Classism in America
siderea.livejournal.com
siderea.livejournal.com
The irony is that I practice "code switching", so basically my coworkers have no idea where I'm from until they ask me. They'll overhear me on the phone talking to my family, and notice that I speak in an entirely different manner. It's not a conscious thing on my part, but I sometimes feel very awkward about it. At times, I'm very upset by the fact that someone who grows up in a particular part of the country gets to speak in their native dialect at work without judgement, all because of stereotypes about intelligence and education, which essentially tie directly to the author's point about class.
On the flip side, there is some evolutionary reasons why humans make quick decision when encountering new people or places, and I would guess it would take generations to change our hardwiring to NOT make those assumptions unconsciously. Even more brutal, if that hardwiring changes, there are circumstances where we'd likely be in trouble but for our split second assumptions.
Fascinating story on NPR last year about a cop in an evacuated Wal-mart looking for an active shooter. Came around the corner to see a white woman and for half a second wondered why a civilian was still in the store. Then she shot at him, he returned fire and barely escaped with his life. So there's arguments to be made for learning how to avoid those assumptions too :) Crazy, mixed up world we humans make for ourselves.
That you would make such a comment in a discussion about classism and racism is very ironic.
No supporting evidence has been presented that a person will necessarily attribute the same level of certainty when positively or negatively associating a person to a category, either globally or under specific circumstances that match these. Identifying someone as a threat and discounting someone as not a threat may engage different levels of reasoning and heuristics in different circumstances, and assuming they are equivalent without justification is a mistake, in my opinion.
> Why is the cop an allowable surrogate of societal stereotypes when he assumes the white woman is not the shooter, but an "individual that makes his own decisions, and has his own opinions, views and predispositions" when an alternative hypothetical is presented?
His behavior with regard to race was classified based purely on his profession. I'm not sure how that's justifiable.
Edit: To more directly address what I think your point is, we were presented a situation, not necessarily the police officer's reasoning and perspective. We don't know if the reason he thought she was not the shooter was her color, gender, clothing, bearing or some combination of those and other factors. There is little information to go on, so we shouldn't assume we know much.
I present this not as an argumentative reply to you, but just to clarify my point in my immediately preceding comment in this thread, as it seems to have been polarizing (it fluctuated from -2 to +3 multiple times, and now sits at 0).
> white people ... committed some 64% of the shootings ... Black people committed close to 16% ... Asians were responsible for around 9% ... Latinos are almost nowhere to be seen
> whites and blacks are pretty proportionate to their population
[1] http://edition.cnn.com/2015/06/27/us/mass-shootings/index.ht...
English and Scottish sayings/slang are my favorite. Southerns have some good sayings but they are not as enjoyable for me to hear, maybe because I used to them.
Indeed when I was growing up even though I was in a rural area people who lived on farms had a noticeably different accent from those of us who lived in coastal fishing villages even though the farms might only be a kilometer or so from the coast.
e.g.
“A ken a ken im, but a da ken far a ken im fae.”
or
"I know I know him, but I don't know where I know him from".
And of course, I was a "wee loonie" when I was younger.
Edit: Of course, the biggest crime I commit when it comes to class is, of course, using "toilet" rather than "loo".
On the other hand, I find it almost impossible to read text that is supposed to show Scottish accent, like the one from arethuza.
I've probably said something like that many times when I was younger (I now have, as someone described it, an "affected Edinburgh accent"). However, you can get silly Scots phrases like:
"Fit fit fits fit fit?"
Or, my favourite:
"Aye, ane an an ingin ane an a"
The latter I can't say without almost singing (and smiling).
You shouldn't have to be ashamed of how you sound or where you're from. I do massively agree with you regarding people thinking southerners are stupid bigots. The way to fix that is to show them you're not, and make a strong point of showing it.
It reminds me of a trip I recently took to Belfast. The day I was there, a car bomb from the IRA killed a police officer. A cabbie asked me if I supported Donald Trump and told he we was surprised I didn't. He told me all Americans supported Trump. So I asked him if he was an IRA thug/terrorist, to which he naturally said no. So rhetorically, I asked how he was from northern ireland and not IRA. When he explained what was obvious, I said EXACTLY, this is much like people who support trump in America. The vocal minority often drown out the majority. Blindly categorizing someone in $group is bigotry plain and simple. Just because it comes from an educated person in tech doesn't make it any less so. Perhaps point out this hypocrisy.
It's hardly reasonable to compare being a member of a terrorist organization to supporting the leading candidate of one of two major parties.
Consider just the sheer effort of participating in terrorism is far greater than voting.
38.6% of Americans state that they would vote for Donald Trump over Hilary Clinton while 49% state that they would vote for Clinton over Trump.
There are only several hundred members of the IRA today (out of 1.8 million people in Northern Ireland) and even fewer of them participate in terrorism.
And it's not a logical fallacy. The cab driver clearly didn't mean all Americans support Donald Trump. Presumably he knows there are other candidates so thats at least a few people who don't support Trump. He meant a lot of Americans do support Trump and clearly they do.
[1] http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/ge...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Irish_Republican_Army
Why are you willing to accept that the cab driver was speaking figuratively, but not that SEJeff was?
Then why was he surprised to meet an American who didn't? You're really reaching.
SEJeff obviously isn't saying that Trump support and IRA support are exactly equivalent. He's saying they're both subgroups in a larger population that outsiders stereotype as representing the entire population, to the disgust of many of the people stereotyped. It's an excellent analogy because it references a situation that's intimately familiar to the person he's speaking to.
In my limited experience working with others, southern accent = ignorant bigot has not been something I have seen with my co workers. People usually just shrug it off but I can see why a country accent may be looked down upon by ignorant people.
What part of the country do you work in?
Ha ha amazingly I can detect a southern accent even in your writing! ('different' when someone not from the south would say 'differently')
Language is amazing isn't it.
I know, because in high school I became friends with a highly educated family who moved into town after having lived all over the world, and made an effort to match their more intelligent sounding speech (which included, among other things, adding -ly to adverbs.)
My mom still occasionally teases me that I say "eye-ther" instead of "eee-ther" (for "either.")
It's all just class. One can be just as intelligent with a Southern accent as one can be stupid with another.
I've found that it's the keywords that indicate where people are from within the Midwest:
Is it soda or pop? Is it car-mel or care-uh-mel?
(I do linguistic stuff in my day job.)
To my ear, the Chicago accent is represented but exaggerated in the "Bill Swerski's Superfans" sketches from SNL in the 1990s - "Da bearssss".
And it's "cur-muhl". :)
Fox News Network, LLC 1211 Avenue Of The Americas New York, NY 10036
The question was whether there's a network "showing what's important to the middle states".
(Which I interpret as "important related to their views on laws, life, politics, ethics, etc", not as "related to regional news").
As much as I like rural folks and like to spend time with them (and despise folks who look down on them), the farmer is just as reliant on the financiers who ensure a steady cash flow for the multinational which delivers him his fertiliser, his fuel, the parts for his tractor, his clothes, his food &c. &c. &c.
