The British are Googling what the E.U. is, hours after voting to leave it

>They don't want to deal with change

Brexit is a pretty massive governance change. Everyone blames old people for its success, so I'm not sure why the narrative is that "old people won't vote for changes". I think it's less that older people are hostile to change as much as they've seen enough political opportunists and fraudsters that they have some firmness to their opinion (and again, this is a good thing). As Brexit shows, older people often do support changes that they believe would be beneficial.

I know that my dad, for example, would really like to see some stuff change, even though he's a senior citizen. But he's not excited by Bernie Sanders.

>for example, keep in mind that the internet is only 20 years old, as far as the public is concerned.

I am 1000% behind the idea of changing the laws that govern intellectual property and internet access, but this is not an issue that's age-dependent. Few people in any age strata care or think about this because if their news sources have any vested interest, it's in keeping IP laws locked down as tightly as possible. You'll find near-universal praise for copyright among every age group, because the public is presented only one side of the copyright debate. Laws expanding IP rights and locking down tech access routinely pass with minimal debate or interest. The exception to this is the hacker subculture, where it's not really an age-dependent thing either. Some older persons involved in certain niche businesses may remember slightly-less-oppressive copyright regimes and want to go back to that.

>Cut off the young, and you take away the meat of the progressives, and your society will stagnate.

This is everyone else's complaint too, but it's begging the question. "Progressiveness" is not inherently correct. Social insistence on certain behavioral standards is good. We don't want to "progress" out of all of our values.

>And if you want evidence that the old are just as susceptible to stupid politics, look to Fox News's target audience: the silver hair brigade. Or talkback radio.

I know a lot of young people who are into Fox News and conservative talk radio. People consciously pick the news outlets that agree with them most often because it's more pleasant to listen to someone encourage your beliefs than discourage them. Conservative media is not specifically targeted at old people; it's targeted at all conservatives.

I take the point, and that was a significant part of my own decision to vote remain.

I actually think that the EU itself may scale back the political union bit and push up the economic cooperation bit over the next decade. Then options for the future (on all sides) may open up again.

Those options will be for the ones under 30 now to explore of course and they voted heavily to remain.

> Brexit is a pretty massive governance change.

The people voting for Brexit want to stop the changes their seeing to their country. Brexit itself is a massive governance change, but the people going for it see it as the option to stop the change they see in the streets around them.

> internet = copyright issues

Bollocks. If that's all you think the internet means to people, intellectual property, you need to open your eyes considerably wider.

> "Progressiveness" is not inherently correct.

Not inherently, but a) our societies are far wealthier (fiscally and socially) and far more equitable than ever before, largely due to progression, and b) the world changes anyway, and you have to adapt to change. If it weren't for progressiveness, we'd still have slaves, women wouldn't be able to vote (or work, really), Africa and Asia would still be colonised, anti-semitism would still be the norm of polite society, so on and so forth.

> I know a lot of young people who are into Fox News and conservative talk radio

'Target audience'. You can have a lot of other members in your audience.

See, that kind of comments don't contribute anything to the conversation.

All you're doing is portraying yourself as a victim and hijacking the issue back into the bullshit "are we too pc" debate again, which quite frankly most people are already sick of.

That's misleading. The party elite was not living in much greater luxury than the general Soviet population. The party leaders did not indulge in Saudi-Arabia style opulence. They did kill a lot of people, but that's orthogonal to the question of material equality.

The Soviet Union and its satellites were one of the most egalitarian societies ever seen. What this shows is that equality and lack of socio-economic stratification is not necessarily a good thing. Of course already Marx/Engels were criticised along the lines of: any organisation strong enough to enforce equality will need to be so powerful, so brutal that it will not relinquish power after it has achieved economic equality, leading to all manner of negative consequences.