Yesterday I accidentally listened to Elvis Presley singing In The Ghetto. Accidentally because I try not to, at least in public, since it’s one of the songs that make me talk back. I also read this post by our very own Phantom. And this is my way of talking back to it.
“Now, Phantom? NOW? The left has always been about discrediting free will or what we now call individual agency.”
Take “in the Ghetto” — do, I don’t want it — yes, I know that all of Elvis biographers go on about how he was being caring to sing it. Maybe he was. Or maybe he thought he was. Maybe he even believed in the message, though G-d only knows why given his own life trajectory. And maybe the reason everyone thinks this song is “caring” is that they have a massive Marxist black hole in their heads.
Because what “In the Ghetto” does is show someone whose life is pre-determined from the fact he’s born black, in the Ghetto, to a mother who doesn’t want him because she doesn’t need another “little hungry mouth to feed.” He’s going to grow up to be an angry young man, and try to steal a car and get shot. It’s DESTINY. It’s all PREDETERMINED.
It’s tripe. It’s insulting tripe at that. No, it’s really insulting tripe. I won’t call it racist, because honestly Elvis probably never thought of race as a factor in it, just of poverty. And never realized how insulting that was to most people who are born poor. Because the vast majority of people who are born poor NEVER steal cars or try to shoot people, okay.
They might not get very far. I’m not going to pretend the circumstances of your birth don’t influence your life. Of course they do. Of course people who are born poor are more likely to live at that level of society than people born to a multimillionaire family. BUT THEY’RE NOT MORE LIKELY TO BECOME CRIMINALS. Maybe more likely to be caught and not to be able to get our of the charges — stares Hunter Bidenly — but that’s about it.
Here’s the thing, though: most people who are born at whatever level tend to stay at that level. Downward movement is slightly more likely than upward, but even that is not extremely likely. And the reason is not that their future is predetermined, but that most people tend to understand and like the subculture into which they were born and in which they were raised. That’s all.
Look, I look at the way a lot of other people — richer and poorer than I, to be fair — live and I don’t want that. I also don’t understand why anyone would like that.
Let’s take richer, first. I could have chosen to become a lady who does lunch. It would have meant a considerable reduction in our real life quality, as it would be hard to find time to write, or read as much as I do. And I’d have had to zip my lip. But the thing is, I’m an introvert. Cons are a chore as much as I love my fans. If I didn’t love my fans and meting them, I’d never go. Why would I want to have that kind of social club close up and personal. Yes, I do realize it might have helped with Dan’s work opportunities, and heck, with opportunities for the kids too. And all sorts of access. I mean “Ladies who do lunch” work. And the work helps their families. It’s just a different kind of work. And one I’m not suited to and which would make me mortally unhappy.
I no longer do much furniture refinishing and such, though Is till do house repair and fixups and probably always will. But the thing is I realized long ago if I won the lottery, I’d still live more or less as I do. I really don’t have interest in the “finer things.” We’d still buy our cars used, because buying them new is wasteful. I’d still repair things rather than replace them, because to do otherwise is wasteful. And though I’ve been forced to give up buying clothes from thrift stores, because they suck in this area, if they didn’t I still would. (You pay in time rather than money.)
I can imagine something from an “upper class” wondering why I don’t do better for myself, and sneering at me or imagining that the circumstances of my birth pre-destined me. (Though how you would, considering the absurd life I’ve lived I don’t know.)
In the same way it took me decades to understand that those who frustrate me, because they could better themselves and won’t are perfectly happy where they are. To me living on bare minimum and having to make all sorts of compromises sounds hellish, but they know how to navigate life at that level and are self-obviously okay with it.
