REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

No Such Thing As White Privilege

POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Monday, June 17, 2024 16:30
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Wednesday, March 1, 2017 4:53 PM

THGRRI


I am tired of people going to the White thing. It's one of the problems the democrats have, and why they lost the White House as well as 1000 seats across the country since 2009. The White working class keeps getting poked.

Here's a controversial opinion. There is no such thing as White privilege. Minorities are sold this bill of goods to garner votes. It feeds into what they want to hear. What there is, is culture privilege. After you have explained to the country what culture privilege is, you can explain how being White in America has gained them privilege. How it has helped them get ahead and been a get out of jail free card others don't possess. This is a truth the White working class can understand and accept. I have yet to see the democratic party has figured this out.

We need to stop poking White people to garner favoritism from minorities. It only builds a wall between hard working minorities and hard working White people who need each other.

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Wednesday, March 1, 2017 5:42 PM

OONJERAH




A basic principle of the ruling class: Divide & Conquer. :)




... oooOO}{OOooo ...

I've given up looking for the meaning of life. Now all I want is a cookie.

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Wednesday, March 1, 2017 6:03 PM

THGRRI


Quote:

Originally posted by Oonjerah:


A basic principle of the ruling class: Divide & Conquer. :)




... oooOO}{OOooo ...

I've given up looking for the meaning of life. Now all I want is a cookie.



Amen to that. And man has it worked. If they ever really address this it will take decades to unravel. At that point though the power will be with the people.

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Wednesday, March 1, 2017 7:01 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


I can get on board with that.

The problem with the whole "White Privilege" thing is that when a minority that has bought into it looks at somebody like me, all they see is another Trump or somebody else with actual class privilege. Doesn't matter that all my clothes come from good will and my car is 20 years old when all they see is the color of my skin.

What nobody ever talks about is "what is white?". Just a few generations ago, the melting pot that is white was full of different ethnicities that essentially hated each other. My grandma gave up the family money and was shunned to marry my poor Polock grandfather. Well, he might have been poor, but back then he was able to raise 5 kids and have a stay at home wife on a grocery store manager's salary. Those days are long gone...

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Wednesday, March 1, 2017 7:15 PM

THGRRI


I see nothing in your post that deputes what I said Jack. Even though you say you can't get on board with what I posted. I'm not claiming many White people haven't had a hard time of it. Just that even poor Whites have an advantage. Read it again.

Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I can get on board with that.

The problem with the whole "White Privilege" thing is that when a minority that has bought into it looks at somebody like me, all they see is another Trump or somebody else with actual class privilege. Doesn't matter that all my clothes come from good will and my car is 20 years old when all they see is the color of my skin.

What nobody ever talks about is "what is white?". Just a few generations ago, the melting pot that is white was full of different ethnicities that essentially hated each other. My grandma gave up the family money and was shunned to marry my poor Polock grandfather. Well, he might have been poor, but back then he was able to raise 5 kids and have a stay at home wife on a grocery store manager's salary. Those days are long gone...

Do Right, Be Right. :)



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Wednesday, March 1, 2017 7:16 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Read what you quoted. I said "can"

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Wednesday, March 1, 2017 7:19 PM

THGRRI


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Read what you quoted. I said "can"

Do Right, Be Right. :)




Ahhhh, I stand corrected Jack.

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Wednesday, March 1, 2017 10:09 PM

DREAMTROVE


Quote:

Originally posted by THGRRI:
I am tired of people going to the White thing. It's one of the problems the democrats have, and why they lost the White House as well as 1000 seats across the country since 2009. The White working class keeps getting poked.

Here's a controversial opinion. There is no such thing as White privilege. Minorities are sold this bill of goods to garner votes. It feeds into what they want to hear. What there is, is culture privilege. After you have explained to the country what culture privilege is, you can explain how being White in America has gained them privilege. How it has helped them get ahead and been a get out of jail free card others don't possess. This is a truth the White working class can understand and accept. I have yet to see the democratic party has figured this out.

We need to stop poking White people to garner favoritism from minorities. It only builds a wall between hard working minorities and hard working White people who need each other.


I agree. It's self-defeating identity politics.

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Thursday, March 2, 2017 12:28 AM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


Stunning surveillance video emerged Friday showing retired tennis star James Blake getting slammed to the sidewalk by an undercover cop who mistook him for a credit-card scammer.

Will you just LOOK at that menacing black man obviously up to no good!



Democrats were counting on 'demographics' to do their work for them. Well, I hate to mention it to them, but it'll be decades before the 'demographics' are a majority.

In the meantime, there is still white privilege. It doesn't mean whites have it easy. Nobody but the top echelons are guaranteed to never worry about money, no matter what. Everybody else has to scramble. But on the whole whites and especially white males have to scramble less than others.

What makes people fight over these relatively small differences is that we are mostly very, very close to going under. Nobody is all that secure. All it takes is a flood, a job loss, or a serious illness, to fail economically. Your life and the lives of everyone in the family can be blighted for decades afterward.

But we turn on each other, like we do, instead of fixing the real problem.




How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?

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Thursday, March 2, 2017 1:31 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Show me how White Males have it any easier when you take class out of the equation.

A well dressed and well spoken black man has as good of a chance as a well dressed white well spoken man at a job interview. Likely a better chance at a lot of larger corporations who benefit from hiring minorities. Go outside of any suburban area and you'll find plenty of uneducated whites in America who are far from well spoken.

A lot of black parents do damage to their employability with the names they give their children too. I won't say her name here, but I will say that one of the girls I worked with at Kmart used her middle name, and the rare occasion one of the day managers used her given name she got angry about it.

My point is, dress nicely for a job interview and do something about your ridiculous name if you have to, and you've got just as good a shot of getting a job as a white person. If you're female, your chances are even higher.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Thursday, March 2, 2017 1:45 PM

THGRRI


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Show me how White Males have it any easier when you take class out of the equation.

A well dressed and well spoken black man has as good of a chance as a well dressed white well spoken man at a job interview. Likely a better chance at a lot of larger corporations who benefit from hiring minorities. Go outside of any suburban area and you'll find plenty of uneducated whites in America who are far from well spoken.

A lot of black parents do damage to their employability with the names they give their children too. I won't say her name here, but I will say that one of the girls I worked with at Kmart used her middle name, and the rare occasion one of the day managers used her given name she got angry about it.

My point is, dress nicely for a job interview and do something about your ridiculous name if you have to, and you've got just as good a shot of getting a job as a white person. If you're female, your chances are even higher.

Do Right, Be Right. :)





First I want to say Jack, as usual, you base your beliefs on what you think rather than on facts. This shit is easy to find. In the future I will respond, look it up for yourself.

Whites doing better in this country was due solely to being here before the other cultures and in much greater numbers. Not forgetting the American Indian, so please, don't bother.

•"I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented."
•"When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization,” I am shown that people of my color made it what it is."
•"If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race."
•"I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time."
•"If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area, which I can afford and in which I would want to live."
•"I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me."
•"I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed."
•"If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege."

The concept of privilege refers to any advantage that is unearned, exclusive, and socially conferred. For example, white people are generally assumed to be law-abiding until they show some sign that they are not, while people of color are routinely assumed to be criminals or potential criminals until they show they’re not. One way to see this is through a survey in which respondents were asked to close their eyes and picture a drug dealer. When asked to describe what they saw, almost 95 percent mentioned a black person, even though the vast majority of drug dealers in the U.S. are white.

So, when it comes to being randomly stopped and frisked by police, anyone identified as ‘white’ has an advantage they did not earn and that is exclusive to whites. It is socially conferred in the sense that it depends on them being perceived in a particular way by the police—as ‘white’—before the advantage is given to them in the form of the assumption that they are not criminals.

