The assumption that old people are inherently right wing and young people are inherently left wing is just wrong. Correlating age with political beliefs is a fucking pseudoscience, and so is the whole concept of generations like boomers and zoomers. Their marketing terms, the baby boom was a uniquely United States thing and to apply that term to 20 odd years of people from across the world is just factually wrong. We got to stop self identifying with these terms because they are ageist and they divide us and they allow for shitty excuses like “it’s just their generation” to excuse shitty behavior.

What’s the point of this? Stop dunking on old people. Old people aren’t inherently reactionary.

  • mufasio@lemmygrad.ml
    ·
    1 year ago

    Correlating age with political beliefs is a fucking pseudoscience

    I stopped reading here. No it’s not, it’s call statistical trends that have held up and gotten more right wing over decades. Yes, not all old people deserve the wall, but until a majority of them stop being selfish class traitors they deserve no sympathy or compassion. They, as a whole, are reactionaries who have had a “got mine, fuck everyone else” attitude their entire political lives. They have raped the earth and the global south and left their children and grandchildren with a lower standard of living and honestly only grim outlook for the coming decades. And overwhelmingly they still continue to show no remorse, no understanding of the death and destruction they are wreaking on the world, and so they deserve no compassion and should be treated as enemies just as any reactionary.

    • Wheaties [she/her]
      ·
      1 year ago

      the "got mine, fuck everyone else" attitude is the result of a society overrun by market relations, not the cause of it. It's a behaviorally successful - not good, just successful (enough) - the context we live in selects for it (among others). Expecting the bulk people to see the flaw in that outlook without first changing the context is silly. Change the context and you change the behavior being selected for.

      And... most boomers aren't capitalists or politicians. Most are no closer to the levers of power than you or I. Most of them work or worked for a living. People don't choose the context they are born into.

      • mufasio@lemmygrad.ml
        ·
        1 year ago

        We are all the result of our material conditions. Which is why as marxists we should assess groups of people that are useful for propagandizing and radicalizing to our cause. And “old people” are the last group I would be focusing on and that I would expect to have success with. Yeah, most boomers aren’t capitalists but most of them support capitalist interests even when it goes against their own interests. They are too far gone and shouldn’t be trusted as a group to support the cause. If that hurts some boomers’ feelings, then honestly, shut the fuck up and go talk to your peers and convince them to quit fucking over the planet.

        How many boomers told you that you would become more conservative when you got older? I don’t know about you but I’ve only become more radicalized and I can see the same thing among my fellow millennials even the ones that don’t have class consciousness. And the zoomers are doing even better. We are all the result of our material conditions and boomers as a whole were given opportunities that they stripped from their children and future generations. Even now as we sit in the crumbling ashes of late stage capitalism they still support the same failed policies that got us here in the first place and are eagerly embracing fascism. Understand your enemy, and never underestimate their contempt for you.

        • Wheaties [she/her]
          ·
          1 year ago

          Which is why as marxists we should assess groups of people that are useful for propagandizing and radicalizing to our cause. And “old people” are the last group I would be focusing on and that I would expect to have success with.

          Yeah, I agree with this assessment. I... just worry sometimes when I see harsh language directed at a whole demographic, even one as butts as the yankee boomer. "At the risk of sounding ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by feelings of love" and all that.

          • mufasio@lemmygrad.ml
            ·
            1 year ago

            Thanks for the discussion and that quote is a good reminder that it is my love for the people that makes me a Marxist. Everyone that sees this thread and hasn’t seen The Motorcycle Diaries should put it on their list, it played an important part in my early radicalization.

            There’s a lot more I could and want to say but probably shouldn’t. But I just want to finish by saying that we would be so lucky to be in our 60s or 70s and living in a world shaped in the image of our politics and to have the younger generations yelling at us to shut up because we are out of touch. I hope that we both see that day comrade.

    • blobjim [he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      but until a majority of them stop being selfish class traitors they deserve no sympathy or compassion. They, as a whole

      they they they they. This is just self-satisfying tilting at windmills.