What we should conclude is that the social progress opposing Republicans have no clue about those on social welfare or those who need assistance, and continually insist that low wage means low skill and low effort, and that this kind of thinking is dangerous and ignorant. People should not be lambasting those on public assistance.
I don’t see “welfare” as a bad word, no one should, and to say that we have too many food stamps or too much welfare and those poor people oh why don’t they just get another job and quit complaining means precisely shit when they ARE working hard but they’re stuck in situations that prevent easy upward mobility.
What you should learn from that is that wealth does not necessarily mean genius, or hard work, that it has a lot to do with luck. Because of that, it is perfectly fair to ask the rich to pay a little more in public assistance, to have higher taxes so we can have daycare centers for working parents, and it is perfectly fine to increase the minimum wage, or force companies to accept unions, because these people that those programs are helping are not stupid or lazy but in many cases hard working and smart, but they haven’t had the same breaks as the rich to move out of their shack and into a house
You know, it’s like you didn’t even read my response.
Yes, the game favors money. A factor you’re not taking into account, though, is that money conveys more access to those who *write *those rules. As such, the wealthy are able to have laws passed which allow them, and only them, to become even richer. And that’s the problem- the poor don’t have that kind of access to the inner machinery.
I kind of wonder at this point if anyone realizes that my original post was sharply critical of Republicans and **one of the **arguments they make against social welfare programs.
The iron-fisted control of the legislative process by the rich that you postulate simply doesn’t exist. If it did, we would all be working in ChemicalDeathCo’s mile-deep pits for fifty cents an hour. For that matter, we probably wouldn’t get that fifty cents. We certainly wouldn’t be able to vote (which is the poor sector’s access to that “inner machinery,” and in point of fact, all but the wealthiest people have exactly that same access, no more, no less). Also, I am indeed taking into account who writes those laws–but you’re not taking into account the vast influence that many, many decidedly un-wealthy people have and have had on the legislative process.
What I am trying–evidently unsuccessfully–to convey is that there are indeed powerful arguments in favor of social welfare and income redistribution, but that the rich are in some manner undeserving of their wealth is not one of them. If the left would get off that particular soapbox, the true arguments in favor of social progress would be that much clearer and more evident.
In the French Revolution, the first thing the mobs did was kill off all the rich people. Funny thing is, doing that didn’t make the peasants any richer, nor did it create social justice (or any other kind). We can’t engage in class warfare to create a better society; that doesn’t work, and it’s not morally justified. “Kill/rob all the evil, undeserving rich people” is counterproductive.
I really do wish that the political left–whose views I largely agree with–would abandon these simplistic, populist, slogan-driven approaches to progressivism. We want to bring about these changes to create a better, happier society, not to avenge the fact that the guy next door could buy a Lexus and we couldn’t.
I’m aware that it’s some kind of cognitive bias. If you’re bringing that up because you disagree with something I’ve said and want to use the mention of that effect as an extremely backhanded and roundabout way of both expressing your disagreement and insulting me at the same time, I’d like to note that a) that is a cheap trick that only pseudo-intellectuals use and b) this is the BBQ Pit, so “You’re out of your mind, you diseased asshole” is a more appropriate way of expressing your disagreement.
Parenthetically, what kind of cognitive bias is it when you elevate your own opinion to such a status that you think that disagreeing with you is *ipso facto *evidence of a cognitive bias? (Just wondering. I have to give you the benefit of the doubt here.)
If you are saying the Republicans I am criticizing are the ones who suffer from the DKE (whatever it may be; I haven’t bothered to look it up), then please disregard the above.
Without arguing against your thesis, or anyone else’s points, actually the vast majority killed in the Terror were peasants. Loads more who then died in the decades’ long wars that followed on. The Revolution was not a social revolution but an ideological one.
And one of the first things the revolutionaries did was to ban trade unions ( the Loi Le Chapalier ).
Which law remained until the mid 1860s, long after the British capitalists had reluctantly made their peace with unionisation. Rather intending proletarian or peasant control — they executed Babeuf, after all — the Revolution was a triumph for the sort of people who are now the political class of *today. *It was kicked off by aristocrats, co-opted by lawyers, and then entrenched the social and monetary power of the bourgeoisie.
What I find amusing is the assumption is that most of the rich are rich through their own hard work. As I recall, the vast majority are rich for the same reasons that those named Bush, Romney, Kennedy, and Hilton (Paris, that is) are rich. The rules are geared really well to making sure that amassed wealth stays there. Mobility to, and from, the extremes of wealth and poverty are pretty damned rare.
What I find amusing is the assumption that most of the rich got that way through luck, lying, stealing, cheating, or some combination thereof. I’ve spent long enough in the world of work, and of business, to know that that assumption simply isn’t true. It’s a comforting and rather seductive point of view (for one thing, it allows one to rationalize one’s own perceived lack of material success by saying, “well, yeah, I’m honest, so I couldn’t beat all those crooks out there”), but it’s a fallacious one nonetheless.
And mobility upward from the extremes of poverty happens all the time. Perhaps not as often as you’d like, but the situations of the poor in this country are far less dire, and less hopeless, than those of the poor in many, many other countries.
Again, we as a society have to resist the urge to engage in class warfare. It weakens the motivation for actual social change and reform, and ignores the real reasons why we need it. I’m not going to be better off, and neither are you, if we burn Donald Trump at the stake.
