Boomers: The Evil Generation!

[hobbsyoyo]

I've been thinking on this and I believe I have some ageist biases, both conscious and unconscious. I have internalized a lot of economic and social anxieties that have lead to quite nasty thoughts and generalizations on my part. These are things I recognize as problematic and counterproductive and I need to reckon with them. But more to the topic, I've had some other thoughts -

@Birdjaguar made the point that a lot of the social progress of our immediate past was kicked off by the boomers. When he said it, I thought well, yeah I know that already, but it really didn't grok. On reflection, it groks. We would not have strong civil rights if the boomers hadn't pushed for them and sustained them against attack. A lot of progress was made in short order that our society has benefited from and boomers are largely to thank for it. I would point out though that I think claiming the gay rights movement as a boomer-led phenomenon is not really true. State-sanctioned discrimination continued right into the 2000's and the biggest group of homophobes are still older folk. On race, the boomers did kick off major social justice progress but older folk still trend more racist in my opinion and experience.

I also take the point that a lot of the economic anxieties I have are caused by rich *people* and not really boomers as a whole. Class really does divide us more than anything else and because the boomers are the oldest, they have the most wealth as a natural outcome of that. It doesn't follow that the entire generation are responsible for the decline of the middle class - that fault lies with the wealthy who have bought control of the government.

Similarly, anti-climate change policies are being bankrolled by the wealthy donors and corporate interests and can't be blamed on boomers entirely. Recycling movements did pick up steam with them and they are responsible for the genesis of a lot of the individual environmental movements.

Having said all of that, it is still true that by and large the boomers have voted for politicians over the last 20 years that have taken extremely regressive stances on these issues. There is also in my opinion a pretty wide lack of empathy toward younger generations from the boomers. This may be my bias speaking but there seems to be more than a bit of denial that the problems we're facing are in fact problems and that economic circumstances for younger generations have changed in many ways for the worst.

My frustration caused by my own personal experience with that lack of empathy here and in real life have fed back into my negative biases and created a lot of hostility on the subject that I hope to leave behind me going forward.

I'll stay off your lawn if you stop griping about my goddamn avocado toast.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I'll stay off your lawn if you stop griping about my goddamn avocado toast.

Bring enough avocado toast and you can pitch a freakin' tent on the lawn.

 

[Synobun]

Avocados are gross, mushy dirt. I'll stay off anyone's lawn if they have avocados there.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I hate them too actually.

 

[Hrothbern]

Since 1990 to now

yeah.. a lot of Dutch links, I am lazy.. but numbers are international

* infant + child mortality decreased with 50%
http://www.worldsbestnews.nl/zo-eenvoudig-kan-het-redden-van-een-kinderleven-zijn/
* 2.8 Billion people got access to sanitation
https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream...d=63D703582236005EF9C75BBB21375766?sequence=1
* 2.6 Billion people got access to clean drinking water
http://www.worldsbestnews.nl/tien-redenen-om-wereldgezondheidsdag-te-vieren/
* the first ocean clean-up arm to catch plastic (600 m long) is now operational.
https://www.theoceancleanup.com/
* A feeling of progress and optimism about the future counts ! people in poor countries far more optimistic about poverty than in developed countries, especially young people
http://www.worldsbestnews.nl/waarom...ijde-vooruitgang-eerder-leidt-tot-pessimisme/



And it is not only aid from us:
You have the local knowledge as well... (you arrogant westerners !)
* Niger invented 30 years ago how to counter structurally the desertification of the Sahel zone, and re-make arable soil again for crops... and it works: the tool is the Gao tree (winthertorns). in 30 years 200 million trees were planted.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/16/regreening-niger-how-magical-gaos-transformed-land
a real magic forest

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Since 1990 to now

yeah.. a lot of Dutch links, I am lazy.. but numbers are international

* infant + child mortality decreased with 50%
http://www.worldsbestnews.nl/zo-eenvoudig-kan-het-redden-van-een-kinderleven-zijn/
* 2.8 Billion people got access to sanitation
https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream...d=63D703582236005EF9C75BBB21375766?sequence=1
* 2.6 Billion people got access to clean drinking water
http://www.worldsbestnews.nl/tien-redenen-om-wereldgezondheidsdag-te-vieren/
* the first ocean clean-up arm to catch plastic (600 m long) is now operational.
https://www.theoceancleanup.com/
* A feeling of progress and optimism about the future counts ! people in poor countries far more optimistic about poverty than in developed countries, especially young people
http://www.worldsbestnews.nl/waarom...ijde-vooruitgang-eerder-leidt-tot-pessimisme/



And it is not only aid from us:
You have the local knowledge as well... (you arrogant westerners !)
* Niger invented 30 years ago how to counter structurally the desertification of the Sahel zone, and re-make arable soil again for crops... and it works: the tool is the Gao tree (winthertorns). in 30 years 200 million trees were planted.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/16/regreening-niger-how-magical-gaos-transformed-land
a real magic forest

@inthesomeday has already pointed out that "silly numbers" will not carry the day with those on his side of the argument, and the rest of us were pretty well convinced by the previous round of "silly numbers," so your laziness is justified.

