The Boomer Supremacy

[pietillidie]

The generational bit is just some populist sauce for discussion. It's basically about the incentives of different groups within the context of the day.

Ye Olde Ba$tards have the wealth now and expect to live longer in an age of weakened family ties, so they're clinging to it and using it to shape society to their end.

This is a natural state of incentives, but it still means it will have to be wrenched from their gnarly hands in order to shape society to suit others.

The very topic, of course, shows just how limited the notion of "ownership" is at social scale; the context of life is a social one, and if the social context is smashing certain groups, they have to fight back.

Wealth, power and facility are not fixed states or rights; they're negotiations at best, and wars at worst. Ye Olde Farts have been waging war on young people for a while now.

[David]

Are they really 'waging war' on us, or is it just that our ageing population means there are more votes in old people issues? At worst, I'd say, our politicians show a callous indifference to the welfare of younger people. But politicians aren't all baby-boomers, and even if they were, a couple of hundred professional politicians don't constitute a generational group.

I'm not saying I necessarily disagree with your analysis, I'm just wondering if there's any use in finger-pointing. People vote according to their self-interest: there's no malice inherent in that. What we need is better, fairer policies, and that requires younger people to get interested in politics and fight for the things that matter to them. Actually enrolling to vote would be a start!

[Morrigu]

[David]

Pensioners, no. But I think it's fair to say the next age group down (those who are now in the 50-65 demographic) have done pretty well from government policy over the past few decades. I have little disagreement with Wokko or PTID on that point.

[pietillidie]

[David]

As CS Lewis might have put it, the greatest trick Bitter Old Uncle Fred ever pulled was convincing David he didn't exist.

Seriously, though, does he? He seems like a bit of a caricature to me.

I do feel like you sometimes ascribe malicious motivations where there are none. Which is not to say that there aren't people out there actively campaigning for policies that leave young people worse off. But yes, I do find it hard to believe that many are consciously "smashing young people" � who may well be their own beloved children and grandchildren.

I'm not doing anyone's PR, or bending over backwards to accommodate anyone. And I don't care for morals or being Gandhi. I just want to fight systems, not individuals. Because the Bitter Old Uncle Freds of this world are voting citizens and I have to live in the same society as them whether I like it or not.

[pietillidie]

^He's a caricature, for sure. But, remember, he's a battering ram, real or imaginary. Most people actually fall into that quiet category, sneakily piling on behind the battering ram caricature.

You have to deal with Old Ba$tard Fred the archetype to deal with the problem, assuming he encapsulates it to some useful extent. You can't get at Sneaky Mavis because she creeps around in the shadows and spreads her nonsense in people's ears over a piece of sponge at the regional lawn bowls luncheon.

This works in exactly the same way as any form of identification and representation.

This is precisely why leadership and representation are built into groups and social thought; our brains are good, but not good enough to avert categorisation as a core means of making sense of the work.

So, instead of seeing this as a game of precision engineering, which would send you poststructuralist-style mad, you have to see it much more fallible tug-of-war for modest outcomes, led by factions and representatives.

To challenge Mavis' nonsense, we have to challenge Fred's nonsense, which of course doesn't mean Mavis won't also get a serving if circumstances arise, but she's a lot sneakier than Fred.

And, if Mavis doesn't disassociate herself from Fred, yet follows behind him like a vulture benefiting in his wake, she's fair game, much like Trump is fair game on race because he won't denounce the racist vote (nor even the white supremacist vote ).

But, this all breaks down at some level, agreed. This is why, ideally, after sparring with Wokko, TP, Stui and Morrigu, among others, we would go and drown our sorrows at the pub in recognition of the fact at some level everything is nonsense and nothing is worth dying for!

[Mountains Magpie]

This smacks of 'first world problem' to me.

No generation prior to the boomers was ever in a position to leave less to the next generation, so there was no point in saying 'in memory' in the 3rd paragraph of the article. Most people of the pre boomer generations would've left not much, or less, to their children.

In the west, the generations immediately before the silent generation would, by and large, never have had the opportunity of home ownership and certainly had way less stuff marketed to them that they were brainwashed into buying, if you know what I mean. A roof over the head, warmth, the bible, and food, were the big priorities. To read and write was an added bonus, compulsory education being a product of the 3rd quarter of the 19th century.