What makes it seem like they aren’t and makes people wonder why other people don’t “better themselves” and make something of their opportunities is that most humans — not just poor ones — do kind of wish their lives were better. But they wish for this in the abstract and without considering the costs. As in, I don’t know anyone who is poor and doesn’t dream of a “lottery win.” And heck, I do too. Periodically I even buy a ticket (usually when trying to get change and not wanting to buy a candy bar) but I also know if I ever win the lottery literally no one will know. Or people will, but only if they look closely. Because if I won the lottery, I’d have a full time assistant, who also does things like proofread. And I’d have a house cleaning person. And Dan could quit so he can work at the things he wants to do with writing, music and math. And other than that…. oh. Pretty much the same. Okay, fine, the cats would have the fancy food they love ALL the time, instead of once a month. And the boys would each get a house and new cars.
But would our life change? Not really. Nor would most people’s. Most people spend a lottery win within a couple of years, no matter how large, and then go back to living as they always did.
“But Sarah, you’re saying it’s predestination.” No. I’m not. I’m really not. I’m saying most people make the effort needed to live the way they want to, and not a little bit more.
Which means, yes, people born poor and used to being poor are likely to stay poor. They can escape — even in more stratified societies than ours people manage to leave their past behind and climb up the ladder. The cost just starts at high and goes higher. — but most of them don’t really want to. They just vaguely wish things would be better.
(Sometimes I wonder if that’s why most other countries hate America and Americans. Because we’re sort of a middle finger to the face saying “yes, you can escape and do better” — because even our poor are better off than most of the world middle class — and yes, there is a price here too. Americans work longer, and have a different mind set about work than most of the world.)
But other than the fact that humans are lazy, individual humans have agency. Do I need to say that? Of course we do. And what any human can accomplish given enough wish to is almost infinite.
While the majority of humans are willing to do the minimum work needed to perhaps live a little better than they were raised, civilization is built by those who have ambition and are willing to work for it. Those who figured out how to domesticate animals and grow what vegetables they wanted instead of hoping those randomly grew, are the first in a long chain of innovators, trying to improve their own lives and thereby improving everyone else’s.
Does any of that prove that there is individual will, instead of predestination? No. But predestination and the idea that humans were all somehow programmed is idiocy anyway. Idiocy at the level of “If it were true, what would it matter?” and “All it does is make humans into widgets who don’t count, so why would I believe that?”
And this btw, even though Heinlein said it, is why I hate the idea that humans don’t reason, they just pretend to. True in some circumstances. There have for instance, been presidential candidates I dislike at a gut level so much I could never rationally consider them. (Coughs. Clinton.) But even so I tried. And they didn’t help their case.
Not true in every circumstance, and also avoids facing the fact that humans often reason at a level they’re now aware of. For instance, I knew there was something “off” with the whole covidiocy before I found out the facts of the Diamond Princess. Had I made up my mind before I studied those? Not really. I just felt uncomfortable about it. But I’m sure it means my subconscious had caught on to a lot of the inconsistencies and nonsense in how the “emergency” was being handled, not to mention the air of glee of bureaucrats and kleptocrats viewing it as a golden opportunity to consolidate power and control elections. Was it “pretending to reason?” No.
None of this “You were predestined to do that” passes the smell test. Predestined by whom? And how? If it’s all a game of inevitability since the first cell came to life, what’s the point? And why would anyone who believes this bother to stay alive, even? And yet they stay alive and strive, which means they don’t really believe it. (And we’ll leave aside the very weird religious creeds that believe this. Yes, I know some of my readers belong to those. pardon me, but you’re very weird. I won’t pronounce on your concept of G-d. Heinlein already did for one. For another, my religion is funny too. But that’s all different from pretending that predestination makes ANY rational sense in the secular world and absent divine revelation.)
More important here, though, is that the left has always believed in predestination. Or at least always believed that individual humans have no agency. Now this might be because the entire Marxist theory is the creation of a man who obviously didn’t believe any other individuals existed or were capable of agency. Look at his conception of the world as a giant game of oppressed and oppressors engaged in eternal tit for tat. And how the only things with agency were “classes” as defined by someone whose understanding of humans might lead one to believe he was an alien spider from Alpha Centauri.
Unfortunately this leaked out as his followers took over education and entertainment and news. People got bombarded with this idea so much that they came to believe utterly bizarre, mind boggling lies like “Poverty causes crime.”
