Microblog Memes

Ah the good old days. I do miss stagflation, the SNL crisis and the boot of Reagonomics on my neck. Fun times.

Millennial here. I don’t remember that either. I feel like my life has been in survival mode from one once in a lifetime crisis to the next and my dad died from issues from agent orange exposure in Vietnam and my mom died from early onset Alzheimer’s after she worked hard her entire life and lost everything after 2008 not because she didn’t work hard and save but because she was layed off at the height of the Great Recession and burned through her deflated 401k and then began to get sick and lost her home and moved in with me but I couldn’t access healthcare for her in this evil system and her slow horrible death was beyond traumatic for my small family. Things keep getting more expensive and corrupt everyday. When is it time to burn this mother down? And hold the pedofile parasite class accountable and take our power back? I don’t think we want much just the ability to live in a system with integrity and to not have to worry about being cast on the streets to die in squalid conditions

"Good old days"

Terms and conditions apply. Mainly that you were a white cis-het male and were christian or at least willing to go along with the charade. And didn't get drafted into war. And didn't have to work in a coal mine or some other dangerous line of work.

Those “good old days” were propped up by strong unions, excellent public education, high taxes on the ultra-wealthy, and not much regulation beyond not letting another stock market crash happen (See also: rivers literally on fire in Ohio and elsewhere).

So, 3 Good Things, and 1 really Bad Thing (that makes a lot of money). We’re currently speed running back towards the Bad Thing, we’ve effectively killed unions, public education has long since been gutted, and taxing the ultra-wealthy at all is basically un-American. So…

Capatilism is only possible when you steal value from someone or somewhere else.

The US financially raped the rest of the world to generate it's vast wealth.

China saw the opportunity to steal this wealth back itself by convincing US companies to abandon their manufacturing capabilities. Now we are watching the slow decline of the world's default nobility as they scramble to justify their value.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.

Millennials and zoomers are essentially the “hard times make good men” crowd like the greatest generation.

Unfortunately, I’m not too confident on “good men make good times” this time around.

I am GenX and in my 20s lived stuffed into houses with 2 other couples so that we could make rent, I am not sure why people think we were skating on minimum wage, it was shit. If you put 6 wage earners in a house you can make it today too.

On college cost, that is absolutely true I do agree, it's gotten so expensive it is not an automatic choice among my kids. Those who went straight out of school mostly didn't have to borrow, nor did I pay much, they got scholarships to cover it.

We are At War now, according to President Bush, and I take him at his word. He also says this War might last for "a very long time."
Generals and military scholars will tell you that eight or 10 years is actually not such a long time in the span of human history -- which is no doubt true -- but history also tells us that 10 years of martial law and a war-time economy are going to feel like a Lifetime to people who are in their twenties today. The poor bastards of what will forever be known as Generation Z are doomed to be the first generation of Americans who will grow up with a lower standard of living than their parents enjoyed.
That is extremely heavy news, and it will take a while for it to sink in. The 22 babies born in New York City while the World Trade Center burned will never know what they missed. The last half of the 20th century will seem like a wild party for rich kids, compared to what's coming now. The party's over, folks. The time has come for loyal Americans to Sacrifice. ... Sacrifice. ... Sacrifice. That is the new buzz-word in Washington. But what it means is not entirely clear.

From Hunter S Thompson: https://www.espn.com/page2/s/thompson/010918.html

Still wild to me that he was publishing stuff like that for ESPN. Can you imagine ESPN putting something like that about Trump on the page today?

Some misconceptions here. The good old days that still existed in the ‘80s and early ‘90s were kinda still there, but the signs of economic retreat were there too. We were offshoring a lot of manufacturing, bankruptcies were tools to get rid of pensions and union strength, and then everything Reagan did to fuck us that just wasn’t apparent yet. They weren’t the good old days that the Boomers had, but they were far better than today.

You could still rent a place for a few hundred bucks on a single job, community college was ~$50/semester not including textbooks. A cheap house in a not so great area was ~$100k, often a lot less. People didn’t use credit cards the way they do now so debt wasn’t as common, it was harder to spend money you didn’t have. You could still claw your way ahead or at least tread water.

2000 was a turning point. The dot com bust, 9/11, offshoring of even more jobs in tech, multiple recessions, endless war, and corporations running out of ideas other than finding ways to extract more and more from the consumer while offering less in return. Every generation since has had to deal with more things being put out of reach.

In order to have a middle class, you need government subsidies for the working class and regulations on the robber baron class.

FDR started to do that. And do it went for a couple decades. Hence the booming 50s with a house and car got everyone on a single income.

Then, in 1981, Reagan happened. The subsidization of the working class was slowly peeled back. More was given to the robber baron class.

Which brings us to where we are now. + Dictator voted into office on top of that. So, no help there.

You know what's even funnier/saddening? When people who never experienced "the good old times" will still defend inequality and conservative values because those promise a full blown lie of "we actually bring prosperity" while accusing the left of "defending their elites' privileges"

Millennials are anticapitalist for the opposite reason. We DO remember the good old days.

I wish zoomers were anti-capitalist because they understood that the "good old days" were only "good" because of the exploitation of the global South.

i’m 36. i have young coworkers and i try telling them that even 10-15 years ago it was not like this.

Many early zoomers (1993 to 2006) may remember something of the world before 2008 crisis and before neoliberalism fucked the ideas of the American left. We had the opportunity to experience a slower way of life and peace of mind. Many of us also had the opportunity to witness the very few last years when traditional family was still a thing. Late zoomers and Gen alpha have never experienced nothing like that

My impression is that Zoomers in the USA have been told that the abysmal, violently upward-distributing societal scheme prevalent in America in the 21st century is "Capitalism" and everything else is "Socialism" which "doesn't work."

That is not so. The world has a vast spread of free market capitalist countries, and none of the other ones have a model similar to America's. What is most telling is that other countries kept the model that America came up with after World War 2, while America destroyed it and refashioned is as corporatism starting in the 80s.

It's as if someone had replaced "We The People" with "We The Corporations." It's telling that a lot of people measure the welfare of the commonwealth by stock market indices, because those measure the welfare of corporations.

In Eastern Europe people seem to love capitalism because the "old days" were living in the Soviet bloc and they think things are much better now than they used to be. Wonder how long it'll be before they too begin to recognise severe capitalist decay