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Culture War

Just a thought that’s come to mind.

In France - which may or may not have a right wing government - the group which is being used as scapegoat is not a marginal minority, but a huge group - the young.

Maybe others will see it differently, I’m not a native Francophone and I don’t live there, so I could easily have misunderstood things. I think the French media and the French political powers are busy blaming the irresponsibility of the young for the rise in new COVID cases. Not black or Muslim or working class or dispossessed young - all of them, the lot. The idea is that they haven’t controlled themselves over the past few months, they’ve been having parties, getting close, and the result: the disease is getting increasingly rampant.

This has had serious consequences: major cities, including Paris, Marseille, Strasbourg and many others, have made masks compulsory in all public places, inside and out. That’s a major imposition, I certainly would hate it. The reason given for the new regulation is this: the young aren’t disciplined enough to observe social distancing, so we have no choice. Masks outside are unnecessary at best if you keep your distance, but the French young population have shown that they can’t be trusted to do that - that’s the line being spun.
Culture war here is a one-sided generation war too. All the anti-woke, anti-cancel culture stuff that fills the papers is designed to enrage older people about black people in particular but also young people in general.

It’s interesting how this generational thing has played out here because central to the British culture war is the idea that young people have become weak and risk -averse, and the right wing ghouls pushing culture war are generally anti-lockdown. So it’s difficult for the papers to vilify young people for their reckless disregard for the rules etc. Instead we’ve had this kind of thing:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/self-pitying-woke-generation-needed-war-coronavirus-got-one/

Interestingly young people seem not to have cottoned on to fact that their elders and betters hate them so much. All the polling suggests more support for lockdown amongst the young than the old, and since everyone knows they’re less vulnerable you’d have to put this down to concern for older people.
 
Culture war here is a one-sided generation war too. All the anti-woke, anti-cancel culture stuff that fills the papers is designed to enrage older people about black people in particular but also young people in general.

It’s interesting how this generational thing has played out here because central to the British culture war is the idea that young people have become weak and risk -averse, and the right wing ghouls pushing culture war are generally anti-lockdown. So it’s difficult for the papers to vilify young people for their reckless disregard for the rules etc. Instead we’ve had this kind of thing:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/self-pitying-woke-generation-needed-war-coronavirus-got-one/

Interestingly young people seem not to have cottoned on to fact that their elders and betters hate them so much. All the polling suggests more support for lockdown amongst the young than the old, and since everyone knows they’re less vulnerable you’d have to put this down to concern for older people.
The LibDems were pushing generation war at the last election. "It's all the fault of the Boomers that you can't get a job or a home and that the climate's changing. Let's take away their bus passes"
 
The LibDems were pushing generation war at the last election. "It's all the fault of the Boomers that you can't get a job or a home and that the climate's changing. Let's take away their bus passes"
Oh really? Missed that. Depressing, but I guess there’s bound to be some pushback sooner or later. Just typical Lib Dem opportunism here though I suspect.
 
All this 'generation war' bollocks ignores the fact that many of us have children, and the younger ones amongst us have parents who are still alive. It presupposes people who came into the world, raised, fed, clothed and educated themselves without any assistance. I'm sure there are young people who resent old(er) people (indeed we have an example on this very forum) and old(er) people who resent the young, but my experience is that the different generations actually get on quite well together and help each other both materially and emotionally.

(Anyway, they can't take away my bus pass because I never got round to getting one).
 
All this 'generation war' bollocks ignores the fact that many of us have children, and the younger ones amongst us have parents who are still alive. It presupposes people who came into the world, raised, fed, clothed and educated themselves without any assistance. I'm sure there are young people who resent old(er) people (indeed we have an example on this very forum) and old(er) people who resent the young, but my experience is that the different generations actually get on quite well together and help each other both materially and emotionally.