We're all interconnected.
But do you think your medicine, qualified doctors, medical equipment, internet, computers you use, movies and tv series you watch, trucks you drive and tons of other things besides grow on trees?
(Not to mention farming subsidies)
Not many medicine schools, pharma corps, research labs, car manufactures, tech companies, tv and movie studios, etc operating out of rural Idaho, or South Dakota, or Alabama, or what have you...
I grew up in the city and spent summers on my uncle's farm and have seen both sides. Gods, I am tired of this fucking stupid rural vs urban debate. They need each other, and can't exist in a modern world without each other. Move to the countryside and I hear stereotypes about how shit the people in the city are. Move back to the city and hear stereotypes about how shit the people in the country are. Both sets of stereotypes are largely wrong. Likewise, the people whose jobs straddle both urban and rural environments are not the people who use these stereotypes.
If the opposite happened, urban areas would buy their food somewhere else and eventually save some money thanks to the increased competition in the market and the lack of agricultural subsidies, not to mention all the other ways we subsidize rural America's inefficiencies.
If I could participate in this career/industry from a smaller town, you bet your butt I'd do it in a second.
The people who ended up working remotely are the ones who worked in the office for many years and gained the trust of their employer. Then when the family moved (usually due to a spouse changing jobs) the employer decided to let them work remotely rather than letting them go, at least in the near term.
Well yes pretty much this. I worked for a year on-premises before switching to remote, and I can imagine it's harder to find remote work from the get-go.
My father was a school board administrator. He was able to make good money, work in an office with colleagues, and still had the ability to live in practically every town in the US. School boards are everywhere. Tech companies are only in the largest cities.
It's really frustrating.
Todd Barry has a great bit on this (language might be offensive to some) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfNnM2aYsWo
There is a lot of bigotry in the Bay Area and online. Considering what we know about the mental shortcuts people use to process complex social information, evidence/science minded people should expect there to be bigotry as an unfortunate phenomenon to be aware of. Instead, it has received the imprimatur of "sin."
It's a thorny problem. Talk about bigotry in the "wrong" way, and you ironically open yourself up to yet more bigotry involving projections about your internal mental state.
I mean, sure, there are super racist areas in the south. I grew up and lived in mostly rural Alabama for the first 20+ years of my life, and there were some rural areas that were just as terrible as people imagine (cross burnings, open Klan meetings, etc, though that was starting to die down in the last 10 years or so I lived there).
That said, a lot of cities in the south are 30% - 50% black (sometimes more), and people who live in those cities, generally speaking, coexist and interact with many black and white people on a continual basis. It'd be kind of hard to do that and be super racists to the level people imagine the south to be.
Or maybe I am just bitter about a 70% white city talking about how racist a 53% black city must be.
Besides racism, that's also a way to say "too poor/downtrodden/crime ridden".
To which, they would indeed have a point (statistics wise), although that of course is caused by the systemic injustice and lack of opportunities against blacks for centuries.
Also notice how people still say the exact same thing about "white trash" places in the North (and South), and nobody seems to mind, because while the US got more tolerant about race, they still don't give a rats arse about classism and social exclusion based on being poor and not a "success".
In my experience, there isn't a huge difference in the level of racial bigotry between northern and southern states. The difference lies primarily in the openness of it.
For example, the effects of deed-restricted home sales are still being felt today in many neighborhoods in northern states.
In some ways, the openness of the southern brand of racism is more respectable than the northern brand. While the southern real estate agent was open with you, the northern real estate agent may simply assume you don't want to live in a neighborhood that's "too black," never say so to your face, and proceed to only show you houses in the "nice" part of town.
Yes, it's a contrived example, but it's also something that happens every day all over the country.
When I was managing people in the '90s in California one of the technicians who worked for me was black and had worked all over the country.
He said he much preferred living in the South, because while there was no difference in the number of bigots he ran across, outside the South the bigots weren't brave enough to be open about it so it was harder to tell where he stood.
I think there's probably some legitimacy to that view, but I always wonder how much "shit happens" type stuff gets identified as racism. I'm white, so when a white guy is an asshole to me I assume he's an asshole. If I were black I might assume he's a racist.
Not saying one group is smarter/dumber, just that the difference in values makes it hard to come to an agreement, which can make the "other" side seem stupid / "full of shit" / nuts.
I'd wish people would get that, and only complain when a generalization is statistically wrong (e.g. doesn't really hold for the majority of the people it lumps along), instead of everytime they find a counter-example...
Are the people in California traditionalist, religious, backwards, or even racist, etc, as the people in Georgia? They might not be, regardless of who they chose to vote for -- which takes into account many factors and policies.
That said, California is also traditionally regarded as conservative (at least by us in Europe) -- it's places like Massachusetts or Vermont that we'd count as progressive. Especially since California is regarded as hardcore pro-money/big-business, which is large part of being a "conservative" here.
Atlanta is not all that different from LA and Boston politically.
Saying the entire south in aggregate is "stupider" because of that is plain wrong.
Educational outcomes are far worse in the South. Teachers make less, schools are funded more poorly, especially for poor folk.
2) I also meant to highlight "some do, some don't" by saying "perhaps 51%". Perhaps 51% is even too high, maybe it's just a vocal minority.
3) By calling them (in quotes) "those people" and "other" I was alluding to a certain amount of xenophobia on the part of coastal dwellers when considering fly-over dwellers. And yes, that cuts both ways.
It's only reasonable to recognize and acknowledge that the South as a whole acts somewhat differently. But it's wrong to talk about all Southerners as if they're the same, or treat all Southerners badly because of it.
It's just like with race. There are real, factual differences between racial groups, and acknowledging this is not a bad thing. What's bad is judging or biasing your interaction with people from those racial groups because of it.
A lot of tribes in the US have members that exhibit this same behavior. A respectful pause to consider a response and a slow cadence should be a sign they have considered their words, but instead is portrayed as stupid. It made going to DC and dealing with bureaucrats in the 90's a pain in the butt.
I'm really glad to hear that I'm not alone with this struggle. Still don't have a good answer for it though. :(
I bet half of those people left the South and are fronting about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociolect
Basically, since class is culture, and cultures have language, a sociolect describes the language of a class, the ways you have to talk to perform that class.
And, naturally, this goes both ways. Someone talking the sociolect of a certain class is seen as performing that class, and therefore belonging to the class.
It should also be noted that the original article is itself a class performance! The author uses more complex words and grammar than necessary, thereby signalling academia or professional class. (Someone in the comments on that page wondered why this article had a more complex language compared to other articles by the same author, but didn't connect the dots...)
But even today, if people use the words of French origin rather than the old English words, one is regarded as being from the upper class, such as using 'purchase' instead of 'buy'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Frenc...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-_and_low-context_cultur...
This features quite a bit in War and Peace, too. As tensions increase between France and Russia as Napoleon takes over much of Europe and war between the countries looms, you'll find Russian nobility taking Russian language classes, because their first language is French!
Such as pig/pork, beef/cow. The working classes spoke English and dealt with the live animals, the elites just ate them.