The children of mid 19th century people, and their children's children, faced pretty much the same type of life as their parents and grandparents.

In recent times, wealth distribution has been increasingly narrowing so it makes sense that there will be less for the many and much more for the few. It's been like that since the end of the neolithic, most of the time.

You just can't blame a generation of people for taking advantage of the circumstances that they find themselves in, at a certain point in history. There's PLENTY of poor boomers out there by the way.

If people think times are tough in the west in 2016 they are having themselves on. It's going to get much MUCH tougher.

MM

[David]

Can't disagree with any of that, MM.

[pietillidie]

Call it what you like, but the policies certain cohorts are voting for, and politicking hard to have implemented or furthered, are draining the blood of the future economy. Fact: Budgets are getting balanced by downward cuts which are making social and productive access, from housing to education, less affordable.

If it offends your sensibilities to locate the cause of those downward budget cuts in the desires of an interest group with capital and incumbent social heft, and which votes and pushes for commensurate policies, then feel free to tell us where else to intervene in this "system" to correct the problem.

Perhaps we could join hands in a circle of prayer and request an immaculate intervention?

[David]

[pietillidie]

Forget the "baby boomer" bit; as mentioned, that's just populist sauce. It doesn't include a whole range of baby boomers for various reasons.

If you want to call run-of-the-mill political tussle "demonisation", then you most certainly are trying to do a Gandhi, no matter how much you remonstrate otherwise.

What else would you like to call a self-interest which damages the whole, or a certain group? If you call it a "world problem", which things like racism and violence surely are, in this case you've introduced Old Darwinianism via the backdoor.

We can't begrudgingly agree to free will at the outset, only to undermine it completely in another way.

So, the onus is on you to locate this problem in the world. To repeat, if it's not a problem of human agency, what is it a problem of? Where should we intervene?

"Agitating for policy change" is not an immaculate intervention. All you're doing is leaving the dirty work for others to do on your behalf. Everyone else gets sullied by the politics that you support and benefit from.

This is a Leftist fantasy of the sort which causes entire swathes of the polity to disengage from business and the economy. Sure, you know you need productivity and a job, but you're not going to soil yourself with the Devil's work of creating any of that; instead, you're going to whinge from the sidelines when someone else engages the economy to your dissatisfaction.

As I say, we assume free will at the outset here. We're not dealing with the wills of children or peasants being pushed about by forces beyond their control; we're not marveling at the magical hierarchy of Old Darwinianism. Nope, we're engaging in politics, where you have to take a position, which at minimum requires negotiation as a form of engagement.

It seems to me you're yet to notice that incumbent power doesn't have to negotiate with you. It can just ignore you because it has sufficient leverage to do so by definition. This leaves us with a situation where incumbent power goes about doing what it wants, unimpeded and without engaging others except through propaganda, and you go about "agitating through the usual channels", meaning chatting furiously. Consequently, no negotiation at all follows.

This is opting out of politics�albeit in a grand flurry of white robes. My take is that you're not doing politics; you want to do science, but not seriously; you want to do politics, but not seriously. Now, I personally face that problem, too. Few of us have the time to engage in proper science, so that's completely understandable. But politics is not an expertise or profession; like economic activity, it's a necessity, meaning neither of us have excuses for hovering about the matter uselessly.

[David]

You've built a bit of a straw man here, to say the least.

Firstly, since when have I ever "begrudgingly accepted" free will? I don't accept it in any way, shape or form. I might grant that the illusion of free will can serve some necessary functions, but the operative word there is illusion. If people are not actually acting as free agents, how can you justify viewing them as morally inferior to yourself?

You can perhaps still make a consequentualist case for doing a bit of head-kicking � whatever that might entail in practice � but I see that as a mostly counterproductive approach. That's a view that has absolutely nothing to do with the question of whether or not free will exists. I just think that directing hate at one person or group of people is a distraction and an approach that overlooks that most problems in our society are systemic, not a function of the inherent badness of the people in charge or the people who vote for them (who may, oddly enough, be not exactly swayed by being told they're selfish pricks).

