The World We Lost

Whereas the Boomers are openly gleeful to have denied the younger generations the world they knew, it grieves Generation X that we were unable to preserve it.

When Spacebunny and I bought our first house, I consciously sought one that was on a dead end culdesac backed up on a park, with the idea that the children we hoped to have would be able to run around and play there with the pack of neighborhood kids one day.

But, as Spacebunny correctly pointed out, it was already too late for that. Even by the end of the 1990s, suburban kids really didn’t do that anymore, for a variety of reasons.

DISCUSS ON SG


Why Gen Z Rejects the Jews

This incident in the UK pretty well summarizes why Israel is getting obliterated in the global PR war, particularly among Gen Zers.

This is the moment an irate taxi driver kicked out an ‘antisemitic’ passenger from his cab after she ranted about the ‘Jewish machine’. The furious London cabbie was filmed booting out his female fare, telling her to ‘get the f*** out of my cab’ during a journey through Soho, on Halloween last month.

Footage of the clash appeared online today, with former Tory leadership hopeful Tom Tugendhat MP hailing the driver’s actions as ‘the correct response to racism’.

In a conversation recorded on dash-cam, the passenger says: ‘It’s so easy to trigger people nowadays… The Jewish machine is so strong. It doesn’t allow you to talk. But again, there are so many examples of me showing you brutalisation of Palestinians.’

The irate cabbie then interrupts the woman and rages: ‘Right, you can get the f*** out of my cab. Out. Out.’

‘Why,’ asks the woman, before the driver shouts back: ‘The Jewish machine doesn’t allow you to talk!?’

‘You’re an example of that,’ replies the passenger as she gets out the taxi and a door slams shut.

Now, I’m sure Jonathan Greenblatt and his UK-resident equivalent are celebrating the fact that their pet politicians and clueless Anglo-Boomers are applauding what they have been taught to be “the correct response” to antisemitism. There are no shortage of comments supporting the cab driver’s actions; these are some of the top-rated ones:

  • Well done the cabby
  • Well done cab driver for speaking out.
  • Absolute respect for this man. Absolutely none for her!
  • Love that taxi driver!
  • Excellent. Well done, sir!

Of course, no one under the age of 65 comments on a newspaper site.

Meanwhile, the younger generations, who have been taught that everyone is equal, everyone has a right to his own opinion and his own truth, and that freedom of thought, speech, and expression is the highest human value, are NOTICING that this poor woman did literally nothing but express her own opinion, and in response was angrily denied a basic service that she had already purchased.

And I’m certain they are perfectly aware that if the positions had been reversed and a British driver had told a Jewish passenger to “get the fuck out of my cab”, the British flag would be flown at half-mast over Buckingham Palace, every Premier League team would hold a minute of silence before games for the rest of the season, King Charles would announce that he would prefer to be styled “the Defender of the Torah”, a new Cabinet Ministry would be appointed to “fight antisemitism”, Rachel Riley would be on the front page of every major newspaper crying about how she has a panic attack every time she sees a taxi, and the driver would be hunted down by Scotland Yard, disemployed, and prosecuted for thirty-seven hate crimes.

Now, the Boomers observably don’t give a damn about fairness. They literally could not care less about it. But Generation Z genuinely cares about fairness. Young people have always cared a lot about fairness, with the obvious exception of the Boomers due to their super-special generational status that rendered them society’s wise elders from birth. And there is absolutely nothing fair about the claim that an individual’s opinions, however unpopular, somehow magically eliminate all of the laws and rights and principles and ideals that have been relentlessly trumpeted since the dawn of the Enlightenment.

Those who don’t play by their own publicly declared rules will eventually discover, to their dismay, that their enemies have followed suit. And they will also learn that no one under the age of 50 gives a damn about this totally unexpected state of affairs.

The lesson, as always, is this: shameless hypocrisy is terrible rhetoric.

UPDATE: Yeah, blasting your users and banning their videos is totally going to convince Gen Z that you’re the good guys. Totally.

TikTok has blasted users promoting a vile letter written by Osama Bin Laden in regards to the 9/11 atrocities and promised to remove any content referring to it. ‘Content promoting this letter clearly violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism,’ TikTokPolicy wrote in a post to X, formerly Twitter. ‘We are proactively and aggressively removing this content and investigating how it got onto our platform.’

DISCUSS ON SG


Intergenerational dynamics

I’ve been having a little email debate with John Xenakis, who I suspect has somewhat misapplied his own Generational Dynamics theory to the financial crisis as a result of Boomer idealism failing to grasp the full extent of Gen-X cynicism. His interpretation is as follows:

“The evidence is overwhelming that Gen-Xers were the perpetrators of the crimes related to the financial crisis simply because it was only the Gen-X financial engineers who had the education and skills to create fraudulent residential mortgage backed collaterized debt obligations (RMB CDOs). And the evidence is overwhelming that they created and sold these fraudulent synthetic securities knowing full well that they were fraudulent. And the evidence is overwhelming that their Boomer bosses knew what was going on, but let it go on because they were making too much money. I’ve written about this evidence dozens of times.”

Now, in support of this interpretation, here is the question that he has asked of his Gen-X interlocutors:

1. “Jon Corzine should go to jail, and any Gen-Xers reporting to Corzine who committed fraud or who participated in co-mingling investor funds illegally should also go to jail. Do you agree with that or not?”

To which I will add three more questions.

2. To what generational cohort do you belong: Greatest, Silent, Boomer, Gen-X, Millennial?

3. Do you believe there is any chance, however remote, of an investigation that will dig into the organizations, find all the perpetrators, and send them all to jail, including Corzine?

4. It is the members of the _______ generation that are primarily responsible for the perpetration of the crimes related to the financial crisis.

Answers in the comments, please. I’ll tabulate and send the results to John later. I’ll have some more on the exchange between the two of us in a future post, which I suspect a few of you here may find interesting. I do find his theories to be remarkable, inasmuch as it is almost creepy to listen to the original Down to the Ground and see how some of his themes are readily apparent in lyrics written 15 years before I first encountered his theories.