Do boomers hate minimum wage workers?

[Gokuma]

OH MY GOSH!   I specifically asked for exactly 29 ice cubes in my diet coke, not 30!  I am just totally beside myself!   You'll never be anything!  This is why you don't have a real job!   BLAH BLAH BLAH!!

 

A couple friends of mine have a name for people like that.  They call them the Good Lifes.   Because the worst plate of shit they ever had to eat was plain unflavored yogurt.

[FractalBeast]

7 hours ago, Rare Hatchiama said:

There is also the darwinist response to this...not every member of any given species is supposed to survive or pass on their genes. That is how a species grows and gets stronger, and trying to help all that are weaker goes against that.  Cold and heartless yes, but as is nature.

 

This is an incredibly dumb and shallow view on evolution. Please never use that as an argument ever again. This is creationist-tier thinking about evolution.

 

If humans had evolved as you described, we'd all be idiotic carnivore apes with the attitude of tigers. Antisocial killing machines. We're not - because we humans are communal apes that discovered that a bunch of cooperating weak apes with lots of social skills and pointy wooden sticks can and will kill anything with ease.

 

[Doomkid]

8 hours ago, Rare Hatchiama said:

What obligation do people who aren't poor or homeless have to assist anyone they don't feel compelled to assist? [...] I don't ever feel guilty about being better off than some due to my labors or obligated to share anything I have with anyone I don't know.

[...]

My experiences throughout life have admittedly caused me to be very lacking in the empathy department, I can be quite callous  But it has enabled me to focus on my own progress

It shouldn't be about obligation nor should it be about guilt. It should be about understanding that helping others in your community is helping yourself. If everyone took the "I have no obligation to help" mentality, "we'd all be idiotic carnivore apes with the attitude of tigers" as was so well stated by FractalBeast.

 

The idea that empathizing with others / thinking about the plight of the world beyond your own life somehow "takes resources away" from your ability to focus on your own progress also seems fundamentally untrue. You can acknowledge the suffering of others and think deeply about what societal structures stuffed them into that position and also keep your main focus on self-improvement. The two are in no way mutually exclusive!

 

8 hours ago, fraggle said:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/i-dont-know-how-to-explain-to-you-that-you-should_b_59519811e4b0f078efd98440

I love the content of this article, but it would resonate with me personally so much more if it was framed with a desire for people to at least try to see eye to eye, including thinking about topics that make them uncomfortable.

 

I think a lot of these people (who have been portrayed basically as "soulless, self-centered husks of humans" by this article) were led to their conclusions by right-wing propaganda more than this "in-built evil and lack of empathy that can never be moved past and will never allow us to see eye to eye".

 

A lot of right-wingers believe what they believe because they have empathy, hard as that might be for us left-leaning types to realize at first. Their media sources have fooled them into thinking that, if you care about your fellow countrymen - if you care about the future of society - you can't be for things like socialized medicine/socialized education/high taxes on the ultra rich/legalizing gay marriage/embracing trans rights/acknowledging that our corporate overlords are destroying the environment, because, as right-wing media will tell you again and again, if you're for any of those things, you're a commie who wants nothing more than the downfall of America.

 

Obviously, the right-wing media is stuffing a bunch of bullshit into the minds of their audience, but they don't believe because that crap because they're just "naturally bad people", they've simply been lied to by sources they were told they could trust, likely by the family who raised them.

 

I think getting such people to see the virtues of left-leaning positions would be as simple as leading them down the path to realizing they've been duped by millionaires who are paid by billionaires (Fox news hosts, twerps like Ben Shapiro, etc). You absolutely can change hearts and minds and can see eye-to-eye with your "opposition", there's just certain ways to go about it that resonate better with certain people.

 

...Laughable as it may sound, I think if you had some stereotypical gun-toting Clint Eastwood-like badass come out and deliver some left-wing points, in a way that a "man's man" could understand, you'd instantly have millions of converts to leftism, because: "someone who talks like me and likes guns like I do said it? Well heck, I didn't like it when those liberal pansies said it, but now it all makes sense!"

 

I think the main reason this (very silly) approach would work is because they'd be seeing someone from their own demographic touting these ideas, and as established earlier in the thread, for some reason belonging to the same demographic means most people can actually listen to the content of what they say rather than focusing on the "eww, they're different from me" aspect. Essentially, you'd have to try and understand (or even enter) the opposition's headspace before having any chance and changing their minds, but that is not the same as "impossible".

