I’m not into religion and all the made up bullshit and rituals, but I did get a solid cackle out of this:
Shorter Nancy Pelosi: I’d like to see your manager, Mr. Cordileone.
This post is in: Open Threads, Politics, Religion
I’m not into religion and all the made up bullshit and rituals, but I did get a solid cackle out of this:
Shorter Nancy Pelosi: I’d like to see your manager, Mr. Cordileone.
Comments are closed.
MisterDancer
Hey Boss? Check yer formatting on your post :)
Paul in KY
Good for the Pontiff! I hope the Cordileone guy gets retired by Pope Francis sometime in the near future. I assume he can do that.
Mnemosyne
Someone was saying in the previous thread that Cordileone is pissed because he got passed over for a promotion. Turns out that publicly and repeatedly defying your boss is not actually the best way to get ahead. Who knew?
Also, the odds that the Vatican did not know whether or not a visiting dignitary was eligible for communion are very, very low. They knew who Pelosi was and that she was being denied communion in SF.
Alison Rose
She’s such a boss bitch and I love it. Nancy never had a single fuck to give for right wing hate against her, and she sure as hell isn’t going to find one now.
scav
Cordileone flunks basic geography as well. His writ don’t work in Rome. Does he think he is Missouri or something?
pacem appellant
Even I, a ex-Catholic and militant atheist, got a chuckle out of this. Well played, Speaker.
opiejeanne
@Mnemosyne: Exactly! Some goof on Twitter claimed that she got it because they didn’t know who she was, just a face in the crowd.
She really stands out in the crowd photo of her next to the cardinals and surrounded by men in black suits. Everyone knew who she was.
opiejeanne
The Vatican again reminded the faithful that there is much more to being Pro Life than being against abortion. I think that was yesterday or maybe right after the Supreme Court decision dropped.
Betty Cracker
My spouse the lapsed Catholic also got a kick out of this. I had no idea the Catholic Church was so riddled with politics until I married into a Catholic family. I should have known since my one of grandfathers was a Southern Baptist preacher and that church is political AF; Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) attended one of my grandparents’ anniversary parties. Anyhoo, good for Nancy Pelosi, for taking that red beanie-wearing wingnut asshole down a peg or 10.
Wag
Good for Pope Francis!
Good for Nancy!
Layer8Problem
The Current Pope’s got all the temporal backup he needs. Somewhere around here I have a saved .jpg from the last few years of him greeting Patti Smith in what looks like St. Peter’s Square; she’s grinning at him like a crazed fangirl.
Cameron
Frankie One, popin’ it old school….
Suzanne
I laughed at this story, too.
Yanno, I m reminded that I am beyond happy that I want raised Catholic. Imagine giving even the tiniest fuck about what these dirty old men think about anything.
Ruckus
@Betty Cracker:
I’ve written here before that I, a non catholic and non believer, went to a Catholic all boys HS for freshman HS yr. To me, the concept that the Catholic church denied biology for the guy that supposedly created – everything, including all that biology, had all the logic of wishing on rainbows and flying cows that didn’t fart. In the 60 yrs since I’ve seen absolutely no reason to believe I was mistaken then.
Ken
I’m recalling a similar issue a couple of years ago, where Pope Francis couldn’t force the guy to step down, but could promote him. I think it was to something like curating the Vatican’s collection of thirteenth-century aspergilla. Very important position, right there in the Vatican itself.
(I believe it was The Peter Principle that called this technique a “lateral arabesque”.)
grumbles
I live in San Francisco, Sal’s been a well-known local asshole forever.
Every town has one of these retrograde dicks. He just gets lots of candy from Fox because of where he lives.
Berkeley has to put up with John Yoo. I’m not sure which is worse.
Anonymous At Work
This is how you KAREN FOR JUSTICE!
West of the Rockies
@Ruckus:
I don’t know what kind of flying cows you’ve got, but mine never fart.
LibraryGuy
What a sad, small, pathetic shred of a faith you must have, what a childish tantrum to throw, denying Communion to someone when the Pope himself is comfortable sharing it with her. Does he even recall Jesus among the poor, the sick, the thieves and prostitutes? This “holier than Pelosi” ass of an archbishop has a DUI on his own record and is accused of covering for abusive priests.
James E Powell
According to PEW research, Catholicism has experienced a greater net loss due to religious switching than has any other religious tradition in the U.S.
According to my anecdotal evidence, my very Catholic mother had seven kids. Five of us went to Catholic school. Not one of us is Catholic, only one of us attends church at all. (Fundy Trumpster brother, I’ve got no explanation.)
ian
@grumbles:
The college or the town? The town I sympathize with, they can’t control it. The college? Those fuckers have some serious ‘splaining to do. I suppose we could waterboard the lead administrators to enhance our knowledge through interrogation of what they might know… for national security reasons…
MisterDancer
Raised non-Catholic, spent 8 years in Catholic Schools, until HS.
Logic has very little to do with much of church doctrine, esp. the stuff that’s layperson-focused.
MisterDancer
Also, a reminder of the long-standing Pro-Choice Catholic organization, Catholics for Choice:
Anyone who tells you all of Catholism is forced birthers, is full of crap themselves.
Ruckus
@West of the Rockies:
I went to an elementary school with the playground chain link fence separating us from a dairy. Cows fart and crap constantly, believe me. If they are alive they are farting and crapping.
Tony Jay
Sad to see a pious Catholic like Archbishop Cordileone subjected to passive aggressive bullying on this scale by the Secular Left.
I warned them that no good would come from imposing a Liberal Fascist on the throne of St Peter in defiance of God and the Constitution!
Ruckus
@MisterDancer:
Damn. And I thought one year was 2 yrs too much.
Gravenstone
@Mnemosyne: Fucker’s lucky he doesn’t get kicked back to “humble” priest and shipped off to some ass backwards hellhole in need of enlightenment.
Ruckus
@LibraryGuy:
My experience is that it is “Do the fuck as I say, Not as I do.”
They are the bad bosses of religion. They own the rulebook and decide how sadistic they want to be. Some of them are OK, in my experience most of them can not live without the power and sadism that they often exhibit. They didn’t become priests and higher in spite of the power, they did it because of the power.
Ken
@Gravenstone: That’s kind of cruel to the people in whatever backward hellhole he ends up in, isn’t it?
scav
@Tony Jay: Would you mayhap prefer transitive aggressive?
Gravenstone
@Ken: True. Folks like that would take their rage out on those who can’t defend themselves. Alas, since someone upthread noted the Pope seems not to hold that power, we can only hope for a creative “promotion”. Perhaps something along the lines of Esteemed Slime Mold Curator or some such…
zeecube
I veered away from the Catholic Church eons ago at age 13 and recall the exact moment of disengagement. I was sitting in religion class, at an all boys catholic high school, really not paying much attention, when the teacher, a Jesuit priest no less, states as fact that intercourse is not meant to be pleasurable but only for the purpose of procreation. Even my 13 year old virgin brain went “‘WTF’ did he just say”?
The real irony is that my mom always thought I’d be the one of her seven sons to become a priest. (Did I mention I come from a Catholic family?)
Kent
My wife was raised as Catholic as it is possible to be raised. She grew up in Chile and attended Catholic schools from pre-K through medical school and residency at Pontifica Universidad Catholica de Chile. She has plenty of rich right-wing cousins and uncles who are no doubt members of Opus Dei. And her mother is on first-name basis and interacts socially with the Archbishop of Santiago (now a Cardinal).
Ask her what she thinks about the Catholic church and you will get a hell of an earful. The ONLY time we ever attend the local Catholic church is when the mother-in-law is visiting from Chile and that is just to keep the peace. She is way too old to change or do anything else
I grew up Mennonite and long ago veered away from that primarily due to the anti-intellectual and fundamentalist bent that characterized the particular branch of that church that my family was involved with. I always kind of appreciated some aspects of Catholicism, especially the Jesuits, for their intellectual rigor and honor for the high arts compared to Mennonites. But my wife has disabused me of the theology.
Tony Jay
@scav:
I think you’ll find that the traditional Church disapproves of that lifestyle choice too.
MattF
People keep underestimating Pelosi, even while they’re being skinned and filleted. A mystery.
pacem appellant
@ian: The school. It’s a stain on my alma mater. It matters little, but I’ve informed the alumni association for over a decade that so long as Yoo is a professor in the law school, my wallet is denied to them.
scav
@Tony Jay: And yet look at their fashion choices!
Ruckus
@Ken:
Yes.
It’s going to be cruel to someone. He’s the kind that likes the power, abuses the power, and likes being the abuser. Given the few stories here, I’d say that is a lot wider spread than many might imagine. The principle in that school I went to – Father Schaffer – was a sadistic bastard. The cardinal in LA who visited the school once – Cardinal McIntyre – was a sadistic bastard. That’s a very large percentage for such a small sample size. It’s possible that was an outlier situation but from the stories I’ve heard, from the people here, I don’t think so. What’s that saying? – Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Ken
“But how do you explain that it is pleasurable?”
“We think that God was just having an off day when designing that part of the Creation.”
(Which reminds me of Neil Gaiman’s “Murder Mysteries,” one of the few stories to explore that ancient question “What was God doing before the creation?”)
Ruckus
@Tony Jay:
I see that British humor is not lost on you…..
Ken
I think Baud could be trusted with it.
Betty Cracker
Since we’re discussing Catholicism and this is an open-ish thread, have any of y’all seen “The Young Pope” and “The New Pope”? I think both single-season series are on HBO, and well worth the subscription price, IMO.
Suzanne
@MisterDancer:
Okay, yes, but c’mon. #notallmen and #notallwhitepeople were both really fucken annoying, and #notallcatholics is almost as bad.
No one genuinely thinks that all members of the Catholic Church believe abortion should be illegal, but the institution does, and that matters.
Tony Jay
@scav:
Often imitated, never bettered.
Well, except by Prince at his most Purpleicious, but he was always the exception that proved the rule.
Ruckus
@Ken:
The true explanation is that the people enjoying the sex are working for the devil. True god fearing people don’t enjoy sex.
