Hillary Clinton: Classic or Dud?

generation of sociopaths by bruce gibeney (warning: a techbro and most likely a shitlib) is pretty instructive on this topic

(no offense aimless; lots of good boomers obv)

you don't believe how vietnam fucked up so many boomers? or how women were financially and reproductively crippled before the 70s fucked them up? There are so many of of these factors. xpost

i mean at some point it just became a Fall of Rome question where everybody has their reasons and hobbyhorses some of which are perfectly plausible but maybe don't explain the depth of the fucked-up-ness and some people have "novel" solutions like lead poisoning or some shit and some people say "well, actually, rome didn't fall at all, they just collectively decided they'd rather all go back to foraging and die of starvation at the age of 20", and all the answers say more about the people explaining the problem than they do about the problem, viz: white boomers are, as a generation, uniquely fucked up and dangerous.

oh, I am sure it's always easier to blame an earlier, not so distant generation because there are always better records documenting the triggers, like civil rights, and real life experience to relate.

i don't think I responded correctly to your post on re-read. I have no clue what you are saying besides people are stupid and believe stupid things.

generational talk is false consciousness encouraged by those who seek to divide you from your boomer comrades, the majority of whom suffer as you suffer; it's just not useful to think about. so it's a pity that they are already destined to be remembered forever as the genocidal narcissists who tried to take the world with them. oh well

btw, having witnessed society as run by the so-called Greatest Generation, they also fucked things up a fair bit, including very large amounts of racism, sexism, homophobia, and widespread, staunch support for the Vietnam War. not all of them were race-baiting, VFW, 'better-dead-than-red' types, just a considerable swath of them. You look at the March on the Pentagon and there were tens of thousands of middle-aged activists against the Vietnam War; they just weren't in strong enough numbers to win many elections.

as I've often said, Bill Clinton is (ok, was) smart, and a lotta good that did us.

What do you want me to say, #notallboomers? Yeah all group consciousness is false consciousness, all generalizations erase nuance and some of the more beautiful and worthy parts of individuals, and if we atomize it enough we can make it look like there isn't a problem with the boomers at all, people are just people and always will be, nothing to be done about it, suck it up starfish.

If you're a boomer and are consistently kind and caring and supportive, congratulations! You're not like most boomers of my experience. Boomers still suck and people are still going to assume you suck just because you're a boomer. You've lived long enough to be the villain, hell, maybe you can outlive being the villain. Give it a shot at least.

What do you want me to say, #notallboomers?

Nah. I'm tremendously disappointed in the failings of my fellow boomers, when considered en masse. But the poisons in our society are not somehow newly born into any particular generation. Every generation imbibes them and time will tell how brilliantly the up-and-comers perform through the decades. They may get beaten down and fed enough fear and hatred that you won't recognize them when they're old. Or not. I wish all of us the best of luck.

Lol UK boomers are completely fucked up too and they didn't have a Vietnam. They were the first generation born into a world with universal healthcare, free university tuition, bought their first house for an affordable price, good stable unionised job. A whole plethora of simmering resentments that has led to them endorsing pretty much every attempt to limit or curb the advantages gifted on them going to subsequent generations. These coddled babies of the welfare state have become the most viciously acquisitive advocates of punitive individual responsibility and civic distrust. I mean notallboomers etc but. I don't know what the common factor is

UK boomers mend and make do austerity fetishism is maybe in part becaus of not having a Vietnam! Of not having to go through what their parents did, and having a mix of both preceding generations (in the past) and following generations (today) calling them coddled and priviledged.

The weird co-opting of the second world war to be one of their signifiers, the nihilism in on some level wanting Brexit to cause problems. In some ways it feels like either replicating how their parents viewed them OR a transferring of guilt to generations below. Possibly over-compensation for feelings of undeserved position

I don't know that there is a common factor though, and even if there was the differences seem too substantial

(I may be wrong, but I think 55-79 was the only age group to have a majority for leave, over 80s skewed remain)

The common factor is Rupert Murdoch, isn't it?

Nah. I'm tremendously disappointed in the failings of my fellow boomers, when considered en masse. But the poisons in our society are not somehow newly born into any particular generation. Every generation imbibes them and time will tell how brilliantly the up-and-comers perform through the decades. They may get beaten down and fed enough fear and hatred that you won't recognize them when they're old. Or not. I wish all of us the best of luck.

― A is for (Aimless)

I mean, maybe I'm projecting here, certainly Gen X already has its fair share of monsters (waves to Silicon Valley). The problems of the Internet specifically are, I think, on us and not on boomers.

But this catastrophe means that in some sense I've already gone through that phase; when I was young I thought we were saving the world when in fact we were destroying it, and regarding white boomers that realization didn't seem to really truly hit until about 2016.

The projection is that I spent decades as an undifferentiated "fucked up person" with all sorts of diagnoses and in retrospect a lot of my problems turned out to be more simple and obvious than I thought they were, and this _unique_ boomer fucked-upness... yes humanity as a whole is fucked up yes you didn't start the fire but white boomers, I really believe, have a specific and specifically differentiable generational/cultural problem; something happened to them, and I don't know what it is, but I do think it's _knowable_.

I wish I could find where I once read that the internet got nastier once the boomers showed up

idk if it was total gladwell style cod-research but it has a certain old man yells at cloud computing truth for me nevetheless

They showed up late to the game and their perpetual also-ran status (and inability to understand that they could just type a url into the address bar instead of Ask-ing Jeeves to Alta Vista a Google search for 'go to hotmail.com') left them bitter and determined to stick it to those wise-ass youngsters somehow even if reposting Breitbart articles on Facebook was the peak of their vengeful e-savvy.

