What’s with this “OK Boomer” business?
It’s a thing.
William Shatner got into a Twitter fight about it.
Here’s an explanation of how the phrase is being used:
…[T]he term ‘boomer’ doesn’t precisely mean ‘baby boomer,’ not on the internet, anyway, where Kelly adds “we’re constantly navigating our identities.”
“We’re not using ‘boomer’ per se to take down people who were born after World War II in the baby boom. We’re using it in an ironic, often humorous, though sometimes malicious way as a catchall or stand-in for a set of attitudes. A ‘boomer’ [in this case] is an older, angry white male who is shaking his fist at the sky while not being able to take an insult. They have close-minded opinions, are resistant to change — whether it’s new technology or gender inclusivity — and are generally out of touch with how their behaviors affect other people.”
In other words: shut up, old white male person who hasn’t hopped onboard every stupid trend that’s come down the pike to be embraced (and required) by younger people ignorant of history, intolerant of liberty, and to a large extent devoid of one of the possible perks of old age: wisdom.
Oh, but I’m generalizing, something I don’t like to do based on age, or sex, or race, or much of anything else. People are individuals, and neither the young nor the old are any one thing.
However, if I may allow myself to generalize, I will add that people who use the phrase “OK Boomer” as a put-down, a way to insult someone and discount that person’s point of view if he or she happens to disagree and to be older, are themselves ignorant and arrogant fools.
Maybe they’ll learn better as they get older.
Of course, it was certain Boomers who popularized the phrase, “Never trust anyone over thirty” – which was actually coined by Jack Weinberg, activist leftist and member of the previous generation, the Silent one. Ooops! Both Boomers and Silents are now being reviled by some of those under 30 – although some Millennials are now feeling the hot breath of forty breathing down their necks.
The hyperbolic ‘woe is me’ act from so many millennials is insufferable. In that Shatner thread the millenial mentions something about having to see the world destroyed. WTF?
There has never been a better time to be alive almost anywhere on earth. The lack of perspective and gratitude for those that have come before is really astounding.
This is weird. I first encountered this thing yesterday morning. One of the three was on this blog–someone’s comment, can’t remember which post. Logged in to Facebook and immediately saw it mentioned two more times. Now today probably 5 or 6 times….it’s weird.
I posted something on Facebook about it and got this response:
Boomer friend: It’s not disdain for our generation. It’s disdain for bloviating asses.
Me: But is there a correlation between our generation and bloviating asses? Much like the one between young people and ignorant twerps?
I think the answer to both questions is yes, actually. But in the end it’s just the latest variant of the age-old conflict between youth and age, not to be taken too seriously.
An epitome of modern wisdom — Greta The Scourge
“In America the young are always ready to give those who are older the full benefits of their inexperience.” — Oscar Wilde
Somethings never change. But so many young ‘adults’ seem to be smug, arrogant snot nosed kids. They know little about history and they seem proud of their ignorance.
I call firsties to use “Ok boomer” here!
I find boomer pretty mild compared to racist, white supremacist, misogynist, nazi, or whatever-phobe. Capt. Kirk had an easy enough time fending it off. “Ok boomer” sounds amusing to me.
I wonder if some of its resonance comes from “Ok Computer,” the big Radiohead album from 1997 — a little early for millennials, but close enough. That was a magnificent album musically and sonically, but the pretentiously stupid, leftie lyrics should have embarrassed an 8th grader. Pretty much ruined Radiohead for me.
Even Rolling Stone had Radiohead’s number when reviewing their foolish self-documentary, “Meeting People is Easy”:
You don’t feel sorry for Radiohead, exactly (that’s their job). Instead, you just marvel at — and envy — all the rock-star ego on display, the kind of ego that inspires five rich and famous young men to commission a feature-length art film about how bored they are with their work.
If Radiohead types are giving me the “Ok boomer,” well, that’s Ok with me.
As someone in the middle (Gen X I guess) it seems to me the millennials are far more arrogant than my generation. I don’t think my generation thought we knew it all at such a young age. My theory is the internet has led an entire generation to know less but think they know more.
Also I’m not sure I’ve seen Douglas Murray’s new book ‘The Madness of Crowds’ brought up on this site but it’s quite good and he theorizes that after every great economic downturn we see the rise of very strange and dangerous ideas. In this case trans, etc. and the growth of socialism because the younger generation is disillusioned by the failure of the existing system.
Like I said it’s a good book and Murray is one the best accessible thinkers out there right now.
David Harsanyi had a couple keeper articles on millennials. Read the whole things, though the titles tell it all.
“The Conventional Wisdom About Millennial Suffering Is A Myth”
https://thefederalist.com/2019/05/21/the-conventional-wisdom-about-millennial-suffering-is-a-myth/
“Millennials Are The Most Prosperous Generation That’s Ever Lived’
https://thefederalist.com/2019/03/22/stop-whining-millennials-youre-prosperous-generation-thats-ever-lived/
huxley,
Insults I can laugh off, but ignorance of history and human nature is off putting. And I promise to acknowledge you have dibs on ok boomer.
😉
Some of it could be pushback against the generalization of millennials. Some of it could be the disdain that young lefties seem to more naturally have for older people than do conservatives. I have seen the disdain expressed on more than one occasion in comments. I am glad you mentioned the “ Dont trust anyone over 30” thing. As a kid born in 1970, I thought the people saying that were dumb. But I have been a conservative my whole life.
But . . . Boomer Sooner: Ok! [h/t RR & OH II]
OTOH, I think it’s natural, even necessary at some point, for the younger generation to say to the older, “Ok boomer.” There would be no USA without our Founding Fathers saying, “Ok England,” back in 1776.
Another thing I like about “Ok boomer” is that it doesn’t stop the conversation like “Ok Nazi” does. I didn’t check to see where the Shatner-Ok-boomer twitterfest landed, but there was a discussion.
“Ok boomer” doesn’t indicate, at least not yet, “And now we are going to make sure you never have a public voice again and we plan to ruin your life and those of anyone you are close to.”
huxley, as much as the founders looked back at history, “ok boomer” did not apply. When you read some of their writing, they were well versed in western history. The bloody French Revolution, on the other hand, was an “ok boomer” revolution.
Yeah not sure the American Revolution fits. The three writers of the Declaration were 33, 41, and 70 in 1776. So kind of cross generational. And they were very well read and in Franklins case very experienced in the world.
jon baker: I don’t have much sympathy for “Shut up until you know enough to speak and I’ll be the judge of that” arguments.
I heard enough of those in parochial school and as far as I’m concerned, I was mostly right, though I still had much to learn.
Huxley,
Yeah, the thing is it’s not the older generation telling the younger to ‘shut up’ instead it’s the older generation ceding control to the young. That is the main thing on college campuses today. Do you think all these professors and administrators have always believed some of these nutty things that are implemented on campus today? I don’t, instead they are just acquiescing to the students and when you give an inch they’ll take a mile.
huxley: I like OK Computer a lot but I don’t think I’ve ever understood more than about a third of the lyrics, and didn’t pay much attention to them. Had no idea they were “pretentiously stupid, leftie lyrics.” Good thing I guess.
Or liked the first two-thirds or so of it, anyway. Seemed like the last few songs weren’t that great. Lots of albums made for cd are too long, to my taste.
In the off topic section of a Creighton basketball message board, I carve up the global warming scam.
The millennials refuse to debate the merits. They think “scientific consensus” answers everything. One smart alec gave me the “ok, boomer” response.
So clever!
At Creighton, the students passed a divestment in oil and gas securities resolution.
I want a resolution where they turn the temp down to 60 this winter. And if the endowment suffers any losses, they will indemnify Creighton with ten percent of their income from 40-50.
I read the undergrads’ research in support of their resolution. “F” work. I can’t believe these kids are at a Jesuit school. Embarrassing to me as an alum.
Hi! I’m a long time reader, first time poster (as best I can remember), and a 31-year-old millennial.
This is pretty standard generational bickering, as has been going on since time began. The ‘OK Boomer’ phrase is only different in that it has been standardized through internet meme culture. Older folks can be disrespectful and rude toward other generations too (with this thread being Exhibit A).
I found neo’s emphasis on this being a left-wing phenomenon a little surprising, as I’ve seen condescension directed toward boomers from my peers both on the left and the right. Young right-wing individuals seem to be greatly frustrated with boomers on a number of political issues. Among them:
-A total failure to manage the budget and national debt over two decades
-Outrageous cost increase of college, which has saddled millions with huge debt and delayed marriage/children/house ownership/etc.
-In the Republican party, prioritization of an aggressive neocon foreign policy and pandering of corporations over other priorities
-The beginning of a huge slide in moral issues. (Things like divorce and sexual promiscuity are way up in boomers relative to their parents. Christianity has transitioned from a majority to a minority culture under their watch.)
For what it’s worth, the above was intended more as conveying a message rather than taking a shot. I concede I largely agree with the points I typed above (with some qualifications and nuances), but I’m also worried about my own generation. I’m doing fine for myself, but as a group I find my generation to be troubled.
OT but relevant to us here:
I watched the LSU-Alabama football game (#2 vs #3 in national rankings) at Tuscaloosa on CBS today. As expected, it was a hell of a game, with incredible athleticism and determination on both sides. LSU won 46-41.
Our president, who had joined in declaring this the “game of the century”, was in attendance. CBS did not once mention that fact, nor find him by camera. Had he been Barack H Obama, we would have gotten close-ups of him and Michelle many times, of course.
A comment from sdferr’s link to the Great Greta Mural (ps none of the comments was positive, some of the pix & gifs are amusing).
“The amount of pollution from spray cans used is just… They are a cult that don’t care about fixing ANY of the actual pollution problems.”
Not a few blog posts remark upon that small hypocrisy; here’s one.
https://www.redstate.com/nick-arama/2019/11/09/artist-paints-a-huge-tribute-to-greta-thunberg-but-theres-a-small-problem/
As Instapundit is fond of saying, “I’LL BELIEVE IT’S A CRISIS WHEN THE PEOPLE WHO KEEP TELLING ME IT’S A CRISIS START ACTING LIKE IT’S A CRISIS.”
Sorry – the all caps came from his archive of posts with that caption.
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/?s=%22i%27ll+believe+it%27s+a+crisis%22
Trip down memory lane (walking or biking, of course)!
This story isn’t there yet, but I’m sure it will be eventually, along with Greta’s other gaffetastic activites.
I feel sorry for that youg woman; she is being used and abused by the Greens, Dems, and leftists in general.
Here’s the answer, from Second Hand Lions:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GKZt3I0v7U
Delivers not one, but two great quotes on meaning in life.
Well worth the three minute tuition.
So this is the problem. We boomers were always overshadowed by the WW2’s. Fine, they were the greatest generation but we were the coolest generation. And just when it’s our turn to reminisce, what do these kids say? “Ok boomer.” *sigh*
PS – the artist says he wants to draw attention to the danger of climate change, but there is no caption on the mural that I can see, so that reaction depends totally on people knowing who she is and what she stands for (I can’t imagine any of the homeless junkies living on that street have a clue, or care a bit).
Sounds like that “Bye Felicia” BS that Mrs 0 was mentally dropping on FLOTUS.
I despise condescension in all its forms…asking for a thump if you ask me.
What’s with this “OK Boomer” business?
Don’t know, don’t care.
Cameron: “This is pretty standard generational bickering, as has been going on since time began.” Right. Plenty of boomers did it to their parents’ generation.
And “I’ve seen condescension directed toward boomers from my peers both on the left and the right.”
Yes, me too. There are several regular right-wing commenters on Rod Dreher’s blog (at the American Conservative) who get really quite agitated about boomer sins and omissions.
Cicero: CBS did show the president and Mrs. at least once. But only once that I saw, and I think I watched every minute of the game. (Congratulations, LSU) Your basic point is probably valid, though. Probably would have been more attention paid to BHO.
A further thought on cross-party hostility to boomers: I wonder this is one sign of a movement toward a post-liberal order (or disorder). It sort of seems like one source of the impatience if not hostility of the young on both sides is that they feel like both “liberals” and “conservatives” (as the parties have been defined for 50-60 years) are clinging to ideas that are no longer workable.
I, a member of the Boomer generation, pretty much agree with Cameron’s list of misdeeds. I am less opposed to an active foreign policy.
Yeah, the thing is it’s not the older generation telling the younger to ‘shut up’ instead it’s the older generation ceding control to the young. That is the main thing on college campuses today. Do you think all these professors and administrators have always believed some of these nutty things that are implemented on campus today? I don’t, instead they are just acquiescing to the students and when you give an inch they’ll take a mile.