Pheasant: from Old French fesan. (the current french is faisan).
But I don't think this is well explained by a class distinction. I mean, the classes of people who raised sheep weren't so different from the people who raised chickens.
Upper class: valet [val-ett], fillet [fill-ett]. Middle class or lower: valet [val-ay], fillet [fill-ay].
Upper class: claret [clar-ett] (from French clairet). Middle class or lower: Bordeaux.
Most people out here can comprehend the concept that there are people in our country who conservative, religious, and smart. They'd shit themselves if they met someone who was conservative and smarter than they were. (This is where you insert a joke about if they're so smart then why are they conservative! hardy har har.)
I grew up in Seattle and still live there. If you voice any opinions that are not in a narrow band of the far left wing, they (including recent transplants) will attribute you holding that opinion to your place of origin, rather than listening to any justification you have for holding that opinion.
Along some axes Seattle is very diverse. But along others not so much.
I grew up in the South (though not rural or Appalachia) and at age 10, I made the conscientious decision to get rid of my southern accent. It sounded "unintelligent" to me but more than that, it seemed to bely my moral values. As judgmental as this sounds (and it's true, it is judgmental), I looked around at the values that are often attached to the South -- bigotry and racism being the big two -- and said, "no."
So, at age 10, I lost my accent. I first stopped saying "y'all" -- but it quickly morphed into my entire accent changing. My parents/sister and most of my friends still had an accent, but I lost mine. With the exception of a few words or phrases, I don't even say southern colloquialisms. (I do still call every type of soda "Coke" -- but that's just Atlanta pride).
When I take those tests that determine dialect, I never get the South, I almost always get midwest or Southern California. (That was the goal, so go me?) Even drunk, I don't slip back to a southern accent, simply because it doesn't exist as part of me anymore.
The fact that I made that decision at age 10 -- and to be VERY clear, it was my own decision and not one pushed/encouraged by my parents (in fact, they probably rolled their eyes) -- I think says a lot about just how palpable those stereotypes that you mention are. Because at that age, when given the opportunity to lose an accent (I had speech impediment, was taking speech therapy a few times a week and had to basically re-train myself to talk. I decided to hack the system and get the accent I wanted in the process), I took it. I'll be totally honest, I don't regret it.
But still, I do often think about the code switching that I chose to take on at that age and what that means. For my career now, which often includes going on television -- it's realistically probably served me well to have no accent. Even in high school working in retail, it often served me well to "not sound like I was from the South" when selling someone a $1500 digital video camera or charging $50 an hour to repair a computer.
Still, I do think about it a lot. I think about why it was so important, even at that age, for me to reject something like my voice/accent.
My husband (a software engineer) is a lot like you in that he is able to switch his accent on and off depending on who he talks to. When speaking with his parents or grandmother, his Tennessee twang comes out. With colleagues or people in our neighborhood, there is a slight hint of an accent, but nothing major. And he does it for the same reasons.
No one wants to sound like a redneck in a professional setting, especially one stereotypically white-collar like software engineering. And yet, we don't talk about why that is the case -- or why where we are from matters.
My dad is a tradesperson, and his influence is the one thing I have never been able to completely hide, even in professional settings. It's gotten me a bit of grief over the years, as my response to stress is often to start swearing like a builder.
On one hand, I like being able to code-switch easily. On the other hand, I feel like the only reason I can do it is because I had to, and the inability to completely mask my lower class upbringing has negatively impacted my opportunities at times.
At this point, I just try to own it. If I don't, it's just persisting the negative stereotypes of people of Maori descent never making something of themselves. Gotta start breaking those biases down somehow.
While I agree this is not ideal, it's also built into human nature to use any/all hints to help generalize/categorize (likely because it determined survival in the past).
Most elite Northerner whites are just as insulated as they think Southerners are, when it comes to traveling within their own country. In fact they typically know jack shit about Southern culture. There was a time when Southern accents were considered deliberately slow, enunciated, cultured. Yes, at that time whites were at the top of the class food chain, and yes most of that white privilege was racist or at least depended on it. But the accent is orthogonal to racism. We've just come to associate one with the other, using a stereotype.
Another stereotype is white Northerners will pretty much assume white Southerners, identified as such by their drawl, may be a racist.
Assumptions are traps.
I've had instances where if I reveal my technical experience with the usual way I speak about such things - I get cold/rude service. This happened at one of those AT&T storefronts, Best Buy, Fry's Electronics, and at more than a few Apple Stores. I don't try to be intimidating, but I do want to inform the person "helping" me if I can...
I've gotten into the habit of adopting a slower speech with a slight drawl in an effort to appear more relatable and honest about my intentions. It takes some patience as I have to describe my problem 'in a circle' and without a larger vocabulary. However, I don't get treated like sheltered upper-class and people seem to want to help me rather than avoid me.
I've also avoid sounding like the stereotypical homosexual. Just the "accent" makes some people freak out and say I'm 'shoving it in their face'. I'm looking at you Aunt Marlene. I reserve the lisp for Vegas and Chippendales.
Just something to think about...
But, the same rules of "invisibility" apply where I'm from. Whenever I've talked to my upper-middle class friends about what social class they belong to, they are completely clueless. They don't know they belong to it, they don't know others don't, and they completely subscribe to the "we're all just regular middle class" mentality. The friends I have from other classes, or who have also made class journeys, are much more in tune, they have no problems seeing class and classism.
One thing that was very illuminating to me in this article was the notion of class as culture, and class as performance.
> It is a common misconception that the primary obstacle to being in a much higher class is money to afford the things by which one performs that class. The limiting factor is not money, it is this: it is impossible to join a culture the ways of which you know nothing. You may come by money, but the ignorance of how to use it to perform that higher class will keep you out as adamantly as if there were a wall built around it.
Holy crap. Yes. A thousand times yes.
The subtle differences between the USA and Europe on this subject are quite interesting. Another one is that in the USA, being branded as 'upper class' is pejorative and instantly implies you are rich, spoiled and not likely to be a hard worker, if you work at all.
That's also fascinating, because in the US, wanting to be rich is seen as a very positive thing. Everyone is supposed to be living the American Dream and improving their lives, but reaching the end goal is a bad state? Hilarious.
And where I'm from, wanting to be rich is seen as an ugly thing, the only socially acceptable ways to be rich is to win the lottery or be a sports champion. Then it's perfectly fine, but should you actually earn your money then that's automatically suspect and you're labelled a Bad Person.
I have friends who are in the IT industry, making good money, and who are genuinely ashamed of how much money they make.
As noted in the essay, a plumber can be rich, but will unlikely ever be upper-class.
It's also worth noting that the "American Dream" is really just upper-middle-class. Single family house, 2.5 kids and a dog, a new-ish car, and enough disposable income to take an annual vacation.
Very few people truly aspire to be upper-class (think Kennedy or Vanderbilt). Rich, maybe, but probably not upper class.
Among some demographics, that may be true. But, ask a classroom full of not-poor children, and answers are more likely to be along the lines of "I want to be an astronaut", not "I want to be Kim Kardashian".
