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Notes -
American Compass has a new article complaining about the decline of the Summer job:
The article notes one reason why:
This might lead you to wonder if maybe you should learn something from the wealthiest racial group in America. But no, the author doesn't suggest that. Send your kid to work at McDonald's, good for them, builds character. Who cares if Asians take 25% of Ivy League seats and conservatives find themselves increasingly locked out of the American elite?
This is the same kind of error Leftists make when they see that kids whose parents took them to art museums have higher incomes than kids whose parents didn't and conclude that it means we need to subsidize art museums. In both cases, genetic confounding is ignored. But while the left fetishizes education and high-class culture, the right fetishizes hauling boxes and cleaning pools.
None of this is to say that summer jobs are necessarily bad. If your teen is rotting his brain with electronics 16 hours a day, kicking him out and telling him to get a McJob is probably gonna be good for him. But if he's well adjusted, does well in school, and has lots of friends, there's no reason to make him work manual labor because someone conservative writer who attended a third-rate university told you it's an "American folkway." It isn't, by the way. John Adams said, "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." It wasn't "I must study politics and way so my sons can work a cash register and be in touch with the working-class."
Y'know, I scrolled down fast and didn't see the author's name on this post, but when I hit this bit:
I went "Oh! Alexander!" and scrolled back up and whaddya know, I was right!
Friend, mate, old buddy, old pal - learn a new song? "Righties are dumb and smelly and low-class and have too many bastard kids and are way too sympathetic to the low-grade low-IQ blacks and browns who have too many bastard kids" is getting boring now. The pure despite and contempt you have for those who make it possible for you to live a comfortable life is astounding. Oh, you don't like the grubby proles who work the cash registers? Don't worry, supermarkets are working fast on self-checkout so now you can do the job of being the grubby prole who works the cash register for free!
Even for those Elite Human Capital who are going to waltz into whatever high-status white-collar job you think most desirable will do better if they have some experience of summer work. Granted, it'll probably be an internship with a company of one of Dad's golf buddies, but some experience of "this is what work looks like" is much better than none. Otherwise you end up hiring people who have all the right qualifications on paper but need to be hand-held every minute of the day since they have no idea what to do on their own (I see plenty of smart people who haven't a clue about "okay this is my first job, how do I sort out my tax?")
You really do want all the low-class (by your metric) people, regardless of colour, to just disappear so you don't have to interact with them, don't you? No more manual labourers. No more people on the tills in shops. No more unsuitables that can be confused with you, the striving wannabe, by the elites you so desperately want to belong to.
Ok come on now. @AlexanderTurok is biased against many right-wing folks as he has admitted, just like 80%+ of us here are biased against the left, progressives, wokes, etc etc. The entire point of this site is to allow us to discuss across ideological divides.
Personally I think this post was fine and shows a willingness to take the feedback from the mods he was given earlier.
While it's a bit of a personal attack, I do think this is a interesting frame - should the elites not care about the working class? So far in America they have (at least nominally), seems like folks nowadays are sort of turning against that. I am curious to see where elite consensus moves on this.
It's not that he's biased against 'the right', it's that he has a demonstrable animus against those he considers lower-class, and that includes people who would work for a living (see his snobby remarks about manual labour).
That's anywhere from 30-46% of the American population, depending on definition and self-identification as such. That includes people who do the kinds of things that support Alexander in his lifestyle as Elite Human Capital:
Alexander may well think Vivre? les serviteurs feront cela pour nous but what are you going to do, when you dismiss 30% of your working population as beneath notice or dignity? The AI serfbots are not quite here just yet. Have you any right to be surprised then, when the people you have mocked vote for a demagogue and a populist? Will you take any responsibility for driving people away?
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And the monkey's paw curled a finger hard on this one.
I've long though that people abuse that Twain quote about travel being fatal to prejudice and bigotry, and that travel- especially if it's only a limited exposure- has about a 50/50 shot of reinforcing it instead. Likewise here; if your exposure across the ideological divide is limited and of... particular quality, it only reinforces just how obnoxious/stupid/evil/whatever "the other" really is.
Did he say that, really? Innocents Abroad is a very funny monologue of an American studiously refining his bigotry and moving his judices from pre- to post- as a factor of travel. The French have terrible barbers, the Catholics are Mary-idolators, the Turks are subhuman, and the Arabs are sub-Turk - is the very clear sentiment arising from that book. And, of course, that Americans (especially the Evangelicals) are greedy, pompous, idiot looters, but at least they’re civilized.
What an unexpected thing for him of all people to say, excepting of course that he may have been saying it with his trademark irony…
It is indeed somewhere in Innocents Abroad, so it was likely intended ironic but modern readers take it as literal.
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