I’m only expressing my thoughts on what conservatism means to me and what I think it should be. I’m not making any claims that it is what conservatism actually is in this country or any other, or about what it has been at any point in time (even if they sometimes like to pretend that it’s what they’re about.) like I said, I don’t align myself with any of the so-called conservative movements that are out there.
Heart disease is one of the biggest causes of death in all age brackets.
For people 65 and older it is the leading cause of death.
Is it ageist to point out that statistic? Is it ageist to recommend that older people should see their doctor regularly, pay special attention to their cardiac health, eat right, get exercise, etc?
Of course all people should do those things, but since those older people are the ones who are most at risk of those issues, I think it’s pretty reasonable to specifically target them with those messages.
Ageism would be if you refuse to hire someone who’s over 65, or insure them, or allow them to do other things just because statistically people in their age bracket are more likely to randomly keel over dead of a heart attack, whether or not they themselves actually have any cardiac issues.
Same goes for voting. Americans in general vote in pretty sad numbers, but the numbers for young people are especially bad, even if our current young people are better at it than young people of previous generations, the numbers for them still are pretty bad.
Pointing that out, encouraging them to vote, talking about why that’s the way it is, what it means for them and for the rest of us, etc. isn’t ageist.
What could be considered a form of ageism, however, is that because they don’t vote in as great of numbers, politicians don’t pay attention to the needs and wants of younger people.
And unfortunately since we can’t just flip a switch and make politicians and other voters grow a conscience and take those younger people into consideration when they’re making decisions, the only way to address it is to actually get those younger people to vote and make their voices heard.
There’s other issues at play, the way people talk about young people not voting and such can certainly contain some ageist language, not all of the takes on the issue are good ones, and the way people try to target their messaging to those younger people to encourage them to vote is often seriously lacking, tone deaf, and even offensive.
There’s also the issue that the way voting and politics are handled in this country can often make it difficult for young people to get to the poles, be engaged in the process, etc, and there’s certainly an argument to me made for that being an ageism issue.
But just making the core statement that young people don’t vote in high enough numbers is not in and of itself against.
Circling around to the all lives matter comparison
Just as people of any age can die of heart disease, people of any race can be needlessly killed by police. However, in both examples, people of certain demographics are at significantly higher risk of those things occurring. Yes there’s a lot of overlap between things that may get both a black guy and a white guy shot by cops, or that may lead to both a 20 year old and an 80 year old having a heart attack, and tackling those common issues is important, but there’s also risk factors that significantly impact one demographic or the other and they need special attention. Black people have to deal with poor police training, mental illness, drug use, etc. same as white people, but they also have to deal with systemic racism on top of that and white people don’t generally have to deal with that, and old people have congenital heart issues, environmental exposures, poor diet and exercise habits same as young people, but have additional health concerns due to their age on top of that which don’t tend to affect young people. As they say a rising tide raises all ships, but some of those ships have issues besides just being stuck at low tide, and the rising tide isn’t going to do anything to fix their leaky hull.
Which is why “all lives matter” is such a stupid statement, because if they truly think that all lives matter, they’d be happy to see those leaky ships getting patched up so they can take advantage of the tide rising for everyone.
So yes, it’s an issue that Americans in general don’t vote enough, but younger people especially don’t vote enough, and so we need to be paying special attention to that issue to try to solve that and make sure their voices are heard. And saying that calling attention to that issue is ageist because other demographics also don’t vote enough absolutely has the same kind of energy as pulling the “all lives matter” bullshit when people talk about black people being killed by police because “white people can get shot too.” Both can be true, and we need to address both parts of those issues, but one demographic needs a little extra or at least a different kind of attention. We can’t ignore the age-related health complications, the systemic racism, and the factors that lead to poor voter turnout amongst younger people just because those issues don’t affect everyone, we have to address them alongside those other issues.
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In a saner world, I’d probably consider myself a conservative, in the world we actually live in though, I’m not touching anything the conservative parties have anything to do with.
