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The really funny part of saying that estate taxes are part of equality of opportunity and not equality of outcome is that it literally equalizes the final outcomes of people's lives. What's really meant, of course, is that TheImmigrant wants to murder nine-tenths of this forum through starving them to death, but whatever, the blood wouldn't be on his hands when the "lazy" die off. Equality of opportunity and of outcomes are entirely intertwined and you, like TheImmigrant, have to be willfully redefining them to present them as mutually exclusive without resorting to market-liberal blather.
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Dec 26, 2014 19:09
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TheImmigrant posted:Dead people have no property rights. With equal opportunity, a rich man dies rich, and presumably more comfortable than a waster. Estate taxes ensure that the rich man's offspring are not given a head start on everyone else because of circumstances that have nothing to do with their own merit. Haha, you smug little bitch. Nice slicing and dicing you got going on there, with the sauce of "waster" (read- low-wage service worker) besides. The point is that in order to equalize opportunities you must equalize outcomes. Money must be taken from people who accumulated it from inheritance, elite schooling must not be anything other than randomly available if it exists at all. Corporations may not be able to exist if we really, truly want equality of opportunity at a radical level. Conversely, equality of outcomes does require equality of opportunity as well, because there are many ephemeral things you can't transfer between people. Of course, the two diverge if we take them to shithead interpretations, but there's no need if we're communicating, and if we aren't, I might as well be asking whether you gotta pay extra when the hooker sees your face.
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Dec 26, 2014 19:18
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TheImmigrant posted:You concede the argument so early, with the ad hominem. When the revolution comes, people who write like this will be assigned a debate coach, who will smack them whenever they use formalism in informal communications. Happy Boxing Day!! Also, an adhominem would have been stopping there, or speculating on whether you're morbidly obese, or just regular type, ya big lardbucket. quote:No, money is taken from estates. An estate is the vestigial property of a dead person. It is by operation of law that an estate becomes the personal property of an heir - there is no reason that the law cannot dictate another recipient of a wealthy decedent's estate. Elite schooling should be reserved for those with elite intelligence who are willing and able to apply it. Opportunity comes at the beginning. Outcome is the end. People have varying ability and motivation; start them all at an equal footing, and they will wind up in different places. Equal outcome requires hobbling the gifted so that the mediocre are able to wind up in the same place. I don't know about you, but I'd much rather see my society defined by the accomplishments of the gifted than anchored to the inertia of the mediocre. You're starting out with a muchness of jabbering that actually, really, communicates that equality of outcomes are necessarily extralegal instead of whatever stupid bullshit you intended to communicate. This is an improvement, because it makes you seem more and more like a deranged schizophrenic pretending to be a world traveler. Okay, now determine what intelligence is, how to measure it accurately and without cultural effects, how to evaluate someone's ability to apply intelligence, whether disabilities that can be treated should disqualify you from getting a good education... Note that while you're probably going to ignore these, you actually should think about them on the off chance you think about anything. More importantly, you wrote this without reading the part where I said, "to shitheaded interpretations", or else you don't actually want to communicate, just sermonize. Well, preacher man, gently caress you. At least the dipshits cackling for violent revolution want to do something, instead of being a pasty blob of white-collar, centrist smarminess until they retire and instead become someone's boring great-uncle. quote:This is true, which is why 'equality of opportunity' is necessarily a term of art. We can't guarantee that everyone is born with equal intelligence or physical ability. The ideal is to guarantee that everyone has the opportunity to realize their potential fully. As an ideal, it can never be fully attained, but that's no reason not to continue working toward that idea. Actually, there is. For example, the institutional knowledge associated with corporations may be worth the lack of entrepreneurship opportunities. Technocracy may prove to be inferior to democracy. quote:You sound angry. How's that working out for you? Didn't your mother ever tell you that if you go through life sneering, your face will freeze that way? Oh, that explains why you have that expression on all the time.
