See also: patriarchy.
Kubrickâs âprecious bodily fluidsâ thing wasnât just a joke, it was based on the culture of the Western right.
Fuck. The. Police.
Painting resistance to the empire as invasive pathogens. Iâve heard that song before.
Been my motto for a long time, the latter one.
That post is kind of weird. I make over $100K a year and yes, my situation is definitely better than many working class peopleâs. But no fucking way am I thinking about âaffording a second home.â I live in a pretty cheap area and have no kids as it is; things would be quite a bit tighter if I were trying support a family of four on $100K in, say, LA.
I have very little savings to speak of, because the decent salary came more recently in my life and I was living month to month for quite a while. A comfortable retirement is difficult to imagine. Also the meds that I need, without insurance, would cost multiple thousands per month, quite a lot more than my mortgage.
The last time that a US soldier was killed by conventional aerial attack (not counting the USAFâs constant blue-on-blues) was during the Korean War.
Itâs coming out of a broad-ranging debate thatâs been active over left twitter for the last few days.
Basically:
-
Middle-class/PMC person complains about financial hardship.
-
Minimum-wage person chips in with something along the lines of âget some perspective / if you think youâre doing it tough, imagine what itâs like for someone on sub-median wagesâ. This may involve some cranky hyperbole along the lines of âstruggling to pay the mortgage on your holiday home / new car / etc is not the same as watching your kids go hungryâ.
-
Middle-class lefties start talking about the cost of living in New York and how $100K doesnât go as far as it used to, theory-focused socialists start talking about how âeveryone who works for a wage is working class / you need to recognise the difference between PMC-rich and billionaire-rich, theyâre not the same thingâ
-
History-focused socialists point out that the middle classes, on average, tend towards reactionary conservatism until they have no other option.
And so on.
To someone working three minimum wage jobs, anyone getting an educated workerâs salary is rich. To someone working a normal middle-class job in the USA, the rich are other people.
The state of things is such that yes, even someone earning $100k US (which is about triple my highest-ever income, BTW) is going to experience life as a constant struggle just to hold position. Healthcare and housing and education and transport costs eat most of what they make.
But the key difference is this: the $100k person is desperately fighting to avoid falling into the ranks of the truly poor. The truly poor are desperately fighting to stay alive.
There are policy divides here as a consequence; the middle class socialists tend towards reformist soc dem approaches, the underclass street activists tend to be a bit more keen on revolution and radicalism, etc etc.
Yeah, but without the threat of homelessness, how will we keep motivating people to show up to work at the Amazon warehouse? How will we threaten them into silence when the mold and the rats in the slums make their kids sick?
And we canât let 'em get too comfy with being homeless, either. They might start looking out for each other and build a tolerable community.
Move 'em along, move 'em along.
I havenât been following Canadian electoral politics at all, but based on this it seems that Trudeau is about to lose:
Diogenes is always good value:
âŠalthough that is an extremely loose âtranslationâ of the original.