 

[Synobun]

That bit about Niger is really interesting. I've always been fascinated with treeline projects, artificial desert irrigation, and greenifying previously inhospitable terrain.

Looking at a picture board from a few years ago, it seems I had a particular interest in the gao tree at the time. Nice to see that was well-placed.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

That bit about Niger is really interesting. I've always been fascinated with treeline projects, artificial desert irrigation, and greenifying previously inhospitable terrain.

Looking at a picture board from a few years ago, it seems I had a particular interest in the gao tree at the time. Nice to see that was well-placed.

Just so you know, "greenifying previously inhospitable terrain," where I come from, is called "wanton destruction of the desert ecosystem" and many people here think it should be a capital crime.

 

[Hrothbern]

@inthesomeday has already pointed out that "silly numbers" will not carry the day with those on his side of the argument, and the rest of us were pretty well convinced by the previous round of "silly numbers," so your laziness is justified.

Taking care and managing on relevant numbers ... is like planting trees
and trees win always unless you chop them down

Just so you know, "greenifying previously inhospitable terrain," where I come from, is called "wanton destruction of the desert ecosystem" and many people here think it should be a capital crime.

arrogant westerner !

 

[Synobun]

Just so you know, "greenifying previously inhospitable terrain," where I come from, is called "wanton destruction of the desert ecosystem" and many people here think it should be a capital crime.

Sucks to be those people. Deserts are important and should be preserved, but some semblance of thrivability is key for human populations. Safe and consistent access to water and crop growth is tough to shake a fist at. Doesn't mean deserts should be terraformed into lush forests, though.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Taking care and managing on relevant numbers ... is like planting trees
and trees win always unless you chop them down

Funny juxtaposition here. Back at either 'greenifying the inhospitable' or 'wanton destruction,' I was raised in this desert so the whole "trees always win" thing is totally lost on me. When I was a youngster and my sister was in college I went to stay with her one summer. I was absolutely fascinated that where she was living they had parks where the city basically just took a chunk of land and designated it as a park; put up a couple signs, maybe scattered some picnic tables around. My life, to that point, had informed me that parks had to be built, literally from below the ground up. Without a sprinkler system and years of steady maintenance so that alien trees could be forced to grow big enough to provide shade who the heck would ever think of going to a park? And one week at the wrong time of year without maintenance and the most well established park in town is gone, just another vacant lot.

 

[Hrothbern]

Funny juxtaposition here. Back at either 'greenifying the inhospitable' or 'wanton destruction,' I was raised in this desert so the whole "trees always win" thing is totally lost on me. When I was a youngster and my sister was in college I went to stay with her one summer. I was absolutely fascinated that where she was living they had parks where the city basically just took a chunk of land and designated it as a park; put up a couple signs, maybe scattered some picnic tables around. My life, to that point, had informed me that parks had to be built, literally from below the ground up. Without a sprinkler system and years of steady maintenance so that alien trees could be forced to grow big enough to provide shade who the heck would ever think of going to a park? And one week at the wrong time of year without maintenance and the most well established park in town is gone, just another vacant lot.

yeah, if I am in dry areas, I really miss the color green, whether from green grass, bushes, trees.

Here it was originally 50% water, peat, bogs, swamps, reed, and small trees like birch, alder tree, willows etc in the wetlands, and 50% sandy soil with dense forests.
=> no-tree areas including meadows are always the effect of humans.
In guess only a few percent of our total surface is not human made... we are one big parc !

Our in the sunset so beautiful purple heather areas, so nature looking, are all unnatural, because they grow full of trees within a few decades, unless we have sheep that eat the young tree sprouts (farmers used sheep eating heather and sprouts to get their small plots fertilised from their dung when during the night in the stable)
Our green meadows with all the cows are all human made, by chopping all the trees and after that cows eating tree sprouts.
Most of our lakes were low peat areas, and needing the turf sods for housing and heating, we changed the peat areas in lakes. And most of those lakes were later made into polders !

We have a very small desert !
The local forest chopped in early medieval, the heather sods used to build houses and enrich the soil of the plots in early medieval, followed by a scorch the earth war against the "evil" Spaniards, and we suddenly had a sand desert of perhaps 5*5 km !
And because of the wind, we have lots of that, the drifting sand swallowed some forest and villages, around it.
The trees started to grow back to their lost territory, but this went remarkable slowly, because the topsoil was gone. And since last century it is a nature reseve.
.

