HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Mexico is bursting at the seams with dogs. These dogs are not family members. They are alarm systems, beasts of burden to be used, abused, and thrown away. Locals will sometimes say, “They are working dogs,” but this is not a good enough reason to chain your dog to your roof and neglect it for years. Walking down streets full of starving, chained-up dogs exposes one to a constant stream of psychic pain much like that which famously drove Friedrich Nietzsche insane. As the story goes, one day in 1889, Nietzsche saw a horse beaten to death in the streets of Turin. He lost his mind, had a mental breakdown in the street, and never wrote again. (Of course, Nietzsche may have actually lost his mind because untreated syphilis ate his brain.)
I find this pearl-clutching a little hollow when most Westerners eat animals for breakfast lunch and dinner. Close the factory farms first, then you can get all high and mighty about Mexican dogs.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
80-89 — Below average
Above the threshold for normal independent functioning. Can perform explicit routinized hands-on tasks without supervision as long as there are no moments of choice and it is always clear what has to be done. Assembler, food service.
This website seems scarcely believable. Only at 130 does one apparently 'just capable of writing a legible piece of text', yet he a moment before described the 120-9 range as masters students, lawyers etc. who are surely capable of writing 'an article'? Where are his sources? Just looks like complete dross he plucked out of the air.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Now what was that verse by somebody or other?
Well, two can play at that game.
Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night - she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question - "Is this all?"
A woman today who has no goal, no purpose, no ambition patterning her days into the future, making her stretch and grow beyond that small score of years in which her body can fill its biological function, is committing a kind of suicide. The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive. There is no way for these women to break out of their comfortable concentration camps except by finally putting forth an effort - that human effort which reaches beyond biology, beyond the narrow walls of the home, to help shape the future
It's easy to portray a working life as drab and meaningless, but one can equally do so for the non-working mother. FWIW I think both are oversimple and overgeneralised.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Homogenisation is real and I do think it's a shame for the traveler but I can't get too mad because unfortunately it does seem to be something generally attendant to prosperity. This is especially true of poorer countries, and it would feel a bit wierd to moan about the rest of the world being insufficiently varied for my leisure pursuit.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
time and money to get far from trade routes,
Time sure, but money? Surely it's cheaper to go to less touristed places almost by definition, as the further off the tourist path you go the less demand there is.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
If you want to know why Dems will never get the working white class vote this is it
What? Yeah, I'm sure non-binding anti-Semitism plans are absolutely top salience issues for Bud from Scranton.
A lot of antisemitism as defined is very close to just telling facts. Jews really do have a disproportionate amount of power in key institutions.
This misses the point. No-one denies that Jews are over-represented in important areas, what is anti-semitic is suggesting that this is either the product of some nefarious process or that it will have deleterious consequences because of some imagined Jewish agenda. One can criticise Soros individually, even if I think the criticisms are mostly dumb, but bringing up his Jewishness in a negative light certainly implies anti-Semitism.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Upon some further skim reading I think I do stand corrected that removing environmental regulations could probably arrest the decline in coal mining (though I'm not convinced it's going to get any mines re/newly-opened). In any case though I'm not sure that it's very important for the WWC as a whole. It looks like the number of people employed in coal mining is well under 50,000, pretty negligible in the grand scheme, especially when one considers that the decline of coal has surely opened up jobs elsewhere. Indeed, when one considers the domestic environmental effects it's hard to see that the decline of mining is really a bad thing for the entire WWC at all.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
I don't think that would achieve such a goal. Oil, gas and foreign completion killed coal mining, not the EPA. Hence why the decline of coal mining in Britain preceded concern about carbon emissions by decades.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
So you'd vote for an anti-idpol pro-worker party?
