The final screwing by the boomers...

[trenchfoot]

So long as the very wealthy have a tight ironclad grip on our politicians, especially those of the conservative stripe, every succeeding generation from the middle class and the poor will suffer more than the one before it.

It began with the class warfare the very wealthy started in order to put those cocky upstart burgeoning post WWII middle class folks back in their place as having little or no say in how the very wealthy wanted to run the country.

The war continues and it's rather too obvious to point out who's winning it, especially with one of their own blessing himself and his ilk with tax cuts and more and more unneeded corporate welfare that they can't seem to get enough of.

So let's keep having the peasants argue among themselves as to who to blame as the very wealthy laugh their asses off at the spectacle they've encouraged and had a lot do with.

 

[ivwshane]

what machine?

The machine they created.

 

[pmv]

I understand that. Its why, as I said, I'm all for taking care of you guys and giving you the ability to enjoy the rest of your lives. But that doesn't change the fact that the boomer generation really, really, fucked over subsequent generations. I don't blame you or moonbeam specifically but I do hold your generation accountable.

Don't take it personal, recognize your generations mistakes and do what old people do best, warn the newer generations of your mistakes and shortfalls and what you could have done differently.

I get occasional stabs of resentment towards baby-boomers in certain contexts, but I really think there's a fundamental logical flaw in this intergenerational war/resentment. There's something a bit off with the whole logic of it.

It doesn't work like other forms of group-conflict, like the conflict between classes or gender-wars.

The baby boomers didn't stop the Millennials from doing things 'right'. It's not as if they grabbed and held on to power that would have been better shared with Millennials. They were the only people there doing anything and keeping the economy and human society going. Millennials didn't do anything to stop them or raise a squeak of protest back then, so why do they have the right to whinge about it now, eh?

That they weren't born yet is a weak excuse - that wasn't the Boomer's fault. If Millennials are so concerned about things having been messed up in the past they should have arranged to have been born earlier.

What matters is what we do _now_.

 

[pmv]

...and it still comes down to the specifics of inequality and (mostly) economics. Not all Boomers are rich and not all Millennials are doing badly. There are some issues where your generation has an effect, but they need very careful case-by-case analysis that includes that along with all the other aspects (e.g. over how the housing market has operated). Painting it largely in generational terms is a trick by the economically fortunate to divert attention from the real issue.

 

[BoomerD]

Well one less boomer due to ants. All you ever wanted.

 

[Moonbeam]

...and it still comes down to the specifics of inequality and (mostly) economics. Not all Boomers are rich and not all Millennials are doing badly. There are some issues where your generation has an effect, but they need very careful case-by-case analysis that includes that along with all the other aspects (e.g. over how the housing market has operated). Painting it largely in generational terms is a trick by the economically fortunate to divert attention from the real issue.

In Sufism there is the concept of the Commanding self based on the dominant concealed prejudice of any culture at some time and some geographic location. The nature of that hidden prejudice shifts from place to place and from age to age. Your post here reminds me of just how dangerous these unconscious prejudices can be when shared by masses of people:

Wiki: "One form of economic antisemitism in the Middle Ages was a mass of legal restrictions imposed on the occupations and professions of Jews. Local rulers and church officials closed many professions to the Jews, pushing them into marginal occupations considered repugnant, such as tax- and rent-collecting and money-lending, but tolerated then as a "necessary evil".[20]
Catholic doctrine then held that lending money for interest was a sin and forbade it to Christians. Not being subject to that restriction, Jews dominated this business. The Torah and the later sections of the Hebrew Bible criticise usury, but interpretations of the Biblical prohibition vary. Since few other occupations were open to them, Jews were motivated to take up money-lending. That was said to show Jews were usurers, which then led to many negative stereotypes and propaganda. Natural tensions between creditors, typically Jews, and debtors, typically Christians were added to social, political, religious and economic strains.
Peasants who were forced to pay their taxes to Jews could personify them as the people taking their earnings and remain loyal to the lords on whose behalf the Jews worked.
Also present in the Middle Ages was the coercion of Jews into being economic objects, possessions and even slaves by groups of nobles, as is evident in examples from the English code Leges Edwardi Confessoris. Jews were pressed into various economic occupational roles and so became a people that could be coveted, sold or traded for economic purposes by those in power at the time. That use of Jews also had political causes and ramifications in the time period, but the economic practice of using Jews to fill particular roles in economic sectors was prevalent.[21]"

Enter the German pre-WWII political scene, and there were the Jews, all ripe and ready to blame for the economic misery of the Aryan poor and a psychopath politician infected with the inevitable growth on the notion of the Greedy Jew who had been kept out of other professions than the ones most easily hated by any population. Of course, it just had to be something genetic about these people who had been segregated from the full range of a normal life, that made just them particularly evil. They became the Boomers of their day. This same creation of what we fear and the extermination it inevitably engenders, whispered about at first and leading to this or that Pogrom, is the same thing that repeats and repeats though history. Nobody will take responsibility for their own pain. Misery loves company and the miserable will do what they can to make sure everybody feels their pain.

