Having lived in the shadow of “boomers” all my life, I’m rather bemused by the story arc they took - when I was very young, they were being castigated by the culture as being a bunch of idealistic, hippy-dippy dumbasses that didn’t know how “real life” worked. Most of this coming from MSM, mind you, and still controlled by the older generation. Then, when the 80s really came along, I remember lots of common tropes where some Gen X kid/teen is winking at the audience about the “60s leftovers” and how much more savvy the kid/teen is than their hippie drug-addled idealistic parents or whatever - often a nod to Reaganite sensibilities.

Then as Gen X started coming into their own, they mostly seemed to be grumbling about how they wanted to have their day in the sun, but by the time they left high school/university, the American Dream was already crushed for the boomers and also by the boomer “sellouts”, so what hope did our generation really have?

Then, later, once the culture mostly shifted to Gen Y, the MSM narrative seemed to pit boomers vs. Gen Y and paint the boomers as these extreme far-right reactionaries that ruined everything for everyone?

That’s quite an arc…and this is coming from someone that does hold a bit of a grudge for 1) Missing the 60s and being way to young in the 70s to appreciate a lot of the cultural things that happened. 2) having to live most of my life in a culture where nearly all of it seemed to be about the 60s generation holding up a mirror to their own generation and struggling to free themselves from the Silent Generation/Greatest Generations, even into their 40s and 50s and beyond. So very much of the movies/TV that I grew up with was about catering to boomers…we had a small window with that “brat pack” thing, and then a few indie movies aimed at/made by our “slacker generation”, but so many other movies were still about boomers, ultimately, even during that phase…like Forrest Gump.

Only to see this repeat with Gen Y - I’m already watching them go through similar nostalgia phases that the boomers seemed to go through. It will be interesting to see if they have a very similar arc…

It’s not like I hate diversity 100% and whenever it pops up in media. There is a very clear difference between when companies like Disney do it and when say an indie director does it.

I will just say there have been times when watching something and you get this weird experience where something happens…everyone has probably known someone that sells something like Amway or some other MLM bullshit in their lives - one minute you are having a conversation about normal life, then, bam, some very awkward and very forced turn is taken into trying to sell you something…and all you can think is “how did we end up here”? It’s just bad writing, IMHO.

I just want god stories, man. With awesome characters being challenged and overcoming or failing and being consumed. But eh. Hollywood isn’t doing their job and currently it doesn’t matter because America has way bigger problems than some cringe movies no one really likes if they are honest with themselves.

Very true. I’m still able to find lots and lots of content that I want to watch. If people are telling me something is very cringe - for whatever reason - I tend to avoid. I’m a life-long horror fan and there is so much content these days it’s hard to keep up with even just only all the horror content. I would think it’s similar for other genres? And if the well is coming up dry for the current year/month, there is a huuuuge back catalogue of TV shows and movies to mine, both foreign and domestic. For people that are very reactionary, they could watch Leave it to Beaver episodes or whatever and never anything else?

But yeah… it’s one thing to dislike a social trend and to vote a tyrant into power who is forcing- not only Americans, but the rest of the world to eliminate everything diversity from their companies if they want to trade with America.

So much agreement here. It’s possible some mainstream movies/shows got cringe as hell for some, but…so what? There are a lot of choices out there. I really do think what the culture is doing caused a lot of people to take this weird turn into voting for the worst people. I think some of it comes down to some of them being enraged that OTHER people might be consuming “woke” media and they cannot have that.

I still don’t know what they thought was going to result with donvict in power? Do some of them really want donvict to nationalize Hollywood or something and start making only right wing cishet xtian white nationalist bullshit? I mean, he already took over the Kennedy Center…I guess I could see the likes of Benny Johnson wanting that, but I think that guy is just a Russian asset getting paid to tear this country to shreds.

I think it has something to do with how the right lionizes business so much. I think they adore business because it has zero democracy; it’s basically a top-down structure, just like the authoritarian government they so crave.

Because they think government should be run like a business (another idea that is beyond stupid) and since they think only Republicans operate businesses, they seem to think this translates into “Republican in charge” = “good economy”.

History and facts don’t seem to enter into it, it’s all vibes with that bunch.

Sometimes it feels like sabotage. They don’t seem to want queer stories to succeed. They’ll use them for their tax write offs.

I’d buy the sabotage angle, and maybe any reactionaries they create is something they consider a bonus? I just don’t understand their intent - it doesn’t seem to be about making money? Unless some of the people involved are just really that out of touch?

