> But equally sinister is Schrodinger’s Boomer, who destroyed America through being simultaneously too far right and too far left. Progressives accuse Boomers of instituting market-worshipping neoliberalism, failing the challenge of climate change, and resisting the arc of history on issues like trans rights and Palestine. But conservatives accuse the same Boomers of overregulating everything in the name of “the environment”, shutting down the nuclear plants, and starting the trend towards “gay race communism” with their hippy-dippy 60s values.

The asymmetry in this both-sides argument is pretty stunning. If these really are points of criticism that conservatives deploy against Boomers, they’re pretty weak. Nuclear power c. 1970-90 was a threat to coal and oil, who largely funded the environmental lobbying groups arrayed against nukes. LGBTQ rights was a niche movement with barely any popular support until the late 90s. The hippies themselves were a fringe movement with isolated enclaves concentrated on the coasts, hardly representative of the median Boomer.

Schrodinger’s Boomer seems to at least partially decohere.

> Consider the way that “capitalism” gets used in socialist spaces. Although there are still a few classical Marxists with a clear conception of what capitalism is and why they hate it, most lefties just use “capitalism” to mean gestures around expansively at everything, with no concern about whether it involves market processes at all. Israel bombing Palestine? That’s capitalism. Trump arresting immigrants? Somehow that’s capitalism too.

Both groups are pretty explicit that they want to develop Gaza as beachfront property, a new Dubai or Singapore is what I’ve heard, so at best Scott could probably have worked a little harder to find a better example.