In a tremendous essay in VDARE.com, "Flashman, Ron Paul, James Kirchick," John Derbyshire eloquently examines the whoop-te-doo over all those horrible, horrible things Ron Paul's ghostwriters wrote.
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29 comments:
Newsflash to Derb:
Most of the people making the biggest fuss are over 50. Ron Paul actually has much stronger support from younger voters than from boomers. If he had strong boomer support, he'd be taken seriously. Because he doesn't, he isn't.
As for the loss of freedom, Derb can thank people his own age, who have been on the vanguard of social conformity since they were teenyboppers listening to the vastly overrated Beatles. Face it Derb: if it weren't for your generation people like Susan Sonntag never would have progressed beyond some obscure assistant professorship in an "alternative" urban university.
Sorry Derb, but you can't take a pass on this one. Take your fellows to task. Younger folks absolutely despise PC and the people our age who use it to their advantage.
I'm frankly tired of boomers passing the buck. It is so familiar, and it's starting to get old.
Oh, I forgot to mention, as parents you boomers were really good at the wuwei principle. It's funny, most of your wealth comes from wuwei too.
Maybe it's time to wu get in our wei from now on...
"As for the loss of freedom, Derb can thank people his own age, who have been on the vanguard of social conformity since they were teenyboppers listening to the vastly overrated Beatles."
I can't believe you've unloaded on the Derb, Bill. I never thought of you as the kind of guy with chest hair. Obviously, I was wrong. ; 0)
BTW, I'm sick of the Beatle cult, too.
Under 50's unite!
Some of us are unfortunate to have been born within the period of time that is defined as the Baby Boomer era but have little in common with them other than an appreciation for the music. Some of us BINOs have been fighting PC all our adult life, to no avail. The generational warfare that is beginning to pick up between the boomers and the younger generations is going to be uglier than typical, and not without justification. Look at the state of our country as a result of idiotic boomer policies and governance! I'm going to distance myself to the extent possible from the world as I get older, because I know I'll be lumped in with all of the embarrassing nincompoops of my generation. Sorry for what you're inheriting, guys. If it had been up to me and the minority who share my point of view, it wouldn't be like this at all.
"bill" can unload all he wants, but if he's a member of the younger generation, future "bills" are going to be unloading on him twice as harshly. All the PC indoctrination, diversity training, and multicultural sensitivity that all of us young kids have been learning from the first day our parents turned on the TV set for us is firmly ingrained. Just wait til the super sensitive kiddos get serious cultural influence, just like the hippies have now.
Oh, and they aren't going to have grandparents like Derb's dad, who don't give a rip about PC speak. If this generation continues what it's been taught, PC will be a harsh ruler. It can get worse.
I'm 33, and having grown up under PC, I can only hope that people younger than myself see through it. My favorite part of unlimited immigration is that it shuts up, or should shut up blacks who wont stop whining about how much they're discriminated against.
My favorite personal victim debunking episode was in Silicon Valley in 2000, peak of the Internet boom. I'm sitting in a restaurant with a black colleague who was hired as a business analyst but for some reason wanted to have a go as a programmer. He made some comment about how things weren't going well because only "certain kinds of people" were allowed to become programmers. I just said "look around man", and he realized that he was sitting with a white guy, a chinese woman, and two mexicans, all software guys, all good at what they do. Nothing to do with race.
Well, after that job he retreated into the "public service" industry in Oakland. Better to be with "his own kind" and be able to complain about "the man" I suppose.
"If it had been up to me and the minority who share my point of view, it wouldn't be like this at all."
I appreciate your apology, BINO. But in general, boomers are a bunch of ex-bra burning, draft dodging, child abandoning, pot smoking hedonists transformed into sanctimonious, do-gooding, dead end fiscal policy making narcissists who have allowed our country to be cratered by uninhibited immigration in order to buck up the social security pyramid scheme in hopes that things won't go to hell until the last of them bites the dust.
Check out Jonathan Haidt’s dangerous big idea at edge.org.
