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Translation: you’ll become more conservative when you have children and own a home
Millennials: 😆
Zoomers: 😂
Alpha: 🤣
Whateverthefuckcomesnext: 💀own a home
Too bad boomers ruined my best chance at that.
I’ve been fortunate enough to have seen my material conditions improve as I’ve entered my mid-thirties which has let me start a family and buy a home. I’ve also watched my incredibly talented and hard working friends/acquaintances/neighbours be ground into dust under the cruel rule of capitalism. I got lucky, they didn’t, this has radicalized me far more than any naive idealism ever could.
Exactly this. I’m fortunate enough that the skills I’m good at have a lot of demand at the moment, but people I know that are more hard working than I am and very talented, struggle to get by just because their job for some reason is considered less worthy to pay for.
Wanting to maintain this rotten system is the purest form of greed.
Having to mow the lawn is the first step in the pipeline of fascism
Everyone knows it’s a gateway chore
You joke, but if you ever talked to a homeowner about their lawn and heard them complain about their neighbor’s lawn…
Mowing the lawn is the only hour of uninterrupted creativity I get in the week. Also my neighbour’s lawn is 50% dandelions.
Your lawn is green concrete; a lifeless painting with nothing for pollinators.
Your neighbor’s lawn has wildlife in the deadlands of the suburbs.
Except for the magnolia tree and vegetable garden cleary visible in the photo…
A tiny little strip of life, carefully manicured to minimize nature as much as possible.
Might as well pave over the rest of it and just have potted plants for all the good that does.
my neighbour’s lawn is 50% dandelions.
its too late, you’re hitler himself
Influencers on the whole are trying their best to make little nazis out of the next generations. Give them time.
Wait is Alpha the next generation’s name after Zoomers?
Yeah, for now. That might change. Millennial was originally Gen Y.
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Which is weird since conservative politics is all about cutting funds for schools, gutting the department of education completely, no pre k or free lunches for kids, and getting rid of a large portion of our law enforcement. Just doesn’t make sense why any one who cares about education or safety would be conservative
getting rid of a large portion of our law enforcement
I’m pretty certain neither party supports this. After 2020, every state and city, including dem-run ones increased police funding.
If you’re talking about republicans complaining about the FBI because it went after Trump, they’re just as likely to abolish prisons because some jan 6ers got convicted. These people like those institutions too much when they’re doing their primary purpose of neutralizing leftist political movements.
Also you’re not private property nor do you own significant capital. It’s not your law enforcement.
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How would they prove to you that the funding for schools is necessary? What studies do you require? How is the state going to conduct these studies (in your view), in a timely manner that will positively impact this generation?
There is plenty of research showing, e.g., that fewer kids per teacher provides for better education. Studies that show the benefit of school nurses, counselors, and other wellness experts. All of this costs $$$, often way more money than any given community is willing or even able to put up. This is why strong state funding is so important, rather than relying on levies and bonds. Requiring your specific state to prove the value of teachers, special education, etc is quite an ask. Why isn’t the existing research good enough for you?
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That’s an exaggeration. The median price for new construction in 1980 was $64,600. [1] As for existing housing stock, the median home value in 1980 was $47,200. [2] As housing prices are heavily right skewed, the prices of cheap housing is far closer to the median than the price of expensive housing. Based on a cursory overview of some charts, it seems like the bottom 20% of houses are no more that 30% cheaper than the median, putting them in the $30k range.
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I’m with you. I’m a conservative who believes we should support families, and that means making public schools a better place for the next generation.
It’s unfortunate that the cost-cutting, austerity driving, regulatory capture enforcing conservatives are in charge of most right-wing parties at the moment. It doesn’t have to be that way.
The current breed of conservative males us all look bad. I fully support regulations that make sense and are effective. There is an old saying, you have to spend to make money. I agree with that. We just need to make sure it’s sensible spending. Public schools need to be funded appropriately and teachers need to be accountable for their students test scores. I need these little turds to pay my social security.
Then why conservative when they actively hate children and society in general? It seems insane to lean that way.
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How myopic to forget the Republicans’ stonewalling after Sandy Hook and Uvalde.
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Economic issues always come down to economic incentives. You care about property values because your home is an investment. You care about stocks because you have a retirement plan. You care about not being a burden on your children when you’re old and having inheritance to leave behind when you die. You care about crime because you have things to steal and a life to lose.
