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.
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.
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.
I’m afraid to ask, but I have to. If you extrapolate the data that is available to you, where does the general trend lead you? Riots? Civil War? Fascism?
So far, you’ve creeped a few of my comments and extrapolated incorrect conclusions from a tiny amount of data, and haven’t provided any numbers. Even if you are telling the truth, the fact that you felt confident enough to say the majority of my comments are about Starfield and coffee when they’re the vast minority, means your data and the conclusions you draw are also highly questionable.
You’ll have to forgive me if I call bullshit.
