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Yea, the 80s were full of crazy people in government and everywhere. I remember when D&D was honestly considered being a gateway to satanism / Devil worship, and not in jest. And not a short two week news cycle thing, but it went on for years. Oh, and heavy metal too. It all finally started to wind down when the televangelists were exposed as money grubbing perverts.

Paradise Lost took place in that era. If you haven't seen the movies, they're disturbing but good.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Memphis_Three

You millennials think you have it bad, the boomers were absolutely batshit crazy to GenXers (we were also considered lazy BTW).

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There's an insane quote from John Ehrlichman about the origin of the war on drugs in the Nixon Whitehouse:

https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

I wonder, is that credible? If so, it's kind of amazing how little has actually changed since those laws were put in place.

(Edit: okay, there are some reasons to doubt that quote) https://www.quora.com/Is-John-Ehrlichman-a-credible-source-w...

>it's kind of amazing how little has actually changed since those laws were put in place.

Given there's a lot of bureaucratic inertia and jobs at stake here, and:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

...is it really so surprising?

This aspect of human nature is not isolated to the Drug War. Jaime Escalante was possibly the best teacher in America, and demoted because his success threatened the jobs of others-1

What about the never ending wars for profit? Wolf Blitzer at CNN tells us it's a moral problem for the US to stop funding war because a lot of jobs will be lost-2

The problem is that if we are to truly care about human dignity and equality, we need to fundamentally change the way in which we approve of jobs without critically looking at what they actually produce. This isn't just isolated within the economy of the War on Drugs.

1-reason.com/reasontv/2017/08/22/stossel-government-run-schools-crush-in

2-https://theintercept.com/2016/09/09/wolf-blitzer-is-worried-...

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

We live in a society that puts people on an economic treadmill for their entire life. The government gives incentives for getting into debt - guarantees on student loans, mortgage interest tax break. We have property taxes in most states, so you always have a bill to pay even if you never borrow.

Then people come along an propose things like basic income which can't work (I'll do the math for you one of these days since nobody else has). What they really want is to offset the costs of basic existence. I believe those costs could be lowered if the government would focus on that instead of profits and GDP.

> I'll do the math for you one of these days since nobody else has

Please do.

Regarding credibility: "Ehrlichman" literally means "honest man" in German, so there you have it :P

That gives Nixon too much credit. That sort of policy is exactly what would be in an FBI manual of the era.

> I remember when D&D was honestly considered being a gateway to satanism / Devil worship, and not in jest. And not a short two week news cycle thing, but it went on for years.

Just because D&D is no longer one of the things people with a religious agenda hired to advise law enforcement are pushing as dangerous doesn't mean things are more sane, just the targets have shifted.

> You millennials think you have it bad, the boomers were absolutely batshit crazy to GenXers (we were also considered lazy BTW).

To be fair to the Boomers, a whole lot of the crazy we in GenX put up with was from the “Greatest Generation”, not the Boomers. (And to be even more fair to the Boomers, they were treated even worse in their youth for their conflicts with the orthodoxy of their elders.)

Too late to edit, but a correction:

> To be fair to the Boomers, a whole lot of the crazy we in GenX put up with was from the “Greatest Generation”, not the Boomers.

While they are sometimes combined under the “Greatest Generation” label, this actually was intended to refer to the Silent Generation (the one mostly too young to fight in WWII, but born before its end.)

Yes, the Greatest Generation were pretty hard core, growing up in a depression of which the only escape was to fight the Nazi and Imperial Japan war machines (and I guess Mussolini too).

Sure, but then they got older, displaced the Lost Generation as the politically dominant generation, and brought us Vietnam, an abundance of abused of foreign intelligence apparatus against domestic political opponents, the War on Drugs, and Watergate.

And then taxed themselves like crazy, while building massive private and public infrastructure, and had decades of middle class income growth that was the envy of the world.

The “taxed themselves like crazy, while building massive private and public infrastructure, and had decades of middle class income growth” was mostly a combination of the Lost and Silent Generations; the “Greatest” started dismantling that when they became politically dominant and had completely wrecked it by the time the Boomers eclipsed them.

The silent generation came after the greatest generation, so I fail to see how they could dismantle it before the generation who enacted it was in power

> And then taxed themselves like crazy

While the marginal tax rate on the top bracket was very high, it applied to almost nobody, and the effective taxation yield rate of revenue to GDP was actually lower than it is today.

> decades of middle class income growth that was the envy of the world

Largely accomplished because the European post-war economy was damaged enough that the US could take over as the de facto imperial force of the world. It's not like it was due to anything that generation did; it was the global geopolitical landscape of the time, and not one we'd like to repeat.