It’s important to note that privilege does not guarantee good outcomes for the privileged group or bad outcomes for everyone else. A white person, for example, can work hard and have little to show for it, can be mistreated by the police without cause, be denied a job they’re qualified for. What privilege does is load the odds one way or the other so that the chance of bad things happening to white people as a category of people is much lower than for everyone else, and the chance of good things happening is much higher. Privilege is not something a person can have, like a possession, as in “Where’s mine?” Instead, it is a characteristic of the social system—like a rule in a game—in which everyone participates.

A system of privilege—a family, a workplace, a society—is organized around three basic principles: dominance, identification, and centeredness.

A system of white privilege, for example, is white-dominated, which means the default is for white people to occupy positions of power. White-dominance doesn’t mean that all white people are powerful, only that the powerful tend almost always to be white, and when a person of color occupies a position of power, that will be noted as an exception to the rule (as when Barack Obama is routinely identified as a black President and not just ‘the President’).

White-identification means that the culture defines ‘white’ people as the standard for human beings in general. People of color, for example, are routinely identified as ‘nonwhite,’ a term that doesn’t tell us what they are, but what they are not.

When a category of people is named the standard for human beings in general, the path of least resistance is to see them as superior, there being no other reason to make them the standard. Several things follow from this, including seeing the way they do things as simply ‘human’ or ‘normal,’ and giving more credibility to their views than to the views of ‘others,’ in this case people of color. White-identification also encourages whites to be unaware of themselves as white, as if they didn’t have a race at all. It also encourages whites to be unaware of white privilege.

White-centeredness is the tendency to put white people and what they do at the center of attention—the front page of the newspaper or magazine, the main character in the movie.

When you organize a society in this way, the result will be patterns of unearned advantage that are available to whites simply because they are socially identified as ‘white.’ A related consequence is patterns of oppression centered on people of color. Eighty-five percent of people who buy, sell, and use illegal drugs in the U.S., for example, are white, but more than half of the people in jail or prison for drug crimes are people of color. The white privilege in this example, is the practice of the criminal justice system to overlook drug crimes committed by whites, while the corresponding oppressive consequence for people of color is the systematic selection of people of color for arrest, prosecution, and punishment.

http://www.agjohnson.us/glad/what-is-a-system-of-privilege/


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Thursday, March 2, 2017 2:21 PM

REAVERFAN


It's somewhat amusing to watch known racists deny reality, but that's what our resident Nazis love to do. LOL!

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Thursday, March 2, 2017 2:40 PM

THGRRI


Quote:

Originally posted by reaverfan:
It's somewhat amusing to watch known racists deny reality, but that's what our resident Nazis love to do. LOL!



I gotta tell ya reaverfan. I often find myself on the same side of an argument as you. Yet I find it hard to converse with you due to the way you continually use the term Nazi. It sends off a vibe of pure hate. I can't go there. Major dislike yeah, but not hate. Not all the time.

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Thursday, March 2, 2017 2:44 PM

DREAMTROVE


Quote:

Originally posted by reaverfan:
It's somewhat amusing to watch known racists deny reality, but that's what our resident Nazis love to do. LOL!



So, Reaver, just out of curiosity, you vote for any of the three jews, the guy who said jews should make nazi wedding cakes, or the woman who said lets get the grimy jew bastards out of washington?


Yeah, I know, I know, don't feed them

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Thursday, March 2, 2017 5:45 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by THGRRI:
A very long post about how some whites in this country with Class Privilege have it good and then how that is applied by the regressive left to all whites, regardless of class.



I'm not reading all of that. I tried, but it's just bullshit.

I think you're confusing white guilt with white privilege.


I did take notice to your response to Reaverfan though, and I do appreciate somebody besides me saying something about his use of the word Nazi.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Thursday, March 2, 2017 5:55 PM

THGRRI


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:

Originally posted by THGRRI:
A very long post about how some whites in this country with Class Privilege have it good and then how that is applied by the regressive left to all whites, regardless of class.



I'm not reading all of that. I tried, but it's just bullshit.

I think you're confusing white guilt with white privilege.


I did take notice to your response to Reaverfan though, and I do appreciate somebody besides me saying something about his use of the word Nazi.

Do Right, Be Right. :)



Who are you quoting Jack? You claim it's me but I never said that. I've had a lot of trouble dealing with your many posts, that facts easily show to be wrong, but I never thought you to be a liar.

Trust me, no one who suffers from white guilt would have started this thread.

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Thursday, March 2, 2017 6:26 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by THGRRI:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:

Originally posted by THGRRI:
A very long post about how some whites in this country with Class Privilege have it good and then how that is applied by the regressive left to all whites, regardless of class.



I'm not reading all of that. I tried, but it's just bullshit.

I think you're confusing white guilt with white privilege.


I did take notice to your response to Reaverfan though, and I do appreciate somebody besides me saying something about his use of the word Nazi.

Do Right, Be Right. :)



Who are you quoting Jack? You claim it's me but I never said that. I've had a lot of trouble dealing with your many posts, that facts easily show to be wrong, but I never thought you to be a liar.

Trust me, no one who suffers from white guilt would have started this thread.

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Sorry... I paraphrased your very long post about nonsense. I thought that was apparent, but maybe I should have been more clear on that.

What "facts" are you talking about? That post didn't have any.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Thursday, March 2, 2017 6:49 PM

THGRRI


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:

Originally posted by THGRRI:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:

Originally posted by THGRRI:
A very long post about how some whites in this country with Class Privilege have it good and then how that is applied by the regressive left to all whites, regardless of class.



I'm not reading all of that. I tried, but it's just bullshit.

I think you're confusing white guilt with white privilege.


I did take notice to your response to Reaverfan though, and I do appreciate somebody besides me saying something about his use of the word Nazi.

Do Right, Be Right. :)



Who are you quoting Jack? You claim it's me but I never said that. I've had a lot of trouble dealing with your many posts, that facts easily show to be wrong, but I never thought you to be a liar.

Trust me, no one who suffers from white guilt would have started this thread.

---------------------




Sorry... I paraphrased your very long post about nonsense. I thought that was apparent, but maybe I should have been more clear on that.

What "facts" are you talking about? That post didn't have any.

Do Right, Be Right. :)



When you do that others may take it as something I actually said. That's why we put it in quotes. Besides, what you say is not paraphrasing it's opinion giving, yours. Look at it again.

I never said I agreed with all the article said. I barely glanced at it myself. I only pasted it here because you are too lazy to look into the subject for yourself. Like I said, I don't believe in White privilege but being white in America does have it's advantages. In order to have an honest discussion with those who are not white, you have to understand that. Look into it, understanding culture privilege is not a slight against White people. The term White privilege is.

I'm glad to see the term liar still doesn't apply to you. Wish I could say that about others here.

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Thursday, March 2, 2017 7:14 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by THGRRI:
When you do that others may take it as something I actually said. That's why we put it in quotes. Besides, what you say is not paraphrasing it's opinion giving, yours. Look at it again.

I never said I agreed with all the article said. I barely glanced at it myself. I only pasted it here because you are too lazy to look into the subject for yourself. Like I said, I don't believe in White privilege but being white in America does have it's advantages. In order to have an honest discussion with those who are not white, you have to understand that. Look into it, understanding culture privilege is not a slight against White people. The term White privilege is.

I'm glad to see the term liar still doesn't apply to you. Wish I could say that about others here.



Point taken, but quotes wouldn't have exactly worked either. Probably would have to start it off with "Paraphrased: " or something.

