115th Congress - Fantastik! Try to remember we vote in November.

[unofan]

I have no doubt Gen Xers and Millenials will be as personally selfish as Boomers, who were as personally selfish as Great Gens, who were as selfish as the Lost Generation, and back into the mists of time.

Generational cross-comparisons are the ultimate in never being able to walk in someone else's shoes. What you have is a population responding to the circumstances of their time with a distribution of outcomes. Take the newborn babies of every age in history and substitute them for the Boomers at birth and you'd get the same general distribution. Switch the slave owners and the slaves at birth and you'd get the same general distribution of outcomes.

The moral comparison I am interested in is between people at a similar starting point exposed to similar conditions who produce very different outcomes based on their choices. A generation does not have "will," therefore it does not exercise choice, therefore criticizing it is basically criticizing stochastic processes. Collective identities are imaginary.

For someone who believes the GOP is a dying ideology, it sounds like you may be disappointed in that prediction.

Either millennials as a whole are the same as the Boomers, in which case the GOP will be around till the end of time, or they're not, in which case there are some differences in between the generations. Which is it?

[ScoobyDoo]

Re: 115th Congress - Fantastik! Try to remember we vote in November.

For someone who believes the GOP is a dying ideology, it sounds like you may be disappointed in that prediction.

Either millennials as a whole are the same as the Boomers, in which case the GOP will be around till the end of time, or they're not, in which case there are some differences in between the generations. Which is it?

One wonders. Kep may have painted the broadest and most defined picture of Doom ever painted in this forum.

[Kepler]

Re: 115th Congress - Fantastik! Try to remember we vote in November.

For someone who believes the GOP is a dying ideology, it sounds like you may be disappointed in that prediction.

Either millennials as a whole are the same as the Boomers, in which case the GOP will be around till the end of time, or they're not, in which case there are some differences in between the generations. Which is it?

1. I don't think the GOP is a "dying ideology." The core GOP ideology -- give aid to the powerful at the expense of the weak -- is eternal. The dying ideology is the rabid misogyny and racism that the GOP has stuck its blood funnel into as a convenience. Once that dries up they'll find some other food supply.

2. Millennials don't behave "the same as" Boomers because they grew up under different circumstances. What's the same is the base model under all that -- the nested bell curves of intelligence, ethics, and motivation that separate people out within their generation. The external pressures both form how those people will express those differences and also carve the landscape that helps some types succeed and others fail. Example: violence used to be a more evolutionarily successful way to resolve your problems than it is today, so Joe Rockhead had a place in that environment, whether it was murdering his neighbors (homicide rates in the west are 1/50th of what they were as recently as 100 years ago) or using his brute muscles in his work on the farm or in the mines. Today? Not so much.

3. Exploding the myth of generations has very little bearing in either direction on politics.

[Kepler]

Re: 115th Congress - Fantastik! Try to remember we vote in November.

One wonders. Kep may have painted the broadest and most defined picture of Doom ever painted in this forum.

Not at all. I never said nothing changes. I said people are the same clay as always, but the circumstances that shape them are changing all the time. Millenials aren't the same as Boomers. The point is to the extent they are different it comes down to forces that have nothing whatever to do with them, so all this "Boomers suck you ruined it for us" crowing is just another of the human brain's million ways of creating spurious hierarchies to put oneself atop of. It's vanity.

[Rover]

Re: 115th Congress - Fantastik! Try to remember we vote in November.

Anybody who can follow where Kep is going with all of this, please raise your hand. The rest of us...DRINK!

[ScoobyDoo]

Re: 115th Congress - Fantastik! Try to remember we vote in November.

Anybody who can follow where Kep is going with all of this, please raise your hand. The rest of us...DRINK!

He just wants to destroy my last refuge of sanity. Not surprising.

[Kepler]

Re: 115th Congress - Fantastik! Try to remember we vote in November.

Anybody who can follow where Kep is going with all of this, please raise your hand. The rest of us...DRINK!

It's all there for those who want to try to parse it. I can't judge whether it's coherent because I already know what I'm trying to say. It sure doesn't seem as if I'm communicating effectively, though.



Losing unofan gave me the shakes. He and LynahFan are my Reasonable Man standard for the Cafe, so if he's not getting it that's on me, not you guys.

[Handyman]

Re: 115th Congress - Fantastik! Try to remember we vote in November.

New polling out of Texas puts Democrat @RepBetoORourke in striking distance of @tedcruz pic.twitter.com/KPsT7Zr3EH

— Kasie DC (@KasieDC) April 30, 2018

[The Sicatoka]

Re: 115th Congress - Fantastik! Try to remember we vote in November.

I saw a poll the other day that 51% of millennials blame boomers for things being worse off now. I'm surprised it was only 51%.

The other 49% didn't understand the question because it didn't come from their social media news feed.

[The Sicatoka]

Re: 115th Congress - Fantastik! Try to remember we vote in November.

But you can no more judge a generation than a race. Those are fictive collectives. They are empty.

They are just made up entities composed of individuals.

The individuals make the decisions and are responsible for them.