He’s looking forward to the Boomer generation retiring because they have suspended and even retarted social science research with PC-first nonsense like moralistic antinativism and moral conformity pressures:
1) Moralistic antinativism. The deep and politicized antipathy to 1970s sociobiology produced a generation of social scientists wary of nativism in general and of evolutionary thinking in particular. Nobody these days admits to believing that the mind is a blank slate at birth, but in practice I have noticed that social scientists older than me generally begin with a social learning explanation of everything (especially sex differences), and then act as though it is "conservative" (scientifically) or "liberal" (politically) to stick with social learning unless the evidence against it is overwhelming, p<.05, which it rarely is. But shouldn't we use p<.5 here? Shouldn't we always let nativist and empiricist explanations both have a go at each question and then pick the one that has the better fit, overall, with the evidence? I look forward to the day when most social scientists learned about the astonishing findings of twin studies in their twenties, and very few know who Stephen Jay Gould was.
2) Moral Conformity Pressure. Imagine an industry in which 90% of the people are men, male values and maleness are extolled publicly while feminine values are ridiculed, and men routinely make jokes, publicly and privately, about how dumb women are, even when women are present. Sounds like a definition of hostile climate” run wild? Now replace the words male” and female” with liberal” and conservative,” and we have a pretty good description of my field —social psychology—and, I suspect, many other areas of the social sciences. I have no particular fondness for conservatives. But I do have a need for them. I study morality, and I have found that conservative ideas (about authority, respect, order, loyalty, purity, and sanctity) illuminate vast territories of moral psychology, territories that have hardly been noticed by psychologists who define morality as consisting exclusively of matters of harm, rights, and justice. If social psychology had been a morally diverse field, we would have done a much better job of studying the full expanse of human morality, and we'd be in a much better position right now to understand the morality of radical Islam.
Why the Beltway Libertarians Are Trying to Smear Ron Paul
http://www.takimag.com/site/article/why_the_beltway_libertarians_are_trying_to_smear_ron_paul/
Tremendous column by the Derb indeed.
Let me second BINO, though. I certainly don't mind generational generelizations. But I also think it's worthwhile remembering that often a fairly small number of people fit the cliche. I'm a post-50 Boomer, and I was complaining about certain members of my cohort starting back in around 1965. Magazines and textbooks don't emphasize enough, for example, that the group of people known as "the hippies" were a fairly tiny percentage of Boomer kids. In my age bracket, for instance, almost no one was a hippie -- we were a few years too young for Woodstock, and when we got to college the last of the hippies were packing up and leaving. There was a real "the party's over, and now you get to clean up" atmosphere around. (Me and my group had our very brief moment in the pop-culture sun with punk.) And in the town where I grew up (middle class, small-town-shading-into-suburb), there were almost no hippies. We didn't have enough money, and we loved our parents, however much we may have acted like stupid teens.
Anyway, it's worth pausing for a sec to acknowledge that the people who imposed Boomer idiocy on the rest of us were and have been a relatively small percentage of the Boomer population. Many of the rest of us have been grumbling about them all along.
I've always thought someone should write the sequel to Tom Brokaw's "The Greatest Generation" covering the Baby Boomers:
"The Most Narcissitic Generation"
"The Most Smug, Self-Rightous, and Hypocritical Generation"
Any suggestions on titles?
If all the destruction wrought by Boomers is due to a tiny elite, how did they come to seize the power of an entire generation? Was it just that they were such brazenly outrageous sanctimonious media hoares?
One happy go lucky LA Boomer I talked to told me all the protests were just a way to get acohol, drugs and an easy lay. He didn't even care or know what the politics were about - the more things change I guess (at least in this regard).
Derb's an idiot. Let's count the ways.
1. Paul's support comes from almost entirely young men below age 26. That's a losing "cult" following. Plenty of disposable income, low on numbers (6-7% of the population?)
2. Paul gives PC a *good* name because he won't stand up for his country. He takes the side of Iran and AQ and blames the US. [There's plenty to beat GWB for on Iraq, McCain's support would say there's a lot of desire for a "win" instead of PC-losing. Paul's prescription for more losses and blame-America is as attractive as cod liver oil.]