One of the funniest things I've noticed though are most of the people that talk about White Privilege are white people who don't actually have anything to do with any minorities and they love throwing out studies and statistics. It's usually whites who are also extremely well off who like to throw that term around. To me, that just sounds like guilt. Maybe white guilt isn't even the appropriate term. I think they're just guilty of the money they've got and they misinterpret their own class privilege for race privilege.

I've had many, many different types of jobs over the years and have worked several where I was the minority or even the only white person there. I didn't shy away from conversations regarding race when they came up, and I wasn't treated poorly by any of them because I was white. Most of them were great to work with. Some of them were dicks. I've worked with a lot of white dicks at other jobs too. Some people are just dicks.

I just don't agree with anybody who says that being white has its privleges anymore. This was true a few decades ago, but it's not the case anymore, and we're talking about right now. The white male, more than any demographic, is the person who has to walk on eggshells around everyone else. All of the laws regarding hiring practices and speech are against him now.

Just twice in the last 30 minutes you misinterpreted jokes I was making. Granted, sometimes it's hard reading things right in this format, and you and I don't exactly see eye to eye on much, but it happened nonetheless. At least you don't call me a nazi.

I'm not racist. I'm just getting tired of being treated like shit for nothing other than the color of my skin.

To the regressive left: Hey! I get it! It doesn't feel nice. Go talk to my dead great grandparents and how they might have treated blacks. 2 wrongs don't make a right and I don't deserve any of this bullshit.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Thursday, March 2, 2017 7:26 PM

THGRRI


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

I'm not racist. I'm just getting tired of being treated like shit for nothing other than the color of my skin.

Do Right, Be Right. :)



That's the point of the thread Jack.

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Thursday, March 2, 2017 7:27 PM

JEWELSTAITEFAN


Sometimes I am reminded of the fact that, if "African-Americans" were a separate state, they would be the 13th largest economy of the world - with no other "black" country ranked higher. So they need to whine about being better off than any of their ancestors. Whether enslaved or murdered by their fellow countrymen from a rival tribe, it didn't happen in the past century. Now their ancestral home countries just have rival tribes commit mass genocide.

This thread is one of those times.

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Wednesday, September 20, 2023 6:24 AM

JAYNEZTOWN


Dove partners with BLM activist to promote ‘fat liberation’ after she was accused of getting white student wrongly expelled

https://nypost.com/2023/09/14/dove-partners-with-blm-activist-zyanha-b
ryant-to-promote-fat-liberation
/

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Wednesday, September 20, 2023 4:11 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Having interviewed many many people and been on many interview panels, I can say unequivocally that a tall, good looking well-spoken and technically knowledgeable white male stands a better chance of being hired than anyone equally knowledgeable and well spoken who is older or fatter or shorter or darker. (Unless they're Asian.)

Also, Bambi-like females have a clear advantage over non-Bambi females.

Yes, there is still discrimination, even in fields where technical knowledge and aptitude for the job is well-defined.

But blacks do themselves no favors when they define speaking proper English, hard work, math, reading, perfectionism, punctuality etc as "white". The deck is already stacked against them a bit (not as much as B4) so why put yourself at an insurmountable disadvantage?

Also,THERE IS A CLEAR LACK OF JOBS AT ALL LEVELS AND IN ALL SECTORS OF SOCIETY, except the medical field, low paid personal services such as elder companion, nanny and gardener, and even lower -paid agricultural work, stoop labor, and piecework.
And construction.(And if real estate implodes, so will construction work).

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Wednesday, September 20, 2023 9:12 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Having interviewed many many people and been on many interview panels, I can say unequivocally that a tall, good looking well-spoken and technically knowledgeable white male stands a better chance of being hired than anyone equally knowledgeable and well spoken who is older or fatter or shorter or darker. (Unless they're Asian.)



Check that tall and good looking part again. I think you'll find the tall and good looking person gets hired before any other person regardless of race or sex.

Quote:

Also, Bambi-like females have a clear advantage over non-Bambi females.


Agreed.

Quote:

Yes, there is still discrimination, even in fields where technical knowledge and aptitude for the job is well-defined.

But blacks do themselves no favors when they define speaking proper English, hard work, math, reading, perfectionism, punctuality etc as "white". The deck is already stacked against them a bit (not as much as B4) so why put yourself at an insurmountable disadvantage?



Yeah... I don't get that one.

Quote:

Also,THERE IS A CLEAR LACK OF JOBS AT ALL LEVELS AND IN ALL SECTORS OF SOCIETY, except the medical field, low paid personal services such as elder companion, nanny and gardener, and even lower -paid agricultural work, stoop labor, and piecework.
And construction.(And if real estate implodes, so will construction work).



I've posted long thoughts on this one. When women started working and eventually became half or more of the workforce out of necessity, the job pool shrunk in half. I've known women in my life who have bitched about the "revolution" and would rather not have to work to live, and I've known women who were stay-at-home moms and are grateful that their husbands made enough money to allow them to do that. They constantly get shit on by other women in their lives.

--------------------------------------------------

How you do anything is how you do everything.

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Thursday, September 21, 2023 2:57 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.



Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Having interviewed many many people and been on many interview panels, I can say unequivocally that a tall, good looking well-spoken and technically knowledgeable white male stands a better chance of being hired than anyone equally knowledgeable and well spoken who is older or fatter or shorter or darker. (Unless they're Asian.)

SIX: Check that tall and good looking part again. I think you'll find the tall and good looking person gets hired before any other person regardless of race or sex.

Part of the definition of 'good looking' ... for men, anyway... involves being white. Possibly bc Hispanic-looking or black men are tainted with the prejudice of being uneducated or violent or both.

Quote:

SIGNY Also, Bambi-like females have a clear advantage over non-Bambi females.

SIX: Agreed.

And older people are frozen out of the job market.

Quote:

SIGNY Yes, there is still discrimination, even in fields where technical knowledge and aptitude for the job is well-defined.

But blacks do themselves no favors when they define speaking proper English, hard work, math, reading, perfectionism, punctuality etc as "white". The deck is already stacked against them a bit (not as much as B4) so why put yourself at an insurmountable disadvantage?

SIX: Yeah... I don't get that one.

SIGNY: Also,THERE IS A CLEAR LACK OF JOBS AT ALL LEVELS AND IN ALL SECTORS OF SOCIETY, except the medical field, low paid personal services such as elder companion, nanny and gardener, and even lower -paid agricultural work, stoop labor, and piecework.
And construction.(And if real estate implodes, so will construction work).

SIX: I've posted long thoughts on this one. When women started working and eventually became half or more of the workforce out of necessity, the job pool shrunk in half. I've known women in my life who have bitched about the "revolution" and would rather not have to work to live, and I've known women who were stay-at-home moms and are grateful that their husbands made enough money to allow them to do that. They constantly get shit on by other women in their lives.

That's a complicated question. Whether a woman is happy being a "stay at home' mom depends a lot on the kind of husband she has. Some men are abusive. I know of one man who beat his wife to death with a wire coat hanger. (We know his son, who worked closely with hubby, so this isn't some distantly-told story.) I know of another man who burned his stay-at-home wife with an iron. (Another story from someone close to us.)

On the less-extreme end, my next door neighbor's husband (when I was a kid) would come home and yell at her and the kids for -literally- hours. (Our houses were a driveway and a bit of lawn apart, and in the summer with the windows open we could hear everything that went on.) OTOH My aunt and uncle both worked, and they were even-tempered people who were nice to their kids and enjoyed life.

So, yanno, being a stay-at-home mom isn't the panacea that some people think it is, and being a working woman isn't necessarily terrible.

But being a single mom, tho, usually sucks.

