The only way my views have changed over time is that, more and more, I’m convinced that nothing I do affects much of anything beyond my own neighborhood. I have no illusions about significant national change, but I can keep my own block clean and take good care of people here.
my sister told me public transportation is how the government is going to limit mobility and “15 minute cities” are bad.
i asked, have you ever used public transport? she said no. I asked if she could afford a car, she also answered no.
“but public transport is a means to limit people from traveling so they can trap us”
i almost hit her.
Thats literally the talking points people like Alex Jones aka the Far Right.
Your sister is dumb. I live outside of a major city, it’s faster and cheaper for me to ride my scooter to the train and ride the train downtown. I also don’t need to pay attention the whole ride so there’s some uninterrupted gaming time as well. As a bonus my employer pays for 80% of the train fare too.
My car mostly just sits there waiting for the weekend.
I found that my stress level about getting to work on time disappeared. Unlike traffic, I can’t make the train go a little bit faster by screwing over other people on the road. There’s no competition to save one minute off my drive. Once you’re on the train, you get there when you get there. There’s a certain Zen appeal to that.
Sounds like a take straight from one’s dumbass social media algorithm. Imagine not having a car and also being anti-public transportation.
You must have endless patience, Madz.
When right-wing people see the statistics that educated people are more likely to be left-wing, they apply the obvious incorrect logic that ‘education is indoctrinating our children’.
The simple fact of the matter is, that in high school, college, and university, I was exposed to people. I played sports with people from every culture, shared classrooms and completed group projects with them. I was taught by people with different cultural backgrounds and I can promise, not a single word of it had anything to do with politics.
Meanwhile, the uneducated are born in their small town, they go to work in their small town, they are surrounded by the same people they went to high school with (presumably from their own cultural background) and ultimately, they listen to mass-media telling them that X people are bad.
And if you explain this to them, they’ll still say that you’re brainwashed.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379422000312
This study has presented new analysis of the causal effect of higher education on political values, finding that individuals become less authoritarian, less racially prejudiced and more economically right-wing due to achieving a degree.
Higher education seems to make people libertarian rather than left wing.
I grew up fairly socially isolated. I was always taught as a kid and younger teenager that people different from me are bad, that X type of people deserve bad things to happen to them, yada yada conservative bullshit.
Then I got older. It’s hard to see X type of people as the bad guy when they’re treating you with more kindness and less judgement than everyone you grew up around and when you realize that they may be different from you and want something different from life than you, but they still just want to survive the day and find happiness, just like you.
People who can’t engage with logical reasoning or evidence without resorting to intellectual cop-outs to defend their positions can’t be helped.
The older I become the more progressive I become. I remember when I was a conservative little shit and am glad I ended up growing a brain.
The really just thought the brainwashing would eventually take. They didn’t know it also requires years of lead ingestion
Every conservative accusation is a confession.
Interesting podcast on this subject: https://srslywrong.com/podcast/ep-346-does-parenting-make-you-more-conservative/
The conclusion they come to is that becoming more conservative with age generally only applies to low information apolitical people who are sort of vaguely left leaning when they’re young. As they age they become more entrenched in the system, acquire more wealth, etc, and those vaguely conservative ideas they had in the back of their minds become more pronounced. There’s also the overton window shifts that may mean someone who thought of themselves as vaguely liberal in the past may now consider themselves socially conservative in the current climate.
Boomers at least had a reason to go through this development because they were still able to accumulate some wealth. With a good job in the 80s-90s it was possible to invest into assets that have by now exploded in value. That does make some people more inclined to hold on to the status quo.
Anyone after Gen x on the other hand has little reason to hold on to a system that keeps screwing them over.
I think that, with boomers, you’ve got something special happening: boomers were brainwashed by Reagan, by neoliberalism.
But it’s also worth pointing out that the evidence shows a clear trend: hard-earned wealth is tied to progressive values.
Broadly, richer people who worked for their wealth are more progressive than poorer people. Note that THIS IS TRUE LESS AND LESS THE MORE THE WEALTH IS SOURCED FROM EXTRACTIVE PRACTICES. But, assuming the wealth was earned from work, it holds true. The effect work-wealth has on progressive values is multiplied with education and interconnectivity from living in cosmopolitan spaces or having access to the internet.
FWIW I’m a genx who did well and I didn’t grow out of it.
I know the system is rigged, I don’t want to hoard anything, and I want to live in a world where everyone does well.
People that change their values because they make a lot of money don’t actually have any values.
Same. I live small with little, I choose to recycle and not waste, I underconsume. I work to help others. Progressive and proud.
It pisses me off when those around me complain about the young, if the young can’t build lives they have nothing to conserve.
they were still able to accumulate some wealth
Right, and they became “conservative” because they want to hoard it for themselves to the detriment of others. They mentally regress to a selfish two-year-old.
Exactly. Conservatism is not really very strongly correlated with age, controlled for other factors. But it is correlated with various things that are themselves correlated with age. Like wealth. And family status.
In fact, if you look at the evidence, the reality is the complete opposite: generations are becoming more progressive because they’re getting better educated and they understand the world better.
question I guess is, will the trend reverse when education gets worse?