3. Paul engages in lunatic conspiracy theories that gives Libertarianism a bad name -- from 9/11 idiocy to the 1993 WTC bombing being done by "the Jews" and so on.
4. Ron Paul is an anti-Semite. See above lunatic conspiracy theory about the 1993 attack.
5. Paul has nothing but surrender in mind to respond to Jihad since he wants to shrink the military. He's explicitly repudiated "rubble doesn't make trouble" from Derb. Which Derb tries to ignore.
6. Paul has attracted neo-Nazis, David Duke, and others who find his anti-Americanism to their liking. "By their fruits ye shall know them." NO OTHER CANDIDATE has that support.
7. Paul doesn't get and neither do his supporters that middle-working class families WANT big government. They just want it to run efficiently and do things for THEM. Instead of connected big guys.
Libertarianism is a fringe and kook element. The only hope of slowing down government growth is something akin to Thompson's Federalism, pushing down to States and Localities as much spending/taxing as possible. But people want Federal student loans, housing guarantees, a strong defense, clean up of polluted bays, rivers, and the like.
Paul's supporters are young men with no real family responsibility or maturity and it shows.
Anonymous -- I'm not sure "tiny elite" is quite right, but "smaller than usually imagined elite" is certainly accurate. Long hair, potsmoking and rock music were everywhere, but for an awful lot of people "the '60s" (as in riots, flamboyant drug trips, protests, etc) were something that happened elsewhere, or maybe on TV and in the pages of magazines. You could go entire days without spotting more than a few genuine hippies.
As for how that media image came to define the generation ... Well, that's how these things happen, no? When you watch the nightly news, you aren't watching "how people generally live," you're watching things that are extraordinary. I mean, do the words "Winona Ryder," "Reality Bites," and "Nirvana" really do justice to all the sides of the phenomenon we know of as Generation X? Yet that's a big part of the popular-culture image of Generation X.
My general rule: 80% of people just kinda get by, go on with things, and live life, while the other 20% carries on with mischief, ego, image, greed, etc. Too bad it's often the 20% who get all the limelight and acquire too much of the power.
"Libertarianism is a fringe and kook element."
Libertarianism is the stepping stone to conservatism. I expect the majority of those young males 26 and unders (assuming your stats are accurate) to evolve into well-informed conservatives by age 40. I welcome their political activism. Why would you want to discourage young thoughtful men from getting involved in politics?
As for the neo-nazi's, I think there may be 2 and you neocons make a big deal out of it b/c you are afraid of Paul. Why is that? Are you afraid the rest of us might start taking a second look at neocon lies and delve beyond neocon spin?
1/ Paul is running for President. This fact seems to have been missed by all of his defenders.
If someone wants to put out a newletter saying that MLK Jr. was a bisexual pedophile he can do that. But doing that and expecting to live at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave is another matter.
2/ He wasn't exactly winning too many (any) primaries or caucuses before the TNR article. I suppose his supporters are going to use one article in one magazine as the reason for his losing since they can't seem to believe that he would have lost without it. Oh well.
I can't believe you've unloaded on the Derb, Bill.
-fifi
It came naturally -- he sounded like my long-winded dad (who is the same age as Derb) complaining about younguns.
I never thought of you as the kind of guy with chest hair. Obviously, I was wrong. ; 0)
You don't know how wrong you were (about the chest hair)...
XD
I would go a little further back than the generation that grew up in the late 60s. A lot of these Boomer ideas seem to actually be products of 1950s and early 60s (or even 1940s?) academia. I think the first signs of an impending fall were in the 1950s, but I can't quite put my finger on the cause.
If someone wants to put out a newletter saying that MLK Jr. was a bisexual pedophile he can do that. But doing that and expecting to live at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave is another matter.
-anonymouse
Well, he did hire hookers, rip off dissertations, and still call himself a "man of God." I'm not expecting to live at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.; is it OK for me to say that at a typical corporate job or at a public political event without fear of negative consequences?
It's time to deconsecrate MLK. His message was as much of a fraud as the man himself, and history has proven that over and over.
