to manifest, new cases should peak within this general period.
- Several clinics are now testing for COVID-19, whereas before it was just the Vector state lab.
- Tests have become more sensitive, and results are delivered faster.
This would suggest that the current spurt is overwhelmingly driven by quarantined people from abroad getting tested, as well as a “catching up” effect due to the improvements in testing.
The pessimistic interpretation, I suppose, is that there is an undetected shadow epidemic in its early stages already growing in Moscow or elsewhere. I suppose we’ll see by ~April 1.
In other news:
- Anyone over the age of 65 in Moscow now officially ordered into quarantine as of March 26.
- All the schools, colleges, and gyms have been closed since three ago, and will remain closed up into at least April 12.
- Traffic intensity is down by almost 50% (many major European cities are ghost towns, with e.g. London down 75%).
- Now nightclubs and cinemas have been closed. Bars have been prohibited from offering hookahs.
- Promotion of digital payments; banks ordered to hold onto banknotes for 14 days so that they’re decontaminated.
Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.
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in St. Petersburg this is not the case. While schools are closed for regular holidays, universities are recommended to switch to distance learning, but some continue to work at least partially
Yeah, I meant wrt Moscow. The institute where I work part-time moved online as early as March 12.
HSE wrapped up IRL events by around March 20.
Corona is clearly some deep mystical attack on boomers and their globalist accomplices. It is a generational shake-down: they either give up blood or treasure. They are trying to hold on to everything so far, not a good strategy. Locking up the over-65 crowd at home is just the beginning, no wonder they go incoherently from ‘everything is ok‘ to ‘the sky is falling‘.
This is a mental global meltdown because the boomers declared ‘end of history‘, grabbed all toys and wealth, sold their children to debt penury, while they kept on spending their ill-gotten virtual money on vacations to Italy. Now they are old, feeble and vulnerable. Corona would be a non-event without this generational context.
Another wacko conspiracy theory. More surreptitious nonsense? 🙂
Ok, grandpa, what is it going to be? Blood or treasure?
(It is not a theory, it is an observation – can you tell the difference?)
It’s your “observation” pipsqueak, why don’t you tell me (I enjoy a good yarn as much as the next guy)?
Semi agree, I am not into this disrespecting ones elders thing (because everyone will one day get there). However if this brings down the ZOG world order then I am all for a massive pandemic, the current world order is the worst possible system there is, anything that replaces it will be better. White interests can get a big boost with a global economic collapse (I am however under no delusions that the jews will not try to ramp up their oppression in a desperate bid to keep power).
Wow, what a vocabulary, you are clearly in a wrong decade…
There is no disrespect. I simply pointed out that the boomer generation – and that is a huge generalization – has created this world to benefit them. Some of it was justified, but they also clearly sold out their own children with their support for mass immigration and pyramid like assets schemes.
We have millions of migrants because boomers wanted it to get cheap labor and services, and some to ‘self-realize‘ their deep traumas. We have lower incomes for young people because the boomer generation decided that the young can suffer in hyper-competitive labor markets and by removing all social norms and protections. They turned education into a debt-trap, while they themselves mostly paid nothing for it. What a f…ing generation, who does that to their kids?
We can be polite and not mention it, but why? Mr. Hack is scared, as are all older boomers, they know that they have gamed the system and now their strength is gone. They rely on the kindness of people. I simply observed that the corona panic of 2020 fits this inter-generation chasm – and it also suggests who will eventually win.
Fucking liberasts! This also shows that liberals are naive and stupid people, going on vacation in Europe in the middle of the pandemic.
Glad that I can impress you with my vocabulary (had to look these two words up, huh?). So far though, you’re not impressing me with your abilities to explain this new conspiracy theory of yours, where a coalition of boomers are supposedly conspiring to hold back the financial and economic prowess of millennials and other such lowlife pfuschers*? I’m all ears, really.
I explained it fairly succinctly above. So drop the variety show nonsense and read what I said. Tell me which part is wrong. I listed the main things that the boomers have passed on to the next generation, address that. You either agree or disagree, or you can deny that it happened. But blowing smoke is not a response.
I will always consider actual arguments, but silly word games are a waste of time. And it makes you look desperate and out-of-touch.
One of the most interesting aspects of this outbreak is how the cosmopolitan jet-set seem to be more susceptible to it, at least in the short term.
