Yep... for all the "boomers ruined everything" attitude, I can't think of anything that was better in 1950 than it is now except
- macro climate
- wage gap
The oldest boomers were maybe 5-10 years old in 1950.
The boomers generally started working in the mid 60s and hit peak earnings during the 1980s. Seems like a golden age for social safety nets such as pensions, affordable college educations, social security, healthcare, stock market returns, real estate returns, wage growth, productivity gains via technology...
Tumin on
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syndalisGetting ClassyOn the WallRegistered User, Loves Apple Productsregular
Yep... for all the "boomers ruined everything" attitude, I can't think of anything that was better in 1950 than it is now except
- macro climate
- wage gap
Wealth inequality
Upward mobility
Full time employment
If you view wealth inequality and upward mobility through a white middle class lens things have gotten worse.
I feel like part of what is happened is we have expanded the scope of who we consider worth tracking in those metrics, and by and large all people of all creeds/races/gender identities are doing better and have access to more opportunity than they had in the 50s.
But nowhere near as well as things could have been, and in large part because the boomers on a macro level fought against anyone else succeeding.
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Let's play Mario Kart or something...
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Shortytouching the meatIntergalactic Cool CourtRegistered Userregular
Yep... for all the "boomers ruined everything" attitude, I can't think of anything that was better in 1950 than it is now except
- macro climate
- wage gap
a lot of what they ruined is still ahead
retirement is a big one, for example
millennials are, on average, fucked when it comes to retirement planning, because boomers (and, let's be real, their parents) eliminated pensions and replaced them with 401Ks (a lot of which got wiped out in 2008) or nothing at all
thankfully, because the effects haven't fully hit yet, we can reverse it, theoretically
Yep... for all the "boomers ruined everything" attitude, I can't think of anything that was better in 1950 than it is now except
- macro climate
- wage gap
a lot of what they ruined is still ahead
retirement is a big one, for example
millennials are, on average, fucked when it comes to retirement planning, because boomers (and, let's be real, their parents) eliminated pensions and replaced them with 401Ks (a lot of which got wiped out in 2008) or nothing at all
thankfully, because the effects haven't fully hit yet, we can reverse it, theoretically
Also failure to plan ahead for their own retirements. It's not like we didn't see issues with Social Security and Medicare a long time ago. But nope! More tax cuts.
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Shortytouching the meatIntergalactic Cool CourtRegistered Userregular
Yep... for all the "boomers ruined everything" attitude, I can't think of anything that was better in 1950 than it is now except
- macro climate
- wage gap
The world is better in almost every way than it was before the boomers. But the absolute growth of wealth and capability was irregularly distributed.
I look at it more like the boomers had the opportunity for absolute greatness and squandered it on a very "fuck you got mine" attitude towards most things.
boomers took the greatest birthright any demographic has ever gotten and absolutely wasted it
they will be remembered as the most frivolous, selfish, incurious, and foolish generation in American history
nobody but antebellum planters will be more hated if there is any justice in this world
Yep... for all the "boomers ruined everything" attitude, I can't think of anything that was better in 1950 than it is now except
- macro climate
- wage gap
The oldest boomers were maybe 5-10 years old in 1950.
The boomers generally started working in the mid 60s and hit peak earnings during the 1980s. Seems like a golden age for social safety nets such as pensions, affordable college educations, social security, healthcare, stock market returns, real estate returns, wage growth, productivity gains via technology...
Yeah, imho Boomers don't get much credit for things that happened when they were young adults or younger, because they weren't wielding the political power to make those changes. The Greatest Generation (i.e. the ones who fought fascism, and I might add, are dying off right as fascism is coming back with a vengeance) get credit for most political action leading up to the mid 70s, I would argue.
I will say Vietnam really sucked for the Boomers, but otherwise they had a ton of privilege that many of them convinced themselves they "earned" rather than were given to them by their parents.
Stuff like the rightward shift in Denmark makes me suspicious of claims that racism in the USA is primarily because of the USA's unusually weak unions, social safety net, etc.
Starting at the age of 1, “ghetto children” must be separated from their families for at least 25 hours a week, not including nap time, for mandatory instruction in “Danish values,” including the traditions of Christmas and Easter, and Danish language. Noncompliance could result in a stoppage of welfare payments. Other Danish citizens are free to choose whether to enroll children in preschool up to the age of six.
Denmark’s government is introducing a new set of laws to regulate life in 25 low-income and heavily Muslim enclaves, saying that if families there do not willingly merge into the country’s mainstream, they should be compelled.
For decades, integrating immigrants has posed a thorny challenge to the Danish model, intended to serve a small, homogeneous population. Leaders are focusing their ire on urban neighborhoods where immigrants, some of them placed there by the government, live in dense concentrations with high rates of unemployment and gang violence.
Politicians’ description of the ghettos has become increasingly sinister. In his annual New Year’s speech, Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen warned that ghettos could “reach out their tentacles onto the streets” by spreading violence, and that because of ghettos, “cracks have appeared on the map of Denmark.” Politicians who once used the word “integration” now call frankly for “assimilation.”
It doesn't matter that we've been atomized, that conditions necessary for class consciousness do not exist anymore, that liberals and "conservatives" destroyed the Red Belts through a policy of urban sprawl and landlord love, and that our political system is captured entirely by a market orthodoxy that is hostile to the continued survival of the species. For you see, the numbers look good. The numbers!
Well of course the numbers look good, people derive political legitimacy from said numbers. Said people would get real clever with them if the numbers were bad. If the numbers were bad, our masters and their patsies would claim credit for improvements made in a mixed economy where absolute authority is held by a panel of potentates who derive legitimacy from being able to make tangible improvements in the lives of their citizenry. :razz:
Yep... for all the "boomers ruined everything" attitude, I can't think of anything that was better in 1950 than it is now except
- macro climate
- wage gap
Wealth inequality
Upward mobility
Full time employment
If you view wealth inequality and upward mobility through a white middle class lens things have gotten worse.
I feel like part of what is happened is we have expanded the scope of who we consider worth tracking in those metrics, and by and large all people of all creeds/races/gender identities are doing better and have access to more opportunity than they had in the 50s.
