This is not my personal opinion, I know Gen Z men who voted for Harris. But the voter demographics really speak for themselves, and maybe now people will look at the radicalization of young men as a serious (but solvable) issue.
this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2024
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As a zoomer that's old enough to be working class now. Man, my childhood was fucked. At school, being a right wing troll was the norm, at least for boys. I was too.
The worst part is no-one cared, fucking "they'll grow out of it" and now everyone is suddenly in shock. When I talk about it to my friend today he's even in fucking denial about it, "Oh they didn't actually mean that, it was all jokes".
And our education system doesn't do anything to combat this shit either. Quite the opposite, the dogmatic authoritarian approach schools take coupled with zero-tolerance policies pretty much ensures people shouting this hateful shit get away with it.
After all saying "Hitler did nothing wrong" only gets annoyed looks, gets completely brushed off as "edgy" or something. But then when someone points out that person's shit, suddenly that's an attack???
I graduated from a Christian high school a few years ago, and now they have a Discord server that's basically their own version of 4chan and they post a bunch of edgy racist/queerphobic/etc stuff. Then the person running it went to MIT. It still exists and I'm pretty sure the staff knows about it and doesn't give a shit. Of course the school itself promotes racist and queerphobic political ideologies as well so that's not exactly helpful either.
A lot of this are encouraged under the table. Any plans on it is usually talked rather than texed, so there will be less chance of it that it could surface, and is between the most trustworthy people.
Most edgy teens do grow out of it. I roll my eyes at embarrassment at some of the stuff I wrote in college, and high school me was even stupider.
But one difference in my high school years (in the 90's), edginess wasn't inherently politically coded. Some of it was racist, sexist, or homophobic, but plenty of the targets were also Republican constituencies: rural/small town people, Christians, fat people, old people, prudes, etc. In a conservative suburban area, jokes about abortion, sex, drugs, etc. were often designed to elicit shock and disgust.
I think we've seen a cultural shift in which edginess is seen as right wing in itself, in part because the right, which used to get offended at things like Harry Potter and Howard Stern and Disney movies, has fallen in line with edgy Gen X comedians who somehow didn't grow out of it, and made room for people who smoke weed and mock the Bible.
in the 90s you attacked whatever was around cause you were a piece of shit, now you got the internet so pieces of shit worldwide can band together and hate a specific cause.
We had the internet in the 90s. It just wasn't in every 12-year-old's pocket all day, and the nefarious smoky room types were too old to understand how it worked, let alone carry our mass manipulation campaigns with it as the medium.
The thing with Gen X teenage nihilism was that the only cardinal sin was actually having a strong opinion. There wasn't much room to hate on anything, because actually hating something showed that you cared too much, and that wasn't what we were about.
Gen Z seems to be much more willing to embrace negative emotions and acknowledge that they care enough to hate. Whether that's a better or a worse thing, I'm not sure.
I begged my admin to do something about my boy students sexually harassing my girl students. Instead, my some of my boy students discovered I was trans and outed me.
Because those were jokes.
The problem we have today is not that it was socially acceptable to be a psychopath online in 2014. The problems are, in my opinion:
The right-wing shift is part of a global failure of established governments.
Yes! Thank you.
Just as the next left-wing shift won't be a result of humanity getting smarter somehow, it will be a result of right-wing policies failing. And that shift won't lead to any improvement either.
It's a pendulum.
People are willing to tolerate a failing system longer, when it aligns on surface with their own views. This is similar to people on the right defending Pinochet and death squadrons.
And people on the left 20 years ago would defend a lot of things about USSR or Che Gevara or stuff like this, even not being tankies.
Tribalism leads to degeneracy.
Get that logical crap out of here!!
A lot of millennials were pro war back in 2001+ a bunch of people I went to school with joined the military. People would say "support our troops!" When you criticized the wars. This is nothing new, just brainwashing.
I have seen teachers say that hitler was right, that walls were invented by aliens and that giants existed and were romanian
Wait, what? I didn't see any giants in my high school. Are they invisible giants or something?
Also, where were those giants during the 2nd Dacian war? Romans must have been superheroes or something to take on giants and win.
We were told that there were only bones on romanian territory, not alive ones
Also, why do you think there were multiple Dacian wars?
Not enough Panera bread locations.