The other thing that I’ve noticed is that it’s very hard to tell what is a decent show/movie with things like The Acolyte from reviews, since there are obviously people that are leaping into the fray with a specific agenda, and probably more than a few paid shills - the critic rating is 72% while the all audience rating is 19%? That 72% number seems awfully high, but then 19% is probably due to the brigading of the butthurt “antiwoke” chuds upset that Disney “ruined their childhoods” or something…

I don’t know much about tax write offs or how they work, so I looked around and it seems like they have reduced their tax bill substantially from other shows…

https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinereid/2024/09/26/disney-reveals-star-wars-show-the-acolyte-was-over-budget-at-230-million/

It’d be a helluva thing if some dumbasses were to actually buy these things, then have it rendered null and void if the adults get back in charge…and are not given a refund.

Ever since seeing that scene in the original Dune where the Bene Gesserit hand down all the wisdom of the past sisters, I cannot help but wonder what an ability like that - even if only through some kind of technology augmentation - would do for humanity.

Yes, what is happening right now is very dangerous. If things get bad enough economically speaking, the demagogues will point the angriest set of magoffs at the other half of the country and grant them the “right” to do their worst.

People keep acting like things under Biden were awful and that the Democrats/Kamala/Biden were just being monsters to say the economy was actually tracking on a very good course. Sure, many people I’m sure were miserable as economic inequality has not been getting better. But again - the adults in the room know full fucking well things could get much, much worse, especially in the hands of the clueless and the party without any empathy whatsoever.

However, I don’t think some have any idea just how much worse it could get. Many people are too young or have forgotten how miserable the 70s were, apparently. And people seem to not have learned about violence in the 60s.

And if people think they were mad about bullshit made-up nonsense like “Bidenflation”, just fucking wait and see how angry they get over the kind of pain that donvict seems determined to inflict on everyone…if enough people are starving and are told by the likes of Faux that it’s the fault of “DEI” or the trans or the liberals or Biden…enough will believe that to make things get very dangerous very quickly.

Exactly. I think once they started monetizing the data from “smart” TVs, they really, really fell through the floor. And yeah, compare that to memories of the 60s or 70s when a mere color TV of any size was a big deal and definitely a luxury item for the rich and adjust for inflation…in 1965, say, $599 would be $59.13…so if you imprinted on that in your twenties, I could see how that might be hard to understand the delta…

See the prices for a 23"-25" color TV in 1965 - $1800-$2000. That’d be $18,233 - $20,259 in today’s dollars…so if someone is doing “boomer math” when chastising people for buying huge TVs, and claiming that’s the reason they cannot afford a house/rent, I can sort of get it, but it’s also just a one-time cost…and they really need to update their thinking.

I’d love to ask them to define a “company supporting dei”?

The stock market is a rich person’s playground in this day and age mostly.

Unfortunately, if they do poorly, THAT definitely “trickles down”.

Came here to note that S&P has been down over 16% since the clown took the WH and the circus started back up again.

Companies are drooling at the prospect of replacing workers - it was several years ago when I attended a talk that was about how mining companies are seeking to automate all of it - this around the time when people like donvict were talking up coal-mining jobs and of course the magoffs piled on - if people looking to prop up that industry think it will result in lots of good-paying jobs with dignity, I have a bridge to sell them.

And that’s just one instance…

Yep. Not sure why you are getting downvoted.

I’d love to see donvict, fElon, Lutnick, Thiel, Vance and especially Navarro forced to live in poverty for a while.

I’ve seen a few other outlets talking about it too, not just Fortune. Yeah, again, it would be the aggregate and not everyone’s experience. And it’s hard to calculate the harm of the formative years for a given age range - if you tried to enter the market just as 2008/2009 crash came…that’d be something you’d not soon forget, unless you had a cushy home life you could fall back on.

I remember trying to find just a summer job and work-study job in the early 90s “jobless recovery” - and there was just a real dearth of any job, even the most menial of jobs [1]- and that made an impression, maybe even more so than the later layoffs I had to endure. And 2008/2009 was worse.

[1] I ended up working for Manpower at various shit jobs; the longest of which was at a Ross warehouse. The next longest stint was helping to round out housekeeping at really cruddy hotels. I did put in an application at a McD’s and several other fast-food places, but didn’t get hired. The job market blew really hard for a few years there.

The irony about the qons that voted against Kamala because “woke”… I mean, donvict and his demons may go after Hollywood, etc…but the thing is, neither the Democrats nor Kamala were or are responsible for a lot of the culture stuff - meaning Hollywood can crank out “woke” trash that makes almost everyone’s eyes roll as long as they can economically sustain it [1], regardless of who is in office. I guess some of the qons really do want donvict to go full Putin/Hitler and make every aspect of life, including movies, bow to his stupid and backwards will.