But nowhere near as well as things could have been, and in large part because the boomers on a macro level fought against anyone else succeeding.
I'm well aware of the racial disparity, but "Things suck for everyone, worse still then they were before" doesn't exactly pay for cancer screenings or give people a work life with any sort of dignity.
Boomers could have raised everyone up but instead chose to bring everyone low.
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Stuff like the rightward shift in Denmark makes me suspicious of claims that racism in the USA is primarily because of the USA's unusually weak unions, social safety net, etc.
Starting at the age of 1, “ghetto children” must be separated from their families for at least 25 hours a week, not including nap time, for mandatory instruction in “Danish values,” including the traditions of Christmas and Easter, and Danish language. Noncompliance could result in a stoppage of welfare payments. Other Danish citizens are free to choose whether to enroll children in preschool up to the age of six.
Denmark’s government is introducing a new set of laws to regulate life in 25 low-income and heavily Muslim enclaves, saying that if families there do not willingly merge into the country’s mainstream, they should be compelled.
For decades, integrating immigrants has posed a thorny challenge to the Danish model, intended to serve a small, homogeneous population. Leaders are focusing their ire on urban neighborhoods where immigrants, some of them placed there by the government, live in dense concentrations with high rates of unemployment and gang violence.
Politicians’ description of the ghettos has become increasingly sinister. In his annual New Year’s speech, Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen warned that ghettos could “reach out their tentacles onto the streets” by spreading violence, and that because of ghettos, “cracks have appeared on the map of Denmark.” Politicians who once used the word “integration” now call frankly for “assimilation.”
Recent elections in Sweden and Finland are of note for contemporary politics. They confirm that the rightward shift in Nordic politics is not confined to Norway and Denmark but forms a more general trend. This includes increased appeal of both mainstream conservatives and populist radical right forces. This article contextualises this phenomenon within broader European developments. In accounting for the shift in question, the article stresses the cumulative effects of choices made by erstwhile centre-left hegemonic agents, most notably the consequences of the so-called Third Way. This perspective has the merit of providing a way for holding politicians accountable, and it avoids the fatalism entailed in invoking ‘inevitable’ structural developments.
Last week’s election, which resulted in a shift towards the right, signals a crisis of identity and dissatisfaction with Denmark’s political governance, according to Global Risks Insights and Seven59.dk.
Winning more votes than ever in the party’s history, the Danish People’s Party (DPP) soared to new heights in the latest election, amassing 21.1 per cent of the vote and surpassing The Liberals as the second largest’s party.
The DPP mixes a pro-welfare stance and socialist objectives with a fierce hostility towards immigration and threats to “authentic” Danish culture. The party advocates both a tougher immigration stance and renegotiation of Denmark’s European Union participation.
This approach extends to some unconventional propositions to combat internationalisation in Denmark, such as imposing a tax on English-language advertisements and banning university degrees in English, writes Global Risks Insights.
“Syriza and the Danish People’s Party are mirror images of one another, part of the same megatrend now in many European countries,” said Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “There is a remaking of the political order, with centrist parties that have run politics over the last few decades being hollowed out and replaced by parties appealing to the fringes.”
To Mr. Leonard, the shift appears structural, similar to the way that liberal parties were weakened a century ago and then surpassed by socialist parties, like the Labour Party in Britain.
“Globalization produces winners and losers, and large groups feel they’ve been left behind, no longer represented by mainstream parties,” Mr. Leonard said. “The parties of the left have become representatives of public-sector workers and the creative industries, while the right represents big business and finance, and both are rather liberal in social values. That leaves large segments of the population feeling angry and unrepresented, and new parties are emerging with a different language.”
For Daniela Schwarzer, the director of the German Marshall Fund’s Berlin office, the failures to deal with Greece have exacerbated polarization in other member states.
“The parties gain ground who want to unravel the system, and the moderate parties never understood that you can be critical of the E.U. and still pro-European — they’ve missed that window,” she said. “Now a huge gap has been left open, without a positive narrative about the future and without the necessary review and criticism of the functioning of the system.”
The danger is the accumulation of these political events “in a trend with common roots, which is a loss of trust in government by increasing numbers of European voters,” said Robin Niblett, the director of Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs.
those two both 2015
But again: The problem is these are not unicausal issues, but instead are multi-causal, systemic failures.
Racial Supremacy, an Economy that exploits the masses in favor of further enriching the Capital class, Nationalism/Jingoism etc. and so on form together to form a nasty social mechanism where the interconnected systems are easily able to reinforce each other to the detriment of the vulnerable.
Yep... for all the "boomers ruined everything" attitude, I can't think of anything that was better in 1950 than it is now except
- macro climate
- wage gap
Student loans?
The housing crisis?
Drug epidemic amongst the midwesterners?
The death of rural america’s economy?
Health care?
You ain’t thinking too hard my dude.
Yep... for all the "boomers ruined everything" attitude, I can't think of anything that was better in 1950 than it is now except
- macro climate
- wage gap
Student loans?
The housing crisis?
Drug epidemic amongst the midwesterners?
The death of rural america’s economy?
Health care?
You ain’t thinking too hard my dude.
Adding to that: Working class folks having to take multiple jobs to make ends meet and still living in precarious financial straits.
Yep... for all the "boomers ruined everything" attitude, I can't think of anything that was better in 1950 than it is now except
- macro climate
- wage gap
Student loans?
The housing crisis?
Drug epidemic amongst the midwesterners?
The death of rural america’s economy?
Health care?
You ain’t thinking too hard my dude.
Adding to that: Working class folks having to take multiple jobs to make ends meet and still living in precarious financial straits.
Shit's great if you're at the top of the pile.
If you're not, well, shit's not that great.
Add to that that these multiple jobs are erratic, back-breaking in many cases, and have no benefits whatsoever.
And it’s not like shits better in the professional world. I’m constantly hearing from older peers that I need to be prepared to leave my job every two-three years to maintain upward trajectory in my career. Why? Because companies refuse to handout pay raises. I’m autistic. Do you know how much it stresses me that I’m going to have to go through the interview treadmill 4 to 5 times a decade?
