PBR is nasty. I think that at least goes across all political spectrums 
Trying not to be political, but I was very disappointed with Obama for choosing Bud Light:
“If a man (or woman) is molesting children or beating his wife or girlfriend, yeah, I care what someone does in the privacy of their bedroom.”
Oh for heaven’s sake - I thought it was implicit I meant “what consenting adults do in the privacy of their bedrooms.” Not involvement of minors or physical abuse.
There’s a saying that a Conservative is a Liberal who’s been mugged.
Fresh out of school when I started my first job, I was a flaming anti-gun advocate. Then I got robbed at gunpoint, alone on the street. Nothing like having a teenager point a gun to your face. It was then I that I finally understood that if guns were banned tomorrow, people like this teenager would still have them, and law-abiding people like me would just be sheep.
After that, I packed heat in my home until I moved overseas.
Only thing was more of the Gen Xers I knew who were in favor of gun rights and more unrestricted private ownership along NRA lines held those positions from young ages…some as early as 8th-9th grade. And they’ve not only held onto those beliefs, but also went further on them by later buying second homes in areas with less gun restrictions and donating to the NRA and mouthing their political talking points to anyone within earshot as young adults.
On the flipside, most of the millenials I’ve met who favored gun restrictions or an outright ban weren’t necessarily fresh out of college, but graduated for several years.
I’d be willing to bet that none of them got mugged at gunpoint, so the world is still a Panglossian place to them.
When they are receiving Social Security and Medicare, they will be voting to protect and increase their benefits which you will have to pay higher taxes for.
The other half of the saying is that a liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.
Isn’t it the Left that’s complaining that the police are over-militarized?
And maybe a liberal is a conservative whose kid needs a treatment derived from stem-cell research.
So conservatives are all against stem cell research?
There’s a lot of generalizing going on here. People are individuals, including the millennials, who generally manage to think for themselves.
You’d be wrong about that as several of them grew up in some of the worst neighborhoods in NYC and other high-crime areas.
They just disagree unrestricted gun ownership along NRA lines is the solution to what they’ve experienced.
I’ve personally been mugged countless times during my childhood and early adolescence…including walking into a friend’s apartment in the midst of being burglarized and having two burglars pointing guns at us at 14. And yet, while I’m in favor of gun ownership, I believe it should be regulated more strictly than what the NRA is calling for.
Of course there is generalizing, it is the only way to handle such a large group! And besides, there are definitely patterns and trends, and while everyone thinks “I’m unique!” the reality is that at any given time you could create a few dozen political ideologies/parties that would happily encapsulate 98% of the views of 98% of the population. And if you were willing to go to 80% of the views of 80% of the population it would probably be in the area of 5 or 6 ideologies.
^^Okay, you’re probably right about that, cosmicfish. However, by generalizing things between liberal or conservative, that boils it down to just two ways of thinking, and I don’t think most people are that linear. Particularly the younger generation.
When I hear things like this, it always makes me wonder how good the data really is, time and again we hear about trends, how this group is X and this group is Y. The Baby boomers were the 60’s generation, who were supposedly going to change society, get rid of the influence of corporations on US society, the whole revolt kind of thing…and the baby boomers led directly to the ‘reagan revolution’ of the 1980’s, boomers suddenly embraced all that they claim to reject.
I have also read that Millenials are a lot more reluctant to divorce, which I can believe, many Milennials and generation Y were the children of divorced parents, and from what I understand in that age group divorce once again has a kind of stigma about it. As far as being sexually conservative, though, I am dubious about that, I wonder if a lot of that isn’t based on self reporting. Given the boom in social media, in the ability to hook up really easily, I really have to wonder if for example, young people in the millenial generation are that much different in terms of sexual partners than let’s say Gen Y, or quite honestly, even Gen X that dealth with the explosion of AIDS in the 1980s. With AIDS now a chronic disease, rather than a death sentence, I really wonder if Millennials are all that much different. In terms of drinking,maybe the writers of that are on another planet, but from what I can tell I don’t think kids are all that much different than we were (I am tail end booker/start of gen x), when I was starting working the chief sport of young people seemed to be going out drinking, and that hasn’t changed all that much, and from what I have read, that hasn’t changed in small town America and urban America.