Are you sure that isn't an act? People pretend socially acceptable emotions all the time.
If they donated the excess to the IRS (the IRS accepts donations!), I'd be a bit less skeptical.
It isn't. I'm from a economically below-average country in Europe, have lived in a couple others and I've settled down in the north. Almost none of my friends (particularly back home but here too) know how much I make because it's genuinely embarrassing. It's something of a "why do I make so much more when I'm no better than anyone else here?" feeling.
Also I know it's not just me, I see it around me from other people in both countries; the only people I've ever talked about it with was with other friends I know earn similarly to due to similar circumstances at the time.
edit: now that I think about it, while talking about earning a lot is generally shameful, discussing buying expensive things doesn't elicit the same feeling, despite being effectively the same.
Anyway - it's interesting to think of this mentality as part of "European culture".
It's an interesting phenomenon and I've begun studying it more after moving out of Silicon Valley and suddenly realizing how very privileged I really am. A specific point is that generally you can't discharge the guilt just by doing good things. Donations and volunteer work don't seem to help because there's nothing to atone for.
To make a defense, reaching the end goal implies that one (or more likely, one's children) have stopped striving, stopped contributing to society, and are enjoying a parasitic lifestyle of indolent luxury.
More to the point, it makes sense that "upper-class" is pejorative in the US because the US was settled in large part by people from Europe fleeing from the aristocratic upper-class there. The people here specifically wanted to contrast themselves from the rentier upper-classes in the "home countries".
It's more complicated than that. It's people who start with wealth who are looked down on, not people who come from modest means to achieve wealth. The default assumption is that these individuals bought their way into whatever success they have, never have to work for anything, and never experience hardship.
Not just them. I feel the same when I hear that I earn more on my 28-hour-a-week job than my brothers working full-time as civil engineers (including night shifts and lots of overtime).
You say class isn't about money, and I suppose it shouldn't be. Maybe they think class is about something even worse than money and they don't want any part of it.
> Whenever I've talked to my upper-middle class friends about what social class they belong to, they are completely clueless. They don't know they belong to it, they don't know others don't, and they completely subscribe to the "we're all just regular middle class" mentality.
In being oblivious to a well-documented phenomenon? That's not very likely. Obliviousness to class is a class marker for middle class. Major values of the middle class are equal opportunity and meritocracy, but existing class structures prevent that, so the middle class stick their heads in the ground and pretend that the upper classes have earned their position at the top, and that the lower classes haven't yet earned a higher position. Members of both the upper and lower classes are well aware that this is a complete farce.
> How did you gain this ability they lack, to detect precisely who is upper-middle class?
By being friends with people from different classes, by being interested and observant, and by having made a small class journey myself. I suggest you read the entire article, it might open your eyes as well.
In my extended family there are no college professors, but a lot of cops, even a lot of women that are cops. (There are some accountants, but they are forensic accountants ;-)
When I get stopped by the cops I don't worry, they like my attitude, they will tell me that people don't like speeding in their residential neighborhood and to them I look more like a guy who doesn't like speeding in my residential neighborhood and not the kind of guy who likes to play Initial D in residential neighborhoods.
Sometimes I've been a bystander when it looked like the cops showed up to arrest the first black person they saw, or when 15 police vehicles show up to arrest some black guy as thin as a rail and I even have a friend who grew up in a much richer family than me who had a bad attitude towards the police and has had his ass kicked, etc. Somehow though, even though I am not a cop and I don't particularly see things the way cops do, I've somehow absorbed enough protective coloration that I have a lot of "privilege" in this area, and less in some other areas.
My understanding is that they share the same mental model of the world on average; which is not a critical view of either, just what I've heard from people that know much, much more about how different types of people think than me.
To be clear, it would be foolish to say all people, even of a given type, think the same.
To be clear, it would be foolish to say all people, even of a given type, think the same.
One of the main purposes of training for many jobs (lawyers, physicists, police, etc.) is explicitly to modify the mental model you apply to the world.
Can you clarify what you are trying to say?
Anyway, I can't really see the connection you trying to make, are you saying that something innate to (some of) the people who choose policing as a career overrides their training? Or that police training is in some particular way unsuccessful in modifying mental models?
Any rate, what I am saying is that some types of personalities (that develop prior entering a life of crime or law enforcement) predispose individuals to enter either one, the other, or both.
Special forces has a saying, that is, you're either born to be a seal, or you're not; which is to say, training will never make you something that you're not, but it will weed out those that can't be trained; reference the seals, since they're at the extreme of having a very develop mental model prior to training.
I think there is probably some truth in what you are saying, and some pure selection bias. However, I also believe that there are many modifications to ones mental models that happen through training - that a) are probably very opaque to the recipient and b) do not occur naturally/intuitively almost ever.
Meaning I think when you put people into primal life or death situations which require split second decision making a lot of instinctual processes take over.
Certainly cops and criminals have plenty of reason to get into each other's heads.
Maybe a better analogy could be the rift that exists between police and the black communities in many places. Definitely these people have a different perspective about things. There is definitely a hard core of criminals who are coincidentally black who are playing a "cat and mouse" game against the cops, but then there are a lot of blacks who have surplus trouble with the police as well as situations like
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/04/04/the-m...
where cops feel driven to do things that look brutal, maybe are brutal, but they don't see an alternative.
If so, unclear what race has to do with my comment, or for that matter, the topic.
To see an example of what I mean, watch the trailer for the "Stanford prison experiment" on YouTube:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=3XN2X72jrFk
And read about it here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
As for "getting along" - it's more about selection bias than anything else; which in some, if not many, cases takes the form of racism.
It's an important topic to me, and I'd be the first to say I still don't completely understand it, or more importantly, how to fix the issue.
> family there are no college professors,
Fussel's Class was sort of OK, but then he went on a wish-fulfillment tripe dump, whereupon he wished college professors like himself to be above it all.
Hardy har har, sure, sure ...
To be fair when a graduate student I knew had an absentee PhD supervisor and a nervous breakdown and tried the "experiment" of not showing up for work and seeing how long it took for the paychecks to stop, the "experiment" strung on for most of a year until his dad realized he had no idea how to get in touch with his son, called up the department, and they called me up.
He had managed department failing department stores for decades and he thought our college town was a "dump" because it didn't have a Nordstrom's.
The social position of the college professor has changed a lot since Fussel's generation. Up until 1970 or so it was a path of upward social mobility, but a slowdown of tenure track hiring, social changes that doubled the number of professor's kids that could be recruited (counterbalanced enough by massive imports of male graduate students from hyperpatriarchical cultures to not threaten feminoid narriatives) mean it is no longer a path to social mobility, unless you mean trading a life of baking cookies at an organic cafe 9-5 to working 80 hours a week at 5 different colleges spread out over 200 miles while eating off food stamps...
In New York, for example, it has been shown that people across the income spectrum there will pay more than the national average for shoes and watches. New York is very wealthy and urban, so you are always walking and being seen in your shoes (and checking the time) and it confers a sense of class. The more people think about the quality of their footwear, the more they will be concerned with keeping up appearances. Even poor New Yorkers spend a higher part of their income on shoes than most poor Americans.