And, JOBS have simply have disappeared. Where I grew up the economy was still on an immediately post-war high. But eventually the foundry, which made train carriage wheels, ran down. The next industry after that, AMC (which made pinsetting machines IIRC) shut down. A company that made agricultural and food processing machines, FMC, moevd out of the area. Semet Solvay was bought out by Union Carbide and then by ...? and then went under. The steel mills - Bethlehem, Lackawanna, Republic - which between them employed over 60,000 people ... shut down. The Buffalo auto assembly plan shuttered. Even Trico, which originated in Bufallo, wound down its presence and is now mainly near the Mexican border.

SIX, over the course of 20 years the economy went from being vibrant to being moribund, and the two employers who were still going strong were the university and the mafia.

You weren't around for the hollowing out of the rust belt but hundreds of thousands of jobs just in WNYS alone went POOF!

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Thursday, September 21, 2023 12:03 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Having interviewed many many people and been on many interview panels, I can say unequivocally that a tall, good looking well-spoken and technically knowledgeable white male stands a better chance of being hired than anyone equally knowledgeable and well spoken who is older or fatter or shorter or darker. (Unless they're Asian.)

SIX: Check that tall and good looking part again. I think you'll find the tall and good looking person gets hired before any other person regardless of race or sex.

Part of the definition of 'good looking' ... for men, anyway... involves being white. Possibly bc Hispanic-looking or black men are tainted with the prejudice of being uneducated or violent or both.



I don't agree. There are plenty of good looking black and Hispanic men. If they're well spoken and don't show up to the interview wearing a basketball jersey or wearing pants that show their drawers, they'll get hired over an ugly short white dude any day of the week.

Quote:

Quote:

SIGNY Also, Bambi-like females have a clear advantage over non-Bambi females.

SIX: Agreed.

And older people are frozen out of the job market.



Absolutely.

Quote:

Quote:

SIGNY Yes, there is still discrimination, even in fields where technical knowledge and aptitude for the job is well-defined.

But blacks do themselves no favors when they define speaking proper English, hard work, math, reading, perfectionism, punctuality etc as "white". The deck is already stacked against them a bit (not as much as B4) so why put yourself at an insurmountable disadvantage?

SIX: Yeah... I don't get that one.

SIGNY: Also,THERE IS A CLEAR LACK OF JOBS AT ALL LEVELS AND IN ALL SECTORS OF SOCIETY, except the medical field, low paid personal services such as elder companion, nanny and gardener, and even lower -paid agricultural work, stoop labor, and piecework.
And construction.(And if real estate implodes, so will construction work).

SIX: I've posted long thoughts on this one. When women started working and eventually became half or more of the workforce out of necessity, the job pool shrunk in half. I've known women in my life who have bitched about the "revolution" and would rather not have to work to live, and I've known women who were stay-at-home moms and are grateful that their husbands made enough money to allow them to do that. They constantly get shit on by other women in their lives.

That's a complicated question. Whether a woman is happy being a "stay at home' mom depends a lot on the kind of husband she has. Some men are abusive. I know of one man who beat his wife to death with a wire coat hanger. On the less-extreme end, my next door neighbor's husband (when I was a kid) would come home and yell at her and the kids for -literally- hours. (Our houses were a driveway and a bit of lawn apart, and in the summer with the wondows open we could hear everything that went on.) OTOH My aunt and uncle both worked, and they were even-tempered people who were nice to their kids and enjoyed life.

So, yanno, being a stay-at-home mom isn't the panacea that some people think it is, and being a working woman isn't necessarily terrible.



It might not necessarily be terrible when they have good jobs. I can tell you that it's been many years since I've had what somebody considered a good job and I've yet to meet a woman who liked hers since that time.

I've never known any stay at home mom that had an abusive husband, so I can't speak to that. All I know is that they regularly get shit on from other women about it. I would assume that's part out of a sense of "obligation" from a lifetime of brainwashing, and part jealousy.

Quote:

Being a single mom, tho, usually sucks.


True that.

Quote:

And, JOBS have simply have disappeared. Where I grew up the economy was still on an immediately post-war high. But eventually the foundry, which made train carriage wheels, ran down. The next industry after that, AMC (which made pinsetting machines IIRC) shut down. A company that made agricultural and food processing machines, went under. Semet Solvay was bought out by Union Carbide and then by ...? and then went under. The steel mills - which employed 60,000 people total ... shut down. The auto assembly plants shuttered.


This is all true. But if only men worked still there would be so many jobs left unfilled that the workers could name their prices.

That was the big scam the Women's Liberation movement perped on everyone.

Quote:

SIX, over the course of 20 years the economy went from being vibrant to being moribund, and the two employers who were still going strong were the university and the mafia.

You weren't around for the hollowing out of the rust belt but hundreds of thousands of jobs just in WNYS alone went POOF!



I didn't live through it, but I know about it though. I lived through the 2nd time that happened when the tech and service jobs went POOF!

I've had two jobs making middle-class money in my life without a college degree simply because I'm well spoken, well written and I used to be very tech savvy and up to date with the latest tech. You might as well not even bother applying for a non-minimum wage job today without a college degree. And the tech jobs are just gone now. Even if you managed to find one it would only be a short matter of time before you weren't necessary anymore... especially with the advancement in AI of late.

My guess is that in 10 years at least 30% of the people working right now aren't going to have jobs.

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How you do anything is how you do everything.

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Thursday, September 21, 2023 12:11 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


It's funny bc EVERY stay-at-home mom that I knew when I was a kid was under her husband's thumb, if not outright abused.

As a girl, it gave me a strong incentive not to be financially controlled by anyone. There may have been happy stay-at-home moms in the neighborhood, but I didn't know them.

The problem is the relative powerlessness of stay-at-home moms creates the potential for abuse. If she has a bad husband, what are her options? It used to be, when families lived closer together she went back home to her mom. In some long-ago European neighborhods, the men, or the women, in the neighborhood intervened. Now there are "women's shelters" which is just one step above being homeless.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Thursday, September 21, 2023 1:37 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
It's funny bc EVERY stay-at-home mom that I knew when I was a kid was under her husband's thumb, if not outright abused.



I don't believe that at all. I think you've been brainwashed to believe that.

About 1/3rd of my time growing up was being at my grandparent's house. My grandfather would have never imagined ever hurting my grandmother.

She was from a well-to-do family and had a college education. Instead of working, she "married down" with the poor Pollack, was immediately disowned from her family and the inheritance she would have gotten, and she stayed at home and raised 5 kids, PTA meetings and all. And my grandfather got on his hands and knees to scrub that kitchen floor up until the day he was unable to do it anymore, always saying that type of work was beneath her.

She never bitched once about her cancer, and in all the times she was on chemo she never got sick or lost her hair either. When it finally came for her, it was quick and relatively painless.


The scenario you present is not anything I've ever been familiar with. I think you must have been a part of or been very close to somebody who went through something traumatic and you're projecting that on to everyone else.

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How you do anything is how you do everything.

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Thursday, September 21, 2023 5:07 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Oh fuck you, SIX. Don't fucking tell me what I do and don't remember.

I didn't know every stay at home mom in the neighborhood, but I knew my next door neighbors, and my 'cross the street neighbors.

One next door neighbor yelled at his wife and kids for hours. It was impossible to miss. The other dad (the one who worked as a chemist at Union Carbide) wore a permanent scowl, and his wife scurried whenever he came home. I never even SAW my 'cross the street neighbor, I swear she never left the house. It's like the men resented having to go to work.

To be fair, my backdoor neighbors seemed relatively quiet... there was one lady in the neighborhood who, fir one summer at least, gave art lessons (but I think she was a teacher). Two of my three aunts worked and my mom worked. The one aunt who didn't work actually seemed pretty happy, so at least there was that.

So let me modify that: not EVERY stay-at-home was under her husband's thumb, but a lot of them were.
And not every working mom was hapoy- my mom was working and miserable.

