Facebook Follies of Friends and Families

[Tamas]

Because I tried and I failed

I am sorry but I fly off the handle every time someone argues against modernisation on the grounds of "what they have is good enough for them". It's racist and condescending when the one saying it does not share the same living conditions and general outlook for the future.

[Valmy]

Well I would love to just be who I am as a person but this pesky brown skin, well people ascribe judgments and motivations to it.

Sure people ascribe things to me based on all that shit to. But that is not who I am.

[garbon]

Well I would love to just be who I am as a person but this pesky brown skin, well people ascribe judgments and motivations to it.

Sure people ascribe things to me based on all that shit to. But that is not who I am.

It isn't who I am either - but it would also be a mistake to ignore the impact that such an 'identity' (though foisted on me by others) has as an impact. I think it would also be a mistake to not wish for that to change.

[Capetan Mihali]

every time someone argues against modernisation on the grounds of "what they have is good enough for them". It's racist and condescending when the one saying it does not share the same living conditions and general outlook for the future.

  I'd object to those grounds for an argument against modernization as well, just as strenuously as you.  It just happens that I'm arguing for modernization on different grounds than you.  And I find that no more racist and condescending than anything a relatively privileged member of a globally privileged society can say about the rest of the world.

[Valmy]

I am sorry but I fly off the handle every time someone argues against modernisation on the grounds of "what they have is good enough for them". It's racist and condescending when the one saying it does not share the same living conditions and general outlook for the future.

But the savages are so noble Tamas! Why corrupt them with our decadent ways?

[Valmy]

It isn't who I am either - but it would also be a mistake to ignore the impact that such an 'identity' (though foisted on me by others) has as an impact. I think it would also be a mistake to not wish for that to change.

That is not what I am objecting to though. It is people claiming a race/gender/sexuality identity for themselves rather than fighting some bullshit foisted upon them by assholes.

[Capetan Mihali]

If you want to talk about racist and condescending, the "$0.35 an hour sewing Nikes is good enough for them; after all, they'd be tenant farmers in the rice paddies otherwise" argument advanced by the "free market" crowd had a good lead on anything the socialists produce.

[Tamas]

Well I would love to just be who I am as a person but this pesky brown skin, well people ascribe judgments and motivations to it.

Sure people ascribe things to me based on all that shit to. But that is not who I am.

To be fair us white straight males don't have to worry about that. I am not saying the whole PC and equality thing isn't getting overblown by the shrill elements, but you and I really can't know it because we never encounter it.

Silly example coming: it was enough of a taste of the uncomfortable position of being on the receiving end of stereotypes (and how minor it was!) living in the UK during the election campaign and seeing that my demographic (East European immigrants) are the cause of every bad thing befalling the Englishmen, right down to traffic jams.

[Martinus]

Luckily, there's real leftism, which holds as little truck with self-congratulatory identity politics as the right does.  We want to put the majority -- workers -- into power, not this minority or that, especially not when that group is an extraordinarily privileged one like the one pictured.

Fair enough. At least it's a honest way to convince me that I am not a leftist.

But I respect it more than identity politics, as perpetrated by one of the most privileged groups in human history, aka white Western middle class women.

Making the ruling class more "diverse" by making bosses out of some women and/or non-white people is cold comfort to a lot of people who haven't a prayer of making even their grandchildren members of that class.

Hence the fundamental inadequacy of Clintonian finger-wagging and mock-horror that the "Trump Democrats" who gave Sanders those 80/20 primary victories (hint: not young affluent "Bros") couldn't give a shit about the welfare of a party steadfastly intent on rejecting their interests or of a candidate who continues to ignore them as the general election gets closer.

Yeah, it's basically what the Onion is lampooning in this article I posted in the elections thread:

Shocking: The Average Female CEO Only Makes 258 Times What Her Employees Make
Posted Feb. 12, 2015

Wow. We knew that gender inequality in America was bad, but according to an alarming new study, it's actually much worse than anyone could've thought.

A recently released report from the U.S. Census Bureau revealed that female CEOs in America make a paltry 258 times what their average employee makes, while male CEOs make an average of 331 times more than theirs. That's a pay gap of nearly 23 percent, which in dollar value—per median salary of U.S. CEOs—translates to an average disparity of $2.57 million, or enough to buy approximately 12 Aston Martins.

These numbers empirically prove that inequality is alive and well in the United States. It's hard to fathom that in 2015, women who take the same cutthroat routes to the peak of the corporate ladder as their male peers are still only earning the commensurate income of a combined 258 subordinates. This means these women are being forced to get by on just $8 million to $9 million a year (and that's before taxes!).

If true equality is ever to be achieved, then the wealth needs to funnel away from the pockets of the topmost male earners and into the offshore accounts of the women who are every bit as deserving. Why should male executives be able to afford five or six mountain estates across the world while their female counterparts are forced to make do with just four?