This juxtaposition of social factors with biological factors makes it impossible to miss how Western civilization in many ways parallels a biological system, which is prey to infection. I hope that this perception encourages a serious consideration of layered, evolutionary defenses against civilizational ills, just as a body has many layered defenses.
Perhaps, this virus will have some positive effect on the public mind and help wake people up to biological realities. Or maybe that is too hopeful, and it will be like AIDS and how it caused the poz, by making people sympathetic to gays. Right now, I am not liking what Greta-worhippers are saying about Gaia being right to kill us.
We would know it was Gaia’s punishment if it were a disease that came from dogs
I’m not sure that it is fair to blame the boomers.
Truth is that they weren’t in power, when all this stuff started, they were too young. Hart-Celler was in 1965, the oldest boomers were like 19. Wasn’t de Gaulle in power when France starting importing North Africans in mass? He wasn’t a boomer; he fought in WWI!
Do I really need to remind you that it’s you who first started these “silly word games” rather shortly after I first requested a fuller explanation of your “observations”? Well, now that we’ve dispensed with the formalities, let’s move on:
Uh oh, the first step towards group perdition! 🙂
Two huge sins are foisted on the backs of these malicious boomers!
Mass immigration – I don’t recall there ever being a plebescite on the issue? Don’t blame a whole age group for the lack of foresight hoisted on the whole planet by a group of professioanal politicians! At least in the US, there are already many laws on the books to help stem the tide of illegal immigrants. If you mean easing the requirements for legal immigrants, especially for the more qualified ones, why not take advantage of these rules yourself, instead of squirling away your time in backwoods Slovakia and move to take advantage of any such opportunities?
pyramid like asset schemes – I don’t quite know what you mean by this, but whatever it is, there’s no one pointing a gun at anybody’s head requring them to invest their hard earned bucks in anything risky. “Buyer beware.”
Once again, you’re barking up the wrong tree. It’s not boomers that created this new world order, but the dishonest politicians that do the bidding of their enablers. Boomers, as a class often feel and partake in the problems of their offspring by helping to pay their tuition costs and then having to support them even as they graduate from college with free rent and other economic necessities.
I’m not yet quite scared of a roving mob of millenials knocking on my door that will somehow try to confiscate the fruits of my lifelong labor – they’re much to docile for that, smoking high grade dope (that they can now legally acquire) and sitting immobilized watching flicks all day long or texting their other miscontented comrades on their “smart phones.”
I must say as an “essential” worker the shutdown is great. The city is empty, no traffic, nobody around. While everyone else is locked away I’m enjoying the peace and quiet. Six months of this is not too bad as long as you’re in the right position. So thank you jetsetting elites for providing me with this!
There is some truth to your comments here, surprisingly enough. But only a little. The boomers were not the only ones to blame. It was an alliance between them, and the generation prior to them, that screwed later generations, and their elders were in the driver’s seat when the disastrous changes were made. *
As for today – well, in the West the old boomers are much less pro-immigration than the young people, so eliminating them will accelerate mass migration. In Ukraine the end of the boomers would be the last nail in the coffin of pro-Russia sentiment and Sovok nostalgia.
Not worth it if loved ones suffer, of course, but certainly a much better commute.
Age of Entitlement, by Christopher Caldwell explains this all very thoroughly. It’s worth reading.
Basically it is a product of a pact between the young boomers and their elders who were in power, each getting something they wanted, to the detriment of society and later generations.
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51e6HQdl1rL._SX336_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
I haven’t looked at numbers or anything, but my intuitive sense is the stage of development of the epidemic in Russia is about 2 weeks behind countries like the UK. (The UK also never introduced travel bans, unlike Russia – so it’s possible it’s even more than 2 weeks delay).
A danger is in most of Russia, the weather will be ideal for development this epidemic until around late May. So there’s around 2 months of danger still.
However, the situation of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, shows this does not have to be the apocalypse happening in the Latin Europe.
The success of Japan could be somekind of strange good luck though – they had a large number of infections in February, and introduced school closure before anyone else. However, the development of the epidemic has paused for almost a month now in Japan.
That’s the core of your argument, so I will focus on it. My answer is that it doesn’t matter – people are responsible for what happens as they go through their lives.
