"One might argue that at least anti-Boomerism has a time limit; at some point they’ll be gone and people will have to blame something else. Still, this is a double-edged sword. You shouldn’t be racist or sexist. But if you have to be one or the other, be racist. You can be racist purely and honestly, but if you’re hetero, then sexism will inevitably make you miserable: it can’t help but be a love-hate relationship. Yet ageism is even worse: you are doomed to one day become what you hate. You may never be a Boomer."

There's a lot to quibble with in this piece, but on this part I'll repost here what I recently told Scott via email:

Is anti-old a particularly terrible form of prejudice? Here's where I disagree the most. How many genocides and mass killings in history have been penetrated based on age? People seem much more willing to commit atrocities in the name of oppressing a rival class, religion, or race. Oppression based on sex has been almost ubiquitous. But being anti-old people goes against the grain of human nature. That's a feature, not a bug. We all have old relatives, and we'll all be old. You seem to worry that this will lead to self-loathing and negative stereotypes that we'll all suffer from in the future. But I'm concerned more about the immediate problems of housing prices, the coming entitlements crisis, and finding an alternative to right- and left-wing forms of populism, which have the wind at their backs. Criticisms based on age never causes as much psychic damage to people as those based on race, sex, and sexual orientation.

The Boomers themselves I think showed how relatively benign prejudice against the old is. in the 1960s and 1970s, they talked about being oppressed by older generations. It never led to mass killings, or systematic discrimination or anything like that. In fact, the old continued to acquire more money and resources and the welfare state has been expanding with more and more money going to them. My hope is that ageism can be strong and compelling enough to motivate some budgetary and housing reforms, while being too weak to lead to the downsides we see in other forms of identity politics.