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Dec 26, 2014 19:38
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TheImmigrant posted:PolySci undergrads are so disappointing these days. I'm not a political science undergraduate, you arrogant sack of poo poo. But at least I know that you can't or won't respond to any criticism of your revival of Plato, even something as meek as "how do you find philosopher-kings" or "maybe this technocratic system isn't as good as democracy". quote:I'd put good money on most of the cackling dipshit armchair revolutionaries here making GBS threads their pants at the first whiff of tear gas, and certainly being more bloblike and pasty and killself miserable than my circle of deviants and bon-vivants. Okay, whatever, keep masturbating to how deviant you are (hot wax, maybe you're a queer of some kind, maybe even daring the whip) and how much better your circle of pretentious blowhards is than the other circle of pretentious blowhards.
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Dec 26, 2014 19:52
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TheImmigrant posted:That's, like, awesome. Yes, I might be gay - you might call me a human being. I'm sorry I distressed you enough to interrupt your circle-jerk over whether Marx is really cool; or really, REALLY cool. Scintillating debate you have, son. I'm a fag myself, so you should shut up. In any case, your entire schtick is being incredibly hostile and pretending that someone who disagrees with you on one thing disagrees on all things. If I acted like you, I'd be using your insistence that we should have no equality of outcomes because that impairs (ha-ha) "geniuses" like you (ha) to conclude that you disagree that the Holocaust was a bad thing. I doubt you'll understand why, because age not only doesn't guarantee brains, it also doesn't guarantee wisdom and you may well think legitimately that the only way to believe in 100% estate taxes and redistributive school funding is if you're "open to heterodoxy", which seems to mean sucking your dick. Well, I don't want syphilis, so I'll pass on the fellatio. EDIT: 100k doesn't make you rich anywhere in the rich countries unless you're single and devote all your disposable income to looking rich, but it's still enough for a good lifestyle.
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Dec 26, 2014 20:37
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Disinterested posted:Why do you keep offering lower and lower $ values by way of example, and what does it have to do with anything? He's saying that 100k US$ a year doesn't make you rich except in poor countries, in order to say something about how blah blah blah Che Brigade blah you shouldn't say anything nasty about the upper middle class or anyone within that august realm.
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Dec 26, 2014 20:47
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TheImmigrant posted:It's unlikely in London, with safe and affluent as parameters. Feel free to prove me wrong. So am I right that this is an elaborate way to say that we shouldn't say nasty things about the UMC, or what? Bip Roberts posted:Has anyone suggested I'll do it. We can fix the class system over a period of decades by pushing one step at a time for full safety nets, economic democracy, the leisure society, etc. without needing more than the usual levels of violence in a liberal democracy. In theory.
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Dec 26, 2014 20:53
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social democracy
Disinterested posted:Good luck, social democracy is on the wane in Europe. Given infinite political will and no gigantic economic disasters...
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Dec 26, 2014 21:00
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Disinterested posted:That is a fairly universal problem - it nonetheless does not explain why the United States has a nominal top rate of corporate tax higher than any European country. I'm quite certain corporations in the US are paying a greater proportion of their income in corporation taxes than comparable British ones. People in the US don't like corporations all that much, so it's not a winning proposition from a voting perspective and the notion of appealing to something being good policy is anathema to our political culture. Thus, it remains an internal business Republican talking point.
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Dec 26, 2014 21:47
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spacetoaster posted:You say that, but what are the political leanings of most gun nuts/veterans/police in the U.S.? I won't stand for your filthy innuendos about right-wingers, but I will return your fantasies about the death of a perfect stranger with gruesomer ones.