Due to various bad habits of mind, it might be more accurate to say that crime causes poverty, to be fair, but at best the two are weakly linked mostly due to the fact that again you’re more likely to get caught and punished if you’re poor.
But tell me, given Hunter Biden’s economic circumstances of birth, would you have predicted his trajectory? Why on Earth does he need to be criminal, when he could simply be lazy and charming? Of course, if you understand his father, you start to see, yes, it’s what he was raised in and what he’s comfortable with. (Except for maybe some vestige of conscience which he must dull with crack.)
There are, I bet, as many shiftless criminals among the very wealthy as they very poor. Most humans just do the bare minimum.
This whole idea that humans have no agency is fueled by people refusing to understand other humans don’t want to live as they do. That other humans are genuinely different.
And the left has always thought humans had no agency, because if they did it left precious little room for bossing them around, let alone for the graft and corruption that is the life blood of Marxists.
If humans don’t really have individual agency, that means all humans. And what difference would it make? We’d all be G-d’s NPCs. And He’d be playing the world’s most boring game. And us arguing about predestination is predestined, and just another boring scripted argument and the only mystery is why we haven’t all opened our veins in a warm bath, except of course, we’re not predestined to.
But in this as in everything else, the left always excepts themselves. Their argument actually goes: “Other people don’t have Free Will as I do. And that’s why they should live according to my mental script. Because that’s better for everyone.”
To which my answer is two middle fingers straight up. Yeah, maybe in the boring game of the universe, I was scripted to do that, but the so called elites better learn to enjoy my digitus impudicus waved in their faces.
Because that’s all their cute little idea that I’m a widget will get them. And it will get them that in great abundance.
According To Hoyt 
A little off-topic but I’m thinking of the woman who “invented” the idea of “white privilege”.
She saw all the privileges she got from being of a wealthy family and imagined that those privileges were because she was white.
Of course, she also imagined that All Blacks Were Poor and All Whites Were Richer than Blacks.
IE Whites were predestined to be Privileged and Blacks were predestined to be Under-Privileged. [Sarcastic Grin]
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As one of my characters says to Caren ‘Whoopi’ Goldberg: “You have forty million dollars and your own TV show — benefits enjoyed by not one person in a hundred thousand. And yet you use your position of privilege and influence to whine about how blacks and women can’t succeed in America, blind to how your own success proves it’s a lie!”
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Count on a leftist to miss that the label “White trash” was coined by antebellum black slaves to describe whites who, though “free” enough, were far worse off than themselves.
(Source: Miss Stowe’s notes and bibliography for Uncle Tom’s Cabin)
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So if some white boy uses the term “white trash,” even self-referentially, is that cultural appropriation? Asking for a white friend….
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My grandfather would have been much surprised to hear that…..
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I suspect what we can and cannot control about ourselves is one of our culture’s great blind spots. We often don’t want it admit to ourself that we don’t and probably shouldn’t even try to control everything within our regard.
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Meh, the bigger blindspot is that we can’t and shouldn’t even try, to control everything outside of our regard.
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In all the universe there is nothing you can control other than your own actions. Those actions can affect other people, but you have little control over how they are affected, and none at all over what they do about it.
You are solely responsible for everything you do, and say, and everything you don’t.
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Yeppers. You have free will over yourself but you are not the boss of anyone else, except your children when they are underage and in your home.
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“…your children when they are underage and in your home.”
And the leftists are doing their very best (actually, “worst”) to take that control away.
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And even with your children, your powers as boss are rather less than you think.
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I strongly suspect the drug-addled life of the Biden children stems from the fact they were raised by a sexual predator -pedophile. That doesn’t excuse the crimes they chose to commit as an adults of course but I can understand wanting to numb yourself with drugs because you’re in so much pain.
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Our Hostess said
Sadly I would have expected it to certainly be high in the list of probabilities of Hunters possible fates. I (a child of blue and pink collar parents) spent my high school years at a private high school with children of the wealthy and well connected. I lived/live in a wealthy upper class enclave on the north Shore of Massachusetts and saw many of my daughters compatriots have similar addicition issues. There is a great deal of ruin inherent in idle wealth and parents often in an overabundance of protection (especially Noveau riche who worked hard to get what they have) coddle their children to an excess.
