This isn't feminism in any meaningful sense of the word.
I'd agree that it would probably not fit into any of probably dozens of strains of academic feminism. However I think it was Louise Perry or somebody of that thought who half-jokingly defined the practical, Elle style of modern feminism which actually fits:
Feminism is whatever women do.
Women can do X and its opposite and if you criticize anything, then the defense of both simultaneously contradictory positions is feminism. As an example, women can be soldiers and our army will be strengthened by it - which is feminism. But at the same time women should be not compelled or even shamed into military service, or even subject to same physical standards and that is also feminism.
I think there is grain of truth in there, feminism in current day-and-age is mostly a tool of how to prevent any semblance of judgement for whatever behavior women engage in.
For me, this is another example of the woke are more correct than the mainstream. Don’t whine about black music! Respond to this criticism by saying that it’s much easier to appeal to PMC fears of chud expression, that liberals said they favored free speech, and that this is a serious art form that deals with all aspects of human life, including the negatives. Have they ever listened closely to country singers and thought about what it might mean for an artist to give voice to the people that they grew up alongside in the trailer park? It’s doubtful.
This misses the point, Walsh was not as much whining about rap music, he was pointing out the double standard of Aldean's critics. And even that one is not self-serving, it is just a reminder that the PMC class does not not care about the rules - they run anarchotyranny of culture. The clerics on Twitter are the ones interpreting the reality, and they are the only ones with arbitrary authority to call for excommunication for any transgression - even the one that is on the face value thousand times milder than what they regularly not only tolerate, but also praise.
For me, this is another example of the woke are more correct than the mainstream.
Yes, this is nothing new. As an example, back in the dinosaur days of 2019 Bill Maher had Denis Prager on his show who talked to him about how there is a push to say "men can menstruate". I think Maher was absoletely clueless about it, he thought that Prager was some nut inventing conspiracy theories or some such. I think Maher now admitted that he underestimated the whole thing back in the day on Rogan's podcast, and he now does interviews with Peterson, which is interesting to see. I would not describe it as woke being more correct as mainstream as opposed to mainstream being absolutely clueless. It is almost a defining feature of mainstream, as soon as you stop being clueless you will pick a side - Maher will be right-wing coded by "platforming" people like Peterson.
The word tansphobic itself is already part of the whole stupid CW game. It is obvious that homophobic or transphobic means something else compared to let's say arachnophobic or claustrophobic.
In general you have to identify this whole ad-hominem weapon used in culture war. Your opponents are either evil (racists, white supremacists etc.) or crazy (you say it because you are hurt) or stupid (you do not have PHD). Or ideally combination of all of these. Saying that you are transphobic achieves at the same time medicalization of your view and it also makes makes it evil. You can often see it applied in various lefty spaces like sneerclub, Contrapoints himself uses it a lot.
I also think that there is something more here. For instance after ideological 60ties and crushing/burning 70s came 80ies with their yuppie culture. These were free market hedonistic know-it-all youth, often in love with Ayn Rand and similar radical thought. Even then this was not the culture that would be predominant in the general population, but this was something in the air.
Similarly I think that wokism today has its function inside corporate governance structures. It provides executives with convenient moral cover for various things they want to do and it offers huge toolset to narcissists and psychopaths inside the organization. Remember, today's wokeness is often viewed as a successful turn where former radicals marched through institutions such as law, education, media but also government administration. There is rich tradition such as that from Dwight Waldo preaching that there is no "value-free" governance and thus we should adopt governance that promotes equity.