Andrya
As an actual Catholic, I got a kick out of this. I agree with Mnemosyne, Francis definitely knows about the whole imbroglio- Cordileone has been a thorn in Francis’ side for a while. Cordileone used to afflict the Diocese of Oakland, where I live, and I was pleased when he moved to San Francisco (though a priest I know transferred out of San Francisco to get away from him).
I have to say, though Cordileone is a jerk and an idiot, he’s not as bad as Yoo. As far as I know, he hasn’t facilitated torture.
Baud
If I were Catholic and denied communion, I would do like Napoleon and give myself the wafer.
Ruckus
@Ken:
Really?
See #47
Really?
Baud
@Ruckus:
They should have sex with me!
Tony Jay
@Ruckus:
Jonah Goldberg is British?!?
Ruckus
@Baud:
OK I see the flaw in my theory.
I wouldn’t enjoy sex with you. You are lawyer for god’s sake.
Ruckus
@Tony Jay:
He ISN’T??
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: One up them and get some good pastries. And an Irish coffee.
Ken
@Ruckus: I’m not saying that some people wouldn’t get their hair mussed or their continent melted…
Ken
@Tony Jay: Since you’re here, have you any opinion on Nicola Sturgeon’s plan for a Scottish independence referendum in 2023?
(Ducks, fully aware what asking for Tony’s opinion might unleash…)
Kent
And my favorite “Not all Republicans”
Anotherlurker
@Ruckus: I went thru 12 years of catholic education . From 52 years of perspective, I can confidently say that religious education is child abuse.
The fact that my parish, in a rich village on L.I., NY, proudly hosted and protected 2 Pedophile priests. This was 2 of these assholes in the parish when I was there. They had a couple more there after I left school. All these priests were hidden and protected by the Diocese of Rockville Center.
Additionally, my younger brother was beaten to a pulp by a I.H.M, nun. She banged his head on a desk for the Capital Crime of talking in class. He was in 2nd grade. He has permanent hearing loss.
On top of the physical abuse, the religious instruction was corrosive to a child’s self esteem. We were shown that we were all guilty of the state of the world.
Original sin. Demonizing sex. Denigrating young women and the rest of the bullshit that comes with being catholic.
We were shown that we were sinful and guilty guilty guilty for the suffering of the baby Jesus and the moral decay of the world.
Like I said, child abuse.
The only other religious institutions that I hold in lower regard are Fundies and mormons .
The world would be a much better place without religion of any kind.
Tony Jay
@Ruckus:
You must be thinking of that other tubby Rightwing font of Catholic bullshit.
And no, we don’t want Sullivan back.
Anotherlurker
@Suzanne: Well said, young lady!
Bex
@Betty Cracker: Saw and liked them both. Reminds me of what Pope Lenny did to one of his Cardinals who defied him. It involved the Arctic.
Baud
@Tony Jay:
What if we returned the tea we dumped in the harbor?
NotMax
‘@Omnes Omnibus
Devil Dogs and Snakebite.
//
Tony Jay
@Ken:
Well, everything else aside, Sturgeon’s party has won repeated elections on an openly Independence manifesto, the latest one a few weeks ago.
I don’t really see a moral objection to letting the Scots decide if they want to remain tethered to the increasingly fucked up UK or go their own way and seek EU membership.
Suzanne
@Kent: #notallBoomers is also up there.
NotMax
‘@Tony Jay
Property taxes on Balmoral alone could fund a quarter of the annual budget of an independent Scotland.
:)
Mike in NC
Here is the headline from USA Today: “Aide portrays crazed Trump”. Yup, just a perfectly normal story you can read every day!
Goes on to say, “He fought Secret Service agent to join rioters”.
Tony Jay
@Baud:
You broke it, you bought it.
In fact, that was a lot of tea, so I think it’s only right you should take Piers Morgan as well.
Tony G
Ha ha. The Catholics who are even further to the right than the current pope can feel free to rebel and form their own church. They can call themselves protest-ants. I grew up as a Catholic (walking away from all religion when I was 17) and I can still remember the bland taste of those “Communion Hosts”. In the time and place where I grew up it was just an automatic ritual that people did every Sunday (and then afterwards you’d eat a big dinner and maybe watch a ballgame). I never heard of anybody being “denied the host”, but, then, at
that time and place it was all just a mindless ritual — as God intended.
zhena gogolia
@Suzanne: It will be interesting to see how you react when you are old and someone blames you for everything that happened during your younger years, as if you were responsible. You’ll be responsible for Trump! Won’t that be fun?
Ruckus
@Anotherlurker:
A very distinct possibility.
However.
Humans being humans it seems entirely possible to me that if there was no religion, there would likely be some sort of replacement for it that wasn’t any better. Humans seem to be able to look for the worst or the best in themselves or not search at all. I see no way to change that.
Geminid
@zeecube: I heard a story about Paul the Evangelist that explains the Church’s attitude towards sex. The accepted account is that God intervened and converted Paul while he was on the road to Damascus. But there is another story:
So he did.
Tony Jay
@NotMax:
Screw that. If we all decided to hand Lizzie the Moocher her cards we could fund half of the NHS budget on former royal palace tourism alone.
Ruckus
@Tony Jay:
Are his initials ASS? Just asking for clarity.
So that’s our punishment for leaving, we have to take HIM?
Damn that’s harsh.
Suzanne
@zhena gogolia: My demographic cohort already is blamed for voting for Trump, but you don’t see me saying #notallwhitewomen. It’s valid to criticize group behavior and interests, and I don’t take it personally. Everyone knows that not all members of a group do anything, it’s not illuminating, and it doesn’t change the privilege relationship.
zhena gogolia
@Suzanne: Blaming boomers for everything is tiresome. What does it add to any conversation?
NotMax
‘@Tony Jay
Quexit?
Ruckus
@Tony Jay:
Now that’s just revenge.
japa21
@Suzanne:
In general, I agree, but there are some people, even here that do say things in a way as to condemn a whole group. There are some who have criticized anybody who is a Catholic, or, indeed, a member of any organization. There are those who will only grudgingly, if at all, admit there might be some boomers who aren’t totally messed up.
MisterDancer
I’m mostly reacting to a currently-banned person who…well, let’s just say he’s an extremist on these matters.
As much as I might be estranged from the Black Church, I’m also aware of it’s critical role in the freedoms I enjoy today. And my point in the prior comment was to point out that there’s nuance in the Catholic community as well, not to make some claim that there’s not also a lot of major and severe issues with that community on many issues I hold dear, as well.
So no, it wasn’t meant AL ALL to whitewash the toxic elements of Catholicism, but rather to note there’s people in that community, pushing back — and have been for decades.
Suzanne
@zhena gogolia: I’m sorry it’s tiresome, I also find it tiresome that the Boomer age cohort voted (as a group, not individuals, holy feelings) to cut funding for education after they availed themselves of it. And that the Boomers benefited from low housing costs relative to today, which will affect the wealth-building capacity of the people who will now be renters their whole lives.
In all seriousness, it needs to be discussed because the generations after the Boomers are the first generations in American history to be downwardly mobile, which will affect our collective prosperity and also (in my view) is an issue of fairness. I would hope that awareness of that fact would change people’s opinions and behaviors.
Ruckus
@zhena gogolia:
Someone to blame.
Some folks just always need someone else to blame.
Doesn’t make life better, just makes them feel less responsible.
Tony Jay
@NotMax:
She’s a thousand years old and her family are a bunch of deviants, Quexit can’t be far off.
geg6
@James E Powell:
My parents had six of us and all but me attended Catholic school until 8th grade. The nun who was principal at the time basically threw me out of the school in October of first grade because I talked back to her when she told me to button up my coat (I was too warm and had left it unbuttoned for recess). She called my mom in and told her she had to keep me at home until the next year because I was not socially ready for school. My mom told her to stick it and put me immediately into the public school. I loved it there and it pretty much set me on the path to my current atheism.
Today, not a single one of us goes to mass. And we never will again. And we’re all pretty happy about that.
Suzanne
@japa21: Okay, but can we grant some rhetorical leeway when discussing imbalances in privilege and resources? The vast majority of people here are reasonable and understand that not all members of any cohort do anything, but we need to have the language to describe unequal power relationships where they exist.
As the saying goes, “if it’s not about you, then it’s not about you”.
Tony Jay
@Ruckus:
“Piers Morgan’s body.
Lies a smouldering on the coals
So the truth can have some fun!
Catchy!
Suzanne
@MisterDancer: Understood. When Catholics for Choice gains some significant influence, I’ll be cheering them on.
geg6
@Suzanne:
Some ridiculously high majority of the laity of the American Catholic Church supports Roe. It’s the clergy, mostly, and the rich Catholics who are the outliers.
And if you look at what is happening in Mexico and South America, it looks like the same is true there. Those countries are moving toward legalizing or recently legalized abortion there.
Suzanne
@geg6: Oh I know. Lots of “cultural Catholics”. I’m related to a whole bunch of them. But again, they give their money to the Church, and the official position of the Church is that whole mortal sin thing and Catholic hospitals still won’t provide sterilizations and etc etc etc.
Baud
OT. Justice Jackson will be sworn in at noon tomorrow.
Anotherlurker
@Ruckus: You make good points. All humans seek meaning in the things that surround us. Image of Jesus baked onto a piece of French Toast and other instances of Pareidolla are just one example.
However, I can find meaning in the concept of the Golden Rule: Don’t be a dick to your fellow human beings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule#Ancient_Egypt
From the Wicki article, the concept of doing unto the other can be traced back to Ancient Egypt.
I can’t help but wonder what the world would be like if Humanism was the basis for the World’s cultures.
If Humanism were the governing moral cornerstone, would the world be blessed with massive projects that were created for the good of humanity. Would we have fewer cathedrals and more ancient sanitation systems? Would we have fewer monasteries and better dark ages transportation systems? Where would Medical Science be if the shackles of religion were not a factor? Would the Industrial Revolution have begun 500 to 1,000 years earlier?
Anyway, there are things I think about when I do a deep dive into the state of the world.
elliottg
@Suzanne:
I’m not sure about that. When membership in a group is voluntary then you can impute that ALL members share (or are ok with) the basic tenets of that group. #definitelyallNazis #almostcertainlyallGOP #???allCatholics
Alison Rose
@Baud: Ooh, thanks for the heads-up! Setting a reminder now.
geg6
@Suzanne:
You do know that, despite all the evil they do as an institution, there are Catholic churches, nuns and priests who do good in the community, right? I’ve given money to local Catholic charities and no one on earth could possibly despise the Church more than I do. But if the local church is doing something good, I’m there for it, financially at least.
zhena gogolia
@Alison Rose : You are so nice.