But, again, I think it goes back to the kinds of husbands they had. My dad was suffering from massive PTSD. He was kind of damaged, emotionally, and so insecure he made mom go to work. My husband's dad was even more damaged, and he abused his stay-at-home wife. The guy who beat his wife to death was psychotic, had nothing to do with whether she stayed at home or not.

I wonder whether the men in our neighborhood were already reacting to diminishing economic prospects. Feeling insecure in your job and your ability to support your family can cause a lot of pressure.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Thursday, September 21, 2023 5:21 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:

And, JOBS have simply have disappeared. Where I grew up the economy was still on an immediately post-war high. But eventually the foundry, which made train carriage wheels, ran down. The next industry after that, AMC (which made pinsetting machines IIRC) shut down. A company that made agricultural and food processing machines, FMC, moevd out of the area. Semet Solvay was bought out by Union Carbide and then by ...? and then went under. The steel mills - Bethlehem, Lackawanna, Republic - which between them employed over 60,000 people ... shut down. The Buffalo auto assembly plan shuttered. Even Trico, which originated in Bufallo, wound down its presence and is now mainly near the Mexican border.

SIX, over the course of 20 years the economy went from being vibrant to being moribund, and the two employers who were still going strong were the university and the mafia.

You weren't around for the hollowing out of the rust belt but hundreds of thousands of jobs just in WNYS alone went POOF!

When productivity increases in the factories, employment decreases. It's mathematical, not personal.

Explanation from the Federal Reserve Bank
https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2016/05/manufacturing-up-down/
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=197Sv


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, September 21, 2023 6:06 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


So maybe there's something fucked up about a system that is hell-bent on destroying jobs.

Because I have to ask the question: Is the economy there to serve us, or are we there to serve the economy?

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Friday, September 22, 2023 12:21 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
So maybe there's something fucked up about a system that is hell-bent on destroying jobs.

Because I have to ask the question: Is the economy there to serve us, or are we there to serve the economy?



We are tax farms Sigs.

They conned the women into thinking that working as slaves to the system along with the men was a good thing.

We serve the economy. There is no question about that.

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How you do anything is how you do everything.

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Friday, September 22, 2023 1:14 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.



Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
So maybe there's something fucked up about a system that is hell-bent on destroying jobs.
Because I have to ask the question: Is the economy there to serve us, or are we there to serve the economy?

SIX: We are tax farms Sigs.They conned the women into thinking that working as slaves to the system along with the men was a good thing.We serve the economy. There is no question about that.



I don't think you're thinking big enuf, SIX. There's some bigger than government. Three guesses as to what to that is.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Friday, September 22, 2023 3:00 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Space Aliens?



--------------------------------------------------

How you do anything is how you do everything.

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Friday, September 22, 2023 12:54 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Okay- a hint: Who or what gets away with paying no, or few, taxes? Bc whoever they are or whatever that is, it is -or they are- bigger than government and are immune to the government taxman.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Monday, September 25, 2023 3:40 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Ok, SIX, an example to get the brain going...

Let's say there's a foundry, and in that foundry they have an worker who does small stuff... If a machine needs more sand, he brings it. If an aisleway needs clearing, he clears it. If something needs sweeping up, he sweeps it. He keeps the bathrooms clean and orders small stuff ... toilet paper, cleaning supplies, vending machine stuff, forms for invoices and such. His fellow workers recognise the contribution he makes, but with one big difference

HE DOESN'T GET PAID.

Instead, he's allowed to sleep in a small room set up just for him, and eat whatever anyone chooses to bring for him or buy for him from the vending machines, and maybe somebody gives him money from time to time.

If this were to happen in the USA we would call it slavery. OR, WE MIGHT CALL IT UNPAID LABOR. Or, being a housewife.

Unpaid household labor is just another way for business owners to wring more profit from their employees, because their employees can come to work with all of their personal needs taken care of, ready to focus on the day. And when business needs to hire younger labor ... VOILA! There it is! Someone popped them out and raised them (at least partway), without any cost to them!

Business doesn't just parasitize the worker, it parasitizes government and it parasitizes the whole society, including the family.


-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Monday, September 25, 2023 10:25 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Ok, SIX, an example to get the brain going...

Let's say there's a foundry, and in that foundry they have an worker who does small stuff... If a machine needs more sand, he brings it. If an aisleway needs clearing, he clears it. If something needs sweeping up, he sweeps it. He keeps the bathrooms clean and orders small stuff ... toilet paper, cleaning supplies, vending machine stuff, forms for invoices and such. His fellow workers recognise the contribution he makes, but with one big difference

HE DOESN'T GET PAID.

Instead, he's allowed to sleep in a small room set up just for him, and eat whatever anyone chooses to bring for him or buy for him from the vending machines, and maybe somebody gives him money from time to time.



Most of us already live like this already, Sigs. Sure... nobody is actually living in the mop closet at KMart, but they barely make enough money to have a small apartment (far too small if there is a family with kids). I was lucky enough to be doing those types of jobs after I had done right with the money I did make from good jobs I used to be able to get, but I've worked with plenty of people holding down 2 or 3 part-time shit-wage jobs while their spouses also worked 2 or 3 part-time shit wage jobs. Neither of them had insurance through their jobs because government only forces that for full-time work, and the companies know this so most of them limit the full-time work strictly to management. The only reason they even got the benefits of food-stamps is because of the kids, since working those combined 4 to 6 part-time shit-wage jobs would have priced them out of SNAP. Some of them could afford insurance from the marketplace if they could show any restraint with the almost non-existent extra money they had after paying all the bills. Most of them couldn't.

Wage slaves are still slaves. And there are tens of millions of American citizens that fall into this category. But at least, somehow, they're a step above the growing number of millions of homeless people putting up shanty towns all over the US's major cities.


Quote:

If this were to happen in the USA we would call it slavery. OR, WE MIGHT CALL IT UNPAID LABOR. Or, being a housewife.


That's a subjective point of view on your part. And you've already told me that in your world you've never known a housewife situation where she wasn't being abused.

My friend's wife who is a stay-at-home mom and home-schools their daughter loves her life. I'd only ever met her once before they got married when we were all in the limo for another mutual friend's wedding. Her husband and I had a falling out years earlier and it wasn't until 4 years ago that we reconnected and he's one of my closest two friends today. So it wasn't until I spent all night talking to her after she and her daughter made me dinner after mowing their lawn while he was out of town for job training about a month ago where I found out that back then she was kind of a big shot at an advertising firm when they met. When she got pregnant, she decided she wanted to stay at home and raise their daughter and my buddy made plenty enough money to make that happen.

Their daughter is one of the most impressive 9 year olds I've ever met. She was telling me about books she's reading (EGADS! 9 year olds even know what a book is in 2023!), and they weren't kid books. Two years ago when she was only 7 years old she was baking her own cookies that she got the recipe for online, with her mother only there to supervise to make sure a 7 year old doesn't burn the house down. They were amazing and she was so proud of them. I never see her moping around or bitching about anything. When the 3 of them are together and I'm over it's like watching 3 adults talking with each other.

She was telling me about her plans with the two closets in her bedroom last time I was over, including shelving and drawers, and a place to put her new record player she's going to get for Christmas because she's excited to be able to play her new vinyl records she'd saved up for, and how she's going to sell her old toys (some sort of beanie baby type collectable plushy things that are hot right now) to fund the job. (Her dad could easily afford it, but they're teaching her right, you see).

That's when her mom chimed in and said they were hoping I could be involved in that because they've seen what I did to my closet and she also saw the mock-up I made for a future project in the Man Cave a few months ago.

Quote:

Unpaid household labor is just another way for business owners to wring more profit from their employees, because their employees can come to work with all of their personal needs taken care of, ready to focus on the day.