Secondly, you paint my reference to "the usual channels" as some kind of armchair activism, clicking "like" on a few Facebook posts and not actually doing anything meaningful. That's a pretty gross misinterpretation, but I'll presume I simply didn't explain myself clearly. By "the usual channels" I mean all the effective methods of political activism, whether that be arguing the point in everyday conversation or on the op-ed pages of the newspaper; lobbying politicians directly; protesting and putting posters up on traffic light poles; getting activist lawyers involved; donating; boycotting; hell, throwing bricks through windows if the situation calls for it. In other words, the full arsenal of political activism.

What all of these activities have in common is that they all have the aim of achieving systemic change; policy change. That's all I care about, really. My point above was just that, in most areas of progressive activism, the most effective approach isn't one of creating pantomime villains (as if there's even anything particularly remarkable or especially repugnant about the sort of people who are at the top of society's tree), but of formulating an effective policy argument and getting the message across convincingly to as many people as possible.

Take negative gearing, for instance. While it's a good idea to be prepared for the pushback and to know what forces are keeping that policy in place, at the end of the day I don't really care how good or evil the motivations of its propagators are. Actually, I already more or less know what their motivations are, by and large: they want what's good for their hip pocket. What I want is what's best for everyone's hip pocket. If you and I and everyone else who agrees with me can effectively prosecute that case to the extent that even a well-funded scare campaign can't bring it down, then we will win.

[pietillidie]

^When I said "begrudgingly accept", I meant precisely as you described. So, there's no disagreement there (why even imagine there might have been disagreement on that when we have held the same views on this for ages now, and I've written thousands of words on it? ).

But, moving beyond that agreement, have you thought through just why exactly you and everyone else accepts this illusion of free will? Again, I've written on this before and I have no reason to believe this is news to you, but it's because you've got no choice but to motivate your actions with the illusion, particularly difficult and complex actions. That's Homo sapiens, apparently.

Well, guess what? Everyone else out there is also motivating their actions with these illusions. And they're doing it substantially through that that class of illusion called "morality". (Forget the bit about cosmic good and evil; save that for your debate with Bobby Jindal, Rick Santorum, Eric Abetz and Tony Abbott).

One of the main illusions which stimulates action here beyond "drives" is defined in other fields as "reputation". It is viewed as a fundamental social asset in both biology and economics, and assumed in psychology. This is why Trump loves waving libel laws about; why oil companies spend tens of millions of PR; or why you bother doing your hair (or not, in your case!). It's also why people react when their reputations are attacked, and why they try so hard to justify their own nonsense and appear all "moral".

So, under the personal and social assumption of free will, aside from contingencies such as vulnerability (e.g., mentall illness, destitution, childhood, etc.), this commodity of reputation is fair game, because the foundation of moral assessment over time, i.e., reputation, is the assumption people had the free will to do otherwise.

So, you can't get rid of reputation any more than you can get rid of free will. You're locked in socially, like it or not.

In other words, that great fairy tale merismus, good and evil, doesn't get you out of the problem of judgement; it's just another avoidance strategy. Again, it's removing free will by other means, and opting out of making hard calls, presumably due to the discomfort of making hard calls.

Don't confuse the necessity of making Fred accountable for his views with the ultimate use of "power" in every single action, and the ultimate nonsense of existence itself. You're not violating the rights of the old bastard; he's fit and capable, and we know this because of the amount of energy he puts into spreading his self-serving nonsense using those rights.

But, there you are, afraid of questioning the morality of Fred, even though Fred uses deluded stories of morality and nonsense claims to drive himself and cover his self-serving tracks, even as he works to bugger up life for folk with genuine power deficits, from children to young people, and single mothers to refugees.

Heck, if he's not willing to join you down the library, you're not even willing to challenge his motivations in order to force him to justify and engage, even though he forces others to do that. We wouldn't want to violate the poor bloke, like

Basically, by definition, you can't disembody, or de-moralise, politics. It's always and ever about will, desire and reputation. It's not a philosophical meditation on the way others get mired in the filth of real-world decisions, but you singularly manage rise above the worldly fray.

(As a timely aside, perhaps you could suggest a non-contact, library version of of how to deal with this BS, so as not to offend the marvelous heights of character demonstrated by the fundamentalists irrationally privatising the wrong services in Dublin: http://magpies.net/nick/bb/viewtopic.php?p=1655786#1655786)

[think positive]