I generally think that things should overall trend towards being more liberal, and conservatism should just kind of be a moderating factor, not really working against a liberal agenda, just kind of slowing it down, making sure everything is fully thought through before we jump into anything, that the plans and funding and contingencies and such are in place, and in some cases just slowing things down because some stubborn assholes (mostly the current “conservatives”) need to be eased into certain changes because their tiny minds will explode if you go to fast
I have a few ideas about that ranging from the boring to insane conspiracy bullshit.
A decent amount of people, myself included, have chosen to register as republican despite not really aligning themselves with the party. PA is a closed primary state so if you want a vote in the primaries you basically have to choose R or D, I personally went Republican on my registration because in general I can live with whoever the Democrats put up, they may not be my first, third, or 20th choice of candidate, but on the Republican side there are mostly only bad choices, and I’d rather try to head off the worst of them before they make it to the general election. In other cases it might just be down to a coin flip.
A lot of PA is pretty damn red, in some cases you may not have many or even any Democrat candidates in your local elections, and the ones you do have don’t really have a snowballs chance in hell, so you might as well try to work with what you got on the Republican side.
Or maybe even you just registered as a Republican because that’s what your parents told you to do when you got your driver’s license and never bothered to change it. Maybe you just kind of figured that’s what everyone did, or maybe you’ve had a change of heart since registering.
There are still some never-trump type Republicans out there, some of them even have their heads screwed on mostly correctly. Someone who sees trump as damaging to their party, or maybe even democracy while holding other Republican values may want him and his ilk taken out.
Again, some Republicans do have their heads screwed on mostly right, and maybe they feel very strongly about one of the many things Trump will obviously make worse.
Starting with the conspiracy bullshit - someone wanted to make trump a martyr to galvanize the Republican base. Maybe they only intended to wound him, maybe they did want to kill him. Maybe it’s a publicity stunt orchestrated by Trump himself or other high ranking Republicans, maybe it’s a lone actor who decided that it would really get Republicans motivated.
They know Trump is overall pretty incompetent, and felt he has already served the role he was needed for and wanted him out of the picture so that someone just as evil but actually good at his job could step into his shoes.
Even more radical Republicans who think that trump doesn’t go far enough in advancing their race war, or christofascist, or whatever insane bullshit they want to bring about.
Putin is sick of his shit, or some other foreign actor helped bring this about.
Just plain ol’ mental illness and trying to understand the motivation here isn’t going to get you very far because it’s not based on anything approaching logic.
I believe when talking about naval ships, commissioning is when they enter active service, so construction probably began early 90s, maybe even late 80s, and probably a few years of designing, bidding, etc before that. And of course there were probably all of the usual idiot politicians, bean counters, stubborn assholes, sales people, etc. involved who pushed for older tech. Maybe because everything else they had worked on the old disks, maybe they were skeptical of the new tech not being robust or tested enough or wouldn’t catch on, maybe it was just cheaper, etc.
I’m willing to bet that they somehow locked themselves into using 8 inch disks in the early to mid 80s if not earlier, when the 5¼ discs were still new-ish and the 3½ were brand-new or not even available yet.
To build on/give some example about what you said with the comments and function names (programmers, excuse the sloppy pseudocode that’s about to follow, it’s been a long time since high school intro to computer science)
Let’s say in a video game, you run around collecting coins, and if you get 100 coins you earn an extra life
One small part of that code may look something like:
IF
newGame = TRUE
THEN
coinCount = 0
lifeCount = 3
coinModel.all.visibility = TRUE
//Players start a new game with 3 lives and 0 coins, and all coins are visible in the level
IF
playerModel.isTouching.coinModel.x = TRUE
THEN
coinModel.x.visibility = FALSE
coinCount++
//If the player character model touches one of the coin models, that coin model disappears, and the players coin count is increased by 1
IF
coinCount % 100 = 0
THEN
lifeCount++
//if that coin count is divisible evenly by 100, then the players life count is also increased by 1
Quick notes for people who have even less programming background than me
++ Is used by a lot of programming languages to increase a value by 1
% is often used as the “modulo” operator, which basically returns the remainder from division. So 10 % 2 = 0, because 10 is evenly divisible by 2, 10 % 3 = 1, because 10 is divisible by 3 but not evenly and leaves a remainder of 1
// Are comments, they don’t affect the code, they’re just there for human readability to make it more understandable, so you can explain why you did what you did for anyone who has to maintain the code after you, etc.