Ruckus
@MattF:
Nancy is just that good.
Central Planning
Nothing good will come from that. LB clearly has no respect for the Constitution, nor anyone not in “the church”
Suzanne
@elliottg: I mean, I could point out Oskar Schindler was technically a Nazi and was apparently a good dude, but, like, fuck…. I think we can safely assume that NAZIS ARE BAD and that bringing up the exceptions is at best not helpful and is at worst a pretty bad derailing tactic intended to delegitimize important discussion.
geg6
OT, but that slimeball R. Kelly was just sentenced to 30 years. Good.
Alison Rose
@zhena gogolia: Hey, thanks, most of the time I feel like I am just a crabby bitch on this site. But I am very much looking forward to the moment she is sworn in. Similar feeling watch Harris and Haaland get sworn in.
zhena gogolia
@Suzanne: So you’re equating people who happened to be born between certain years with people who joined the Nazi Party? Good to know.
zhena gogolia
@Alison Rose : Your posts always lift my spirits. I’m touched by your empathy for Ukraine.
Scout211
I posted this downstairs in the STFU thread but I’ll drop it here, too.
Cassidy Hutchinson’s attorney just released a statement.
Speaking of boss mode. Good on Cassidy and her attorneys.
zhena gogolia
@Scout211: Right on!
Ken
@Central Planning: She will be so surprised when the theopolice break down her door and she finds out she’s in the wrong church
(Doesn’t matter what church she’s in; the theopolice can always find some heresy.)
JaneE
As a non-Catholic, I have been amazed by the utter pettiness and dictatorial tendencies of some, repeat some, of the Catholic clergy. I knew a Jesuit priest and an Immaculate Heart nun from some of my Latin classes in college. Both were just wonderful people. Of course the nun was from the order that laicized rather than let Cardinal McIntyre dictate that they could not change their habits to something less medieval. Before we met, my husband had the RC church refuse to give a funeral service for his mother because she died on a visit from back east, and she was not a member of the parish. His mother had converted to Catholicism from Eastern Orthodox, but even so the local Greek Orthodox church had no problem giving her a funeral service there.
Of all the popes in my lifetime, I think Francis is most like the Jesus Christ I learned about in Sunday School. And the American bishops as a group probably the least like Him.
Suzanne
@geg6:
Sure.
Doesn’t mean that I’m going to start referring to “the Catholic Church but really only the people who covered up the child rape and oppress women and shame gay people in accordance with direction from their hierarchy”. I’m gonna say “the Catholic Church”. And the members of the Catholic Church who don’t do that stuff can rest assured that I’m not talking about them.
Tony G
@geg6: Several of my relatives (who I love dearly) are devout Cafeteria Catholics. Almost all American Catholics are of the cafeteria persuasion — that’s why you almost never see families with 10 kids anymore. Having been part of that church until I was 17, I remember that the psychology of almost all Catholics was something like “Let’s see what we can get away with, without the authorities noticing.”. To me, although I hate the institution of the Catholic Church, individual Catholics seem more human than their evangelical counterparts. That might just be because I know then better, though.
ColoradoGuy
@Ruckus: Excellent point. If there was no religion, at least with humanity in its current state of moral awareness, something similar quickly arises that is effectively the same. Look at Communism: ostensibly atheist, it almost immediately became a religion itself, except clothed in the guise of “historical inevitability” and “scientific socialism”, using history and humanist ideals to conceal a cult of lies, power, and brutality. And the idea of “pie in the sky by and by” was directly lifted from the crudest forms of Christianity.
Look at the cult of TFG. That too is a religion, based on promises of a return to a mythical past, and vengeance for the unbelievers. That it objectively failed doesn’t matter; it never does for true believers, although over time many sneak away and pretend they never joined up.
cain
@geg6: Someone from the black community observed that R Kellys conviction is much longer than Ghislaine Maxwells for the same crime.
Baud
@Scout211:
Suzanne
@zhena gogolia: No, for fuck’s sake. I’m saying that #notallanything is a derailing tactic when discussing power/resource imbalances and that members of a privileged cohort can stop getting up in their feelings about it. That it’s never about an individual, so it shouldn’t be taken as a personal affront, but making it so is a way of centering an important discussion about a social problem on oneself.
Here’s a discussion about #notallmen. It applies to a large extent to all of the #notallanything discussions.
raven
Breyer off the court.
cain
@Tony G: How can you even afford it? Ten kids now would impoverish you.
Baud
@cain:
Is it exactly the same? Same counts and everything?
Baud
@raven:
Tomorrow. Term ends tomorrow after opinions issued.
geg6
@Tony G:
Nah, you’re right. Most Catholic laity and many parish level clergy here in America pay less attention to the spouting of the hierarchy than even I do. I actually knew the bishop of the Pittsburgh diocese when he was a parish priest. He was a very sweet guy who seemed like he was going to be one of the good ones. Sadly, he got suckered by ambition into the hierarchy and is now a total asshole.
zhena gogolia
@Suzanne: Just try to remember this conversation when you’re old. That’s all I’m asking.
Kent
To be fair, R Kelly was the one actually committing the acts, Maxwell was just an accomplice.
The better comparison would be to compare R. Kelly to whatever sentence Epstein might have received had he lived. In a just world it would have been longer than Maxwell’s.
raven
@Baud: Everyone knew this already?
geg6
@cain:
They are both disgusting creatures, but I’m pretty sure Maxwell didn’t piss on anyone and take pictures of it. I’m sure we’d have heard if she did. That said, her victims are not happy with that sentence.
Regardless, I’m not sure defending R. Kelly by comparing his sentence to hers is what his Black victims really want to hear right about now.
J R in WV
@Ruckus:
There’s another quote going around that is very appropriate right now:
When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time!
These power-hungry monsters are pretty conspicuous. They deserve only our rejection and shunning.
geg6
@Baud:
No.
Baud
@raven:
Not everyone. About 68% of folks.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne: That works when the cohort is 99% evil. But what do you say about a very large group that votes just over 50% for the GOP? Hell, 54% of boomers voted for someone other than Reagan in 1980. If you are talking about half of a group as though it represents the whole #NotAll… doesn’t seem that off base.
Kent
Having Catholics on one side of the family and Mennonites on the other, I would suggest this is primarily due to the Catholic separation of clergy and laity which isn’t a concept that nearly as much exists in the protestant world, especially the more fundamentalist flavors. In Catholicism it is more about the clergy and Vatican telling you want to do and right from wrong. In the more fundamentalist flavors of Protestantism it is more about discerning it for yourself through your own [literal] reading of scripture and such.
Life in a fundamentalist home like I grew up in involves long hours of sitting around the table listening to your grandfather quote scripture at you from his well-worn Bible. Catholics tend not to do that.
raven
@Baud: Sorry, I didn’t look at the time stamp on the article.
Betty Cracker
@Bex: Yes! That’s what reminded me. :)
J R in WV
@Andrya:
I would disagree. I think anyone standing in the way of health care for pregnant people is guilty of torture. No matter their phony and contradictory theology made up centuries after the founder exited the scene. Now he’s ready to help people kill women right here in America, and to fight against freedom.
Plus he will fight against equal rights for our gay brothers and sisters, contraception for everyone, etc, etc. Barbaric evil from the middle ages!
Alison Rose
@zhena gogolia: Thank you <3 My Ukrainian heritage is minimal, but it’s there, and I’ve just always been someone very affected and very energized by seeing people fighting for their existence and humanity. Immigrants at our southern border, or trans folks, or the Roma people, or places like Ukraine or Taiwan or others…and since there isn’t much I can actually do about it, I feel like I can at least be sure to express that empathy whenever and wherever I can.
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: I have no problem describing the Boomers as conservative.
Here’s from Gallup:
I will also note that even Boomers who didn’t vote for the GOP still benefited from the economic and policy environment of their time; that’s how structural social problems work. And I also think that it is important to describe power/resource/privilege imbalances where they exist and call out who benefits. To draw a correlation, only a few more than 50% of white women voted for Trump, but this is important to understand, and if we didn’t point this the fuck out, we would miss describing how racism may be at work in the electorate.
The Moar You Know
@Tony Jay: as my buddy from Glasgow pointed out to me a few months ago, the issue is not moral but economic; separated from the United Kingdom, they’d be the poorest country in Europe.
THAT will make you pause and think.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne: Forty-four percent self-identify as conservative. Per your source. But okay.
zhena gogolia
@Omnes Omnibus: Forget it, Jake.
Suzanne
Here’s another piece on #notallmen.
Important discussions about large-scale social issues and privileges shouldn’t get bogged down in listing every exception to a trend so that individuals don’t feel bad. That’s why, “if it’s not about you, then it’s not about you” became a bit of a phrase a few years ago.
Geminid
@Suzanne: Those numbers from this poll leave out the total for moderates. Conservatives are not even a majority even though they may be twice as numerous as liberals.
Tony G
@Layer8Problem: Patti Smith for pope!
geg6
@Suzanne: Then they need to define or redefine who is a Boomer. I am, according to just about anything I’ve read, a Boomer. But I didn’t get the same privilege that my older siblings did. My younger sister and I (both technically Boomers) were young children in the 60s. My dad was laid off from his steelworker job when we were college age and my family didn’t have the $$ to help us out the way they did my older siblings. We pretty much paid our own way, just as college costs were starting to skyrocket.
I hate shoving such a large and diverse group of people into the same slot. Our experiences at the end of the boom were vastly different than for those born immediately post-war.
raven
@geg6: You could have used the GI bill. Oh wait. . .
Dan B
@Kent: My partner’s family on his dad’s side were conservative Mennonites in Oregon. He was sheltered from them but some of his cousins suffered from repression.