Griffin: I take your point. I don’t believe all the profs and admins believe that stuff. I think mostly they like their quiet, cushy, albeit hard-working, lives. I’ve got problems with that too. That’s a betrayal of Western Civ.
And perhaps the American Revolution isn’t the best example of the general principle of the young rejecting the old at some point.
However, I don’t consider “Ok boomer” in the face of condescending criticism from elders to be out of bounds either.
And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They’re quite aware of what they’re going through
–David Bowie, “Changes”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCgzX7vwlFk
If the children lack the full perspective of Western Civ, that’s understandable. It’s still possible that their elders don’t have their perspective either.
I see the kids everyday at school and in my work cafe. They look scared to me, more than anything else, and I don’t blame them.
I like OK Computer a lot but I don’t think I’ve ever understood more than about a third of the lyrics, and didn’t pay much attention to them. Had no idea they were “pretentiously stupid, leftie lyrics.” Good thing I guess.
Mac: How about the bridge from “Paranoid Android”? “Yuppies networking, the panic, the vomit.” T.S. Eliot couldn’t have said it better.
But the music is sublime.
____________________________________________
Rain down, rain down
Come on, rain down on me
From a great height
From a great height, height
Rain down, rain down
Come on, rain down on me
From a great height
From a great height, height
That’s it, sir, you’re leaving (Rain down)
The crackle of pigskin (Rain down)
The dust and the screaming (Come on, rain down)
The yuppies networking (On me)
The panic, the vomit (From a great height)
The panic, the vomit (From a great height)
God loves his children
God loves his children, yeah
–Radiohead, “Paranoid Android”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIklhgI-m2s
Cameron: I hope you continue to comment. I’m a boomer and I’m dissatisfied with boomers myself, though not to the point of the blanket dismissal I often hear from conservatives.
The great thing about “Ok boomer,” as I say, is that it’s actually a normal, chafing, generational interaction. People are used to that and work it out after a while.
Calling everyone older and lighter a white-supremacist nazi, then trying to shut them up and ruin their lives, is not normal and bad things happen.
So, I see “Ok boomer” as an improvement on the current state of polarization.
huxley;
Yea, and some Millenials are scared of the climate apocalypse, and gender bender hate, and finding Adolph part 2 in the White House.
Whereas the boomers had to live through M,A.D., the Vietnam War, the social changers brought about during the Civil Rights movement but also the unfortunate riots and destruction, political assassinations, and a few other minor events,
So to me “ok Boomer” from a progressive who also whines about safe spaces and speech being violence ,,,,, seriously. Pound sand and then and grow up.
This story has the same twitter thread as the one Neo linked, but comes from a humorous — and definitely Trekker — perspective.
huxley on November 9, 2019 at 6:35 am said: (on the Paradise thread)
https://www.barstoolsports.com/boston/you-will-not-come-at-william-shatner-with-your-ok-boomer-crap-and-live-to-tell-the-tale
“…if I could interview any entertainer alive today, Shatner would be my first choice and it’s not even close. I’d call him a National Treasure, but that’s damning the man with faint praise. He’s an Interstellar Treasure. He has been for six decades. And he’s still kicking cyber ass at the age of 88.
So don’t try your “OK Boomer” garbage on William Shatner. Or me. Or you will not live long or prosper. Resistance is Futile.”
OK Trekkie!
Just in case you wanted to know the definitions; year ranges differ on other sources.
https://www.kasasa.com/articles/generations/gen-x-gen-y-gen-z
So to me “ok Boomer” from a progressive who also whines about safe spaces and speech being violence ,,,,, seriously. Pound sand and then and grow up.
om: I can be dissatisfied with millennials too, you know. And apparently Gen Z too — h/t to AesopFan.
Furthermore, someone who says, “Ok boomer,” may not be the cardboard cut-out you are complaining about.
From what I read and have heard from my niece and other young folks, student debt has blown their minds.
All the adults told them and told them, “Go to college. Don’t worry. You’ll get a great job and pay the loans off. Go to college.”
That was good advice until somewhere in the 2000s, maybe earlier depending on the degree. But it’s not now unless you take a serious career-oriented degree in STEM, business or something concrete.
Now that advice feels like a significant betrayal from the people they were supposed to trust.
Admittedly, it’s not like being a working-class kid who went to Nam and got his head blown off because he didn’t have a college deferment. But still.
Instead we are 10/20 years after the 2000/2008 crashes. Life has gotten much more buttoned-down. You can ruin your life with a bad tweet or Facebook comment. Or someone else can do it for you. It’s not at all clear you can find a decent job with a college degree.
It may well be Trump’s most significant accomplishment, if he can keep the economy humming for another five years, that young people can relax and start building their own wealth.
But is it ok to say ok, if the ok sign is racist?
huxley: I never have had a good ear for mushed-up lyrics in pop songs, and unless I had some reason to think the writer might be saying something worth the trouble, I didn’t bother to try figuring it out. I’ve recognized only two words in the “Paranoid Android” lyric when listening to it: “rain down.” That’s nice. The rest was just vocalizing. Might as well have been Cocteau Twins. Thank you for posting them, but it only confirms my first reaction: I don’t care if I can’t understand him because he’s probably not saying anything much anyway.
Folks, fairly early on, this story contained the phrases: “William Shatner”, “older angry white man”, and “shaking a fist in the air”. And not one of you posted:
“Khhhaaaaannnnnnn!!!”
What is wrong with you people???
It’s a passive-aggressive way to criticize the Baby Boom generation. That generation is perceived by the younger generations as having had their lives comparatively easy, while setting up conditions in the future to make it much harder for everyone else.
1. Paying for college by just working a summer job, versus having to go into debt for tens of thousands of dollars.
2. Buying their first home at 25, while others have to wait until 35-40, in a very overpriced market.
3. “Just look the hiring manager in the eye and give him a firm handshake,” versus multiple rounds of interviews, hundreds of resumes submitted, no call-backs, and competing with millions of foreigners on H1-B visas and the like.
4. National debt less than $500 billion forty years ago, while over $23 trillion today. Just wait until interest payments go up in a few years.
5. Boomers expecting to get all of their Social Security and Medicare, while we all know it will be bankrupt for everyone else. Same deal for pensions in places like California and Illinois.
6. Growing up in a homogeneous, unified culture, while pushing diversity and multiculturalism on everyone else. And then letting their white grandchildren become a minority in their own country.
7. The expectation that foreign affairs will always be the same as post-WWII and post-Cold War, where the US can afford endless interventions and alliances, to make everything perfect.
8. Being able to work in a good factory job back then, versus offshoring the manufacturing base today.
And you can go on and on, with many other examples related to environmentalism, feminism, racism, sexism, social and political experimentation, globalism, consumerism, diversity, multiculturalism, and immigration, where the policies the Boomers push on everyone else makes it worse for them, while they suffer no consequences.
This “OK, Boomer” phrase is a put-down of a generation that is seen as over-privileged and out of touch, and unable to deal with the many problems that it has helped to create.
During China’s Cultural Revolution, idealistic youths with grievances murdered adults, so this could get worse.
It has to do with climate change.
There was a viral video a few days ago. This young lady was giving a speech, saying that her generation will pay the price for the foolishness of her elders. Some guy heckled her and she retorted with “OK Boomer”.
Cameron: “… I’ve seen condescension directed toward boomers from my peers both on the left and the right.”
Also, Yankee’s comment.
One immediately thinks of Bronze Age Manifesto.
Lots of hard-to-categorize viewpoints bubbling and fermenting. Typically a good thing.
Cameron:
Glad to see someone younger commenting here.
And of course, Boomers are far – and I mean far far far – from perfect in terms of their generational accomplishments. And of course that can be stated and they can be criticized.
But the newer generations are doing even worse so far, and have no cause for being condescending and dismissive.
Just to be clear, I am not suggesting that you are either condescending or dismissive. But the phrase “OK Boomer” is both, and expresses the basic snarkiness that so often passes for argument these days.
I’m a late Gen-Xer, almost a Millennial.
Besides the factors that Yankee showed, there is also the question: Who made the Millennial generation what they are? They didn’t make themselves in a vacuum.
At some point, people need to grow up. But they were misled about many thinhs by people they trusted.
I believe “Ok, Boomer” is a manifestation that of that dawning realization that the world is not what they were told it would be and not everyone will be receiving trophies for participation.
“OK Boomer” is snarky and condescending. But, as I’ve stated before, I hold very little regard for My Generation (I was born in 1952). Boomers are defined psychologically by the Vietnam War. Though I don’t know the percentages, it seems to me a majority of Boomers still support many of the changes their more radical generational colleagues have wrought.
We often talk here about the Gramscian march. And which generation really accelerated that effort? It’s obvious to me it was the Boomers. The crack in time to me was 1968, and maybe even narrowing it down to the Democratic Convention. From then on it seems the radical Boomers started their long takeover of the Democrat party, Ayers, and others, began the takeover of the education system, and the media was also targeted. All of this can be laid at the Boomers feet. Look at the Dem party and it’s leading candidates: Warren, Sanders, Pelosi, Schumer, Biden, Bloomberg, the Clintons….all Boomers, and all continuing what was started back in 1968.
Boomers: the Worst Generation, and deserving of a bit of smackdown.
Amen, physicsguy.
I genuinely get mad when people lionize many of the cultural icons of the Boomer generation. I have been waiting my entire, adult life to hear an apology from them. Time has proved so much of what they said and did wrong, but none will self reflect and admit the harm they have done. The drug culture is a fine example. The sexual revolution.
Many of their own generation were wise enough to know the surest path to success was to do the opposite of everything they rationalized, and it’s those people who gave us what good exists in our present society, yet idiots like the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Timothy Leary, Hunter Thompson and Paul Ehrlich are still revered.
It’s also just desserts. Was their any generation before or after the Boomers who was more adversarial and disrespectful to their parents and those older than them?
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Loved Cameron’s post. I simplified his/her points.
Older folks can be rude tw/ other generations too … condescension toward boomers is both left and right. E.g.,, among young right-wingers frustrations are
1. failure to manage the budget and debt
2. cost increase of college, which delays marriage/ children/ house ownership/etc.
3. Republicans prioritised aggressive foreign policy
4. Pandering corporations over other priorities
5. a slide in moral issues (divorce promiscuity)
6. Christianity transition fr. majority to minority culture.
7. I’m worried about my generation. I find my generation to be troubled.
While those are (some of) young right-wing worries, let’s look at whether they are (generally speaking) ushered in by D or R. #1 ushered in by both R and D and never “fixed.” . #4 seems R-led. #2, #3, #5, #6 seem NOW to be D-led-as Rs are giving up on foreign wars. And on #7 – let’s all keep talking. Neo’s place here is one great place to talk.
From what I read and have heard from my niece and other young folks, student debt has blown their minds.
I think this is a key. The Duke Power case began the trend when employers were told they could not use IQ tests. The result was everybody had to go to college or else. I know some young men who are doing very well with no college but they have a father who put them to work and kept them straight and narrow.
Now we have millions of kids with useless degrees or worse no degree and huge debts they will never repay.
Like manju, I am a bit concerned about climate but unlike him, and the DNC memo writers, I am concerned we may be entering another Little Ice Age. The early winter may be a coincidence but we’ll see.
Good list, MHollywood. I’d add the philosophy that drugs can solve all your problems, even expand your wisdom and improve your life.
I had encountered this recently on Twitter (aimed at me) and didn’t understand it. Thanks. I’ll know how to address it in the future.
Heh: Babylon Bee — Nation’s Gen Xers Announce Plan To Just Sit Back And Enjoy Watching Boomers, Millennials Tear Each Other To Shreds
Huxley:
When a poll reports that 40% of millennials have a favorable view of socialism that might be a “Boomer” problem and a problem of ignorance and gullibility on the younger set.
Those leftist “Boomers” in media, education, culture are indeed worthy of scorn, contempt, and derision since they have gulled and wrecked vast swaths of western civilization. However, I strongly suspect that the older individual who “heckeled” the 25 year woman in the video was not of the left. So this young woman IMO continues to be ignorant and gulled, seeking to blame others.
” and are generally out of touch with how their behaviors affect other people.” But we all know only certain “other people” are considered.
Mac
I am reminded of the time in Latin America when I was asked to translate the lyrics of some rock song. My reply was that as I can’t tell what they are saying in English, I can’t translate it into Spanish. No, the song wasn’t Louie, Louie.
Mike K,
“… I am a bit concerned about climate.”
Everyone complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.
You’re a smart guy. I assume you were typing quickly? “Concern” for the climate is as sensible as compassion for a tree, or a rock. The climate will be just fine despite how much concern the Boomers or Millennials give it. It may not be temperate for humans, but I assure you; the climate has far less concern for us than we for it.