My prediction is that it will and that this is why the education system is being degraded
Don’t predict, rely on that being the case for several decades now.
You know that fucker you grew up with but no longer talk to?
Wonder no more. It’s been effective, act accordingly.
I think so, yess.
deleted by creator
As an oldster who becomes more progressive (and shorter) every year I have to disagree.
Same for me.
Me three
Four!
And pretty vocal.
Former fascist/conservative here, the whole “you will grow out of progressive politics” is both a Reagan-era lifestyle marketing gimmick, and a passive ultimatum saying “you either cease your progressiveness or you won’t live to an old age”.
What changed you? If I may ask
Basically I was lured in (or “ideologically groomed”) to fascism, and as people around me started to go more mask-off, I thought I need to leave ASAP or I cross the point of no return. Then I had to learn that conservatism wasn’t about “moderate nationalism” but “power for power sake”. Then I had to learn, that communism wasn’t bad because of the lack of nationalism but due to the authoritarianism part. So first I became an “edgy liberal” to address the “rampant political correctness” of “the left”, then I learned that socialism can be much more than Kádár-era work morals and the secret police torturing people until they admit to horrible crimes.
Morals and compassion are unAmerican tbh.
Reminds me of that quote „one who isn‘t leftwing in youth is heartless, one who isn’t rightwing when an adult is thoughtless“ (say only old men that smell their own farts)
Wow, I was coming here to say it was a churchill quote, but I went down a small rabbit hole and apparently it not only wasn’t him, but it wasn’t a few dozens others it’s been attributed to: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/24/heart-head/
Or they’re dead inside.
Not quite:
There’s a grain of truth in “progressiveness is just a fad that one grows out of”, & that is that naive-communism is something that people who’ve HAD TO find-out just how different people are, ought be all treated the same.
What’s required is a level-playing-field, hard-walls for limiting corruption/criminality, AND the ability to earn one’s own success, but not disproportionately ( at the expense of the ones doing the majority of the work that the success is made-of ).
That differentiation isn’t something that the instinct of the young groks.
It’s like the fact that neurotypical-children younger than 4-yo simply don’t understand that some people you have to give-up-on: it doesn’t compute.
Identically, the communist “nobody-ever-contributes-more-than-any-other” braindeadness only owns the young/immature, not the people who’ve had to fight-for their own mental-potential.
The old saw about "in a ham & eggs dinner, the hen’s involved but the pig’s committed … " holds true.
“skin in the game” is another way of saying the same thing.
People have to be able to work-for the unique-potential that G-D/karma/Universe put in them, XOR that potential starts atrophying at whole-society-level ( part of what sunk the Soviet Union ).
Communism puts a lid on individual-validity, individual-contribution, individual-accomplishment, for sake of homogenousness.
& that is delusion.
But that is delusion that the young often believe-in, because they’ve not-yet experienced having their unique-potential systematically-snuffed by “the party”, for sake of homogenousness.
I was “lucky”, & lived in Ottawa, Canada’s equivalent to Washington D.C., so I got to have the condescention, the gaslighting, the machiavellianism of committee “help” snuffing my potential without living within any communist country.
A … Dutch? shelled-moluscs scientist, eye-blind, he “sees” through his fingers … identified that in communism, nobody takes care of anything, because nobody owns anything.
& then, decades after reading his book, discovered that Marx’s delusion was that in communism, everybody would be owning everything, together, in wholistic & happy fraternity.
IOW the opposite of what the evidence actually proved to be true: the essence of communism is brutalism.
So, all this to say that yes, there is a fundamental-difference between young-naive-wokeness & old-objective-wokeness, so there is a grain of truth in that saying, but to pretend that that statement is “true” is defective.
& many reject the naive-left/progressive position & go instead to fascism, of course, with its simplistic “thinking” & its “alphaness” proving its “validity” ( according to its simplistic-standards )…
That doesn’t prove that it’s “more mature” than naive-progressivism: it’s only a reaction against the original naiveness, is all…
It’s when one outgrows the whole category of ideology, then one truly is getting somewhere.
That makes things difficult, of course, as now EVERYTHING requires considered-reasoning, & NOBODY wants some asshole who holds that the entire-category of ideology, including their ideology need be tested with rigorous-thinking…
but integrity’s worth more than belonging, for some of us.
_ /\ _
Oh no, someone has a nuanced take! Downvotes incoming.
The issue here is the catch-all terms being used. „Progressive“ is a bit of a mushy term in the first place.
Young people tend to be more idealistic and radical, regardless of the specific political ideology. The young know little, have little experience, and don’t own a lot. That tends to change with age.
Real life experience changes this over time. You notice when ideology and reality don’t align. You notice how implementing an ideology disadvantages you compared to others in some contexts. The cost can become quite high, if you’re deeply ideologically invested.
They are being downvoted because they are confidently misrepresenting almost every topic they talk about. There is nothing nuanced about it. It unironically reads like one my grandkids telling me a story about the fairies that live in their rose bush, but with none of the adorableness.
