Because if you haven't noticed, there is a general sense among the younger generations that the many, many ills of yesteryear are actually bad, not just "business as usual" and instead of tolerating them we should start to fight back.
The people who are carrying the torch of this mentality were teenagers and twenty-something during the Obama administration. Now they are all grown ups.
The better question is, why were Boomers so willing to go along with these policies (and far worse) for decade after decade?
Oh BS. It’s clearly apparent over the last few election cycles that if your side does something, “it’s unfortunate, but we’re trying to fix it” and if the other side does something “they are horrible people who are monsters”.
It comes down to nothing more than scoring political points.
I'm curious what side you perceive standardUser to be on. They are making the case that this wasn't acceptable under the Obama administration either to younger generations, but they lacked the political power and voice to do anything about it. Voice and political power that they are now finding as they age into voting enfranchisement and build political action blocs.
> Gitmo’s a great example. Under Bush it was immoral. Under Obama? Barely heard a thing.
Your history is off. Obama tried to shut it down until it was overturned by Congress.
As soon as the political reality of transferring the prisoners became apparent, all Congressmen blocked the closure of Gitmo. No one wanted to take the prisoners into their own state. No one wanted to be the Senator or Representative to say "I accepted 100 Al-Qaeda detainees into our local prisons! And now our local judges have to put into public trial under our protection, with jury members selected from our State / Cities"
So on the one hand, we had President Bush literally open Gitmo. In the other hand, we have President Obama who tried to close it... but failed because of other more powerful political forces. And yet, you draw a false equivalence between the two.
EDIT: This hits a political pet peeve of mine. False equivalence and whataboutisms. Instead of seeing the differences, a political group deploys propaganda to get their side to believe that there's a false-equivalence on an issue.
And now that you're aware of false-equivalences, I hope that moving forward you'll be better equipped to avoid them in the future. Its an exceptionally powerful propaganda technique. In general, if a group is desperately deploying propaganda to make you believe that two things are equivalent... they probably aren't equivalent.
Your sarcasm is noted, but I don't believe it is in the spirit of this forum to talk in that manner. Its much better to leave the sarcasm in Reddit.
If you do not wish to discuss a matter seriously, then there's no real point in discussing it at all. This website mostly aims at a higher level of discussion than other websites.
"On 20 May 2009, the United States Senate passed an amendment to the Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2009 (H.R. 2346) by a 90–6 vote to block funds needed for the transfer or release of prisoners held at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp" [0]
Bush started Guantanamo as an extrajudicial prison and stocked it full of prisoners. Obama managed to release many of those prisoners and tried (and failed) to shut it down.
Obama got plenty of criticism from the left for things like drone strikes, extrajudicial killings, deportations, the intervention in Libya, the weakness of Obamacare and TPP to name a few. Most of this was during his second term (when that massive group of people I keep mentioning started becoming politically active).
> Gitmo’s a great example. Under Bush it was immoral. Under Obama? Barely heard a thing.
Anecdotes are just that. Just because you weren't paying attention to it doesn't mean it didn't happen.]
Left wing media I paid attention to definitely did not drop the issue of Guantanamo during that time. Just google some common sites - MotherJones, commondreams, Obama, and Guantanamo and you will see the criticism did not disappear for Obama not forcing the issue to an unwilling Congress.
I think it's a mistake to look at "the last few election cycles".
The people making all of this noise were children during that time. Just about everything has changed in the last 5 or so years, and a lot of that change appears to be driven by the historically massive and historically diverse Millennial generation.
That's absurd. Politics changes all the time, we just happen to be in a more tumultuous moment than in the last 3 or 4 decades. Nothing spectacularly unique, but different enough across countless metrics to warrant a fresh look at the very least. The trends and patterns we relied on for many decades just don't stand up any longer.
> many, many ills of yesteryear are actually bad, not just "business as usual" and instead of tolerating them we should start to fight back
And somehow that moment of clarity by pure coincidence happened on January 20, 2017? Sorry, not buying that particular bridge.
> The people who are carrying the torch of this mentality were teenagers and twenty-something during the Obama administration.
Literally the same people in the press who promoted the "people in cages" thing were working at the same placed during Obama admin and virtually none of them said anything. There were some very small number that did, but the overwhelming majority said nothing and certainly there was no widespread public outrage about it and no employees told their employers they wouldn't work for any contract with Obama administration because it puts people in cages. No, not buying this bridge either - it was several years ago, it's not decades. They were the same grown ups then as they are now. Only back then their tribe was in power, so outrage wouldn't be appropriate.
The people who are carrying the torch of this mentality were teenagers and twenty-something during the Obama administration. Now they are all grown ups.
The better question is, why were Boomers so willing to go along with these policies (and far worse) for decade after decade?