chapotraphouse @hexbear.net Vernon_Tennessee [null/void, he/him] @hexbear.net 2 wk. ago

Boomers are the original Ipad kids

A lot of boomer behavior and beliefs make sense when you realize this. A lot of them were raised by whatever garbage was on TV due to neglectful parents.

Do yourself a favor and watch an episode of one of these shows some time. MASH, Gilligans Island, the Andy Griffith Show, etc. Pure escapism. Simple black and white moralistic protestsnt values.

Now realize that when boomers reminisce about a time when "townspeople knew the local cop" that this never existed. They are literally just going off what they seen on the andy griffith show as a kid during their formative years.

24 comments

My Hindu fascists parents are addicted to corporate owned cable TV news. They cannot avert their gaze from the fast moving graphics, the bright eye-popping colours and the newscaster who is for some reason constantly shouting and is a thinly veiled far right demagogue. It is like watching a toddler who cannot help but stare at the TV screen. Even when passively absorbing it I can feel my soul getting poisoned and they watch it non-stop whenever they have free time.
- Permanently Deleted
  
  I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
  
  yewtu.be
  
  inv.nadeko.net
  
  yt.artemislena.eu
  
  piped.video
  
  I don't know which ones honestly. I always bounce off if they have their audiovisual opiod dispenser on. There are a legion of those, all almost identical differing only on the language and the retina burning colour scheme. I know that they watch Republic TV sometimes, and the channel which is the cesspit of that annoying dickhead Arnab something.
  
  Edit: Might not be named Arnab but I am certain the name is Bengali.
They really were the first online generation. After World War 2, pretty much all the functions we associate with the internet were present, but slower and spread out over multiple systems. Radio, television, telephone - even older forms of mass media like magazines and newspapers played some role. People even note that the sixties marked a new cultural phenomenon - by that point the first generation raised in this "analog online" was old enough to be contributing to it's cultural output. It marked the start of the feedback loop.

The Baby Boomers experienced a lot of firsts for whats now considered the standard experience of growing up in the US. It... really explains a lot.
Gilligans Island […] Pure escapism. Simple black and white moralistic protestsnt values

revisionist bullshit regarding a Marxist show? on my hexbear?

At the height of the Cold War, Gilligan’s Island depicted seven Americans living in an analogue of a post-apocalyptic world where the survivors have to rebuild civilization. Remarkably, the society they create is pure communist. Interviews with the show’s creator and some of the surviving actors, as well from professors from Harvard, reveal that Gilligan’s Island was deliberately designed to be dismissed as low brow comedy in order to celebrate Marxism and lampoon Western democratic constructs.

https://letterboxd.com/film/the-gilligan-manifesto/
- So Gillian’s island was promoting communism along with Star Trek. Pretty cool, however 90%+ of boomer viewers didn’t get it and still became reactionary dickheads. 😞
Dragnet was like catnip for boomers. "Look at these stupid evil kids with drugs. We got em good!"
- Mathnet, the educational parody, is an unironically better show and I'm willing to die on that hill
  
  I haven't thought about Mathnet in decades
  
  (actual decades!)
In defence of MASH: I like it don't be mean to me :(
- MASH was an anti-war, anti-violance, anti-racist show.
  
  Its not like the others on the list.
  
  It is all those things to a degree, but it's also very racist sometimes. Korean characters are often just not played by Korean people, and are just saying gibberish that's supposed to be Korean for example.
Now realize that when boomers reminisce about a time when "townspeople knew the local cop" that this never existed. They are literally just going off what they seen on the andy griffith show as a kid during their formative years.

To be be fair, I know a couple of old ladies that I work with for which this is true but, only because their fathers literally were the local cops.
generational politics
Baby Boomers were called the "Me Generation" by their parents and they never recovered.
-gen x
- Gen X shows were less often black & white moralistic shows once we got out of the 80s. Yeah, they still existed for sure (and still do), but things started to pick up more grey morality. Antiheros were inescapable in the 90s, and sometimes you'd even see tragic or relatable villains. Seinfeld never had an aesop -- they were just kinda asshole protags. Frasier was quite often wrong. Batman had you rooting for Mr. Freeze.
  
  And beyond that there was just a shitton of shows that didnt engage with moral questions at all, or that settled on moral apathy
It's the 1% vs the working class, not generation vs generation.

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