Bruce Cannon Gibney is an American writer and venture capitalist. He was one of the first investors at PayPal, and went on to work for PayPal founder Peter Thiel’s hedge fund Clarium and his venture capital company Founders Fund.
Bruce is a point man for “Blame the Boomers”, which is a campaign to distract attention from utra-rich libertarian kleptocrats and pin it on Boomers. After chopping public budgets for education, health care, other social programs, they want to go after social security. (Treating civilization like another looted company: sell the assets, pile on the debt.)
When I heard him on the radio, and before looked him up, I though “Hey, he sounds like another Ben Shapiro clone!”
Slightly off-topic, but happy belated Diwali everybody. Even in these times of ass-inspired trumpholes, hopefully we can still find the time to celebrate the victory of light over darkness, good over evil, and knowledge over ignorance.
I am still confident that we can pull through this. It’s gonna suck, but we can do it.
Once they feel the GOP might be losing power, the “reasonable conservatives” move immediately to anti-intellectualism and nationalism. I just saw this cover on display at the check-out counter:
Piketty addresses this issue early on in Capital in the 21st Century. He rejects the premise of generational inequality. The data don’t fit. Each “generation” is as unequal as the others. We currently perceive a generational inequality because Boomers grew up in the anomalous post-war era of global decreasing inequality, which started reversing in the 1970s. But the cross-section level of inequality within that generation is just as unequal as subsequent generations.
For all the “OK, Boomer” stuff as a legitimate retort to those selfish and clueless Boomers (usually white, usually male, usually cisgender) who are blind to the unusual era of prosperity they lived their youth and adulthood in, that’s very true. For example, plenty of Boomers saw their retirement savings wiped out in 2008 thanks to greedhead bankers taking advantage of the holy “free”-market writ of deregulation.
I’m not a boomer, but I really dislike the “OK, Boomer” shit. Not for the reasons from that ugly Twitter thread. It’s that it strengthens the artificial divide between people who have more in common than they have difference. It’s a designer meme to weaken the natural alliance between people who have on-the-ground experience with resistance from the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War protests and contemporary anti-fascists, BLM, and climate change activists.
It might be satisfying to throw around, especially when some privileged white fart talks about how they worked through college to pay their tuition or other BS like that, but in the end it weakens the progressive cause through division
I’ll have to plead guilty to voting for Bill Clinton, who later signed off on Gramm-Leach-Bliley (the act that repealed Glass-Steagall and opened a big door for the bankers to go wild with mortgage-backed securities).
There’s no doubt that too many Boomers (mostly white and educated ones) abandoned the progressive ideals of their youth to vote for Reagan and his programme of de-regulation, and continued to vote for other Republicans who continued that legacy. But the Dem establishment (including Boomers like the Clintons and Obama) until recently stuck with a less fundamentalist version of the same basic neoliberal assumptions.
The Boomers were perhaps more willing to indulge in the fantasy that they were seeing the “end of history” in their middle years, but for almost 25 years the duopoly system hasn’t offered any of us much of a choice. I’m hoping that will end next year with either Warren or Sanders as the nominee.
I wouldn’t take it personally if a stranger assumed I voted for trump. The majority of my demographic voted for trump, and there’s nothing about me at first blush that would suggest that I didn’t. Blaming me personally would be a little asinine, but I would understand the trepidation they might feel around me if they didn’t know my politics. That’s basically how I feel about Boomers. I understand that not literally all of them torpedoed our economy, but a good chunk of them did and are rather unrepentant about it decades later.
“Half the population is below average intelligence.”
The classic true but misleading statement. Statements about Boomers aren’t quite as bad, but not by much.
Assume everyone lives until 80, and then dies in a geriatric Festival.
If you scoop up an 18-20 year segment of the population, white, black, male, female, native born, immigrant, mutant, rich, poor … then you have 25% of the population even without the boom bulge. (And the trailing edge includes kids of the kids from the leading edge.)
That makes a mighty big target to pin the blame on, even though I doubt there were many issues where they voted en bloc.
some sources consider those born between 1961 and 1980 as part of the gen x cohort. others insist that the boomers run through the births of 1965. i’m just not buying that last bit, even if many of my birth year cohort share some things with the for sure boomer cohort a few years older, the ones from 64 and 65 are wildly different from those of 54 or 55.
i feel that obama and i (1961 birth years) are much more characteristically gen x than boomer. i’m much farther to the left than he is but he was farther to the left than clinton, william jefferson. while obama was a liberal version of an eisenhower republican i’m more of a far left version of a henry wallace democrat. to the left of sanders but to the right of carl dix.
the most rabid trumpians among my extended family are all boomers. most of the ones that are my age or younger tend to be democrats although there are a couple of my boomer cousins who are liberal democrats but it really is only two or three. oddly enough my parents, both part of the so-called silent generation were just about as far to the left as i am. in 1972 my mom and dad voted for nixon. in 1976 they voted for carter and never voted for a republican presidential candidate again. my dad died in 2009. he had voted for obama and complained bitterly to his republican friends about the shameful way the republican party was working against the aca and the recovery act.
i have a framed copy of my 2008 obama delegate credentials to the texas state democratic convention hanging in my classroom. nobody mistakes me for a trump voter.
edited to remind everyone looking at this that john yoo is an american war criminal who is paid a 6 figure salary by the state of california to teach at a university.
the only person i want hauled in front of the international criminal court in the hague more than yoo is henry kissinger. there are others who should go there (arguably every living president) but those two should be first in line.