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Dec 26, 2014 23:46
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Mirthless posted:I have a US-centric question related to this topic: While I know that it didn't fix the problem, we were at least able to band-aid the class divide after the great depression for a little while, weren't we? Was it the New Deal that did that? And, provided the political will ever existed, could a New Deal II ever happen, or would that be impossible with the way the global economy works now? More important was the aftermath of WW2, when virtually all of the nations in the American sphere worked out various deals for prosperity with their citizens. Some of these were imposed like in West Germany and Japan, while others were directly negotiated at the ballot box like with Britain and France, or left somewhat implicit as in the US (and the fact that the US was one of six or seven industrial nations which weren't a burned-out husk, and the only one that had been a major power before the war, helped). These largely lasted until broad economic crises in the late 1970s destroyed the march towards the affluent society described by Galbraith, Keynes, and many of the early social-democrats (this is where people stopped getting more money for greater productivity) and the austere governments of Thatcher, Reagan, and so on replaced this liberal ideology. Of course, the New Deal was a large part of the American idea of liberalism too. So with that said, it's possible to go to a similar attitude of prosperity-first, but a rerun would require a gigantic series of crises that first (and this is my speculative interpretation of why these deals were adopted, mind) cleared out the market-liberal beliefs that hold so many today and discredited them entirely, and secondly reinvigorated idealistic liberalism and led people to hold to the ideals of liberalism across the board (or democratic socialism, or social democracy, or whatever you want to call it). That is, the Great Depression and World War 2. We've had a long depression, but it hasn't actually discredited austerity or conventional economic theory as of yet where the Great Depression opened up room for developmentalists in the US and Keynes's theories in Europe. Nor, hopefully, will we have a global war where the inhuman violence of one side transforms the war into one of ideals anytime soon.
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Dec 27, 2014 03:56
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Smerdyakov posted:http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-15/cost-of-college-degree-in-u-s-soars-12-fold-chart-of-the-day.html There hasn't been a 1120% increase in costs. After inflation, the real increase in the price of college has been a mere 400% in tuition and fees and 260% when we consider room and board as well. This is roughly 100% more for tuition than private nonprofits have increased, while the overall price increase has stayed similar. In the last 30 years, 48 states in the USA have slashed their real expenditures on higher education (without increasing their amount spent to account for the increases in enrollment), and the federal government spending is- well, the DoEd budget tables are difficult to parse, but it has increased to keep pace with increasing enrollements, although the majority of provided federal aid is loans (roughly half of all students get Pell grants, but Stafford loans give out more money overall) and thus only displaces the cost to after graduation. So in other words, we have slashed money spent on higher education (to the point where Alaska might well fully privatize its colleges by 2030 and several others not far behind) and offloaded the majority of that cost onto students. We are getting what we have paid for.
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Dec 27, 2014 15:22
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TheImmigrant posted:Not to mention that colleges now use students as a conduit for federal loans. No one incurs any risk with student loans, other than students. Loan originators incur no risk, as the federal government guarantees the loans. Colleges get whatever ridiculous tuition they demand, and facilitate debt serfdom for legions of 18-year olds who'd never be approved even for financing on a used car. At 22, those students are left with a $160,000 piece of shitpaper, stating that s/he has memorized the collected works of Frantz Fanon, and is therefore qualified to pull espresso at Starbucks. For-profit colleges are pure poo poo, but blaming colleges for raising tuition when direct funding has been slashed and enrollments are increasing (for reasons that are ancillary and outside of the power of colleges to change) is ridiculous. Many of them are chasing elite status and anticipating a barring of college to the majority of people, but this is once again a fairly rational action given the perceived powerlessness of universities against these grand changes, not that the typical administrators would do poo poo to change the world if they could.
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Dec 27, 2014 18:08
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It's funny how people pull out their good friend who makes a cool six figgies working as a welder (and how much overtime is he pulling, eh? That's what I want to know) to respond to the fact that people hold having a degree in higher esteem, hold jobs where you don't work with your hands in higher esteem, and believe that manufacturing is on its way out in the USA. Even if there were millions of jobs of slack capacity in terms of skilled trades to take on all the fools in non-STEM degrees, mind.
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Dec 27, 2014 22:29
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TheImmigrant posted:Higher esteem from which people? With most Creative Writing or Sanskrit BAs, I think 'my waiter' and/or 'debt serf.' Don't get me wrong - I love studying linguistics and history - but they are hobbies. Most liberal arts disciplines are professionally worthless without a PhD, and planning on a tenured career in academia these days is only slightly more realistic than planning on becoming a lottery winner. Well, frankly, I hold Gen-Xers in much lower esteem than Boomers, since at least some Boomers died at Kent State and in Vietnam while you fucks voted Reagan in again and cheered the destruction of welfare. But to answer your question, from themselves, their parents, and their social circle. The average person looks down on manual labor, and frankly, I bet you do too, even if it's somewhat higher for trades jobs than for the contemptible service worker. The average person respects a college degree, which is why they're considered materially relevant to many jobs even with English, history, forestry, chemistry, and other "useless" degrees. Furthermore, there's an easy solution that doesn't involve gigantic social engineering projects built around Stalinistic glorification of manual labor, or exalting working 60-70 hours a week even more than already happens.