 

By the way, I'm not directing this whole chunk of the screed directly at you, fraggle - it's more a general response to many people I've heard on the left saying it's just flat out impossible to "teach empathy" without realizing that's probably not what we need to do in the first place. We just need to de-brainwash, essentially - the irony being that the only way to de-brainwash someone is to temporarily enter their head space - empathize - and try to frame your points in a way that makes sense to someone IN that head space. I sincerely apologize if this comes off as preachy, believe me when I say this is all meant as friendly conversation, despite the heaviness of the topic.

 

7 hours ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

The guilt is best placed in the hands of people like Bezos, because they're the ones who are taking way more money than they're worth. I'm saying "taking" instead of "earning", because employing slaves in the amazon box mines isn't something that should "earn" anybody anything of value.

[...]

I'm a huge fan of "fix your own stuff proper before trying to help someone else with their problems"

Re: the first point, god damn it's nice to hear someone come out and just fucking say it so plainly. So often I hear about how, if we impose some stricter regulation on companies like Amazon, we're impinging on their "freedom". It's just this oddball view of the freedom of corporations being placed on higher priority than the liberty, safety and humane treatment of the people working for the corporation. Like, yeah, you're damn right, the corporations will be less "free" because of-fucking-course they shouldn't be able to use slave labor/mistreat their workers/underpay/etc. Their freedom should end where the obvious cruelty begins If you say that you're "anti freedom" or some bullshit, apparently.

 

 

Now, this is a bit of a digression from the main topic, but - Re: the second point, I do understand how the "clean your room, bucko" idea is useful for most people, but I'm glad that the majority of visionaries and influential people in human history actually didn't follow it

at all. Brilliant people like Martin Luther King Jr. didn't have his personal life totally in line, but that didn't stop him from looking outside of his own life and causing great change in the world. Even though he didn't really have all his ducks in a row, he still became one of the most influential people in modern history. He's just one of many examples!

..but of course, most people aren't visionaries, so it probably makes sense for most people to focus on getting their shit together :p I just had to point out that there are millions of exceptions to that rule.

 

[Linguica]

4 hours ago, Cynical said:

Given that it's fairly easy to get a full academic scholarship (I did it, and have tons of friends who did the same), I'd say that those "intelligent and studious" people who couldn't get a scholarship weren't all that "intelligent and studious".

 

lol. I was offered several full rides to colleges so this is hardly sour grapes, but this statement would have been absurd in 2000 much less 2020.

[HorrorMovieRei]

1 hour ago, Doomkid said:

A lot of right-wingers believe what they believe because they have empathy, hard as that might be for us left-leaning types to realize at first.

 

That's an idea that everyone needs to realize, but at the same time seems far fetched with how easy it is to spread misinformation. It goes back to what I said about negativity bias earlier. Maybe I'm just being pessimistic but sadly it seems like news stories and anecdotes with embellished, frightening pretext is more attractive to readers than facts or even common sense.

 

Personally I'd rather do away with the idea of labels as a whole, specially in politics. I think for most people it takes them down a slippery slope of mob mentality. Not necessarily because of ignorance, but because the world is a scary place, and we're confused and we want to make sense of things, and to find comfort within a group. But when that group has the baggage of toxic dogmas, it ends badly for everyone. It's the same thing as cults essentially.

 

Your enemy is not your enemy if you humanize them, and it seems to be in the best interest of the elites to not make that so., and for the people it feels comforting to have such a well defined adversary, when whatever problem they rally against is much more likely to be multi-layered, and not as black and white as they'd hope. That's why I'm always open to consider new information and have my mind changed, even if cautiously to not fall for dirty tricks. Granted of course that if a lefty calls me a "fascist", or a right winger calls me a "faggot" you most definitely won't see turn the other cheek.

 

The way this thread is going it might not last much longer, but that's a good post and I just wanted to acknowledge it and throw my two cents lol. I try not to get into politics usually but sometimes i get passionate about it.

[Cynical]

2 hours ago, FractalBeast said:

This is an incredibly dumb and shallow view on evolution. Please never use that as an argument ever again. This is creationist-tier thinking about evolution.

