To let someone else use my browser without having to log out of everything, and destroy the session when they are done.
To look for stuff without having them pop up in my autocomplete later
geeky: to debug sites by ensuring no cookies, headers or local storage is used.
To read some news articles without them saying “you have read your three free articles for this month” to me
Porn is best viewed in an entirely different browser altogether, preferably on a VM that can be rolled back to get rid of malware. Just my snooty opinion.
Oi! That’s for us Gen X’ers! Boomers were the ones giving the medalsribbons to us, their kids and pupils! They considered us slackers as early as elementary school, so they thought these ribbons and certificates and whatever were needed just to get us up away from in front of the Ataris!
Sheesh. It’s getting hard to tell these generations apart, I’m tellin’ ya…
Definitely not all boomers, so the joke didn’t say all. It was just a reference to the idea that initial house ownership generally had less barriers to entry 40 or 50 years ago and that’s all. It’s not a monolithic experience for everyone.
I tried that once when I was a kid. Once, and only once.
Thankfully my parents weren’t cruelty obsessed, so when they realised that I was severely depressed they tried to get help instead of punishing me, unlike my head of year at school. Sadly, the world wasn’t ready to accept what my problems were at that time. The cruelty obsessed still aren’t and probably never will be, as it will shatter their worldview.
I think I am classed as the tail end of the boomers (1964) but I feel no connection at all with that generation. You are correct, trying to group individuals by birth cohort and then say “you are all x, y, and z” is an exercise in futility. But there is a human urge to pigeonhole things so you don’t have to actually gather information and make judgements. Much easier to just say “you belong to this group, therefore I know all there is to know about you.” IOW, once again,
Hating on people for their race, religion, gender, etc. is no longer acceptable on this site (we have guidelines). But create an arbitrary group, let’s say people between 55 and 73 years of age; insist that they have no individual minds but all share the same reprehensible values; blame them for all the wrongs of the world; and a depressing number of people will jump at the chance to indulge in a two minutes’ hate. See also: Fox News.
Why is this encouraged? It’s a way of selling pop-sociology books like David Foot’s Boom, Bust & Echo: Profiting from the Demographic Shift in the 21st Century. The subtitle is significant, part of a large subset of “how to profit from…” bestsellers.
Retail advertising uses the idea all the time: “You are cooler than your parents ever were, and you can demonstrate that by buying our product”.
But there is also the political divide-and-conquer aspect. In the 1960s it was “don’t trust anyone over 30”. Exploit the natural tensions between parents and children and you can make it less likely that boomers and their children and grandchildren will work for a common cause.
Talk of arbitrary 20-year generations is just lazy. People are born every year. Every cohort grows up in a different world. Every individual reacts differently to the world they grow up in.
I would argue that it does, at least often enough to be worth considering.
According to his birth date, Obama is technically a Boomer…but of course he isn’t. His parents were much younger, they had not lived through the Depression, did not serve in WWII, their lives post-WWII were not directly shaped by the GI Bill (for good or ill), etc.
His upbringing was very different from an ‘average’ Boomer upbringing, as a result. And one outcome of this difference is that his way of interacting with the world is different.
Another aspect of Boomers that never gets talked about is that, because of when one of the biggest surges of immigration happened (1880s- 1920s), most Boomers grew up with at least one immigrant grandparent, who probably didn’t speak English very well and who still followed the culture and customs of their home country. Plus, the mindset was to be grateful to be in America, and pushing the grandchild to ‘succeed’ as an American.
Growing up Boomer was very much small ‘c’ conservative. That affects how you navigate the world as an adult. I catch myself all the time, realizing that I’m reacting from my Boomer upbringing, not from how I authentically feel now as an adult.
Ah, well. The gist remains true regardless of the accuracy of attribution. I have come to the conclusion that pretty much all well known quotes are bastardized, plagiarized, bowdlerized or otherwise mangled recollections of some pithy statement made by some nobody which is then attributed to some well known intellectual. Of course, just attributing every quote to “anonymous” is a cheat also, so here we are…
I confess, the way my brain works, I remember a buttload of quotes, but can never attribute them correctly. And yes, I did pick the first google result. I will file away the info on Goodreads, but do you have a more reputable suggestion?
For me, “Boomer” is less a definition of a generational cohort than it is a definition of a selfish and toxic and ultimately delusional white American attitude toward society that emerged over the course of the postwar economic anomaly (approx. 1947-2007, give or take). Few individuals better typify the attitude than the repulsive David “Bobo” Brooks.
Slotting people into that category by birth year alone isn’t helpful, because there are all too many Silents and Gen-Xers (to use the standard generational terms) who’ve internalised this crappy outlook, and plenty of Boomers who reject it.
Wikiquote at least has an electronic paper-trail, and some referenced attribution. It’s grouped by source; here’s Mencken’s.
It’s not perfect, but it’s not as easily fictionalised.
There is a further irony in quoting Mencken here, because while he may have been one of the most intellectually sharp and pithy writers of the 20th C., and despite his great incisiveness on many topics, he was still incredibly dependent on the concepts and practises of prejudice and over-generalisation to make his points.
If he had lived longer, I’m sure he would have spoken of the Baby Boomers in hyper-essentialist terms that would leave people gasping.
The chronology does factor in enough that calling them Republicans or conservatives or neoliberals doesn’t quite cut it. The rough age cohort we call Boomers (a group with the numbers for serious demographic clout) were born into and lived their entire lives in an unusual period of American prosperity that deeply informed the crappy attitude we now associate with the generation (or at least the “easy mode” default). That attitude also crosses party lines – witness the typical member of the Dem Third Way establishment.
Currently, for every year younger a person is than 55 it’s less and less likely that their conservatism (assuming they embrace it at all) will be informed by the same assumptions as those over 55, or will take the same form that theirs did. As bad as the Boomer embrace of Reaganism was for American politics (and the planet in general), Millenial right-wing populism may turn out to be a worse trend.
I tend to think of it as more shared cultural experiences – like my example above of kids being left alone – with definite bleeding/blending around the edges. How you react to something like the Kennedy assassination, or 9/11 or Trump differs if you’re 8, 28, or 88. TBH, I would chop things up smaller, because an 8 y/o has vastly different takes and experiences than a 16 y/o, which creates different adults. Blending also is affected by which cohort your parents fall into: their shared experiences are affecting how they raise you.
And you can mark some things by those experiences. Laws or the over/under-enforcement of certain laws happened at a specific time. Therefore, shared experiences tend to fall on one side or the other. There are always exceptions to the rule, but generally, it holds. And yes, it’s confounded by other things such as race, gender and sexuality – and those things are affected by time period. A gay person who was around in the 80’s has a vastly different outlook than one born tomorrow – for tomorrow’s kid, AIDS is not the crisis it was for someone older.
WWII era generations (very, very, generally, and generally English-speaking North America) had a different deal than Boomers (very, very, generally, and generally English-speaking North America) who had a different deal than Gen X (very, very, generally, and generally English-speaking North America).
#NotAllBoomers is hereby understood, agreed, and acknowledged.