The boomer generation has made this world as it is today, they are the ones who voted for Blair, Merkel, Clintons, Cameron, Sarkozy, etc… they are the ones who stood silent as this was implemented with devastating consequences for the younger people. Too many of them benefitted from mass migration with cheaper services and management perks at work. In addition without the silly boomer fantasies like ‘we are the world‘ and ‘imagine‘ the elites couldn’t carry out the neo-liberal globalist plan. And how do you justify the student debt-trap that boomers implemented for their children after getting their own education largely for free? The boomers are primarily responsible for what happened and where we are today.
It is true that the previous generation set-up the policies starting in the 70’s and 80’s – but from history’s point of view lumping the ‘silents’ with the boomers is ok. It is true that too many among the young have embraced the neo-liberal one-world nonsense and are today its most visible proponents – sometimes in an absurd way. Their choices were limited by what the boomers did it and in each village you will find a few idiots.
In any case, the unravelling has started. So what is it going to be, blood or treasure?
I use ‘boomers’ as a catch-all for the previous generation responsible for these policies, open borders, neo-liberalism. When history is being made, the few years or even a decade up or down are not that significant. Those are details, don’t go autistic on us again.
The open borders policies that started in the 60’s and 70’s were not at the beginning as dramatically harmful as they are today. It took decades of build-up and chain migration to bring about Merkel’s 2015 tsunami. It doesn’t justify them, but when the water level reached unsustainable levels, it was the boomers who doubled down on those policies – because they largely benefitted from them. That had an effect of selling out their own children, who the f..k does that? Are you surprised that the young are confused?
Hack does seem a bit more agitated than usual, perhaps he just got his Charles Schwab statement in the mail. I’ve always had a fairly dim view of the boomers, they seem out of touch and entrenched in their beliefs. But I always thought that this was unwitting, as you have pointed out, and they really believed their intentions were pure.
However, dealing with boomer relatives during corona-chan has been so exasperating, that I find myself quite bitter. You’re trying to help them stay safe and they act like you are inconveniencing them. Then they say, “we’re old anyway and we don’t care if we die.” Fine, but your children DO care and you have a responsibility to them to fight for your life. Perhaps they should be renamed the Selfish Generation.
Countries will have their own path, indeed a big mystery is why London hasn’t had a bigger outbreak already.
https://twitter.com/LSHTM/status/1242528219582119941?s=20
There was a definite Blair/Clinton generation, grew up in the late sixties and early seventies, that radically accelerated things.
I think some of this latter-day boomer fatalism is a realization that they really screwed up – they were given the best hand in history and threw it away and hurt their own children (if they had any). They also obnoxiously celebrated along the way.
Without this underlying boomer-vs-young context the corona pandemic would be less dramatic. It looks like everyone was just waiting for something to pull the plug on the dysfunctional society that boomers have given the world.
Mr. Hack is in a state of inner panic, denial and anger. That’s why he says that ‘some of us help the young whenever we can‘. It is a sense of guilt that they assuage with meaningless charity, if that.
What generation in history that was living in uber-properous times has ever bequeathed to their young a society so completely f..ed up? Gender freaks and migrants everywhere, virtual money hoarded by the boomers, oligarchs and their puppets running most countries, rentiers running amok, and social stabilisers that took hundreds of years for our ancestors to fight for discarded on a whim of libertarian austerity. All of it so Mr. Hack can throw a few crumbs to charity.
This is going to get ugly, as I said, blood or treasure. I hope they choose wisely and soon.
Which is silly because the generational differences between the “GI generation” who set up mass migration and social degeneracy and the boomers who realized these visions is stark. These are not mere details.
While this is correct, it is silly to use this argument in order to present boomers as worse than those coming afterward. The post-boomers are just the same. They support mass migration even more than do boomers. Outside of Russia, they support social liberalism even more than do the boomers. They have not achieved real power yet, but once they do it will be like the boomers vs. the boomers’ predecessors.
The “GI generation” (young soldiers of World War II and their little siblings who were alive during the war but didn’t fight it), who turned all of this on, were the ones who really made the radical, civilization-altering choices. They opened the borders, they created Playboy and culture of hedonism, “civil rights” culture, destruction of traditional architecture and city-scapes, etc. They fought a war and lived through Depression in childhood, they had a right to get what they wanted and to cash out the future, good and hard.
Boomers just joined the party, obeyed their predecessors, turning Playboy and cocktail party hedonism into drugs, sex and rock and roll. A change in taste, not substance.