Contrast this with, say, San Francisco. The shaggy-looking dude in jeans and a Hard Rock Cafe t-shirt could be a multimillionaire, you'd never know. But it is more likely than not that the given individual is physically fit. It's always bikini season in California, whereas New York's long and snowy winters allow for big meals and bigger coats. The more fit people you encounter, the more you will be concerned with your and other's fitness, because it is more readily on your mind. ("It's warm and sunny all year round and you don't even jog or bike? Get off your ass."). Consequently, the Bay Area sees a disproportionate amount of income spent on health clubs.
[1] The New York Times had an excellent Op-Ed from a few years back, called: "What People Buy Where" http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/12/14/opinion/sunday/what-peo...
In contrast, few people in Florida away from the beach seem to work out at a gym, and very few people bike (drivers there see cyclists as fun moving targets). It's often too gross outside to do physical activity, whether it's raining or hot as balls.
>I find it pretty hard to find a fat person on the subway in NYC.
Maybe you ride a particularly fit (particularly affluent?) section of the subway because if 56% of New Yorkers are overweight or obese, it seems like they'd be fairly common on the subway.
Status was once (and perhaps still is) a useful metric for the level of contribution someone offered a community - doctors, lawyers and others like them get status because status is what a community could use in lieu of payment as a means of expressing gratitude for the useful service the person provides. We attribute status to athletes, musicians, companies and others for the same reason - they give us something we want.
In order to feel like one belongs you must have acceptance from your community, be it a street gang or a country club. One of the most critical dimensions of the character of a person is how you treat someone that you do not have to treat well.
So we should use our progressive monocultural aspirations for good (treat people fairly and as they want to be treated) instead of just talking about how much you want to save the world while you reject people who have a lesser degree than you.
It's really funny: I grew up in a slum, but software now gives me as much money as politicians and senior executives of public companies.
In my first paying contract overseas, I went to the most expensive restaurant in my town.
Although I wore the same clothes and belonged to the same race, everybody was staring at me. The waitress would always reiterate the price of meals.
I actually felt pretty good.
I was fascinated how the former exuded class in how he comfortably dealt with the waiter and the wine list, etc., while the latter clearly was desperately trying to do that and failing.
The difference was apparent even in how they walked and sat.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xhhJVYK4nvQ http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WmGemNT7urY
The upper classes are effortlessly sociable, polished, and polite, even if they think you're an idiot - unless you're the help, in which case they aren't.
There are some subtle markers you can only learn either by being born into them or being told about them.
E.g. when middle class are introduced they say "Pleased to meet you."
When upper class people meet they say "How d'you do?" - and if someone says "Pleased to meet you, they immediately know they're not dealing with one of their own."
I spent some time on the edges of the upper class scene, and the polish often hides drama and resentment - possibly because public school in the UK can sometimes seem to be a bizarre form of institutionalised child abuse.
It's hard to imagine someone who's set to inherit a gigantic country mansion feeling that life has given them a raw deal, but I've seen it happen.
There's also an almost complete absence of passionate creativity. I've seen working class kids (almost literally) kill to become musicians or artists. The upper classes sometimes drift into it, but the work is often derivative and shallow, and doesn't have the kick it has when someone has had to struggle.
He never finished college but started a machining company making parts for the food industry and has done very well making many times the money I have. He is a reasonably smart guy but most people wouldn't guess it talking to him. He sounds like he stepped directly out of the "Deliverance" movie. I didn't realize how bad it was until I saw him a year or two ago and even though he hasn't lived in the south in years, I swear his accent has gotten worse.
Obviously this would be a huge negative in certain professions in certain locations. But it certainly hasn't prevented him from succeeding. In fact, my theory is that it has helped and this is why the accent has gotten stronger.
His employees are mostly machinist/welder types. No way to say sissy to those guys more than speaking properly without accent. So maybe it give his some credibility with that crowd. He also does high dollar contracts for major companies. I bet more than a few times he has been sized up as "dumb hick we are going to take advantage of" and been severely underestimated in negations. Point being, in some times and places appearing a dumb hick might get one further than talking smart. Not in the software industry in California necessarily. There appearing smart might be more important than actually being smart:)
I've always found the reflexivity of class to be somewhat interesting. Economically, my family is in the bottom quartile of the country—but it never felt like that. They definitely raised me with "upper class" values and attitudes. (For example, there was never even a shadow of a doubt about whether I'd attend college.) My grandparents, on the other hand, were quite well off.
As such, I've always felt more comfortable and fit in with people whose families have incomes vastly exceeding my family's.
Wouldn't this actually meant that the average of one's parents, grandparent's, and great-grandparent's income quintiles is a better predictor than one's parents alone? (Unless these studies only looked at personal income of male relatives instead of household income?) The income of the grandfather is still a single point subject to fluctuations.
Where are these studies?
For example, early on we get "impecunious" and "shibboleths", followed up shortly afterwards with "booboo" (!). I find it distracting, to the point that I've lost the main thread of the article and I'm now wondering what the author was trying to accomplish with this style, if anything.
I often find myself switching to a different form of conversing when debating here, but I would like to think that's because I'm trying to be precise, and so I switch to a more precise method of expression. Sometimes that makes it into my speech, for example when I'm trying to explain or diagnose a problem. It can be detrimental to communication if leaned on too heavily though.
Using "shibboleth" as a shibboleth is itself a shibboleth. She's declaring her bona fides (gratuitous Latin is also a shibboleth, especially if highlighted with italics) as a scholar by demonstrating her ability to use an obscure term correctly, and is being gracious to her audience by assuming their comprehension. Switching to "booboo" is intentional, showing consciousness of register.
My background is somewhat similar to hers, although without the parental guidance. Perhaps as a result, my acculturation was less successful. I think this is a brilliant article, and (having read and enjoyed many of your other comments on this site) I encourage you start from the assumption that the author is fully conscious of the tone of this piece.
No. Or maybe yes, but not in the condescending way you imply. The article is about "class", and stylistically, it's speaking to a particular class. If you are in that target class (or familiar with it), it reads very well. If you are not, well, that's the self-referential topic of the article.
I mean, those are just a few things I ran through and picked up near the beginning. I found the article extremely easy to read, and appreciated some of the subtle details in the writing that drove the point home. Is any type of long form writing on a subject pretension, or what would you prefer?
A totally valid response, I was asking honestly, not sarcastically. :) The truth is, I'm not exposed to southern accents very often outside of media. I've lived and worked an hour north of SF most my life, and I think I'm more likely to identify a British or Australian accent in the area than I am a southern one. Unless they are hiding their accent, which I guess is entirely possible considering this thread.
> Switching to "booboo" is intentional, showing consciousness of register. ... I encourage you start from the assumption that the author is fully conscious of the tone of this piece.
I assumed the author was completely aware of the tone, I just wasn't sure how to interpret it myself in the short amount I had read.
