Culture-Class Wars

[jerwin]

So vectors are going to get paid?

[DaakSyde]

Well you can convince some people not to wear a mask, and you can convince some people to go to political rallies, and you can remove eviction protection and unemployment and force some people to go back to work. But if you really want to spread it and kill as many people as possible, you also need to target the people with good enough jobs that they don’t have to go right back to work and who have vacation time, and pay them to use it to go travel and spread the virus. It’s a multifaceted strategy.

[mindysan33]

Also, I’m really tired of this whole idea that we can fix any problem by throwing a tax credit at it…

[CleverEmi]

Jeez, lady, it sounds like you sound like someone who thinks poor people matter! If we do stuff besides tax credits, we run the risk of making peoples lives better, and some of those people might not be the “right” sort of people, and that sounds like communism to me. /s

[smulder]

@DaakSyde

conspiracy theories about how evil weathermen are going to defeat their god

[kxkvi]

@CleverEmi

that sounds like communism to me. /s

Or even trying to get back to having a middle class, instead of the onward progress to feudalism. That would be just as bad./s

[AndyHilmer]

It seems we have a six-sigma consensus on putting the rich in check.

[AndyHilmer]

What Is Owed: Without Economic Justice, There Can Be No True Equality

[RAvery]

Relevant:

Tackling The Racial Wealth Gap: William Darity's Plan For Reparations

[AndyHilmer]

The third and final position of this post is, admittedly, obscure to mainstream America. This is the position of a number of immigrants with a conservative structure of feeling. This group believes that the defendant, an East African by birth, deliberately hit the protesters because he was infuriated by what many immigrants of the conservative cast perceive as “lazy Americans.” We immigrants, says this group, get the jobs done. We do all of the hard work, while these Americans live on government aid and have all of this free time to protest whenever they feel like it. Upon the revelation of the crash’s driver—his color (black); his name (African-sounding)—this kind of talk certainly circulated in immigrant circles and chat groups. He was tired of seeing these lazy Americans. He got angry. He decided to teach them a lesson. And he did. Horrifically. With a car bought with hard-earned American cash.

This structure of feeling leads, of course, to a dead end. In fact, poor people in the US are actually overworked. The mainstream right uses the lazy American myth to justify social cuts. Conservative immigrants use it to cover the pain and wounds of living in a system that ceaselessly exploits the working class.

What Dawit Kelete's Case Tells Us About American Culture

[AndyHilmer]

Link via Pharyngula:

Jeet Heer (HeerJeet)

[AndyHilmer]

Shoot canon out of a cannon.

Oh, Christ, Not the Science Fiction Canon Again

[Nonentity]

I’ve seen some tweets about that, and been rather mystified… I don’t think I’ve ever seen “canon” used in this context before, and I really don’t see the point.

It sounds like it’s describing what I’d call “classics” or “deeply influential for the genre”. And, if I’m right on that, then, well… there’s a lot of books in that category that I absolutely loved when I was gorging on them in middle school, which I wouldn’t even think of recommending for most people I know today because they’ve just lost the relevance and would be a slog for someone used to more modern fiction. Heck, some of the ones I’ve tried to go back to for a re-read out of nostalgia have ended up boring or annoying me to the point of dropping them.

[DaakSyde]

Reminds me of my second-year English professor in college. First year was great, that professor taught us to think of things from different angles and consider different aspects of it and how it might relate to other things. The second year professor though, she’d made up her mind that there was One True Interpretation of anything and it was hers and everyone who even considered anything else was Wrong. I dropped that class so fast.

[kxkvi]

How can there be absolutes in something as subjective as literature anyway? It’s not like F=MA.

[jerwin]

The second year professor though, she’d made up her mind that there was One True Interpretation of anything and it was hers and everyone who even considered anything else was Wrong

And was this one true interpretation throughly conventional, or did it at least amuse the mind?

From a footnote in a paper I’m reading

2 While the term universalism has been virtually banished from the critical vocabulary of many disciplines today, it should be acknowledged that not all scholars are so quick to agree that the universal is always or by definition a falsely imposed, imperialistic notion. See, for example, …

[AndyHilmer]

There are ideas that are more supportable than others, for sure, and areas of support are more diverse than just what underpins a dominant culture. Given that, it creates a more fluid idea of support than can be accounted for in a list of “canon”.

[AndyHilmer]

So a reading list of literary history is going to be best served by having some essays touching on old ideas of canon, but the works to read should always be presented for the meaning they have to us today, whether by accidental relevance or a part of a chain of canon that… people still like.

This means that contemporary academia and criticism is free to speak on these topics, but can be held accountable for the need to be flexible about the universality of what they come up with.

[AndyHilmer]

It seems the corruption potential of wealth, and the strange people you wake up next to, covered in slime and some kind of crust, still needs to be talked about, because supposedly smart STEM people did not get the memo.

* I keep forgetting to paste the link:

The grift, oh the grift

[AndyHilmer]

Er oh.

r/Portland - Repeated Burglary At My NW Apartment Complex

And then…