You guys all remember Obama’s “you didn’t build that” speech, right? Beyond the obvious crowd of fucking pants-on-head-retarded, mouthbreathing, shit-for-brains idiots who asserted that Obama meant that business-owners didn’t build their own businesses, there was a second, less outspoken class of republicans who asserted that “in context, it’s worse! He’s basically saying that if you made it in life, you got there because you were lucky”.
No, you densemotherfuckers, in context it is correct. There is no arguing, under any circumstances, that your success is independent from your luck. Ever. You cannot make that argument, because in order for you to be successful in society, you pretty much by definition have to appeal to a great number of people, and those people are outside of your control
I’m reminded of an essay I wrote while on The Escapist…
And of course, the very first response I got was:
…So obviously, this concept can be a little hard for the particularly dense to grasp.
We’re already in class warfare, the rich have declared the poor expendable a long time ago when they opposed the social progress of minimum wage, 40 hour work weeks, overtime, child labor laws, unions, and any form of worker protection. Your problem is that you think it doesn’t happen
Every man who loses his job because his company outsources it is a victim of class warfare. Every women who makes less than a man doing the same job is a victim. Every man who works full time but cannot pay for his family is a victim. What legislators and the 99% are doing is simply taking back some of the power that’s been defaulted to the rich and powerful
You misspelled “unions.” That’s probably it’s own thread though.
I Liked the OP in general, wish it would’ve included a “boy who cried wolf” metaphor because someday the R’s will be right but as they’ve wasted their credibility on nonsense nobody will pay them any mind.
Then I thought, But really? ANOTHER antiRepublican circle jerk? I mean, it’s fun and all but frankly I’m tempted to read the Brad Pitt thread–presumably WWZ wasn’t any good–just so my break time can get an infusion of novel invective. Not sure Mr. Pitt has ever been scolded here before, could be interesting.
Then I thought maybe we should just shut up about the Rs because they never seem to do anything [del]right[/del] correct, and just assume they’re still fucking up until someone creates a specific non-pitting of them. Like when they introduce a well-planned, fully-funded state-run healthcare system that the wealthy can buy their own way out of in favor of whatever else it is rich people need to do to stay as healthy as they wanna be.
Then I began to giggle uncontrollably because I’m a little off balance this time of year and the coworkers began to stare.
Google “social mobility in the US” and you get more cites than you can shake a stick at. This pithy quote from Wikipedia (I know, but I’m hurried):
The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal published a series of front-page articles on this issue in May 2005.[8] Americans have often seen their country as a ‘land of opportunity’ where anyone can succeed despite his background. A study performed by economists at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development in 2009 found that Britain and the United States have the lowest levels of intergenerational mobility, or the highest levels of intergenerational persistence. The Nordic countries (Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland) and Canada tend to have high rates of social mobility. Norway proved to be the most mobile society.[9]
Plenty more, but you get the drift. I wasn’t wrong.
That, and skill and intellect. Primarily luck, though.
Really? What makes Apple’s iPod different from, say, Microsoft’s Zune? Now, sure, the Zune is a bad example because Microsoft was big enough to take that stinker, but a startup that put that much money into R&D and Marketing for what turned out to be an utterly failed product would have filed for bankruptcy before the first shipment was off the assembly line. What was the difference between the Zune and the iPod?
People liked the iPod more. It became a fashion statement, while having the Zune became culturally seen as “second best” - if you had the choice, you were picking the iPod. Now go ahead and tell me that the people at Apple were in control of this. Sure, the iPod was aesthetically pleasing, and quite a good machine, but plenty of aesthetically pleasing, useful machines come and go without such cult status. Apple got lucky. Not blindly lucky, but lucky.
Or, how about this: what’s the difference between me and the guy right next to me who got hit by the drunk driver? What was in my control that could’ve changed the outcome, had that driver swerved a little further to the left and left me plastered all over the apartment behind me? Nothing.
Really? Care to elaborate? Maybe with citations?
Oh, I agree. However, what you’re missing here is the historical context in which a lot of the rich-bashing has been going on. There are a couple of things worth noting here.
First off, it’s worth noting that we’ve gone through a period where a lot of people got rich at the expense at those who were already worse-off. Sure, plenty of that were the victims’ faults, but there’s going to be a lot of ill will against the rich involved in, say, Goldman Sachs, who made off like bandits from the suffering of the rest of us.
Then there’s people like the Koch brothers, who have taken their immense fortunes and decided to use them as a battering ram, essentially doing their best to buy politicians to stack the deck in their favor, making things even harder for the poor in the process.
And finally, there’s the massive lionization of the aforementioned rich by one half of the political spectrum. It hardly matters how they got rich (unless they won the lottery), they’re the good guys. At which point “class warfare”, and taking the rich people down a peg, seems to make perfect sense - they’re already being held in far higher esteem than is deserved. This shit doesn’t come from nowhere, you know.
…Bad example, society actually probably would be better off if we burned Donald Trump at the stake. Not because you or I is wealthier, but rather just because this is Donald Trump we’re talking about.
Actual social change and reform depends on class warfare (not necessarily in the violent sense, but more nearly so than Occupy Wall Street was). Based on historical experience, we won’t get it as a gift from upper-class liberal policymaking elites or any other. The most we can get that way is some halfassery like the New Deal.
It is amusing when rightwingers point out that unions are unnecessary today as there are social programs and work regulations ( both of which they resented when implemented and resent still ), when it is only due to union struggles that these were won back in the day.
Your opinions aren’t that far off from mine, so that really isn’t it. You’re just no where near as smart as you think you are, and you don’t even know it. It’s funny. You’re not a diseased asshole, you’re just someone who’s a lot more sure of himself than he has any right to be.