(Also, I agree with you that global cooling is certainly possible and would be worse for most us humans than temperatures trending up. The recent sunspot activity and global atmospheric and deep sea temperature readings are disconcerting. No matter what the U.N. and our governments choose to do regarding greenhouse gases, the Sun may have other plans for the next 7, 11 or 20 years.)
Physics guy said:
We often talk here about the Gramscian march. And which generation really accelerated that effort? It’s obvious to me it was the Boomers. The crack in time to me was 1968, and maybe even narrowing it down to the Democratic Convention. From then on it seems the radical Boomers started their long takeover of the Democrat party, Ayers, and others, began the takeover of the education system, and the media was also targeted. All of this can be laid at the Boomers feet.
Not to excuse my/our generation, but honestly, the Gramscian march through our institutions started well before us “Boomers” further screwed things up. It really started with the generation of folks born in the last decades of the 19th century and first part of the 20th. Think John Dewey, the progenitor of our modern education system.
Or Walter Duranty, a journalist and student of the Frankfort School, imported to the US from Germany at the turn of the 20th century.
Other examples abound, but the gist is that this march through the institutions has been going on for well over a century and every generation since then has played their small part in letting it happen.
But is it ok to say ok, if the ok sign is racist?
Diversity is a many Pro-Choice thing, selective, opportunistic, politically congruent.
[Catastrophic] [Anthropogenic] Climate Change, probably not.
Climate change, certainly, over unpredictable (i.e. evolution or chaos) periods. Meanwhile, weather with sustainable temperature swings of 10, 20, 40 degrees or more within hours, days, perhaps weeks.
A bunch of great comments.
Bottom line for me is the Boomers have surrendered our country for a mess of pottage.
Although I did not understand the shift as it occurred: in 1968, the long-hairs were despised, especially by young male blue collars, but within 2-3 years that blue collar crowd all sported long hair. Identifying with the enemy?
Well, the definition of “Boomers” that I always heard was of the “Post war baby boom” – those born in the twenty years from 1946 to 1965. But that’s neither here nor there really.
However, there are two things about this boomer bashing – or any generational bashing for that matter – that I find disconcerting.
First and foremost is that “generations”, however they are defined, don’t “do” anything. Only individuals do. There are boomers who are horses asses and boomers who are fine upstanding citizens, and all points in between.
*The same can be said for all the other generations as well.*
(There are a lot of so called Xers and millennials who are at this very moment serving their country honorably. Just as millions of boomers did back in the 60’s and 70’s.)
Second – and this concerns the boomer bashing in particular – the the leaders of the sixties counter-culture, were NOT boomers. They were almost all of the previous generation. Consider, that in 1968, the very oldest boomers were still in their early 20’s. Most were still in High School. Hardly leaders.
But personally, I am also getting heartily tired of the anti-boomer bullshit.
I was born in 1954 – right in the middle of the boomer generation – and I have honored my side of the social contract – always and in many ways.
Now I’m defined by some as a horrible person for expecting at least some reciprocity of that contract.
Well, all those who bash me for no other reason but the year I was born can kiss my boomer butt.
Maybe they’ll learn better as they get older.
they wont… they wont because they will make the change that will end up doing what to them? right now. Sweden is being raped and bombed to death…the feminist ideology they follow has made sure to invite an army in and they cant fight because they believe the army is part of them now.
actually the leadership following the ‘witless” plans we dont believe, has imported the army that will destabiliize everything so much, that totalitarianism will be seen as the solution to the prevention of false nazism that will be in response to the activities of the invaders
ie. hold one group down (what is said to be the dominant class), and lift the other up (the oppressor class that has a right to class hatred against their oppressors, who do not have a right to their defense – as taught in college for 30 years in those feminist studies courses… you did take them didnt you and you do know their content, right?)
this is why they label the mass attacks in the US as “teens”
in england they call the perpetrators by what name?
oh, and in Sweden, its “gangs”
all three refuse to identify which groups are acting out, as if all groups are acting out, so no groups respond… it became the rape capital of the world because after the feminists invited them in, with posters and rainbow invitations, they proceeded to rape the women without veils. funny how they already had a method of doing this that requires about 10 guys, where half of them face outwards preventing anyone from seeing or acting on it, while the other half does the dirty deed with the lady made available by not being Islamic (of this type – note that in places like Indonesia, this isn’t accepted either!!!!!!!!!! their punishment for it is to kill the people doing it, unlike the swedes)
Do remember that the policies that we are pushing here in the US by the international communist coordinations in each country, have not been fully implemented. So we have guns, and Swedes dont… recent feminists/racialists/lgbt have been callling for US police to give up their guns too.
Trend in gang crime bombings rock Sweden
https://www.france24.com/en/20191108-trend-in-gang-crime-bombings-rock-sweden
Just as they figured how to implement Herr Hitlers population control without ovens and opposition, they have also figured out how to have an army fight a war without the opposition fighting back!!!! or pushing against invasion..
By importing the combatants before the fight breaks out..
you have a civil war, not a classical war at the border
and given western sensibilities, they will NOT wipe out the other side in a civil war they way they would potentially subdue the other side in a classical war
and civil wars in democratic republics lead to what? class? class? beuller?
yes.. that right.. a totalitarian outcome (like the Czech velvet revolution) because at some point, they will be allowed without opposition to declare military or such intervention and like a parent who doesn’t care which child does bad, hold both sides responsible and impose what kind of government as a solution?
ah.. pass the popcorn.. as i am too witless to see how this will pan out
or perhaps that’s projection and the people who are victims are that way?
i dont know
but i dont care… if i care, i am a racist white male oppressor heterosexual nazi
so, i dont care… after all… all the methodologies to act on this would prove the above
better to enjoy the show than be in it, in this case
i am neither a sacrificial lamb or a Judas goat…
but my family and many others who came from such places and “get” it
are not under the illusions of the people who lack experience, knowledge, history, and even the abiltiy to decide what their children learn or dont learn!!!!!!!!!!
hope there is enough butter, it would be a shame to run out..
Its kind of humerous that you guys dont actually know where this behavior is coming from vs the father knows best period… that its a specific plan because each of the ideas you can find in each of the target countries with a different person representing the reproducible cut out..
all of you are so focused on your own, your missing the very weird and odd spontanous same coming from all over!!!!!!!!
some are upset that they dont know history
and i can point out that most of you that think you do, dont either
because your history is mostly about yourself, and not an integrated whole
but integrated only where ever your own did something..
so you have NO IDEA of the history of countries and process and things which happened when your country was not present… only when it was, then it was included as something to learn
even more funny, is your just as bad as the people your commenting on!!!
at least that is the way i see it not being the same and having never belonging so i have no emotional reason to do that, or restrict, or make names when something challenges my world view… odd that i actually LIKE things challenging my world view… its meant to me a huge source of the smarts i have..
you have already been told where the smugness is from
and while there is intergenerational pusharound, which you can go back and read cicero (not our cicero but THE cicero) repeats and so does plato…
but like ALL mental disorders they are not mental disorders because of the action, but because of the extreme of the action… this lets lots of bad things seem normal or not smoething to push back on, because its not the action itself
turning off a light switch is not a mental disorder,turning it off three times and not being able to break the chain is. ..
killing someone is not a disorder, killing them for personal pleasure, gain, or sexual gain is
hating the prior generation is not abnormal, hating them till your willing to let them have their medications rationed and more… is what?
you all talk and surmise as to what and where it is, but none of you actually no, and because you dont know, you think everyone else doesnt know, and do not listen to someone who points it out to you… – making us equal
cause as hambly said in “You just dont understand” a person who knows something when another doesn’t is seen as being above them. This is why men who are status oriented married to status oriented wife’s (who dont admit they are usually) wont ask for directions. they would be seen as having lower status in front of the person who requires that status to feel secure and want them! no amount of carping will make them do otherwise for people who are told some excuse and dont know themselves… men and women dont just speak the same, we speak very differently… but are not allowed to realize it or are curious enough to find out.. (a man will say, i am thirsty and will stop, and ask do you want something.. a woman will say, are you thirsty… your supposed to pick up that she is, and want that so she can ahve it… its been shown in tons of studies)
but back to the point at hand..
the issue with the children and other things, like sex eduation goes to the bela kuhn government… they go hand in hand and from the 1960s cultural revolution were a part of causing the internal strive necessary that the next generation once unfetterd by the old generation would do what they were told and not what the older generation they been told are stupid and less eduated and they have to educate.. (thats the abnormal part)
its a process thats been foisted upon the ignorant for decades in more than one country… remember how classy england was? now tell me about Yobs and certain others in that their kids are more feral… given they couldnt do that along race lines, its a bit more hard to draw the correlations
and given you dont know the detailed history of the Bella Kuhn regime and that oscial experiment, i cant refer to that
but you DO know connected history, and you do know entertainment based onit
1) in the ballet movie white knights latvian ballet dancer Barishnikov climbs on the roof to another room where young girls are studying their dance… as soon as they see him, one of them grabs a stick and challenges him, as the young girls are so sure what they were taught HAS to be right, and he discovered he is erased… but the point is the attitude of the very young girl with the stick
2) it was brought up, dont trust anyone over 30… that abnormalized the division, made it wider… just as the weather underground said, kill your parents… they had to get their model from another socualist system that was successful in changing the face of the population to get results. which leads me to number 3
3) the jugend.. they would be the arm that would run around and insure that Gliechshaltung reached into the homes, the campus… that this divide was fomented to help the regime negate the older wiser people…
after all
age and treachery always wins over youth and enthusiasm
without any limits and morals defined as anything that works to achieve the goal of a socialist/communist state… things normal people think are off the table can be done in front of them without even being noticed… even when the results of such action are in front of them, they wont see the actual thing that was using a process to create it..
for instance… how could you do this if a family was whole and a father who favors freedom was balanced with a mother who favors what more? easy, get rid of dad.. how do you get rid of dad? easy, convince women who have all this stuff that they didnt have it and would have had it earlier if it wasnt for the evil mates they had kids with.. how do you stop the current leading population with a interest in preventing the change to such a state? easy, help foment women to work, and men out of the family, so that kids can be in a homogenized school system that replaced the old one..
you can do it right in front of them!
and if you do it slowly enough they wont get it
they will argue and fight and even defend it
after all, slowly enough it appears to be a natural basis for their world view
and if its their world view, why would they change it?
as the brits fought to protect their world view from the Nazis
the kids all know better and are fighting to protect the world view that was given to them once the men were kicked out of education and the women of the revolution changed the syllabus to give them that view from kindergarten
and the 2nd and 3rd waves insured that the 4th would have such a lock down they would be willing to do what to their elders?
As i have said.. no need to work this out
you can actually read that IF you wanted to read the opposition
you dont… recently i was called witless for reading it and noticing the alignment
this is why, i think more butter on the popcorn will be great
not a damn thing that can be done once you let sepsis get this far
you only had to understand why Stalin was friend to all children..
but you argue more than you want to be unequal with someone that claims to know more
its really hysterical you all will bet your whole future and children’s future on that
and get angry at the messenger for upsetting the apple cart
after all, things went a lot nicer in Germany after 1933 as long as everyone went along with it
wouldn’t you agree? the whole point of trotsky forever war was to wear opposition down year after year till they gave up exhausted..
you might wonder why they are making sex ed and classes in masturbation and anal sex for kids under the age of 14… (or even at that age)… but that wont come up… will it? well, note that sex education pits every parent against the children in the system. how can they be so mean as to not allow us to do this says the child?
Mary Steichen Calderone
Calderone served as president and co-founder of the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) from 1954 to 1982. She was also the medical director for Planned Parenthood. She wrote many publications advocating open dialogue and access to information at all ages. Her extensive work with popularizing sexuality education has often been compared to the Margaret Sanger’s campaign for birth control.
100 dollars say you dont know who she is… but they do make a lot selling baby parts, ruining young ladies lives (so they blame the wrong person and give them power, and again, population control.. but now there are 11,000 sigining on that that is ok (again!)