Rural America in 1950 makes rural America in 2018 look like a picnic.
I thought the differences now is that most of those towns are literally starting to cease to exist? And the heroin epidemic killing those that remain.
Well and that your cost of living and wage disparity between rural and urban areas barely matters anymore. I may have low wages and cheap rent but I still pay the same price for most goods as someone in NYC, and the cheap rent keeps getting higher while my wages stay the same.
Rural America in 1950 makes rural America in 2018 look like a picnic.
I thought the differences now is that most of those towns are literally starting to cease to exist? And the heroin epidemic killing those that remain.
Well and that your cost of living and wage disparity between rural and urban areas barely matters anymore. I may have low wages and cheap rent but I still pay the same price for most goods as someone in NYC, and the cheap rent keeps getting higher while my wages stay the same.
We needed a minimum wage hike badly.
I have wanted to move from the rural town I'm in to a city located about an hour away for about five years now. I absolutely hate being stuck in a small town with nothing to do and no likeminded people to associate with.
But my student loans make it too expensive to live in the city where the jobs I would want to take are. Plus I actually do currently have one of those fabled high-paying factory jobs (about $600/week for a position requiring only a high school diploma), so even if I did get a job in the city I probably wouldn't be making as much. I at least don't have to worry too much financially because I don't have any children to take care of, chronic illnesses to treat, etc, so I feel like I shouldn't complain, but the social isolation and difficulty relating to co-workers is a big thing that gets to me (it was really bad for much of last year, too).
I hope I'll at least be able to pay off one of my two loans within the next year, which should help. But I hate feeling like I've missed out on most of my twenties (I'll be turning 30 in a few months).
Rural America in 1950 makes rural America in 2018 look like a picnic.
I thought the differences now is that most of those towns are literally starting to cease to exist? And the heroin epidemic killing those that remain.
Well and that your cost of living and wage disparity between rural and urban areas barely matters anymore. I may have low wages and cheap rent but I still pay the same price for most goods as someone in NYC, and the cheap rent keeps getting higher while my wages stay the same.
We needed a minimum wage hike badly.
I have wanted to move from the rural town I'm in to a city located about an hour away for about five years now. I absolutely hate being stuck in a small town with nothing to do and no likeminded people to associate with.
But my student loans make it too expensive to live in the city where the jobs I would want to take are. Plus I actually do currently have one of those fabled high-paying factory jobs (about $600/week for a position requiring only a high school diploma), so even if I did get a job in the city I probably wouldn't be making as much. I at least don't have to worry too much financially because I don't have any children to take care of, chronic illnesses to treat, etc, so I feel like I shouldn't complain, but the social isolation and difficulty relating to co-workers is a big thing that gets to me (it was really bad for much of last year, too).
I hope I'll at least be able to pay off one of my two loans within the next year, which should help. But I hate feeling like I've missed out on most of my twenties (I'll be turning 30 in a few months).
I eventually discovered that there are plenty of like-minded people in my small town, they just don't talk out loud because it's a red state and people get shitty and crazy when opposing views are heard.
And once I discovered that, I made the best friends I've ever had in my life, and this small town has been a real home for me for nearly 20 years.
Rural America in 1950 makes rural America in 2018 look like a picnic.
I thought the differences now is that most of those towns are literally starting to cease to exist? And the heroin epidemic killing those that remain.
Well and that your cost of living and wage disparity between rural and urban areas barely matters anymore. I may have low wages and cheap rent but I still pay the same price for most goods as someone in NYC, and the cheap rent keeps getting higher while my wages stay the same.
We needed a minimum wage hike badly.
I have wanted to move from the rural town I'm in to a city located about an hour away for about five years now. I absolutely hate being stuck in a small town with nothing to do and no likeminded people to associate with.
But my student loans make it too expensive to live in the city where the jobs I would want to take are. Plus I actually do currently have one of those fabled high-paying factory jobs (about $600/week for a position requiring only a high school diploma), so even if I did get a job in the city I probably wouldn't be making as much. I at least don't have to worry too much financially because I don't have any children to take care of, chronic illnesses to treat, etc, so I feel like I shouldn't complain, but the social isolation and difficulty relating to co-workers is a big thing that gets to me (it was really bad for much of last year, too).
I hope I'll at least be able to pay off one of my two loans within the next year, which should help. But I hate feeling like I've missed out on most of my twenties (I'll be turning 30 in a few months).
Have we ever had a thread about the student loan crisis? Because I feel like the insanity we’re experiencing now is going to magnify by a million when it pops.
This is just an ill-formed thought of a non-academic, but I think the seeming nostalgia for a rural America in the 1950s is, in fact, not the real rural America of the 1950s, but rather a sort of White American Utopia. This is a neverland cobbled together from the childhood nostalgia of the Baby Boomers, the media repacking of the 1950s that occurred in the 1980s, and extreme dissatisfaction with the realities of our post-modern existence. This nostalgia manifests in a longing for the pop culture representation of the 1950s (and really into the 1960s - our popular conception of the 1960s is largely based on the late 1960s) because it is the last inarguably modern (rather than post-modern) period that is accessible. Those members of the population with a meaningful experience of the Depression or even World War II are almost completely gone at this point, and neither one was an expression of modernism that lent itself to romantic utopianism anyway. Similarly, there is little interest in romanticizing urban experience (even white urban experience) of that period because the groundwork for post-modernism is already present. White American Utopia presents a set of seemingly contradictory guarantees that seem "safe". For instance, there is a social hierarchy that is also strangely egalitarian. White men are at the top of this hierarchy, but can unironically say that "all men are equal" and "anyone can be president". The religious vision is ecumenical - the notion of conflict between Christian sects is completely alien, but the assumption is that everyone is Christian. It rejects blatant racism but demands assimilation into white culture and acceptance of a subordinate role in society. It celebrates business but is suspicious of finance. It is wary of mass media but is unaware of the fact that the vision itself is the amalgamation of a million half-heard sales pitches that have emerged as a ready-made identity for those in search of one.
Rural America in 1950 makes rural America in 2018 look like a picnic.