People my age were forced to repeatedly listen to his speeches as children, even as our chance of being beaten for being white increased dramatically during his commemoration.
from anony-mouse:
"If someone wants to put out a newletter saying that MLK Jr. was a bisexual pedophile he can do that. But doing that and expecting to live at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave is another matter."
Well Paul can no longer claim to be the kkk candidate, Huckabee has gone for that demographic by supporting the Confederate flag in a big way.
from bill:
"You don't know how wrong you were (about the chest hair)..."
I have a newfound respect for you, Bill.
I also have a modest proposal for getting reparations from the boomers. Once they retire and start receiving SS they should be deported to Mexico, given the nominal value of their checks in pesos instead of dollars (which might turn out in their favor if the value of the dollar keeps dropping). Also, all their medical and nursing home needs are to be met in Mexico.
"fifi said...
But in general, boomers are a bunch of ex-bra burning, draft dodging, child abandoning, pot smoking hedonists transformed into sanctimonious, do-gooding, dead end fiscal policy making narcissists who have allowed our country to be cratered by uninhibited immigration in order to buck up the social security pyramid scheme in hopes that things won't go to hell until the last of them bites the dust."
Nolo Contendre. You sure got our number. I was born at the tail end of the baby boom, and I didn't participate in any of the classic boomer rites of passage. Wasn't at Woodstock or Altamont. Never smoked pot. Never wore beads. The closest that my cohort of "my generation" got to something like woodstock was the "Live Aid" concert, which was more of a television event, and I didn't see it.
I think that my generation was however exceptionally and insuferably self-righteous. The world had spun on it's axis for years before we ever got here, but when we made the scene we were convinced that it had all been only a prologue......to US. We would show those old fogeys the way, and the light, and the truth. We were probably more besotted with ourselves than any generation which had preceded us.
And to you, the generation that comes after, we leave only the dried out husk of western civilization. Like a bored cat, we played with it for a while, ruined it, and then moved on. The greatest civilization the world has ever known, destroyed by an overweening vanity.
Sorry.
"I think the first signs of an impending fall were in the 1950s, but I can't quite put my finger on the cause."
Someone, may be Samuel Huntington, has argued that the 1960s were starting to happen in the 1920s. A dramatic loosening of sexual constraints, the thrill of "slumming" to listen to "race music" in the form of jazz, an increasingly consumerist ethos coupled with a thirst for excitement and a sense of unlimited possibility. Take a look at Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" or Fitzgerald's "The Crack Up." They're describing a world familiar to us today, but one that would have been pretty foreign to someone living in the late 19th century, when these writers wre born.
So what stalled the evolution of the "60s ethos" in the 1920s? The Great Depression, followed by WWII. There was a widespread fear during the Second World War that the country would slide right back into an economic depression once the hostilities ended. When the opposite (more or less) happened, and the economy took off on a long, upward glide, "the 60s" as a cultural, rather than a chronological, phenomenon picked right back up. One of the reasons I find the 50s such an interesting decade is that one can in fact see the foreshadowing of much that will follow in the 60s and beyond.
As for the Baby Boomers, I agree with all those who've argued here that we need to distinguish between the use of this term to describe a cultural cohort and a demographic one. The last of the Baby Boomers, born in the early sixties, were hardly in a position to participate in what we consider the quintessential Baby Boomer experiences. They were in elementary school, if not kindergarten, when Woodstock and Altamont occured, and America was pulling out of Vietnam before they'd even entered high school.
Culturally speaking, the Baby Boomers were mostly upper middle class kids from the northeast and west coast, who were born by the mid 50s. Chronologically, Barack Obama is a baby boomer, but people see him as practially a generation removed from the Clintons, which, in a sense, he is.
I just have to share this, from the Redstate blog, with ISteveites:
crooked freezer cash Congressman ... Harvard Law ... Alan Dershowitz
Posted at 10:17pm on Jan. 18, 2008
Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA): "I know very little about criminal law."