Again, I think that the mistake here is to evaluate wokeness in its own idealistic terms, or maybe in terms of alternative structures. I think wokeness should be evaluated in its own practical terms of its inevitable end state, which would look more like Chinese state today. Everything is political, everything is argued for as implementation of one noble government goal or another. But bellow the surface you have vicious struggle of elites for power inside beurocracy where identifying where the wind blows from is crucial for commercial success. For politically well connected CEO, it is easier to squash competitors by making sure they have low ESG score by taping ones social network as opposed to market competition. It does not matter if population wants or does not want ESG, what matters is what elites want and how they compete for power. Similarly in China it does not matter if you provide service that people want, as soon as you are not protected politically, you end up like Jack Ma.
georgioz
5mo ago
In what sense is this a collateral damage? It is not as if the government wants to send an airstrike for military installation and kills an innocent janitor. They are defunding a corrupt organization and money spent are saved. In fact I would say that the DEI and grift is the airstrike in question, it is those corrupt people who in their greed caused people to suffer now.
As an analogy - basically all the companies have some sort of charity pledge to send 1% of the profit from a good you buy to spend on saving poor children in Africa. So if you personally decide no longer to buy that product, are you an evil man who just collaterally damaged kids?
The applause lights come on, people clap, and they clap because they enjoyed the applause light.
I do not remember it exactly, but I think comedian Bill Burr described similar phenomenon as "clap commedy". "Comedian" tells a joke and instead of people laughing, they just clap. Comedy is special in that even if the joke is maximally politically incorrect, the laugh is involuntary and it clearly shows if the joke was actually funny.
Whatever Amazon is doing, they're doing something right. I cannot escape hearing about this fucking show from every possible outlet, social media site, and of course this culture war chessboard.
I agree, this fanbaiting was adopted by big studios at least since Ghostbusters 2016 with all female cast. The overall phenomenon of critics and showruners vs fanbase dates back to Gamergate if not even farther in the past. And while it may not be the best long-term strategy for the corporations, I think it is the best strategy for people inside those organizations: C-level executives, directors, writers and actors. Even critics are now part of the game - with the Zeitgeist being what it is, they cannot afford standing out too much if they like their career. As an example there is an upcoming The Woman King movie about African Amazonians from historical kingdom of Dahomey fighting white colonialists and slave traders. Predictably it sits at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes with 36 reviews so far, which should make it one of the best movies of all times on par if not better than movies like Citizen Kane (99% out of 127 reviews) or The Godfather (97% out of 149 reviews) and of course Black Panther which has 96% out of whooping 529 reviews.
I agree with you, there is a utility in all these controversies: it is free marketing and a very good shield against constructive criticism of the content.
The President laments not only not being able to get anything done to the hysterical claims of harm but it being used to basically marginalize and remove her and other party figures
Oh, she does not understand what is going on. The idea is as follows: there are people at or near the center of a circle who hold power and then there are people "on the margins" of the circle who are oppressed by those in the center. Once all the people on the margin band together, they can collapse the circle - this is often called as centering [oppressed category] in wokespeech. It is literally described in the book Mapping The Margins by Kim Crenshaw.
So sorry Mr/Ms/Miss Kuttner. You were not marginalized for finding yourself out of the new collapsed circle - you were just de-centered. And by your inept defense you just opened the door for future criticism to bury your career 10 feet under. I am sorry for the person, but to be frank I have some level of schadenfreude here. This is exactly the shit that was happening in the past in many countries gripped by the revolution. You cannot be just an ideologue, you have to also be savvy political operator and you have to constantly have your finger on the pulse of where things are going or you are out.
Revolution eats its own and if this new challenger actually invented the whole trap for cynical purposes to gain power, I want to congratulate them on their game. They are the harbinger of the things to come.
But constantly talking about it on the national stage does not help. It is just virtue signaling. What would help is to win some fucking elections.
This is such an incomprehensive take to me. Pro-life movement had one of the biggest victories recently with repeal of Roe v. Wade, even leftists tacitly admitted that
This decision is the culmination of a deliberate effort over decades to upset the balance of our law. It’s a realization of an extreme ideology and a tragic error by the Supreme Court,” President Joe Biden said. But he added: “This is not over.”