 

[AmazonQueen]

For women the modern age has been a blessing. I coped with having 2 children but I wouldn't fancy having another half dozen or so. My sister would have died giving birth to her first child without blood transfusion.
That saying about a parent shouldn't have to bury their own child would've made no sense until relatively recently. Edward I who I presume would be considered a privileged person had 17 children from 2 wives, only 8 of the children made it to adulthood.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

yeah, if I am in dry areas, I really miss the color green, whether from green grass, bushes, trees.

Here it was originally 50% water, peat, bogs, swamps, reed, and small trees like birch, alder tree, willows etc in the wetlands, and 50% sandy soil with dense forests.
=> no-tree areas including meadows are always the effect of humans.
In guess only a few percent of our total surface is not human made... we are one big parc !

Our in the sunset so beautiful purple heather areas, so nature looking, are all unnatural, because they grow full of trees within a few decades, unless we have sheep that eat the young tree sprouts (farmers used sheep eating heather and sprouts to get their small plots fertilised from their dung when during the night in the stable)
Our green meadows with all the cows are all human made, by chopping all the trees and after that cows eating tree sprouts.
Most of our lakes were low peat areas, and needing the turf sods for housing and heating, we changed the peat areas in lakes. And most of those lakes were later made into polders !

We have a very small desert !
The local forest chopped in early medieval, the heather sods used to build houses and enrich the soil of the plots in early medieval, followed by a scorch the earth war against the "evil" Spaniards, and we suddenly had a sand desert of perhaps 5*5 km !
And because of the wind, we have lots of that, the drifting sand swallowed some forest and villages, around it.
The trees started to grow back to their lost territory, but this went remarkable slowly, because the topsoil was gone. And since last century it is a nature reseve.
.

You don't have room for any deserts. Just on a curiosity I drew a triangle on the map marking out "my" desert, the relatively minor corner of the Mojave Desert known as the Antelope Valley. It's an isosceles triangle about 150 miles on the legs with a hundred mile base. Then I drew a similar sized triangle on a map of the Netherlands. It barely fit. I think to get a genuine desert ecosystem requires too big of an arid region for people to actually make one. Global climate change might do it, but I think it might be just as likely to create a vast hotbox of humid jungles.

 

[Birdjaguar]

“The world is better off now than in the past.”

I disagree with this because I disagree with the way you frame each key phrase included. Let us begin with “the world”.

You have repeatedly refused to consider the world as it exists beyond the very, very narrow life experience of a few humans. First of all, the world ought to mean exactly what it says, which is “the world”. Meaning the planet earth, or at least conditions for life on the planet earth. We can call this definition 1. Beyond that, if you insist on saying “the world” and meaning “life for humans”— which is I believe quite dishonest and manipulative— then it ought to mean for all humans. We can call this definition 2.

life on earth has existed for 3.5 to 4 billion years without humans. There is nothing that humans can do it it that hasn't been done ten times worse in the past. And once life appeared, nothing has been able to kill it off. It has been decimated for sure, but it rebounds. So yes, when I say the world I am referring to life for humans. Nothing else is meaningful when talking about changes over time that improve living conditions for people. I think we can ignore your Definition 1. And you want to insist that all humans be a standard. Your definition 2. Stop being silly. People live individually and each life is different. Automobiles are a marker for progress, but if a person crashes and dies, it was not good for them, so what? That does not negate the value of automobiles. Misuse of positive change by some people does not negate the value of that change to the whole group. Your use of the word ought is just your opinion and it looks like a hedge to try and bolster a weak argument. A more meaningful approach is to look at averages or typical, or use another word that allows comparisons. That is what I am doing. I am comparing conditions before some chosen point in time to conditions after that point in time such that conclusions can be drawn and a discussion held.

The next thing is “better off now”. Your defense of this has been the extension of human lives and the providence of new material conditions to those lives. Considering definition 1, which is the world meaning the world, I hope you can see how these metrics are effectively meaningless to the majority of the consideration. In fact in many ways this is an actual detriment to the world at large. The extension of the human life means the extension of the time period of consumption at rates unlike any other creature, of resources untapped by any other creature.

First, I will just ignore your definition 1 because there is nothing that we can do to end life on earth short of blowing up the entire planet and I don't think we can do that yet. Yes, the extension of human life does extend the use of planetary resources that other creatures cannot and do not consume at any scale close to people. Our capabilities are much greater than any other living things we know about.

