: The amount of outright race-baiting and extra race-baiting in political ads over on FB is getting kinda startling.
Figures, though, what with all the Boomers over on there, especially the panicky faux-Christians alt-white one. Reading their comments on the ads demonstrates to me that perhaps cognitive ability and IQ tests should be brought back into use in re: voting.
Those MFs are irretrievably GD stupid, and I say that not lightly.
@thedisasterautist I was talking with my older sister about this yesterday. I can tell she doesn’t the changes that have occurred in media. We grew up with Walter Cronkite on the news. As rock solid as you could get. The changes since then are so many and so fast, it’s hard to get a grip on them before everything changes again! I think this is where many boomers are. It’s not that they want to be panicky, but it all moves so fast for them. The feeling that they can’t catch up scares them
@thedisasterautist
We were raised in a Chicago blue collar/blue politics family. We all seek to be knowledgeable voters. For her to do that is hard despite her desire to be up on the facts. So I think if media makes her head spin, it’s even harder for people who don’t want to work for the truth or who don’t understand how much more complicated it is to seek the truth. They’re older. They tire out easily. They don’t like things being complicated. Not an excuse but my explanation.
@allin: I totes get that. I noticed it in the 1990s, as early as '90 and '91. It shifted up into 2nd-gear by 1995, and then its acceleration became steadier. It took many Boomers fifteen years or so to "understand" Facebook, well behind the curve. It took a lot of them eight to ten years to "understand" computers enough to not be more scared of them than they were of angry stray pit bulls.
It's quite ironic and irksome that as a generation they often insisted they were the smartest people in...
@allin: ...the world. (I wish I was being facetious, but I'm not. Their parents were often intransigent based on tradition. The Boomers generally were intransigent because they were post-WW2, lived in relative comfort due to the 30-year economic boom, and they thought they saved the world from everything (Vietnam and racism, mainly). And they tended to think the economy would always keep rising. But here we are.
*Now* they're all alarmed and pearl-clutching in the world they made? In short...
Screw them, as a generation.
Screw Reagan, Mergers & Acquisitions, Neoliberalism, easy credit cards and consumer debt, endless deficit-spending to afford a lifestyle their kids, grandkids, and great-grandchildren will pay for, and all.
Yes, I'm a pissed-off Gen-Xer who saw it coming when he was twenty and like many others who did, couldn't get anyone to listen because we "were too young" and such "to understand".