I thought the differences now is that most of those towns are literally starting to cease to exist? And the heroin epidemic killing those that remain.
Well and that your cost of living and wage disparity between rural and urban areas barely matters anymore. I may have low wages and cheap rent but I still pay the same price for most goods as someone in NYC, and the cheap rent keeps getting higher while my wages stay the same.
We needed a minimum wage hike badly.
I have wanted to move from the rural town I'm in to a city located about an hour away for about five years now. I absolutely hate being stuck in a small town with nothing to do and no likeminded people to associate with.
But my student loans make it too expensive to live in the city where the jobs I would want to take are. Plus I actually do currently have one of those fabled high-paying factory jobs (about $600/week for a position requiring only a high school diploma), so even if I did get a job in the city I probably wouldn't be making as much. I at least don't have to worry too much financially because I don't have any children to take care of, chronic illnesses to treat, etc, so I feel like I shouldn't complain, but the social isolation and difficulty relating to co-workers is a big thing that gets to me (it was really bad for much of last year, too).
I hope I'll at least be able to pay off one of my two loans within the next year, which should help. But I hate feeling like I've missed out on most of my twenties (I'll be turning 30 in a few months).
Have we ever had a thread about the student loan crisis? Because I feel like the insanity we’re experiencing now is going to magnify by a million when it pops.
Its possible it never pops, it just drags several generations down a couple qualify of life rungs.
Frankly the Greatest Generation did the heavy lifting in the Civil Rights Era
the boomers got stoned and took the credit
They were the civil rights lawyers, true, but also the ones who were in the KKK and the ones who spat at little girls trying to attend school.
Every generation has people who suck and people who are great. My parents in law are old hippies and they are still great.
Yeah. My parents are good boomers. The problem, as mentioned earlier, is that the good die young. Part of marginalization is lacking access to things that ensure a long, healthy life, so the marginalized die at early ages. For example, Boomers generally oppose LGBT rights more because a huge chunk of the LGBT Boomers died in the 80's. So most of what's left are the people who had everything they could ever want handed to them on a silver platter. The same will probably happen to our generation.
Rural America in 1950 makes rural America in 2018 look like a picnic.
I thought the differences now is that most of those towns are literally starting to cease to exist? And the heroin epidemic killing those that remain.
Well and that your cost of living and wage disparity between rural and urban areas barely matters anymore. I may have low wages and cheap rent but I still pay the same price for most goods as someone in NYC, and the cheap rent keeps getting higher while my wages stay the same.
We needed a minimum wage hike badly.
I have wanted to move from the rural town I'm in to a city located about an hour away for about five years now. I absolutely hate being stuck in a small town with nothing to do and no likeminded people to associate with.
But my student loans make it too expensive to live in the city where the jobs I would want to take are. Plus I actually do currently have one of those fabled high-paying factory jobs (about $600/week for a position requiring only a high school diploma), so even if I did get a job in the city I probably wouldn't be making as much. I at least don't have to worry too much financially because I don't have any children to take care of, chronic illnesses to treat, etc, so I feel like I shouldn't complain, but the social isolation and difficulty relating to co-workers is a big thing that gets to me (it was really bad for much of last year, too).
I hope I'll at least be able to pay off one of my two loans within the next year, which should help. But I hate feeling like I've missed out on most of my twenties (I'll be turning 30 in a few months).
Have we ever had a thread about the student loan crisis? Because I feel like the insanity we’re experiencing now is going to magnify by a million when it pops.
It won't really pop
The way the loans work the only way it pops is if a massive number of folks elect outright poverty after the loans come due.
Student loans can't be discharged in bankruptcy, and servicers can garnish your wages till they've been paid off, they come for your family after you die in some cases. Student loans get paid.
Seemingly the only reason folks trade em around all the time is because they are really valuable debt and they need the fractional dollars now to overcome a shortfall of one kind or another.
Literally the only option to not pay the loans is to be poor forever... I've considered this path before.
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Shortytouching the meatIntergalactic Cool CourtRegistered Userregular
for me it's more like "pay the loans and be poor" or "not pay the loans and be poor"
Presumably that is only until a majority of the electorate has student loans and someone runs on just wiping them out?
Any incumbent in Congress probably doesn't have any, they get paid enough.
The only real issue is that they're not discharged in bankruptcy. That change should never have happened, and is probably a major contributor in how much student debt is around.
Presumably that is only until a majority of the electorate has student loans and someone runs on just wiping them out?
The only real issue is that they're not discharged in bankruptcy. That change should never have happened, and is probably a major contributor in how much student debt is around.
Agreed. This prevents the lenders putting "sanity checks" on the loans, because they *know* it will be paid back.
People will ask, "What's to prevent young people getting student loans and then immediately declaring bankruptcy on graduation?" and I'll say it's the same thing as prevents them getting dozens of credit cards, buying designer clothes, and immediately going bankrupt.
It would also be trivial to make it *somewhat* harder to declare bankruptcy for student loans, but not impossible. Such as having to prove that you had made a good-faith attempt for 7 years to pay back the loans but are just getting deeper into debt. That prevents the "bankruptcy after graduation ceremony" hack.
Notable: my grandparents went to Michigan in the early 50s, they paid something like $200 a year including football tickets. Inflation adjusted, that's a little under $2000. When I went back to grad school in 2015 I paid $35k.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
Stuff like the rightward shift in Denmark makes me suspicious of claims that racism in the USA is primarily because of the USA's unusually weak unions, social safety net, etc.
Starting at the age of 1, “ghetto children” must be separated from their families for at least 25 hours a week, not including nap time, for mandatory instruction in “Danish values,” including the traditions of Christmas and Easter, and Danish language. Noncompliance could result in a stoppage of welfare payments. Other Danish citizens are free to choose whether to enroll children in preschool up to the age of six.
Denmark’s government is introducing a new set of laws to regulate life in 25 low-income and heavily Muslim enclaves, saying that if families there do not willingly merge into the country’s mainstream, they should be compelled.
For decades, integrating immigrants has posed a thorny challenge to the Danish model, intended to serve a small, homogeneous population. Leaders are focusing their ire on urban neighborhoods where immigrants, some of them placed there by the government, live in dense concentrations with high rates of unemployment and gang violence.