Tony G
@Kent: Yes, that’s my experience! My mother had been a devout Catholic on an emotional level, but she never talked about (and probably never thought about) doctrine or scripture. She loved almost everybody (it was rare to hear her say an unkind word about anyone) and she believed that God, his Son and Mary were up there loving everybody too. People just had to follow a few simple rules. Other people undoubtedly had a harsher, more punitive idea of the religion, but nobody really lectured anybody else. You showed up for Mass once a week, showed up for Confession periodically, and otherwise went about your life. Not so bad, relatively speaking.
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: Boomers and Silents voted for Trump, in 2016 and 2020 (Boomers by a small but statistically significant percentage). Boomers voted for Reagan in 1984. They’re twice as likely to identify as conservative as liberal.
Leslie
@MisterDancer: I remember being told that masturbation was a bigger sin than child molestation. The “logic” was something about it being the most awful thing because it was purely selfish. The implication that child abuse is somehow less selfish because it involves another human being is beyond twisted.
Tony G
@Tony G: Actually, for about half of my mother’s life, the Mass wasn’t even in English. I remember the Latin Mass from when I was very young. A guy in a robe mumbled some gibberish in Latin, you kneeled and genuflected when you were told to do so, and then you went home to eat and watch the Giants play football. Very undemanding.
Dan B
@Alison Rose : Warnock 9 points ahead of Walker in Quinnipiac poll!
Baud
@Dan B:
Suzanne
@geg6:
Why? Discussion of a large-scale trend is never inclusive of the intersections of everyone’s individual circumstances. It’s meant to help understand high-level social issues, not to illuminate anyone’s individual life.
Omnes Omnibus
@geg6: I always love these things because I am technically a boomer by five months. Born in August of 1964. Yeah, I got virtually free college and the Vietnam War. Wait, I got neither. JFK was assassinated around the time I was conceived.
Barbara
@Suzanne: It’s true. White people who came of age between 1970 and 1980 are among the most likely to identify as conservative and vote Republican. It doesn’t make intuitive sense to us because we all look at the 60s as generating significant social trends that clearly undercut traditional family structures and roles in all kinds of ways. However, it pays to remember that experience of trends varies regionally, so this one might be a lot easier to see depending on where you live.
Ksmiami
@Barbara: we were also the generation most exposed to lead…
Barbara
@Omnes Omnibus: It was a slide. When I started college as an out of state student at a public university, my all in expenses were $6000 per year, including $1600 in tuition — which was 2x the in-state rate. I saw tuition escalate at that school somewhat while I was there, and then rapidly and dramatically skyrocket when I went to law school, elsewhere. I considered myself extremely lucky to have gotten out of college when I did. You were basically one college cycle behind me — I was born in 1960 — which means you probably paid double or triple what I did.
Kent
I’m probably related to some of them somehow. My grandparents are both buried at the largest conservative Mennonite church in Oregon: https://www.fairviewmennonite.com/
Lavocat
Shorter Pelosi: FUCK YOU, kiddy diddler!
Geminid
@Suzanne: Most Boomers voted for Trump in 2016 and and 2020 (albeit by “a small but statistically significant margin”). You know adjectives are free, don’t you?
raven
@Omnes Omnibus: You would have made a great CO!
Omnes Omnibus
@Barbara: I went to a private college, so my numbers wouldn’t line up.
Tony Jay
@The Moar You Know:
That’s true, they would start out that way. OTOH, they’re tied to an English dominated Union that is well on its way to economic catastrophe and social dissolution. I could see a LOT of otherwise doubtful Scots deciding they might as well take a punt on seeking a brighter future back in the EU.
raven
@Barbara: When I started college in 1969 the GI bill was exactly the same dollar amount my old man was getting in 1949!
Fair Economist
@The Moar You Know:
Your buddy needs to check his figures. Scotland’s per capita GDP is 30,384 *pounds* or 36,764 dollars which is more than Ukraine, Kosova, Moldova, Albania, Macedonia, Bosnia, Serbia, Turkey, Montenegro, Belarus, Bulgaria, Russia, Croatia, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Latvia, Slovakia, Greece, Lithuania, Portugal, Czechia, Estonia, Slovenia, Cyprus, Spain and Malta.
Scotland would actually be above the median! Quite a long way from the poorest country in Europe.
Omnes Omnibus
@Tony Jay: Wouldn’t Scotland get the remaining North Sea oil money?
Barbara
@Omnes Omnibus: I went to a private law school, and although the scale was different the trend was the same — My third year tuition was more than double what it was in the first year. They made similar changes at the undergraduate level. They promised to increase aid, but only to undergraduates. They may have had different motives and financial incentives, but the same trend prevailed everywhere, public or private.
Omnes Omnibus
@Barbara: Well, we won’t need to worry anymore once Suzanne puts us on an ice floe.
Hoodie
@Barbara: Public law schools started to skyrocket in the late ’90s/ early ’00s. For example, UNC in-state went from about $2k/year in the early 90s to about $20k/year now. Inflation adjusted, about a five-fold increase.
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: Or one could chill TF out and realize that description of a trend in a country of 330 million people is not about one’s specific self. And that turning the discussion to one’s individual life functions to cloud the illumination of the trend that exists. And discussion of that trend might be important.
Seeing as how the Boomers are the last upwardly mobile generation in America, discussion of that trend might be important.
NotMax
‘@Omnes Omnibus
On the brighter side, no problem keeping the beer cold!
scav
But Scotland would get to choose, freely choose!, the color of their own passport. Isn’t that ultimately what Xexiting really all about?
Tony Jay
@Omnes Omnibus:
Ha! That’s going to be up for a lot of debate. I suspect the Westminster Government would be looking for a division of moolah that Edinburgh would find hard to live with. Was it ‘Scotland’ that developed those fields or the UK? Etc.
The lawyers will probably end up pocketing most of it.
Suzanne
@Hoodie: Public schools in general have gone through similar increases, varying somewhat by state.
livewyre
@Suzanne: If the goal is to facilitate understanding, then there may be a distinction being elided that could help with that. Specifically, causality.
We know by now that there is a correlation between “lean Republican” and being born within a certain arbitrary range of years. What we don’t know is how those things would relate to each other with regard to the arrow of time. Correlation and causation aren’t the same thing.
Does Boomerism directly result in voting Republican through some reasonably explicable mechanism? If so, then the problem is already solved – nobody’s being born between those years anymore. But somehow I doubt that’s the end of it. Are there other age ranges with the same relationship that would compensate for such an effect? Or is some other mechanism in play instead?
I notice the comparison with #NotAllMen in terms of excusing isolated instances of a systemic malady. What’s distinct is that there exists an established causal relation between traditionally masculine norms of behavior and gender-related marginalization and oppression. The causation is a common antecedent – the same thing that shapes the definition of “men” also encourages those so defined to pursue supremacy over others.
Nothing about being born within an arbitrary (marketing-defined!) span of time compares to such a relation. We’ll have to look elsewhere if we want to explain it.
RaflW
The right to freely travel the country (which the GOP seeks to block not just for anti-abortion control, but also for gender care, and one can easily imagine other “attempted crimes”) has to be absolutely hammered. Good on Pelosi to raise it. The whole caucus, and senate Dems, need to hit that note endlessly.
Omnes Omnibus
Well, yeah.
Hoodie
@Tony Jay: A potential problem for Scotland is being tied to the euro and Germany. Perhaps if the Germans actually start spending for their own defense that might be less of a problem. I could be wrong, but it seemed to me that the UK really had a good setup being able to have its own currency while having the advantages of the EU markets.
Barbara
As I have been saying for many years, I long ago realized that I was not the norm for my cohort generation. I never take these discussions personally. I can’t wait for my generation to lose influence.
Hoodie
@Suzanne: Yes, but they really jacked up the professional programs (law, medicine, business) as a way of generating revenue. Undergrad tuition is somewhat held down by political pressure. By way of comparison, undergrad tuition at my alma mater (Georgia Tech) has undergone about a three-fold increase.
cain
@Kent: Yeah, that seems reasonable – she was the person bringing the girls in.
Kent
I went to Reed College and graduated in 1986. During my final year there 1985-86) my total annual bill for tuition and fees was $8900 which I paid for as follows:
Try to make that work today when tuition and fees is over $65,000 and the total cost of attendance is pushing $80,000 (Portland is a MUCH MUCH more expensive city to live in today than it was in 1986)
We visited Reed when my daughter was exploring college choices and after running some numbers figured out that we would be paying virtually the entire sticker price. She is now attending UW where the quarterly tuition/fees check that I pay is about $4200 or about $12,600 per year. Housing in Seattle is a whole different other subject but that isn’t really a direct educational cost.
Steeplejack
I’m going to the craft store for a bigger corkboard and more yarn. Anybody need anything?
Thread.
sab
Deleted because misunderstood.
Tom Q
@Suzanne: I think it’s the latter half of what’s now known as the Boomers — the cohort born between 1955-1964 — who account for most of the GOP lean. These were the people who took the contrast between troubled-by-crises Jimmy Carter and serenely confident Reagan as their party definitions, and have voted in line with that mostly since.
I note this because I’m from the earlier part of the boom — born between ’45 and ’55. And, in fact 1) I always heard that as the definition of the boom when I was growing up, and don’t know when the parameters were changed and 2) it makes no sense whatever to lump someone born after JFK was shot in with people born when their fathers returned from the war in ’45. I mean, by ’64, we were two wars on from WW2.
Suzanne
@livewyre: Here’s a piece that explores causality somewhat. It credits aging and “practical reality”, which is of course debatable.
I mean, I would invoke Occam’s Razor here and that the causality for their conservatism is likely around protecting their economic and social interests. I’d love to have that debate rather than explore everyone’s individual exceptions to the trend.
I will also note, as a personal example, that my father-in-law is a Boomer white Christian cishet dude without a college degree and raised in relative wealth, and he has never voted for a Republican in his life.
MomSense
There’s a speck of good news in Maine following the SCROTUS decision to force taxpayers to subsidize tuition at religious schools. The schools in question have decided not to pursue these funds because last year Maine expanded the provisions of our Human Rights Act to prohibit state funds from going to schools that do not ban discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity. Ha! The State Senator who sponsored the legislation is a badass! So proud to know him.
SCROTUS will probably fuck with us again on this, but for now it feels good to outsmart the bastards.
cain
@Barbara: I was going to mention Gym Jordan as I assumed he was on Gen X but nope, he’s 64, late boomer I guess. They are still out there –
I guess we Gen Xers have to take responsibility for the ultra crazy MTG –
I would prefer we just skipped the Gen Xers too.