> I think this is a brilliant article
Well, with that endorsement, I'll put extra effort into finishing it then. Not that I stopped for reasons pertaining to the content or delivery, I just ran out of time and all too often interesting articles are never finished due to that (the number tabs I have open in an obviously unsuccessful attempt to work around this behavior actually make for a comical view).
Oh, and thanks for the compliment, It's (usually) nice to be noticed. :) After you've been following discussions on HN a while, certain names start to stick out when you see them, and I've definitely noticed yours (for positive reasons!)
As evidence of my incomplete assimilation, I happened to spend last weekend up your way (north of Lake Sonoma) doing carpentry and pig hunting at a relative's cabin. Culturally, as an Eastern-educated Wisconsinite who was born in the South, I sometimes think I fit in better in your area than down here in the Bay Area proper.
the number tabs I have open in an obviously unsuccessful attempt to work around this behavior
I'm familiar with that. When I said "this is a brilliant article", it means I had the article open in a tab for months with the intent of submitting to HN at some appropriate time, and closed it only when I switched browsers (Opera to Safari).
My parents probably agree with your assessment of the area, as they both grew up in rural Wisconsin (Wabeno/Lakeview), and settled here close to forty years ago.
> it means I had the article open in a tab for months with the intent of submitting to HN at some appropriate time
I have the opposite problem, as I get a far larger proportion of my reading from HN than from external sources, and I've been thinking I need to fix that lately.
I knew my tab-bookmark prooblem was really bad when I had two separate tabs for Fogus best things and stuff lists for separate years, and each tab was started when they were first submitted. :/ (of course, this example is mitigated by the fact that a list such as that is not something that can, nor should, be consumed quickly).
Ploughing as many 7 syllable words as possible into a sentence makes an author seem...self-conscious about tone. Strunk & White says "Omit Needless Words". I've always taken that as "Omit Needless Ornament". Thrice nested sentences, v̶e̶r̶b̶i̶a̶g̶e̶ ̶o̶b̶s̶c̶u̶r̶a̶ o̶b̶s̶c̶u̶r̶e̶ ̶v̶o̶c̶a̶b̶u̶l̶a̶r̶y̶ big words, flowery language, et cetera.
In contrast, I find the "ornamental" language of the essay itself to flow easily. It's all part of the register we're typically accustomed to. Shibboleth, for example, is instantly recognizable to me (though it always reminds me of The West Wing).
Or Shibboleth, of course. I'd actually expect quite a few folk here to know the word from the SSO solution.
Of course, it's entirely possible it's just my experience, I don't want the above to be taken as me discounting that possibility. That's just how it looks from my perspective with the input I've gotten so far.
OTOH, I first heard the term it was from working with academic institutions in the UK, because Shibboleth seems to be the favoured form of SSO there (though apparently it came from the Internet2 group, which is US).
So anyone doing SSO or SAML etc would probably have heard the word and you'd have to be fairly incurious not to look it up :-)
Next interesting point, I think a lot of the outrage with Donald Trump from within the republican party is he is projecting 'lower' class based signifiers and in effect turning power from the 'upper' class republicans to the 'lower' class republicans.
He was definitely trying to project an image of being from a lower social class, and he played to issues that lower social classes were more likely to support.
I take issue with her desire to leave race out of the discussion. That's precisely the problem with race in America: race is a decent first-order approximation of class, with all the bad that entails. If we could address that head-on, if people didn't automatically assume that others of the same race are 'like them' and others of a different race are 'unlike them,' and not have those things be true, then racism would be a thing of the past — or, at least, no worse than the silliness one sees about redheads/gingers. The colour of one's skin has no more effect on one's worth as a human being than the colour of one's hair: the day that it's seen as no more important is the day racism is dead. But as long as race and class are conflated, that day won't come.
> The ban on smoking in restaurants – which, let me be clear, I am wildly in favor of, being someone who can't patronize a business with cigarette smoking in it
Can't? Given that tobacco smoke contains no allergens, methinks the mot juste would be 'won't.'
> I empathize when social classes not mine find themselves on the short end of the stick, such as in the above account of smoking regulations, but that doesn't mean I'd do anything to change that outcome. Like, "Wow, it must suck to have your class' norms so disrespected by a change in the law like that. Welp, I'm off to buy a burger in this now refreshingly smoke-free burger joint, and discuss with my class-peers how else we can change public policy to make it more support my class' norms – even, if necessary, at your class' norms' expense."
What was wrong with the previous policy, which meant that some places catered to the author's class and some places catered to other classes?
In general, of course, I find the idea of announcing 'derailing' topics to be ridiculous, meaning something like, 'here are my thoughts on a topic: you are free to talk about your thoughts in these related areas, but not those related areas, because I don't want you to, and will consider you rude.' It feels childish to me.
All you've done is complain about it (i.e., derail).
So many times, when you hear racism of any kind, it's more complaints about mannerisms. Stuff like: That black person, dressing up in "gangster" (read: hip-hop fashionable) clothing, playing "gangster" music (also read: general hip-hop), well, to the racist, he must be a "thug". Regardless of how rich or poor that person is, regardless of the actual lack of "thuggery", etc.
Put a similar black person in a business suit, adjust the mannerisms to be more "professional" for a lack of a better term, and the person becomes more acceptable to the "professional" type classes. (However, he might be an "Uncle Tom" to some of his black peers, and he probably won't impress the "blue collar" social class either.)
You can go on from there. I do think there are general "I hate everyone who is xyz race" people out there as well, but I almost would be willing to say that a lot of racism is more the sort of social class issues identified in the article. The race is almost more of a side note as a way people over-generalize, kind of like the "Southern accent = hicks" over-generalization mentioned above.
> Can't? Given that tobacco smoke contains no allergens, methinks the mot juste would be 'won't.'
I cannot speak for the author, but my asthma is severe enough that indoor cigarette smoke (or being in the home of a smoker) is sufficient to cause discomfort.
Nightshade allergy includes tobacco.
Not really. I mean in my state (WA), 48% of people below the poverty line are white, 18% are hispanic, 14% are asian, 14% are black. Sure some approximations of some classes are heavily involved with race, but if you're discussing class dynamics in general race isn't a necessary distinction.
> If we could address that head-on, if people didn't automatically assume that others of the same race are 'like them' and others of a different race are 'unlike them,' and not have those things be true, then racism would be a thing of the past...
Except that humans can't ignore race. The feel-good stories we tell each other about how we are naturally colorblind and taught to be racist, about how racism is an unnatural malignant artifact in our culture, are just that; stories. In reality children will show a strong preference for members of their own race by age 3, and it's not something we can just disappear.
You may just be getting numbers back based on the ethnicity that predominantly lives in your state.
Look at relative poverty numbers. i.e., of the number of people who are of ethnicity X, how many are poor? I think you'll surely find a correlation that OP describes as a decent first-order approximation.
For example: white 9%, hispanic 18%, black 37%. That's 2x and 4x more likely to be poor vs white depending on if you're hispanic or black.
[0] http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/poverty-rate-by-raceeth...