Chores are chores. Nobody should be paid to do household labor. I can't believe that this is what you're hinting at and I think I'm reading this wrong.

But now that you mention it, a lot of people ARE paid for household work. You just have to be on the poor end of the working spectrum to do it. I know I've told the story before of the single mom that worked at KMart overnight with me who had 3 kids before.

One day about a month from Tax Day she said she can't wait until tax time. I laughed and told her "that's a sentence I've never heard anybody ever say in my life." This is when she explained to me that because of the fact she was a single mom with 3 kids making what we made at The Mart, she was going to be getting $12k "back" at tax time with the EIC and other credits. I looked it up. She wasn't lying.

So both of us worked the same amount of hours per week, but she was getting paid more than twice the amount I got paid to do the job because of government subsidies that went her way to raise the kids.

As to not resent her because I liked her, I reasoned it out in my head that she was one of the only other people on night shift that actually did her damn job and she was a hard worker, and I'd been to her house and met her kids and they all seemed pretty decent. With how little we got paid there would be no way for her to take care of the three of them without that extra money, and I could only imagine how bad their lives would have been without it. They were all half-Mexican (their MIA dad who skipped town was Mexican), and they lived in a kind of lousy part of town. If their mom didn't have enough to provide for them, I could easily see them out doing drugs and joining local gangs instead of doing homework and playing video games.

Quote:

And when business needs to hire younger labor ... VOILA! There it is! Someone popped them out and raised them (at least partway), without any cost to them!


Well right... Tax Farms.

But more than that... I've already said how half the jobs or more in this country (and the world) only even exist because of how many people are on the planet. In a world where we reached equilibrium with the environment LONG before there were over 8 BILLION people living on the planet, there would be no need for a McDonalds and Starbucks and CVS on every major street corner.

Quote:

Business doesn't just parasitize the worker, it parasitizes government and it parasitizes the whole society, including the family.


Yup. And our goddamned government doesn't do a thing about it. We're reaching a point where only a handful of people own all of the companies, and the dream of owning your own business is rapidly fading away since you could never actually compete with the behemoths. Every corporate buyout or merger is a travesty, and even when our government pretends to do something about it they never actually do anything about it.

And even DIY work is being incorporated in current day. I'm sure you've seen or heard ads about "same day carpet installation" or something similar like "ultra-fast" kitchen and bathroom remodeling. I hear them on the radio out in the garage all the time... often with the offer to "work" for them if you know how to do the work. These aren't carpet installing and home rehab companies that are advertising. These are just guys with money who put out ads and set up jobs and take a big hefty chunk of the profit for the carpet installs, while sitting back and doing nothing while local guys do all the work. And since everybody hears the ads or sees them on TV, that's usually the first place they're going to call, making it even harder for the ones who can't advertise to get any work of their own without somebody who never held a hammer in their lives raping their wallets.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Monday, September 25, 2023 11:44 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.



Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Ok, SIX, an example to get the brain going...
Let's say there's a foundry, and in that foundry they have an worker who does small stuff... If a machine needs more sand, he brings it. If an aisleway needs clearing, he clears it. If something needs sweeping up, he sweeps it. He keeps the bathrooms clean and orders small stuff ... toilet paper, cleaning supplies, vending machine stuff, forms for invoices and such. His fellow workers recognise the contribution he makes, but with one big difference

HE DOESN'T GET PAID.

Instead, he's allowed to sleep in a small room set up just for him, and eat whatever anyone chooses to bring for him or buy for him from the vending machines, and maybe somebody gives him money from time to time.

Most of us already live like this already, Sigs. Sure... nobody is actually living in the mop closet at KMart, but they barely make enough money to have a small apartment (far too small if there is a family with kids). I was lucky enough to be doing those types of jobs after I had done right with the money I did make from good jobs I used to be able to get, but I've worked with plenty of people holding down 2 or 3 part-time shit-wage jobs while their spouses also worked 2 or 3 part-time shit wage jobs. Neither of them had insurance through their jobs because government only forces that for full-time work, and the companies know this so most of them limit the full-time work strictly to management. The only reason they even got the benefits of food-stamps is because of the kids, since working those combined 4 to 6 part-time shit-wage jobs would have priced them out of SNAP. Some of them could afford insurance from the marketplace if they could show any restraint with the almost non-existent extra money they had after paying all the bills. Most of them couldn't.

Wage slaves are still slaves. And there are tens of millions of American citizens that fall into this category. But at least, somehow, they're a step above the growing number of millions of homeless people putting up shanty towns all over the US's major cities.

But wages slaves at least get a wage, which is a step above not geting anything.


Quote:

SIGNY: If this were to happen in the USA we would call it slavery. OR, WE MIGHT CALL IT UNPAID LABOR. Or, being a housewife.

SIX: That's a subjective point of view on your part. And you've already told me that in your world you've never known a housewife situation where she wasn't being abused.

I said that in the households I knew (and I later remembered one exception, which was my step-aunt and her husband) MOST of the housewives I knew were under their husband's thumb, and I knew of two horrific cases of abuse, one ending in death. And since I know the children very closely, these weren't just stories I heard third or fourth-hand or rumors or newspaper clippings. But just bc a married women worked didn't guarantee happiness, a lot depended on the man she was married to.

Hubby, who was abused as well as his mom and brother, remembers nice households from his youth. When he was working construction and got to know the people and their families on his team pretty well, in most cases hubby just turned his paycheck over to wiffy and she ran the household and raised the kids and did the budgeting bc hubby was working 6 days a week, 14 hours a day.

So, your mileage may vary.

Quote:

My friend's wife who is a stay-at-home mom and home-schools their daughter loves her life. I'd only ever met her once before they got married when we were all in the limo for another mutual friend's wedding. Her husband and I had a falling out years earlier and it wasn't until 4 years ago that we reconnected and he's one of my closest two friends today. So it wasn't until I spent all night talking to her after she and her daughter made me dinner after mowing their lawn while he was out of town for job training about a month ago where I found out that back then she was kind of a big shot at an advertising firm when they met. When she got pregnant, she decided she wanted to stay at home and raise their daughter and my buddy made plenty enough money to make that happen.

Their daughter is one of the most impressive 9 year olds I've ever met. She was telling me about books she's reading (EGADS! 9 year olds even know what a book is in 2023!), and they weren't kid books. Two years ago when she was only 7 years old she was baking her own cookies that she got the recipe for online, with her mother only there to supervise to make sure a 7 year old doesn't burn the house down. They were amazing and she was so proud of them. I never see her moping around or bitching about anything. When the 3 of them are together and I'm over it's like watching 3 adults talking with each other.

She was telling me about her plans with the two closets in her bedroom last time I was over, including shelving and drawers, and a place to put her new record player she's going to get for Christmas because she's excited to be able to play her new vinyl records she'd saved up for, and how she's going to sell her old toys (some sort of beanie baby type collectable plushy things that are hot right now) to fund the job. (Her dad could easily afford it, but they're teaching her right, you see).

That's when her mom chimed in and said they were hoping I could be involved in that because they've seen what I did to my closet and she also saw the mock-up I made for a future project in the Man Cave a few months ago.



Well, see - you're an insipiration!

All I can say is, your friend must have a highly paid secure job.

I can't account for my hubby's and my different childhood memories. Maybe his home life was so horrid that anything that looked halfway normal looked great. Another possibility is that when and where he grew up (in the USA) the economy was robust and men were mostly secure in their jobs. Where and when I grew up, it was in the shadow of an economic decline already. My dad lost two jobs right after coming to America, and I think many men were nervously waiting for that pink slip to show up.