As for "winning elections" this to me seems as a strange thing, what do you need to win elections for? Presumably to pursue your preferred policies. If your candidate "wins elections" but then he goes against your deepest held values, does it even make sense to call him your candidate anymore? And it is not such a small number of people - according to Gallup the number of people who say abortions should be illegal under all circumstances ranges from 10%-20% since 1975.
One thing I also noted, is how right and left differs in treating their ideological fringes. Leftist mainstream people have no problem tolerating or celebrating even the most unhinged leftist radicals. Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers can get a cushy job at public University and get praise from Wall Street Journal columnist as a model citizen. Marxist radicals such as Angela Davis can be popular champions of police reform movement no problem. Democrats nurture and take care of their radical fringes, they defend them and propagandize in their favor, and then they use their vigor and energy to replenish their ranks and to push Overton window in favor of their policies. Kamala can have the most insane takes like taxing unrealized capital gains or transitioning children of illegal immigrants for free - and you see the ranks closing and defending her exactly on the grounds of pragmatism: it's only a rhetoric to mobilize more radical voter base, nothing to see here. She is still our joyful momala.
While the right absolutely shits not only on "far fringes" like J6ers, who have nothing on leftist radicals like Kathy Boudin - the mother of Chesa Boudin and professor at Columbia after being released from prison in 2003 - bombing the senate building. That would be absurd, but the right also shits on anybody who is not moderate like pro-life activists. They even shit on people who go against mainstream leftist narrative, it is "moderate" right who will be the first to execute their up-and-coming talent for racism, sexism, being pro-life - exactly like you do now. The rightist moderates completely adopt leftist versions of morality and sins, and push it on fellow rightists, moving the Overton window. It would be absolutely inconceivable, that some right-wing version of Bill Ayers such as some former abortion clinic terrorist would be a chair of charity organization, a university professor at state university and could ever be called as "model citizen" by WSJ or similar media.
So yeah, the right will not win elections with castrated elite, with no semblance of balls or spine, which tone-polices and cancels their own people in accordance to leftist sensibilities. And even if they win, they won't do shit with that victory. Or maybe even worse, they will take their victory and cave to leftist preferences as we saw it in UK with immigration, because supposed conservatives are terrified of being called as racists or booed if they go take their kids from private school/university. Who needs enemies with wussy wankers as allies.
I actually think it is the opposite. President is there to lead and communicate policies of his team toward the public. If his staff members are the writers, president is the actor or comedian delivering the lines and bits. Presidents are supposed to debate, they represent their administration while giving State of the Union, they should represent the state behind closed doors meetings with other world leaders, they should inspire in times of need and be the face of the administration and above all else they should provide legitimacy for the government they represent, as they are the person that people get to vote for as opposed to their PR managers or analysts.
This take that person of POTUS is just unimportant position and that a corpse remotely controlled by unnamed staffers could do as good of a job, and that people really should just vote opaque party machinery and believe in the best is absolutely surreal to me. If the politicians can no longer be bothered to even pretend that they care, the legitimacy of the power is gone. It is incredibly dangerous direction imho.
You probably did not notice, but there is potential schism brewing inside the Catholic Church. The theological debates are interesting, they revolve around ecumenism post Second Vatican council and it seems that current Pope takes them very far with messages like
Some theologians say it is part of God's "permissive will," allowing "this reality of many religions. Some emerge from the culture, but they always look toward heaven and God," the pope said.
As a former Catholic myself just briefly investigating this over last few months I am convinced that the pope is probably either an apostate or a heretic. The church also has to deal with day-to-day subversion from the left as with the rebellious bishops from German Catholic church that decided to bless LGBT unions. And on top of that there is some strange relationship between Pope and Davos types around wide variety of topics such as climate change or strange messages like this openly mentioning return of catholic integralism, which may be the way how some of the critics of Vatican II were placated.