Earth Needs Fewer People to Beat the Climate Crisis, Scientists Say
More than 11,000 experts sign an emergency declaration warning that energy, food and reproduction must change immediately.
see? real easy when no one wants to refer to actual history, methods and prefer to entertain themselves.. (and get angry at someone who sees it and says fine, lets entertain, and i will have popcorn! your not supposed to actually admit this talk a thon without history is entertaining!)
do remember that a Council is a soviet… and that the idea is to run things with endless specialized councils over each idea that you cant work to defeat them all any more than fighting a hydra – even more so if you dont actually believe in the hydra
SIECUS – Sex ed is a vehicle for social change
see. i am crazy.. but you know who said that? SIECUS itself!
https://siecus.org/sex-ed-is-a-vehicle-for-social-change/
the germans spoke of how the jews had control and supremecy and it had to ended
whats the difference here?
and your angry that i just am going to sit and watch?
why? obviously i been told i am witless and that this is not relevant
so ok… its not.. i accept it..
pass the popcorn
You say, “OK Boomer.” I say Boomer Sooner.
Or, Boomer Sooner Chant. 🙂
Which recalls the OU President, when appearing before the state legislature, who said, “I would like to build a University of which the football team could be proud.” Coincidentally, the father of one of my former employers was a starter on several of the Bud Wilkinson teams that won 50+ straight back in the 1950s. Both father and son were entrepreneurs. My boss was very bright, so I would have to assume that his football-playing father was also very bright. So much for the dumb jock stereotype.
and
and as a finale
see? i have no rights.. and no say
so why cant i have my popcorn and be left alone?
and why cant i have it buttered?
oh.. those quotes are from the same page that is linked in the post above it..
sorry… blaming the wrong people..
your blaming the victims of the older people..
age and treachery outdoes youth and enthusiasm
the Peace movement was metered by russia, they admit it, its in their papers, they are proud of it… the free love? that was first in russia with Kolontai.. Sex ed? that was Kuhn government..
but you call 1968? yes, that was the year of the sexual revolution… (not singing revolution, the velvet revolution, the orange revolution, etc… before today, you and everyone focused on the sex part, and saw revolution as a synonym for change, and not that this was an actual revolution. ALL revolutions are cultural!)
the official years of the boomers: 1946 – 1964
Birthdates
Ayers was born: December 26, 1944
Betty Naomi Goldstein Friedan: February 4, 1921
[Hyphenated names of the rich women a bitch?]
Jerry Rubin: July 14, 1938
Abbie Hoffman: November 30, 1936
Paul Krassner: April 9, 1932
Franz Boas: July 9, 1858
Margaret Mead: December 16, 1901
Alfred Kinsey: June 23, 1894
Jack Kerouac: March 12, 1922
League for Industrial Democracy (LID):
Founded by as a successor to the Intercollegiate Socialist Society in 1921
Bob Dylan: Robert Allen Zimmerman: May 24, 1941
Timothy Leary: October 22, 1920
David Dellinger: August 22, 1915
John Froines: 1939
Lee Weiner: September 7, 1939
Michael Harrington: February 24, 1928
Tom Kahn: September 15, 1938
Most of the people your upset about doing things were not boomers
their victims were the boomers
Got a beef? Take it up with this guy: Isidore Marie Auguste François Xavier Comte, 1798–1857
Such a pathetic crowd that use this phrase and adopt this attitude. If my behaviors, as an older white male, upset or offend you then, well, that’s on you. Suck it up buttercup.
Strauss & Howe (The Fourth Turning, generational theory, coiners of the terms “Millennial” and “Silent”) count the Boomer generation not according to the pure demographic bulge of 1946-64, but rather according to generational attitudes and childhood experiences, which come out to 1945-1960.
I was born in 1965 so I’m a GenXer either way you count it. But a friend of mine born in 1961 had a very different growing up and adolescence than his brothers just two or three years older — when he got to high school, suddenly out were the days of easy drugs and free love, and in was the War on Drugs and the dangers of STDs.
And Cameron, those are all good points. All of which have been standard issue opinions of every GenXer I’ve ever met for at least the last thirty years, but sandwiched between the Most Narcissistic Generation and the Second Most Narcissistic Generation, nobody pays attention to us. Sigh.
huxley:
That “rain down” in “Paranoid Android” made me think of Edith Sitwell’s poem, “Still Falls the Rain”, about the bombings of Britain in 1940, a truly tough time to be alive:
As a Boomer I’ll pass on what my Greatest Generation parents often told us kids:
‘Wait until YOU have children!’
Here’s a great new book,
“Eat What You Want And Die Like A Man: The World’s Unhealthiest Cookbook,” and to partially quote the Amazon writeup–
“Eat healthy and live to be 100? Screw that. Why choke down bland, mushy, steamed veggies and brown rice when there’s so much fat-laden, calorie-rich, heart-bursting cuisine out there to be savored? Because you want to live? So you can spend your golden years wandering aimlessly around a Florida shopping mall and eating dinner at 2 in the afternoon? So your rotten kids can plop you into some hellhole of a nursing home the minute you forget what day it is? Go ahead, triple your cholesterol and triglyceride counts, and clog those arteries. You’ll never get out of this world alive, so enjoy life while you can
See https://amzn.to/32yqvB4
Given that we are 20% below replacement, and pets outnumber children, that might be a problem…
Ann: Thom Yorke, the main songwriter for Radiohead, went to a fancy British prep school (called public schools over there, though I’ve never penetrated that mystery) where he met the rest of the Radiohead members. He wanted to study English at Oxford, but didn’t make that cut … however, he does have a university education.
Which is to say, Yorke may well know the lovely Sitwell poem you quote.
However, we do know for certain Yorke is a hard left fan of Eric Hobsbawm and Noam Chomsky. Hence, the hard left politics of “Ok Computer,” however moronically expressed.
Eat What You Want And Die Like A Man…
Snow on Pine: I wonder if that’s a back-handed reference to Henry Miller’s “Paint As You Like and Die Happy”?
It’s not well-known but Henry Miller painted regularly, mostly water colors, throughout his life. He made no claims to greatness, but his works are accomplished in their way and quite charming.
The book is a real shot in the arm for anyone working creatively.
Strauss & Howe (The Fourth Turning, generational theory, coiners of the terms “Millennial” and “Silent”) count the Boomer generation not according to the pure demographic bulge of 1946-64, but rather according to generational attitudes and childhood experiences, which come out to 1945-1960.
Brian Lovely: I was intrigued by Strauss & Howe’s theory in the early 2000s, but things didn’t seem to go their way. America was supposed to hit a transformative crisis in which the Millennials would reprise the Greatest Generation in the Depression/WW II and pull us through under the enlightened leadership of the best of the Boomers.
In S&H’s accounting Millennials were born 1982-2004, so if they are going to be a Greatest Generation they had better get on the stick.
I did like S&H’s generational scheme in the broad cyclical sense that one generation scratches stuff together, the next makes it solid, then the next generation enjoys the prosperity and squanders, then the next gets by somewhat cynically on what’s left.
Then the world goes smash, and the next generation scratches stuff together…
With that in mind, I truly don’t believe any other generation would have handled the beautiful high noon of prosperity Boomers inherited any better. We weren’t stupid; we were human.
@huxley: Yeah, I’ve been trying to figure out what event would herald the S&H “Crisis” ever since 9/11. It’s fanwanking, but I’m willing to allow that maybe generations are living longer so the cycles are longer?
On the other hand, I sure read a lot of articles and blog posts re: “things are reaching a breaking point between the two camps, and we don’t know how it’s going to come out nor what America will look like when it’s done”. Which is pretty much exactly how S&H describe the “Crisis”.
I think we’re in it now, and maybe the Millennials led by the Boomers aren’t the obvious “good guys” this time like the Greatest+Progressive generations were in the Depression/WW2.
Oh, and in 100 years historians will be arguing over “what provoked the early-21st-century crisis” the same way that we argue now over what provoked the Civil War crisis. But back then I suspect it was too diffuse for anyone to realize they’d hit the point of no return without benefit of hindsight, and I suspect the same is true today.
huxley: I never have had a good ear for mushed-up lyrics in pop songs, and unless I had some reason to think the writer might be saying something worth the trouble, I didn’t bother to try figuring it out.
Mac: Thom Yorke has his faults but singing indistinctly isn’t one. If you don’t care about lyrics, you don’t care about lyrics and bully for you. Nonetheless Yorke is quite serious about what he sings, however stupidly his lyrics hit my brain.
I’ve read and written poetry since I was 20. So it’s natural for me to listen to rock lyrics with some care. The big bands are big because they are damn good across the board and that includes the lyrics they choose.
As opposed to much contemporary poetry, it’s not that hard to figure out the basics of rock lyrics. I find the puzzles fun. But rock music isn’t nearly as much about lyrics as music, so lyrics are optional. Most people don’t bother and that’s OK.
huxley,
Not that I am apart of this conversation, but to this day, one of my many peculiarities is I loathe both poetry and modern music with lyrics.
I love and prefer symphonies and musical movie scores and instrumental covers of songs. But I really don’t like words getting in the way of me enjoying music. One exception is if the song is in a language that I don’t speak. I was once fluent, back in my teens and twenties, in Dutch, French and Cantonese. So, if I hear music in any language other than those and English, I might actually like it.
I don’t know why this is or where it comes from but my parents tell me I’ve been this way since being a small child. And it happened around the time they discovered my sensitivity to the feel of certain fabrics, like denim, which makes my skin crawl.
Bryan Lovely on November 10, 2019 at 11:45 pm said:
Oh, and in 100 years historians will be arguing over “what provoked the early-21st-century crisis” the same way that we argue now over what provoked the Civil War crisis.
well, unlike us here, those people WILL read the history texts and historical things i been trying to get you to read to understand it. their being dispassionate they wont have any reason not to if they are free enough to have access.
your all missing validated data, which the people in power and our state and their states have not only acted on, but found out to be true enough to act on
but they are limited in their actions because the people are dense and do not want to know, and so, cant support them in their efforts..
it wasnt too long ago, that we had no belief how bad the swamp was, because they kept their behavior within the bounds of ambiguity, and we keep our discussions to singluar elements that are not put together.
kind of like the 10 blind men each touching a different part of an elephant
and then wondering why they have no idea what it is they are examining!!
refusal to accept information that people actually used
refusal to read the books they actually read
refusal to study the systems outside the state
refusal to learn how those organs of action work
the general reason is that to not refuse is to have to accept a world even more scary and uncertain than they think it is when they ignore it!!!!!!
we endlessly discuss kennedy… ok… but do we accept that Russia from their own files, using writer Mark Lane to disseminate them (which he denies)
or that when we use the pejorative McCarthyism, we usually wrongly attribute HUAC to him, and are using the term created by one of the spies from a book they wrote about their innocence?
Here is a short list of what has been confirmed and we do NOT discuss, preferring to read entertainment as real, and ignore archives, and other things (like the commissions of four or five countries who then acted on information)
Forged letter from Lee Harvey Oswald to E. Howard Hunt, attempting to incriminate Hunt in the Kennedy assassination
Discrediting the CIA using the ex-CIA case officer and defector Philip Agee
Spreading supposedly unconfirmed rumors that the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was a homosexual.
Attempts to discredit Martin Luther King, Jr. by placing publications portraying him as an “Uncle Tom” who was secretly receiving government subsidies
Stirring up racial tensions in the United States by mailing bogus letters from the Ku Klux Klan, by placing an explosive package in “the Negro section of New York” (operation PANDORA), and by spreading conspiracy theories that Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination had been planned by the US government
Fabrication of the story that the AIDS virus was manufactured by US scientists at the US Army research station at Fort Detrick. The story was spread by Russian-born biologist Jakob Segal.
that last one they actually apologized for, and is very active in the black community with a variation that it was created to kill the blacks…(and others imagining the movie plot that they came up with it to kill gays)
there are two versions of operation PANDORA… and you have to get past the army of false information and false conclusions to read about the actual details… anything sensitive that they are connected to, has a large army of conspiracy theorists to keep reasonable people from reading the actual information!!!!!!!!!!
So when you look it up, IF your not discerning, you will find every piece of wack job crap around it precisely that it hides the information that IS good… and scares away people, preserving its invisable status
they have easily learned you can do anything you want, you only have to then use people and press to promote crazy around it, and voila… what happens never happened or doesnt matter any more..
