Hi Travis, I wanted to counter you with something I read this weekend, which I think was on your recommendation. I'm reading They Thought They Were Free by Milton Meyer. In fact, I'm struggling to stop reading it and do something else. I can't get it out of my head. Anyway, here is one of Meyer's masterful quotes:
Hi Travis, I wanted to counter you with something I read this weekend, which I think was on your recommendation. I'm reading They Thought They Were Free by Milton Meyer. In fact, I'm struggling to stop reading it and do something else. I can't get it out of my head. Anyway, here is one of Meyer's masterful quotes:
There were two truths, and they were not contradictory: the truth that Nazis
were happy and the truth that anti-Nazis were unhappy. And in the America of the
1950’s—I do not mean to suggest that the two situations are parallel or even more
than very tenuously comparable—those who did not dissent or associate with dis-
senters saw no mistrust or suspicion beyond the great community’s mistrust and
suspicion of dissenters, while those who dissented or believed in the right to dis-
sent saw nothing but mistrust and suspicion and felt its devastation. As there were
two Americas, so, in a much more sharply drawn division, there were two Ger-
manys. And so, just as there is when one man dreads the policeman on the beat
and another waves “Hello” to him, there are two countries in every country.
I would say there are 2 generations to every generation, also. There are Boomers who agitated and Boomers who shut down agitators. The Boomers got farther and made more progress on a lot of subjects than their parents ever did. We let the phrase "Greatest Generation" cover up a lot of sins.
They made a lot of progress on *some* subjects, and they inflamed others. They got women's liberation done. They passed the voting rights act (being gelded as we speak though). They ended the war in Vietnam. They got civil rights legislature passed.
Then they bootlicked the rich and gave us the status quo of extreme wealth inequality and an economy run by the shareholder class. They let the unions get gelded in favor of corporatism. They ran up the bill on college tuitions and made the Ivy League a pay-to-play system that advantaged rich kids. They got rid of the draft and forced all future wars to be shouldered by a smaller and smaller cohort of contracted service members who got turned into recyclable cannon fodder for a 20-year war that wasn't going to be won. They bought up all the housing and did NIMBYism to cut down on new developments and crunched the housing supply so hard that it's unaffordable to a large chunk of the urban and suburban working class. They cut government revenues by giving away tax breaks to the people who needed it the least (the rich). They had the power to reduce carbon emissions and not cook the planet over the course of 50 years, and instead they made up conspiracy theories about how climate change was a hoax and kept giving the oil companies billions in government subsidies. And now they want to make the younger generations foot their social security lifestyle subsidies via debt-spending while they collectively sit on top of the largest share of the national wealth.
I'd say on balance, the Boomers did WAY more harm than good. They might even just be the Worst Generation. Fuck their social security, they can take out reverse mortgages on their way off of this mortal coil.
Hi Travis, I wanted to counter you with something I read this weekend, which I think was on your recommendation. I'm reading They Thought They Were Free by Milton Meyer. In fact, I'm struggling to stop reading it and do something else. I can't get it out of my head. Anyway, here is one of Meyer's masterful quotes:
There were two truths, and they were not contradictory: the truth that Nazis
were happy and the truth that anti-Nazis were unhappy. And in the America of the
1950’s—I do not mean to suggest that the two situations are parallel or even more
than very tenuously comparable—those who did not dissent or associate with dis-
senters saw no mistrust or suspicion beyond the great community’s mistrust and
suspicion of dissenters, while those who dissented or believed in the right to dis-
sent saw nothing but mistrust and suspicion and felt its devastation. As there were
two Americas, so, in a much more sharply drawn division, there were two Ger-
manys. And so, just as there is when one man dreads the policeman on the beat
and another waves “Hello” to him, there are two countries in every country.
I would say there are 2 generations to every generation, also. There are Boomers who agitated and Boomers who shut down agitators. The Boomers got farther and made more progress on a lot of subjects than their parents ever did. We let the phrase "Greatest Generation" cover up a lot of sins.
They made a lot of progress on *some* subjects, and they inflamed others. They got women's liberation done. They passed the voting rights act (being gelded as we speak though). They ended the war in Vietnam. They got civil rights legislature passed.
Then they bootlicked the rich and gave us the status quo of extreme wealth inequality and an economy run by the shareholder class. They let the unions get gelded in favor of corporatism. They ran up the bill on college tuitions and made the Ivy League a pay-to-play system that advantaged rich kids. They got rid of the draft and forced all future wars to be shouldered by a smaller and smaller cohort of contracted service members who got turned into recyclable cannon fodder for a 20-year war that wasn't going to be won. They bought up all the housing and did NIMBYism to cut down on new developments and crunched the housing supply so hard that it's unaffordable to a large chunk of the urban and suburban working class. They cut government revenues by giving away tax breaks to the people who needed it the least (the rich). They had the power to reduce carbon emissions and not cook the planet over the course of 50 years, and instead they made up conspiracy theories about how climate change was a hoax and kept giving the oil companies billions in government subsidies. And now they want to make the younger generations foot their social security lifestyle subsidies via debt-spending while they collectively sit on top of the largest share of the national wealth.
I'd say on balance, the Boomers did WAY more harm than good. They might even just be the Worst Generation. Fuck their social security, they can take out reverse mortgages on their way off of this mortal coil.