I suspect you really hate Boomers because in Eastern Europe they played a leading role in ending the ugly and evil Communist experiment. You hate Poles for a similar reason.
Your argument is basically a flow of generations, GI-Silents-Boomers-Millenials all contributing their share and all having a role. I don’t discard that narrative, there is always a year-by-year flow. What it overlooks is the boomers’ role in very dramatically accelerating the process and also their open desire to game all rules to benefit them. And the fact that boomers have been the main beneficiary.
I will give you two examples:
– Boomers were largely in power as the mass migration from the Third World took on tsunami proportions; Blair/Clinton/Bush/Sarkozy/Merkel – all boomers. The boomer generation has also as a whole benefitted materially from the migrants: their assets went up, the cost of service labor went down, there were plenty of obedient younger workers, their status usually improved because they had the power. Plus boomers often live of rent income. For the young it created an uber-competitive labor markets and much higher costs – as a result they are failing to form families and some unfortunately embraced the crazy open-border mentality. Maybe because many of them are from open-borders beneficiaries, or the previously mentioned village idiot class.
Both of the above were largely done by the boomers (of course not completely). It was a selfish, short-sighted thing to do. All I am saying is the consequences will fall on them too. If you can find a different analysis for the two above example, share it with us, I always like to challenge any idea (even my own).
No, wrong on both counts. And this is not about hatred, I am not very emotional :).
Boomers mostly ruined the post-Communist countries in the 90’s, it was the post-Boomers who slowly fixed it.
Poles are misguided and mostly cause harm to themselves. Their latest installment is to refight WWII, like drunk desperados they are sh..ing on everything. As always in the past it will cost them dearly. Then they will write more heroic poetry.
COVID-19 is not just a generational issue. Here’s why:
The focus in much of the commentary has been on mortality rates and the aged dying and less on hospitalization rates which are around 5% (in some places much more).
While hospitalizations are also skewed to the elderly, around 40% of cases (plus or minus depending on region) are below 60. This cohort has a high chance of surviving…but mostly if they get hospital care, often fir weeks. In other words if this 40% did not have hospital care, a large fraction will die.
Even if say >60s are left to die/fend for themselves, a socially wrenching choice, that’s still ~2% of cases (40% of 5%) of <60 that require hospitalization. Exponential growth of the virus would still mean that the hospital capacity would soon be exceeded since capacity cannot grow exponentially but linearly at best.
So the real danger of coronavirus is not mortality rate in a steady state paradigm where there is hospital capacity, but that in an exponential setting.
And stress/breakdown of hospital capacity will certainly impact medical care of all diseases/ailments.
This is a
The gargantuan outbreak in New York started to flood New Jersey.
It’s interesting how people are mentioning Russian boomers, and English boomers. When I think of boomers, I think almost purely of Americans, who may have been born under the best possible circumstances, in the entire world, at the time, and so possibly spoiled. This geographic spread seems to call the idea into question.
I suppose one explanation might simply be a youth bulge or the dead men making for a more feminine society. I wonder if anyone ever calculated the effect it might have had on elections. But I’m honestly skeptical of the whole thing.
My model of corruption is more that it is something that slowly accumulates. This natural chronology of growing corruption can be confused as having contemporary causes. For instance, some people like to blame the Irish or Italians, but I point out that the American Civil War can’t really be blamed on them, nor can England’s modern state (though some still blame the Irish for this). And the colossally stupid world wars can’t be blamed on the boomers either.
What’s more, I don’t think that it is in anyway healthy to encourage the use of these marketing terms to split what are already a fairly outnumbered people. Hostile groups would desire this outcome. We should take the model of Asians who have more intergenerational respect.
This was the world created by the Silent Generation.
I am not really invested into either the liberal or conservative side of the social “culture wars”, but it’s pretty clear they were way more conservative than boomers.
The WW2 GIs were more “racist” than most of today’s Alt Righters: https://www.unz.com/akarlin/alt-center/
How can people be responsible for what happens to them as they go through their lives, when they don’t really have any direct inputs with the politicians that represent them? Or when 1,400 page bills are passed that include scores of unrelated provisions that effect their daily lives, that even the politicians that pass the bills never fully read? Elections today are merely popularity contests fueled by one minute sound bites, where the well heeled adversaries spin dirt on their opponents that are formulated to look like yellow journal op-eds one reads at the supermarket checkout stand.
