- FakeGreekGirl ( @FakeGreekGirl@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) English43•7 months ago
The version I always heard when I was young was, “If you’re not a liberal at 20, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative at 40, you have no brain.”
Here I am in my mid 40s, and I’m pretty sure the conservatives are the ones with no brains.
- rumschlumpel ( @rumschlumpel@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 9•7 months ago
Arguably, conservatives used to have more brain than today. But maybe they just had slightly more decorum.
- ThatFembyWho ( @ThatFembyWho@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) English39•7 months ago
looks up from reading “The Conquest of Bread”
Reaally? O_o
My mom did assure me of that, 10-20 years ago.
By age 40, I trans’d my gender and now I’m ready to smash capitalism and seize the means of production. Let’s gooooooo
- Annoyed_🦀 ( @Annoyed_Crabby@monyet.cc ) 37•7 months ago
I’m actually more conservative in my 30s, as in conserving the very limited energy i have and not arguing with idiots and use that on those who worth it.
- JasonDJ ( @JasonDJ@lemmy.zip ) 15•7 months ago
Ahh. Conservation of Energy. I’d like to see the modern party of “law and order” refute the foundational laws of physics!
- twelve20two ( @Twelve20two@slrpnk.net ) 6•7 months ago
Please no gravity deniers 💀
- JasonDJ ( @JasonDJ@lemmy.zip ) 2•7 months ago
It’s just a theory.
- Uriel238 [all pronouns] ( @uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) English33•7 months ago
The reverse happened. But I’m GenX so that might be normal?
I was given the full American Exceptionalism battery of civics propaganda in my public schooling, and I believed it all even more than my peers. It might be a neurodivergent thing, being credulous and actually believing what my teachers taught me.
I also took economics 1A and 1B in my early college career, which was all capitalism centric. (They talked about command economics, usually as a counter example, highlighting the problems it has.)
I was kind of an asshole, but I was young.
Then SCOTUS gave Bush the presidency, and that was weird. He was creepy even before 9/11 but then that happened and, well, all the conservatives went full evil. When my dad was telling me that yes, Donald Rumsfeld is right that waterboarding is not really torture (Narrator: Waterboarding is, in fact, commonly classified as torture by the scholarly consensus) and that extrajudicially detaining and torturing people because they’re Arab and Muslim is entirely acceptable, I had a reckoning and an internal identity crisis. I knew that torture was what Darth Vader did to Leia to show that the Galactic Empire was evil through and through, and Vader didn’t flinch at the grisly tasks.
In the next decade civil rights, including ones established in the Constitution of the United States, started getting massive carve-outs. The bill of rights didn’t apply whenever national security was invoked. FBI was sending NSLs left and right telling people they’re now FBI informants, yet were obligated to keep that secret on threat of being disappeared. (NSLs are still a thing, BTW.)
Officials were openly engaging in war profiteering. Halliburton was getting fantastically rich. Also Texas, by way of Enron was fleecing California. The rolling blackouts were featured in Monsters Inc. …as was the scream extractor, possibly the best representation of late-stage capitalism at its most extreme.
We talked a lot of enhanced interrogation and extraordinary rendition and black sites. Signs of the surveillance state started manifesting even before Edward Snowden dumped a ton of data to news agencies.
Obama got elected. There was tons of talk about Hope and Change. Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize just for not being George W. Bush. Neither hope nor change were forthcoming. In fact, the Subprime Mortgage Crisis starting in 2007 resulted in some massive bailouts (about $1 Trillion) to some really big companies. If your company collapses, I had learned according to Capitalism 101, it means your business model is bad and it deserves to collapse, so this bailout didn’t make sense from the ideological perspective. A lot of other people noticed it and formed OWS and protested until New York City turned off all its cameras and sent the police in to anti-riot them.
Then in 2014, Michael Brown was shot in dubious circumstances, triggering the Ferguson unrest. Police uniforms lined up pointing their assault rifles like they were at a firing squad, what I remember was poor weapon discipline, and the sort of thing Red Goons from the Soviet Union did in movies starring Clint Eastwood or Chuck Norris. Troops and troops of police officers pointing their guns like they’re ready to start shooting into the crowd. Then when the policing hour happened at night, they gathered up in their MRAP and started tearing up the streets (literally) firing their tear-gas grenade launcher willy-nilly, just gassing the whole neighborhood for no peacekeeping purpose. It was terrifying.
I learned in the 1970s a congressional order required FBI to catalog all officer-involved homicides and report annually to the BJS. They hadn’t. Only civilian volunteer groups had been tracking killings and brutality by law enforcement. Several news agencies started after Ferguson. One of the beats on Techdirt already was about police being stupid or drawing their guns early, or SWATTING the wrong house and rendering it unlivable. Oh yeah, social engineers discovered they could get a house raided by police with big guns anytime they wanted to, and it became an occasional tactic in COD PvP.
In 2015, I was long read about the faults of capitalism, the failures of government, the rise of regulatory capture, the police state, the surveillance state and rising wealth disparity (which was a big deal in my college Macroeconomics class – this is how you get your civilization to collapse to social unrest). I’d also taken a deep dive into moral philosophy so I understood why torture is generally frowned upon, and I didn’t have to take my cues from George Lucas.
From there, I was a few breadtube videos away from going totally Pinko Commie, but I less adhere to any given ideology so much as specific ideals (e.g. Everyone gets fed. )
Strangely, a Bolshevik chorus follows me around everywhere I go.