I don’t have property. I will never retire. I will never have children. I am nothing and no one and that will never change.
When I was younger I was a pretty typical liberal. By 30 I was a Marxist-Leninist and desired nothing but the complete destruction of the demon shithole country called Amerikkka. 😘
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I am a machine that exists to create value for my boss. I’ll never doubt that.
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That’s a well intentioned sentiment. So don’t tske any of this as an attack, just a clarification.
We aren’t just all on this journey together, some of us are oppressed by others. Our problems aren’t abstract, they are a consequence of the ruling class engaging in warfare on the rest of us, and that’s what the person above was getting at.
We know we’re people, but we also know that we aren’t people to the ruling class.
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Optimism is for older generations, who lived the before times when life got better year-after-year.
That has never happened in my entire life.
Currents of “optimism” or “pessimism” are meaningless. Actions are all that matter. And it’s not just you out there.
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Nothing about the way everything’s going is designed to let me feel like a person. Money’s a requirement to simply exist. Everything’s a race to get enough money to sustain myself. I’m simply a worker who generates profit so my parasite of a boss and the associated shareholders can hang out on yachts. My job is nonsense too that doesn’t help anyone. I’m estranged from my family for gender and lifestyle reasons, can’t make friends because I’m always exhausted from work, can’t go to therapy except sparingly because it’s too expensive.
No matter how much validity my humanity holds, none of it really matters if none of it can be expressed due to a combination of alienation and dead eyed pessimism about climate change.
And no, we all aren’t on the same journey together. The economic strata that sits above mine has nothing in common with me.
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No offense, but it seems pretty naive to say things will get better. I try not to jump on conservatives when they are willing to engage, but that’s a pretty rough take.
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That’s a beautiful response, and I share the sentiment. Just because someone is on the complete opposite side of politics doesn’t make them less of a human being.
Exactly. People always want to dehumanize the other side. It’s disgusting behavior and try to avoid it.
We are all sharing this earth. While we may disagree on the best solution, we are still people.
I’m more conservative and I’ve been called a Nazi even when if they’d asked, I’m on the same page as them.
Thinking the government spends to much money wastefully isn’t a Nazi belief. It’s a fact. We spend more than we collect and even if we taxed the hell out of the rich, it wouldn’t cover what we are spending.
We really need to look at how we are spending money. Otherwise our children won’t have a future.
I am nothing and no one and that will never change
I hope you find some comfort one day.
This kind of talk is so worryingly common on this site. Feels like people insist on being seen as a “drone to serve their boss” even though they’re desperate to escape it. They’re disgusted by optimism because someone taught them that escapism is dumb and they believed it
Not in my case. I grew up pretty conservative she moved right libertarian until learning economics in college which moved me left. I bought a home and have two kids and am squarely on the left. I care about schools and crime which is why I want more funding for education and programs that actually decrease crime.
Healthcare is the big one for me. We should not be forking over 20% of our paychecks for healthcare. People on the right are fucking nuts to believe that the cost is because of too much regulation considering we have the least regulation and pay twice as much with now limited options. We need Medicare for All.
I care about schools. I want them to be free and public.
I care about crime. I want to abolish the police and use that money to on social safety net programs including healthcare, social workers, housing, and more which is proven to reduce crime.
I care about children. I want paid parental leave for both parents, guaranteed job return, free childcare, free healthcare for children, and a monthly check for groceries.
Conservatives want none of that, and actively work against every point. Centre/centre-left only want some of that performatively and will undermine any implementation of these programs. The only people working for this are the “hard left.” And because of decades of anti-communist propaganda, no one will touch it.
The only reason I can think of to be conservative and “socially liberal” is to protect your own capital at the expense of others while not wanting to feel bad about doing it.
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Schools are already free and public
Not Pre-K for most parents, and schools are only “free” and “public” for now, thanks to conservatives and liberals alike. College, tech college, and other educational programs are also not free and need to be. Private schools need to be abolished.
Most people do not want to abolish the police. Crime would soar as there would be nothing to stop the criminals.
First, okay? I said me, not everyone. Second, that’s objectively not true. If you care about a data-driven argument that shows how policing increases crime, see Alex Vitale’s End of Policing. You can download it for free in a bunch of different formats here.
You get a monthly check for groceries, it’s called a job.
Ah, so you truly are a conservative. A person’s worth is only equal to their productive in the blood-soaked economy machine. A child can’t have a job, jackass, that’s why giving new parents a check for groceries helps their income as their total costs rise.