You can easily read the essay pretending that everybody in the US who isn't white simply doesn't exist, and it still makes completes sense.
> Can't? Given that tobacco smoke contains no allergens, methinks the mot juste would be 'won't.'
Those of us who have had to put up with reactions to cigarette smoke do not particularly care that those reactions are due to cigarette smoke being an irritant rather than an allergen. Won't is the operative word (except if you define "won't" as "won't because I might have to go spend some quality time in the local hospital").
https://www.sharecare.com/health/impact-nicotine-addiction-o... seems like a nice summary.
Where there is guidance, it's about language usage.[2] The classic on this being, of course, "My Fair Lady"[1]. This is less of an issue since TV and movies imposed a standard linguistic dialect.
The author likes Paul Fussell's "Class", which is an excellent read. It's quite funny.
Social class is less social than it used to be, and more marketed. As a horse owner, I've seen this change since the 1980s. In the 1980s, it would have been considered tacky to have advertising at a horse show. Now, Rolex ads are all over the place. Polo is the classic upper class sport (Silicon Valley has three polo fields), but polo players are usually people who were football jocks in high school, but not college.
Well into the 1980s, regular customers could sign their register receipts at Roberts of Woodside (a supermarket with an excellent deli) and be billed monthly.
[1] http://www.asanet.org/introtosociology/Documents/Hidden%20Ru... [2] http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1010... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhninL_G3Fg
Keep in mind that television itself has significant class segmentation. The vast majority of characters on shows I watch are from my class or present as such.
On the occasion that I do see something from a lower class, it's quite jarring and I also have a lot of trouble differentiating race and class in such scenarios (>90% of the "lower class" characters I see are African-American).
The upper classes constantly change the performance, because when lower classes catch on to a certain performance, it is immediately discarded. The elites are trend-setters, and they are constantly making damn sure that it's hard to quickly learn how to perform.
There is often a bit of truth in a joke. I wonder if the "medium" would change the reception of a story.
Medium is nouveau riche, LJ is authentic aristocracy. If you think Medium is "nice middle-class", it means you're lower-middle-class.
PS: I can't tell if I'm kidding or not.
PPS: what does it say about my class that I thought these post-scripts are a good idea?
What IMO get's lost in these discussions is poor people can make rational choices that conflict with wealthy culture. "Sorry, broke" is a shield for many things making savings often money that you simply don't get to spend. What happens when your 50 and owe more money than you will make in the rest of your life?
> Politically, the left pretends class doesn’t exist
...what?
Max Weber, another leftist considered one of the fathers of sociology, named the "Status Class", related to prestige, one of the three main ones along economic and political allegiance ones.
Modern intersectionalists routinely bring up how arbitrary many of our social predilections seem to be, such as "tan white > white > black", or "pink is for girls", and look at these chicken-and-egg situations trying to figure out where they started. Where does the impetus for this bloggers' parents verbally check[ing] us in a heartbeat if the vowel in our "to" started getting too schwa-like come from?
The big mistake made by the author of that piece is the idea that they can isolate class and talk about it as its own thing. It's a very scientist-like analytic-approach (kinda like Marx isolating economic factors in spite of the others), but seeing as the author is openly against abolishing classes, it seems to be in service of discrediting the efforts of the economically-conscious-left ("even if you abolish economic classes social classes will prevail, so don't bother") rather than as an honest intellectual inquiry.
With this line:
> Please note: for purposes of this discussion, the topics of race, ethnicity, gender, immigration status, and native language are all derails of the topic, which is class.
The author seems more concerned with prevailing than with being correct.
> It is a common misconception that the primary obstacle to being in a much higher class is money to afford the things by which one performs that class. The limiting factor is not money, it is this: it is impossible to join a culture the ways of which you know nothing. You may come by money, but the ignorance of how to use it to perform that higher class will keep you out as adamantly as if there were a wall built around it.
So learn from this. Learn how to perform as upper middle class. Learn to radiate more confidence, try to look like you belong. If you look like a trespasser, if for a moment you look like you cannot believe you would end up in a place like this, you're exposed as not "one of us".
http://www.cracked.com/podcast/americas-secret-caste-system/
And both of these are not identical to race in the US, but their perception is indeed still partially mediated by race.
If you are studying in an Ivy League tier university in the US and your parents know influential people in major companies, you are incredibly privileged. And as the article lays out, this actually reflects two forms of privilege: social class and economic class (of parents, close family, potential love interests and eventually yourself as an aggregate).
The number of trans, non-male, non-white or non-heterosexual founders and leaders in major tech companies gets talked about every now and then. But I doubt any of those (proportional to the absolute distribution across the population) is significantly more concerning than the number of people from lower social and economical classes in the same roles.
Of course these attributes can compound (e.g. "race" is often used as a handle for social class) but diversity needs to take all factors into account in order to fulfil its promise. Nepotism isn't just about skin colour and dangly bits, and class discrimination is far easier to hide behind "culture fit" than other forms of discrimination.
A reddit discussion on bullshitting and class: http://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/1h3j08/generatio... with a link to this piece: http://brightgreenscotland.org/index.php/2013/06/my-public-s...
For whatever reason, that clicked with me. So, I added my middle name to my resume and had a job within a week. I've been going by my middle name professionally ever since.
The accent still pops out once in awhile, usually when I'm tired or agitated. Some folks find it grating or aggressive. I just tell them to screw off.
In America, there is also an example where we "build up" the social class of some segment to compensate for our self-centered guilt.
Take the example of the military service. The vast majority of people would rather be at the mall and let someone else fight and die for the country. But the "I support our troops" bumper sticker is everywhere, or maybe they sent ten bucks to Fisher House or Operation Homefront, but not once have those people wanted to volunteer at a veterans hospital.
So what do we do to cover got guilt? "Ah, let's do a parade for them!!!"
Thus you can support the troops, but deplore the actions of those who caused them to be there in the first case.
I do agree that volunteering at a veteran's hospital would be a perfect way to contribute though. Volunteering at any hospital would hopefully be a useful contribution to society!
This doesn't really hold up, there are more dangerous jobs than "soldier" and they get no respect. No holidays. No parades. No ceremony.
Militarism is a cult.
Idealistically, if you could convince all of the soldiers on both sides to not fight, then you stop the wars, but realistically you need to convince the populations and leaders of the states they are fighting on behalf of that war is a bad idea in the first place.
This cult is propagated by civilians more than soldiers.
>This cult is propagated by civilians more than soldiers.
Exactly! I think we're in agreement.
I'd like to explore this statement a moment - know that I mean absolutely no offense.
Would you agree that volunteering at a hospital for wounded ISIS fighters is similarly noble?
If you put a US doctor into a hospital for wounded ISIS fighters they'd probably help. Humans are humans.
Compensating for self-centered guilt is not evil or virtuous. Life is not boolean. When you start to dig into any one person's psychology it's amazing any of us have the gumption to wake up in the morning and accomplish anything given how much of our habits and behaviors are coping mechanisms for something else.
This was a very good article. But the conclusion that we should all feel guilty for covering up our guilt with social class worship is not terribly productive.