By Vladimir Jefferson
Says FBI Agent Lied in Court
He also says officer watched him use bathroom
In a hearing before his scheduled Feb. 25 bribery trial in Alexandria, VA, Jefferson squandered what's left of his credibility:
Ellis issued no rulings, but did express skepticism at Jefferson's suggestion that he wasn't aware of his legal right to refuse to talk to the FBI. Lytle elicited from Jefferson the congressman's impressive legal resume, which includes degrees from Harvard and Georgetown University law schools, a stint as a clerk for a federal judge in New Orleans, time spent as a prosecutor for the Judge Advocate General and more than two decades in Congress.
Jefferson said the only criminal law course he took was at Harvard 35 years ago and said, "I know very little about criminal law."
Under questioning, Ellis discovered that Jefferson had taken the course from renowned criminal defense lawyer Alan Dershowitz.
"I doubt he would agree you only know a little about criminal law," Ellis said wryly.
http://redstate.com/
Michael, Martin -- I share your pain and embarrassment at what a subset of the boomer generation has wrought. It's going to get ugly. Even though you, and I, were born at the tail end of the boom and didn't really participate or have any influence and have hated just about everything the boomers have brought about, we're going to be lumped in with them. Don't expect a lot of compassion if you're fortunate enough to live past 80. I'm going to do my best to look younger than my real age (50 now) and pass myself off as as a Gen X-er. Other than music, boomers have done nothing but destroy this country and indoctrinate people into a liberal totalitarian mindset. The REAL revolution has yet to begin.
Oh, and I also think MLK was a fraud...although I'll bet that, within 100 years, he will have been elevated by blacks to being the equivalent of a black Jesus Christ.
Don't have children. The world is going to become a savage place with the loss of Western Civilization. We who knew better have no one to blame but ourselves for rolling over while the boomers destroyed it.
Fifi, I hope you will forgive me for this, but I have to say that in hindsight I was a bit harsh on Derbyshire. As I wrote, it was a natural reaction on my part, because reading his piece was frustrating in the same way listening to my parents can be.
But generational blame aside, he's right. And the sad part of this loss is it hurts all of us, from the old men to the little children we go to such pains to shield from the ugly realities we have brought about.
This issue of generational change was on my mind when I read Derbyshire's piece. I had recently read an essay by Orwell on language and politics, and was in the process of writing down some thoughts on the subject. I think Orwell's essay is worth reading for those of us who wonder how these problems came about, and I offer my own take in an interpretation of Orwell's "Politics of the English Language".
Don't have children. The world is going to become a savage place with the loss of Western Civilization.
Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy! The relative birth rates between the civilized and the savage are the main reason the decline is happening. Darwin in action.
Someone, may be Samuel Huntington, has argued that the 1960s were starting to happen in the 1920s. A dramatic loosening of sexual constraints, the thrill of "slumming" to listen to "race music" in the form of jazz, an increasingly consumerist ethos coupled with a thirst for excitement and a sense of unlimited possibility. Take a look at Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" or Fitzgerald's "The Crack Up." They're describing a world familiar to us today, but one that would have been pretty foreign to someone living in the late 19th century, when these writers wre born.
Very interesting. Thanks, Black Sea. I suppose "The Roaring Twenties" do have some distinct similarities to the Sixties. This is something that deserves further investigation.
If you suspend Godwin's Law it easy to see that the bulk of '68'ers went with the flow just like the '33'ers did in Germany. I think the quality of the collective hysteria(at least in the major metropolitan areas)among the young was roughly equivalent. I say this as an old guy who came back to the US from Vietnam in June 68 and who has read more than a few books about NS Germany.
The hippies were a miniscule fraction of Northeastern Jews and their White followers. The vast majority of all types of kids in the 60s were not hippies. By the time the conformity wave hit the hinterlands, it was the 70s and there was nothing to conform to, and "nothing" was precisely the result.
chief seattle:
I've seen variants of that anecdote repeated many times. Get a room full of high-performing people, you see a diverse mix of races and sexes, but it sure doesn't "look like America."
You end up in a group full of East Asian men and women, South Asian men and women, white men and women, and maybe one black woman. It's just *hard* to look at that group and say "See, the reason there aren't more blacks here is because whites discriminate in favor of their own." Unless "their own" is defined in terms of "groups that perform well in the US."
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