I don’t think that’s exclusive to Gen Z, I think pretty much every generation is experiencing that. I think that it’s safe to say that Gen Z and Alpha have been negatively impacted by the COVID lockdowns due to when in their lives they occurred, but the corporate enshitification of all aspects of basic living and human interaction affects everybody.

Dating Is Rough for Gen Z, Especially for Men Who Support Trump

Misleading title, fixed it. Gen Z is fine. It’s just the fascists who are having trouble finding people willing to put up with their vileness.

Maybe they would if they were afforded the opportunity to. They’ve shown up in “unprecedented numbers” in almost every recent presidential election, starting with Obama’s first term. But it’s never good enough for anybody else.

Maybe if they had better political education and easier access to voter registration, they’d show up more.

Older people can show up to elections because they have benefits that the younger generations don’t. Things like time off, better wages, and no student debt to worry about. The kinds of jobs that kids work are the same kind to refuse to give you the time off on election day and fire you if you miss work.

I’ve been hearing the same song and dance since I before I was 18. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it reminds me of the conversations about kids not protesting. Millennials got blamed for not being able to afford to protest, and Gen Z grew up nihilistic enough to simply not give a fuck and just eat Tide Pods because we’re all gonna die to climate change anyways.

This was my thought as well. Too many years of retail has left me with an instinctual hatred for holidays. Like how Labor Day is a holiday for the rich to “celebrate” the working poor who have to work that day.

A third world country in a Prada belt.

True. I even added the “probably” after writing it for that reason, but that’s still giving them too much benefit of the doubt.

I’m sure the IDF soldiers feel very bad about all the women and children that they’ve driven bulldozers over.

And yet, that still doesn’t justify killing civilians randomly.

And Israel has been running a military campaign to exterminate Palestine since the 1950s. It’s hard to claim their hands are clean in any of these conflicts.

I still remember when they were offering Israeli citizenship with the purchase of former Palestinian homes to American Jews in the 2000s.

If he’s bringing politics into the workplace, that’s unprofessional behavior, and he should be reported to HR.

And just because you work together doesn’t mean you have to be friends. Only talk to him when it’s strictly necessary and ignore him otherwise, and he’ll probably eventually get the hint that you don’t like him.

I didn’t realize that HAMAS was as large an organization as the Israeli government and armed forces.

We’re also talking about a completely different country from Palestine that had nothing to do with any part of any of these conflicts, and even then, an indiscriminate terrorist attack on Palestinian civilians wouldn’t be justified by HAMAS’s terrorism. That’s like saying that the US bombings on Iraqi civilians are justified by Al Qaeda’s attack on the WTC on 9/11.

This is why I turned to hardcore drugs. Much cheaper.

…Factorio counts as a drug, right?

Can’t somebody smell nice without having to bring chemistry into the equation?

Not mines, IEDs. It was an indiscriminate terrorist attack on a civilian population using improvised explosive devices.

Considering there was a trans woman who got elected as a county sheriff in New Hampshire a few years ago while running a “defund the police” campaign because she was the only one to run as a Republican candidate and nobody bothered to do their homework before voting for every R on the ballot, I’d say chances are pretty good.

I was going to say, “Didn’t this happen when he was in office too?” because I was getting serious deja vu, but then I started reading the article and it turns out that they’re talking about the same incident.

We already knew this, but it’s good to remind people with all the absurdities that occur every day that this nutjob is still alive.

Clearly. They are the same picture, after all.

This just in: 1 in 5 Republicans are openly sedititious traitors.

And from my anecdotal experience, lockdowns varied greatly locally as well. We had what I would call “rolling lockdowns” here, where a town might close restaurants and stuff for a few weeks before opening back up while neighboring towns would have mask mandates only. Some would go as far as total lockdowns, and many almost never had an actual lockdown. And it was all based on the waves of COVID infections. Towns would only act once they hit a certain threshold of daily infections.

I had a job during lockdown where I had a form stating I could drive on the state highways for work and up near the major city I might see 4 or 5 cars on the road when there should’ve been rush hour traffic, but in my town the only businesses that really closed were bars and restaurants, and that was only until they started adding outdoor seating and plexiglass walls between tables.

And then you had stuff like a girl I know posting pictures of herself drinking in a packed bar in South Carolina at the height of COVID, not a single mask in sight.

The idea that the world united against the horrible atrocities of the Nazis is post-war propaganda. Your average person didn’t know anything about what was going on until photos of the camps made their way home as we pushed into Germany itself. Most countries didn’t give a shit about the Nazis until they were on their doorstep. Most people said, “Hitler’s only saying that stuff to get elected. Once he’s in office, he’ll calm down, you’ll see.” And then they said, “Well, if we leave him alone, then he won’t bother us.”

Many people across Europe and North America actually agreed with Hitler’s views about the Jews before “The Final Solution.” Antisemitism was common across Europe and North America, if not the globe. In Mein Kampf, Hitler refers to America as the sisterland across the ocean that shares his values.

The phrase “Make America Great Again” was used by the pro-isolationism political group the America First Committee, who formed in 1940 and dissolved after the attack on Pearl Harbor, who largely opposed support for the UK. And they had over 800,000 members from all different backgrounds (from Democrats and Republicans to communists and anti-communists) with major tones of antisemitism and pro-fascist support amongst its leaders and speakers. They dissolved 4 days after Pearl Harbor and joined the war effort, not to fight the Nazis but to protect the US.

The Nazis were inspired by the treatment of Native Americans when they started their camps, and we had our own camps for Japanese Americans. We hated the Chinese when they came here, and we hated the Irish as well. Most ethnic groups coming to the US settled in communities of their own culture from their homeland. That’s why the culture is so varied here, even across a single state. To quote somebody else, “Racism is as American as apple pie, and some people will see hatred of the first as hatred of the second.”

I remember the days after 9/11, when attacks on black people doubled, attacks on Jews tripled, and Muslim parents were asking their kids if they wanted to change their name to something more American to avoid being bullied. That racism has always been present. It was just often couched in the lie of being edgy jokes or just that one racist uncle at the family party. The biggest differences today are that they’re no longer afraid to say it openly, and the number of young men caught up in the rhetoric of the online fascist pipeline that gives them a target to blame all the problems in their life on. The ironic racist jokes of their teen and childhood years stopped being ironic at some point and became their actual beliefs.

I was talking about this with my dad not long ago. My Bernie supporting liberal dad was talking about how “patriotic” the country was after 9/11 and how awful all these MAGA maniacs are today. I was in middle school when 9/11 happened, but I told him what I remembered from that time was how attacks on Jews tripled overnight, attacks on Blacks doubled, and attacks on Muslims were so bad that parents were asking their kids if they wanted to change their name to something more American sounding.

America has always been like this. They just hid it behind a veneer of “it’s just a joke.”