Politicians’ description of the ghettos has become increasingly sinister. In his annual New Year’s speech, Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen warned that ghettos could “reach out their tentacles onto the streets” by spreading violence, and that because of ghettos, “cracks have appeared on the map of Denmark.” Politicians who once used the word “integration” now call frankly for “assimilation.”
Recent elections in Sweden and Finland are of note for contemporary politics. They confirm that the rightward shift in Nordic politics is not confined to Norway and Denmark but forms a more general trend. This includes increased appeal of both mainstream conservatives and populist radical right forces. This article contextualises this phenomenon within broader European developments. In accounting for the shift in question, the article stresses the cumulative effects of choices made by erstwhile centre-left hegemonic agents, most notably the consequences of the so-called Third Way. This perspective has the merit of providing a way for holding politicians accountable, and it avoids the fatalism entailed in invoking ‘inevitable’ structural developments.
Last week’s election, which resulted in a shift towards the right, signals a crisis of identity and dissatisfaction with Denmark’s political governance, according to Global Risks Insights and Seven59.dk.
Winning more votes than ever in the party’s history, the Danish People’s Party (DPP) soared to new heights in the latest election, amassing 21.1 per cent of the vote and surpassing The Liberals as the second largest’s party.
The DPP mixes a pro-welfare stance and socialist objectives with a fierce hostility towards immigration and threats to “authentic” Danish culture. The party advocates both a tougher immigration stance and renegotiation of Denmark’s European Union participation.
This approach extends to some unconventional propositions to combat internationalisation in Denmark, such as imposing a tax on English-language advertisements and banning university degrees in English, writes Global Risks Insights.
“Syriza and the Danish People’s Party are mirror images of one another, part of the same megatrend now in many European countries,” said Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “There is a remaking of the political order, with centrist parties that have run politics over the last few decades being hollowed out and replaced by parties appealing to the fringes.”
To Mr. Leonard, the shift appears structural, similar to the way that liberal parties were weakened a century ago and then surpassed by socialist parties, like the Labour Party in Britain.
“Globalization produces winners and losers, and large groups feel they’ve been left behind, no longer represented by mainstream parties,” Mr. Leonard said. “The parties of the left have become representatives of public-sector workers and the creative industries, while the right represents big business and finance, and both are rather liberal in social values. That leaves large segments of the population feeling angry and unrepresented, and new parties are emerging with a different language.”
For Daniela Schwarzer, the director of the German Marshall Fund’s Berlin office, the failures to deal with Greece have exacerbated polarization in other member states.
“The parties gain ground who want to unravel the system, and the moderate parties never understood that you can be critical of the E.U. and still pro-European — they’ve missed that window,” she said. “Now a huge gap has been left open, without a positive narrative about the future and without the necessary review and criticism of the functioning of the system.”
The danger is the accumulation of these political events “in a trend with common roots, which is a loss of trust in government by increasing numbers of European voters,” said Robin Niblett, the director of Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs.
those two both 2015
But again: The problem is these are not unicausal issues, but instead are multi-causal, systemic failures.
Racial Supremacy, an Economy that exploits the masses in favor of further enriching the Capital class, Nationalism/Jingoism etc. and so on form together to form a nasty social mechanism where the interconnected systems are easily able to reinforce each other to the detriment of the vulnerable.
I think it's interesting the amount to which it does seem universal and fairly unicausal. You see it in the UK and in the examples above and it seems to be a force in Germany too these days from what I've read. The core issue is appeals to anti-immigrant/anti-diversity/anti-refugee/etc. The inability of the established party systems to properly represent broad anti-multiculturalism and ethno-nationalist sentiment and the subsequent hollowing out or take-over of one or more of those established parties as those sentiments begin to express themselves more strongly.
History is a story of people not being able to deal with those different to themselves. If no-one foreign is available, people will make their own minorities to abuse (e.g. Catholic vs Protestant, Hutu vs Tutsi, oppression of LGBT)
Politicians need to think about how we can deal with this fact of human nature in light of the invention of the airplane to get them there, and the TV to know that there is a "there" to go to. You can't put that genie back in the bottle. People can travel, they want to travel, so they will. Even Japan, famously hostile to immigrants, has immigrants.
Rural America in 1950 makes rural America in 2018 look like a picnic.
I thought the differences now is that most of those towns are literally starting to cease to exist? And the heroin epidemic killing those that remain.
Well and that your cost of living and wage disparity between rural and urban areas barely matters anymore. I may have low wages and cheap rent but I still pay the same price for most goods as someone in NYC, and the cheap rent keeps getting higher while my wages stay the same.
We needed a minimum wage hike badly.
I have wanted to move from the rural town I'm in to a city located about an hour away for about five years now. I absolutely hate being stuck in a small town with nothing to do and no likeminded people to associate with.
But my student loans make it too expensive to live in the city where the jobs I would want to take are. Plus I actually do currently have one of those fabled high-paying factory jobs (about $600/week for a position requiring only a high school diploma), so even if I did get a job in the city I probably wouldn't be making as much. I at least don't have to worry too much financially because I don't have any children to take care of, chronic illnesses to treat, etc, so I feel like I shouldn't complain, but the social isolation and difficulty relating to co-workers is a big thing that gets to me (it was really bad for much of last year, too).
I hope I'll at least be able to pay off one of my two loans within the next year, which should help. But I hate feeling like I've missed out on most of my twenties (I'll be turning 30 in a few months).
Have we ever had a thread about the student loan crisis? Because I feel like the insanity we’re experiencing now is going to magnify by a million when it pops.
It won't really pop
The way the loans work the only way it pops is if a massive number of folks elect outright poverty after the loans come due.
Student loans can't be discharged in bankruptcy, and servicers can garnish your wages till they've been paid off, they come for your family after you die in some cases. Student loans get paid.
Seemingly the only reason folks trade em around all the time is because they are really valuable debt and they need the fractional dollars now to overcome a shortfall of one kind or another.
Literally the only option to not pay the loans is to be poor forever... I've considered this path before.