The providence of new things to the human occurs at the expense of “the world”— it means the extraction of mineral and other natural resources in ways which physically, chemically, and biologically wreak disaster on the environments from which they originate. No amount of improvement on the methods by which we extract or burn carbon will change the fact that we are burning carbon, for example. Mining iron or copper, or cutting down trees. These things affect the state of the natural world in a physical way that cannot be mitigated, often by virtue of the simple mechanics involved and beyond that in chemical and biological ways we can’t see. Frakking, still a useful example, not only physically removes a large volume of material that leaves a physical cavity underground, but also results in the inevitable poisoning of groundwater nearby and in the destruction of any habitats related even tangentially to those resources— physical and chemical— that are damaged by this extraction. This seems awfully specific but the generality can be applied to all manners of resource extraction. Fundamentally the human lifestyle that “progress” celebrates cannot exist without this extraction.

OK. Clearly, you are against using the earth's finite resources. But The actual earth/world does not care if we use them and use them up. the impact of using them primarily affects the more complex lifeforms.

Beyond that we have consideration 2— life for most people. Let us establish a timeline for agricultural civilization beginning around 8000 BCE. The beginning of history, right? The beginning of progress. That gives us roughly 10000 years of progress. The extension of agricultural civilization across the majority of the human population took thousands of years, almost always enforced by violence by state forces and, later, private forces. @Lexicus explained this in a previous post. For the vast, vast majority of that time— in most agricultural societies, I would argue until at the latest about 800 years ago— the conditions for common people living in agricultural societies were materially worse than they were for people living outside of agricultural societies. While I can’t provide you with statistics, since non-agrarian peoples tend not to keep records, anthropologists and historians are relatively certain that life expectancy, leisure time, physical security, food security, health and well-being, and many other factors were worse for the commoners living in agricultural society than for people outside of agricultural society. The majority of people, during the majority of the existence and imposition of agricultural society, were effectively harmed by its expansion.

Interesting. You choose a very long time frame and set your endpoint at ~1200 AD. Then you argue that all during that long span non agricultural people had better lives than agricultural people. I guess your point is that the "material progress" made on the "urban" side of the fence made life worse than what had already existed on the "rural"/non agricultural side. In addition, you are implying that there was a high price paid enable more humans exist. That price had environmental costs and maybe others. The implication I see is that you think we should never have adopted agriculture. It was our fatal mistake. Could be, but if you actually believe that, you fail at understanding people.

This brings me to the final contention.

“In the past” can be made incredibly arbitrary, which you have beautifully demonstrated. Since 1945? Really? Why then? Why the past 200 years? Why does progress get to begin then? It betrays either a historical ignorance or a willful, stubborn, intellectually dishonest reframing of our arguments on your part. It shows, OVERTLY, that you are less interested in thinking and analyzing critically than you are in justifying the imposition of modernity— however and whenever that shall be defined— upon people who openly resist, who are violently subdued, and who finally suffer for that imposition. By starting the timeline at 1945 you conveniently avoid most of the glaring and easily citeable atrocities on which the modern global-capitalist status quo is established. Even the Holocaust, the Bengal Famine, and the Holodomor, which could perhaps be called the punctuation of industrial genocide. The question is why should we be so convenient? Why not start our analysis of progress even 5 years earlier?

The answer: because 5 years earlier the planet, defined environmentally or anthropocentrically, was inarguably in the face of the absolute worse conditions it had ever seen, indisputably directly resulting from modernity. A lot of people like to think of World War II as the end of history, which tends to be a satirical assertion, but in a way it’s useful and telling for us that you choose to start after this. I’m not trying to claim that all atrocities stopped after World War II by any means— indeed many industrial genocides are happening all around us this very day— but many of the ones that people like to trace as the ones that lead us into “modernity” occurred before, and even ended in, 1945.

You are actually arguing something very different than I am as I stated above. You are arguing that humans should never have moved away from a pastoral lifestyle. [see below] That such a move is the moment of our downfall. I think we could find more such points in the past 10,000 years. However, we did make that move and it is our reality. To pretend that we have a choice to go backward is silly. I choose 1945 for two reasons. First, it was a date recent enough that most people here have some reasonable knowledge of the world since then. Secondly, it began a period of significant and rapid change that can be readily measured. Prior to that change happened, but more slowly and more narrowly. Other potentially useful points might be 1492, the Industrial Revolution, the Renaissance and 1776. The topic, have we improved the human condition over time, is broad enough to encompass lots of things. We could begin in 27 BCE and end at 400 AD and look at just greater Europe. Did the Roman Empire improve life in Europe? What happens if you choose 100 years from 200 BCE to 100 BCE and look at how change made a difference across the world? You probably won't get zip. Life at the start and life at the end was probably pretty much the same. Not so for the 75 years from 1945 to 2020.