[note that they mix up MKUltra stuff, with american stuff, and pandora, so that you cant make sense of it unless you read the archives and realize that the added information has no validity, and is quite limited to other things!!!!!!!!!]
here is a quick example..
the Mitrokhin Archive archive facts have been verified as much as they can
One american politican of note said without it, we would not know our own history
so…the Mitrokhin Archive has notes as to Pandora from the KGB… now… IF you try to find more information and look to the web… here is what you find that has NOTHING to do with the KGB and instead, like Manju or Art Decco, twists things around..
the above is part of active measures to hide active measures made public
the tin hat thing came from the MK-Ultra tests… in this case taking a MASER. a laser in microwave frequency
if you shoot the maser at someones head, it will cause heat to expand water, which expands bone
and like the laser pointers activating Siri, a maser can induce audio through bone conduction
THIS is where tin hat comes from. people who are mentally ill, believe in their own self importance
that a government would want to spend the resources it wouldnt spend on a murder investigation
to put voices in their heads to control their behavior…
one part of that above is very valid…
the other part of it is crackpot city..
the crackpot city, hides the valid by scaring away people who are not crackpot a
and who do not want to be labled that way
ie. if you know about the actual tests of mkultra, and the papers, and you dont believe your that important because your one of literally millions who read it, and have no important anything about you, and its just a test, someone like Manju, or Art Decco can call you wacko, or other names and turn people around you to force you not to discuss the factual part sans the crazy conclusions
this is the psychology part of active measures… using human individual psychology and the knowlege of group psychology to set up a dynamic that is useful on several levels… it works very well, and there are a lot of funky schools around the world, not just the KGB but in the USA and UK and Germany, in which this ‘art’ is disseminated.
in some cases you can read these books, and learn from them..
if you were green beret (for real) some of these books are on your table
because movies focus on your fighting… not the side of the job where you create groups
of resident people to join you in the fight and be your mini army and a force multiplier
huxley: Actually I care a whole lot about lyrics, and for the most part only pop artists with really good lyrics make my personal “best of” (e.g. Leonard Cohen). But for whatever reason, the lyrics of Ok Computer weren’t immediately clear to me. Maybe it’s more the mix than the singing itself, I don’t know. Haven’t heard it for a while. And for whatever other reason, I didn’t make any effort. From what you quoted it sounds like that was just as well. However, now I’m curious and will listen to the album again (I am still one of those who mostly listens to whole albums).
Maser
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maser
now the funny thing is that we believe the energy in microwaves from the phone cause cancer… Actual science or active measure point to make people dislike technology and be more like a luddite against economic progress?
i dont know… while i know the tech and what it can do, there is absolutely no reason to think about it other than as a curiosity, at least on any kind of mass scale… do note that the american public has access to a hell of a lot of fun technology that is sold in large amounts for people to play with and they have often found things they come across this way..
Directed-energy weapon
A directed-energy weapon (DEW) is a ranged weapon that damages its target with highly focused energy, including laser, microwaves and particle beams. Potential applications of this technology include weapons that target personnel, missiles, vehicles, and optical devices
the funny thing is that we all know about the effect of hearing AM radio in your teeth, or braces!
i dont believe you can hear FM, though they keep saying as all AM needs is a diode to rectify and some metal oxids on a metal base can act as such… think of the old hobby of making radios from some wire, a razor blade and cats wiskers (not real cats its just a term)
its just a sad side of our prior politics…
The project (MKUltra), which was officially halted in 1973, aimed to identify and develop mind-control drugs and procedures to be used in interrogations and torture in a bid to force confessions and control behavior.
about all that really came from it and its disclosure was a huge boon to the soviets and others in discrediting and embedding a self hate towards our own state.. it really didnt succeed in much… LSD did not work for interrogations… a few people died… the MASER stuff was thought to be something you might do to a world leader at a distance to shake them, but not all that practical (lots of water in the air causes beam divergence)
The CIA admitted to running the covert operation during congressional hearings in the 1970s, but claimed all records relating to it had been destroyed.
and here is where the wacky plane takes off… anything we know beyond the above comes from someone who claims to have found such records misfiled in financial records… if that sounds fishy, it should… its a reasoning that will get ignored or latched on to as perfectly valid, which then allows for the rest of the bait to be swallowed
here is from the UK press..
the above just doesnt fly… does it? even more so when you realize that they could ask soldiers to volunteer and do the same thing without adding more to the nefarious plots…
but why do all that? well, the game is accuse your opposition of doing what you do, right?
well, its well known that Russia has organs of state that have been around for 100 years that are charged with doing this, and we have seen the outcome of their work, have known defectors that showed it, and even had two assassins who got away with their murders, turn sides, and show us the tools (you can see them in the museum now!!!!!). The chinese sell organs of those condemed to die, so russia and china have things they can experiment on, and so does north korea..
there is no way to equalize this, other than gin up this one incident to ridiculous proportions
and then all of it, the truth and the wacko, is ignored..
Art: “Most of the people your upset about doing things were not boomers
their victims were the boomers”
You make a good point there. However, it seems clear to me that the “students” of the people you list learned quite well from the people you listed. My point is that they have carried on, to our despair, the plan. One bit of evidence: who did Hillary write her thesis on? Hoffman, Leary et al may not have been technically Boomers, but it certainly was the Boomers that soldiered on.
One bit of advice Art, not that you will take it: you really are not superior to the rest of us, try to be a bit less condescending and maybe more people will listen to your viewpoints.
I think we’re in it now, and maybe the Millennials led by the Boomers aren’t the obvious “good guys” this time like the Greatest+Progressive generations were in the Depression/WW2.
Bryan Lovely: Could be. I keep thinking things will wind down, but so far, not so much. The next 12 months aren’t going to be easy,
I think we’re in it now, and maybe the Millennials led by the Boomers aren’t the obvious “good guys” this time like the Greatest+Progressive generations were in the Depression/WW2.
The cohorts who provided the manpower to fight the 2d World War (roughly those born after 1904 and before 1928) weren’t en bloc all that consequential during the Depression except perhaps as young voters or subaltern employees. Harold Stassen (1907-2001) and Lyndon Johnson (1908-1973) were prominent pols during the Depression and Paul Nitze (1907-2004) already prominent on Wall Street but you’d have to scrounge to find too many other examples.
Dear Neo:
Long agio I was “diagnosed” by a very close friend and film colleague as “possessing an Over Sensitive Gag Reflex for Bullshit.”
Guilty then; Guilty now.
You Dear Neo, are diagnosed with it as well!! Thank God.
physicsguy yup..
ie… we are blaming the kids who were raised to trust their elders and not the elders that were entrusted with them, and who had ulterior motives for themselves and what was often very wealthy very connected family and parents..
Silas Bissell was a member of the weather underground..
Silas Trim Bissell was born April 27, 1942. Bissell’s father, Wadsworth, was the grandson of the founder of the Bissell carpet sweeper company. Silas’ mother, Hillary, was a Marxist-civil rights activist and encouraged her son to be the same. Bissell went to the University of Michigan, where he was awarded three Hopwood Awards for poetry. He fell in love with Judith Emily Siff, a New Yorker and they later married
Because they were a married couple in a movement that perceived the practice of monogamy as bourgeois, the Bissells were challenged by the members of Weatherman to prove their dedication. Their chance came on January 17, 1970, after being asked to place a bomb at the University of Washington.
They placed a home-made bomb under the steps of the University’s ROTC building. It did not go off because the Bissells made mistakes with the wiring. They were captured by the campus police almost immediately, making them think they had been framed by the members of Weatherman.
I do NOT believe his wife’s statements any more than i would Ethel Rosenberg
over and over if you take a DETAILED look and have any sense, you would wonder why these wealthy successful and old money families with lots of connections would want a political system that would take all they ahve and turn them into serfs? Bella dodd figured things out and nearly lost her life (another person we wont cover in detail), pointing out that she wondered why she was told to contact people living permanently at the waldorf astoria if she lost contact with her group…
the women of the wealthy are the ones who use the other women as in the chatecisms rules, and so, drive the Vapid and others to their own doom..
even the british wealthy had the chance to move out of the way of the bombs if they so wanted!!!!
would it be any different? if epstein was alive, you can imagine him and his friends hanging out on the island till the noise died down
One bit of advice Art, not that you will take it: you really are not superior to the rest of us, try to be a bit less condescending and maybe more people will listen to your viewpoints.
I never said i was…
what i said is i dont sleep much, and have spent 40 years reading what others dont, and know what others dont..
i have an eidetic memory for facts… do you? that alone would say… my memory is superior to yours
its even considered superior to the gifted on the tests.
if you had 4 hours a day more to live without sleeping, what would you do with 30 years of such?
i study… its how i got into Bronx science early…
and actually its more like 50 years… but 30 is only 31,800 EXTRA hours that others dont have
4 years of 24 hour days.. 5.44 years of 16 hour waking days
I make 6 figured with no degrees, played at Lincoln center, signed as a top fashion photographer, won a clio award in advertising, and design and invent solutions for fun.. My tested and validated IQ is 185.
can you do that? should i hide it? there is more… a lot more..
neo wont let me show any of it as any kind of validity…
but what would YOU do to hide it when thats all you have, and you have very few friends..
and i learned EARLY on, there was no way to do what your saying and participate without holding back
and holding back helps who? if you dislike someone, they are arrogant… if you like them, they are admirable..
what would you suggest i do? pretend i dont know to appear more humble?
lie to make us more equal?
you realize that there are people who ARE more capable, better, and more able
the mistake you make is that you think that i think that means something
what DOES it mean?
well, it means i have few friends – i lack contemporaries having not going to college like my sister
it means i did not get the girls, except for much older women who were brain groupies
it means i live a very lonely painful disconnected life in which what i have i cant share (thanks!)
it means i am frustrated as people who cant do what i do, have paper, and so can pretend to
it means i have been cleaned out by people who saw my potential and stole it..
it means that i have to deal with a lot of peoples ego issues, who go out of their way to take me down and peg, even if they hurt themselves doing it
it means i learned to fight and fight hard.. nose broken 7 times, ribs broken, held down and had most of my fingers dislocated by people who are what? equal? once had my red hair pulled out… they threatened my closest friend as a child to get me someplace… thats when they held me down and tried to kill me with a brick.
i have been stabbed too…
my life got a lot better AFTER i decided to be ME
after i decided that i wasnt going to let people with idiot opinions help me with dumb ass ideas they were told
after i decided to let it all hang out, and found that there are people who are not threatened by what i have
and that there are other people that admire it, and can rent it
you want to know what it would cost you to have my 185 IQ, my expertise, and all that just like me
be my friend.
currently i know english, spanish, french… some latvian, russian, slovak
my wife is indonesian so i am learning bahasa…and mandarin and cantonese
my programming languages are cobol, cobolII, java, c, c+, c++, C#, cold fusion, micro to mainframe assembler, verilog for electronics… mssql databases, oracle databases, cloud… lisp, AI… high level of mathematics
one of my papers that would never get published is on the physics of space time cavitation of electrons
thats what i do for fun
but yet… i dont think that makes me better than you
it makes me better at those things and other things than you probably
i was a member of prometheus… meaning there are only about 100,000 people on the planet with my level of thinking
and guess what.
its all a waste…
there is no way to show it
and if you think harvard and yale like me, go jump in a lake
i am their competition
and bosses hate me… cause i may take their job (i dont want)
i wish neo would let me show some stuff
but i have been attacked before from online
the funniest thing about your comment is that i would have to have such a great theory of mind so as to be able to pretend to be something else.. i would have to know waht to pretend i dont know, what to pretend would expose me, and more..
there is no way to do it
i would if i could..
just so i could go have some beers, and play pool again
in my younger days, i would do drugs to make myself slower to accomplish what you requested… i was more popular among what crowd though?
in older days i was popular with the brains for giving them answers and helping them, and beating the shit out of the assholes that tormented them!!! being 6’2″ and about 225, and growing up in an inner city ny slum. high crime, high violence… been a bouncer at one time for extra cash…
again… i have no idea how to do what your saying..
you probably dont either.. you probably just want what annoys you to stop
but each person will focuson a different annoyance
when they are done… what remains is something they dont want either
so.. to quote doc of the bay
I cant do what 10 people tell me to do, so i guess i will remain the same
by the way… i remember things the way sheldon does and wanted to be a physicist like sheldon, but feminism decided otherwise.. (sister has 6 degrees you helped pay for, but is above average)
i had a college level reading ability by 7 years old..
i am 55 now… i can read a 200 page book in two days
and everthing i read i remember… which is how i can point out so much here
how do you hide that?
i play 5 musical instruments.. my my two cousins were better, they went to juliard, and i turned juliard down ,as i gave up music at 13 finding it boring and wasnt the type to have people fawn over me like a circus poodle
at 8 i built one of those huge model ships with all the trim and sails on it
by 9 i had a pass so i didnt have to go to class any more..
the teachers couldnt teach me more..
i had a physics teacher that was great..
she would compllain i would eat like a horse in her class and read books
then one day she called my parents in, to have a conference..
she said… this is a go at your own class… your son is driving me nuts
if he would have taken the tests one after another, he would not have to attend my class being done in the first month… why doesnt he do that?
my parents said why are you asking us, why not ask him
i said… because if i do that, i would be alone and the other kids would try to torture me more…
she never said a thing again..
