By the way, since will/drive/ambition are out of play, do you recognize the luck/chance aspects of heritage/genetics/“life circumstance” (definition pending, I assume) or were those also just figments of my allegedly variably (in)sincere attempts at redefinition?
I suppose that applies to a lot of them, but it’s not definitional. Many working-class people have high job skills and some go to college (community, at least). There are various definitions of the"working class" – but not so widely various that it is difficult to say who is and isn’t in it.
One can perhaps meaningfully subdivide the working class. From Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (originally published 1983), by Paul Fussell:
Also – Fussell seems to overlook this – the working class can also be subdivided racially/ethnically. Among other things Marx got wrong, a social class is not merely a set of people of the same economic status or economic function. It is also a sociological entity. People of the same class do not just work at the same kinds of jobs or earn the same level of income, they live in the same kinds of neighborhoods, go to the same schools, socialize with each other, marry each other, and absorb a similar outlook growing up. The white and black working classes are really two different social classes, and will remain so until socialization and neighborhood and intermarriage between them is a great deal more common than it is now. It’s not that either is above the other (except that the whites probably provide most of the high-proles as Fussell defines them); they’re like two halves of the same layer of the cake. Or thirds, or whatever, because the Latino working class is separate from both, etc.
I linked that post merely as an elucidation of the point, which is so obvious to anyone who pays attention that I hardly think it requires proof.
People do have free will, and the workers are not workers because they’re stupid – ignorant, perhaps, but not stupid. They were smart enough to organize vast and powerful labor unions, once upon a time. What you say cannot be any less obvious to them than it is to you. If it were – not that easy, but that simple – for working-class people to acquire a middle-class lifestyle like they could from the '50s through the '70s, then, while cultural factors might still be a holding-back force, a very great many more would acquire it than actually manage to do so, any more. No, the problem is that they now live in an economic environment where they simply can’t earn the kind of incomes that their parents could, they cannot enjoy the job security or benefits their parents could, etc.
Actually, you’re wrong, in a way that is so obvious it does not require proof.
No. If I stood next to someone who was buying a 72-inch plasma screen on credit, I am certain he would acknowledge the math that shows why it was a bad choice…but he’d still sign the credit card receipt.
But whether he did or didn’t – in that particular transaction and in others habitually – would not really make much difference in where he would be 10 years from now. What, you expect him to save his money to buy stocks or bonds? He still couldn’t buy enough to eventually finance a middle-class standard of living. Middle-class people can hardly do that any more, they mostly live paycheck to paycheck like the proles, and their earned income, not investment income, is what finances their lifestyles. Why don’t you say something about those silly middle-class spendthrifts who simply have to have homes in the 'burbs and send their kids to college?
What, specifically, is a “middle-class standard of living?”
Does it include plasma screens?
Neither choice is necessarily spendthrift. How many Disney vacations, cars for the kids, and unused gym memberships are also on the table?
I gather that for the good of America, plasma-screen technology must be banned.
Bullshit. It was a class noun. You used synecdoche, and you used it deliberately and knowingly.
Yeah!: It’s like you’re some kind of, uh, synecdouche!
[heads to Wikipedia to look up something completely unrelated]
Nope.
I assert that your success is partially due to the advantages your father gave you, dipshit.
I’d suggest that being uncommon is in some respect luck. For instance, in our society, being a tall, white, attractive guy helps someone in life. It gives them an advantage. I don’t doubt you and your father have, or had, high IQs. That’s luck . Having a good family who train you well. Having connections and acquaintances who you can network with. Having access to education. Growing up with good nutrition. Being taught the right accent. That one helped me, if my mother hadn’t taught me neutral-American English, I’d have had a tougher time.
There are countless things you don’t control that contribute to your life’s path. Your actions use these things as a base. Like Trump for instance, we’ll never know if he would have been a success without his dad’s empire. He obviously didn’t run it into the ground. But he certainly had some luck on his side, and by luck I mean things out of his control.
If you’re gonna grade people on accomplishments, I’d say the grades need to take account what they had to begin with. Your father, assuming what you say about him is true, and you’re not omitting relevant details (which seems possible, given that you are dishonest when it suits you), accomplished something great. You, have tons of advantages he didn’t, so I’d say your path is less impressive than his. Not that you aren’t impressive in general, you obviously have mastered a complex trade, and that’s a rare thing. And I respect that, even if I think a cosmic ray obliterated your empathy-node at some point in the past. 
Luck is a factor. In everyone’s life. Period. It isn’t the only factor.
Then you are inept at communication.
He isn’t always. I’m picking up on his “plasma screen” dog whistle, like his earlier “lottery winners who pissed away their fortunes” one. The message there is “it doesn’t matter if some poor people lose their votes - I know poor people are too stupid and irresponsible to vote since I once heard about a guy who spent his whole welfare check on Interne porn.”
Nowadays, almost certainly, and you know that much very well. But even more certainly, it includes a suburban or high-end-urban home and a college education – and those silly middle-class spendthrifts actually go into debt for such things, instead of saving the money to play the stock market, like you seem to idiotically and incomprehensibly think that even the workers should!
Cliven Bundy referred to “the negro” having less freedom now than under slavery. Do you suppose he was referring to one specific black person, or all of them? Saying “the liberal” implies all (or most) not just one. The word “the” makes it a clear synchecdoche , in my opinion.
Well, to be fair, even Martin Luther King wrote and spoke of “the Negro,” and many Jewish writers wrote and spoke of “the Jew,” that kind of collective ethnic noun was just conventional usage of . . . a time long past, which time produced Cliven Bundy and some even less savory things.
So. … to be fair, “the whatever” has long been used as a collective noun?
I have no sympathy for someone who goes into debt to have a large-screen plasma TV, no matter how much such an item is “required,” for the lifestyle.
I don’t recall mentioning the stock market. When did I?
Or else they are working multiple jobs trying to keep their family together and living hand to mouth, and realized that while voting is something that he would very much like to do, on any given week day there were always things that had more immediate real world importance, that take precedence over the abstract advantage of casting a vote. This is in many cases honestly the right and moral choice. It’s basically the same thing that was wrong with the poll tax. If they knew 4 years in advance, everyone could probably scrimp and save and pull together say 50 bucks to pay to vote. But since the sacrifice this would mean for the poor is much larger than that for the rich it was a very effective way to make sure that the “wrong” people wouldn’t vote. This is just poll tax mark2 but using time and the cost of obtaining the right supporting documents in the place of a more blatant tax.