It really is strange and pope Francis himself seems to have interesting enough background to generate controversies ranging with his embrace of socialist version of catholic teachings endemic to Latin America called liberation theology with openly communist figures like Hélder Câmara whom Pope calls as that holy bishop. Add in a very strange way of how Francis got elected - while previous much more conservative pope still lived and you have anther leg of the controversy.
So yes, Catholic Church is not safe from culture wars, if anything they are waged even on larger scale given that Catholic Church is a vulnerable institution. Now it is not as if there was not a problem with Catholic Church before, there were antipopes and murderous popes like Stephen VI and so forth, this time may not be different.
georgioz
2yr ago
There used to be a meme that if UK was US state it would be third poorest state. I looked at 2021 numbers and with UK's GDP of $46,500 Per Capita (Purchasing Power Parity) it would actually rank as literally the poorest before Mississippi with $47,190 and West Virginia with $53,852. The US GDP is $70,250
Many people talk about welfare state in Europe, but even this ranks hollow mostly because people do not understand that US is 51% richer than UK. So even if USA had half the spending on welfare as percentage of GDP compared to UK, it would still be on par in absolute amount.
georgioz
2yr ago
I care because it is one of the many instances of how the social norms are established and before you know it, it will be your own daughter smelling around the dinner table. I am done with the "live and let live" attitude for all the craziness it brought upon us. I am now all for return of good old shaming/blaming back into town. So yeah, I have no problem calling Aella and any of her partners as disgusting people. Sue me.
Now, there are a few "high inquisitors" like tenured critical theorists, internet moderators, or the SLPC who have to engage with this information enough to fight its dissemination. To steelman what they would say, the evidence for what you're talking about is not conclusive (iron deficiencies in childhood, shared environments, etc), and could have disasterous social consequences if the average idiot takes a simple conclusion from complex and mixed research.
This reminded me Sam Harris and Ezra Klein debate around Murray's Bell Curve book, race, IQ and all that with Harris defending existence of IQ gap. At one point Klein did use the argument that even if true (which he argued against), it would be bad for it to get out there. The discussion then derailed when Harris said he is interested in facts and what is true, for which Klein responded that Harris also has biases that prevent him from finding truth. When Harris denied such biases, Klein threw at Harris accusation that he did not have enough people of color on his podcast and the discussion got quite heated from there and turned into shit.
I absolutely lost any faith in Klein as an intellectual from there on. Anything he claims that is true or that he believes should automatically be suspicious as he may just lie for moral or political reasons. What was interesting is that Klein is fully aware of him engaging in this Conflict Theory thinking, his defense as I understand it is assuming that everybody is Conflict Theorist, some people just deny it. Another interesting notion to me is that Ezra knowing that he is a Conflict Theorist puts him on a moral high ground compared to misguided naive people like Harris who just delude themselves and do not have moral power to do what's right. To use an analogy, it is like CDC experts lying about efficacy of masks early on in order to prevent panic buying from general public. And they kind of admit it in similar fashion - people should have known that we lie and in fact it was a fantastic thing we did and we would do it again. Grow up and cough up some money so our good work can continue. I do not quite have my finger on what is going on here but I think this is very important phenomenon to understand.
This is ridiculous for me. Not UK resident, but I got my first small folding knife when I was maybe 6 and I was given knives to do stuff by adults even before then. It was part of the ritual to get your own knife from your dad for your birthday, it was source of great pride and acknowledgement of responsibility of kids. Having a knife was seen as one of the hallmarks of boyhood/girlhood. I do not remember any type of "knife crimes", quite to the contrary it was a step on the ladder for kids to mature. Learning how to handle knives was commonplace - one did not have to hide the ownership of knife, self-teaching oneself in secret - which would exactly be the source of injuries.
Knife is incredibly useful for all types of things: making stuff from wood, serving as scissors to cut rope when you construct anything, when you gather some type of fruit or shrooms and myriad of other things. I carry knives with me very often, I have multiple of them in various places such as a car or work, etc. And it is not only me but also my wife.