Thanks for your posts here.

 

[JSt0rm]

@pcgeek11 What is the machine? You laugh at my post as if you are in on the truth so spell it out.

 

[BoomerD]

@pcgeek11 What is the machine? You laugh at my post as if you are in on the truth so spell it out.

 

[pmv]

In Sufism there is the concept of the Commanding self based on the dominant concealed prejudice of any culture at some time and some geographic location. The nature of that hidden prejudice shifts from place to place and from age to age. Your post here reminds me of just how dangerous these unconscious prejudices can be when shared by masses of people:

Wiki: "One form of economic antisemitism in the Middle Ages was a mass of legal restrictions imposed on the occupations and professions of Jews. Local rulers and church officials closed many professions to the Jews, pushing them into marginal occupations considered repugnant, such as tax- and rent-collecting and money-lending, but tolerated then as a "necessary evil".[20]
Catholic doctrine then held that lending money for interest was a sin and forbade it to Christians. Not being subject to that restriction, Jews dominated this business. The Torah and the later sections of the Hebrew Bible criticise usury, but interpretations of the Biblical prohibition vary. Since few other occupations were open to them, Jews were motivated to take up money-lending. That was said to show Jews were usurers, which then led to many negative stereotypes and propaganda. Natural tensions between creditors, typically Jews, and debtors, typically Christians were added to social, political, religious and economic strains.
Peasants who were forced to pay their taxes to Jews could personify them as the people taking their earnings and remain loyal to the lords on whose behalf the Jews worked.
Also present in the Middle Ages was the coercion of Jews into being economic objects, possessions and even slaves by groups of nobles, as is evident in examples from the English code Leges Edwardi Confessoris. Jews were pressed into various economic occupational roles and so became a people that could be coveted, sold or traded for economic purposes by those in power at the time. That use of Jews also had political causes and ramifications in the time period, but the economic practice of using Jews to fill particular roles in economic sectors was prevalent.[21]"

Enter the German pre-WWII political scene, and there were the Jews, all ripe and ready to blame for the economic misery of the Aryan poor and a psychopath politician infected with the inevitable growth on the notion of the Greedy Jew who had been kept out of other professions than the ones most easily hated by any population. Of course, it just had to be something genetic about these people who had been segregated from the full range of a normal life, that made just them particularly evil. They became the Boomers of their day. This same creation of what we fear and the extermination it inevitably engenders, whispered about at first and leading to this or that Pogrom, is the same thing that repeats and repeats though history. Nobody will take responsibility for their own pain. Misery loves company and the miserable will do what they can to make sure everybody feels their pain.

Thanks for your posts here.

Well, yes, apparently, from what I've read, the irony is that the prohibition on usury for Christians meant Christians still lent money, they just did so on far more capricious and abitrary terms than did the Jews. Hence people preferred to borrow from Jewish lenders because you at least knew what the terms were and had some confidence they would stick to them.

Not that I'm 100% sure where Jews come into this, unless your point is that "anti-Boomerism" is another flavour of 'the socialism of fools', which I guess I'd agree with.

 

[Ajay]

So long as the very wealthy have a tight ironclad grip on our politicians, especially those of the conservative stripe, every succeeding generation from the middle class and the poor will suffer more than the one before it.

It began with the class warfare the very wealthy started in order to put those cocky upstart burgeoning post WWII middle class folks back in their place as having little or no say in how the very wealthy wanted to run the country.

The big push, IMHO, came in the late 60's and early 70's - and culminated in the 'Reagan Revolution'. Lucky us. Having cemented their power, corporations and the wealthy have exerted considerable power even on democratic administrations (like the insurance companies 'forcing' a 20% administration charge to be written into the HCA).

 

[JSt0rm]

thats not an explanation.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Boomers -- like me -- only had current print/TV media news about Vietnam and the Saturday propaganda DOD feature "The Big Picture". We were lucky that Ellsberg's Pentagon Papers arrived only ten years after the JFK murder -- which by itself was an act of deceit by a low-level CIA propaganda psy-war specialist.