 

If humans had evolved as you described, we'd all be idiotic carnivore apes with the attitude of tigers. Antisocial killing machines. We're not - because we humans are communal apes that discovered that a bunch of cooperating weak apes with lots of social skills and pointy wooden sticks can and will kill anything with ease.

 

"Cooperating" weak apes being the key word.  The apes that don't pick up a pointy stick and help with the stabbing don't help the community kill anything; thus tribes that give them resources and reproductive opportunities do worse than tribes that don't; thus, over time, the non-contributing apes are bred out.

[ketmar]

4 hours ago, Doomkid said:

So often I hear about how, if we impose some stricter regulation on companies like Amazon, we're impinging on their "freedom".

which is quite strange idea, tbh, because corporations are not humans, and i see no reason to give corporations human rights, like freedom. of course, we can say that de-facto corps (and their money) are even participating in elections, and we should just make de-facto thing valid de-jure, but i feel something deeply wrong here. ;-)

[ketmar]

3 hours ago, Cynical said:

The apes that don't pick up a pointy stick and help with the stabbing don't help the community kill anything; thus tribes that give them resources and reproductive opportunities do worse than tribes that don't; thus, over time, the non-contributing apes are bred out.

and then the whole tribe follows. by kicking away everybody who doesn't do what others do you're depriving society of the ability to change and evolve, therefore dooming it to death if any external conditions ever changes. because all you have left in your tribe are those who will never ever think about doing something their fathers and grandfathers never did.

[Tammato]

I live in a small-ish city in Argentina, a country with an extremely volatile economy that the lower classes suffer a lot. Here, boomers have an extremely odd vision of poor people. 
Most of them flat out hate them, seeing them as "leeches" that live off the safety nets and (our equivalent of) social security. Yet at the same time they idolize being "humble" and of low means. They will be the ones that talk about how they had to build their houses themselves, how they had to work since the age 9 along with their however many brothers, how they had to play with no toys because they grew in a po- I mean "humble" family, that they never finished school (Around 50% of the boomer generation, in our case). When they're poor, it's great and humblng and it builds character. When other people are poor, they're leeches and lazy and should learn to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

[holaareola]

On 2/19/2020 at 1:11 AM, Doomkid said:

The short answer is, yes. Most people with a “Boomer mentality” (regardless of their actual age) look down on minimum wage work and generally lack empathy for those below their station in life. Because that’s how people are taught to behave, by and large. “Zero empathy for any demographic that I don’t belong to” is the name of the game

 

I find that funny, because that's exactly why I think ageism is the one prejudice that some segments of my generation and younger who'll passionately declaim every other kind don't care about at all.  I've heard so many arguments about representation in these recent years, but man, if I roll down Netflix, 95% of the the faces on my screen are going to be young and hot. According to adverts in the UK these days, every family is mixed race, black, or has at least one non-white friend, but this same kind of thing just doesn't apply to a huge and growing slice of the population that intersects with all other demographics.  Money is one thing society prizes, but another is hotness, vitality, youth. I think they're the only ambient values that are actually louder and more prevalent than money. Ask an old person if they'd rather have whatever capital they've accumulated or their youth back and all the potential it comes with, I think we all know which way they'd go.  It's no wonder the ones that have it clutch their cash, the one form of social power the average older person can still have.

 

This kind of othering really depresses me, especially when it comes from people doing the exact thing they pride themselves on calling out. I sometimes wonder if one generation is ever really wiser than another or just more stupid and more clever in different areas.

 

There's a huge epidemic of loneliness amongst older people in the UK where I live. Increases in the number of food bank users (if they have the mobility to get to them), excess winter deaths, fuel poverty. I used to work with older people and yeah, their views are generally more conservative. They're old. The model of the world they've got is out of date for many reasons, neurology alone is one deep but simple cause -- keeping up to date is learning, and when's peak memory and intelligence, early 20s maybe? Learning's all harder from there. But back to it: hating minimum wage workers? I don't think so.  Looking down upon, maybe a bit. But I've found this equally in well-off or successful millenials I've met. I think this is a people thing, not an age thing. When it comes to status, blame the weaknesses and claim the strengths.

 

Anyway, think your post is excellent all the way through. Especially the point on class. The left's return to identity politics with the divisiveness, propensity for purity tests and devouring its own that accompany it is a large factor in this awful (for me as a left-winger) swing to the right sweeping across the European and English-speaking world.  When the left's focus on the biggest divide of all is lost, the elections follow.