I think this best take away about communism is if it was so great, why were people fleeing from it rather than to it?
You need to do some self-crit and question everything you have been taught. For example, there are more people in prison right now in the USA than there have ever been in a gulag. If you genuinely want to learn more about communism from a communist perspective, there are plenty of places to turn. You can start on the Prole Library with some shorter introductory works. You can watch Parenti’s famous yellow lecture for a short introduction, and you can watch Richard Wollf’s introduction to Marxian Economics on YouTube. You can read The Jakarta Method, Blacks and Reds, or listen to a few podcasts like Blowback to learn about the propaganda machine at specific times (e.g., Iraq, Cuban Revolution, Korean War, Afghanistan in order of seasons of Blowback).
But you’re going to have to stop trying to win internet arguments by being a smarmy ass and put in the effort if you really want to learn how a better world is possible.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=eAbHJn4WIz8
https://piped.video/watch?v=ljgRSIUxrCo
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
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Pre-K isn’t necessary.
“Fuck them kids” - You
Consistent with other studies that find preschool has a huge effect on kids, Walters, Gray-Lobe and Pathak find that the kids lucky enough to get accepted into preschools in Boston saw meaningful changes to their lives. These kids were less likely to get suspended from school, less likely to skip class, and less likely to get in trouble and be placed in a juvenile detention facility. They were more likely to take the SATs and prepare for college. The most eye-popping effects the researchers find are on high school graduation and college enrollment rates. The kids who got accepted into preschool ended up having a high-school graduation rate of 70% — six percentage points higher than the kids who were denied preschool, who saw a graduation rate of only 64%. And 54% of the preschoolers ended up going to college after they graduated — eight percentage points higher than their counterparts who didn’t go to preschool. These effects were bigger for boys than for girls. And they’re all the more remarkable because the researchers only looked at the effects of a single year of preschool, as opposed to two years of preschool. Moreover, in many cases, the classes were only half a day.
College should not be free
Scratch a liberal and…
It doesn’t make sense for a garbage man to for someone else’s gender studies degree
There it is folks. Mask off in three replies.
“I will read anything suggested.”
Direct links to books, articles, videos, and a podcast
“I have talked to people who lived during communism and I have visited a communist country.”
Your only interest is yourself and your capital. You only want to protect yourself and, by doing so, you actively harm others. You are not only incredibly selfish as a conservative but want people to applaud you for being “socially liberal.” I hope your pile of gold is worth it.
I only have one further question: have your children cut off communications with you or is that something you have to look forward to?
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I have heard this my entire life and now that I recently have kids and a home, I find it to be an insane take. If anything, the greater my knowledge of the world becomes the MORE liberal I am. I’m significantly more aware of rigged systems and injustice as I age.
Reality has a liberal bias.
Not everywhere.
In order to be conservative you have to be afraid, irrationally. Afraid your guns will be taken, afraid the gays are going to out-breed you (not even kidding, they really “think” that), afraid what you want won’t be what everyone does, afraid other people are smarter or more capable, afraid that when you die you won’t get magicked somewhere to live forever. Basically afraid of everything whether it makes any sense or not. And afraid someone else will find out how afraid you are all the time.
They’re pathetic and not fit to walk a dog much less run anything.
My old man has told me this my whole life and I always tell him no, because I’m not a cunt. 42yo so far and still going strong.
I’m more conservative than a lot of people here, but no, I’ll never be a religious nut cheering on death. If that’s conservative they can keep it.
Lol as if being conservative automatically equals ‘cunt’ 😂
Maybe not but a venn diagram of the two gonna be lookin like an eclipse
This is the best joke today yet!
I was actually more right wing as a kid. Now that I’ve learned some things about the world that’s when I became a left leaning liberal.
liberal
Don’t stop there… commit fully to the dark side
Went from voting far right in 2017 (fucking welfare abusers ) to far left in 2022 (fuckibg corporations costing three times more than welfare) kek
greatest comeback
I’m at a pretty low level of rightishness, but I fluctuate a bit. I’ve been socially left since my late teens and sort of homeless but libertarian economically. My personal ethics are definitely closer to some left-lib ideologies.
I’m really uncomfortable with subjective categories. My brain wants objective lines. I’m also extra empathetic. Working out a personal philosophy that fits both is kind of time consuming, but worth it because my brain really likes objective lines.