I do not think that is the failure mode for Hunter or Ashley though. I suspect in their case Mommy and Daddy had other things to do (mostly because Mommy and Daddy were absolutely self-centered and narcissistic assholes). Also, Daddy loved elder son Beau the most (hinted at by Biden’s insane lies and virtual canonization of Beau). So Hunter had lots of money and Daddies protection from bad consequences (hell Hunter somehow managed to skate on what should have yielded a Bad Conduct Discharge for drug use in the military). Hunter I suspect sees himself as the incompetent F up worthless second son who Daddy always comes to rescue and then duns with tales of the sterling elder sibling. Hunter plays the part to a tee. Hunter even seduced his brother’s widow as if just to prove he was a jerk, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
Running back to one of the favorite analogies from Starship Trooper Bidens failure to parent is very like that situation Col. DuBois talks about in training puppies. And we have all seen Bidens skills in training dogs especially the several Secret Service agents that had run ins with the teeth of the various Biden dogs. If anything their skill with dogs is far superior to their skill with children.
Ashley’s is a much sadder and (I hope) rarer tale. Her dad seems to be (like many politicians) an oversexed horn dog with extremely poor boundaries (His second wife is/WAS the babysitter, come on really?). He really also really has something for pre pubescent or near pubescent girls. The incessant picture of him pawing at such are the things of which memes (lots of them) have been made. Being near him as a young woman seems to be a trial at the best of times. Being in the same house with him as one was likely hell on earth for a pre teen girl. That Ashley has not simply killed herself from that kind of abuse is astounding. Unsurprisingly, she is massively messed up. And yet in some form of Stockholm Syndrome, she still protects her father (although that may be trying to avoid the Biden equivalent of Clintonicide).
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I suspect Brandon may be on a list of visitors, which is why that list hasn’t leaked.
Also fits the pattern of “They accuse what they do” “Oh they have ‘compromat’ on Trump…”
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Our kids, with one exception, make much more money than we ever hoped to make. To do that they all moved to the big city. We didn’t because we like the lifestyle of living in a small town and thought it was a great place to raise a family. And our families are here.
But now our kids live a long way away and, while they have money, they also have kind of rat race lifestyles. It seems like a lot of work to have money.
To each his own I guess.
It’s a free country (or at least it was) and people are free to go out and get better jobs, move to areas with more opportunities etc. It’s always been that way here. Lots of people have risen from lower circumstances to great wealth or fame. Ben Carson, Sam Walton, Abe Lincoln, Oprah Winfrey, Helen Keller… The list goes on.
You are, and always have been mainly limited by how much effort you want to put into it and how important it is to you.
*I always hated that song and thought it was racist too.
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The only reason I know this song exists is because nasty little sociopath Eric Cartman sang it when they were forced to stay at their poor friend Kenny’s house
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Personal Anecdote time (feel free to keep scrolling).
My parents had many albums from The King. Including the track “In The Ghetto.”
When I first heard it, I had no idea that bIack persons in the U.S. were spoken of as living in ghettoes. I WAS familiar with the story of the Warsaw Ghetto and the European Jews living in ghettoes. (Books. I read books. About history.)
So I thought the story was about a Jewish kid who turned to crime.
There is a WHOLE lotta background and backstory you have to be familiar with to get “racist” out of it. In the 1970s, living in a tiny town (less than one thousand by census) in a blindingly WHITE part of the country….I didn’t have that.
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Son has stayed in the city (town?) he grew up in. No, he is not using the degree he earned. To do so he has to move to California, Seattle, or another big city back east. Would his gross salary be higher? Yes. Would he be poorer overall? Yes. That is discounting that he has no expenses by staying here. While rents and home costs are ridiculously high here, they are astronomically higher where the jobs are for his degree (there were some locally when he started, just the jobs evaporated as he was finishing up). There is a reason why *rumors of Silicon Valley and Seattle, programmers and engineers were “homeless” (living in RV’s), and places like Google and Microsoft were exploring on campus apartments for their employees. Their salaries couldn’t come close to providing housing.