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Dec 27, 2014 23:32
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TheImmigrant posted:I have a lot more respect for a plumber or a long-haul truck driver than I do for a theoryhead with a BA and no practical knowledge of anything. Service workers, well, I worked in restaurants and bars for over a decade before and during grad school (thanks to my liberal arts BAs), so I have a high degree of empathy for them too. Fascinating, then, that this is all just self-loathing twisted into urging people not to do what you did. Are you dissatisfied with your life? quote:Are you sure about that? Your 'average person' might not match what I consider an average person. Blue-collar types tend to scorn eggheaded Philosophy graduates who couldn't tell you the difference between Phillips and flathead screwdrivers. HR types won't hire most unqualified liberal artistes without a hook or connection, and STEM types tend to think they are retarded dupes whose primary aptitude is abstract bullshit. That leaves Mom and Dad who are SO PROUD of your degree in Semiotics from Directional State University, and whose 401k portfolios benefit handsomely from SLABS whose value continues to grow the more students mortgage their futures to Sallie Mae. I'm an "STEM type", you dipshit, and actually, most people in the real sciences look down on engineers and programmers more than on history majors or fine arts types. At least, this is judging from casual conversation. Blue-collar types may hate "eggheads" enough to zero in on the bastards in the liberal and fine arts over science majors or prissy engineers (not quite my experience, admittedly), HR types may greedily snap up biology majors, and once you graduate with a BS in Astronomy maybe you do become a raging rear end in a top hat. But in any case, what I get from your last sentence is that young people should kill their parents. Lol. quote:Enlighten us with your easy solution. Debt forgiveness and free tertiary education. These are policies other countries have in place, are mainly a matter of political will to implement, and involve very little shifting of people's fundamental beliefs, and what would shift wouldn't be in the insane direction you're espousing.
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Dec 28, 2014 00:11
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TheImmigrant posted:Debt, and the unconscionable way in which the education industry encourages it, is my big concern. My liberal arts degrees were on full scholarship. Emerging from school without debt changes the analysis. I didn't have any serious job prospects with my undergrad degrees, but I didn't have life-ending debt hanging over my head either. I'm quite happy with my life, but I'm self-employed in a very narrow niche law practice. (I counsel against law school even more strongly for most people.) Funnily enough, you're pure poo poo at communicating electronically as far as I can tell, since what's coming across is a lot of sneering about those goddamn liberal arts majors and whining about the previous generations. quote:Why do you sound so angry all the time? Lighten up, Francis. No, I don't advocate killing Boomers. I do take their 'esteem' over a worthless degree with a grain of salt though, since the American economy has changed quite significantly since they had to weigh the pros and cons of a university education, and most of them aren't aware of just how. Seeking understanding from that generation for the student debt crisis is akin to expecting them to appreciate St. Vincent's latest album or Quentin Tarantino's films. I sound angry because you're an rear end in a top hat and I don't want to be polite to you. I think that you're going about this in such a backwards way that I also don't want to explain that I was talking about why people go for college degrees and that in order to change things away from the current trends you need to address these factors instead of brutal contempt for the average American. quote:That's great. I also want a pet unicorn that can shoot powerful lasers from its eyes and breathe fire to incinerate my enemies on telepathic command. No you haven't. You've been pulling out the old saws about skilled trades and "STEM", that is, engineering and programming, far more than anything else. Getting people to view plumbing as prestigious requires a Stalinistic glorification of manual labor that even the USSR never really committed to, and the fact that drawing lots of jack from those jobs requires lengthy overtime means glorifying the 70-hour workweek in order to keep people from gazing enviously at 70k/year office jobs where you can go home by six. This is not a direction I, as one of the "Che brigade", think the world should go in. But now that you've brought out your "actual" opinion, I'd like to point out that it relies on the assumption that universities are raising tuition for no reason, rather than to cover the increased size of their student bodies and the lack of state and direct federal funding. If that isn't the case, chopping Stafford loans just means that fewer people will get into college period (and of course firing lecturers, cutting TA positions, leaving expanded dorms and lecture halls and the like to rot) as universities are unable to afford teaching them. The fact that you started up on haruffing about how nothing is free makes it pretty clear you won't accept that someone would use "free" as a metonym for "fees are kept essentially nominal to ensure all students have access to university education", so I'll just imagine you standing in a Wal-mart and bitching at people for mentioning "buy one get one free" sales.