>While the marginal tax rate on the top bracket was very high, it applied to almost nobody, and the effective taxation yield rate of revenue to GDP was actually lower than it is today.

First, it doesn't matter if it's one person, as it was in 1935, or 1000. The idea that a handful of people get to be hoarders makes the system untrustworthy.

Second, very high marginal tax rates incentivize spending money on deductible expenses rather than ones that aren't deductible. When it's a use it or lose it tax rate, and you don't think the government has the best ideas how to spend it, you can avoid the tax by taking your own risks with your own money. But the point is, again, you can't be a hoarder.

I believe the US was also oil rich during this period.

On the other hand, they also expanded into coastal regions and areas rife for economic development and secured first-mover advantages that will last for centuries.

It's not all roses.

As a millennial the one thing I hope I can maintain going forward is a healthy respect for the new, young and different. Watching every new form of media get scrutinized by clueless old people has been endlessly frustrating.

Growing up, you must have known people older than yourself - be they schoolteachers, coworkers, academic professors - who seems to be "with it" who accepted and embraced change. I wondered what made them to be like that compared to the crotchety elders we've known, who are very resistant to change.

Is it merely attitude, or does neuroplasticity come into it? I'm not even old yet (at least I don't think so) but I remember my mind being very resistant to adopting git over SVN and TFS because it was so different to what I was using and "if it ain't broken..." but now I love it. That experience has taught me to persevere: to not criticise something until I understand it, but what if I'm unable to understand something in future? Can I maintain a healthy mental state in that situation?

My bet is that to the degree that neuroplasticity is involved at all, it's effects are largely dominated by more mundane effects, such as the fact that as you get older you have kids and other commitments that keep you from spending as much time learning new things as you used to.

Likewise an 80 year old that sees themselves as having less than 20 years left might require a higher bar for the payoff for dedicating themselves to learning something new than a 20 year old that sees themselves as having 80+ years left.

> 20 year old that sees themselves as having 80+ years left

Any such 20-year-old is delusional; becoming a centenarian (let alone having good enough health to appreciate it) is not much more common than winning the lottery, at best.

> Yea, the 80s were full of crazy people in government and everywhere.

2017 is just as full of crazy people in government and everywhere. They're much easier to spot a few decades later...

I don't know... I think the clarity with which we see the past is illusory and that it comes from reading the over-simplified accounts of the victors.

True.

Also, like all tales from a culture you haven't lived in, people won't understand that actions that seem crazy today made perfect sense without technology X, Y & Z.

> Oh, and heavy metal too.

To be fair though Heavy Metal has been playing on the Satanist/Gore imagery for years, and not just in graphics, but lyrics too. Not because they are satanists, but it because it sold well.

Some acts (like Marilyn Manson) might have played up the satanist image for media attention, but it was really more about rebellion from established social mores and strictures. Metal took the disillusionment that Punk sang about and expressed it through escapism and fantasy. The ultimate source of the anger was the same though.

New priest at our church here is a metal-head. Truth. Says Metallica saved his [temporal] life.

Because it sold well, as compared to non-Satanist/non-gore Heavy Metal? Definitely would like to see the data you used to draw that conclusion. And how inclusive your definition of "gore imagery" is.

To be fair, I think Slayer gets a lot more play than Stryper, but I have no data for you.

That said, the notion that metal bands are fine-tuning lyrical content to minimax paydays is pretty funny. I think income-maximizers generally gravitate towards different careers. But I like picturing a bunch of corpse-paint MBAs sitting on a conference call: "Nice, Sean, I like it, I like it a lot. What about the next line - I think 'Demons dining on your shame' will sell better than 'Demons know this ain't no game'. How does that grab you?"

This is a funny thought. But my guess is that if they were income-maximizers, they wouldn't be writing metal with "satanic" or "gore" content.

Slayer certainly has been successful, and have built a nice consistent career. You can do well with niches. But by one statistic, album sales... well, they've never created an album that's gone platinum. (Stryper actually has once!)

The "money" to "maximize" in music, if anything, is in pop. A large portion of pop these days is written by teams of people these days. I'm not sure how it goes down personally, but I can easily see conference calls coming up with the best love metaphors for a teen idol to croon. :)

Some (not all) of these attitudes were religion-based.

A reason I don't respect people's faith (superstition) because legitimized magical thinking still has an outsized effect on elections, laws, and policy, with many examples during our lifetimes.

The first D&D campaign I ran fell victim to this; two of the players were brothers and their mom picked up on that, despite the fact that I attended the same church as them.

The government is still full of crazy people...

The population in general is full of crazy people. No reason to think the gov't wouldn't be equally represented.

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