• FMT99@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Besides that a significant portion of the youth is turning hard-right as we speak. Young progressives always think all young people are like them.

    • Cowbee [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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      9 months ago

      That’s paired with an even greater portion turning far-left. Overall, Gen Z is far more progressive than reactionary, though there are radical fascists as well.

      • WoahWoah@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        I haven’t seen any data or polling that supports this. A larger portion of young people are “more liberal,” but I’ve not seen anything that says that the extensions of the far, radical right have been met with equal (let alone greater) turns towards leftist political ideology.

        Perhaps you just mean center-left people refer to themselves as “leftists” more often? That’s more of a result of the shift in the Overton window than any actual groundswell of leftist support.

          • WoahWoah@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            Thanks for the Wikipedia link.

            That you don’t see the difference between the hyper-radicalization of the right and the “progressive pro-government” tendencies of Gen Z is precisely what I’m describing.

            You spend most of your time on this platform talking about videogames and coffee occasionally punctuated by airy anti-capitalist sentiments. The young–and typically white and male–hard right talk about guns and politics, errant and blind though it is, and they train for revolution.

            There is no growing revolutionary sentiment on the left that is meeting, matching, or exceeding the violent revolutionary discourse and “propaganda of the deed” by the right.

            We’re losing. Hiding behind a hope expressed by a Wikipedia article that maybe this “progressive” and “pro government” sentiment is actually what will pull us out of this death spiral actually makes me more pessimistic about the future.

            Go play Starfield.

            “Haha.”

            • Cowbee [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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              9 months ago

              There’s radicalization on both sides, but the general trend is to the left.

              What prompted you to dig through my comment history? That’s extremely weird.

              • WoahWoah@lemmy.world
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                9 months ago

                Well, my point is, no, it’s not. One “side” is growing more radical, and the other “side” is being more adamant about their social media comments. Does that seem equal to you?

                “Dig” through your comment history? I took 30 seconds, clicked on your name, scrolled a few times, and then came back. What prompted me to do that? To see if your general profile matches the broad Pollyanna ignorance you’re expressing in this conversation.

                • Cowbee [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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                  9 months ago

                  Your point is unsubstantiated, not mine. Radicalization is more common in general among all demographics, but increasingly so for Gen-Z, which is combined with the increased trend to the left. There are more fascists among Gen-Z than normal, but this is in tandem with far more Socialists.

                  Your 30 seconds of scrolling resulted in a whopping 2 posts worth of comments, I talk about Starfield maybe once a month and coffee maybe 3 times a month, lol.

                  Call me ignorant all you want, but absolutely none of what you’ve said has mattered, and has been entirely ignorant this comment string.

                  • WoahWoah@lemmy.world
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                    9 months ago

                    Fair enough. I do this for a living, which means that I’m paid to study trends of radicalization through various demographics across North and Central America. I specialize in youth culture trends as it relates to political identification.

                    I’m not going to expose my identity here, but, what I am telling you is that you are wrong about this.

                    I think we can be on the same side, I think we probably want the same thing, but your diagnosis and feelings about how “youth culture,” specifically “Gen Z” feels politically is riven between extreme radical actors that are willing to commit violence and those that just want a better world.

                    I want a better world too. But there is no countervailing force to the rise of violent extremism on the right, especially among young men. And pro-government sentiment within the Gen Z and Gen A cohort doesn’t change that. If you were looking at the data I see, you would be upset too. It’s mostly “progressives” and “leftists” that use those words and do very little with it, and a well-armed reactionary force that are being recruited by large, organized, right-wing organizations.

                    It’s just a lot of extremely violent organizations that are successfully recruiting from M, G, and Z. It’s a bummer, but it is what it is. My duty is just to report the data.

                    Edit: we do, in fact, report our data. And the thing that upsets me most is just how splintered the youth cohorts are about this information. We get the literal version of a downvote from the young people we show this data to. We regularly give presentations at college campuses across the United States and Canada, and the general sentiment is “nuh uh, look at my phone, see how radical we are?”

                    It is EXTREMELY upsetting. That’s the ballgame, really. Wrap it up and head home. No one believes things are as bad as they are because they can pull a community together and have it fed directly to them 24/7 that tells them that’s not the case.

                    What difference does raw data make? Especially when it disagrees with what we call “ambivalent cultural sentiment and belief.” When that’s the category, cohorts Z and A almost always revert to a belief system built on digital community instead of their physical community, and those tend to be built around what they already believe, and it just serves to reinforce structures of feeling that are not in alignment with the physical conditions and states of the physical community around them.

                    It’s absolutely and unabashedly terrifying to me.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      a significant portion of the youth is turning hard-right as we speak

      Normal thing to happen when the enthusiasm of youth is blunted by betrayal and rejection and defeat.

      Like, fuck Fascism, but I can’t really blame a guy who has soured on the whole “Hope and Change” thing. Then having your brain hooked up to the YouTube algorithm of Andrew Tates and JBPs just blasting away all the braincells that aren’t killed by booze and vaping…

      The allure of Fascism is the promise of a big ethnic club to end your sense of alienation and despair combined with a near-to-hand enemy you can lash out at with the consent of the police. The Methamphetamine of ideologies - powerful highs and hard crashes. Its what you take when you’re scrambling at the edge of a psychic pit.