I feel that. I was raised in a religious household and had some weird beliefs, but time and education has made me a communist.
If you make sure that you never ever stop learning and that there is never an end to the process you will eventually go further.
Don’t stop.
I will never stop learning. This is actually something I admire my parents in. They never stop learning new things
Good
Appetiser: https://youtu.be/2mI_RMQEulw
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Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Boomers got more conservative as they grew older because they’ve been eating shovels of propaganda since reagan and never learned how to fact check like younger generations
Don’t forget the leaded gas fumes and rampant racism!
Don’t belive everything you read online, kids!
Proceeds to freebase Facebook conspiracism like it’s the 70’s again
I remember a high school friend’s father saying something to me like, “You’ll get more conservative when you start paying taxes.” This was around 1993-1994 or so.
I’m 45 now, modestly wealthy, and pay plenty of taxes. I can’t envision ever voting for a Republican for any public office ever again…and the current circus of bullshit around TFG just seals that deal for me.
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Same (though not American). I did the opposite. I started off conservative cause that’s what my family and community was. Then found out that was hateful bullshit and am now extremely progressive. I’m happy to pay my taxes (and I pay waaaay more than average). I do sometimes wish they went to better things and weren’t squandered as often (especially on MPs paying for $16 glasses of orange juice), but overall Canada does a decent job at using its taxes. It’s impossible for taxes to go to 100% agreeable things, since there’s no satisfying everyone. They’re ultimately a net benefit.
I also don’t have kids but am happy to see kids get the benefits of my taxes (and many other things taxes go to that don’t directly benefit me). People who expect tax dollars to always benefit them are selfish and narrow-minded, which I think is the root reason some people don’t like taxes.
Even if conservatives go back to being about “small government”, I can’t see myself voting Republican. I don’t think I’m anything. I can see “small government” working. But I can also see the democrats vision of “government should do things” working too. I can see either technique working. The problem is, back when Republicans used to promote “small government”, I noticed after a while, they never made government smaller. When I confronted some of them on that, they used to say at least its not as big as what the democrats want. What the fuck does that even mean? Democrats, on the other hand, actually try to do stuff.
They want small government for the rich and big government for anyone that’s not a conservative pentecostal Christian. Simple. Lol
The older I get, the more liberal I get.
Just turned 38 and from an ultra conservative household, every since I broke the indoctrination I’ve just gotten more and more liberal
Literally the story of my life, without the ultra part. They were evangelicals, however.
Interesting, I didn’t realize you could be an evangelical and not be ultra conservative, having been raised by the full package
They were kinda close, but I’ve definitely seen far more strict than what they were. They both supported Trump, but died before Jan 6th.
I’m sorry for your loss
Thank you
Same. I’m almost 42 and I’ve never been more liberal.
Mid-40’s, same.
49 here. Liberal AF.
Same. Only getting more and more liberal as I get older.
The older I get the more injustice I see the angrier I get. The only difference between now and my twenties is I know who to direct my rage at and it burns hotter then ever.
GenXer. I’ve gotten more progressive. I used to consider myself a moderate dem back in the 90s. On the other hand, the 90s moderate dem is now considered a commie woke libtard, so shrug? Shocking that I want justice for all, fair wages, end systemic racism, end homophobia, etc. So librul! I’m destroying Western society! Oh wait, I’m a POC immigrant woman, course I’m destroying America!
This is the woke agenda smh my head
Been forever since I’ve got to bust this one out
But also, obligatory Plane Picture
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It’s a famous example of survivorship bias. The idea is, adding armor to planes make them heavier, so you want to minimize where you put armor. After some flights, you take note of where the bullet holes are in the planes that come back.
Where do you put more armor? Do you put it where there are the most bullet holes? That seems to be where the planes are being shot the most.
The problem is, your sample isn’t representative of your underlying population. These are the planes that came back. If they get shot it the cockpit, they die.
So, where should you put the armor? Well if they can get shot and come back, it’s not all that important, so put it everywhere else.
During WW2, the Allies wanted to armor their planes better so more would survive missions. But armor is expensive and heavy so you’d have to prioritize where to put it.
So they go out and collect data on the returning planes to see where they’d been hit. That picture is basically the data collected: where returning planes had sustained the most damage.
So most of the engineers looked at that and went “Aha, the points with the most damage should be armored, since they get shredded up pretty good.”
And one engineer went “Um actually, if they got shot there and came back, armor doesn’t matter. We need to armor the spots with no bullet holes, since a plane shot there wasn’t able to return.”
