Summary
Gen Z’s reputation as a reliably progressive generation has been challenged by recent U.S. election results, showing a noticeable shift toward conservative voting, particularly among young men.
Many young people struggle with financial security, psychological safety, and optimism about the future. Trump tapped into their anxieties of a frightening world that’s worsening.
Issues like inflation, financial stability, and safety now rank higher than traditional progressive causes for many young people.
Additionally, conservative influences from figures like Joe Rogan and family ties to Gen X parents may have nudged Gen Z rightward, reflecting their complex and evolving priorities.
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I think the two most salient points here are:
- Podcasts
TV and radio are dead, social media is a wasteland. Podcasts are reaching young folks, especially men.
Which brings me to…
- Young men are in freefall
They’re doing worse than previous generations did at their age, across every metric you can imagine, and they’re also doing worse than young women.
That’s not to say we should stifle women’s success!
But if all you have to offer young men is a lecture on their unearned privilege, I think it’s not surprising that they take their business elsewhere.
Importantly: This doesn’t make them right.
But if we don’t figure this out, we’re fucked. We have to have a positive message for men who are struggling and desperate. If we don’t offer a plan, guess who will?
Trump tapped into their anxieties of a frightening world that’s worsening
No reflection on how Trump exponentially makes that worse?
So they’re stupider than we thought. Nice.
Edit: at least the ones that vote
We are now seeing the results of Bush’s No Child Left Behind.
Edit: also:
For years, Gen Z has been either derided or praised for supposedly being “woke.” Its members have been called snowflakes, mocked for performative “slacktivism” and embracing trigger warnings, and described (favorably and unfavorably) as climate warriors and gun-control activists.
Pretty sure that was us Millennials. That stuff started in the late 2000s when all the Occupy shit popped off, when Gen-Z were just kids. Meanwhile we were handing them tablets and phones to keep them quiet and giving them unrestricted access to the Internet, beginning their radicalization right under our noses. Surprise, now leftist mom/dad have a Nazi son/daughter.
For years, Gen Z has been either derided or praised for supposedly being “woke.” Its members have been called snowflakes, mocked for performative “slacktivism” and embracing trigger warnings, and described (favorably and unfavorably) as climate warriors and gun-control activists.
Change a few labels, and this sounds like the same stuff aimed at Gen X - called slackers and the “political correctness” hysteria really started to take off when we hit early adulthood, etc.
The more things change…
I guess it’s time for a Family Ties sitcom reboot
Sha la la la
To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld:
You don’t run for president with the voters you want, you run for president with the voters you have.
Stupid or not, these are the voters we have, and Democrats need to learn how to reach at least some of them if they ever want to win another election.
Que the dems swinging far right
Sadly, yeah… D:
Not voting has the same consequences, so those aren’t too smart either.
Gen Z are entitled like boomers, but with almost no economic prospects outside their parents.
Which makes sense, since loads of Gen Z were priced out of a future before they could even start earning, so there’s no point in giving effort
At least Trump will guarantee Gen Z nearly unlimited well paying work if they’re interested in bounty hunting immigrants and tracking fertility
GenZ is the generation raised by helicopter parents, whose late-Boomer-to-early-GenX parents went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that they never faced any challenges. Of course they’d have some odd ideas about how the world ought to work, after spending their entire childhood and early adulthood with Mom and Dad working strenuously to shield them from personal struggles, emotional distress, and the consequences of their actions. What remains to be seen is how those attitudes shift as the rubber hits the road and their parents lose the ability to protect them from the increasingly dire state of the world. I suspect it’ll be an even three-way split between blithe entitlement, despair and withdrawal, and an impulse to step up and do something about it.
GenZ is the generation raised by helicopter parents, whose late-Boomer-to-early-GenX parents went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that they never faced any challenges.
Weren’t the same kinds of things aimed at kids raised by Dr. Spock? In other words, the boomers?
No Child Left Behind
Lots of people just stayed home 🤷
And they’re even stupider.
Eh, I didn’t bother voting either. No support for genocide
Voting isn’t an endorsement for literally everything a candidate says and does. No one even knows who you vote for unless you tell them. It’s about picking the best of the choices. Your lack of a vote is just as much an endorsement of genocide as a vote for Trump, especially since he won.
… or marketing, plain old marketing, advertising and public relations.
You can blast the airwaves with the same message over and over again eventually people just believe it … either because they are lazy, don’t care, it doesn’t immediately matter to them or they just don’t want to be bothered learning the details. It’s the same process of convincing people to either like Coke or Pepsi.