Yes. Within reason obviously (not if they started literally trying to bring back Jim Crow or something), but if it were a choice between a politician with average Republican social views and average Democratic economic views, and the opposite, I would certainly vote for the former. Assuming with all else equal, for instance that they had the same foreign policy views.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
at least pretends to be on your side
Is that really any better? Anyways what matters in policy not general cultural vibe. Let me know when Democrats start pushing Right-to-work, cuts to public services and tax cuts for high earners.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
What issue do you think should be more important to the working class white that would compel them to vote Blue
Obviously I'm not saying there is some defined set of Objectively Important issues to care about, but the following I would say are patently more significant than AA to the material condition of the average WWC person;
Taxation structure, welfare provision, healthcare, housing and planning, transit (plenty of WWC live in cities despite the stereotypes) and road safety, consumer protection, minimum wages, union laws, public services in general, education (i.e. funding for schools and the like, not irrelevant culture war crap) etc. etc. etc.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
It wasn't house Republicans who spent the 90s pushing for deregulation of the banking industry and greatly reduced corporate tax rates under the guise of "modernizing the 1933 banking act" and "making credit more affordable", It was people like Clinton, Schumer, and Feinsten.
Yes it was; it was Democrats too but at least there were some dissenters. Gramm-Leach-Bliley had about ten votes against in the Senate, only one was Republican, same story in the house. 51 D nays, 5 R nays. And of course, Gramm, Leach and Bliley were all Republicans.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Republican policy can hardly have induced that though, except perhaps the tax cuts which were completely at odds with professed Republican fiscal policy.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Obviously this is a plausible argument, though not one I agree with, but can it really account for a change in voting behaviour of a large class of people? Did the WWC just suddenly decide to change their minds on economic policy in the last 20/30/40 years?
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Environmental legislation etc. will obviously have an impact, but I don't see any plausible scenario under which America's coal mines stay open indefinitely. What policies could produce that outcome without imposing intolerable costs on the rest of society?
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Most working class people won't go to AA universities, by definition elite unis must only comprise a small proportion of students, and most of those will be middle or upper-middle class
And you can use the same "there are hundreds of more important issues" argument to abolish AA entirely.
This wasn't a statement about the advisability of the policy, just pointing out that it shouldn't really govern anyone's voting behaviour (on either side as it happens but the discussion here was about working class Republicans)
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Maybe for certain workers whose jobs rely on coal, oil etc., but really those jobs' days are numbered anyway and the left and centre-left are the ones who want there to be a safety net/reasonable transition for coal miners when the last of the jobs move to China or just get replaced by renewables or gas. For the average working class person though doesn't seem profoundly important, certainly nowhere near as important as healthcare, public services etc.
After all, working class people also benefit disproportionately from many environmental policies, living as they do in the most polluted areas of towns and cities etc.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
counter by making the Democratic party the explicit party of college-educated urbanites and Goldman Sachs.
College-educated urbanites yes (though really it's just all urbanites, rich or poor, educated or not), 'Goldman Sachs' absolutely not. Obviously their workforce is composed mostly of urbanites, but their corporate interests (lower taxation and lighter regulation) clearly align more closely with the GOP than the Democrats.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
I don't think voting against the people who want to systematically discriminate you in education and hiring is voting against your economic interests
Do you seriously think that affirmative action poses any genuine threat to the material condition of the average working class person? Maybe there are some outliers at the margins, but there are tens or even hundreds of more compelling issues at the moment.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Whether this is true or not, it doesn't really have any partisan implications, it's hardly as if the GOP national-level politicians are any less part of that elite.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
The usual answer would be ‘they aren’t voting against their economic interests, but they understand their economic interests better than CNN talking heads paid to sell books about the culture wars’.
What, then, in the GOP platform is supposed to benefit the economic interests of the working classes?
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
I do not deny that the boys were in the wrong also (filming and posting the encounter was especially poor), but that still doesn't exonerate the woman.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Not really relevant as that's not what the comment said. I agree the kids should have given the bike up (though I think the woman was still in the wrong for her subsequent actions), given that she is pregnant, but not on the grounds that the comment above suggested.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
I would agree with this were it not for the fact that, so I am told, such behaviour is a widely accepted part of New York bike culture. If a rule like that (i.e. a 'first come first served' principle where if you get a bike out you can keep redocking as you like until you're finished) has been broadly established among most users, as it seems, conversely, it has not in the place you cite, then it seems perverse to lay blame on anyone conforming to the widely accepted rule. This also doesn't seem nearly as bad as the stuff you cite, since those people are clearly trying to just keep the bike for themselves semi-permanently even when they're not using it, whereas these chaps it seems were just keeping it for the time they were using it, albeit longer that the technical limit.
Yeah but the point is that I don't think there's any genuine moral difference there, so it doesn't really make sense as a stick with which to beat Mexican society.
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