(Anyway, they can't take away my bus pass because I never got round to getting one).
It doesn’t really ignore all that, it works very hard to overcome it. That’s the story of the British press, really: working insanely hard, day in day out, to overcome natural feelings of sympathy and common sense in order to get people worked up about literally nothing, as in the case of the proms thing.

It works! But only on those who actually read the papers. As I say, this is all very one-sided: young people seem to have no idea there’s a war on.
 
...my experience is that the different generations actually get on quite well together and help each other both materially and emotionally.

That may be true individually, or within families or social groups. And it’s a good thing.

But old people consistently vote for and apparently respond to a kind of politics which seems to hate young people and the world young people want to live in.

If you took away the votes of over 65s from the past few GEs and the Brexit referendum, the whole U.K. political landscape would be unrecognisably different. The vast majority of young people loathe brexit, far more of them loathe things like the hostile environment and awful attitudes to refugees, they’ve given up on ever owning houses because the housing market is stacked hugely in favour of rich old people, and so on.

The mutual support and regard you see is great. But old people are overwhelmingly the ones who support those who act against the interests of the young. The reverse tends not to be the case, with young people typically being much less concerned with making sure that the wrong kind of people mustn’t have nice things.
 
I floated the idea of Compulsory Retirement at state pension age on here a while back to free up jobs for young people - it was not universally popular.
 
Being able to retire early is a dream most Milennials and Zoomers will never have.

who knows what the future holds or looks like, I take your point but its not a definite, and many will benefit from inheriting their parents properties that the children can't afford (subject to the extant rules on inheritance tax and care home costs).
 
Almost no-one will benefit, the inheritance promise is a delusion. Inheritance for just a tiny proportion of the populace isn’t some magic bullet that will make up for an older demographic’s over-leveraged debt directly & indirectly being paid off by the following demographic(s).

Stalled wages, the shift from career employment to short term & now no contracts/gig economy service jobs with no stability or long term prospects, no income surplus enabling people to save, fewer opportunities for private pensions, vastly inferior pension deals now (try get a final salary pension now), low interest rates = no incentive to save — even if there was any money left over from rents & bills, no likelihood of a meaningful state pension, the end of public healthcare but with no affordable access to private healthcare, rents that outstrip incomes, no chance of home ownership: banks leery of house lending. High education costs (once free degrees) service economy jobs that only just keep ppl going from day to day, that’s the reality for almost all Milennials & Zoomers.

In the meantime, pensioners are freaking out about the end of TV licences... Jesus Christ, the whining entitlement it takes to countenance that — in the meantime the media whips up anti-anyone-other-than-us-Boomers resentment by scoffing at Milennials & Zoomers “& their iPhones instead of healthcare, Starbux & Avocado toast” almost none will have an annual vacation, that is now once a decade & ppl try to “we clothed & raised you’ guilt trip? F*ck that shit.

America is on fire, fascism is looking sexy, police brutality ensues, racism is back in vogue, homophobia & transphobia everywhere whipped up by the media, climate change & global warming, pandemic, billionaires hoarding all that prosperity (that’s the “trickle up” part of “trickle down economics” I suppose), yeah everything is looking f*ckn peachy for the future.

The idea that receiving an inheritance is some magic bullet is some kind of special messed-up bullshit (or just wilful spitefulness, depends on how you look at it) even the Idea that we can’t predict what happens in the future is callously disregarding of the conditions of the now set in place by conditions of over leveraged debt racked up by generations earlier. What inheritance? A house? Volatile stock portfolio in free fall? Blingy HiFi posessions? Clapped out old car? That’s it?
 
I floated the idea of Compulsory Retirement at state pension age on here a while back to free up jobs for young people - it was not universally popular.
I’ve argued it for a long time.
And continued NI payments on pensions income above the tax threshold.
 
Almost no-one will benefit, the inheritance promise is a delusion. Inheritance for just a tiny proportion of the populace isn’t some magic bullet that will make up for an older demographic’s over-leveraged debt directly & indirectly being paid off by the following demographic(s).