Share this article if you believe that gender discrimination is out of control and that female CEOs should be able to afford the same number of private jets and luxury yachts as male CEOs. It's just what's right.

http://www.clickhole.com/article/shocking-average-female-ceo-only-makes-258-times-w-1847

[Martinus]

The temporary pain will be well worth it in the end.

You are Tyrion Lannister arguing that 7 years of slavery is nothing.

[Razgovory]

Hint: the point is eliminating the existence of a ruling class.

And I'll just sit here and wait for the voluminous evidence that "free trade" policies have "lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty"; or else I'll just assert that they have equally consigned hundreds of millions to permanent economic instability and dependency.  "Oh but all those Bangladeshis making Nikes for $0.35 an hour were worse as rice farmers!" -- when the prospect of Bangladesh industrialisizing (and being permitted to industrialize) via an ISI scheme isn't contemplated as an alternative; it's either the neoliberal status quo or feudal rice farming, and that's it.

EDIT:  Turkey, India, and Brazil -- to name a few important players, and not to mention China! -- didn't lift their millions out of poverty post-1945 by abjectly accepting the "free trade" conditions imposed upon them by the Western powers, if you'd bother to do the homework for yourself instead of accepting the rationale of the World Bank/IMF/(Eurozone?) that any other means of development is impossible.

EDIT 2:  And the instability of places like the Shah's Iran and various Latin American and Middle Eastern countries is precisely due to the export-commodity-oriented demands of the Western powers and the subsequent neoliberal ideology (of dismantling the social state, etc.) that formed around it.

What nonsense.  First you can't eliminate ruling classes.  As soon as you do, a new one has to take its place (see NomenKlatura of the Soviet Union), second Turkey, India, Brazil and China are all still desperately poor.  India has had notoriously slow growth following WWII, especially compared to a country like South Korea.  The economic growth of these nations in the last 30 years has been because of the partial rejection of the "other means of development".

Iran, the middle East, and Latin America were unstable for a long time before the neoliberal ideology took hold in the late 1970's.  In fact stability has increased dramatically since the end of the Cold War.

[Martinus]

To me identity politics is guilty of the same sin as any form of totalitarianism - it stops to view people as individuals and instead ascribes to them motivations, needs and agendas solely on the basis of their membership in a group, such as gender, race or sexuality (and even goes so far as to deny those who "break the lines" an independent agency, dehumanizing them as "self-hating", "uncle Toms" and similar epithets). As such, it is an enemy of any movement based on personal liberty and personal responsibility - in short the entire foundation of Western thought (from classical philosophy, to Christianity, to the Enlightenment).

I do wonder about people saying their identity is this big complicated intersection of all these naval gazing gender, race, and sexuality components. I mean I get those are part of who you are but surely ones identity is more about who you want to be as a person and what you want to do with your life than those things. But maybe that is just my 30-something brain talking since all that naval gazing stuff is something people tend to do when they are young.

Well I would love to just be who I am as a person but this pesky brown skin, well people ascribe judgments and motivations to it.

This "pesky brown skin" with Stanford education and better job and flat than 90% of people on Languish. So cry me a river.

[Valmy]

If you want to talk about racist and condescending, the "$0.35 an hour sewing Nikes is good enough for them; after all, they'd be tenant farmers in the rice paddies otherwise" argument advanced by the "free market" crowd had a good lead on anything the socialists produce.

Offering economic opportunities is racist and condescending? $0.35 an hour is not good enough but you have to start someplace. What is your non-racist and non-condescending plan?

[Valmy]

The temporary pain will be well worth it in the end.

You are Tyrion Lannister arguing that 7 years of slavery is nothing.

More like 7 years on welfare, these are first world workers we are talking about. We put together a plan for world economic development. Statistics show it is working. I presume you had a better plan?

[Capetan Mihali]

India, Brazil, and China are by no means "desperately poor" on a global basis.  And SK was permitted to introduce the kind of tariffs necessary to stimulate domestic industrialization, not to mention the anomaly of having a superpower dedicated to its success, ready to buy its goods, to supply it with foreign aid, and to loan it money at advantageous rates.  From the other side of the Cold War, Cuba was relatively successful at industrializing under similar circumstances, too, even though they remained dependent on the export of sugar and coffee.

EDIT:  And yes, Iran's stability has increased quite notably since the 1979 revolution.   The "banana republics" were, in a sense, a crude neoliberalism avant la lettre; one liberally enforced by US military intervention where states were prohibited from any kind of internal development and were induced/forced to base their economy around export-oriented commodities, often a single commodity -- like bananas.  So their pre-1945 lack of stability really cuts against your argument rather than in favor of it.