Just for full disclosure - hubby grew up in postwar Soviet Hungary when there was maybe one working truck in the whole country. People were poor and life was hard. He remembers vividly, and fondly, the times he and his brother were sent up to live with their grandparents (mother's side, the normal side of the family) in a small hamlet in the mountains. There were no such things as "housewives" altho ther WAS a division of labor. Grandpa worked as an engineer in a small coal mine, maintaining the ventilation and elevators, and pitched in at harvest time. Grandma did everything else: She grew a large kitchen garden which was a fair portion of the family's food (in fact, that's why hubby and his brother were sent there for the summer: there was food there), preserved food for the winter, raised a pig for slaughter in the fall (men did the actual slaughtering and butchering - pigs are HUGE, and mean, and wily), raised chickens and geese, baked bread, was the family medic etc. She was also on a council of women in the hamlet who had control of the precious poppy extract, which (aside from willow bark) was the only effective painkiller that they had.

EVERYONE had a job, even the smaller children. It was hubby's job to fetch milk from the one family that had a cow, to herd the geese (they were as tall as he was, and scary), take the dough to the baking kiln (there was one kiln for the hamlet). It was a hard existance, everyone worked, and everyone got to keep the fruits of their labor.

Quote:

SIGNY: Unpaid household labor is just another way for business owners to wring more profit from their employees, because their employees can come to work with all of their personal needs taken care of, ready to focus on the day.

SIX: Chores are chores. Nobody should be paid to do household labor. I can't believe that this is what you're hinting at and I think I'm reading this wrong.


Until you try to raise a family without them being done. Who minds the kids? Who does the cooking? Who does the laundry and keeps the house clean? It's one thing to live as a bachelor and do for yourself, but a much larger chore taking GOOD care of four or five people.

Quote:

SIX: But now that you mention it, a lot of people ARE paid for household work. You just have to be on the poor end of the working spectrum to do it. I know I've told the story before of the single mom that worked at KMart overnight with me who had 3 kids before.

One day about a month from Tax Day she said she can't wait until tax time. I laughed and told her "that's a sentence I've never heard anybody ever say in my life." This is when she explained to me that because of the fact she was a single mom with 3 kids making what we made at The Mart, she was going to be getting $12k "back" at tax time with the EIC and other credits. I looked it up. She wasn't lying.

So both of us worked the same amount of hours per week, but she was getting paid more than twice the amount I got paid to do the job because of government subsidies that went her way to raise the kids.

As to not resent her because I liked her, I reasoned it out in my head that she was one of the only other people on night shift that actually did her damn job and she was a hard worker, and I'd been to her house and met her kids and they all seemed pretty decent. With how little we got paid there would be no way for her to take care of the three of them without that extra money, and I could only imagine how bad their lives would have been without it. They were all half-Mexican (their MIA dad who skipped town was Mexican), and they lived in a kind of lousy part of town. If their mom didn't have enough to provide for them, I could easily see them out doing drugs and joining local gangs instead of doing homework and playing video games.

And all that "housework" is worth something TO SOCIETY. Because what happens when nobody does it?

Quote:

SIGNY And when business needs to hire younger labor ... VOILA! There it is! Someone popped them out and raised them (at least partway), without any cost to them!

SIX: Well right... Tax Farms.

NOPE! Profit Farms! Government isn't the biggest boogeyman, it's business. And business controls government.

Quote:

SIX: But more than that... I've already said how half the jobs or more in this country (and the world) only even exist because of how many people are on the planet. In a world where we reached equilibrium with the environment LONG before there were over 8 BILLION people living on the planet, there would be no need for a McDonalds and Starbucks and CVS on every major street corner.
You're projecting the USA onto the entire planet. In nations that are mostly rural, which is India and the rest of south Asia, most of Africa and large parts of S and Central America, there are plenty of existential jobs. People ... MOSTLY WOMEN ... still farm by hand. Still gather the wheat (in northern S Asia) and rice (in southern S Asia), corn (in Africa and many part of S and Central America) by hand. Still thresh by hand, grow greens and raise small animals and walk their produce to market. Still raise kids, pound grain and fetch water.

The problem isn't "too many people". It's "too much mechanization". or "unfair distribution of production".

In the grand sweep of history, when families were farm-based, everyone worked. Once industialization came into play, once farms were mechanized, and productivty was increased, not so many hands were needed. Children and were shifted OUT of workforce and women were no longer needed to grow and preserve food for the family, and card and spin and weave and do the endless things that needed doing. The "Housewife" was invented.

Men could still do heavy work: dealing with large animals, heavy industry, construction, etc. And then those were offshored or automated, too. (I recnetly saw a headline about the UAW strike which said "Chinese robots don't strike")

Women were only brought back into the workforce when so many men went to war (WWII, "Rosie the Riveter") or as the first step in driving down overall wages (before illegal immigration and offshoring)


In grand sweep of things, this would be progress ... more work can be done with fewer people and less work ... except, in THIS economic system, the only way to partake of all of that production is through money, and for most of us, that means working.

Since so much is skimmed off by stockholders and creditors and speculators, people don't get to keep what they earned, and automation is used ... not to make life easier for everyone, but to squeeze more and more people out of the workforce and lower nearly everyone's security and living standard.

So this isn't a "man v woman" thing, or a "black v white" thing, or an "old v young" thing. It's a "people v profit" thing. We, most of us, are just animals farmed for profit.

Quote:

SIGNY: Business doesn't just parasitize the worker, it parasitizes government and it parasitizes the whole society, including the family.

SIX: Yup. And our goddamned government doesn't do a thing about it. We're reaching a point where only a handful of people own all of the companies, and the dream of owning your own business is rapidly fading away since you could never actually compete with the behemoths. Every corporate buyout or merger is a travesty, and even when our government pretends to do something about it they never actually do anything about it.

Well, like I said, government is controlled by big business. It no longer looks after the welfare of the nation and its people as a whole, but caters to the uber-wealthy. Some people call it corruption. Some people call it an oligarchy. Some people call it fascism. Whatever it is, it's no longer "of the people, by the people, and for the people".

Just as an aside, people look to FDR as a savior of 'the people'. In reality he was saving CAPITALISM from itself. Capitalism, and its extension into money called financialism, had reahced the endpoint that all Ponzi schemes eventually reach: collapse. There was a a significant socialist movement brewing, and revolt was in the air. FDR stepped in to stablize the system (he was a strikebreaker BTW) and splash just enough money around to keep desperate people from a final act of desperation. And whatever "ism" that we've had since then has been one scheme or another to keep "redundant" workers/ idle hands from revolting, whether it's bread (welfare, EIC etc) or circuses (TV, social media, drugs) or endless propagnda or "divide and conquer" (identity politics, the latest "crisis" or faux-outrage).

YOUR BIGGEST STEP DOWN IN LIVING STANADARD WASN'T DUE TO TAXES, BLACKS, OR WOMEN, OR OLD FOLKS. IT WAS WHEN YOUR JOB WAS OUTSOURCED.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Monday, September 25, 2023 12:25 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


So, to get back to the title of the thread, focusing on white/ black/ hispanic/ asian or "other", male/ female, old/ young ... or however you chop up American identity ... is there just to keep us from looking at the TRULY privileged: those people who are 1.000,000 times (or more) wealthier than we are, who get to make the Big Decisions about where industry will be located or how money will be sloshed around the world, or which war is gonna be waged, and how they parasitize and try to control the world this quarter.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Monday, September 25, 2023 1:54 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Oh BTW hubby (whose memory goes back farther than mine) says I have it bassackwards:

Men's wages were ALREADY falling, which is why housewives were forced into the labor market, often unwillingly.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Monday, September 25, 2023 6:37 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
YOUR BIGGEST STEP DOWN IN LIVING STANADARD WASN'T DUE TO TAXES, BLACKS, OR WOMEN, OR OLD FOLKS. IT WAS WHEN YOUR JOB WAS OUTSOURCED.