Hopefully, between the simple variable names and comments, those pseudocode blocks all pretty readable for laypeople, but if not
The first block basically detects if you’re starting a new game (IF newGame = TRUE)
If it is, then it resets your life counter to a default 3, and you start with 0 coins and sets all of the coins in the level to be visible so you can collect them
Otherwise it would carry over the values from your previous level, or save game, or whatever
The second block detects if you touch a coin (playerModel.isTouching.coinModel.x = TRUE)
If you do, that coin vanishes (coin.x.visibility = FALSE)
It also increases your coin count (coinCount++)
Then if your coin count is divisible evenly by 100 (coinCount % 100 = 0) it increases your life total (lifeCount++)
When the code gets compiled, that gets turned into machine code, basically all 1s and 0s that the computer can understand. The computer doesn’t care if you call a coin a coin or if you call it object1, it’s going to strip all of those human-readable elements out because it would just be a waste of storage and processing power to keep it in.
So when you recompile that, you don’t get any of the explanatory comments or the easy to read variable names, so you might end up with something looking kind of like this
IF
Variable1 = TRUE
THEN
Variable2 = 0
Variable3 = 3
object1.all.condition1 = TRUE
IF
object2.condition2.object1.x = TRUE
THEN
object1.x.condition1 = FALSE
variable2++
IF
variable2 % 100 = 0
THEN
variable3++
Which is a lot harder to understand. The code will still work, you could recompile it and run it, but if you want to make any changes, you’d basically need to comb through it, figure out what all the variables, objects, conditions, etc. are, and try to piece together why the programmers who originally wrote the code did it the way they did
And that’s of course a bit of an oversimplification, for various reasons it may not decompile and recompile exactly 1:1 with the original code, it’s almost like translating the same sentence back and forth between 2 languages with Google translate.
And even this little snippet of fairly simple and straightforward code would probably going to be backed up by dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of other lines of code just to make this bit work, defining what a coin is, the hit boxes, animations, how it determines if it’s a new game or or continuing a previous game, etc.
A lot of them absolutely do learn those skills the same way I did
But for a lot of parent/child relationships, being gay can still be a pretty big stumbling block. If your dad is rejecting you, doesn’t want anything to do with you, maybe even kicking you out of his house, you’re not going to be able to learn anything from him. If he’s overall supportive but worried about not wanting to push you into traditional gender roles and ideas of masculinity and such that you may not identify with, he may not try hard enough to pass those skills on. If a kid coming to terms with his sexual orientation feels pressured to act a certain way because of pressure from his peers or society, he may push back against his parents trying to teach him those skills, etc.
It’s not unique to being the father of a gay son, lots of parents struggle to find ways to bond with their kids who have different personalities, interests, opinions, etc. than they do, but being gay can throw an extra level of complications into the mix and so I suspect you’d see it at least somewhat more among gay guys than otherwise comparable straight guys.
In addition to being disinherited, discrimination, moving to more expensive bluer areas that are more tolerant, and such that people have already touched on, and I’m sure are significant factors at play, I just kind of want to spitball a couple thoughts. I’m no sociologist or economist or anything of the sort so I don’t know how much these thoughts hold water
The sort of stereotypical American dream- husband & wife, 2.5 kids, 2 cars, house in the suburbs, etc. probably looks at least a little different for many LGBTQ people. In many cases, the kids are kind of a non-starter- adoption, IVF, surrogacy, etc. are out of reach for a lot of people for a few different reasons, and if you’re not planning around having kids, you may not need that house in the suburbs with a good school district and a yard for them to play in. And if you’re not spending money on kids, you may want to spend that money elsewhere, it may be more important to you to be close to other things, or to not have a mortgage hanging over you’re head and want to be able to move to a different neighborhood, city, state, or maybe even country every few years when your lease is up.