- SwingingTheLamp ( @SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social ) English10•7 months ago
A lot of other people noticed it and formed OWS and protested until New York City turned off all its cameras and sent the police in to anti-riot them.
Don’t forget the best part: It wasn’t just NYPD. It was a violent crackdown on OWS protests all across the nation, complete with torture and other unconstitutional methods, coordinated in secret by the Obama administration in collusion with the big banks. (For those who have forgotten, integration of government and corporate power is one of the hallmarks of fascism.)
- Uriel238 [all pronouns] ( @uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) English4•7 months ago
Yeah, it’s super evident when the RIAA and MPAA sent ICE to New Zealand to raid the Kim Dotcom estate on grounds of media piracy. They actually used other ambiguous charges like conspiracy and espionage which are what the US legal system uses when they don’t like what you’re doing but don’t have a specific crime against it. It’s been over a decade and its still in court.
ICE also was raiding Florida repair shops for servicing Apple products without an Apple license, one of the events that drove the current right-to-repair movement.
- Gork ( @Gork@lemm.ee ) 31•7 months ago
If anything, I’ve gotten even more progressive over time.
- blindsight ( @blindsight@beehaw.org ) 18•7 months ago
Yeah, agreed. I’ve learned a lot about gender minorities and issues affecting the 2SLGBTQ+ population in the last decade.
What’s the “2S” for?
- blindsight ( @blindsight@beehaw.org ) 10•7 months ago
Yes, starting with 2S is part of Canada’s move toward Truth & Reconciliation with our local First Nations, to recognize how the intersectionality of racism further marginalizes Two Spirit First Nations people.
- FakeGreekGirl ( @FakeGreekGirl@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) English9•7 months ago
- Klara ( @boo_@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 3•7 months ago
Two spirit ig?
- /home/pineapplelover ( @pineapplelover@lemm.ee ) 3•7 months ago
Hot take, 2slgbtqia+ is cringe. I vote we should keep it at lgbt+ or lgbtq+ stop making the community sound unapproachable and weird.
- blindsight ( @blindsight@beehaw.org ) 6•7 months ago
I get that, but 2SLGBTQ+ is the most politically acceptable term in Canada. It’s used by politicians and in education, and the 2S being at the start is a conscious act of reconciliation with our First Nations.
- LinkOpensChest.wav ( @LinkOpensChest_wav@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 23•7 months ago
I become more disillusioned of our system and therefore increasingly more radical as I grow older.
Granted, I’ve never lived in a protective suburban bubble where I can stick my head in the sand and pretend that the world’s biggest problem is charcoal or propane.
- iheartneopets ( @iheartneopets@lemm.ee ) 11•7 months ago
I was raised in that environment and still relate to the first part of your comment
- LinkOpensChest.wav ( @LinkOpensChest_wav@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 3•7 months ago
You feel like you stuck your head in the sand?
- iheartneopets ( @iheartneopets@lemm.ee ) 6•7 months ago
No, just raised in the suburbs
- LinkOpensChest.wav ( @LinkOpensChest_wav@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 1•7 months ago
Therefore, you’re not who I described in my comment.
- iheartneopets ( @iheartneopets@lemm.ee ) 8•7 months ago
I was just trying to offer the perspective to others that not all people in suburbs were like that. I wasn’t trying to offend or come at you or anything.
- jaschen ( @jaschen@lemm.ee ) 20•7 months ago
44 here. Fuck Billionaires. Give equal rights to ALL people. Kill Citizen United. Also, fuck cops. They are all bad unless they see some unjust and does something about it.
- katy ✨ ( @cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 18•7 months ago
the whole notion of “people growing more conservative as they grow older” is a relic from the time before conservatism started becoming the party of gamergate edgelords and identity politics.
- jeremyparker ( @jeremyparker@programming.dev ) 7•7 months ago
I’m not sure it was ever accurate for people who weren’t already conservative.
It makes a lot more sense that, as you get older, you stop growing and learning, so as society progresses, your formerly progressive views become commonplace and eventually anachronistic.
(That’s 100% what happened to my mother, who was a hippie, literally flowers in her hair, and now “just doesn’t really get the whole trans thing”)
And, if a person was progressive, but had some secret conservative or regressive values, those values come into sharper relief when their other views become commonplace – and, as you get older, you’re less interested in hiding your flaws and/or shameful values, so they come out more.
(That’s what happened with my dad, he was in folk music groups in the 70s and then became a doctor and didn’t like the idea of poor people getting some of his money (even though it was those same programs that kept his mother afloat after his father didn’t come back from Korea).)
- occhineri ( @occhineri@feddit.de ) 10•7 months ago
I have become more conservative over the years…
Ferment the rich!
- Smorty [she/her] ( @Smorty@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 7•7 months ago
If we actually got the ability to eat the rich, I would be okay with eating meat again.
- naevaTheRat ( @naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) 6•7 months ago
Me at 20 “I think we can improve things a bit by making some adjustments”
me at 30, much more privileged in general “Ok so I think we should probably start by offering everyone with an investment property execution or voluntary collectivisation of everything they own”
- darkphotonstudio ( @darkphotonstudio@beehaw.org ) 6•7 months ago
53 year old me.
- Holzkohlen ( @Holzkohlen@feddit.de ) 4•7 months ago
Screw that, I’ve got empathy unlike conservatives.