(* Rumors. Pre-2020. Is it any surprise that anyone who could work remote bolted out of the usual suspect areas and are refusing to move back?)
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( Rumors. Pre-2020. Is it any surprise that anyone who could work remote bolted out of the usual suspect areas and are refusing to move back?)*
No. Far from it.
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More than rumors, if the news stories (and pictures) of RVs used and parked along a street in Mountain View were indicative. Over too many years in Silicon Valley, I owned and lived in three houses, in neighborhoods ranging from really crappy (“The coke-ghetto enforcement “Project Crackdown” was started some years after I left the first place) to really nice.
Every one of those places is now unaffordable. The first place, I purchased for $35K in 1977 (sold it one year later–horrible place to live) shows as “worth” $700K on Zillow, with a rent prediction of $3.3K/month.
The last place, really nice neighborhood, I paid $185K in ’86, now $1.6 million. The rent guess is only $3.5K/month, but when we sold a coyote-adjacent buyer wanted it for the non-official bedroom, the storage shed and the leaky garage, all for “living space”. We politely countered in a “go away” manner. Even then, the selling price was high.
The middle place was similar. Haven’t looked recently, but it was breathtaking a year ago.
At least for Silicon Valley, it’s shaping up to be really rich people living in Mansions (some McMansions, some the original issue) or similar, or really poor people jammed into cheap (but not inexpensive) housing. That first place was not a shining example of good construction… Middle class people are getting forced out, thus cleverly (so they think) purging Cali-f’n-ornia of anybody willing to vote for somebody to the right of Lenin. (And I won’t get into the invertebrate issues of Left Coast GOPers.)
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Sister & BIL bought a pre-WW2 stucco 1200 sq with detached garage in 1988, decent lot (compared to postage sized, even then, and now) just before they married. Lucky to be able to find it and afford it (I think they paid around $300k). Took both their engineer HP salaries to qualify. Next door home, same era, sold after they moved in. That house was torn down and rebuilt. SF area (Santa Clara, I think).
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The small house across the street from our last house (lots 300′ deep on that side of the street for reasons, about 50% deeper than ours was) was torn down and a McMansion put in. Zillow has it at $4+ million (several others on that side of the street are such, while the cheap side of the street is mostly 1-2 million. Sigh.
We got enough money out of it (lived there 17 years) to let us buy and build what we needed here. Locally, housing prices have (roughly) doubled from the early Aughts. That’s driven by a lot of Cali-refugees. (True for those who don’t mind snow, and/or more used to rural life.)
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We paid $78k for our house 35 years ago. Zillow has had it north of $500k. House we had in Longview, bought for $68k, sold 9 years later for $71k, no listed on Zillow for $350k. No, Zillow isn’t particularly accurate, especially now. But showing the relative differences between the two locations.
Local conditions are being driven by lack of urban growth boundary options. Already abutting against next town north boundary (put into place to prevent Eugene from encompassing them, they shouldn’t be budging, but who knows). South runs them into more major hills, and another town. West, huge lake, protected wetlands, and other small towns who do not want to be encompassed. East, that is already blocked by sister city. Already passed ability for attached housing, without the requirement for parking (yea, that has gone over like a lead balloon, Portland here we mimic). PTB are talking about their options. Be interesting to see who they get to bully.
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Oh is *that* why the official JC boundary is several miles before you see houses? Yeah, that makes sense.
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Yes. 100%
To be fair, Eugene’s boundary was way south of there, once upon a time. But JC saw the writing on the wall. Or rather the farmers did and the smart ones yelped for help. Not that JC’s residential taxes aren’t as bad or worse. When we have looked at the yearly Builder’s Homes weekly Street of Homes (all over town), always have had some in JC. The “sell” is less taxes in JC. Really? It is 4% max over all (JC, school, and county). Um, excuse me, but 4% of $300k (back when we were still doing this) is $12k, which is way higher than Eugene for same valuation. However, the politics are considered saner.