The student debt-trap is indeed insidious, and can be solely put to blame at the feet of carnivorous government tax collectors who came up with the idea, to help plug the enormous chasms that represent the deficits now in permanent place. My response is for students (and their families) is to consider exiting the often rewardless career junction of a college education for one that inludes vocational training. If making money is your only interest, I would suggest that you skip any formal education and concentrate on flipping houses, restoring old ones and either renting them out or selling them when the market is overheated. No degree necessary.
Saying one generation is more “conservative” than another, is really a contradiction.
“Conservative” is referring to a frame of reference, partly constructed by whatever was normal to conserve for the people of that generation. It’s determined by how the majority of people of that time was believing.
This isn’t any kind of Protagorean statement, just something about how we use those concepts. (Simply to refer to how mass of people are behaving in a certain time).
Any negative surprises that I’ve lately experienced while reading my statement from Chuck are solely mine to bear. Procrastination and pure laziness is why 99% of investors lose money in the market. Everyone crying today know the old axion of “buy low and sell high”, yet most failed to heed this advice and recently got stung very badly – another 10 years in the workforce for those planning to get out at 55? 🙂
Why would that be related to a cultural-specific fact of being born in a baby-boom generation after war, instead of the fact they are just typical, difficult 60-70 years old people?
Do you think your village grandfathers of 100 years ago, would listen to your advice better, and be less stubborn, and agree to break their routines, and stay inside, because some young people tell them? Do you think their personality was less difficult and willful?
Old people becoming stubborn, inflexible, rude, difficult, and possibly a little fearless (rationally in their case, considering they do not have many years to gamble), is a story as old as the human race.
And to be fair to their perspective, why would they want to listen to young people, considering they believe they have so many years more wisdom, knowledge, probably can’t see you without some distant recollection of when you were an annoying baby.
Aside from Hegelianism about some different world “spirit” of certain epochs.
I guess there is a lot similarity of experience of boomers in America, Russia, UK – in terms of wars and economic conditions.
In all the countries involved in the Second World War, the children born in the baby boom had some poverty in their earlier childhood, but then very good (“booming”) economic conditions in their young years (late 1950s-1970s) – except perhaps China. This raised the majority of their living conditions to the highest level in world history at the time.
Of course, many baby boomers in these countries were conscripted and fighting in quite brutal Vietnam, Afghanistan battlefields – but this was still on vastly smaller scale, and smaller impact on the majority, than the world wars of previous generations.
For example, those of our boomer leaders like Putin, Trump (avoided Vietnam War), George W Bush (avoided Vietnam War), Bill Clinton (avoided Vietnam War) – all had a lot more good fortune, and less brutalisation than likely their parents whose youth was often in war, and also far greater poverty (the latter obviously excluding Trump/Bush parents who might be rich even in the 1930s Great Depression).
Hugh Hefner was in the army from 1944-1946 and Ted Kennedy who ushered in mass migration was of the Silent Generation. These generations really started impacting society in the late 50s through 60s. Sure, boomers added promotion of promiscuous open homosexuality into the mix but this was just building on something that had been switched on earlier. Hugh and his bunny-ear wearing harem of playmates dressed differently and used different drugs than did the hairy hippies who followed in their footsteps but the essence was the same and Hugh was the actual pioneer. And this generation got really rich in the 1980s under Reagan, a former soldier, when the massive debt was starting and they were in their financial prime (50 years old or so).
China might be an interesting sociological case. Growing prosperity, but no youth bulge. And then I suppose there might possibly be examples in the third world, like how Iran had a youth bulge, when it had the Revolution. Maybe, revolution in the third world is representative of less violent changes in the first world.
But I guess on a certain level, you could take the age cohorts out of it, and just measure the increasing wealth of the society. Like, the US was able to fight Vietnam, without the government taking over the consumer economy. In many ways, it was a pretty significant thing for that generation of men, who often would have at least known young people who died, or at least have been drafted themselves, which sucks even if you don’t fight, but not as great a thing for other people, unlike WW2, where there was rationing, etc.
I wonder even if the space age was in some way subversive, as people began to believe anything was possible.
It occurs to me though that this whole “boomer” thing is kind of silly though, on another level. If the goal is to encourage better behavior, logically it doesn’t seem to make sense to chastise whole age cohorts, and especially, if the goal is to induce better cooperation between different age groups.