Change comes and powerful people will always impose change on those reluctant to participate. mean people will make others suffer. This is a product of people and not the change. Atrocities will stop as soon as you reinvent people. Mandatory gene editing?

Ultimately I don’t think Lexicus or myself are arguing for a return to pre-agricultural conditions for everyone on earth. Characterizing our arguments that way, and then choosing to reframe the battleground for yourself to post-1945, is frankly a massive strawman that feels horribly dishonest to me.

If you are not arguing that, then you better make clear what you are arguing for. I framed my argument in the manner in which I had made my original assertion: people's living conditions are getting better and life is better now than it has been in the past. I think my long post actually showed that.

As it happens I got caught up typing out this response so I won’t be able to break down your list until later, but I think this suffices for now. Lol at myself for saying I didn’t have the energy to respond and then typing all this out afterwards. This is still pretty abridged come to think of it, and I could probably write a dissertation-length essay about all the problems with how you’ve argued this point, but for now I’ll leave it at this: your framing is problematic and intellectually dishonest. Next post I’ll break down more specifically how each of the points you choose to frame are specifically dishonest.

What I think you miss is that change happens and there is no way to stop it. People act on new knowledge and change the world in both good and bad ways. Unethical gene editing is happening now and will only grow. It will grow in parallel with more modest and deliberate ideas. It doesn't matter if anyone in particular approves or disapproves. What history shows us, in spite of our very strong mean streak, is that we are also kind and overall we are making a better world for more people.

I think for many young people the real concern is that we will destroy the suitability of the environment for humanity and they want to blame our curious nature. Time will tell. Get out and march! Get out and vote.

 

[Birdjaguar]

My life, to that point, had informed me that parks had to be built, literally from below the ground up. Without a sprinkler system and years of steady maintenance so that alien trees could be forced to grow big enough to provide shade who the heck would ever think of going to a park? And one week at the wrong time of year without maintenance and the most well established park in town is gone, just another vacant lot.

You are describing the city of Albuquerque once you get out of the flood zone of the Rio Grande.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

The point of these comparisons is not, as a rule, to suggest that they are state of affairs we should strive to return to, but to challenge certain common assumptions about "human nature" which seem to hold to some revised version of Young Earth Creationism, in which the world as a whole may be billions of years old, but that humans specifically were created about six thousand years ago.

In spite of evidence that humans were around for much longer than that.

Sure man. Maybe it is having had all the normal childhood diseases that makes me "stupid." Or maybe it just makes me experienced. Smallpox was a horror. Polio was a horror. Development and distribution of vaccines for major diseases like those was a massive boon for mankind and the people and companies that accomplished it deserve every nickle they made. Development of vaccines for petty nonsense allows parents to avoid the "my kid is home from school sick with the _____ so I have to take a day off" problems that my parents had to put up with...the fact that the developers of such vaccines have subsequently blown up the petty diseases into world shaking fear material makes no difference.

They're not petty if you happen to be someone at risk for catching them (ie. cannot be immunized due to age or other medical conditions that preclude certain vaccinations).

Think of it like a vet refusing to give distemper/rabies shots before a kitten is at least 8 weeks old. Human doctors will not give vaccines to babies until they're a minimum number of weeks/months old (don't recall what the article said). Until that time both the kittens and human babies are at risk for catching those diseases. This is why some new parents end up with dead babies because some thoughtless anti-vaxxer spread germs around, the infant caught whatever the disease was, wasn't strong enough to fight it, and died.

That's why we were better off when having the mumps, and the other childhood diseases, and developing immunity was part of pretty much everyone's childhood. I'm sorry you somehow missed that one as a child. My own miss was one of the measles, which I didn't get until I was eighteen and in boot camp, but it didn't cause me any problems, fortunately.

I was exposed to both mumps and chicken pox one year in elementary school when my dad and I were living with his girlfriend's family. Both of those diseases went around the school and the youngest daughter was one who caught both of them (not at the same time). She and I were sharing a room, and in spite of this proximity, I never caught either of them.

Fast-forward a decade or so, and I wished I had gotten them over with. I still remember going to my music teacher's home one Saturday for an extra lesson (when I was doing the Western Board of Music exams) and her kid opened the door. I was already in the house before she said, "He's home with chicken pox. You've had it, haven't you?"

Well, no. It was really damned thoughtless of her to set up a lesson in her home while her kid could spread his illness around to other people without warning. I was years older at that point than when I'd had to cope with mumps, and chicken pox is nothing I want to have to deal with.

Frakking, still a useful example, not only physically removes a large volume of material that leaves a physical cavity underground, but also results in the inevitable poisoning of groundwater nearby and in the destruction of any habitats related even tangentially to those resources— physical and chemical— that are damaged by this extraction. This seems awfully specific but the generality can be applied to all manners of resource extraction. Fundamentally the human lifestyle that “progress” celebrates cannot exist without this extraction.