Boomers -- like me -- may have taken for granted our opportunities, like "free" university education at the University of California, or Social Security, or the establishment of the EPA.

Boomers -- like me -- couldn't conceive of the chance that CO2 emissions were overwhelming the atmosphere and accumulating from the Industrial Revolution 200 years earlier. But we established "Earth Day". We cherished our National Parks.

Boomers in general may not have seen the writing on the wall 20 years ago, but I DID -- when I read an LA Times Sunday four-pager on the melting of the Arctic published back around 2001.

Boomers in general may not have realized the underpinnings of the Military Industrial Complex, the "action-reaction" effect shown with the 911 attack, the unnecessary $3 Trillion+ war in Iraq. But I did. I predicted the 911 attack exactly the night before it happened. I predicted the 2003 Iraq War, two years before Obama decided to oppose it.

Y'all need to read a book on Causal Analysis and maybe study statistics and probability.

I didn't do it. Boomers weren't generally aware enough to prevent any of it.

If I "said anything" back in 2000 or 2001, did anybody listen? No -- I'm just a nobody, and a Boomer.

Don't blame me. I'm all for Millennials paying the tuition that I paid. I'm all for an end to fossil fuel usage piling up CO2. I'm all for polar bears and glaciers. I'm all for Social Security solvency, even if my own "dole" is only about $250/month (look up the Reagan Windfall Provision Act applying to civil servants).

But don't blame me. I don't even think you can blame Boomers as a group. You can instead blame certain industries, certain ideologies, certain institutions -- but mostly -- a prevailing and certain Ignorance.

And I'm not freaking Ignorant, Citizen Cornpone!

 

[BoomerD]

Bonzai, not a few of us Boomers just watched the Vietnam War from the comfort of our living room tv...some were "invited" to attend in person, others went voluntarily.

 

[Moonbeam]

With regards to ignorance:

I've heard that according to the Law off Heptaparaparshinokh, a bit about that here: https://www.endlesssearch.co.uk/philo_lawof7.htm, there was a time on the sixties when the rotation of the galactic wheel turned in such a way that the primary ray, the food source of cosmic awareness, shown brighter for a time. If this might account for the notion of the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius, I cannot say or even if all such notions are bunk, the I also heard that something is happening, man, and you don't know what it is. But it does seem that for a time there, there was the outcry, Welcome to the Machine. Of course one could never really explain what the machine is to the machine. But it could be we were made welcome all the same. Welcome to the Hotel California. We have plenty of knives and forks to serve up the generations.

 

[Moonbeam]

Bonzai, not a few of us Boomers just watched the Vietnam War from the comfort of our living room tv...some were "invited" to attend in person, others went voluntarily.

Testing testing testing, do you want to die for Nixon or follow Alice down her hole.

 

[pcgeek11]

@pcgeek11 What is the machine? You laugh at my post as if you are in on the truth so spell it out.

You've never heard of getting caught up in the machine reference?

Did you grow up in a hole in the ground?

Here is a hint:

a cog in the machine

Definition of a cog in the machine in the Idioms Dictionary by The Free Dictionary

idioms.thefreedictionary.com

Like just another brick in the wall.

 

[BoomerD]

Testing testing testing, do you want to die for Nixon or follow Alice down her hole.

As much as I despised Tricky Dick, he inherited that war...

 

[JSt0rm]

You've never heard of getting caught up in the machine reference?

Did you grow up in a hole in the ground?

Here is a hint:

a cog in the machine

Definition of a cog in the machine in the Idioms Dictionary by The Free Dictionary

idioms.thefreedictionary.com

Like just another brick in the wall.

yeah but thats not reality. Like we all have free choice to design our own lives.

 

[pcgeek11]

yeah but thats not reality. Like we all have free choice to design our own lives.

To some extent.

 

[BoomerD]

yeah but thats not reality. Like we all have free choice to design our own lives.

To some extent.

Just like "We the People" have the right to vote for the candidate of our choice...from the list of candidates chosen for us.

 

[Moonbeam]

yeah but thats not reality. Like we all have free choice to design our own lives.

Welcome to the machine where all of your programmed actions will be accompanied by the delusion that you are free and in control of your destiny.

 

[JSt0rm]

Welcome to the machine where all of your programmed actions will be accompanied by the delusion that you are free and in control of your destiny.

 

[JSt0rm]

what you boomers think is your enlightenment was boiled down into a movie 20 years ago. A great movie btw. You should all watch it

 

[JSt0rm]

here this is a good one for you guys...

 

[JSt0rm]

here you go moonbeam. This is where I think you want to be...

what do you think?