Comment by psyc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by psyc | Hacker News Reader

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Denying the validity of the concept of sex, on color-of-medical grounds, is ubiquitous (online anyway) by now.

I had a brief and unsettling flash-forward earlier. Twenty brief years have passed, and I'm a card carrying senior citizen. The way that the young speak is the good and enlightened way to speak. The prevailing ideology is no longer comprehensible to me. I still think of myself as a good, compassionate, and open minded person, the same as I was when I was their age.

But that was the past. I'm the past. I'm the Boomer now. I'm the bad old days when people considered the unthinkable normal. How could we have? And why are we still in power in Washington, anyway? The world will be a better place when my generation and our dated ideas have shuffled off to keep company with all the other ignorant oppressors of the past. I wasn't always, but time moved on and yes, I'm the bad guy. I'm the problem.

It was the weirdest feeling. Like deja vu or trying to remember a dream that's fading.

It only seems ubiquitous because you read the internet in English. People talking in Hindi, Portuguese, Chinese, Indonesian, Yoruba are talking about other issues.

Even in English it's a highly controversial issue, that's why people like to talk about it so much. People rarely talk about things that everybody agrees on, there's less to say.

This is a good point. Sometimes I wish I lived in a part of the world where the Overton Window respects the speed limit. One thing that irks me is that our new progressives are constantly trying to pull the "We've always been at war with East Asia" scam. It goes like this: "We've always blank, this is no different. We already blank, this is no different. You already approve of blank, this is no different." And I'm like, "Huh. That means you'll be able to scale back your activism significantly. Everything has been so close to how you want it to be this whole time."

I don't mean that everyone thinks that way. I mean everywhere I go there are people who think that way, and they are invariably lecturing everyone else. Givin' free lectures. And playing Evil Or Not with everyone.

You should read Bryan Burrough’s “Days of Rage”. The latter part documents how the new left ripped itself apart in the 1970s in precisely this way. The language is strikingly similar. It might be a cautionary less for contemporary progressives.

Thanks for the tip. I will check it out.

It's wildly fascinating and contains material form interviews with people who have never gone on the record before.

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