yup.

what i see as disheartening about millennials, especially as it applies to the left-wing lean of them, is that they tend to not have a great grasp on the freedoms that their notions of social justice are predicated upon. Notions like "free speech", or "innocent until proven guilty" are increasingly seen as vehicles of patriarchy and white male dominance, in favor of not offending people, or "believe the victims" mentality when it comes to rape.

If you were to go down the list, comparing millenials to boomers on issue after issue, i'd side with millenials every day of the week as long as we're relegated to a "yes" or "no" on how we feel about gay marriage, or women's wage gaps, abortion rights, class issues, environmental policy, bank regulation, police brutality, the drug war and so forth.

But when you dive into the details of how left wing boomers (diminishing in numbers as they are), and left wing Gen-Xer's, there's a sense of .. perspective, priority that previous generations tend to understand that the cool kids today, do not.

This guy says things in a way about the "nu-left" in ways i wish i could. In speaking about left mindedpeople who tend to be opposed to them, he states:

What do these people object to? They’re tired of the prioritization of the symbolic over the substantive; of the ever-more-obscure left-wing vocabulary; of the near-total silence on class issues; of the abandonment of labor organizing as a principal method of political action; of the insistence that people who aren’t already convinced must educate themselves, when convincing others is and has always been the basic requirement of political action; of the confusion of pop culture ephemera with meaningful political victory; of the celebrity worship; of the clumsy Manicheanism that divides the world into all good and all bad; of the use of cruelty, shaming, and character assassination; of the insistence that people within a political movement should “just listen” when someone makes a claim, no matter how outlandish, misguided, unfair, or wrong; of the expectation that everyone should know how to speak and act in perfect congruence with obscure and elitist conceptions of righteous behavior; of the profound conservatism of demanding that everyone occupy a narrow band of cultural practices, refusing to enjoy the world’s vast cultural bounties, out of fear of appropriating someone else’s culture; and, more than anything, of the willful obscurity and inaccessibility, the total and complete indifference towards actually reaching out and building a bigger movement by meeting people halfway and trying to adapt to them as you ask them to adapt to you, the replacement of a mass political movement with an exclusive social circle.

and

Claims that doing yoga is impermissible cultural appropriation, arguments that we should drop phrases like “I see what you mean” because they’re ableist, the assumption that linking to Tweets constitutes violence but harassing and degrading people to the point of suicide is noble activism, filing Title IX claims against people for writing essays in major magazines, allowing your position to become synonymous with attacks on the right to free expression, claiming that you can fight capitalism and the state with hashtags — this is the behavior of a movement that cannot win. We cannot win that way.

There is just something, about the nu-left that reeks of helicopter parent childen, tech driven social isolation, and internet mobs all wrapped around each other.

Calling for people's jobs because of emails arguing for free speech at Yale, Oberlin College students incensed over cultural appropriation in cafeteria food, just this obsessive type of person who prioritizes culturally divisive, low-hanging fruit issues at the top because it's super easy to signal goodness and virtue to your peers online by your endless recreational outrage over these issues.

So we'll argue over Rebecca Watson's elevator incident, or GamerGate in the name of women's rights, while watching the GOP state by state win the war against abortion, shutting down endless numbers of clinics with bullshit laws and regs.

It's this generation of people who invests time, energy, money and political capital (when applicable) to those issues disproportionately to the impact issues have on the populace as a whole. Thinks about ..debating die hard Republicans like Caitlyn Jenner rather than worrying about the disappearing middle class, the destruction of unions and the effects of sovereignty stripping free trade deals, globalization and automation will have on working people. Caring about how offensive Confederate flags are more than gun access, mental healthcare and class issues. Think about how gay marriage, an issue i'm a supporter of even, has more political capital than the fear of environmental collapse or the encroaching police and surveillance state.

In this new paradigm, policing ableist speech matters more than opposing war, trans rights matters more than the drug war, body-acceptance (while good) matters more than the obesity epidemic and in fact encourages us to ignore it (as if theirs no middle ground to opposing bullies). And so on. There's just a total lack of perspecitve.

Changing things that affect power that benefit us all, that's difficult. Maintaining our system of representation is difficult. Fighting poverty is difficult. Taking on climate change, is difficult. And there's another reason why class issues should supercede cultural issues (even if they overlap at times). Historically people build bridges during economic booms. During economic busts, we grow more polarized and our politics grow more extreme out of fear. People stop trusting each other. Bridges are most successfully built during times of economic progress for the middle and lower rungs of society. If you prioritized class issues and had successes, it would give people the resources, comfort, security, and the flexibility that comes from having money and time at your disposal, to attack cultural issues more effectively. Wagging your finger at someone on Tumblr for saying "that's retarded" isn't fixing anything. It's really not. You're just alienating allies and potential allies. You are solidifying the idea that all leftism is an exercise in pettiness and cultural authoritarianism.

Instead it's become about micro-aggressions, using safe space theory to annex public space (see Mizzou), abuse of trigger warnings into areas they have no business being used.

If this is the vehicle for change, this SJW culture that says "#FUCKPARIS" when terrorists kill a bunch of people because it interrupted their little protest moment over here, this movement of people screaming at the rooftops about rape culture when western men cat call women walking down the street, but they turn a blind eye to actual rape cultures during the European migrant crisis in some fear of appearing racist, or lslamaphobic (and yes yes.. actual racists are always sitting patiently waiting to exploit things like this to their advantage, but the opposite to actual racists shouldn't be a perspective that equals them in lacking a sense of nuance)

if this is the vehicle of a more "just" society, then i don't know what to feel. I don't see how any of this helps us as a people oppose our culture of endless war, or making it a more just place for women, blacks, immigrants.

This is not "change". This..is masturbation.