It's got to be a drag on any sector of the economy not vested in making money off of the loans however.
It's just a chunk of income that disappears every month for something that is often over priced that barely has any wake in the larger economy.
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Stuff like the rightward shift in Denmark makes me suspicious of claims that racism in the USA is primarily because of the USA's unusually weak unions, social safety net, etc.
Starting at the age of 1, “ghetto children” must be separated from their families for at least 25 hours a week, not including nap time, for mandatory instruction in “Danish values,” including the traditions of Christmas and Easter, and Danish language. Noncompliance could result in a stoppage of welfare payments. Other Danish citizens are free to choose whether to enroll children in preschool up to the age of six.
Denmark’s government is introducing a new set of laws to regulate life in 25 low-income and heavily Muslim enclaves, saying that if families there do not willingly merge into the country’s mainstream, they should be compelled.
For decades, integrating immigrants has posed a thorny challenge to the Danish model, intended to serve a small, homogeneous population. Leaders are focusing their ire on urban neighborhoods where immigrants, some of them placed there by the government, live in dense concentrations with high rates of unemployment and gang violence.
Politicians’ description of the ghettos has become increasingly sinister. In his annual New Year’s speech, Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen warned that ghettos could “reach out their tentacles onto the streets” by spreading violence, and that because of ghettos, “cracks have appeared on the map of Denmark.” Politicians who once used the word “integration” now call frankly for “assimilation.”
Recent elections in Sweden and Finland are of note for contemporary politics. They confirm that the rightward shift in Nordic politics is not confined to Norway and Denmark but forms a more general trend. This includes increased appeal of both mainstream conservatives and populist radical right forces. This article contextualises this phenomenon within broader European developments. In accounting for the shift in question, the article stresses the cumulative effects of choices made by erstwhile centre-left hegemonic agents, most notably the consequences of the so-called Third Way. This perspective has the merit of providing a way for holding politicians accountable, and it avoids the fatalism entailed in invoking ‘inevitable’ structural developments.
Last week’s election, which resulted in a shift towards the right, signals a crisis of identity and dissatisfaction with Denmark’s political governance, according to Global Risks Insights and Seven59.dk.
Winning more votes than ever in the party’s history, the Danish People’s Party (DPP) soared to new heights in the latest election, amassing 21.1 per cent of the vote and surpassing The Liberals as the second largest’s party.
The DPP mixes a pro-welfare stance and socialist objectives with a fierce hostility towards immigration and threats to “authentic” Danish culture. The party advocates both a tougher immigration stance and renegotiation of Denmark’s European Union participation.
This approach extends to some unconventional propositions to combat internationalisation in Denmark, such as imposing a tax on English-language advertisements and banning university degrees in English, writes Global Risks Insights.
“Syriza and the Danish People’s Party are mirror images of one another, part of the same megatrend now in many European countries,” said Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “There is a remaking of the political order, with centrist parties that have run politics over the last few decades being hollowed out and replaced by parties appealing to the fringes.”
To Mr. Leonard, the shift appears structural, similar to the way that liberal parties were weakened a century ago and then surpassed by socialist parties, like the Labour Party in Britain.
“Globalization produces winners and losers, and large groups feel they’ve been left behind, no longer represented by mainstream parties,” Mr. Leonard said. “The parties of the left have become representatives of public-sector workers and the creative industries, while the right represents big business and finance, and both are rather liberal in social values. That leaves large segments of the population feeling angry and unrepresented, and new parties are emerging with a different language.”
For Daniela Schwarzer, the director of the German Marshall Fund’s Berlin office, the failures to deal with Greece have exacerbated polarization in other member states.
“The parties gain ground who want to unravel the system, and the moderate parties never understood that you can be critical of the E.U. and still pro-European — they’ve missed that window,” she said. “Now a huge gap has been left open, without a positive narrative about the future and without the necessary review and criticism of the functioning of the system.”
The danger is the accumulation of these political events “in a trend with common roots, which is a loss of trust in government by increasing numbers of European voters,” said Robin Niblett, the director of Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs.
those two both 2015
But again: The problem is these are not unicausal issues, but instead are multi-causal, systemic failures.
Racial Supremacy, an Economy that exploits the masses in favor of further enriching the Capital class, Nationalism/Jingoism etc. and so on form together to form a nasty social mechanism where the interconnected systems are easily able to reinforce each other to the detriment of the vulnerable.
I think it's interesting the amount to which it does seem universal and fairly unicausal. You see it in the UK and in the examples above and it seems to be a force in Germany too these days from what I've read. The core issue is appeals to anti-immigrant/anti-diversity/anti-refugee/etc. The inability of the established party systems to properly represent broad anti-multiculturalism and ethno-nationalist sentiment and the subsequent hollowing out or take-over of one or more of those established parties as those sentiments begin to express themselves more strongly.
I'm not really sure we can discount the factor of austerity economics in providing fertile ground for far right-wing radicalization. I fear there is a certain level of comfort at play with the unsound economic policies that are an exacerbating factor in this unrest, which leads liberals to discount the economic policies also at play that pair toxicly with white supremacy.
Like again: I am not discounting white supremacy as a factor. But it is not the sole factor at play, and to ignore other factors in favor of just one will inevitably result in a failure of reforms and will lead to targeted non-whites being harmed, along with whoever else the far-right decides to scapegoat for the problems alongside them.
Yep... for all the "boomers ruined everything" attitude, I can't think of anything that was better in 1950 than it is now except
- macro climate
- wage gap
Student loans?
The housing crisis?
Drug epidemic amongst the midwesterners?
The death of rural america’s economy?
Health care?
You ain’t thinking too hard my dude.
Health care now is waaay better than it was in the 50s.* The leaps in health care technology have been astounding. Next time you get sick, you're going to get a prescription for an antibiotic other than penicillin. If you need surgery, you're likely to get it orthoscopically, you'll get anesthesia other than laughing gas, you're going to get a mix of plasma and whole blood - and more of it too - that's been better typed and screened, and you're way way way less likely to die.