Frakking has turned formerly-useful and productive farmland and ranch land into land useless for agriculture here on the Prairies.

Frakking caused an earthquake here a few weeks ago. Earthquakes aren't supposed to happen in this region of Canada, but we got a couple. Thanks, oil companies.

I've been thinking on this and I believe I have some ageist biases, both conscious and unconscious. I have internalized a lot of economic and social anxieties that have lead to quite nasty thoughts and generalizations on my part. These are things I recognize as problematic and counterproductive and I need to reckon with them. But more to the topic, I've had some other thoughts -

@Birdjaguar made the point that a lot of the social progress of our immediate past was kicked off by the boomers. When he said it, I thought well, yeah I know that already, but it really didn't grok. On reflection, it groks. We would not have strong civil rights if the boomers hadn't pushed for them and sustained them against attack. A lot of progress was made in short order that our society has benefited from and boomers are largely to thank for it. I would point out though that I think claiming the gay rights movement as a boomer-led phenomenon is not really true. State-sanctioned discrimination continued right into the 2000's and the biggest group of homophobes are still older folk. On race, the boomers did kick off major social justice progress but older folk still trend more racist in my opinion and experience.

I also take the point that a lot of the economic anxieties I have are caused by rich *people* and not really boomers as a whole. Class really does divide us more than anything else and because the boomers are the oldest, they have the most wealth as a natural outcome of that. It doesn't follow that the entire generation are responsible for the decline of the middle class - that fault lies with the wealthy who have bought control of the government.

Similarly, anti-climate change policies are being bankrolled by the wealthy donors and corporate interests and can't be blamed on boomers entirely. Recycling movements did pick up steam with them and they are responsible for the genesis of a lot of the individual environmental movements.

Having said all of that, it is still true that by and large the boomers have voted for politicians over the last 20 years that have taken extremely regressive stances on these issues. There is also in my opinion a pretty wide lack of empathy toward younger generations from the boomers. This may be my bias speaking but there seems to be more than a bit of denial that the problems we're facing are in fact problems and that economic circumstances for younger generations have changed in many ways for the worst.

My frustration caused by my own personal experience with that lack of empathy here and in real life have fed back into my negative biases and created a lot of hostility on the subject that I hope to leave behind me going forward.

I'll stay off your lawn if you stop griping about my goddamn avocado toast.

I no longer own a lawn and don't care what you put on your toast. All I ask is that you don't tar an entire generation for the misdeeds of some.

I'll confess to some impatience with "the younger generation" (personally defined as anyone under 30-35 or thereabouts, since I'm old enough to be their mother) because of over-reliance on electronics for so much, including basics like writing and calculating simple things. I just finished doing my income tax. I used the pen and paper method, and now I need to find an envelope and stamp. I will not do this online or over the phone, as I don't trust those to be secure.

There are generational arguments over at TrekBBS over the attitudes of people who grew up with the internet and people who didn't. There's even a gap between people who grew up with video recording devices and those who didn't. Yesterday I had to explain this to people because they were complaining about a member who wrote extremely detailed essays about Star Trek over 40 years ago and now he's catching flak from younger forum members because to them all you have to do if you want a detail is look it up on Wikipedia or Memory Alpha or chakoteya.net. You certainly don't bother writing essays about them. They can't imagine a time when people didn't have all these electronic resources to rely on.

Now as to your contention that boomers are largely homophobic, anti-recycling, and always vote for regressive/right-wing politicians... it's true in some specific geographic areas. But is it true for that age group as a whole? I doubt that, and I dislike being painted as someone who votes for regressive people who want regressive policies.

Sucks to be those people. Deserts are important and should be preserved, but some semblance of thrivability is key for human populations. Safe and consistent access to water and crop growth is tough to shake a fist at. Doesn't mean deserts should be terraformed into lush forests, though.

Yet it happened in God Emperor of Dune. In the next two novels (Heretics and Chapterhouse) the Bene Gesserit reversed it and remade two planets into deserts.

One thing I've always thought was neat is how B.C. has basically every kind of ecosystem on the planet, all in the same province.

Funny juxtaposition here. Back at either 'greenifying the inhospitable' or 'wanton destruction,' I was raised in this desert so the whole "trees always win" thing is totally lost on me. When I was a youngster and my sister was in college I went to stay with her one summer. I was absolutely fascinated that where she was living they had parks where the city basically just took a chunk of land and designated it as a park; put up a couple signs, maybe scattered some picnic tables around. My life, to that point, had informed me that parks had to be built, literally from below the ground up. Without a sprinkler system and years of steady maintenance so that alien trees could be forced to grow big enough to provide shade who the heck would ever think of going to a park? And one week at the wrong time of year without maintenance and the most well established park in town is gone, just another vacant lot.