you might think as to things too..
you obviously dont get what its like to have gifts that make people hate you a lot
and not be able to connect with them
most of the time i have to memorize their false information so i can be on the same page as them and figure out what theirs is, so i can be as wrong as they are together.
you try that sometime…i did it for 15 years to hold my job.
exhausting… because no one would let me work without paper to the top of my ability… no one even believes i have that ability… nor will let you show it
when i was a kid. they set up cameras in the class and had me under a microscope like a bacteria trying to figure out how to makemore of me
i learned to distrust people becausse the young people doing social psychology and gifted psychology would become my friends and we would get close… but the minute they got what they wanted from me, they were gone, and the 9 year old was left alone
in the past two years… no one has called me to chat or hang out
what can we talk about? physics? quantum electrodynamics? the many universes? cant do art work, i am not an oppressed woman with a story which is what art is about and the galleries are about now…
right now..
i wish i could solve YOUR problem
i wish i never woke up
every day for decades i wish i would not wake up
not because i want to die
but because i want to make the people i love happy
they are so unhappy… everyone wanting me to be what they imagine themselves would be if they had my skills, and personality, which is how i got to do those amazing things… not holding back..
so say a prayer
pray tomorrow i dont wake up
the world will be a better place, i guarantee it
as my lifes work is going into the trash anyway
my ideas and solutions are going there anyway
i just find it a waste to have me around and making others unhappy for having answers they dont have, or fixing things they cant fix or going places and doing things they think they cant do.
ever try to teach a pig to sing?
it really really annoys the pig, and frustrates you..
which is what happened when they decided to put a kid like me in a room of 42 sociopaths that killed one teacher and put more in the hospital, and thinking in their pedagogy, i would somehow make them into well behaved Einsteins.
you have no idea
so say that prayer, and i will agree
there is no reason, no reason all to be
i have read three SETS of brittanicae
i read one whole set of funken wagnals
i have read the big oxford english dictionary about 9 inches thick from cover to cover
more than 6 bibles
the koran, and the hindu vedas
i have studied US history, when that ran out, european history, when that ran out, russian history, when that ran out, ancient history..
i have read everything that marx and engels wrote, and the other side too
i have read all 9 volumes of gramsci prison books
i have read all of stalins works
the complete works of 2 cannons
then i turned to law… my three favorite lawbooks
the nature and functions of law – berman and grenier
civil procedure cound friedenthal, miller and sexton
the law and ethics of lawyering
i have read most of the congressional record
i have read all scientific american issues from the first one up to about the 1990s
then stopped cause i couldnt take their change to socialism
i have read most of the required books of the feminists..
i read service manuals, and text books… which i used to get cheap when barnes and noble had the college store in manhatten. i would stand outside and wait for kids to come back with their books, and ask what they were selling… and tell them i would pay them a few bucks more than the store would to have them cheaper…
my family when i was young would bring their college texts home and give them to me as a child… reading them from cover to cover..
i taught myself latin and chaucerian english (what a waste and lost most of it)
when run out of a section of the library, i would move on to another section
this included teaching the blind to use the kurzweil reading machine
and self teaching electronics so i can build my ideas that no one believes and test them so i know thye work
but i cant sell my ideas or convince others
how? i dont know how to promote myself so i can do those things and enjoy life
i am the guy everyone loves to hate
When I dropped my kids and the neighbor’s kids off at school, I would always say” Work hard and tell me a new thing your learned at school when I Pick you up.” Most of the other parents sneered at me and were saying things like “Have fun, today”. Today my son is a satellite engineer and my daughter is in the finance department of a major trading company. Both have been off budget for years. Both paid for their own masters programs. Both are fiscally prudent.
As a group we didn’t help the next generation build resiliency by advising them to follow their dreams, by agreeing to participation trophies in competitive sports, by failing to insist on excellence in all their school projects, by not holding them accountable for their actions.
When Boomers were kids, we were afraid of the atomic bomb. We had air raid drills at school where they taught us to duck and cover in the auditorium, as if coats over our heads would protect us from a nuclear blast.
My school gave out pamphlets on how to construct and stock a bomb shelter in the basement. I still have mine. At least that gave us something proactive to do, plus, it was a fun way to play house.
Now children are being taught they’re all going to die, in as little as a few months, because of global warming —and it is all the Boomer generations fault. The only hope to save the future is by accepting global totalitarian communism NOW, which is unrealistic.
But, possibly a more realistic way to stop global warming would be nuclear war, because it would cause a global nuclear winter… duck and cover to save the planet.
The Unique Challenges of Gifted & Creative Adults
Gifted Adult Challenges, Problems & Difficulties
Gifted, talented and creative adults face unique challenges, problems and difficulties while living their lives because of their high intelligence, over-excitabilities and multiple abilities.
Gifted, Talented & Creative Adults need:
multiple sources of stimulation for their curiosity, talents and abilities
a safe environment in which they can fully be themselves
to feel understood, accepted, respected and valued by others
to understand themselves, their needs and their gifts
to be involved intellectually, emotionally, artistically with others who think, feel and act as they do
a variety of outlets for the expression of their interests, talents and abilities
to have and build supportive connections
to develop ways to further personal, professional and creative growth and development
to identify, understand and meet their intellectual, creative, social and emotional needs throughout their lives
to understand the problems and challenges they face when their intellectual, creative, social and emotional needs are not identified, understood or met adequately.
When the intellectual, creative, social and emotional needs of Gifted, Talented & Creative Adults are denied or are not identified, understood or adequately met, gifted adults are at high risk for a variety of personal, relationship and career challenges, problems and difficulties.
When the daily lives and relationships of gifted adults do not include enough opportunities for the utilization of their multidimensional gifts, talents and abilities, Gifted, Talented & Creative Adults will experience a variety of ongoing personal, relationship and career challenges, problems and difficulties.
Gifted talented and creative adults and others need to know and understand that unless gifted adults can relate to, believe in or love the activities they are engaged in, they will
most likely lose their equilibrium
become off balance physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.
have nagging doubts about themselves, their abilities and their competencies
engage in self blame and self doubt
overwork and have a tendency to burn out
not enjoy life, work or relating
have a tendency to isolate themselves when their usual practice would be to be more social
suffer from feelings of not doing enough or being enough
escape into other activities but experience no relief from doing so.
The Problem With Being Gifted
Even the gifted need these three things to succeed.
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Psychologists who study gifted children are familiar with the following scenario: A child is referred to their school psychologist because of “behavioral problems in the classroom,” problems that often include descriptions such as “inattentiveness,” “sass,” and “outbursts.” Following a battery of tests, the school psychologist reports the surprising results. No, the child does not suffer from attention deficit disorder or oppositional defiant disorder. The child “suffers” from…giftedness.
Giftedness can be as much a curse as a blessing.
[except when its a curse, there is little sympathy or caring from others, there is a lot of you deserve it and shadenfreude!]
It depends a good deal on the environment within which that giftedness finds itself. To a harried teacher with lesson plans to cover before the bell rings, the seemingly incessant questions of gifted children can seem like a special kind of hell. Gifted children often find age-appropriate lesson plans boring because their cognitive skills may extend well beyond the schoolwork and lessons contained in those plans. On the playground, they can exhibit a trait termed an “unstoppable urge to create” by Dr. Joan Freeman, a specialist in the needs of gifted children. This “urge to create” makes it difficult for gifted children to simply “play by the rules.” Although they quickly learn the rules of a game, they just as quickly become bored with them and want to change them — frequently leading to consternation on the part of other children who often find solace and comfort in routine. As adults, the gifted can find the workplace, with its many rules and often rigid power hierarchy, a particularly stressful work environment.
[snip]
Research shows that these are perhaps the three most important factors:
1. Being with others who are like them. If you’ve ever watched the TV show “The Big Bang Theory,” you know the importance of this factor. The show’s main characters are brilliant male and female “nerds” who fit in just fine with each other and stand out like tarantulas on white bread everywhere else. No matter who you are, you need to feel there is a place you belong. A good deal of research indicates that gifted adults who are in frequent contact with other gifted individuals are more likely to feel belongingness and satisfaction, whereas those whose social environments do not include other gifted adults feel isolated and dissatisfied.
[i have no place where i belong at all.. might as well be on an island talking to a volley ball]
2. Education settings that challenge them intellectually. In one study, gifted adults who had participated in advanced placement courses in high school were surveyed 15 years after graduation. Eighty-five percent of participants described their academic experiences in advanced classes as positive, and 88 percent of participants indicated that they would support advanced placement for their children if it were recommended by the school. Another study compared successful and unsuccessful men who were identified as “geniuses” during childhood. Their results showed that, even among geniuses, educational achievement was the major determiner of success in adulthood.
[feminism and later social justice makes sure the above is not available to me either]
3. Not being treated differently. In her book Gifted Lives, Dr. Joan Freemen points out that once parents, teachers, and peers see that gifted children are advanced, then they start treating them differently. But, as she emphatically points out, they are advanced only in certain areas and are normal children in every other way. Just being labeled “gifted” can create emotional and social havoc. In one longitudinal study, over 100 children labeled “gifted” child were matched for age, sex, and socioeconomic status (SES) with two others in the same school class. The first matched child had an identical IQ score, and the second was chosen at random. The results showed quite startlingly that the group labeled “gifted” had significantly more emotional problems than the unlabeled gifted group during childhood. By 2005, the labeled and unabeled gifted groups (now in their 40’s) were not very different in life outcomes, but both groups were much more successful than the randomly selected group. The factors that predicted life outcome for the labeled and unlabeled gifted groups were hard work, emotional support, and a positive, open personal outlook.
[without contemporaries (see 1), there is no way to not be treated differently… what you see as showing off (because you cant do it) i see as sharing what i have openly with people i like… but without contemporaries, or friends i made in college i couldnt go to… there is no outlet for anything i do, there is no reason to do anything… other than what i need to do to survive and support family or friends… even my best friend has issues with what i know or dont know… if you DO know the answers, and you DO get them right, you better throw wrong ones in or else your a know it all… right? but all you want to do is share what you know with others as you find it interesting… and hope they do to… but they are guarding their ego, and your not… when ego gets bruised, the id goes a hunting (and the superego hides)]
you hit a sensitive spot… can you tell?
How Being A Gifted Kid Affects You As An Adult
https://www.bustle.com/p/how-being-a-gifted-kid-affects-you-as-adult-32168
it can really really suck
and it sucks more because most others think if you have X you get Y
but the truth is, X is not all that necessary to get Y
Dabrowski’s Theory and Existential Depression in Gifted Children and Adults
http://www.davidsongifted.org/search-database/entry/a10554
wow… cant even have normal depression but have existential depression
does that mean i can sing the existential blues? [yes i can]
Existential Blues
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nJ30dodvdc
oh boy!
Be kind to all you meet, for they too, like you are fighting a hard battle – Plato
others are more likely to say be someone else so you can be liked
but that is basically the same as, if you werent you, you would be more likeable
which makes it impossible to be liked for yourself
for me to be with someone 20 points lower, i would have to find a 165
https://www.britannica.com/science/human-intelligence-psychology/The-IQ-test
It has been common to attach labels to certain levels of IQ. At the upper end, the label gifted is sometimes assigned to people with IQs of 130 or higher. Scores at the lower end have been given the labels borderline retarded (70 to 84) and severely retarded (25 to 39). All such terms, however, have pitfalls and can be counterproductive.
so if your a smart average person with a 100 IQ..
how would you feel if most people around you are 80?
i feel really bad for maria vos savant… she is one in 190,057,377,928..
but she is married to another high iq person… jarvik
150IQ is about 1 in 2,330
160IQ is about 1 in 31,560
170IQ is about 1 in 652,598
175IQ is about 1 in 3,483,046
180IQ is about 1 in 20,696,863
185IQ is about 1 in 136,975,305
190IQ is about 1 in 1,009,976,678
without success and such, what do you do with what you have
you piss everyone off…. you do with ease what they struggle with
120? 1 in 11
even at bronx science i stood out before we moved, and i could pretend i was stupid
145? 1 in 741
as i said… better off dead…
have fun.
Long ago as it was, I still wake up and feel relieved remembering I’m not a kid and don’t have to go to school anymore! The whole sagging and falling apart thing I could do without, but whatever, yay!
Artfldgr – I appreciate your comments today.
Although I am not anywhere close to your intelligence or accomplisments level, I am smart enough to have discovered early in my school life that high IQ has no social payoff, outside of a few enlightened teachers and a very few peers.
A couple of my kids were in the same boat, and I ached for them in my heart during their public school years. College did allow them to associate with more students on their level, and they are doing well in their jobs (STEM of course), but there were times when I was afraid they would be lost before they could be saved.
