here’s my hot take about my generation and people younger than me (I’m 22 years old)
The reason current teenagers and people in their really early 20s are conservative on accident and have such shitty takes on the internet is because our generation was much more sheltered than previous generations and because we were raised to be ok with orwellian servailence and that is 100% the fault of our parents, Reagan Era kidnapping panics, and the rise of technology all coming together to prevent us from doing the sketchy shit that sends parents into panic mode but which is also completely fundemental to childhood development. If your parents had even a crumb of money to their name and even a shred of free time they started tracking your phone as soon as it was possible to. I did not experience this because my parents are actively trying to live like it’s the 1990s and still have not gotten cell phones of their own, and did not let me have one until I was 18 years old and it was no longer their choice, but literally over half of my friends in middle and high school had their phones tracked by their parents at some point or other, and we would occasionally find this out, not because their parents told them, but when we were trying to do the aforementioned sketchy shit and their parent’s car would pull up. And I would, like a reasonable person after finding this out, encourage my friends to just leave their phones at home, and their response would be “What if I get kidnapped” or “My parents are just trying to keep me safe”
This in my estimation has lead to a combination of kids being terminally online because they do have internet access and are better at deleting search history than their parents think they are, but don’t have the freedom to go out and do shit without their parents’ knowledge or consent, so they have the most privacy from the people who control their lives while they’re on the internet, and kids not having the real world experiences they should have, not knowing how to connect with other people irl, not feeling comfortable leaving the house because of the horror story lies their parents told them to make them ok with the surveillance they were inflicting on their kids. Kids these days are growing up in the fucking panopticon when they should be out in the woods playing with knives or stealing cigarettes from their older sibling and going out to an empty parking lot to smoke them or whatever and that shit is sticking with them into adulthood. Things that were “tee hee we could get in trouble isn’t this so fun and daring” in the 1990s and 2000s have become in the 2010s and 2020s things that are “If I do that without texting my parents some sort of lie to excuse where my location is my parent’s car will pull up and I will get grounded for the next two weeks.”
Like even when I was 19 I had a 16 year old friend who would volunteer their time at a food shelf and that’s how we knew each other. We would talk about dungeons and dragons together, and the game store was 4 blocks from the food shelf. One day we left the food shelf earlier than they had told their parents they would and they got punished for that. We were literally just going to look at dungeons and dragons miniatures and dice, which was self evident if you could see where we started and how far we walked and where too. I have to assume that this isn’t uncommon. It’s wrong, but it’s not uncommon.
Ok it has become apparent to me that people do not understand what I mean by conservative on accident.
Nobody my age is voting republican. Let’s be clear on that. With the exception of a small minority of gamer gaters and people who were raised in actual cults most people my age are either commies or good liberals who votes straight blue down the ticket. This is because of the greta thunberg effect. We’re all afraid of dying of thirst because there’s no water anymore at the age of 35. Wealthy white children are no longer safe with the republican party which has become less of a political party and more of a death cult, and white children are less wealthy than they used to be (I specify white because POC by in large never voted for the party of the southern strategy for obvious reasons). We as a generation are so insanely blue that they’re trying to raise the voting age to 25 about it.
This liberalism and party affiliation doesn’t preclude them from being conservative on accident. What I mean by that is… Well
No kink at pride is a great example. The assumption that pride should exist at all makes them think that they’re immune to conservative logic but they’re still trying to enforce a dominant ideology onto a minority group. That person who made the tweet about how you shouldn’t have sex in houses where there are children in the other room and if you can’t avoid it you’re a sex addict. That’s a great example of like straight up puritanism coming out of the mouth of someone who proports themselves to be a leftist
If you ever see a discourse that feels like an obvious psyop as an adult and you can’t understand why these supposed leftist youths are falling for it it’s because that kid has never had sex in the woods and had to try to buy plan b under their parent’s nose. My generation is dumb about sex. We’re dumb about drugs. We’re dumb about theft. We moralize literally everything. We’re so dumb about stranger danger that we never learned how to community organize so while the vast vast majority of us are crushed by existential dread about debt and climate change but we never do anything about it because we just don’t know how to organize because we’re raised to see everyone else as a threat and we never went to or organized parties as teens because our parents would always know and stop us.