Darkrose
@geg6: My wife was born in 1963. Technically that makes her a Boomer. She didn’t vote for Reagan either time; in 1980 she was 17. Trying to make generalizations of people born within a 20-year span is kind of ridiculous, especially since that group includes so many other demographics.
Baud
@MomSense:
MomSense
@cain:
I think we also have Cruz, Hawley, Cotton – and a bunch of other Alex P Keaton wannabes who lost their damned minds for Reagan. It made high school hell.
Baud
Random redditor’s comment on the difference in sentencing between Maxwell and Kelly. FWIW.
cain
@Darkrose: I was in high school when Reagan was elected.. I hated the man right off the bat. I couldn’t vote as I was not a citizen then.
But that decade was filled with pop culture that always hammered public institutions. Many might be conservative simply because of that. Case in point, you have ghostbusters, and you have the EPA shit on because of one guy who clearly off his rocker. Everything always showing cities failing.
MomSense
@geg6:
I think around 2010 they changed the dates for Boomers and Gen X. The cutoff used to be 12/31/1959. That seemed more accurate to me.
Baud
@cain:
Cities were in worse shape in the 80s. They came back under Clinton. I always felt this was part of the reason he was hated by the right.
cain
Oh yeah – those clowns. Assholes all of em. We didn’t have those types in high school. Actually, high school was more or less pleasant – it was the teachers that sucked.
Alison Rose
@Dan B: Ooh, that’s awesome to see!
Suzanne
@Kent: Here’s a piece from 2015 called “Students now pay more of their public university tuition than state governments“.
More recent data I have seen indicates that state funding has dropped in some places to just over 10%.
MomSense
@Dan B:
Really?
cain
Yeah, and some inner city schools had metal detectors and what not. I remember all these movies where they talk about criminals coming in, going out, and coming back in again. The police would declare it was a war zone. Maybe it was.. hard to tell from this small town kid from Indiana.
Mnemosyne
I’m getting ready to mark two full hours of being on hold with the IRS so they can explain where my tax payment went, because it ain’t in my bank account anymore.
cain
@MomSense: On twitter they said 10 points!
Kent
I went to HS in suburban Oregon and graduated in 1982.
My HS was absolutely chock full of raging assholes and bullies. The kinds who tortured anyone not fitting the macho hetero norm, drank beer and smoked pot in the school parking lot during lunch, harassed girls to no end. And judging from Facebook are now mostly full MAGA assholes.
Glidwrith
Implication: it is Catholics on the Supreme Court who have stripped away our rights, who will be directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of women (50,000 ectopic pregnancies per year). Perhaps the Pope is also signaling support for women against the current extremist doctrine?
Leslie
@Tom Q: I’m not sure that’s accurate, as someone who falls in that later group. It would be interesting to try to further parse the political leanings of that vast and heterogeneous bunch. Does it really line up mostly in accordance with age, or does it have more to do with some combination of education / income / religious affiliation and practice, etc.? And of course, white folks are, for the most part, more likely to vote GOP, present company notwithstanding.
Regardless,
scav
@Tom Q: I never realized serenely confident and cretinous were synonyms. I practically hated jellybeans for that man. No wonder I’ve never understood my age-cohort.
Baud
@cain:
The worst was Ferris Beuller. That scamp.
Suzanne
@Baud: Cities would have come back no matter who was Prez. The overall trend (yes, another overall trend) for the entire world has been greater urbanization. It is estimated that in 2007, for the first time in human history, more people lived in cities than in rural/agricultural areas.
Likely due to the increased efficiency of specialization and economic opportunity found in cities.
Darkrose
@cain: I was in high school during the 80’s. I’m as GenX as they come. As others have pointed out, my generation is represented in Congress by the likes of Cruz and Hawley.
The Boomers are considered a cohort for marketing purposes. The idea of treating people born within a span of 20 years as a singular entity falls apart when you realize that the term was mostly applied to white people. Especially when you’re talking about their political leanings, you’re going to get very different crosstabs if you look at factors like race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, immigration status, or even actual birth year.
livewyre
@Suzanne: Right, I can appreciate an analysis that dissects the marketing cohort to pick out economic incentives. So we could draw a causal chain from age range -> baby boom (event) -> positional defensiveness -> social conservatism, where in terms of root cause (i.e. what to do anything about) could get into a whole debate of its own. Maybe we’re not looking at boomers, but the boom.
And then that could tie into masculine supremacy and reproductive norms, where sexual permissiveness becomes perceived as a threat to dominant culture. If the norms had been different at the time, would a boom have happened at all, or led to such a reactionary turn? Implying, now that they’ve evolved, could another boom turn out a different way? We could be staring right at the cusp of an unanticipated change. Kinda here for it.
MomSense
@cain:
That’s awesome. He’s extraordinary.
Baud
@Suzanne:
Urbanization has been a century long process. But US cities were in a period of decay through the 80s. I don’t know that urbanization went down in the 80s. But the 90s saw a rejuvenation of major urban areas.
Suzanne
@Leslie:
Those factors of course overlap and cannot be isolated from one another. But yes, the Boomers are whiter than generations that come after.
Baud
I don’t mind analyzing group behavior without using the #NotAll hashtag. But i also see a lot of demographic hate online which is as inappropriate for age as it is for other categories.
Scout211
@Mnemosyne: Oh no! I had to do that a few weeks ago. I finally talked to someone after 90 minutes.
My electronic payment went into my IRS account as paid but it was supposed to be logged under my husband’s social. He doesn’t have an account with the IRS, though, and doesn’t want one. Sigh. If the payment is logged under my husband’s social it will show up in my account but not vice versa. Weird.
They did fix it but they still charged me late fees. By then I no longer cared. I sent a check for the late fees.
Suzanne
@Baud: Urban planners will tell you that urbanization is a hundreds-if-not-thousands-of-years-old trend due to accessibility to work and trade routes and knowledge, certainly not just in the last 100 years. American cities did indeed have a period of economic and social decline, but again, the improvement in the situation would have happened under any president at the time.
Leslie
@Kent: I went to high school in small-town northern California at about the same time. The kids in my year, from junior high on, had the dubious distinction of being notably rude. In 7th or 8th grade, a musician, solo singer/songwriter guy, performed at the school, and afterwards said we were the worst audience he’d ever had. In high school, a group came down from the OSF, as they’d been doing for years, to do an assembly. Same deal — the behavior was so bad they said they wouldn’t be back.
Plenty of bullying, too. I’m not connected to most of them on social media, and don’t want to be.
Darkrose
@Suzanne: State funding for the UC and Cal State systems has dropped dramatically since the 1970’s. You can’t really blame that on Boomers though: Howard Jarvis, the man most responsible for pushing Prop 13 through, wasn’t a Boomer—he was born in 1903.
SiubhanDuinne
@Tony G:
Interesting trivia point: the designation “patter song” in operetta and musical comedy is derived from the way priests would hurriedly mumble their way through the Pater Noster.
Something to keep in mind the next time you hear someone barrelling through “I am the very model of a modern Major General.”
:-)
Suzanne
Who voted for it? I mean, that’s really how one would look to allocate responsibility.
Kay
Except the 12 year old girls. Her life has no value. She just doesn’t exist in his analysis.
If you had told me a decade ago that the mainstream anti-abortion position would be “12 year old girls should and will be forced by the state to carry and deliver their rapists children” I would not have believed it. The birth process itself in a girl that young is child abuse. The state is mandating she be victimized a second time. Mississippi will be the perpetrator.
Alison Rose
@Leslie: Huh, I wonder if our Northern CA small towns were near each other, because I had some nasty little fuckers in my middle and high schools, too. Well, the first high school, at least, which is part of why I begged my mother to let me transfer to the other one across town after sophomore year
ETA: I suppose most middle and high schools are filled with rude jerks. But mine just felt extra prominent. Probably because I was a chubby grunge girl with bad hair and skin and boy howdy, did they never let me forget it!
Baud
@Kay:
Gunn is just representing his constituents, Kay
Suzanne
@Alison Rose : I think nasty little fuckers in middle and high schools are close to universal.
Miss Bianca
@Suzanne:
So, if I understand you correctly, Boomers are Nazis? Got it. Boomers are the moral equivalent of Nazis. According to you, they all share collective guilt for the sins of the world exercised against your generation.
Interestingly, you know who *else* were big fans of the notion of “collective guilt”?
I’ll wait here while you puzzle it out.
@zhena gogolia: Or, what you said, more succinctly.
cain
I grew up in a college town and so the kids were a mix of many things. I never got bullied and actually had people get into it if someone decided.
Sorry to hear that it wasn’t great there. :/
James E Powell
@Dan B:
Awesome news.
Need to pound that lead, help boost Abrams, other Democrats.
Patricia Kayden
They don’t call her Nancy Smash for nothing.
Kay
Anit-abortion activists and lawmakers will address the technicalities of womens and girls later – right now they’re busy gloating that they have seized control of reproductive decisions.
They care so little for the lives of women and girls they put absolutely no thought or planning into any of these laws – maybe they’ll talk about women and girls “moving forward”, maybe not. Not a top priority.
Old Man Shadow
I wish Pope Frank would drop the hammer on the conservative clerics.
NotMax
‘@SiubhanDuinne
Speediness allowed G&S license to get away with lyrical trickery such as pseudo-rhyming dagger with matter.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
:)
Mnemosyne
@Suzanne:
Silent generation and older voted for it. The very oldest Boomers were barely 18 when Prop 13 passed.
So it was the “Greatest Generation” that decided to fuck over their grandchildren for decades to come rather than allow Black and brown people to benefit from their tax dollars.
Kay
@Baud:
Twelve. A sixth or seventh grader. Not that that matters- she won’t be finishing school anyway. Maybe they can marry her off at 14 and forget that she ever existed.
sab
@Kay: Langford that weird member of congress from Florida thinks thirteen year olds can can give consent. Also too the age of consent in Vatican City is twelve.
I know people in Ohio serving life sentences for such behavior, and the Southern contingent thinks this is acceptable? GOP is a bunch of perverts. Started with taxes, but the sexual perversion is who they are.