Imagine if Hollywood has their arm twisted by the magoffs into just cranking out snow-white super xtian Hallmark movie type of dreck for years…gag. Seriously, who the fuck is going to want to watch any of that beyond just a very narrow and stupid demographic?

I honestly don’t understand what upsets a type of person so very much about godawful cultural content to the point that it changes their vote in the political sphere. Lots of magoffs got very GRRRR mad about the latest Doctor Who, but isn’t that the BBC? What the hell would they expect donvict to do, anyway? Ban it somehow? Invade the UK and make them stop? Same for Disney? Who was making them watch anything from Disney? Don’t these people have choices in what they choose to stream? The movies they pay for? I get it - quite a bit of it is unbelievably terrible, but…I don’t remember anyone making me watch anything. The people think something like The Acolyte “ruined their childhood” and now have the knives out for wokeness and Disney, but I have a newsflash - Episode 1 was complete shit and didn’t need “wokeness” to make it so.

These are the same people that cried for decades that they are “made fun of”. Sure, by some content. But also, lots of content completely caters to flyover country/salt of the Earth narratives and always has.

[1] I really don’t understand what the business model is. It looks like Disney especially seems to want to set fire to huge piles of cash? And for what purpose? It almost seems to be creating more reactionaries. And people that they think they are catering to? I don’t know how much they are bound to be customers of things like Star Wars anyway? The term “woke” now is so loaded, unfortunately, but there is miles of distance between having representation and not being nasty to certain marginalized groups, etc., vs hammering in extremely stilted agendas, doing race/gender swapping almost to intentionally alienate the fan base and so on…it’s so cringe that I often wonder if it’s being done in service of oligarchs’ interest in dividing the nation even further, just like corporations doing their silly rainbow/woke-washing stuff.

I guess we’ll see if any other generation is different than they are/were. I somehow doubt it. I don’t see Gen X or Gen Y doing all that much. Too early to tell for Gen Z and alpha, I think…I think it’s human nature.

The boomers that I knew growing up mostly lived hand to mouth. My parents were boomers and I don’t really remember them being all that comfortable. They lived a very meager existence, lived extremely frugally (I think it was generational trauma in my own family coming from the Great Depression and my grandparents on both sides) and saved as much as possible. They took almost no vacations and they were some of the first ecominded people. They were leftists (of the older type), not so much the hippie type, and most of their friends were, too. I sure as hell know they wanted nothing to do with the Republicans and the ones that are still alive despise donvict.

So, I think it varies. People born in a certain age group are definitely not a monolith. Not every boomer went to Woodstock and then later did a heel-turn and went all-in on the Reaganites and became a Wall street trader yuppie…as much as that is the common stereotype.

I think the script has flipped for Gen Y, at least collectively. It’s possible they may be the richest generation in history, depending on the wealth transfer…

https://fortune.com/2024/10/21/millennials-outperforming-baby-boomers-gen-x-assets-earnings/

Point is, I don’t think it’s Americans alone, and I don’t think it’s this generation in particular. The far right is rising globally. We’ve all forgotten.

I think it’s human nature. Education is supposed to combat that, but it’s slow and imperfect, and of course the reactionaries among us fight that tooth and nail, most especially if they suspect children will come out of that education changed somehow. But changing minds is the very point. If you believe the same things at the end of education that you believed beforehand, well, then, that’s a failed education.

It’s not about indoctrination - that’s just the reactionaries projecting. They believe the purpose of education is to make children believe the exact same things their parents and religious clerics believe.

I think humans not only forget their history, but also the very bedrock of science. We have people still litigating evolution or a spherical Earth, FFS. And we have people rejecting things like measles vaccines because they didn’t see massive misery and death in their own lifetimes. Like you said, there is not enough people being told: without the proper precautions, this could happen to YOU. Or YOUR KIDS. It’s something that happened to prior generations or people that are old (so what do they know about life, lol?).

I mean, just look at something like measles, which was far more recent. But, starting with maybe younger boomers and definitely within Gen X, you started getting this “but what have vaccines ever done for us?” kind of bullshit, because a lot of people are too stupid and arrogant to learn shit from history or their elders.

But those that lived through it tend to remember even if they were not necessarily brainiacs…

It’s sad, but as a group, humans just don’t do very well at learning the important things from their elders or from history…the stupid racism and wives’ tales seems to get passed down, however.

Again, if there is one thing I would hope for when it comes to technology breakthroughs, it would be to make humans smarter, wiser and more empathetic. I don’t know how that might be possible, but truly transferring powerful wisdom to the next generations to all and automatically, would be an unbelievable improvement over what we have. Imagine something like The Matrix, but instead of learning kung fu or how to fly a helicopter, you get the wisdom of the ancients and important lessons from history, at your disposal, for your entire life…and everyone gets that…