One of my favorite books has a protagonist with the same kinds of problems that high-intelligence polymaths endure, during the 16th century Scots-English wars to boot. I still remember many “quotes” from it (although my memory is NOT eidetic, and sometimes I wish it was, but selectively so — contradiction in terms).
The passage that expressed his dilemma the most memorably echoes your situation:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/8361.Dorothy_Dunnett
Tribble on November 10, 2019 at 12:53 am said:
Folks, fairly early on, this story contained the phrases: “William Shatner”, “older angry white man”, and “shaking a fist in the air”. And not one of you posted:
“Khhhaaaaannnnnnn!!!”
What is wrong with you people???
* * *
“That does not compute.”
Robert Arvanitis on November 9, 2019 at 9:17 pm said:
Here’s the answer, from Second Hand Lions:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GKZt3I0v7U
Delivers not one, but two great quotes on meaning in life.
Well worth the three minute tuition.
* * *
One of our favorite movies, and you are absolutely right.
Fight’s kinda cool, too, even if it is just a movie.
Reminds me of Louis L’Amour’s books (what a great name for a writer of Westerns!) in doctrine and action.
Art,
Thanks for your explanation. I now understand much better where you are coming from. I apologize if I offended you.
Garrett Crawford on November 11, 2019 at 1:44 pm said:
…
As a group we didn’t help the next generation build resiliency by advising them to follow their dreams, by agreeing to participation trophies in competitive sports, by failing to insist on excellence in all their school projects, by not holding them accountable for their actions.
Esther on November 11, 2019 at 2:44 pm said:
When Boomers were kids, we were afraid of the atomic bomb. …
Now children are being taught they’re all going to die, in as little as a few months, because of global warming —and it is all the Boomer generations fault. The only hope to save the future is by accepting global totalitarian communism NOW, which is unrealistic.
* * *
Some time back, I read an interesting essay that suggested one of the psychological problems besetting the younger generation(s) is the lack of an actual, really-real existential crisis (as opposed to the current fictional ones), so that they don’t have to focus on accomplishment and accountability, although some of them do so anyway.
“First and foremost is that “generations”, however they are defined, don’t “do” anything. Only individuals do.” – Roy on November 10, 2019 at 12:49 pm
Although it’s important to have a way of talking about large groups of people in order to analyze historical events, we should resist assigning guilt or blame on top of that analysis, because that is invarially unfair to many of the individuals who constitute the groups.
It’s also a tactic of the Left and totalitatians in general.
(oops — those are groups!)
Artfdgr, I too appreciate your writings here. I struggle to keep up with many of them, through my deficient education, but I have learned from you and find that we agree on many issues. I am sorry you have had such tribulations from others and I admire your persistence. Thank you.
huxley, if you’re still reading this: I had an hour-long drive today so decided to put OK Computer in the cd player. It got to Paranoid Android, to the “Rain down…” part–and I did not understand a word between “Rain down” and “God loves his children.”
However, I’m embarrassed. I’ve never listened to this album except in the car, and the first few times it was a copied cd somebody burned for me. I did eventually buy the cd but never looked at the package–the lyrics are right there, printed in the cd booklet. Tiny print, but there.
But anyway: I realized I’ve treated the vocals on that album as basically another instrument. I got enough of the words here and there to get kind of a feel, and that seemed good enough. Having read the lyrics now, I think it was.
Mike Doran: “Vindman should be escorted out of the NSC immediately. Working at the White House is not a career; it’s a privilege. You serve at the pleasure of the president. You are there to help him make decisions according to how he wants to be helped, not how you think he should be helped.”
OleZeb replying to Doran: “Ok, boomer. Actually, shut up, traitor.”
Mac: Good for you — taking the steps to make up your own mind. You’re not wrong that Thom Yorke’s voice is another instrument. It is.
The title comes from the character of the depressed android, Marvin, from the “Hitichhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”
Artfldgr,
Please continue to post here. I hope you feel you are among good friends.
We may not always understand what you post. And if we do think we understand we may not agree with what you think.
But, I hope, we will always be considered your friends.
BTW, one of my sons is ‘gifted’ and none of us treated him any differently from each other. But one of my daughters did tell me she has him balance her checkbook when she gets hopelessly confused ‘by all those numbers’.
Nothing arouses suspicion quicker than genuine, all-round proficiency.
Well, good thing I’m crap at sports, then. 😀
Here is an excellently written essay that makes most of the same points as Artfldgr does in regard to feminism and a host of other topics that are all plaited together by history.
https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2019/10/24/where-does-the-impulse-to-vilify-america-and-the-west-come-from/
It seems to me this whole ‘generation’ concept is a mid 20th century construct and arose out of the rigid age stratification of modern schooling. We don’t hear descriptions such as the ‘Revolutionary, or Civil War’ generation. Although the closest thing to a unifying ‘generational’ definition would be living through or participating in such an historical event.
Althouse mentions this with Keanu Reeves having a 46 y/o girlfriend who has gray hair; doesn’t die it. Only 9 years younger. (My wife is 12 years younger and does die her hair – a lovely auburn.)
https://althouse.blogspot.com/2019/11/ive-been-thinking-about-aging-lot.html
She notes that age insults are insulting the future “you”; just like boomers did (muh muh muh My Generation) in the 60s.
To me, there have been throughout history, “spoiled brats”, who get too much, too easily, and are ungrateful for it. Taking the good for granted and complaining, sometimes bitterly & obsessively, about some particular bad.
The OECD post-WWI peace dividend, the richest “avg” humans in history, has resulted in a very spoiled group of young brats.
Negative interest rates are interesting, and mostly good. Far better to focus on more jobs than higher interest rates. See Miles Kimball, a big long-term proponent of breaking the zero lower bound, rather than what the Fed did with Quantitative Easing.
https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/2019/10/3/how-negative-interest-rates-affect-the-economy
just like boomers did
I think you mean the bourgeois segment of the Boomers. If you’re looking at the wage-earning majority, I doubt you saw much of that. Probably some dismay among the older generation in regard to their children’s propensity to repair to the divorce courts, some dismay about sexual misbehavior among young women, and some dismay in regard to aesthetics (grooming, popular music).
artfl – please get your own blog. Mine is free, easy to write, and few read it, but all are welcome to:
tomgrey.wordpress.com
Put all your stuff on your blog, then a short summary of the most important point here, with a link for those who are interested. Most links there, not here.
It’s not so hard to skip your stuff, after the first often confused paragraph, but the scrolling is a bit tedious. I’m not sure you realize it, but many think you are being RUDE, to Neo and to the other commenters here. You spend too much time writing, too much stuff each time, without even good punctuation. Did you notice that Neo respects her readers with good punctuation?
As a genius, you should know how to deal with normal, smarter than avg folk, like most who comment here seem to be. Your rudeness / obliviousness to the problems in your own writing make me doubt how practical your high IQ is. I have other genius friends; I’m not one. All have quirks. Stanford has an unofficial motto:
“If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?”
In my case, I didn’t come to Slovakia to get rich (and I’ve been VERY successful at that).
Wife & I have been enjoying The Mentalist (in Slovak), who’s a really smart modern Holmes type. There are lots of tough problems in the world, looking for solutions. How to get the respect so that your solutions are tried? Start small, and solve small tough problems.
Hardest problem for most smart folk – predicting the future. If you’re not smart enough to predict the future, all the knowledge is of much less value. “Intellectual superiority” and some cash will get you a coffee; we had many coffees that were more than $1.
I predict Trump will win 2020 (70%); and take the House (55%). These guestimates go down with recession or crimes by Trump; go up with indictments / arrests of deep state criminals (like McCabe, Comey, Brennan).
Go way down if there’s a recession.
Lots of “rocket scientists” got hired by Wall Street firms, to try to create methods for better future prediction.
Some of the OK Boomer derision is about how wrong so many boomer “experts” have been on so many things, so often.
It seems to me this whole ‘generation’ concept is a mid 20th century construct and arose out of the rigid age stratification of modern schooling.
I think more likely out of the discombobulaiton of the life cycle borne of affluence. I have some biographical sketches of my great-great grandfathers. Only one of them had any schooling past age 14, they all married women who were between their 20th and 25th birthday on the wedding day, and they’d all been working for at least 7 years when they married (one of the four 20+ years). An adolescent was a person who’d learned how to read, write, and sum and was earning his keep and learning his trade. Half-assed liberal education and rutting on the neighbors’ daughter weren’t on the agenda. (I imagine there was a certain amount of mischief among the young which involved liquor and games).
Art D – yes, mostly the future elite in colleges (& HS), who were avoiding fighting in Vietnam, and expecting a big college premium boost in income.
Which the boomer graduates mostly did get. But today’s college graduates are NOT getting, and they’re angry about it. Plus with debt and high housing costs.
https://unherd.com/2019/11/young-urban-graduates-the-real-left-behinds/
Plus so much music is so terrible; I’d be a bit angry too, that 60s & 80s both had so much great rock/pop music. With lyrics that could be sung in the car, or while drinking in a bar. And now, in Karaoke, a bit. Few modern hits tho, will last for 5 years.
I predict Trump will win 2020 (70%); and take the House (55%). T
He won’t and they won’t. I think if the Republicans play their cards right, they may end up with 52% of each chamber and Trump may win the electoral vote again. Vote fraud in California and other places I suspect will prevent a popular vote plurality.
Art D – yes, mostly the future elite in colleges (& HS), who were avoiding fighting in Vietnam, and expecting a big college premium boost in income.
They weren’t ‘avoiding fighting in VietNam’ unless they wouldn’t have attended absent a student deferment. If I’m not mistaken, it was the standard practice for college-bound youth during the period running from 1948 to 1964 to attend college first, then enlist on graduation. (Enlistment, not induction, was the modal way of entering the service). That continued during the VietNam War, though it’s a reasonable wager that convention and parental preference played less of a role in those decisions ca. 1967 and anxiety over military service more of a role than had been the case a dozen years earlier. NB, the majority of youths born after 1938 but but prior to 1955 did not have any military service at that time. Among the most vulnerable birth cohorts cohorts (1944-51), fewer than 20% had a tour in Indochina specifically.
TomGrey:
Artfldgr has had his own blog. Individuals can read his or your posts or just scroll by. It is Neo’s parlor/salon after all and her rules.
I had a high IQ friend who, although he was 12 years younger, became my programming mentor, then my friend. He was really good and I learned a ton from him. He always did more than his share of the talking and that was OK … to a point.
But over time, he grew worse, especially as his career prospects dimmed. He always felt the people around him were inferior, in particular the managers. He resented that they wouldn’t acknowledge how much smarter he was and take his word for everything. Needless to say, he lost some jobs.
Which was OK for a while. He got by on consulting jobs. Meanwhile he was working on his secret sauce technology which would speed up the web by 50% and make him millions. I listened to him for hundreds of hours on this. Fifteen years later he still didn’t have anything he could demo, even for me.
Then he started developing health problems — eye pain, stomach pains — that he wouldn’t see a doctor for. He couldn’t work and eventually went home to live with his parents.
I went to visit him and he showed me around his home city talking, talking, talking. I couldn’t get a word in edgewise, so I just stopped listening. By the end of the visit he decided I had become an unpleasant old man going senile. Obviously. He told me with sorrow about how worried he was about me and how I needed to get medical help.
But all that had happened was I just got tired of listening to his monologues and his attitude about how much smarter he was than everyone else, including me.
So we aren’t friends anymore.
Huxley, your friend sounds a LOT like one of mine, who I would run with — mostly listening to him talk. But my friend did produce a lot of good code, as well as make a fantastic tone arm for phonographs. He was and still is an audiophile. Now he’s chief scientist at a retail software company which predicts buyer behavior. We did have a falling out, but he came up to see me at the Grand Canyon from Phoenix. It was a fine day.
Art D, I’m not predicting Trump gets 70% of the vote, I’m saying my own Bayesian probability of him winning in 2020 is 70%. And while I do think Reps win a majority of the House, it’s a much closer 55% guess for majority, because I think even if they win it’s quite close, like you say 52% (-50.1%) they’ll just get slim majority.
om – are you meaning you don’t think artfldgr is being rude? Or perhaps you mean I’m being rude to mention it? (I did say please. Also how we can scroll by.)
Tom Grey: Sounds like your friend is in better shape than mine. Last I heard from his ex, he had made it back to the Bay Area and was working, though not likely as anyone’s Chief Scientist.
I was mystified by my friend. He seemed to have it all — high IQ, tall, handsome, charming, plus a beautiful middle-class upbringing. But it seemed like he never got past being the bestest little boy in the whole wide world.