And so it was, and they called it Survivor Bias.
In this case, it’s survivor bias about becoming more conservative as you age
It’s an old diagram showing where damage to an airplane could be identified after it returned to base without crashing while still damaged.
In short, the places you don’t see damage are parts that the plane can’t get hit in if it is expected not to crash before landing again.
Survivorship bias.
I think it’s the most common places that the planes got hit when returning back to base during WW2, it’s most commonly used when discussing survivorship bias. Which I believe is their intent with said picture.
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I’ve gained empathy as I’ve gotten older. The literal opposite of conservatives
I hate it when boomers, specifically, say this. My grandfather, who is Silent Generation, will tell you that he’s gotten more liberal as he’s gotten older. Whenever I hear a boomer say this, it’s used as a shaming, like “you don’t understand now but you will when you’re older”. Turns out I haven’t gotten more conservative. I listened to minority populations and then came out and it’s turned me more leftist.
Boomers, in general, are a generation of spoiled children that, for the most part, have never seen the true hardships of any other generation. “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” Boomers are the weak men that created hard times for the following generations, yet they keep living and consuming as if our world wasn’t dying. “Fuck you, got mine” I guess.
That might have been true decades ago, but now people have:
- Greater access to knowledge, and are forced to think more critically about what they consume.
- More extreme views, which picks off the weak.
- Most importantly, older people had stuff. They owned houses, had stable, life-long careers, and had settled down before they hit their thirties.
People in their mid to late thirties nowadays might have a fancier job title, but many of them are still struggling like they were before. It’s hard to be protectionist when you have nothing but your life to protect…
Add Less Lead Exposure. Empathy is a function of the brain and lead damages it.
I think it’s your third point, mostly. Maybe even as sharply stated as: boomers became more conservative as the system and status quo brought them wealth, comfort, and security, so naturally they wanted to keep that going. For the generations that have followed, the system and status quo have only continued to bring those benefits to the boomers, not to them, so they’re less likely to trend conservative to perpetuate a system that has failed them.
Additionally, in the years since the boomers came of age, the political right has moved away from a traditional conservative platform to a very extreme and hateful version of itself. Even if many millennials had shifted slightly to the right as they aged, the party typically associated with conservatism has moved so much farther to the right that even with their gradual shift, these millennials are still far closer to the left, or at least to “not whatever the right is saying”.
More people become conservative when they have something to lose. Why would you want to conserve a status quo where you don’t own anything of substance and probably never will?
while the last point is perhaps the main determinant theory behind why many older people are not being owing more right wing, I’m a little confused by your first two points.
especially the fact that people have greater access to knowledge and are forced to think more critically. if anything, with the advent of the internet, echo chambers have never been easier, preventing critical thinking. this leads to a growing of extreme positions which further reinforces such views due to tribalistic fallacies in our thinking and the need for these tribal identities to distinguish themselves.
I think it also depends on whether or not they were provided the education to use the internet well. If all people get is a vague “have at 'er!”, of course we would have more echo chambers. Ever hear the saying “don’t believe everything you read online?”
Properly teaching people how to verify their information sources and how to reflect on things would probably result in fewer echo chambers. “Huh. I don’t want to keep looking like a fool who spreads obviously false things around.”
There’s also internal bias to think about here. If someone is already dead-set in believing only their current mindset, they’re likely not going to be open to other sources. Instead, they’re probably going to search for whatever will back up their claim. People don’t usually try to prove themselves wrong in an argument.
This means that part of getting rid of echo chambers will also be teaching people to accept and acknowledge their own errors. We should be teaching people to go for the best answer, not to just prove themselves right. In this way, this problem also preceeds the internet. That mindset has hindered science for literal centuries. It even goes back to the first days of science in Greece. (Thanks for that attempted halt of progress, religion.)
It’s easier to blame the internet than the people doing these things. Sadly though, it’s in human nature.
I also think having kids has an impact, which we’re not doing as much.
My kids made me more liberal…our conservative government cut property taxes to starve our public education system, I donated most of the rebate to my kids school, some of it went into their education fund.
People who aren’t as fortunate as we are, deserve the same opportunities we have when it comes to public services.
A lot of people get caught up in finding the best local district for education or sports here. I think that mentality prolly says something about them.
That’s very true. could you explain your statement about “picks off the weak”?
Eat the rich at any age