I didn't think that was the conclusion at all.
http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary...
59% of the money goes to actually helping vets, which is pretty crap. Here are a few more credible alternatives:
http://bearingarms.com/four-charities-better-than-wounded-wa...
I entirely agree with your observation however.
Disclaimer: I'm a combat vet of OIF II from 03-04
The key point is that at some level I'd rather be at the mall that work as a software developer, but I'm really good at that so that's what I do instead of goofing off at the mall all day. We should do what we are most productive at, in this way we contribute the most to society (see Comparative Advantage in any economics text).
The military does a tough job. That most of us don't want to do it isn't being hypocritical. It's just the truth that I'm a better software developer than solider.
Now, when I was of an age that I was eligible to be in the military, one often had no choice about it. You were simply told by the government that you had to take years out of your life and perhaps lose you life killing people that most of us saw little point of fighting. Fortunately, my number wasn't picked. Not all of my friends were so fortunate. In that time, we all bore some collective guilt for sending young men off to die against their will to for our politics.
On another angle, the point is not about being a soldier specifically. How about doing intelligence, or translation, or manufacturing, or X, or Y, or Z for the purpose of fulfilling whatever mission the President has decided is important?
The point that you are "told" by the government is a weak one. In the US at least, you elect representatives to make the right decisions for you.
I have been to Israel where I saw armed young people welcoming me to the airport and doing their job for their country. Everybody has to do that job for some time. Everybody needs to sacrifice that time during which you cannot "go to the mall."
Maybe if that was the case, there would be less wars as people would think twice about it, as it used to happen in the past in the US.
My point was that we do build up this "social class" called the "military" when most would not ever consider joining. And that is what is hypocritical.
By the way, here in the USA when I was 18 there was a mandatory draft that sent some people to fight in Vietnam while others, like myself were lucky enough to get high numbers in a national lottery (that only men were subjected to) so I was not forced to go fight.
This actually hurt to read. It sounds like an excerpt from a Nabokov novel.
(Don't get me wrong, Nabokov is a fantastic writer. But there is a time and place for writing like that, and this is not one of them.)
> I feel the need for a disclaimer of sorts. I am writing about class and some of the injustices of classism, but I do not particularly pretend to position myself as an enemy of classism: I'm pretty classist. And by "pretty classist", I don't mean in the sense of "Everybody's a Little Bit Racist" or "gee, internalized misogyny is hard to totally eradicate". No, I mean closer to Segregation and PUAs.
> My parents were born of blue collar families in blue collar communities and were of concerted agreement that their life goals were to flee that class and never have anything to do with it again. Elevating their – and their progeny's – social class was the family project. They enlisted my sister and I in this project, and were explicit, formal, and unapologetic about it.
> I empathize when social classes not mine find themselves on the short end of the stick, such as in the above account of smoking regulations, but that doesn't mean I'd do anything to change that outcome. Like, "Wow, it must suck to have your class' norms so disrespected by a change in the law like that. Welp, I'm off to buy a burger in this now refreshingly smoke-free burger joint, and discuss with my class-peers how else we can change public policy to make it more support my class' norms – even, if necessary, at your class' norms' expense."
The idea that "the Left" engages in "Orwellian double-think" with regards to class, is also pretty puzzling.
> A thing that has been very frustrating to me is that most books and other discussions I have been able to find that really address that social classes are cultures have come out of the Right. Again this pattern: the Right, at least, admits the phenomenon exists, mostly so they can hate on people (also see "culture of poverty"); the Left engages in Orwellian doublethink, insisting the problem doesn't exist and shouldn't be spoken of.
The Left promotes class-consciousness with the goal of abolishing unjust and arbitrary delineations, in its many dimensions (including the extremely well acknowledged ones such as vernacular). The idea that "the Left" has no notion that a poor Led Zeppelin fan can be higher class than the wife of a wealthy drug-dealer is insane.
edit: reply to gjm (because I got flagged too much)
The author
- belittles their opposition (ie: "It is a common confusion – or intellectual dodge – to conflate social class with economic class."),
- expresses veiled dismay that they can't "describe an ethnic, regional, or national culture with contempt, as broken or defective",
- is against legal prejudices today, but against any measures that attempt to correct the damage caused by those legal prejudices in the past ("I'm on-board with the idea that all people have equal rights before the law, and entitled to a baseline level of respect as fellow humans, but I'm not sure how much further than that I go." - ie: the arrangement looks like this today, deal with it as if it was fair regardless of how we got here)
- and concludes with "let's leave race out of it for the moment", echoing much of the talk by LessWrong-types "tired" of talk of sexism and racism.
This piece is not just a humble description of how they see the world, it's very prescriptive. The overall impression I get is a righteous defense of the "fuck you, got mine" mentality, very inspired by Ayn Rand.
And then when you get absurd results, it proves your originality and willingness to look past conventional wisdom.
For my own curiosity, what tension do you see between Bordieu's or Weber's work and this rando blogger's perspective?
Do you have any particular absurd results in mind?
Heard any jokes or insults about Southerners lately? "Trump voters"? Etc.
Which isn't to say that anyone who identifies with leftism is doomed to infinite self-deception with regard to social class, but, most people would benefit from some reflection on how they feel about which groups of people and why.
"Jacobin Magazine"-left, which has a better claim to the mainstream title imo, is all about publicizing interesting and charitable analyses of the phenomenon.
edit: Down-voted into a post-freeze (again). Reply:
Yeah, it's a hairy topic. However, the author states that they had trouble finding left-leaning "books and other discussions [...] that really address that social classes are cultures", which honestly seems like they weren't trying very hard.
lolwut
What makes you say that?
It doesn't look that way to me, because (1) nothing in "the entire thing" particular looks (superficially or otherwise) like a justification for that thinking, and (2) the author doesn't cite any of the rest of "the entire thing" to justify that thinking.
It looks to me as if the entire thing is an attempt to describe how the author sees social class in the USA, and those quotes are just what they say they are: "a disclaimer of sorts".
>> I feel the need for a disclaimer of sorts. I am writing about class and some of the injustices of classism, but I do not particularly pretend to position myself as an enemy of classism: I'm pretty classist. And by "pretty classist", I don't mean in the sense of "Everybody's a Little Bit Racist" or "gee, internalized misogyny is hard to totally eradicate". No, I mean closer to Segregation and PUAs.
> The idea that "the Left" engages in "Orwellian double-think" with regards to class, is also pretty puzzling.
It is not at all puzzling that humans -- regardless of their gender, age, race, nationality -- are bound to identify themselves with particular set of groups to the pointing of "segregating" themselves (and their ways of thinking, mannerisms, etc) from other groups. Left's Orwellian double-think of "insisting the problem doesn't exist and shouldn't be spoken of" is but a cunning way some acculturated groups achieve the said segregation under a moral veil.
The only solution to all of this is to cease identifying once and for all, and treat one another as fellow human beings. It will however be eons before the LessWrong/SlaterStarCodex crowd can even get close to such a stage if they were to continue their current modus operandi.