You might find Red Deer odd, then. Much of the city was designed (especially in the '80s) as an urban wildlife corridor, with trails and green spaces intended to help migrating animals such as deer, moose, bears, etc. get through the city with as little fuss as possible. We have a lot of woods and green space here, most of which are considered part of the overall Waskasoo Parks system.

Other potentially useful points might be 1492, the Industrial Revolution, the Renaissance and 1776.

Right, because Europeans never went to North America 500 years before Columbus.

And why 1776? It was special for your country, but just another year for the rest of the world.

We could begin in 27 BCE and end at 400 AD and look at just greater Europe. Did the Roman Empire improve life in Europe?

Yes, Augustus introduced a number of interesting reforms after he gained power, but I don't recall that they happened as early as 27 BCE. He had a civil war to get through first. And the fall of Rome happened in 476 CE (to keep the dating methods consistent).

 

[inthesomeday]

life on earth has existed for 3.5 to 4 billion years without humans. There is nothing that humans can do it it that hasn't been done ten times worse in the past. And once life appeared, nothing has been able to kill it off. It has been decimated for sure, but it rebounds. So yes, when I say the world I am referring to life for humans. Nothing else is meaningful when talking about changes over time that improve living conditions for people. I think we can ignore your Definition 1.

Obviously nothing beyond human life is meaningful when you stubbornly refuse to consider something beyond human life. But if you choose to ignore the vast majority of living creatures and focus only on one species, so be it. But you don't even wish to focus on the one species, do you? Only specific individuals...

And you want to insist that all humans be a standard. Your definition 2. Stop being silly. People live individually and each life is different. Automobiles are a marker for progress, but if a person crashes and dies, it was not good for them, so what? That does not negate the value of automobiles.

This example is a drastic misrepresentation of what I'm arguing. It displays again that you may well simply misunderstand what we're referring to in a very basic way. The automobile as a marker for progress would not be analyzed like this: for how many people has owning an automobile improved their lives? For how many people has owning an automobile damaged their lives?

Instead, we should ask questions like this:
1. What is the material value of the automobile to its owner? How is it used, and practically how much does that improve their life?
2. How many people have had access to automobiles across history? Using this and question one, what is the total net value of the automobile to humanity?
3. What were the historical, environmental, and material implications of the advent and expansion of the automobile?
4. To what degree has creating, distributing, and utilizing automobiles impacted society? How?
5. Using questions 1-4, what has been the real impact of the advent of the automobile on the world?

All of this is only even in the interest of analyzing whether the advent of the automobile was a good or a bad thing. Beyond that, a critique of the grand narrative of progress would ask questions like this:
1. What conditions allowed or led to the advent of the automobile?
2. Do these conditions imply that the advent of the automobile is in some way inevitable to human society?
3. How was the automobile and the social results of the automobile popularized or expanded across human societies?

In general I think you just simply don't understand the critique that is being offered. It is in some ways a direct critique of the actual reality of those developments included in the narrative of progress-- agriculture, industrialism, capitalism, urbanization, the state-- but the primary critique is against the way that the narrative is developed and used. This whole argument began because somebody claimed that the state was an inevitable development of human society. This is patently false but when this narrative was questioned the evidence provided essentially amounted to "Well we all live in states right now, don't we?"

Yes, we all live in states, but that is completely unrelated to the argument that was brought up. It didn't even originally involve any volume of moral evaluation of the state, but rather a skeptic rejection of the baseless assertion that the state is inevitable. Rather than analyzing in ANY way the development of the state, or the conditions involved, the argument became one of the value of living in states-- a question of their function. This is called teleology, analysis of developments that ignores their conditions but retroactively makes assumptions based on the current function of those developments. It is generally considered poor reason. Whenever history, or the material conditions of development, or the processes by which those developments occurred, were mentioned at all, they were moralized by the invocation of the functions of the modern state.

"I don't like the state, and I believe we should live in a society without one."
"You're out of luck, because the state is an inevitable development of human society."
"I disagree. There were many specific conditions that states developed as a result of, and a lot of history that led to the development of modern statehood."
"Well, modern statehood is actually a good thing."
"What makes it so good?"
"Well it must be pretty great since everybody lives in one."

These points are almost completely unrelated. The entire question and critique of "progress" does no more than point this out. If you wanted to simply argue that the state is a good thing then you could have directly done that, but instead you have framed the existence of the state as something inevitable to human society that could never go away.

I will give you credit for at least openly transitioning your argument from one of advocacy of the narrative of progress to just blatant advocacy for the modern status quo. But the problem is that there are essentially two completely different points at hand, both of which are then used circularly to prove one another.