The “wunderkind” thing works well in one’s 20s. Not so well in one’s 50s without some solid accomplishments.
Then I read a book on narcissism and my friend hit just about all the high points.
huxley — The Curse of the High IQ. Not everyone manages to resolve the difficulties of being very very smart in a socially-acceptable manner.
There has never been a better time to be alive almost anywhere on earth. The lack of perspective and gratitude for those that have come before is really astounding.
maybe you haven’t seen the metoo movement, Hollywood, college totalitarian star chamber courts, and transgender movements lately? People living in a bubble, really are boomers or at least more than one generation removed. Sorta like First World looking At African problems.
Bryan Lovely: My other two high IQ friends were pretty much narcissists too.
One was tall, handsome, artistic and All-State athletic but had a grim childhood with alcoholic parents and a Marine drill sergeant father who beat him regularly. The other was 5’5″ with a hare-lip. I understood their problems better than my friend above.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=484188615758513&external_log_id=754e0951bb7a829d7f7f157fe5111254&q=prince%20ea%20boomer
Prince Ea did an interesting thing about this. That is probably why it is going viral, and infecting twitter. The Earth is like a kind of Borg collective consciousness with social media.
But the phrase “OK Boomer” is both, and expresses the basic snarkiness that so often passes for argument these days.
At least it is a bare minimum of dialogue, compared to other conservatives shutting down opposing/alternative voices because they think “this is their house”. If given a choice between Youtube/Facebook shutting down topics and deleting posts and discussions, vs “snarkiness”, I think the latter is a lot more beneficial and or helpful. The idea that the “Authority” sets the rules and everyone has to obey, is exactly how America created Alphabet, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon etc.
A person’s mind is their own house but the principle of open argument and debate was not creating Fortress House and trying to treat all visitors as enemies that need to be shut down for the safety of the House. This is a trau
you really are not superior to the rest of us, try to be a bit less condescending and maybe more people will listen to your viewpoints.
That’s a little bit ironic coming from the person that thought winning an argument was telling the other guy to go get an education, and then later complaining how Leftists has made your educational institutions into sort of living hells.
But the newer generations are doing even worse so far, and have no cause for being condescending and dismissive.
That sounds like when the media and the mainstream looked down on Men’s Rights Activists and said they had no reason to be complaining about anything. Suppressing and gas lighting people who have suffered perceived attacks and traumas like this, always end up repressing the problem and blowing it up later. Which is something psychologists should know about, but they often act like it is somebody else’s problem.
Tom Grey on November 12, 2019 at 8:50 am said:
artfl – please get your own blog. Mine is free, easy to write, and few read it, but all are welcome to:
This is part of my memory but the last the time we talked about that with Art, he said that he started a blog and got harassed by Leftist feminists (that apparently he couldn’t attack the way he attacks me), so he learned not to mouth off at the world. Which is why his trauma causes him to mouth off at me or others here.
Also, Aesop, Art ful dodger is not a polymath. Ymar or Art Decor may be called a polymath. But that’s not important.
The whole of humanity has significant personal and ancestral traumas to resolve through. Intelligence vs “classes” of intelligence. Religious denominations vs other religious denominations (Protestant vs Roman Catholic vs Orthodox vs LDS Mormons vs Quakers vs Islam vs Armenians vs x vs y vs a vs b vs c…. on and on and on).
Transgender vs GLBT vs Male vs Female vs on and on and on it goes.
Black vs white vs yellow vs red… and on and on and on it goes for humanity.
Isn’t that right, humans.
As for Art’s intelligence, I told people before that it is above average yes… but only slightly. Anyone can do what he does, they just need to read a lot of books. To further develop his talents, Art would have needed a mentor like me early on in his life, and he did not get it. Instead, he chose a life of academia living with femi Nazis that were his superiors. So obviously he thinks all his bosses and other commenters here just like them, are idiots. He even likes calling me a moron, ignorant, or whatever other names his trauma triggers him to use.
Guess what, the Moron can capitalize his sentences but the Genius over there does not because… self change is more painful than calling feminazis bad names.
For those interested in a slightly more readable description of Outsiders.
http://prometheussociety.org/wp/articles/the-outsiders/
(Francis) “Versatility is one of the few human traits which are universally intolerable. You may be good at Greek and good at painting and be popular. You may be good at Greek and good at sport, and be wildly popular. But try all three and you’re a mountebank. Nothing arouses suspicion quicker than genuine, all-round proficiency.”
That makes an almost kind of weird sense. If you become too comptent at various fields, people consider you a “know nothing”, which is something I’ve seen directed at me all too often. It’s not even that I said anything about them or to them, or even attacked their pet theories. Just the existence of someone that seems to “know things” that are beyond their field, is like a threat to the ego and sense of self. They perceive this to be Ego or a mountebank/scammer.
People keep telling me to keep my Ego in check for talking about things I know, that they think isn’t in my field. The thing about polymaths is that they are created, it is not an inherent IQ born of genetics purely. There is no “field” to a polymath. A skill in healing and a skill in martial arts looks almost entirely the SAME.
Also, Neo, what you have been doing recently is basically the same as banning any topic that you don’t want to talk about. It interferes with your guest’s ability to talk about it as well with each other. Normally the rules of the House is for not just the benefit of the Host but also for the benefit of the Other/Self, the guest. To create arbitrary rules that benefit only the Host, such as Ravelry does, is the Service to Self path of the Left hand.
For example, if you just ban talk about O-Grady or Prometheus society, and then ban anybody asking you why you introduced a new rule about Grady and the P Society, and you shut it down with the justification “it is my house, I make the rules”, what does that actually look like psychologically?
A polymath that doesn’t understand and won’t accept the concept of being a guest in someone else’s house. Aka, a boor. A polymath that is a legend in his own mind, That’s “our” Yammer. I don’t think “polymath” means what he thinks it means. Inconceivable.
FYI: A bit more on the OK Boomer patrol:
Proclaiming that the meme marks ‘the end of friendly generational relations’, the New York Times reports that: ‘Now it’s war: Gen Z has finally snapped over climate change and financial inequality.’ The teenagers currently milking the ‘OK Boomer’ meme – in some cases, for money – are elevated to the status of prophets, engaged in ‘their own little form of protest against a system they feel is rigged’.
“The real meaning of ‘OK Boomer'”
https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/11/13/the-real-meaning-of-ok-boomer/
The Younger Generation has been telling the Older Generation, OK whatever, forever. And visa-versa.
Mr. America, walk on by
Your schools that do not teach
Mr. America, walk on by
The minds that won’t be reached
Mr. America, try to hide
The emptiness that’s you inside
But once you find that the way you lied
And all the corny tricks you tried
Will not forestall the rising tide
Of hungry freaks, daddy
–Frank Zappa, “Hungry Freaks, Daddy”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDE9MC3jnl0
There is now an “OK Boomer” anthem:
–Peter Kuli, “OK Boomer”
https://soundcloud.com/peterkuli/okboomer
One might make an invidious comparison between Frank Zappa and Peter Kuli. If Kuli is a good example of what young non-Boomers bring to the party, I’ll stick with Frank.
Ymarsakar:
I have already fully explained to you, many times, exactly why I don’t want someone to dominate the blog threads with comment after comment that is off-topic and on something that I have researched and decided is a fringe thing that doesn’t have basis in fact. If you disagree and want to talk about it, there are plenty of places to do so. And my other guests here who want to talk about it (I haven’t noticed that there are any, but you never know) can talk about it at those places as well.
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Quite the thread here. I haven’t studied each post to see if the point’s been made, just lightly skimmed. I think Fractal Rabbit came close to it. I apologize in advance if this is redundant.
These kids were built, not born, this way. We did make this. Decades and decades of “Stop talking politics, there’s cheesecake” have produced a generation of kids who feel pressured to have independent opinions, but don’t understand how to form them or how to coherently defend them.
So they put together “ironic…humorous…malicious” things like this. It’s fascinating in a way because they’re foreshadowing how the Internet will be used for commerce: Many share a common need, one assembles a package to meet the need, the package becomes a “meme” and many others use it for their own benefit. But it’s also sad because they’re showcasing not only their own ignorance, but their desire to hang onto it.
These kids were built, not born, this way. We did make this. Decades and decades of “Stop talking politics, there’s cheesecake” have produced a generation of kids who feel pressured to have independent opinions, but don’t understand how to form them or how to coherently defend them.
Sir, I could at one time have introduced you to a cum laude graduate of a Seven Sisters college who previously had finished in the top 3% of her high school class. She fit your description to a T. This is nothing new.
Perhaps what you were seeing was proof of how little the top 3% actually meant. If you’re saying grade inflation is an ancient problem, I’m on board.
If you’re arguing against any meaningful change having taken place lately, I dunno. Can’t use pronouns, woke this woke that, can’t sing “I feel pretty” in West Side Story. Here in California we get to see consequences. Potholes everywhere, no electricity on windy days…it has the look & feel of Atlas Shrugged being turned into an instruction manual.
Perhaps what you were seeing was proof of how little the top 3% actually meant. If you’re saying grade inflation is an ancient problem, I’m on board.
I take it you’re someone who fancies himself exceptional.
The top 3% means the same then as it does now. It’s a comparative measure. The ratio of Seven Sisters freshman enrollment to the size of the annual female birth cohort isn’t radically different now than it was then. After 1929, enrollment in high school was a great deal more common than it had been previously, so student bodies as a whole were less prepared than had been metropolitan high school students ca. 1925. That having been said, the composition of the high school in question was such that the academic pace was vigorous. Gentiles were a minority among those in that top 3%. She attended high school before loopy pedagagic fads had got hold of this nation’s teachers and school administrators and before criminal disorder had taken over urban schools. See Thomas Sowell on his time in high school vs. his nieces’.
She was an articulate woman whose interests tended toward the aesthetic side of life (opera, architectural history, the Philharmonic). She functioned well intellectually when a person in authority was setting standards and practices. Her teachers qualified as persons in authority, not her brother or her husband (who were continually frustrated with her).
Negative interest rates are interesting, and mostly good. Far better to focus on more jobs than higher interest rates. See Miles Kimball, a big long-term proponent of breaking the zero lower bound, rather than what the Fed did with Quantitative Easing. https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/2019/10/3/how-negative-interest-rates-affect-the-economy [TomGrey]
Tom — So he thinks something for which there is no evidence it ever before existed in 5,000 years of recorded human history — interest rates that give the borrower a positive return and the lender a negative one — is just a wonderful new “policy tool”? Huh.
Art Deco
Considers himself exceptional. A paragraph of statistics and rumination on educational history and society followed by one family anecdote that illustrates an individual that frustrated others.
Considers himself exceptional. A paragraph of statistics and rumination on educational history and society followed by one family anecdote that illustrates an individual that frustrated others.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EEVMxdFxh8
I take it you’re someone who fancies himself exceptional.
Well…it’s taken me an exceptionally long time to figure out what-causes-what.
I’m not sure how history and anecdotes are going to help us with this though. It’s true that “pedagagic [sic] fads ha[ve] got[ten] hold of this nation’s teachers and school administrators,” and those are other causes that go along with the one I’ve identified. I think at this point we’ve got more control of mine. Kids would rather say “Okay Boomer” than discuss anything with us, because so many among us don’t discuss anything.
Is it your purpose to demonstrate exactly how that works? I’m picking up a vibe that you’re attempting a brand of humor or irony that escapes me.
Is it your purpose to demonstrate exactly how that works?
No, my purpose was to point out that people who don’t think straight unless they are forced to by circumstance or badgered to do so by those in authority do not constitute a novel social type. I said nothing about their commonality over time, though, like other human failings, I imagine there is some ebb and flow over time periods and between countries.
Okay well I agree. I would even go much further and assert that that is the default. Humans are corruptible and corrupted. We get more time to do something, we slow down, we get more money to do something and we waste it. We’re afforded the luxury of surviving while thinking like a bunch of distracted airheads…we’re likely to do that, especially if we’re virginal to the experience of being forced to think in a more resilient way.
Which circles back to my primary point. Obviously we don’t pop out of the womb understanding how to provide foundational support for an argument, or how to skeptically inspect an argument someone else has presented. Now if this generation is waiting around and playing video games all YEAR until they finally sit at the Thanksgiving table with their Republican uncles and for the first time finally have to defend a position…and they can sidestep the whole thing with “Okay Boomer”…well…I guess there are no consequences.
Ever. Not until we hit that tipping point where the public debt can no longer be serviced and the USA turns into Greece. But even at that point, they’ll just blame…the boomers.
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