ChonkyMarmot [none/use name]

Little more than a century later.

That’s because right wing Israelis were afraid of having to deal with groups perceived as willing to negotiate. They are more comfortable being perpetually at war. Contrary to what they claim, they don’t actually care about the security of their own civilian population. Far easier to expand the settler colony through brute violence, even if it means less security for everyone. They like having an opposition composed of zeolous dead-enders because they can use the need for security as an excuse to kill off more Palestinians or illegally grab more land in the west bank for settlements. Having HAMAS as the only opposition is also optically better. You hear them constantly comparing HAMAS to DAESH. Who in their right mind would want to sit across the table and negotiate with DAESH?

It isn’t really the character traits I’m criticizing though. I share some of them. For context I’ve been getting a lot of “you know you’re gen x” memes in my social media feed and couldn’t help but notice quite a lot of chuddy comments with no push back at all. So, yea, the commenter sample is biased to people who identify with the term “gen x” rather than all people in that age bracket. It just got me bummed. Like how can you watch things get worse and worse in terms of inequality as you age and become MORE conservative. It was the exact opposite for me so I just don’t get it.

It's frustrating. They say good things when they are removed from power. He sounds like a good person, but he was not a good president. Obama will probably gradually come around to this kind of talk when he gets older too. He recently all but admitted middle class decline due to concentration of wealth was responsible for the rise of MAGA. Don't know if he will ever admit that drone "assassinations" he was in charge of were war crimes (assassinations in quotes because more than half the time the intelligence wasn't even correct).

It's sad that they only say the truth after they are far removed from power.

The boundaries are all rather arbitrary, but there is a grain of truth to some of the analysis.

Elon Musk probably is more representative these days though, sadly. I'm an older Xennial (born 1980) and I can tell you Gen X mostly sucks. At least Gen X Burgers suck. The good ones seemed to have all died. So many chuds now. I mean, they are different from boomer chuds in that they aren't quite as high on American Exceptionalism. They also made weed legal most places. That's about it though.

They have that famous morose cynicism, but it all got conveniently steered into reactionary rugged individualism. They have that "I am a lone wolf, I go my own way" attitude, but because they can't think outside the current atomized box, they focus their skepticism and distrust on "government". Covid completely melted their brain too. The anti-mask shit was very Gen X driven. They like the idea of "being a rebel" but because their thinking is so individualistic, it is impossible for them to even consider the kind of collective rebellion needed to threaten the actual levers of power in our society. Instead they protest stupid shit like mask mandates. The Capitalist Realism runs so deep and fits right in with their cynicism and apathy.

So yea, fuck Gen X. People born before 1980 are mostly a lost cause. So they supposedly had a hard childhood, but its the people born after 1980 that suffered more economically because they didn't have time to get their careers established before the dot com crash of 2000 and the 2008 housing/financial crash.

Yes. The dumbbell press is so much more natural because the distance between your hands isn't fixed. It's also probably builds muscle faster because you need stability which seems to work muscles in a more thorough way. The problem is testing a 1rm is really intimidating and not worth the risk if you work out at home. There's a big intimidation factor just getting into position. I also remember stopping at 60 lbs each arm. I might have tried 70 once, but it felt dangerous to rep too close to failure because it's just a lot of weight to drop in an apartment. I increased the number of reps and sets at 60 lbs but never felt comfortable to go any higher without a spotter. It seems to really make progress in this exercise you need to go to a gym and have a spotter, but going regularly was a problem for me.

I could never really do a "proper" bench press without developing annoying rotator cuff tendonitis. At one point I slowly did 4 reps with 220 lbs, but stopping with the bar about 1 inch above "touching". After not being able to work out for a month I could do 205 full ROM 1rm with someone spotting me. The first inch off the chest was uncomfortable and my shoulder was sore for a month afterwards, so I just kind of gave up on the bench press. I have mild scheuermann's disease, so I can't really arch my back or get my elbows way below my spine the way I see others doing. ROM issues are a big disadvantage. I started only benching 135, so it was good progress to get over 200 lbs (roughly my own body weight) in 6 months, but that exercise just wasn't worth the pain. I had on-and-off calcification pain in my right shoulder for a couple years after. Ugh.

The ghost of Eugene Debs tripped him.

I had a similar epiphany with the "housing crisis", mostly seeing how ineffectual the Obama admin, and really governments all over the world, were in dealing with it. Then I lived outside the US during the whole rise of Trumpism, and things just kept getting weirder and weirder.

Arguing with neolibs/libertarians after the 2007-2008 economic crisis pushed me left. I was a very basic liberal before that and really didn't think a lot about the state of the world or the future. Thinking a lot about economics and environmental issues pushed me more and more left. It was pretty obvious to me that the stuff libertarians pushed, like Austrian economics was total BS, but then I dug more into more mainstream thinkers like Paul Krugman and found even that not particularly satisfying. I would credit Yanis Varoufakis and others in his camp with turning me to the left. Perhaps not all of them are radical, but most are extremely critical of capitalism and view mainstream economics as basically "propaganda with math".

After that living outside the US in a "semi-third world country" and witnessing a lot of stuff just got me thinking more and more that the world was more scary and out of control than I ever imagined. Then it just kept getting weirder and weirder with politics in the US beginning to resemble things outside the US. I just felt angrier and angrier at how deceived and naïve I was before.