Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/07/07/who-killed-the-world.html
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“Some people just want to watch the world burn”
How big a jump is it from watching peons burn in public housing because you’ve allowed the builders to self-certify their safety to watching the whole world burn because you’ll do nothing about global CO2 levels…
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In a way it’s a good thing that older conservatives are so open about flipping the bird to future generations about existential issues, just as younger people are starting to counterbalance them in demographic political clout.
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I wish I still had the optimism to think that the younger generations won’t get/aren’t just as bad.
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Is there any chance the UK isn’t going to play the US’s lapdog for once? They don’t even try to hide it with a fig leaf.
Don’t get the reasoning:
“We have to get our sovereignty back from those imperialist eurocrats in brussels … let’s crawl into the USA’s ass and do their every bidding to get there”
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No.
(darn it, Post must be at least nine characters)
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…maybe gutting health care for senior citizens is a good thing then?
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The problem with young people is that they get older.
Opinions and circumstances change. Hey, our revolutionary neomarxist party got 30% of the 18yo vote! 10 years later… fuck, they’re all Tories now.
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“I represent the people of Pevensey, not Paris.”
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This is true. But where the Conservatives are really losing important support is the 35-44 year age range. People have surprisingly long memories.
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Once the younger people come into their own in voting numbers, that might very well happen. Whether they continue voting progressive or become cost-cutting conservatives, there’s going to be a lot of anger directed at older generations whose policies left them with no job prospects and a planet undergoing severe climate change.
It won’t be a good thing, but it would be an understandable thing. I’m a Gen Xer who’ll get caught up in all that hatred of Boomers, but we’re used to getting the short end of the stick.
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Huh, I didn’t know that. That’s probably the worst group to lose - old enough to have an established voting pattern, too young to drop dead in the next few years.
I suspect, sadly, that it won’t last. I think the current drop in support from that quarter is pretty much down to the Conservatives having decided that all their supporters are in favour of Brexit and that a hard shift to the right would bring them massive majorities.
Since a lot of otherwise conservative voters were actually quite in favour of the status quo (who would have thought that from a bunch of conservatives?), that didn’t actually go down too well.
I know at least one otherwise solidly Conservative voter in that age bracket who just couldn’t bring himself to do so this time.
I suspect that in a few parliaments time, he’ll be happily voting Conservative again (unless the Conservatives really do cock-up Brexit as badly as they look like doing of course).
There’s a pernicious form of climate denial among the wealthy, in which they accept that it’s real, but assume it won’t affect them personally. I.e. they don’t think they live in that tower. And that means they relegate it to the basket of issues like development aid, refugees, welfare, etc. They sometimes remember to pay lip service to these issues, but think such issues don’t really matter, because they only affect the undeserving poor. To a hierarchist, this the proper state of the world.
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This. Exactly this.
The only thing is… It’s not just the very wealthy. It’s most people.
You see, it will only affect:
People in other countries
Poor people
People in other states
People living by the beach
People living closer to the equator
People who are younger than me
No matter what, it’s irrelevant to ME. And you’re proposing to steal some of my money to solve this irrelevant problem.
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you know it’s bad when they’re not even talking to each other anymore.
I like.
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Dude, as much as you hate everything about the US, you ignore that Ms. May was elected before all the rump bullshit here.
Or should I mention how Helmut Kohl was Reagan’s assboy, or perhaps Gerhard Schröder’s fondness for Russian money that makes rump’s boot licking pale in comparison.
I think you might have learned something about glass houses and stones at some point.
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Sorry but you missed the point - which is hypocrisy: crying about losing “muh sovereignty” while playing lapdog since times immemorable.
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Not my term - it comes from social psychologists like Schwartz and Castillo. Here’s a simple introduction: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/how-risky-is-it-really/201103/take-the-cultural-cognition-quiz
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