This emasculation of society in the name of evermarching safetyism is starting to piss me off big time.
Yes they did, which makes it ahistorical and hilarious. Although I do not necessarily have an issue with that, for instance I liked the movie 300 and also laughed when Leonidas had the speech about age of freedom - yeah, freedom to perpetuate slave society with arguably the highest ratio of slaves to citizens in history.
However, a number of factors make me think that the Philippines would be better off explicitly pivoting towards neutrality.
The question is what do you mean by neutrality. For instance up until recently Finland was neutral, but they spend more money on defense than majority of NATO countries, they have compulsory military service and conscription and warplans that involve turning the whole country into one large military fortress. Being neutral means you have to prepare to face all threats without allies and thus it is much more difficult and costly when it comes to defense spending. Unless you are one of the countries like Switzerland, Austria or Ireland - for which it is easy to be neutral as they are far away from any belligerent country.
But for instance if you are country like Belgium - which was neutral both before WW1 and before WW2 - then neutrality means jack shit when bordering a belligerent neighbor. The only thing neutrality achieved was preventing allies to station their troops there before Germans invaded. This fate of neutral countries was probably main reason why Finland recently decided to join NATO, as neutral Finland could prove to be a soft target for Russia once it wraps its war in Ukraine. With Putin waving old imperial maps when talking to people like Tucker Carlson explaining his Casus Belli, it is is easy to remember that up until 1917 the Grand Duchy of Finland was part of Russian Empire.
Maybe what you meant was something like Philippines becoming vassal of China instead of USA? That could work for preventing war, but it will not work for larger independence and neutrality as it is normally viewed.
I live in EU and I have different take here. EU is increasingly growing irrelevant on global stage. You can look at it from the perspective of GPD, where the share decreased from 31% of World GDP in 1980 to 15% now. Or you can take it through most successful companies in EU where two out of top 5 EU you just have bunch of luxury apparel companies like LVMH and Hermes or old IT companies like SAP or Accenture representing the IT sector with some pharma companies added. Top 15 top EU companies have less value than Apple with 3,6 trillion market cap.
You can look at it from the perspective of security. EU countries cannot do anything for themselves in this front for last 70 years at least. We could not resolve issues in Yugoslavia, we could not resolve issues in Syria or Lebanon and we cannot do shit in Ukraine. The whole EU cannot even produce the same amount of artillery shells as North Korea.
Culturally EU is dead. In the past there were at least some italian spaghetti westerns, some interesting French movies and music. This is now completely overwhelmed by USA. There is basically nothing produced in EU, the culture is thoroughly US based.
Politically, EU countries are weak as well, it is much worse than in other countries. We now basically have permanent unelected bureaucratic structure with zero legitimacy. Our current President of the European Commission - Ursula von der Layen - is career bureaucrat, she was just a party figure in local German politics. She does not represent shit, most people in EU do not even know she exist. She is a dwarf not even compared to people like Trump or Xi Jinping, she is a dwarf compared to Macron and other elected EU leaders. This whole structure is a joke.
When I am thinking about the whole debacle with Trump, it is just another nail in the coffin. Some people in EU may be surprised, but in reality EU countries are not US allies, we are just vassals. If anything I do actually consider this as a "tough love". In a sense it is liberating to see somebody who actually talks to EU leaders as irrelevant dogs as they are instead of getting pets and platitudes from figures like Obama or Biden, while inevitably going into irrelevancy.
It also opens a very interesting conundrum for many people in Europe, who so far thought of themselves as "The West" or some such. This may even continue if some other countries - especially Germany o France elect more nationalistic governments that will try to forge their own path in the world. In a sense the whole Russia narrative is just a red herring. It is the topic of this decade, but there are other heavy-weights: India, China, Turkey or some up-and-coming countries which may have increased importance in upcoming decades such as Nigeria. European countries will have different geopolitical goals even compared to one another - like when Germans were cozying up to Putin for decades despite many warnings from other countries like Poland - until he was suddenly a bad guy. But there will be different goals compared to these other great powers or superpowers.