Yes, a lot of people still die of medical causes, in particular heart disease, cancer, and diabetes, but that's not because cancer didn't exist back in the 50s; it's because people died before the cancer got them. Prostate cancer is emerging as a new focus in medical research for the first time ever, not because men are getting prostate cancer more - in fact, most men have prostate cancer when they die and this has always been true; it's only now that they're living long enough for prostate cancer to kill them, and even then, only because we've taken a lot of the other cancers off the list (or, at least, knocked them down the list).
I think a distinction needs to be drawn between the question of whether our life(styles) are better or worse, and whether our life(styles) are more or less fragile, more or less aspirational, more or less empowered. It seems undeniable to me that life is better, especially for those of us who aren't healthy, straight, white males, but it may also be true that we feel like those gains are always at risk all the time, and that imposes a psychological toll on us that's not really quantifiable or comparable.
* Disclaimer: if in 20 years, pathogenic multidrug-resistant bacteria kill us all, I'll retract this claim.
Yep... for all the "boomers ruined everything" attitude, I can't think of anything that was better in 1950 than it is now except
- macro climate
- wage gap
Student loans?
The housing crisis?
Drug epidemic amongst the midwesterners?
The death of rural america’s economy?
Health care?
You ain’t thinking too hard my dude.
Health care now is waaay better than it was in the 50s. The leaps in health care technology have been astounding. Next time you get sick, you're going to get a prescription for an antibiotic other than penicillin. If you need surgery, you're likely to get it orthoscopically, you'll get anesthesia other than laughing gas, you're going to get a mix of plasma and whole blood - and more of it too - that's been better typed and screened.
Yes, a lot of people still die of medical causes, in particular heart disease, cancer, and diabetes, but that's not because cancer didn't exist back in the 50s; it's because people died before cancer got them.
Yes, and we get to go bankrupt if we get sick. In Canada, things are different.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
"Is life better or worse" is, in my opinion, neither helpful or particularly answerable. Its better to ask "how does life as it is now measure up to what it could be". Whatever life was like in the 50s we have the wealth to allow everyone to lead comfortable lives free of basic material need, but we're far, far below that point.
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The oldest boomers were maybe 5-10 years old in 1950.
The boomers generally started working in the mid 60s and hit peak earnings during the 1980s. Seems like a golden age for social safety nets such as pensions, affordable college educations, social security, healthcare, stock market returns, real estate returns, wage growth, productivity gains via technology...
If you view wealth inequality and upward mobility through a white middle class lens things have gotten worse.
I feel like part of what is happened is we have expanded the scope of who we consider worth tracking in those metrics, and by and large all people of all creeds/races/gender identities are doing better and have access to more opportunity than they had in the 50s.
But nowhere near as well as things could have been, and in large part because the boomers on a macro level fought against anyone else succeeding.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
a lot of what they ruined is still ahead
retirement is a big one, for example
millennials are, on average, fucked when it comes to retirement planning, because boomers (and, let's be real, their parents) eliminated pensions and replaced them with 401Ks (a lot of which got wiped out in 2008) or nothing at all
thankfully, because the effects haven't fully hit yet, we can reverse it, theoretically
Also failure to plan ahead for their own retirements. It's not like we didn't see issues with Social Security and Medicare a long time ago. But nope! More tax cuts.
boomers took the greatest birthright any demographic has ever gotten and absolutely wasted it
they will be remembered as the most frivolous, selfish, incurious, and foolish generation in American history
nobody but antebellum planters will be more hated if there is any justice in this world
Yeah, imho Boomers don't get much credit for things that happened when they were young adults or younger, because they weren't wielding the political power to make those changes. The Greatest Generation (i.e. the ones who fought fascism, and I might add, are dying off right as fascism is coming back with a vengeance) get credit for most political action leading up to the mid 70s, I would argue.
I will say Vietnam really sucked for the Boomers, but otherwise they had a ton of privilege that many of them convinced themselves they "earned" rather than were given to them by their parents.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/01/world/europe/denmark-immigrant-ghettos.html
Well of course the numbers look good, people derive political legitimacy from said numbers. Said people would get real clever with them if the numbers were bad. If the numbers were bad, our masters and their patsies would claim credit for improvements made in a mixed economy where absolute authority is held by a panel of potentates who derive legitimacy from being able to make tangible improvements in the lives of their citizenry. :razz:
I'm well aware of the racial disparity, but "Things suck for everyone, worse still then they were before" doesn't exactly pay for cancer screenings or give people a work life with any sort of dignity.
Boomers could have raised everyone up but instead chose to bring everyone low.
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perhaps relevant to the Denmark Situation:
from 2012: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13569775.2012.702975
https://uniavisen.dk/en/rightward-shift-in-denmark-mirrors-european-trend/
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/20/world/europe/rise-of-far-right-party-in-denmark-reflects-europes-unease.html
those two both 2015
But again: The problem is these are not unicausal issues, but instead are multi-causal, systemic failures.
Racial Supremacy, an Economy that exploits the masses in favor of further enriching the Capital class, Nationalism/Jingoism etc. and so on form together to form a nasty social mechanism where the interconnected systems are easily able to reinforce each other to the detriment of the vulnerable.
The housing crisis?
Drug epidemic amongst the midwesterners?
The death of rural america’s economy?
Health care?
You ain’t thinking too hard my dude.
Adding to that: Working class folks having to take multiple jobs to make ends meet and still living in precarious financial straits.
Shit's great if you're at the top of the pile.
If you're not, well, shit's not that great.
I thought the differences now is that most of those towns are literally starting to cease to exist? And the heroin epidemic killing those that remain.
Add to that that these multiple jobs are erratic, back-breaking in many cases, and have no benefits whatsoever.
And it’s not like shits better in the professional world. I’m constantly hearing from older peers that I need to be prepared to leave my job every two-three years to maintain upward trajectory in my career. Why? Because companies refuse to handout pay raises. I’m autistic. Do you know how much it stresses me that I’m going to have to go through the interview treadmill 4 to 5 times a decade?
Well and that your cost of living and wage disparity between rural and urban areas barely matters anymore. I may have low wages and cheap rent but I still pay the same price for most goods as someone in NYC, and the cheap rent keeps getting higher while my wages stay the same.