Stalled wages, the shift from career employment to short term & now no contracts/gig economy service jobs with no stability or long term prospects, no income surplus enabling people to save, fewer opportunities for private pensions, vastly inferior pension deals now (try get a final salary pension now), low interest rates = no incentive to save — even if there was any money left over from rents & bills, no likelihood of a meaningful state pension, the end of public healthcare but with no affordable access to private healthcare, rents that outstrip incomes, no chance of home ownership: banks leery of house lending. High education costs (once free degrees) service economy jobs that only just keep ppl going from day to day, that’s the reality for almost all Milennials & Zoomers.

In the meantime, pensioners are freaking out about the end of TV licences... Jesus Christ, the whining entitlement it takes to countenance that — in the meantime the media whips up anti-anyone-other-than-us-Boomers resentment by scoffing at Milennials & Zoomers “& their iPhones instead of healthcare, Starbux & Avocado toast” almost none will have an annual vacation, that is now once a decade & ppl try to “we clothed & raised you’ guilt trip? F*ck that shit.

America is on fire, fascism is looking sexy, police brutality ensues, racism is back in vogue, homophobia & transphobia everywhere whipped up by the media, climate change & global warming, pandemic, billionaires hoarding all that prosperity (that’s the “trickle up” part of “trickle down economics” I suppose), yeah everything is looking f*ckn peachy for the future.

The idea that receiving an inheritance is some magic bullet is some kind of special messed-up bullshit (or just wilful spitefulness, depends on how you look at it) even the Idea that we can’t predict what happens in the future is callously disregarding of the conditions of the now set in place by conditions of over leveraged debt racked up by generations earlier. What inheritance? A house? Volatile stock portfolio in free fall? Blingy HiFi posessions? Clapped out old car? That’s it?
 
Almost no-one will benefit, the inheritance promise is a delusion. Inheritance for just a tiny proportion of the populace isn’t some magic bullet that will make up for an older demographic’s over-leveraged debt directly & indirectly being paid off by the following demographic(s).

Stalled wages, the shift from career employment to short term & now no contracts/gig economy service jobs with no stability or long term prospects, no income surplus enabling people to save, fewer opportunities for private pensions, vastly inferior pension deals now (try get a final salary pension now), low interest rates = no incentive to save — even if there was any money left over from rents & bills, no likelihood of a meaningful state pension, the end of public healthcare but with no affordable access to private healthcare, rents that outstrip incomes, no chance of home ownership: banks leery of house lending. High education costs (once free degrees) service economy jobs that only just keep ppl going from day to day, that’s the reality for almost all Milennials & Zoomers.

In the meantime, pensioners are freaking out about the end of TV licences... Jesus Christ, the whining entitlement it takes to countenance that — in the meantime the media whips up anti-anyone-other-than-us-Boomers resentment by scoffing at Milennials & Zoomers “& their iPhones instead of healthcare, Starbux & Avocado toast” almost none will have an annual vacation, that is now once a decade & ppl try to “we clothed & raised you’ guilt trip? F*ck that shit.

America is on fire, fascism is looking sexy, police brutality ensues, racism is back in vogue, homophobia & transphobia everywhere whipped up by the media, climate change & global warming, pandemic, billionaires hoarding all that prosperity (that’s the “trickle up” part of “trickle down economics” I suppose), yeah everything is looking f*ckn peachy for the future.

The idea that receiving an inheritance is some magic bullet is some kind of special messed-up bullshit (or just wilful spitefulness, depends on how you look at it) even the Idea that we can’t predict what happens in the future is callously disregarding of the conditions of the now set in place by conditions of over leveraged debt racked up by generations earlier. What inheritance? A house? Volatile stock portfolio in free fall? Blingy HiFi posessions? Clapped out old car? That’s it?

What you describe there is the starting position, the present. There’s a worrying possibility: that the only prospect for the future that Governments feel able to offer is years and years of partially locked-down economies, education limping along.

How’s your COVID app coming along?
 


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