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Dec 28, 2014 00:47
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TheImmigrant posted:Maybe you are just a poor reader. My spleen is reserved for rapacious university admins and banks. Oh, this is you being polite, then? I guess when I start hearing a vast sucking sound I'll know you're finally venting. quote:Lighten up, Francis. Be more polite if you want people to be nice to you. quote:A healthy, non-teenaged person doesn't need validation of his or her work by random muppets. Fact is, an 'unprestigious' plumber will usually have a much better quality of life than a bartender or file clerk, both in terms of income and debt. Quality of life being a function of income and debt solely tells me a lot about you, and explains most of your responses. In any case, I'm not comparing plumbers to bartenders. quote:Universities in the US are not these benevolent nurturers that you seem to think they are. Even the public state schools offer misleading statistics and flat-out lies to attract students, and more importantly, their federally-guaranteed loan money. Their tactics arguably constitute fraud in the inducement, although universities are still sacred cows in this society, as demonstrated by your reflexive defense of anything they do. Fact is that too many people go to college in the US right now. Many of them will suffer serious adverse effects from drinking the Kool-Aid and acting on the belief that any university education at any price is always a good thing. Yes, okay, the decline in state funding and the increase in enrollment has nothing to do with real increases in tuition, and universities are salting all their money away, not even pouring it into prestige projects. This isn't even necessary for your real argument, which is that only a few people should go to university. That's what I even said was one of the consequences of your approach in my view, so all this was bullshit you could have avoided by saying, "Yes, I believe that fewer people should go to universities in the United States."
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Dec 28, 2014 01:32
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TheImmigrant posted:Quality of life being a function of the prestige that strangers accord your profession tells me a lot about you. And I will absolutely stand by my assertion that earning $60,000 a year at a trade with minimal debt is preferable, in terms of quality of life, to earning $35,000 a year with $100,000 of debt without any equity in anything, but a BA with much 'esteem.' I never said that at any point, nor am I comparing plumbers and bartenders. Unless you know of jobs where you can make 70 grand a year doing filing, in which case please let me know so I can get my kid sister a job. However, a 70k job where you work 50 hours a week is not so obviously worse than a 100k job where you work 70 hours a week. If you want to have a family, for example, it's a difficult tradeoff, isn't it? quote:Do you disagree with the idea that too many people matriculate at colleges and universities in the US? I'd much prefer the German system. I can't actually answer this with yes or no and I feel assured that you'll ignore any qualifications so I'm going to respond with option three: go piss up a rope. But just in case, I do disagree with the idea that too many people go to colleges or graduate from colleges, with a lot of qualifications that I won't bother writing.
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Dec 28, 2014 01:44
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spacetoaster posted:Why is everyone going on about plumbers like that's some low skill, low pay job? Because manual labor is seen as inherently low-class in the American culture. spacetoaster posted:Computer parts referred to it as lower class work, and someone else was going on about rich people not being plumbers. Not really, no. They can make it to the upper middle class, but it's debatable whether anyone really keeps working as a skilled trade worker after they're independently wealthy, let alone how many people manage to become independently wealthy as trade workers. And their children don't work as plumbers, either.