Looking at the property prices, they’re lower than I thought they would be – central Moscow is pretty much double the central Belgrade, but that’s not supposed to happen when comparing a gargantuan superpower capital and a second-rate glorified fort in a rump state
I attribute it to less landlordism/culture of owner occupancy, albeit we do punch above our weight. We also for some reason always had unusually high property prices – I guess it’s a southern euro thing, we’re extremely disinclined to live as tenants, like owning our own housing so that maybe knocks it up. At some point, for the price you could buy an apartment here you could buy a house in Palma de Mallorca, but that was a long, long time ago. Ridiculous! But still not as insane as western property prices
Well yes, I often make that point myself, but I think in this particularly case there’s mutual understanding with AP on what conservatism generally means (“anti-degeneracy”) so it’s not an issue.
The acceleration hasn’t been as dramatic under the Boomers as you believe it to be.
As I wrote, the immigration rules were changed in the USA by Kennedy in 1965. Boomers were schoolkids then. None of them had voted in presidential elections. Immigration exploded in the 1980s under Reagan, who amnestied illegals. Reagan was a GI generation guy.
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizations/2014/demo/second-great-wave.jpg
In France the massive wave of immigration was in the 1950s and 1960s. Also before the Boomers were in charge.
As for debt – here is US debt:
https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/19131.jpeg
Large-scale increase in debt under Reagan and Bush Sr. in the 1980s and early 90s. Reagan was pre-GI generation, Bush Ser. was GI generation. Who benefited? In the 1980s the GI generation and Silent generation were at the peak of their careers (they were in their 50s and early 60s). They are the ones who cashed in. Debt declined under Boomer Clinton and stayed stable under Boomer Bush Jr. It resumed growing massively under Gen X Obama (born 1961, may be late Boomer or Gen X depending on classification).
This is not student debt. Student debt can indeed probably be blamed on Boomers (large-scale expansion began around 2000). Although personally responsibility of students plays a role, too.
One does not have to get into debt. Live at home and attend a nearby state school, and study something practical like pharmacy or medicine or engineering, as off-the-boaters from Russia do. The debt horror stories are mostly stupid people who study things like Anthropology at expensive private schools and then work as waiters and or in non-profits an whine about their debt.
This is mostly just an American problem though – isn’t university basically free in Western Europe? In Canada tuition remains very cheap.
“Ok boomer” is how American teens in YouTube, are calling old people in recent years. It’s funny how this forum is copying all the fashions of American teenagers, but obviously what is fashionable with teens is not related to encouragining better behaviour.
Another funny thing here. For example, “based” is what African American teenagers are calling cool things in YouTube unboxing videos. But on this forum, people like Reinor Tor was saying I was “based” because I wrote Putin is the least bad option. This forum is apparently, culturally downstream from 15 year old African American unboxing videos .
In 1940s America, racism was normal – as part of enforcement of an old caste structure of American society -, and socially acceptable, while anti-racist opinions were a bit of a forbidden rebellion (although one corresponding to Christian teachings).
While in 2020, anti-racism discourse is a normal, conformist position in America, while open racist opinion is the forbidden rebellion that attracts rebellious people unhappy or angry with existing society.
In terms of “anti-degeneracy”? Obviously that is something subjective to what you consider degenerate, but what is “conservative” we can identify objectively as what people think is the “normal structure” of existing society that they would like to conserve.
Another way to identify it is by looking at the character types. For example, what are the eccentric rebellious people saying? That will likely be the revolutionary discourse relative to existing society. And what are the conformist people who are happy with their position in society saying? That will be the conservative point relative to existing society.
Generation differences are interesting (I am a bit Hegelian and sense that different decades feel more foreign than any exotic foregn country) – but it’s not some “theory of everything”.
Obviously, something like American government debt, will be independent of the generation in which a president was born.
–
It is possible, there might be something related to a generational difference between Trump and Obama, although they are both boomers – but from opposite sides of the baby boom. Trump is 15 years older, and seems to me like he is representative of a different epoch of American culture, than Obama.
Perhaps older boomers can often have a more disinhibited view, in terms of what they think is socially acceptable, compared to younger boomers like Obama? (If this is not just an unrepresentative idiosyncratic difference between them).
I agree. I often see older people as emissaries from gone lands I will never see.
