the post of the guy with the milk has me thinking. has anything written anything at length about how RWers in the west seem to have a lot of hangups relating to childhood? there are a bunch of weird things that they have done/picked up on that seem childish to me, or seem to display an inability to move past childhood:

-the brief milk obsession that seems to rear its head again every now and then (oedipal?)

-the frequent focus on what’s going on in schools and colleges, often in lurid terms: furry hysteria, transphobes often discussing locker rooms/bathrooms

-obsession with gaming, anime, star wars, etc. hobbies/interests that most people pick up as kids

-charlie kirk’s diaper thing a while back, i think crowder has also dressed up as a child/baby in public too?

-doubling down on things instead of confronting them, like going on all-meat diets as a reaction to more people questioning the ethics of animal agriculture, and then doubling down on THAT and going on an all raw meat diet. also the pro-tobacco fringe that seems to be especially popular among red scare, “post left” types

-aversion to sex and sexuality

-“this is what they took from you” captions accompanying images of kids playing N64 or riding bikes, nostalgia more broadly

-“trad” stuff presenting essentially a dollhouse version of motherhood

idk if there’s anything there but it seems like enough that someone could write an interesting essay about it. tie it into alienation and the nuclear family/suburbanization and the end of the american dream maybe. like all these people want to live life like a 1950s burger ad, the only time in their life where they’ve felt close to that was in childhood, and now as adults they see that the whole one-income, two kids in the suburb thing isn’t possible anymore so they just retreat into memories of childhood (consciously or not) and get angrier and angrier about it

  • Notcontenttobequiet [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    28·
    10 months ago

    I really wanted to post that emoji, but in all seriousness, this is a really interesting observation. I think in some cases it could be some of them trying to deal with their own fucked up childhoods. And then they impose some other kind of misery on the next generation, while pining for some ideal childhood they never had. Generational abuse / trauma on a minor scale maybe?

    A story from just yesterday that made me irrationally angry:

    Ultra chud at my workplace, drives a massive $60k+ truck, brings in his Black rifle coffee Co thermos every day. You get the idea… A group of us were talking about shoveling snow and he literally says “I don’t ever need to worry about EVER doing that because I have two sons and I make them do it!” and laughs of course. Probably if someone else had said it, it would have been said with more levity and I could have laughed it off. But with this guy, I could just tell, he wanted to make these kids miserable. They need to learn how to become MEN so they don’t get to have a snow day, they get to shovel for dad!

    Another anecdote: dealing with some family issues in regards to my grandfather being shitty to my mother and her siblings. Mom and aunt upset, but dealing with everything with poise and dignity. Uncle, tantrums, anger, drinking, bringing up 50 year old daddy issues. Surprise, surprise, He’s politically the most conservative one in the family…

    Feels like mommy and daddy issues all around that get passed on down the line. Gets worse and more twisted and bizarre as material conditions deteriorate and suburban fascism intensifies.

  • SorosFootSoldier [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    26·
    10 months ago

    It feels like a lot of the online taste makers for the right are coming from 4chan which are mostly elder millennials, so that’s why I could see them pining for the 50’s when their parents were kids and they have nostalgia for shit like the n64. Modern burgerpunk fascism is so goddamned stupid.

  • SuperZutsuki [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    24·
    10 months ago

    You could say the same about anyone born in the 80s or later. Libs are obsessed with Harry Potter and other YA vomit, Disney adults, etc. I think the major factors are exponentially increased alienation/atomization (with better access to subcultures thanks to the internet) and that many people are stuck renting forever and barely scraping by. So many people are unable to have a stable home life because they can’t just buy a house/condo/apt and settle down somewhere. Couple that with the death of the career job and people are forced to constantly move house and grind to find better jobs so the level of anxiety and despair is at an all-time high. This leads to severe mental health issues and I think increasingly alarming levels of escapism is one of the outcomes.

  • GalaxyBrain [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    13·
    10 months ago

    I think it’s the Chud version of a pretty universal thing. If you’re younger than Gen x you were probably locked out of the financial capacity to obtain the signifiers of adulthood like a house and stuff. So what extra money you have isn’t much more than your spending capacity you had as a teenager, so your choices in treats are pretty limited to the same stuff you grew up with, this is also now a huge market so it’s being fed and advertised. Also everything has gotten sooooo much worse