We needed a minimum wage hike badly.
I have wanted to move from the rural town I'm in to a city located about an hour away for about five years now. I absolutely hate being stuck in a small town with nothing to do and no likeminded people to associate with.
But my student loans make it too expensive to live in the city where the jobs I would want to take are. Plus I actually do currently have one of those fabled high-paying factory jobs (about $600/week for a position requiring only a high school diploma), so even if I did get a job in the city I probably wouldn't be making as much. I at least don't have to worry too much financially because I don't have any children to take care of, chronic illnesses to treat, etc, so I feel like I shouldn't complain, but the social isolation and difficulty relating to co-workers is a big thing that gets to me (it was really bad for much of last year, too).
I hope I'll at least be able to pay off one of my two loans within the next year, which should help. But I hate feeling like I've missed out on most of my twenties (I'll be turning 30 in a few months).
the boomers got stoned and took the credit
They were the civil rights lawyers, true, but also the ones who were in the KKK and the ones who spat at little girls trying to attend school.
Every generation has people who suck and people who are great. My parents in law are old hippies and they are still great.
I eventually discovered that there are plenty of like-minded people in my small town, they just don't talk out loud because it's a red state and people get shitty and crazy when opposing views are heard.
And once I discovered that, I made the best friends I've ever had in my life, and this small town has been a real home for me for nearly 20 years.
Have we ever had a thread about the student loan crisis? Because I feel like the insanity we’re experiencing now is going to magnify by a million when it pops.
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Its possible it never pops, it just drags several generations down a couple qualify of life rungs.
Yeah. My parents are good boomers. The problem, as mentioned earlier, is that the good die young. Part of marginalization is lacking access to things that ensure a long, healthy life, so the marginalized die at early ages. For example, Boomers generally oppose LGBT rights more because a huge chunk of the LGBT Boomers died in the 80's. So most of what's left are the people who had everything they could ever want handed to them on a silver platter. The same will probably happen to our generation.
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It won't really pop
The way the loans work the only way it pops is if a massive number of folks elect outright poverty after the loans come due.
Student loans can't be discharged in bankruptcy, and servicers can garnish your wages till they've been paid off, they come for your family after you die in some cases. Student loans get paid.
Seemingly the only reason folks trade em around all the time is because they are really valuable debt and they need the fractional dollars now to overcome a shortfall of one kind or another.
Literally the only option to not pay the loans is to be poor forever... I've considered this path before.
LoL
That's never happening, I'd bet on nuclear war first.
Any incumbent in Congress probably doesn't have any, they get paid enough.
The only real issue is that they're not discharged in bankruptcy. That change should never have happened, and is probably a major contributor in how much student debt is around.
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Agreed. This prevents the lenders putting "sanity checks" on the loans, because they *know* it will be paid back.
People will ask, "What's to prevent young people getting student loans and then immediately declaring bankruptcy on graduation?" and I'll say it's the same thing as prevents them getting dozens of credit cards, buying designer clothes, and immediately going bankrupt.
It would also be trivial to make it *somewhat* harder to declare bankruptcy for student loans, but not impossible. Such as having to prove that you had made a good-faith attempt for 7 years to pay back the loans but are just getting deeper into debt. That prevents the "bankruptcy after graduation ceremony" hack.
I think it's interesting the amount to which it does seem universal and fairly unicausal. You see it in the UK and in the examples above and it seems to be a force in Germany too these days from what I've read. The core issue is appeals to anti-immigrant/anti-diversity/anti-refugee/etc. The inability of the established party systems to properly represent broad anti-multiculturalism and ethno-nationalist sentiment and the subsequent hollowing out or take-over of one or more of those established parties as those sentiments begin to express themselves more strongly.
Politicians need to think about how we can deal with this fact of human nature in light of the invention of the airplane to get them there, and the TV to know that there is a "there" to go to. You can't put that genie back in the bottle. People can travel, they want to travel, so they will. Even Japan, famously hostile to immigrants, has immigrants.
It's got to be a drag on any sector of the economy not vested in making money off of the loans however.
It's just a chunk of income that disappears every month for something that is often over priced that barely has any wake in the larger economy.
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I'm not really sure we can discount the factor of austerity economics in providing fertile ground for far right-wing radicalization. I fear there is a certain level of comfort at play with the unsound economic policies that are an exacerbating factor in this unrest, which leads liberals to discount the economic policies also at play that pair toxicly with white supremacy.
Like again: I am not discounting white supremacy as a factor. But it is not the sole factor at play, and to ignore other factors in favor of just one will inevitably result in a failure of reforms and will lead to targeted non-whites being harmed, along with whoever else the far-right decides to scapegoat for the problems alongside them.
Health care now is waaay better than it was in the 50s.* The leaps in health care technology have been astounding. Next time you get sick, you're going to get a prescription for an antibiotic other than penicillin. If you need surgery, you're likely to get it orthoscopically, you'll get anesthesia other than laughing gas, you're going to get a mix of plasma and whole blood - and more of it too - that's been better typed and screened, and you're way way way less likely to die.
Yes, a lot of people still die of medical causes, in particular heart disease, cancer, and diabetes, but that's not because cancer didn't exist back in the 50s; it's because people died before the cancer got them. Prostate cancer is emerging as a new focus in medical research for the first time ever, not because men are getting prostate cancer more - in fact, most men have prostate cancer when they die and this has always been true; it's only now that they're living long enough for prostate cancer to kill them, and even then, only because we've taken a lot of the other cancers off the list (or, at least, knocked them down the list).
I think a distinction needs to be drawn between the question of whether our life(styles) are better or worse, and whether our life(styles) are more or less fragile, more or less aspirational, more or less empowered. It seems undeniable to me that life is better, especially for those of us who aren't healthy, straight, white males, but it may also be true that we feel like those gains are always at risk all the time, and that imposes a psychological toll on us that's not really quantifiable or comparable.
* Disclaimer: if in 20 years, pathogenic multidrug-resistant bacteria kill us all, I'll retract this claim.
Yes, and we get to go bankrupt if we get sick. In Canada, things are different.