This is not my personal opinion, I know Gen Z men who voted for Harris. But the voter demographics really speak for themselves, and maybe now people will look at the radicalization of young men as a serious (but solvable) issue.

  • LANIK2000@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    As a zoomer that’s old enough to be working class now. Man, my childhood was fucked. At school, being a right wing troll was the norm, at least for boys. I was too.

    The worst part is no-one cared, fucking “they’ll grow out of it” and now everyone is suddenly in shock. When I talk about it to my friend today he’s even in fucking denial about it, “Oh they didn’t actually mean that, it was all jokes”.

    And our education system doesn’t do anything to combat this shit either. Quite the opposite, the dogmatic authoritarian approach schools take coupled with zero-tolerance policies pretty much ensures people shouting this hateful shit get away with it.

    After all saying “Hitler did nothing wrong” only gets annoyed looks, gets completely brushed off as “edgy” or something. But then when someone points out that person’s shit, suddenly that’s an attack???

    • Realitaetsverlust@lemmy.zip
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      7 days ago

      “Oh they didn’t actually mean that, it was all jokes”.

      Because those were jokes.

      The problem we have today is not that it was socially acceptable to be a psychopath online in 2014. The problems are, in my opinion:

      • Rapidly decreasing standards of living
      • Social media making people more stupid
      • Governments being too large and intransparent
      • Pointless governmental spending without explaining the why to the population

      The right-wing shift is part of a global failure of established governments.

      • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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        7 days ago

        The right-wing shift is part of a global failure of established governments.

        Yes! Thank you.

        Just as the next left-wing shift won’t be a result of humanity getting smarter somehow, it will be a result of right-wing policies failing. And that shift won’t lead to any improvement either.

        It’s a pendulum.

        People are willing to tolerate a failing system longer, when it aligns on surface with their own views. This is similar to people on the right defending Pinochet and death squadrons.

        And people on the left 20 years ago would defend a lot of things about USSR or Che Gevara or stuff like this, even not being tankies.

        Tribalism leads to degeneracy.

    • sudoer777@lemmy.ml
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      7 days ago

      I graduated from a Christian high school a few years ago, and now they have a Discord server that’s basically their own version of 4chan and they post a bunch of edgy racist/queerphobic/etc stuff. Then the person running it went to MIT. It still exists and I’m pretty sure the staff knows about it and doesn’t give a shit. Of course the school itself promotes racist and queerphobic political ideologies as well so that’s not exactly helpful either.

      • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
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        7 days ago

        A lot of this are encouraged under the table. Any plans on it is usually talked rather than texed, so there will be less chance of it that it could surface, and is between the most trustworthy people.

    • exasperation@lemm.ee
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      7 days ago

      The worst part is no-one cared, fucking “they’ll grow out of it” and now everyone is suddenly in shock. When I talk about it to my friend today he’s even in fucking denial about it, “Oh they didn’t actually mean that, it was all jokes”.

      Most edgy teens do grow out of it. I roll my eyes at embarrassment at some of the stuff I wrote in college, and high school me was even stupider.

      But one difference in my high school years (in the 90’s), edginess wasn’t inherently politically coded. Some of it was racist, sexist, or homophobic, but plenty of the targets were also Republican constituencies: rural/small town people, Christians, fat people, old people, prudes, etc. In a conservative suburban area, jokes about abortion, sex, drugs, etc. were often designed to elicit shock and disgust.

      I think we’ve seen a cultural shift in which edginess is seen as right wing in itself, in part because the right, which used to get offended at things like Harry Potter and Howard Stern and Disney movies, has fallen in line with edgy Gen X comedians who somehow didn’t grow out of it, and made room for people who smoke weed and mock the Bible.

      • FarmTaco@lemmy.world
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        7 days ago

        in the 90s you attacked whatever was around cause you were a piece of shit, now you got the internet so pieces of shit worldwide can band together and hate a specific cause.

        • exasperation@lemm.ee
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          6 days ago

          band together and hate a specific cause.

          The thing with Gen X teenage nihilism was that the only cardinal sin was actually having a strong opinion. There wasn’t much room to hate on anything, because actually hating something showed that you cared too much, and that wasn’t what we were about.

          Gen Z seems to be much more willing to embrace negative emotions and acknowledge that they care enough to hate. Whether that’s a better or a worse thing, I’m not sure.

        • bitjunkie@lemmy.world
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          6 days ago

          We had the internet in the 90s. It just wasn’t in every 12-year-old’s pocket all day, and the nefarious smoky room types were too old to understand how it worked, let alone carry our mass manipulation campaigns with it as the medium.

    • andros_rex@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      I begged my admin to do something about my boy students sexually harassing my girl students. Instead, my some of my boy students discovered I was trans and outed me.

    • PriorityMotif@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      A lot of millennials were pro war back in 2001+ a bunch of people I went to school with joined the military. People would say “support our troops!” When you criticized the wars. This is nothing new, just brainwashing.