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Dec 28, 2014 06:38
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computer parts posted:It is lower class. Median income is above average but that speaks more to how dogshit our wealth divide is here. Well, not really. A black plumber that's making 80 grand a year is living in a neighborhood where his or her white neighbors are making 30 grand a year. Or in other words, if you can make it to the upper-middle-class while black, you get the privilege of living in a lower-middle-class to working-class white neighborhood. Absurd Alhazred posted:It's almost as if you're bad at sarcasm. I'm saying that trades are a necessary, not a sufficient step. What you are effectively saying is "oh, well, since we live in a racist country let's remove that step and make it even less likely for minorities to succeed". The idea that you move from trades to white-collar requires a permanent underclass of some kind to prevent everyone from ending up in an office job within a few generations.
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Dec 28, 2014 06:42
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Absurd Alhazred posted:computer parts` argument is that the white-collar workforce needs to be more diverse. I am saying that the path from laborer/low-end-service to white-collar in my experience predominantly goes through trades. So by insisting on the status quo, where trades are not promoted anywhere nearly to the same level as debt-inducing college, it decreases the chance of the white-collar workforce diversifying. I wasn't talking about paths from white-collar to trades; that is going to become more and more likely as the realization that white-collar is saturated sinks in. As for white-collar/trades to laborer, well, there's nothing barring that happening for people who aren't part of the 1%. If I come from a family with a few white-collar and blue-collar people and I don't make it, I guess I'll labor. That requires a different front of, say, raising the minimum wage, or introducing mincome, or whatnot, to make sure that those jobs are manageable. The problem is that people want upward mobility and they don't want to fall. In order for this to happen, there needs to be an underclass to provide a barrier against downward mobility and this is largely a matter of race in the USA. Ending white supremacy means significantly rethinking class relationships or creating a new, non-racial underclass that can provide that same barrier. If white-collar, blue-collar, pink-collar, etc. were all roughly equivalent and mobility was largely lateral, much, though not all, of these issues would be resolved, but that of course requires, if not full communism, at least something very close to it.
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Dec 28, 2014 06:53
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Qublai Qhan posted:Well there are a lot of numbers there but looking at it casually so far my conclusions would be this: Applied sciences, business, and agricultural degrees are really the only undergraduate degrees that prepare you for a job, though, so it's not surprising to see them doing better than sciences or arts.
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Dec 28, 2014 06:57
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Keep in mind, plumbers and high-school teachers make about the same amount of money. Plumbers don't get wealthy or even UMC without owning a business or living in a really tony area.
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Dec 28, 2014 07:01
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Qublai Qhan posted:Yes, I agree. That was part of what I was saying and 420DD said: It's probably distorted somewhat by the current depression. Older data suggests that overall "hobby" majors like fine arts or sociology tend to have periods of irregular/unemployment early on and then steady employment afterwards with the occasional upset, as compared to getting hired early on for engineering, compsci, accounting, etc.
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Dec 28, 2014 07:15
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spacetoaster posted:The son who was raised working in the company and prepared to run it would know quite a bit actually. I doubt the janitor is going to show up the day after the bosses death and just start paying bills and organizing schedules. No, they wouldn't necessarily. Labor is specialized to such an extent in heavy industry that having a doctorate in materials science and 30 years of experience in steelmaking just allows you to understand the presentations different divisions make. Light industry is better, but I still doubt that a developed WidgetCo is going to be immediately comprehensible just because Entelbuch Widgetson Jr. filed business cards and made coffee when he was ten. Dynasties also have been pretty ineffectual in practice, and successful companies that are still owned by a particular family generally leave the actual operations to professionals. Absurd Alhazred posted:Essential, by which I meant "necessary" but it's getting late and I was losing patience because of this pointless detour, is not sufficient. You want to wait with everything else until you find the "racism" switch in American society and turn it off. I'm saying there's stuff to do in the meantime, that is necessary for that switch to happen. It hasn't, but eliminating universities from consideration isn't a good idea either.
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Dec 28, 2014 07:24
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spacetoaster posted:Okay. You're talking about huge factories with hundreds (thousands?) of workers. I don't know crap about that. Why would you do that when you can have him trained as a manager and facilitator instead of assuming that sweeping up the shop floor when he was twelve is going to materially prepare him for taking over? Even a tiny, tiny business with workers in the single digits can have ridiculous levels of specialization when it comes to manufacturing. It's also worth noting that small businesses are economically inefficient compared to larger firms.