With smoking, a lot less young people are smoking, but to be honest it is still far too much IMO, from what I can tell more than a few of the younger generations still view smoking as something to rebel with, as being hip and so forth, and from what I can tell smoking rates have pretty much hung out around 20% and haven’t budged.
I think terms like liberal and conservative when talking social behavior are dangerous, because it leads into the political definitions and all kinds of mischief, like, for example, that somehow being politically liberal leads to promiscuity and so forth, when the reality is that when it comes to sex, doesn’t seem to have a political ideology, the only difference being is that political conservatives place this huge emphasis on no sex before marriage, on the kind of sex people should be happening and so forth, all the while acting pretty much the same as liberal folks (take a gander at rates of things like teen pregnancy, childbirth out of marriage, adultery and divorce, in the so called ‘red’ areas).
In terms of politics, I think it is very hard to nail down the millenials, among other things they have such low voter turnout it is very hard to tie them down to anything. What studies seem to be showing is that socially they tend to be more liberal than older people, which is no surprise, even among young people from conservative backgrounds there just isn’t the fire about social issues, and according to polls a lot of younger people in that age group are turned off enough about the social agenda associated with conservatives that they won’t vote for a politicians they might otherwise vote for, the whole religious right agenda especially is a big turn off (among other things, Millenials more than any other generation tend to be the least religious and more likely to say they are spiritual or to take from all faiths). I think talking to people in this generation that fiscally they are a lot more conservative, they are a lot less likely to believe that spending money or throwing money at things will solve them, though unlike what others would call a libertarian stance, they also are very concerned about the influence of big business on the government and don’t think that the answer, unlike the older so called libertarians, is to deregulate business either, for the reason that they don’t trust big business to do the right thing. I think they are tempted by libertarianism, but I think Rand Paul and the like are mistaken if he thinks he can get young people to vote for him, the problem with the libertarian mantle Paul is trying to take is that he mimics the social conservatism of the mainstream GOP, for example he is against same sex marriage, has said we should have an amendment to protect marriage, has said that people should be allowed to use their faith in discriminating against people and has said that civil rights laws were a mistake, that bans on gay sex overturned in the Lawrence Decision should be allowed, none of which is libertarian and young people know that.
As far as guns go, I suspect that also will be a matter of where they live. I suspect that the millenials are not of the ban guns school of thought, but I also suspect they don’t support the NRA position that guns should be sold freely without restriction, like buying gardening tools, either, from what I have seen I think younger people in this generation do want to see reasonable restrictions on gun ownership while maintaining the right of people to own them.
Misread “a few dozen” as “a dozen.” Nevermind.
Allowing businesses to do business with who they want based on whatever criteria they wish to use seems distinctly libertarian. Don’t think that all parts of the Civil Rights Act would have unanimous approval among millennials, even though it’s existed through our entire lifetimes.
My kids and their friends with whom i’ve had some very interesting conversations are social moderates and fiscal conservatives. As more enter the workforce those with relatively well paying jobs and those that are self supporting are leaning towards fiscal conservatism.
A few years ago I took a sociology course through our local CC. I was there for the simply fun of learning and older than most other students in the class. I was stunned by how many young people were voicing very conservative POV…both social and political. I live in a very liberal area, and these folks are vocal and in your face. What I discovered in this little classroom is that there are many more conservatives lurking in the privacy of their own homes than are willing to ‘out’ themselves in my community.
Was the second choice, the WH forgot to reorder enough Taybeh.
Study after study after study after study shows that Millenials have LESS sexual partners on average than their parents’ generation.
So either the studies are ALL off or perceptions are distorted by the media’s need to make “hook-up culture” a thing. My money is on the latter especially as someone who works in sexual health.
By the way, relevant CNN headline story today: http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/12/living/pew-religion-study/index.html
ETA: Also, regarding AIDS, most people still do not realize that it is a chronic disease now more than a death sentence. As an HIV counselor, that is usually the first thing I have to explain to people who are freaking out. That knowledge is NOT wide-spread nor is the information on new preventative measures (such as PReP for example).
Of course, we have the web and iPhones!
I don’t know why this is surprising. Each generation tends to react to the excesses of the previous generation in a pendulum like fashion.