As others said, it is basic premise of stoicism and its teachings on locus of control.
I find it especially useful to avoid certain manipulations - including those asking money from you, like EA. As a pragmatic observation, my internal spidey sense now lights up as spoon as I hear “we” as in “we humanity”. We should stop climate change, racism and if we are at it why not also hunger, all murder and pineaple pizza?
I think saying “not my problem” and even “fuck you, I wont do what you tell me” is perfectly fine stance for random ask by some stranger, especially online.
So the argument is that since "sissy hypno porn etc." is available online, then there is no need to be worried that it is pushed in school as it does not do that much harm?
Good, so given that terminally online people have access to gore and snuff videos or ISIL radical propaganda or holocaust denial bullshit, let's move it into schools maybe in slightly sanitized form. It cannot harm anybody to have teachers handing out books written by Nick Fuentes, right? Kids who don't like it will not read it anyway and even if they do, it will not do that much harm.
georgioz
2yr ago
I just want to add the usual switcheroo between marginalized people and historically marginalized people. As other people say, women now have 50% higher college enrolment compared to men. But if one grants argument that they were historically marginalized, this remains the same even if women are 100% of enrollment and no men are allowed.
I agree with you, gender wars make least sense when it comes to conflict. Mostly because men and women do (or at least used to) literally live together. Everybody has some mother and father or some brothers and sisters or cousins and nephews. Also it is very hard to be hardcore misandrist feminist if you happen to raise a boy.
I think that the modern gender wars are fueled by mostly technological but also social changes in the west in 20th century. There are several important milestones there: the first one being invention of home appliances which made it easier to take care of household production/chores freeing mostly women to pursue other things in life. Second was overall servitization of economy where unlike agricultural or industrial economy the physical strength is no longer advantage. And the last and huge one is of course the pill which gave women control over their reproduction.
What happened as a result of all three of these technological changes is basically emasculation of women who could go out and take over traditionally masculine roles of a provider and also ability to adopt more male style of sexual behavior. One can easily see this in all cultural product where a woman can get away with some pretty nasty and outright insulting stuff that men would not be able to get away with. But this is still incomplete transition, there is still a lot of friction there. We still see lingering women are wonderful effect which basically gives them license to behave this way. It also has to be said that while emasculated women and effeminate men are a thing, they are not necessarily viewed as a model for ideal partner.
I like how Louise Perry described it - if you are a modern woman in office setting you can go about your life without ever encountering any situation where sex really matters, that is if you do not go to a gym or similar setting trying to lift weights or something like that. You would be correct to assume that there is no distinction between men and women and possibly perceive any challenge to that experience as somehow weird or even insulting. Having a widely accepted conspiracy theory about how patriarchy is beyond all this, that any differences are unnatural and a result of these nefarious forces distorting the natural equality of sexes for millennia can look very appealing - especially if believing or at least espousing ideas of such a conspiracy can get you advantages. However this is less tenable view if one becomes a mother of a boy or if one wants to have long-term partnership or if a woman is faced with some really nasty things like financial stress, crime in the neighborhood or myriads of other situation when actually having masculine man would really come in handy.
The right to asylum is not something you can suspend at will. I mean, if you are in the middle of a zombie virus apocalypse, a case might be made, but Poland is very much not on the brink of collapse.
I thought that we are beyond this point already. At least since COVID, everybody knows that rights, including human rights can be suspended at will, sometimes based on unilateral decision of governing bodies for what constitutes a crisis. We now hype everything ranging from climate change through mental health or obesity or anything else as crisis, this is the feature and not a bug. It was actually one of my direct examples to many people during COVID - what prevents government to declare some arbitrary crisis and act with heavy hand?