It may be the biggest, but they all contributed.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Wednesday, September 27, 2023 1:30 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
YOUR BIGGEST STEP DOWN IN LIVING STANADARD WASN'T DUE TO TAXES, BLACKS, OR WOMEN, OR OLD FOLKS. IT WAS WHEN YOUR JOB WAS OUTSOURCED.



It may be the biggest, but they all contributed.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

Try to keep a sense of proportion, SIX. Women, blacks, and old folks didn't decide to screw you over by eliminating your job. We (well,most of us, anyway) are all in the same boat, and trying to step on women or men or blacks or whoever is just playing "their" game.

IMHO the only people who do NOT have the same rights as anyone in the USA are the illegal aliens.
Why???
BECAUSE THEY'RE NOT CITIZENS.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Wednesday, September 27, 2023 3:27 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
YOUR BIGGEST STEP DOWN IN LIVING STANADARD WASN'T DUE TO TAXES, BLACKS, OR WOMEN, OR OLD FOLKS. IT WAS WHEN YOUR JOB WAS OUTSOURCED.



It may be the biggest, but they all contributed.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

Try to keep a sense of proportion, SIX. Women, blacks, and old folks didn't decide to screw you over by eliminating your job. We (well,most of us, anyway) are all in the same boat, and trying to step on women or men or blacks or whoever is just playing "their" game.



I'm not trying to step on anyone. I'm not even blaming women or blacks or old folks. White men outlived their usefulness and then got fucked over. Women, blacks and other minorities were simply the tool used to dispose of them.

What we're witnessing all around us today is the beginning stages of the degradation of society that was always the intended and ultimate outcome of all of this.

TPTB aren't affected, and they won't ever be affected. They own everything and life is perfect in their gated communities. They're fine with everyone murdering everybody else outside of their gates. It's going to get much worse than it is today. We'll look back on the early 2020's and yearn for them.

Quote:

IMHO the only people who do NOT have the same rights as anyone in the USA are the illegal aliens.
Why???
BECAUSE THEY'RE NOT CITIZENS.



Oh, but they do. Have you not been paying attention?

How many American citizens are living out on the streets without jobs right now while TPTB in the major cities are housing military aged invaders and begging for more money to house more of them and get them all jobs?

TPTB don't actually give a shit about women or blacks or other minorities either. We're all just numbers to them. And someday soon you too will have outlived your usefulness of putting white males out of power and there will be nothing but the big boot up top that's stomping on all the rest of us, equally. Citizen or non-citizen. As we literally fight and kill each other for the scraps.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Wednesday, September 27, 2023 9:35 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.



Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
YOUR BIGGEST STEP DOWN IN LIVING STANADARD WASN'T DUE TO TAXES, BLACKS, OR WOMEN, OR OLD FOLKS. IT WAS WHEN YOUR JOB WAS OUTSOURCED.

SIX: It may be the biggest, but they all contributed.

SIGNY: Try to keep a sense of proportion, SIX. Women, blacks, and old folks didn't decide to screw you over by eliminating your job. We (well,most of us, anyway) are all in the same boat, and trying to step on women or men or blacks or whoever is just playing "their" game.

SIX: I'm not trying to step on anyone. I'm not even blaming women or blacks or old folks. White men outlived their usefulness and then got fucked over. Women, blacks and other minorities were simply the tool used to dispose of them.
What we're witnessing all around us today is the beginning stages [er... more advanced than that!] of the degradation of society that was always the intended and ultimate outcome of all of this.

I agree. More about that in a bit.

Quote:

SIX: TPTB aren't affected, and they won't ever be affected. They own everything and life is perfect in their gated communities. They're fine with everyone murdering everybody else outside of their gates. It's going to get much worse than it is today. We'll look back on the early 2020's and yearn for them.

SIGNY: IMHO the only people who do NOT have the same rights as anyone in the USA are the illegal aliens.
Why???
BECAUSE THEY'RE NOT CITIZENS.

SIX: Oh, but they do. Have you not been paying attention?
How many American citizens are living out on the streets without jobs right now while TPTB in the major cities are housing military aged invaders and begging for more money to house more of them and get them all jobs?

I agree. More about that in a bit.

Quote:

SIX: TPTB don't actually give a shit about women or blacks or other minorities either. We're all just numbers to them. And someday soon you too will have outlived your usefulness of putting white males out of power

So, white men WERE 'in power'? More about that in a bit.

Quote:

SIX: ... and there will be nothing but the big boot up top that's stomping on all the rest of us, equally. Citizen or non-citizen. As we literally fight and kill each other for the scraps.


You've touched on a number of aspects where I esentially agree except your focus on "white men being in power".

"White men" were NEVER in power. The best illustration of this was comparing American wealth as piles of thousand dollar bills on a football field, with the 50-yard line being the median. At one end, well, it would be a hole in the ground. At the median, a stack about an inch high. But within a millimeter of the other goalposts, the stack would be MILES high. About 250 miles IIRC, and it's only gotten taller since then.

So, sure, 'white men' had a bit of advantage over everybody else, but white men (as a whole group) never got to decide what industries should be invested in, where should factories be built, how our neighborhoods should look and function, whether there would be competition or socialism or monopolism in our economy, where or even whether they could find a job.

I agree that TPTB are breaking societies apart and they're doing a darn fine job. Once you start breaking bonds between people - married couple to each other and parents to children (divorce), neighbor to neighbor, ethics (criminal v law abiding), language groups, even national identity* - and replace it with so many "intersectional identities" all squabbling for that little bit of extra privilege so nobody feels any commonality with anyone else... then we truly become a broken society of 'all against all'. (Social media doesn't help, all it does is help create "silos" of same-thinking people who are physically distant from each other.)

Anyway, I wouldn't bemoan that "white men have no privilege" or even mention "white men". And this from me: I used to be an early "womens' libber" who was prejudiced against and felt historically put upon. But that's just more intersectional politics.

As I posted in the 'Ukraine' thread, if widespread public opinion didn't matter, we wouldn't be so saturated with propagnda that we don't even realize that 90% is buried in our subconscious. The sooner we realize that, the sooner we can change it.

*That's what I find so disturbing about the *crickets* that I get when I ask the question "What are America's/Americans' interests?" Is as if nobody even grasps the concept of being AMERICAN, and that we all have something in common. The only time "America" is invoked in when TPTB are prepping us for another war.

Off the soapbox now.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Wednesday, September 27, 2023 9:52 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Oh, just as an aside, I've come to realize that "human rights" is a flawed concept.

Rights are bestowed by governments (which usually means nationality.) The USA doesn't have the power to impose "human rights" on the rest of the world and we don't have the money to grant "human rights" to everyone who manages to sneak across our border. Especially when we don't guarantee "human rights' to our own citizens.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Monday, June 17, 2024 4:30 PM

THG


Quote:

Originally posted by THGRRI:

I am tired of people going to the White thing. It's one of the problems the democrats have, and why they lost the White House as well as 1000 seats across the country since 2009. The White working class keeps getting poked.

Here's a controversial opinion. There is no such thing as White privilege. Minorities are sold this bill of goods to garner votes. It feeds into what they want to hear. What there is, is culture privilege. After you have explained to the country what culture privilege is, you can explain how being White in America has gained them privilege. How it has helped them get ahead and been a get out of jail free card others don't possess. This is a truth the White working class can understand and accept. I have yet to see the democratic party has figured this out.

We need to stop poking White people to garner favoritism from minorities. It only builds a wall between hard working minorities and hard working White people who need each other.





T



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