(1) The history of human society can be seen as a linear series of inevitable developments.
(2) The history of human society has generally occurred in a way that benefits the majority of individuals living in it.

Both are contentious; both also implicitly support the status quo, despite the fact that neither directly defends it.

First, I will just ignore your definition 1 because there is nothing that we can do to end life on earth short of blowing up the entire planet and I don't think we can do that yet. Yes, the extension of human life does extend the use of planetary resources that other creatures cannot and do not consume at any scale close to people. Our capabilities are much greater than any other living things we know about.
OK. Clearly, you are against using the earth's finite resources. But The actual earth/world does not care if we use them and use them up. the impact of using them primarily affects the more complex lifeforms.
Interesting. You choose a very long time frame and set your endpoint at ~1200 AD. Then you argue that all during that long span non agricultural people had better lives than agricultural people. I guess your point is that the "material progress" made on the "urban" side of the fence made life worse than what had already existed on the "rural"/non agricultural side. In addition, you are implying that there was a high price paid enable more humans exist. That price had environmental costs and maybe others. The implication I see is that you think we should never have adopted agriculture. It was our fatal mistake. Could be, but if you actually believe that, you fail at understanding people.

This is a very good example of both arguments coexisting and feeding one another in a circular manner. What do you mean I "fail at understanding people"? My understanding of this is that it implies that you think I'm morally judging my ancestors for adopting an agricultural lifestyle because, while I can recognize it has many problems, they were simply acting in their best interest. The first argument-- the grand narrative-- manifests in the implication that the expansion of agricultural society was sort of inevitable, or that everybody participated in it. If I'm failing to understand people, I must be failing to understand why everybody chooses to do something. I must be missing some type of human nature-- something inevitable to the development of human society. This is wrong. Partially urbanized, agricultural society only became the primary means of organizing humans through the continuous application of violence to force people into it. The second argument manifests by the moralization of agricultural life. It must be good, right? Evidently, since so many people live in it. But this comes from the assumption that my disagreement with the assertion that agrarianism spread peacefully, naturally, or positively. I never argued that my ancestors shouldn't have adopted an agrarian lifestyle. Only that they might not have willingly. But now the responsibility has fallen on me to somehow show that, today, the average person would have a better life if 10000 years ago the first farmer had decided to go back to the hills. If I can't prove that, then the status quo as it exists today is a good thing. Madness!

Change comes and powerful people will always impose change on those reluctant to participate. mean people will make others suffer. This is a product of people and not the change. Atrocities will stop as soon as you reinvent people. Mandatory gene editing?

There are a few different, unconnected ideas at play here. The first is that change is inevitable. This I agree with, just because we live in four dimensions. Change to some extent is indeed inevitable but it may well be the only thing in the world that is. Atrocities? No evidence of that. Power? Violence backed by power? These things didn't exist for a very long time. "But their development was inevitable." No it wasn't. "Then why is it so omnipresent today?" And so on. This is the function of the grand narrative.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

You might find Red Deer odd, then. Much of the city was designed (especially in the '80s) as an urban wildlife corridor, with trails and green spaces intended to help migrating animals such as deer, moose, bears, etc. get through the city with as little fuss as possible. We have a lot of woods and green space here, most of which are considered part of the overall Waskasoo Parks system.

We don't have migrating animals, or much of a plan, but the desert cities here have enough undeveloped parcels scattered through them that critters could get through if they had the urge. I was at the Sonic in Palmdale not long ago and there was this big old roadrunner patrolling the parking lot for stray tater tots. I was surprised, because while they can fly they generally don't and the Sonic is in the most heavily developed commercial section of the city...but upon reflection I could piece together a string of undeveloped parcels that would get him to the barren strip between Lancaster and Palmdale, and from there he could run all the way to Vegas if he took a mind...or Albuquerque to visit @Birdjaguar come to that. Have to cross a lot of 'roads to nowhere,' but that's about it.

 

[Hamid.H]

boomers are a very selfish and detached generation. they dont understand the struggles young people are facing and they dont really care because theyve had their government job with full benefits, a great pension, and 4-6 weeks vacation time plus weekends and holidays for decades now. theyve driven the economy into the dirt, exported all of the manufacturing jobs, suppressed wages, and drove the cost of tuition through the roof. theyre done raping america now. they just have one final request and thats for you to pay top dollar for their fully paid off home that hasnt been updated since 1985. the one that they paid only a small fraction of what theyre asking for now. because why keep the home to pass along assets or an inheritance to the next generation, something that they can use to better their lives and generate wealth with when they can blow it all in one big boondoggle like theyve done with everything else?

hh