I’m a fairly stereotypical straight dude, I grew up holding the flashlight for my dad and getting yelled at while he fixed pretty much everything around the house himself, and it gave me a pretty solid foundation as a handyman. There’s not much around a house that I’m not confident I could fix myself or with a couple buddies if I needed to, and I suspect that a lot of girls and probably many gay guys have a different experience with that kind of thing in their childhoods. Not that they can’t learn those skills on their own later on in life if they want/need to, but it can be a pretty daunting prospect, and I could see a lot of people who didn’t grow up learning those skills choosing to live in an apartment or rental house where they can just call maintenance or their landlord when something breaks instead of needing to learn a bunch of plumbing, electrical, carpentry, drywall, etc on the fly as your house is falling apart around you. I’m not sure I’d want to take on home ownership if I had to start from square one and relearn everything I picked up from my dad on my own.
There’s probably a lot of different variables, cows vs bulls, the breed, how they’re being raised, if they have calves with them, how you’re behaving, etc.
In general though, safest bet is always going to be to give them space and not approach them. Not to say they’re necessarily going to be aggressive or anything, but that’s just kind of rule number 1 with any animals you’re not familiar with.
Annecdotally, when I was a teenager, I did Philmont, which is a big property the Boy Scouts of America (now changing their name to Scouting America) owns in New Mexico, where scouts can go backpacking. They also maintain a working cattle ranch there, and I believe so e of the neighboring ranches allow their cattle to (grave? Free range? Roam? I’m not sure of the correct terminology) the Philmont property, so it’s not uncommon to encounter cows in various places there.
They give pretty much the same lecture, don’t approach them, don’t do anything to spook them, and give them some space.
At one point my group was hiking along a trail coming to a junction, and a few dozen cows came down the trail we were about to head up and went into the woods. We weren’t super close to them, but it was probably about the closest I’ve been to a cow outside of a petting zoo in my life, and there was nothing but a few yards of open trail between us. We just stood back and watched them go about their business, the cows didn’t pay any attention to us, we hung out for a couple minutes after they passed in case there were any stragglers, and sure enough there was a lone cow that came running down the trail trying to catch up with its friends.
I’m no cow-ologist, but my general understanding is that they tend to be fairly laid back, and if anything curious. That said, they’re big, powerful animals and you don’t want to spook them.
I’d very much like to hear you explain how that is your takeaway from what I said.
Which would fall under the category of age-related health issues I mentioned that is one of the special considerations their specific demographic needs special attention paid to. People of any age can keel over of a genetic defect, and addressing those kinds of issues helps everyone, but it doesn’t address the specific issue of a 70 year old with a worn-out ticker with no genetic issues, and so there also needs to be attention paid to those specific issues that don’t affect young people. Just as addressing mental health issues helps everyone not get shot by cops but doesn’t address systemic racism, and how improving voter turnout overall is good but may not be enough to specifically get younger voters to turn out in similar numbers to older ones.
And how wild would it be if those damn kids actually turned up and voted in unprecedented numbers, took this election by storm, and kept doing so for the rest of their lives turning politics on its fucking head, making politicians have to cater to them and subsequent young generations? It’s only a prelude to that if 1. The younger people in fact don’t vote and 2. The election is lost by a margin that could have been made up by those youth voters, and if both of those things happen, it would in fact be true that it’s one of the reasons the election was lost from a numbers perspective, millennials and Gen z could be one of the biggest voting blocks, we have the numbers to call the shots if we just turn out and vote, but we don’t.
I’m listening, hell, I’m looking forward to hearing your rebuttal to this, the problem is that what matters isn’t getting some rando on the internet to listen to you, you need to get politicians to listen to you, and unless you have the money to throw around and buy them like big companies, lobbyists, and billionaires can do, the only way to get them to listen is by using your vote.
And sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling when someone says something you don’t like doesn’t exactly leave you very open to being motivated or persuaded, and yet here we both are doing weird things with our fingers.