They managed to invent a generation that hates capitalism but fully buys into individualism and who is supportive of queer people and way less monogamous than previous generations but who still buys into the base assumptions of the nuclear family and thinks sex is evil. The levels of politics going on here are way weirder and stupider and more complicated than “young people vote republican and watch Fox news”
Knowing how to fix things is a sort of curse. When I’m elbow deep in the guts of some horrible machine, sometimes I fantasize about being a normal person. A normal person who bought their car from the dealership, who takes it back to the dealership to fix, and who throws it away when it becomes “too old” to cost-effectively maintain. Such a person would never know the joy that I have felt, trying to knock the fragments of what was once a rusty suspension bolt free so that I can get to work in four hours.
This in itself is not so bad. The problem arises when you buy more broken cars, to establish a sort of stochastic reliability-by-chance. If you have two cars, it is much less likely that both cars will be broken at the same time. And if you have three cars, your odds are even better. This errant, delusional math cascades until you have seven cars, they are all broken, and you only have enough time to finish fixing one before it breaks again.
And when you repair things, more broken things will come into your life, even if you didn’t necessarily want them there. A rusty old bicycle on the side of the road? That’s a shame, there’s hardly anything wrong with it. If I tidied that up, maybe someone could use it. I’ll just put it in the shed with the other rusty bicycles, and bang them all out one perfect summer evening, when my cars are working again.
Ideally, the end result is that you accomplish each and every project on your to-do list and then jump into the grave, before any more can arise. Even this has its problems, though: unless you are a professional gravedigger, you’re not likely to have any six-foot-deep holes lying around the property. You’ll need to buy a shovel, and read some books about how to do it right, and…
The Soviets kicked our ass in the space race its so dope “Oh you went to the Moon, yeah thats cool I guess, we got pictures of fucking Venus, you ever been to Venus? No the fuck you did not.”
You know why you probably never saw these pictures during your space units in high school? It’s because our educations system would be forced to admit the commies did some cool fucking shit.
(don’t go off about Venus…be NORMAL about VENUS!!)
Did y'all know that these are the ONLY photos we have of the surface of Venus because it’s atmosphere is so pressurized that every probe that Russia has managed to get there is DESTROYED??? Did-did you know that on Venus it RAINS SULFURIC ACID AND NOT WATER?? Ok but do you know it is so hot that the atmosphere MELTS LEAD?? Or–or that there are volcanoes that are constantly erupting BRIMSTONE??? Because its surface is basically a hellscape??
Ya know…Venus?? The Morning Star?? Lucifer??
Anyway, the fact that scientists in the fucking 60s managed to get a probe ONTO Venus is wild enough, but then they DID IT AGAIN IN THE 70S AND GOT A FUCKING PIC OF THE SURFACE OF DEATH AND DOOM!!
It’s just like….like really cool. Is all. Venus is pretty cool.
my mom doesnt like the word Piss bc its crass but the fact of the matter is that when our cat shoots a perfectly horizontal beam of urine hard as fuck straight over the top of the litter box she does not Pee. she Pisses
Literally nobody is running around demanding that feminine cis dudes transition into women. Literally no one. Nobody is pressuring cis men to live as trans women, but the reverse sure as fuck is true.
Imagine thinking that the second a trans woman throws on a skirt, everybody and their dog trips over themselves to tells her how much of a female girl woman lady she is. Imagine thinking that trans women are so accepted in society that in the rush to correctly gender us that they’re affirming the womanhood of anyone who could potentially be a transfem.
The majority of people can’t wait for the chance to call transfems men, so I highly fucking doubt literal actual cis men are struggling to be labelled as male lol
IMO whats happening here is simple. people see trans women make egg jokes (which are essentially someone saying “haha i used to do that and so did my friends”). however, a trans woman is, in terms of social capital, the worst gender you can have. so to compare someone to a trans woman is the most gendered insult you can throw out. Now, because we want to be ostensibly accepting of trans people, we need another framwork to say its not ok to do this: misgendering. And so the egg joke gets interpreted as actual pressure to transition, complete with wording that sounds like if you asked ChatGPT to write SFW sissification. Which is ridiculous, but makes sense if you want to explain why a trans woman going “hahaha i used to do that when i was repressing” makes you deeply uncomfortable.