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Dec 28, 2014 15:54
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EB Nulshit posted:So why doesnt everyone in here just abandon their dependents, go back to school in something that will get them a solid job, work for a few years, use their skills to start a business, and then, when only 1/10 of you succeed, that person can use their millions to support changes in their own communities? OK, yeah, I'm going to use one million dollars to eliminate class distinctions within the Detroit Metropolitan Area, sure. I guess I could build a decently sweet commune with that kind of money.
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Dec 29, 2014 03:35
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EB Nulshit posted:Whatever thing they already do in the time left over after they work just to live, it could be done more effectively by multiple people paid full time to do it instead. And if they had a shitload of money, they could hire people. Greetings. I'm using the millions I made with my "punch therapy massage" program to pay people to not be sexist. What's in your wallet?
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Dec 29, 2014 16:01
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EB Nulshit posted:Did you study that in college? If you never went to college, congrats, you're off the hook. If you did, then you should drop everything in your life and learn something useful, probably through college, and then use those skills to make millions. I've got millions of dollars from it that I'm using to bribe people into pretending they're not sexist. If that isn't doing good in the world I don't know what is!!
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Dec 29, 2014 17:07
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wateroverfire posted:FYGM is kind of a natural reaction when you've worked your rear end off at something. When you've given it sweat, tears, years of your life, etc. To then be told you have to give it up to support others who didn't do that work, by someone who didn't do that work, because **Social Justice** (and that Hold on though, you're still giving things up no matter what. If someone is getting mad because they're being asked to spend money on the homeless, or has apoplexy at the very thought that sexism and racism might still be a factor, why are they going to suddenly fork over money or change how they behave because the guy doing it is wearing a suit? For that matter, people that are highly engaged with the system are unlikely to try and change it, either. You didn't see the Rockefellers rushing down to join the Freedom Riders.
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Dec 29, 2014 17:31
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you didn't earn that because you had ADVANTAGES), is at best going to turn you off to whatever that person is trying to tell you. Also, when you have expenses and you're also trying to make your ends meet it's kind of annoying to be told you should be doing more by someone coasting through their super senior year on their way to moving back in with their parents.
EB Nulshit posted:Actually, just use your millions to pay ten people to work full-time doing whatever it was you thought was activism before. Actually, I think I'll be spending time figuring out a machine that you can hook into your circulatory system to avoid death by sleep deprivation, building one and then hooking you up to it, a good couple IVs, a catheter, and then putting you to work 24/7.
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Dec 30, 2014 01:51
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wateroverfire posted:This is WhatIAmTalkingAboutInThePostYouQuoted.txt. Oh, hey, I missed this one. Okay, see, the problem is that you're presenting something that is nebulous enough for you to pretend isn't inconsistent, but actually is. Either people don't want to do the right thing because it disadvantages them, or they're put off by the fact that respectable people aren't calling for it, but both can't be true. I guess you're going with number two, which is that if people just dressed nicely and were fawning in their politeness, cash would start flowing in. Unfortunately, there's a lot of evidence to suggest that asking really nicely doesn't stop people from being racist or sexist and opposing remedies to these problems, and there's even more evidence to suggest that people aren't stupid, and can recognize when they're being asked to screw themselves for other people. Basically, option A is more likely to be correct. Even if that weren't the case, though, and it really was possible to sucker people into voting in a revolutionary vanguard party just by putting on a suit and talking like a corporate consultant, there's still the ethical considerations of lying and cheating people. Not that you'll consider such things as important, mind. But that being said, you seem to think that your second sentence contradicts what I wrote. Indeed, it supports it. After all, if people engaged with the system are the only ones who can change it (and let's leave aside the basic question of whether the civil rights movement amounted solely to talking LBJ into waving a magic wand because that's likely to be the sort of conversation that genuinely, for-real, pisses me off) and the situation needs changing, obviously it's because they don't get involved or believe change is needed all on their lonesome!
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Dec 30, 2014 04:05
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