    • RandomVideos@programming.dev
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      7 days ago

      I have seen teachers say that hitler was right, that walls were invented by aliens and that giants existed and were romanian

      • Barbarian@sh.itjust.works
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        7 days ago

        giants existed and were romanian

        Wait, what? I didn’t see any giants in my high school. Are they invisible giants or something?

        Also, where were those giants during the 2nd Dacian war? Romans must have been superheroes or something to take on giants and win.

  • kyub@discuss.tchncs.de
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    7 days ago

    The main source of this recent trending fascism, anti-scientific thinking and so on is social media or the web in general. To resist or refute the mass of false information and find out what’s likely true and what’s not, requires education, literacy, media competency, things like that. I guess current generations are lacking this so they fall easy prey to “funny” fascist memes, fakes and rhetoric, then vote for rightwing extremists, destabilizing their own country as a result, not realizing that this leads to big disadvantages for everyone including themselves. We failed to protect these younger generations from misinformation, and now they are turning the world into what they are misled to believe is true.

    We used to have relatively high living standards in the Western democracies. This will soon all crumble and we (most people who aren’t rich) will suffer from it, regardless of who you voted for. And on top of that, climate change will finish us all off, because battling that isn’t even on the radar for those fascists because they don’t even believe in it. So instead of doing too little, we’ll do literally zero and even accelerate the problem, meaning it’ll affect us all much sooner already and with higher intensity.

    So enjoy your still existing relatively privileged life while it still lasts. It’s ging to get much, MUCH worse before it’s going to be better again. Buckle up and prepare yourselves.

  • 🖖USS-Ethernet@startrek.website
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    6 days ago

    I blame social media and algorithms. My teen son for the longest time was leaning further and further right due to the content he was getting served on YouTube. He was making disparaging comments about women and how stupid they are. My wife and I who lean left had to sit down and have a talk with him about what he was saying and videos that he was getting served by YouTube (that popular red pill girl, I can’t remember her name and andrew tate among other red pill stuff). He’s a pretty smart kid, once we showed him data and articles that directly proved all the things he was watching wrong, he started to come around. He’s been careful to believe things that he sees or hears on the internet more now. Occasionally, he’ll bring things to us that we have to double take and fact check to see if it’s wrong.

  • merthyr1831@lemmy.ml
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    7 days ago

    the Democrats will just pander to this by getting an endorsement in 2028 from Andrew Tate.

  • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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    7 days ago

    PragerU was started to indoctrinate Gen Z when the realized the Millenials were Far Left and the Boomers were dying out

    Mission Accomplished…

  • Matombo@feddit.org
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    7 days ago

    I guess the lonelyness epedemic plays a part in it which hits younger people harder then older ones and mans stronger then woman.

    • Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      Indeed, and it’ll get worse. Plenty of women (on popular dating sites, at least) have already been swearing off dating Republicans. Now, with a higher likelihood of a national abortion ban, don’t be surprised if straight women become even choosier. After all, every man we think of sleeping with must now also be viewed as a potential father.

      Forget about casual flings or one-night-stands. Why would I risk a lifetime of supporting an entire human being just to have one night of fun?

      And that’s only for straight women. Bisexual/pansexual women can choose to straight up stop dating men entirely.

      In a lot of ways, lonely young men who voted for Trump just shot themselves in the dick.

      • bitchkat@lemmy.world
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        7 days ago

        Straight women can choose not to date men either. Of course I’m older but quite enjoy living alone.

      • Awesomo85@sh.itjust.works
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        7 days ago

        You mean to tell me that using birth control or even practicing abstinence is the best way to avoid getting pregnant and removes the need to use abortion as birth control?!

        And that perhaps having reckless one night stands all the time is risky and probably not a great idea?!!

  • sudoer777@lemmy.ml
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    I’m a Gen Z male, from what I can tell it seems like older generations tend to rely more on cable or traditional news outlets while younger generations tend to get their news from social media platforms like Instagram. Cable news tends to be more corporate and “normal”/consistent, while Instagram tends to feed news from a larger variety of sources that tend to be more anti-corporate and radical, but those sources also tend to optimize for very short bursts to get the point across quickly so the user can quickly move on to the next piece of news, and there’s also quite a bit of low effort content and reposts and misinformation and that sort of stuff. So I think it’s social media that’s the main driving factor in causing Gen Z to be more radical - which in some ways is a good thing since they have more awareness of the events in Palestine (and radical leftism is based), but the platform can also put them into far-right fear-mongering bubbles and cause serious problems.

  • josefo@leminal.space
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    7 days ago

    it’s either being that or a concubine, gen z was the after millennial hope that died

  • spaduf@slrpnk.net
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    6 days ago

    Because the democrats haven’t made a serious appeal to them in a decade. We need to turn bell hooks into actionable political messaging.

  • Femcowboy@lemm.ee
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    6 days ago

    Because they’re being indoctrinated by Kick streamers like I was by YouTubers in 2015. It’s so disappointing to see the same shit that ruined me for years ruin them.

  • FreshLight@sh.itjust.works
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    6 days ago

    It’s never about gender… Turns out there are good and shitty people regardless of gender, race, religion or whatever else there might be…