Sexual perversion isn’t gays being gays. Sexual perversion is raping or seducing minors of whatever persuasion. Grownups seducing or raping children.
dnfree
When I was in college in the 1960s, a Catholic roommate, product of Mother McAuley high school in Chicago, told me that she would rather have an abortion (which was illegal then) than use birth control, because if she actually got pregnant and had an abortion, she would only have to confess it once, whereas if she used birth control she would have to confess it to the priest every time.
Suzanne
Sweet fucking Jesus. No.
This is stupid and offensive.
Boomers — as an age cohort, not individuals — display some conservative trends in their behavior. (This started a couple of days ago, when I pointed out that Boomers did some about of “pulling the economic ladder up behind them” and that following generations are downwardly mobile.)
My contention is that, rather than pointing out, “Hey, I’m a Boomer and I’m not conservative and I didn’t do that and you’re an asshole for making me feel bad!”…. The discussion of this economic trend is important and that centering the discussion around the (many, many) exceptions to this trend is a way of avoiding the discussion. Avoiding the discussion is harmful.
Baud
@Kay:
But the Framers, Kay. Won’t you consider the Framers? What would they think?
Darkrose
@Suzanne: It was passed in 1978. The people who voted for it were overwhelmingly Silent Generation and older, because a huge part of the push was the image of grandma being kicked out of her home that she’d lived in for 60 years because she couldn’t afford the property taxes, That was also when we started hearing people complaining about having to pay taxes for schools when their kids were grown and out of college–again, something that didn’t apply to the Boomers.
Currently, many Boomers are conservative, because people do get more conservative as they age. However, the policies that you’re complaining about were put in place by the generation that held power in the ’70’s and ’80’s, not the Boomers.
SiubhanDuinne
@NotMax:
That, sir, is a calumny; a scurrilous libel upon the great William S. Gilbert. “Dagger” rhymes with “swagger” in the Ruddigore patter trio. It doesn’t, and was never meant to, rhyme with “matter.”
You take that back!
SIR!
Baud
@dnfree:
I respect the efficiency.
Sister Golden Bear
@Andrya:
Well nobody expects the
SpanishSan Francisco Inquisition, do they?Suzanne
@Mnemosyne:
I’m shocked to hear this news.
Sister Golden Bear
@Kent: @Suzanne: I like Stonekettle’s approach:
Suzanne
@Darkrose:
Mmmm, no. The link that I posted from WaPo was from 2015, and it indicated that states really started cutting their contributions in 2005. That’s peak voting years for the Boomer cohort, and I believe they were the largest voting cohort for that whole decade.
catfishncod
Being a proud heir of those who successfully rebelled against the Crown, I don’t really have any inherent right to speak on the subject. My understanding is that the Royal-associated tourism more than pays for what public support the Crown still receives. And I’d be fine with reconfiguring that as a special form of Council Estates and make them file requisitions for trips like any other public servants on the dole. But the ones who actually Do Something? As long as they do, and stay profitable, I’m not too excited about pitching them.
That extends only to the ‘Working Royals’, though. In my opinion, the honors system would be fairer and work better if it were reduced to Working Royals, merit-based orders of knighthood, and a less-discretionary set of Life Peers that worked more like a super-knighthood. Abolish non-royal hereditary aristocracy entirely.
And while you’re at it, clean out Fleet Street and Broadcasting House, eh?
Scout211
@Mnemosyne:
Prop 13 was sold as way to protect older adults from losing their homes to taxes as they age and eventually retire. Older people definitely voted for it, for that reason.
I am toward the older of the boomer group and I was in my mid-twenties when it passed in 1978. I was working in community mental health at the time and my coworkers and I campaigned hard against it. But the effective ads reassured everyone that we just need to protect the olds from losing their homes. Everything else will be fine
The ads were very effective and too many voters of all ages didn’t think it would have any effect on public services. It did.
Property taxes were their only focus. Sigh.
sab
@Old Man Shadow: Long term successful bureaucracies limit the leader. Not enough that he can’t lead, but enough that he can’t blow the place up.
On the other hand they let the new guy lead.
It’s a balance, like all government.
evodevo
@Ken:
yeah, it is…they used to send all their drunks and child molesters out to congregations in the boonies or Indian reservation posts, and not tell anyone there before hand….they’ve been forced to abandon that practice after the scandals of the last few years were exposed. At least, that’s the impression I have….
Darkrose
As I noted below, this analysis isn’t correct. The taxpayer revolts of the ’70’s were not started by Boomers. Prop 13 was proposed by a guy born in 1903, and was largely about retired people whose children were no longer in school not wanting to pay taxes for services they didn’t need.
Yes, a lot of Boomers picked up that attitude as they aged, but you seem to be trying to put all the blame on one generational cohort for problems that were actually created by earlier cohorts, and that are being perpetuated by later ones. The Usurper, Kegstand, and Aunt Lydia? All Gen X, along with Hawley, Cruz, and Cotton. Trump, Clinton, and Obama? All Boomers, and all very different. I just don’t see the point in harping on how it’s all the Boomers’ fault–and I say that as someone who’s always resented how the preferences of that cohort were emphasized while my generation was dismissed as lazy slackers.
Suzanne
@Sister Golden Bear: I like that, too. Not all anybody is anything, but it’s vitally important to discuss social and economic group privileges without it literally becoming, “So you think all Boomers are NAZIS?!”. Jesus fuck.
zhena gogolia
@Suzanne: you are the one who made the analogy between boomers and Nazis, so your anguished exclamations ring hollow
prostratedragon
@Betty Cracker: Loved them. Should rewatch this summer.
Kent
I’m not facebook friends with any of them. But when I go on FB and look up the names of guys who I played football with and went to school with it is almost always a bunch of hunting and fishing shots posed wearing camo interspaced with random stupid MAGA memes and the like. This is semi-rural Oregon and hunting and fishing are BIG. And they were no doubt big participants in various Trump truck parades.
And then I remember why I wasn’t friends with most of them in HS and still am not.
Suzanne
@Darkrose: And I pointed out how you are missing a lot of data. The WaPo piece I linked to indicated that the biggest cuts to education funding started in other states, not just CA, in 2005, when the Boomers were the largest voting cohort.
Pointing our individual politicians is failing at “statistics of small numbers”. Madison Cawthorn is really young, and he is dumbshit conservative, but it is incorrect to say that young people — as a cohort — are dumbshit conservatives.
Miss Bianca
@Suzanne: From my point of view, you are merely justifying your economic resentments by repeatedly (tiresomely, reflexively) blaming “the Boomers!”
And when people (repeatedly) try to persuade you off your hobby horse by pointing out that there just might, possibly, be other explanations for your economic resentments than blaming an entire age cohort, you double down and start thrashing your hobby horse harder, all the while bleating that IT’S IMPORTANT THAT WE ASSIGN BLAME FOR YOUR REASONS, BECAUSE REASONS.
You’re obnoxious and unpersuasive on this subject, and you’ve been told so repeatedly by others beside me. Good Lord, woman. Learn to read the room.
Suzanne
@zhena gogolia: Actually, that was elliotg at comment #91.
sab
@Scout211: Prop 13 dealt with a serious problem. California has a big active government and limited way to finance it.
They were kicking retirees out of their homes because they couldnt pay property taxes. To protect other people who didn’t want to pay taxes on often huge incomes.
Coming from Ohio, I found California taxes appalling. Nail those least able to pay, then steal their houses. In Ohio we pay income tax, even at the city level.
My RWNJ rich brother thought it was fine. Very libertarian, which he is, being a rich finance guy.
Suzanne
@sab:
An unintended consequence of this is that people, once they buy in, are loath to sell. And many of those homeowners became NIMBY people, which is part of why CA’s real estate market is so unbelievably fucked.
zhena gogolia
@Suzanne: you made the comparison to Oskar Schindler
Kent
I grew up in Eugene OR which is also a college town but in the blue collar north end of town where half my classmate’s dads were log truck drivers, millworkers, farmers, or other blue collar trades or middle management types like an accountant at a gravel company. The U of O was 15 minutes away but also 1000 miles away culturally. Every fall there was a clash between the football coaches who wanted 100% attendance and the dads who wanted to pull their kids out for a few days and miss practice to go hunt mule deer in eastern Oregon.
I was kind of a popular smart jock type, played football, debated, ran track, etc. So wasn’t bullied personally. But I saw a LOT of it and to my shame, probably didn’t step in as much as I should have. I’m now a HS teacher and in my judgement the kids of today are 100x better than we were.
Suzanne
@Miss Bianca: I mean, I would love to discuss this:
There might be some policy solutions to this issue. I mean, I’m sorry you find it tiresome, but I’m pretty concerned about the world I’m leaving my kids.
But we can’t talk about it if we’re #notallboomering.
Sister Golden Bear
Another, stealthily intended, consequence of Prop 13 is that it created a loophole that effectively lets businesses property owners (but #NotAllBusinesses) from ever having their property taxes raised.
The cap for homeowners created its own inequities, but the average property tax rate across all homeowners has increased over time. Not
sovery much for business properties. Admittedly CA is running a huge surplus at the moment, but closing that loophole would raised a huge amount of revenue in a decidedly fairer way.Tony G
@Omnes Omnibus: I guess I was the middle cohort of the Boomers — born in 1956. I was very much aware (and worried) about Vietnam as a teenager, but the US pulled out when I was 17. I was appalled back in 1980 to see so many members of my generation (who had fancied themselves part of a “counterculture” a decade earlier) enthusiastically supporting Reagan. Ancient history. “A generation of swine”, as Hunter Thompson once said.
sab
@Suzanne: My brother in Marin moved out and rebuilt his house wall by wall to not trigger new taxes or insane local building concerns (when I was in a prior life as a seagul……)
It took two years. It was insane, but he ducked huge taxes.And he has a rebuilt house.
Couldn’t be done like that in Ohio. The seagulls wouldn’t even have had a vote.
I think it sucks. Rich guy rebuilt his house and avoided properyy tax.
Kent
I was born in 1964 so the very very tail end of the Boomers by only a few months depending on when you make the cutoff.