[The Sicatoka]

Re: 115th Congress - Fantastik! Try to remember we vote in November.

Seems Sen. McCain has resigned himself to his predicament and fate.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/mccain...-speak-my-mind

[FadeToBlack&Gold]

Re: 115th Congress - Fantastik! Try to remember we vote in November.

A new poll that means nothing.

https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN1I10YH

Trickle-down will always sell to stupid people, and Millennials are no exception, since in any given demographic, 50% will have below-average intelligence. The key is to contain the outbreak.

[unofan]

1. I don't think the GOP is a "dying ideology." The core GOP ideology -- give aid to the powerful at the expense of the weak -- is eternal. The dying ideology is the rabid misogyny and racism that the GOP has stuck its blood funnel into as a convenience. Once that dries up they'll find some other food supply.

2. Millennials don't behave "the same as" Boomers because they grew up under different circumstances. What's the same is the base model under all that -- the nested bell curves of intelligence, ethics, and motivation that separate people out within their generation. The external pressures both form how those people will express those differences and also carve the landscape that helps some types succeed and others fail. Example: violence used to be a more evolutionarily successful way to resolve your problems than it is today, so Joe Rockhead had a place in that environment, whether it was murdering his neighbors (homicide rates in the west are 1/50th of what they were as recently as 100 years ago) or using his brute muscles in his work on the farm or in the mines. Today? Not so much.

3. Exploding the myth of generations has very little bearing in either direction on politics.

I agree that generations are shaped by their formative events and experiences, but "twas ever thus" only goes so far. The boomers were handed the single greatest economic engine in the world's history and wasted it on hookers and blow. And then bought more hookers and blow on credit, leaving the 15 trillion bill for their kids.

Maybe I'm being overly optimistic, but I'd like to think that, if we could rerun the Boomer generation, the election of Reagan and Trump would not be a guaranteed outcome.

But then again, maybe we are all the same in the aggregate. In which case, the boomers better be ready for some tough times, cause the millennials are now fully eligible to vote and they will overwhelm the boomers demographic bubble sooner or later. If they* vote as the boomers did, get ready for some major cuts to senior citizen services.


*(or we; I straddle the line between gen x and millennials depending on the definition, I definitely align more with gen x, though)

[WeAreNDHockey]

Re: 115th Congress - Fantastik! Try to remember we vote in November.

Seems Sen. McCain has resigned himself to his predicament and fate.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/mccain...-speak-my-mind

This quote "The appearance of toughness, or a reality show facsimile of toughness, seems to matter more than any of our values," sums up both trump and the majority of the republican party as well as anything could. Phony tough. Just part of their overall hypocrisy. There are a lot of reasons to disagree with John McCain. I'm sure many here do, including me. He's been guilty at times during his political career of the same sort of hypocrisy that literally defines the republican party in 2018. But he also has some honor and bravery. In fact he probably flushed more honor and bravery this morning than nearly the rest of the republican party combined possesses. You people who vote republican must be so proud that the only members of your party that can muster even an occasional display of decency are either retiring or dying. If we're lucky there is something in the air or water in the Capitol building that caused McCain's brain tumor and a bunch of his colleagues will also be so afflicted.

[Kepler]

Re: 115th Congress - Fantastik! Try to remember we vote in November.

I agree that generations are shaped by their formative events and experiences, but "twas ever thus" only goes so far. The boomers were handed the single greatest economic engine in the world's history and wasted it on hookers and blow. And then bought more hookers and blow on credit, leaving the 15 trillion bill for their kids.

Maybe I'm being overly optimistic, but I'd like to think that, if we could rerun the Boomer generation, the election of Reagan and Trump would not be a guaranteed outcome.

But then again, maybe we are all the same in the aggregate. In which case, the boomers better be ready for some tough times, cause the millennials are now fully eligible to vote and they will overwhelm the boomers demographic bubble sooner or later. If they* vote as the boomers did, get ready for some major cuts to senior citizen services.


*(or we; I straddle the line between gen x and millennials depending on the definition, I definitely align more with gen x, though)

I guess my question would be "how can we, in the aggregate, not be the same?" You start with people. Divide them up however you want. Why would being a zygote that pops out in one year as opposed to twenty years before of after possibly be any different on an aggregate level?

The thing that makes a generation "brave" is being raised with enemies encircling you. "Frugal" is a depression and watching your parents stretch every penny. "Tough" is get in the crop or die. "Adventurous" and "open minded" probably come from feeling safe enough to experiment and being exposed to enough of a variation of people not to be bigoted.

But none of those things are virtues of the people themselves. They're the lab conditions that one sample was grown under rather than another. Those characteristics aren't chosen. If there's any choices involved they are actually those of each generation's parenting choices -- one might say the Boomers' parents raised spendthrift irresponsible tax evaders. If anything that means the Boomers raised the generations who are critical of them now, so if those younger generations feel in any way noble or superior or more evolved, that's actually to the credit of their parents, not them.

I don't have a dog in this fight -- I'm an Xer raised by Greatests. The Boomers have no personal presence in my life, so possibly I can be a little more objective about them.