I wonder if boomers' historical positioning with respect to the advance of globalization might have something to do with it. Like, the hardcore nativism and provincialism might be a reaction to it. That would help account for the commonality between boomers in the US and UK at least.

Also the promise and failure of the 60's causing a retrenchment of reactionary politics probably didn't help either.

Inevitable really.

the promise and failure of the 60's causing a retrenchment of reactionary politics

Yes, "the promise" was an overly optimistic utopianism floating around for a short time in the late 60s, but it wasn't embraced by all boomers by any means. It was one manifestation of the much more widely accepted boomer idea that we were going to throw away the rulebook and write our own rules, because the old rules were shitty and oppressive.

This attitude is pretty common among the young. What made it different was the sheer mass of the boomer generation. We really believed it. It was very easy to live in a bubble in which anyone not a boomer faded into the far background and had no importance other than as foils to our generation. They were summed up and dismissed simply as "the establishment", or even more simply as "the man".

But when you reference the "failure" of the boomers it is well to remember that the social equality movements that took root in the 70s were fiercely defended through the reactionary 80s and emerged from the decades-long culture wars battered, but unbowed, and still holding more territory than the enemy.

Plus, the next time you buy tofu or yoghurt in a small town grocery store, thank a boomer.

i will do no such thing

spoken like someone unacquainted with the 1950s ideas of culinary delicacies

wow why are people always assuming i am not acquainted with decadal culinary delicacies ????

anyway so about hillary clinton, get a load of this...

People born in odd numbered years are morally bad, and people born in even numbered years are good, unless it’s a leap year.

explains a lot

Hillary Clinton: odd year of birth (1947), Sun sign of Scorpio, Sunday's child (wise, kind, good, & gay).

Completely disgusting foods our parents ate

Found in the archives... pic.twitter.com/iFFeqloYHM

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) October 20, 2019

wtf i love trump now

Plus, the next time you buy tofu or yoghurt in a small town grocery store, thank a boomer.

― A is for (Aimless)

can i also thank a boomer for making me trans by repeatedly insisting that only girls ate yogurt

(note eating yogurt did not make me trans)

repeatedly insisting that only girls ate yogurt

this is literally the first time in my 65 years I have ever heard this assertion.

I didn't know yoghurt existed until I was over 18, but I never associated it with "girls". When I was 24 I used to culture my own mixing powdered milk with whole milk, warming it to (some exact temperature I no longer recall) and wrapping it in a down parka so it would 'set' before cooling too much. This was the cheapskate way to make it.

Yogurt has definitely been treated as a "girl food."

https://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2013/aug/30/women-yogurt-connection-advertising

P.S. It was necessary to save some uneaten yoghurt from the previous batch to add to the warmed milk mixture, to introduce the necessary acidophilus bacteria. These were originally obtained from buying a small amount of "Nancy's Yoghurt" which has always used live cultures, not the mass-market pasteurized crap.

Yogurt has definitely been treated as a "girl food."

Don't blame the idiocies of mass market advertising on "boomers". They are just the crap we all swim in.

NB: This is a quote from the authoritative The Guardian article cited above:

Women have less-efficient digestion than men, evidenced by the fact that they apparently never break wind. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many women never even defecate.

Yogurt is fuckin godhead

I think any food that is healthy or seemingly lighter is feminized. It kind of sucks because I figure a lot of men have terrible, self inflected butt problems.

Got no beef wit yogurt, enjoy me some before an alcohol blowout.

It kind of sucks because I figure a lot of men have terrible, self inflected butt problems.

― Yerac, Sunday, October 20, 2019 11:57 PM bookmarkflaglink

If you're having butt problems
I feel bad for you son

I think any food that is healthy or seemingly lighter is feminized. It kind of sucks because I figure a lot of men have terrible, self inflected butt problems.

― Yerac

poster child for this is probably Elvis, reading about the condition of his large intestine after his death made a pretty big impression on me

aimless i'm trying really hard to not be an asshole about your yogurt huff but the whole "i've never heard of this before therefore this can't possibly be an Actual Thing" response is one of the most boomer things ever

It seems to me that (white) Boomers, as a generation, have a particular talent for taking personal credit for everything they consider to be good, whether that be the adoption of yogurt as a staple food in the West or Ending Racism Forever, while at the same time utterly disclaiming all responsibility for anything they think of as a bad thing as not being real, or if it is real certainly having nothing to do with them, whether that be the way yogurt was arbitrarily made a gendered food in the West or, you know, all the racist policies implemented by Boomers.

And while failure may be an orphan refusing to so much as acknowledge the EXISTENCE of, like, evil, because you were the conquering hero to end it all forever, and more than that the total implacable commitment to that increasingly implausible narrative in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, boomers' pathological inability to, like, change their minds or take responsibility for Bad Things... well, I feel like that has a lot to do with why a lot of non-Boomers keep throwing up their hands and saying "God, why don't you just DIE ALREADY?" We know it's cruel and insensitive but every day boomers keep making things worse and worse and we can't do a goddamn thing about it.

I think dlh was otm, boomers suck but it’s mostly because they’re old and old people have always kind of sucked

hillary clinton also sucks

boomers suck because people suck

boomers are also alright because people are alright

the notion that there is one batch of human babies who handled the problems of their age differently than another batch in the same circumstances would...it's a head scratcher for me.

But I'm a scumbag Gen X-er.

Boomers are particularly hated because their numbers meant they were catered to for much longer than other generations

So now we have two generation themed threads?

we're also talking about marvel in three different threads rn

ilx collapsing into a singular thread soon