Obama was probably an old Generation X-er:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/obamas-generation-x-factor/
People born in the early 1960s would be late teens when punk and New Wave music were happening. They wouldn’t remember the Beatles and would be too young for Viet Nam. That doesn’t feel like Boomers but like the beginnings of the next generation.
And yet we are responsible. That’s the way it works, excuses are meaningless. That’s especially true in countries where people constantly talk about how free and democratic they are. Well, that means you are also responsible. You can’t have it both ways.
Whining about life gets you nowhere. I also find your response that the young should avoid universities and become plumbers or house flippers preposterous. It is an ad-hoc nonsense that shows the low level of thinking that you do.
Be serious and pick blood or treasure for your cursed boomer generation – if you don’t, you will get both.
The Silents are mostly dead, so it will be the Boomers who will have to own it. I don’t disagree with your points, but a few corrections:
What we see today is an unraveling of an unsustainable system, corona as the catalyst. As the world goes through it a lot of stuff will be discarded. The liberal globalist ideology will be abandoned, to hide for a few years and ready to come back and sweep the next generation of dreamers of their feet.
But the core change will be in our relationship to money, debts, assets, jobs, social guarantees – and boomers are not in a position to adapt, their desperate attempts to reverse the changes will fail because they are weak. That was my point. I will leave judgments on who is good and who is bad to the gods, that’s why we have them…
It’s true, that in the US we still enjoy one of the highest levels of freedom and democracy on the planet, but that doesn’t mean that things aren’t changing in a negative direction or that there isn’t room for improvement. The types of opinions expressed within this website is an illustration of what I’m talking about, where 90% of the opinions expressed herein would be filtered out of the mainstream press. My criticism of how laws are passed here reveals that the process is often a sham, where “pork barrel” rules compress many laws into one bill that never would get passed if voted on separately. A two party system is better than a one party one (that I guess you would endorse), but is still too restrictive and easy to manipulate.
The “low level thinking” that I’ve provided in this instance provides two examples where a young person could skip the attendant huge debt that so many college degrees require today and still make a decent living. Too many students get degrees today that the market doesn’t value and they end up working for peanuts complaining for the rest of their lives as they continue to pay huge monthly bills attached to their chosen “professions”. Let me guess, you finished a 4 year degree in “african anthropology” or was it perhaps “womens’ studies?”
I live in a country that has 10+ parties, it is entertaining, but equally dysfunctional. Blaming the 2-party system is too easy. I stay with my position that we are responsible for what happens during our lives.
Providing a blase why-dont-they-flip-houses non-solution was too cheap, I had to react. Your speculation about me is way off, as always. I am a numbers guy.
I would only agree with your premise up to a point – we are only responsible at the micro level, that is what’s directly in front of us. At the macro level it gets infinitely more difficult to make any discernible or meaningful choices. You can’t determine where and when you’re born, and each society provides its own unique set of constraints and opportunities that have huge impacts on how you live your life.
My boomer parents paid for my university education, as did those of most people I know. And I will do the same for my kids (already doing for one of them).
Many Anglos don’t, as a principle, in order to teach self-sufficiency (us Slavs are more soft-hearted). In that case, smart kids live at home and/or go to state schools and end with low debt. They also study something that offers good pay so they can pay off that debt.
Median debt for a Bachelor’s degree in the USA is $25,000. Median salary for people with a bachelor’s degree is about $52,000 per year. One can live on $40,000 per year and pay off the debt in 2.5 years.
This is mostly a crisis for rich socialist kids who support Bernie and have run up $100,000 in debt by studying sociology or feminist literature or something. The university administrators who parasite off these people are their ideological mentors and allies, ironically.
Look, I’m just here venting on the internet. I’m a Gen X-er, so I don’t really have a dog in this generational fight. And they are family, so I’ll still do whatever it takes to keep them healthy and alive.
All the points you mentioned, and plenty more, including respect for the elderly and the understanding that these people probably know that the rest of their lives, irrespective of whether they get sick or not, will be quite difficult, are ones that I’ve considered. These are what I tell myself so as not to lose heart and succumb to the same defeatism that they do.
Because it’s the continuation of a pattern present throughout their entire adult lives, and not just the manifestation of old age. All the excess debt and consumption, the devil-may-care take on life, the naiveté of believing that since things have always been awesome, they will continue to do so, these predate corona. We’re talking about Americans, remember. As has been discussed on this thread, it’s something I observe not just with them, but with their peers and the country writ large.