Also this is nothing new, human rights were undermined constantly. Look at declaration of human rights and let's use Article 5
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
Waterboarding is widely deemed as torture and yet it was used by CIA in their War on Terror and to my knowledge nobody was punished for it.
Another one is of course article 12
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
This one is dead, governments routinely spy on peoples electronic correspondence and ignore their privacy. And it seems that nobody gives a shit.
Of course Article 14 is also very sketchy:
Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.
This is my favorite one when I am talking with progressives who are supposedly staunch defenders of human rights. It is interesting to watch how many people are then using legalese to weasel out of this one.
Asylum is part of Article 14:
Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.
This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
Again, many people may bog this down into legal battles of who is asylum seeker, if Belarus is not safe country for many such people trying to cross Polish borders etc. Call me cynical, but I do not see how this should be some barrier nobody will cross.
I can't tell if this was the intention of the President's Office when they passed the rule, and how much will be left after everything settles (or if it won't settle, and everything will just sit in storage awaiting a change of zeitgeist).
I think anybody can tell that it was the intent, at least according to the link you provided regarding the NAGPRA Act itself:
These regulations provide systematic processes for returning Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, or objects of cultural patrimony to lineal descendants, Indian Tribes, and Native Hawaiian Organizations (NHOs). The revised regulations streamline requirements for museums and federal agencies to inventory and identify Native American human remains and cultural items in their collections.
Between funerary object, sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony, I think anything goes since cultural patrimony is synonymous with cultural property. And I would emphasize the word cultural is by now long hijacked by the Left: as in cultural studies or cultural sensitivity or cultural racism or LGBT culture and others. The word cultural in this context is one of the archetypal examples of "we share your language but not your dictionary", similar to words like inclusion or diversity. So if you hear something like culturally relevant teaching you cant translate it as woke, probably explicitly as a vehicle to pose as a protector of oppressed native peoples to gain power.
So yeah, I guess the exhibition curators and museum directors are now scared shitless as they probably know what is coming their direction - if they do not immediately overdo at least by factor of 10 of any measure they think is reasonable.
One "theory" I heard was that recent history in the West - and to some extent also elsewhere - basically revolved around baby boomers, partly due to the fact that it is such a populous generation but also due to the fact that so many ideas got discredited as a result of first and second world wars.
The forties and fifties were the times when boomers were born, it was a time of rebuilding, family stability and security.
Sixties and seventies were the times when boomers were young adults full of rebellious energies, experimentation with sexuality and drugs and all that. It was the time of peace movements and mass refusal of military service in the name of communal love and peace and almost teenage ideals.
The eighties and nineties were the times where boomers really came of age, it were the times of risk taking yuppies that proudly destroyed the old stuff in order to unleash creative destruction of this new tide of success hungry urban professionals. It is interesting to see that exactly at the time when boomers were in their most energetic years was also the time the society suddenly discovered that individualism and self-reliance is to be promoted. It was also the time where the society really leaned into gym culture worshiping this youthful vigor, it was the time of Gordon Gekko and Mitch Buchannon.
The Aughts and Tens are the decades of solidification of the previous achievements. At the same time it is the time of bailouts and growth of assets but also the time of glorification of all the ethos and views of how boomers see themselves, as paragons of Civil Rights virtue who carried the torch of progress forward. But maybe right now we should cut back on some of the stuff and strengthen our social security, healthcare and we should also do everything possible in order to save octogenarians from deadly virus. If the price is incarcerating pre-teen kids in their homes, that is the price boomers are willing to pay.
Now take the aforementioned with grain of salt, but once you see this it is kind of hard to unsee. Boomers collectively seem to have quite a grip on our societies to the extent that they literally shape the cultural lense of how society views itself for over half a century at least. One can even better see it if one for instance looks into statistics of average age of let's say US government officials. The first Baby Boomer president was Bill Clinton born in 1946 who became president in 1993 and we are going to have a president either born in 1946 or 1942 in 2024.
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