I entered college in 1982 and noticed there was a night and day difference between the older 1970s era college students on their way out who were still clinging to some vestiges of the 1960s (Grateful Dead, Neil Young, Stones, etc.) and the new generation of college students coming in with me (and younger) who were the MTV generation, into Punk and new wave stuff like DEVO, REM, U2 and a lot more into business careers, young Republicanism, Reagan, etc.
Mnemosyne
@Suzanne:
I was 36 and a longtime voter in 2005, and I’m a Gen Xer, not a Boomer.
Another Scott
@Suzanne: You’re GenX, right?
FTFNYT says you’re doing great even though you have no identity or belief system:
You’re welcome!! :-/
Cheers,
Scott.
Darkrose
@Suzanne:
@Suzanne: I referenced CA because a) I live here, and I’m familiar with some of the issues around funding–like how requirements for states to balance their budgets has crippled education funding, b) Prop 13 catalyzed the “tax revolt” that has affected other states since 1978, characterized by voters not wanting to pay for education in particular becaue their kids weren’t in publicly-funded school, and c) was a huge factor in cratering the state’s education funding.
I pointed out individual politicians to suggest that making generalizations about a cohort of 69.6 million people between the ages of 58 to 76 while blithely ignoring the demographics of the actual people in power and making laws is not helpful or useful in any way. Yes, 44% of Boomers in one survey identify as conservative, but I’m a lot more concerned right now about the actual people in Congress and on the Supreme Court and in state legislatures who are making the laws, not what some randomly selected people out of a huge cohort think. I don’t see the point in focusing on generational warfare; I want to get the right-wing assholes out of government, regardless of how old they are.
Raven
40th anniversary of Chronic Town@Kent:
Suzanne
@Another Scott: There is a stark generational wealth gap.
I’m right on the edge of X and Millennial, but I’m fine. My kids, however, may not be…. not to mention people I don’t know won’t be. That’s what this is about.
sab
When I lived in Marin County in CA we had all kinds of high taxes, mostly on small businesses, but absolutely no social services. The public library in Marin, a very rich county, absolutely sucked. Everything did. They had taxes but I never knew what they spent them on. Probably sslaries for public officials.
Citizen Alan
@Baud:
If I can’t get out of this state by the end of September, I swear to God I’m just gonna liquidate everything, move to Europe, bum round until the money runs out, and then go to Amsterdam and kill myself in a massive cocaine binge. Death would be preferable to spending the rest of my life in Mississippi surrounded by some of the most evil people who ever lived in the history of the world.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne: Do you want to argue that kids are in comparatively dire situation today because of conservative voting patterns over the last 40 year or do you want to say boomers fucked kids over? I would say that one line of discussion is likely to lead toward looking for solutions and the other is not. What is your goal?
Suzanne
@Darkrose:
Pointing out that certain cohorts have reaped benefits (and that other cohorts are not) isn’t “generational warfare”. Hell, it might just be acknowledging unintended consequences. But as I just linked, there’s a huge generational wealth gap (there’s also a large racial wealth gap, I bet they’re linked). There’s a lot of policy behind that gap.
I also want douchebags out of office, but douchebags vote for douchebags.
Geminid
in@Sister Golden Bear: “Some” or “many” work well also. Adjectives are free, and they can help keep the hardheaded from digging deeper holes.
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus:
I think that it is the job of the people who fuck things up (and those who benefit from a situation, even if they didn’t actually cause it themselves) to unfuck it up. This is why I have said this weekend that white dudes need to be fighting for reproductive justice.
livewyre
@zhena gogolia: For what it’s worth, the Nazi connection was brought up previously. But we’re still glossing over the causal thing, and I might have a causal explanation for that too.
There’s a reason we’re resisting analysis in causal terms. Being born within a certain range of years isn’t causal – it’s random. Anyone could have done so. It’s as close to the luck of the draw as life gets, like choosing your parents. So why does it keep coming up as a point of judgment? It’s almost like we’re not looking for a cause in the first place, but something else.
For this purpose, a marketing cohort does just as well as any other coherent identifier. It’s a clear enough marker. We know who’s in and who’s out of the group. Either you’re one or you’re not. And that’s all we really need, when it comes to judging a problem in terms of identity.
If you’re in the bad group, no matter what you do from then on, you’re automatically and indelibly suspect. You have bad nature. Sucks to be you. Cause doesn’t factor in at all – at any point, you could revert to your nature and betray us in the name of your identity, and a shame on us for letting ourselves be fooled. Maybe you should have been born better if you didn’t want us to suspect you.
Doesn’t that sound like how society should be run? Me neither.
Geminid
@Citizen Alan: Move to Minnesota instead. There’s work there, and you’ll meet good people.
livewyre
@Suzanne: Like it or not, if we want the work to happen, it’s disproportionately on us marginalized folks to dig ourselves out of it. Waiting for privilege to do it is just emulating privilege – tantamount to ignoring it. That and the quasi-suicidal ideation expressed above are dead ends. There’s no fix there. Better to look for where one is, and gradually make things less unfair, than insist that it all be turned over before starting. If you ask me, anyway.
Another Scott
@Suzanne: You may not intend it, but your arguments sound an awful lot like “collective punishment”.
It’s not peoples’ birthdays that matters in setting public policy. Lumping tens of millions of people together just based on their birthdate is stupid.
Cheers,
Scott.
Suzanne
@livewyre:
Sure, but here is where I think this breaks down.
We don’t choose our race, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, wealth of family we’re born into, etc., either. But there are hierarchies that exist independent of us (like white supremacy, patriarchy, preference for cishet-ness) predating our birth, and that gives some of us unearned advantages. It’s our job to undo those advantages as much as possible. The first step to undoing that is recognizing that those power differentials are real, and that even though none of us created them, some of us accrue more power or status because we have them.
My original contention (in an old thread) was that the Boomer cohort (again, not all Boomers) got some significant advantages due to economic circumstances they inherited and then got conservative after they made use of a good start.
Suzanne
Show me where I advocated any “punishment” at all.
livewyre
@Suzanne: The problem isn’t identifying an arbitrary group in terms of privilege. That’s been amply done already. The problem is in deciding what to do about it, and that’s where we need to employ causal analysis.
We have a choice here. We can define a group, and then use privilege to assign a moral status to that group – whether they’re a “good” or a “bad” group. Then, when we choose what to do, we use that moral status to decide whether good or bad things should happen to them. Good ones get good things, and bad ones get bad things, right? How does that pan out in practice?
Alternatively, we could find out where the privilege actually came from, assuming privilege is actually a problem in itself. Here’s where it gets causal. Does being born in the marketing cohort of the Baby Boomer cause privilege in itself? That doesn’t wash, because privilege isn’t rising and falling solely with the population of that cohort, nor with any other one. So we have to look further – assuming the point doesn’t start and end with finding the evil and punishing it. Which… I’ll let you decide whether that’s what you want to go for.
livewyre
@Suzanne: What other relevance is there to bringing up a cohort in terms of moral status? If analysis ends there, rather than getting into what actually happened during that period to give them that (relative and aggregate) privilege, then it stops doing anything at all other than blaming. And blame is only useful for assigning punishment, unless you can describe something else we ought to be doing with it.
Suzanne
@Another Scott:
I would argue that people’s collective shared life experiences matter a great deal in shaping one’s worldview. Every group measure is imperfect. But we talk about trends in behavior in all sorts of ways based on observed differences. We note urban/rural, regional, linguistic, religion, race, sex, orientation, financial status…. fuck, even height seems to produce differences in behaviors. Why would we expect age to be different?
SFBayAreaGal
@Suzanne: Nah cuts to education started in the late 70s. After Prop 13, public schools, and public colleges took a big hit.
Kent
I have seen the same exact thing written about racism. That racism is a white invention and a white pathology and that it should fall on white people to solve it. Which makes a lot of sense to me. But it also means that shit ain’t likely to get done.
SFBayAreaGal
@Tony G: My feelings exactly. 1956 also. I was horrified to see how many of my cohorts voted for “Raygun”
Suzanne
@livewyre:
We make — or should make — public policy decisions about resource allocation all the time. The public discussion about student loan forgiveness is one example. I mean, if it was up to me, we’d significantly increase taxes on rich people (and that would fall heavily on Boomers) in a variety of ways and make public universities free and give huge down payment assistance to young and minority homebuyers and probably 10,000 more things I haven’t thought of yet. All with the goal of helping the generation after my own to be prosperous. I don’t consider any of that “generational warfare” or “collective punishment”.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne:
I bet 90% commenters on this blog, regardless of age, agree with that. Like I said above, what are you interested in doing?
Suzanne
@SFBayAreaGal: Cuts to education funding continued long after 1978. They’re still happening. They really ramped up in the late 2000s.
Darkrose
Your first sentence underlines the problem of using 20-year generational cohorts as the delimiter: “people’s collective shared life experiences matter a great deal in shaping one’s worldview.” The Baby Boom generation is 1946-1964, but there are distinct differences between the first half of the cohort, which includes the actual post-WWII children who came of age during the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, and the second, who came of age post-Vietnam and post-Watergate. My wife doesn’t have the shared life experience of someone who knows where they were when they found out that JFK had been assassinated because she was three months old. A queer person who came of age post-Stonewall is going to have a different perspective on the fight for LGBTQ+ rights than someone who was an adult when it happened.
You seem to be arguing that the Boomer label is more important than actual age, shared experiences, or other demographic factors. Whether someone was part of an arbitrary marketing cohort is less important in determining their opinion than things like whether or not they went to college, or their race or religion or gender identity or sexual orientation. And that still doesn’t address why it’s so important to place primary blame on that marketing cohort for systemic issues that have literally affected this country from the beginning. The American Revolution started out as a tax protest; it’s not like the Boomers are the first group in the US who don’t want to pay taxes.
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: I’m interested in undoing the generational wealth gap. The first step is acknowledging that there is a generational wealth gap, and identifying who had benefited from it (follow the money). Hopefully by identifying that gap, some people will acknowledge that they lucked out and have a moral duty to undo it.
I mean, I wasn’t in Zuccotti Park, but I’m on board with their platform.
livewyre
@Suzanne: Sure, we can (and should) define policy based on resources and factors other than cohort, but we can do that just as well without cohort in mind. It seems beside the point. Systemic effects can be taken into account purely on a causal basis.