Goebbels and the Nazi party easily mastered it in the 30s … tell a lie, repeat it often enough and eventually it will be come true … if you tell a lie, tell a big lie, the biggest lie you can make and everyone will believe it.
It all boils down to money and marketing … whoever dumps the money into one party, politician, political movement will get the votes eventually and convince everyone of whatever reality they want them to believe.
Only a small portion of GenZ was incentivized to show up this election. Interpreting the fact that only right wing GenZ showed up shouldn’t be treated as a condemnation of a generation. White women didn’t show up for Harris either. Would we make the same condemnation?
It all comes down to the fact that Democrats offered little and less in the four years where they could have accomplished something, and when called out for that, those critical were told to shut the fuck up.
What the Democrats offered was right wing politics: their base won’t vote for it. Which isn’t to say that groups like GenZ or women won’t show up if you actually offer them something they want to vote for.
This loss can be dropped squarely on the shoulders of the deeply toxic “Blue No Matter Who/ Blue MAGA/ You can’t be critical of Democrats because you only have two choices” philosophy. It was seriously at work here on Lemmy, and moderation and prominent posters here (and across the internet) did real damage filtering down forums like c/Politics, r/Poltiics, etc to select for a narrow and now very proven wrong approach to electoralism.
Complex and evolving priorites
Incels, what will they prioritize next?
Incoming Subsidy for Tesla Sex Robots
Honestly, if the weird “men’s movement” and incels actually got their way on having great robot sex wives, and they thought that meant all the uppity real females have now been “replaced” or outsourced or whatever, would they stop being so angry? I do have to wonder…something tells me they’d still be butthurt about stuff.
If sex robots were actually a thing…
There is a certain segment of incels that would probably be very happy with this, if it was at least somewhat socially normalized, they would probably be fine.
Thats the segment of incels that are more driven by just having no access to sex, already more or less fine with being social recluses.
Granted, that could be accomplished right now by just giving them fleshlights or something, combined with less social stigma around masterbating.
I really do think thats a non zero % of incels.
But there’s also a likely much larger % of incels that are more driven by a sense of revenge for all the times they’ve been rejected, driven by a need to have a living thinking thing to boss around or torment, an active hatred.
Those incels would not be sated by sex robots.
…
Whats more financially / pragmatically / realistically likely in my estimation is that if an actual sexbot can ever be designed, you’d just end up with more, legalized robot prostitutes in brothels.
There is a certain segment of incels that would probably be very happy with this, if it was at least somewhat socially normalized
I think it may take a while before normalized, but then, I remember how quickly it went from extremely rude and annoying for someone to take a call on a cell phone, to constantly happening, all the time, everywhere…some norms can change pretty quickly.
But there’s also a likely much larger % of incels that are more driven by a sense of revenge for all the times they’ve been rejected, driven by a need to have a living thinking thing to boss around or torment, an active hatred.
This is exactly what I was thinking. I think a lot of them are just replaying their middle school/high school experiences and want to take that out on women. Maybe some kind of Westworld scenario might suffice for another percentage of them…
if an actual sexbot can ever be designed
I have not looked, but I would bet more than a few companies exist that have this as their business model.
I have not looked, but I would bet more than a few companies exist that have this as their business model.
AFAIK all that exist are possble life sized dolls with basically internal fleshlight cavities, some talk a bit as well.
Sex is actually a very complex and delicate manuever from the POV of a robot designer.
If the female sexbot suddenly jerks or collapses, it may have just snapped your dick in half. Penile fracture and groin muscle tears are real and extremely painful and debilitating.
A humanoid robot would also probably weigh double or triple what a same sized human would weigh.
If you had the tech required to make a reliably safe sexbot, that would be the same level of tech to just actually make humanoid robots that can say, work in a McDonalds more efficiently than a human.
Its a pipe dream (pun intended) for now.
Honestly, I think if they had something that was safe (enough? - and we are talking about putting autonomous cars on the road in greater numbers, so in the scheme of things, a malfunctioning robot might be extremely painful, but maybe not deadly) in the bedroom, they would get snapped up. Add in the ability to carry on a conversation - and I hear some people are already falling in love with chatbots - and cooking/cleaning, I think that’d be enough for a lot of these guys, assuming the stigma gets blunted over time.
Hey, if it brings down the temperature for this bunch, I’m all for it. I doubt many of them are too complicated - something that lets them bust a nut and makes a sandwich for them and remembers nearly every detail about them might go pretty far…
Well yeah, social justice warriors threw traditional masculinity in the trash without a replacement plan. Just stand over there and take our abuse over privileges you’ve never experienced, oh and also vote for us. No shit they voted for anything else.