The thing is, I’m not sure it really makes a difference whether one considers ones own actions to be collective punishment in determining more broadly whether that’s the action being taken. One can easily be sincerely mistaken about that, especially when it comes to introspection.
Intersection was brought up earlier – privilege in separate but coinciding dimensions. One temptation that’s always been available to those normatively exempt from race has been to decide when an issue is someone else’s problem to clean up. In terms of privilege, that consideration is inevitable – kind of an elephant in the room. If we don’t address the causes of privilege, and instead content ourselves with who’s in the wrong, that work just kind of languishes, and the pressure only tightens. There’s no choice but to cut off the problem where it starts, which in my best estimate isn’t “with whom”.
Suzanne
@Darkrose:
Am I saying that? I have actually pointed out that other demographic differences overlap with the Boomer cohort. Boomers are whiter than generations that follow, women in subsequent generations are more educated, people in subsequent generations are less religious. I’ve pointed out (and linked) that info.
The reason that I think the generational cohort experience is applicable here is that economic conditions like low-cost education, lower housing prices, and a long period of economic growth happened at specific points in time, and those things were benefits to young people at the time who were “on-ramping” their lives. That broadly describes an age cohort. I’m happy to talk about the exact boundaries of that age cohort. But the reaction is stupid defensiveness.
livewyre
@Suzanne: Here we agree on a substantial knot at the heart of the problem.
When it comes to wealth, I see a contradiction in priorities. We want to hold the wealthy responsible for the effects of their wealth, but at the same time the wealth was almost entirely a result of chance (see: choosing parents).
In an interconnected society, opportunity is social – no one’s really self-made even if they actually bought in on the ground floor and then took the stairs all the way up. I highly doubt anyone is capable of responsibly managing so large a portion of an economy on their own. So again, it seems to fall away from “who” in favor of “how”. And I have some thoughts about that which might be for another topic.
Ruckus
@J R in WV:
Yep.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne:
What was that platform again?
Ruckus
@J R in WV:
Well if you think of the original church as perfect then why would one vary from the original church’s BS?
I see a couple of different axises that this concept of church/life/state rotates about. There is the original axis, many of the worst clergy see whatever originality there is in their religion it is the only and right axis. And at a time when people were put up on crosses with spikes I’m thinking original can stuff it.
The second one is those pushing originality may just be control freaks who get off on torturing anyone besides themselves.
If most religions were strictly from the so called teachings, it’s possible they might not be all bad, but when you add in control freak assholes to the teachings of a long, long time ago it really doesn’t meet my view of a livable world.
Suzanne
@livewyre:
There’s a great piece I read a few years back, and I wish I could find the link, about one of the primary determinants of moral alignment is how one considers the role of luck in their lives. Are the good things that happened to you due to something you did or something that you lucked into? Those who believe in a strong social welfare system seem to think of themselves as lucky, whereas those who do not appear to think success is due to their efforts. A growing economy that sustains families when you’re a kid and cheap education and cheaper housing are all things that are, to me, things people lucked into. (ETA that those things existed at specific points in time and are critical to prosperity) As such, they have a responsibility to pass those conditions on.
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
A lot of boomers I know, including me, a earlyish boomer, were democrats. As well my parents were. Not all of them for sure but greater than mid 20%. I grew up in SoCal and it was a republican stronghold that started changing to democratic as soon the early boomers started voting.
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: Undoing the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: I have not seen “the natural conservatizing effects of aging” taking place in me at all. I’ve been some sort of liberal almost my whole life but the precise flavor swings around in sort of a reactive fashion. I think my most moderate/right-curious era was my early thirties, and that’s gone now.
I’ve been somewhat disillusioned with socialist and Marxist radicals in recent years after making what I think was a good-faith effort to hear them out (the last straw was that so many were weirdly sympathetic to Trump as a hammer to beat liberals with), but on the cultural hot-button issues if anything I’ve been radicalizing.
But I am a GenXer. We started out kind of stodgy.
Ruckus
@geg6:
This.
It is also true that differing parts of the country had a wide variation of percentages of dem/rethug.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: SuzMom is like you, this 72-year-old lady is more radical now than any young’un I know. Spent her early life working hard and going to school and now is like “let’s go out and protest these fuckers!”. OTOH, SuzBioDad is the ultimate hypocrite. He was a big fuckin’ hippie, used shit tons of drugs, went to school to dodge the draft, blew up multiple families and didn’t support his kids, but now is on Facebook all the time ranting about how he’s worked so hard his whole life for everything he has and how Hillary sucks BUT NOT LIKE MONICA and how Trump won. He’s a perfect example of someone who benefitted from a stack of good circumstances and fucks over everyone else.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne: So you are up for increasing taxes on the wealthy to provide opportunities for the comparatively disadvantaged? Isn’t that the basic Democratic platform? Inter-generational conflict doesn’t need to enter into it.
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: Yes, but I’d probably be up for some age-related preferences. In home buying, for example. It is critical to acknowledge that we need to not just help people, but help them at specific junctures in their lives so they can build a solid foundation for the rest of their lives.
O. Felix Culpa
I’m a mid-boomer. My sons are millennials. They are educated, urban professionals, and they will probably not do better than their dad and I, even though we started with nothing. My older son graduated right into the global financial meltdown and will probably never recover those years of lost earnings, which sucks bigly.
To me, the more fruitful discussion focusses on how can we help millennials and beyond improve their financial situations? Include combating climate change as part of that discussion.
J R in WV
@Tom Q:
Wait– you mean that I (born late 1950) amd NOT a boomer~!!~
This changes everything!!!
Tehanu
@Alison Rose :
What you said!
Another Scott
@Suzanne:
My father was born in 1935. His first job was working as a pin-setter in a bowling alley when he was 8. He was smart and had lots of odd jobs and saved up for college and had a scholarship to Emory. Something happened, he lost his scholarship, spent his savings on radio equipment, and ended up taking some time off before going back to school at Chicago.
Later he got his Master’s degree at nights at GaTech while he was working.
Nobody could do those things now without massive aid or massive loans, and I don’t know if Lockheed even pays for their employees to get additional education any more or not.
He loved Rush Limbaugh and supported Reagan and the GQP. (He also did a lot of good works in his church and community; I don’t know how he reconciled his politics with that.)
He wasn’t a Boomer.
Yeah, anecdotes aren’t data. But blaming Boomers for the changes that happened from 1980 on is still less than helpful. Why not blame the “Reagan Democrats”, as was so popular among the pundits in the 1980s?? Why not blame the GQP that sold out their party to a bunch of liars who would do and say anything to implement their reactionary policies and to stay in power (voodoo economics, “I had no idea we were illegally selling arms to Iran to fund the Contras”, etc.)???
Blame the people and the party who created the policies, not the voters who were lied to about what they were going to do. People who voted for Reagan to build up the defense budget or get inflation under control or crack down on porn or restrict abortion weren’t voting for them to triple or decuple the cost of college…
Bottom line: There are too many differences among the people in the “Boomer” group to inform public policy. Picking on “Boomers” is using the same type of rhetoric as those who argue for “collective punishment” – Well, you know, tall people on average are shifty and have had unfair advantages, so we need to make sure they’re put in their place….
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
thisismyonlinenym
@Ken:
Now old woman…You are accused of heresy on three counts…
Heresy by thought…
Heresy by word…
Heresy by deed…
and Heresy by action…Four counts!
thisismyonlinenym
@Suzanne:
Or as I like to think of it, pulling up the ladder into the treehouse : )
I also think however that what was this great liberal activity in the 60’s and early 70s was less for the liberalism of the causes and more for a way that liberal causes could gain them more of that economic and social clout.
I don’t doubt that a significant minority of boomers really valued and believed in those causes. And still do. Say 35-40%. Pretty much same as now. But for most of the rest it was just a thing young people could do to fuck the Man. Yeah! Fuck the Man!
It gave a sense of identity, cohesiveness and with that a growing chunk of political power, a means to shape culture in their likeness, and yeah get laid. What more could the Young Generation, The Me Generation, ask for?
Boomer liberal activism was a generational power grab against the economic and social interests of anyone over 30 (Never trust anyone over 30!). And they had the numbers and crucially the economic means to pull it off. Quantity is a quality all its own.
The cause wasn’t as important as they made it out to be in the later hagiography, which they created, of 1969.
When the usefulness of liberal causes for wresting power from the establishment faded — as they became the establishment (and aged over thirty!) — they began to abandon liberal causes.
I think I see a wistful echo in the Twitter/Berner left. A vague whiff of wannabe New Left Che Guevara radical chic. Yeah! Fuck the Man!
Boomers owned the last 40 years of American culture. It’s their creature. It mostly embodies their values. It’s been their world. Until recently. And it seems to me most boomers are not handling the slippage very well. Not surprised. It’s the first time for most of them. They are mostly not gracious about it.
And this is the perfect time to point this out: Boomer culture is white culture. Who’s a boomer is cultural not chronological. Obama is not really a boomer although by birth year some might assume he is.
A black kid born all throughout the so-called Baby Boom years had a different set of experiences than a white kid because the black kid grew up in a very much segregated de facto or even de jure apartheid society. And black kids born in the boomer years did not have the same kind of economic and social gains. They will not be found in the boomer treehouse. If there ever was a treehouse for them it’s over yonder. Because housing in America is still segregated, albeit economically. There really aren’t any black boomers.
Wanna check out some not-boomer white culture? See AOC’s social media. LOL, whut? Yeah, that’s why a majority of boomers are not handling it graciously. It’s a triple whammy. 1. they’re young 2. Not exactly white. 3. boomers aren’t very good at sharing those economic and social gains. Especially with not-boomers. If #3 seems a cheap shot go ask anyone under 30. They’re the ones who get to deal with whatever’s left after the boom generation tries to take it all with them. And they know it.
This is not about individual boomers. But it is about the cohort. It’s my explanation as to why a majority of boomers have abandoned liberalism. It never was mostly about making society liberal. It was mostly about making society theirs.
I absolutely know individual boomers are going to strongly disagree. : )
Paul in KY
@Ken: I would say an Archbishopric in charge of the St. Peter’s sewer cataloging.
Paul in KY
@Geminid: I’ve always thought St. Paul is where Christianity began to go off the rails…