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I have a sister who lives in San Jose, bought more than 25 years ago, a nice little Craftsman with a faux-adobe facade. Expensive then and insane now. Nice neighborhood, mostly original buildings. Neighbors engaged with one another, landscaping ranging from well-done to unkempt-but-pretty.
The city tried to declare the neighborhood “blighted.” Probably because it’s within a mile of SJSU, and they were looking to have a way to expand. The neighborhood successfully fought it, but oh lordy.
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Paul Shanklin (who did song parodies for Rush Limbaugh) had a better use for the music. His “In a Yugo” is gloriously snarky, and IMHO, fun. On the other hand, I liked Dr. Demento in small doses. YMMV.
Lyrics: https://www.flashlyrics.com/lyrics/paul-shanklin/in-a-yugo-84
I didn’t look for a Tube of Ewe version.
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Looked. Found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pz2eCFoafXk
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Trivia note: This song was written by country singer Mac Davis.
So one pale gentleman singing something written by another pale gentleman, from public records neither having anything close to experience of suchlike urban lifestyle.
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You can’t have it all.
You can have whatever you want, but it’s going to cost you, and usually a lot of, whatever you don’t want.
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You can have whatever you want provided nothing you want is incompatible with something else you want.
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I’d rather listen to it than “Imagine” though. (But give me Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Jimmy Durante over either.)
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Swing it, Jackson!
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I would rather listen to 8 hours of Kidz Bop and used-car-lot jingles than “Imagine”.
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That is damning with faint praise indeed…
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In Elvis’ (and his songwriters’) defense, the idea that “Society is to blame” became mainstream back in the 1920s AFAIK, probably even earlier (Elvis recorded In the Ghetto in 1969, and during the same session he also recorded Suspicious Minds, Kentucky Rain, and Don’t Cry Daddy; there endeth your random trivia session for today).
That said, the complete lack of personal responsibility and accountability that has become so pervasive and overwhelming in our society infuriates me. The best example I can think of is the worst not-quite-six months of my life: the time I worked at an airport rent-a-car counter. Look up “Toxic Work Environment” in the dictionary and there’s probably a picture of the counter next to the entry. My fellow counter jockeys – who remain the single most miserable group of people that I’ve ever had the displeasure of knowing – were the primary reason the place was so awful. Among the many ways (and there were many) they made the environment so intolerable is that the day monthly bonuses were paid out (we got bonuses based on the % of customers were were able to upsell and the $ amount we upsold, and the bonuses had a tiered structure), they would spend the entirety of their shifts not on the counter waiting on customers, but in the back room literally screaming at the managers for “f***ing them over” and “stealing their bonus money.”
It never occurred to any of them that if they spent less than half the effort that they spent yelling at management and complaining about how much their job sucked a) actually doing said job, b) at least trying to be polite and friendly to the customers, and c) actually trying to upsell products and services, they’d make top-tier bonus payouts every month. Nor did they take kindly to me pointing that out when I’d finally had enough of their bullsh*t. They shouldn’t have to be polite and friendly and actually do work! Corporate should pay them top-tier bonus every month because they deserve it! Why? Because they said so!
And as for why they were able to carry on like that (among other things, including blatant fraud) without Corporate firing their asses? Well, it was a union job, and they were represented by one of the Big Labor Unions, and they knew that their contract was written such that they could not be fired or even disciplined for anything short of committing murder or grand theft while on the clock (and even then the Union would intervene and ensure they kept their jobs). And every time Management did try to discipline someone for any reason (including the aforementioned blatant fraud), they would file grievances with The Union who would threaten walkouts to force Management to drop the issue. They knew they were untouchable to the point where the rules effectively did not apply to them, so they ran wild like they were in Lord of the F***ing Flies.
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Carp, somehow posted before I was finished.
You see this sort of behavior all over the place: Karens who think that the rules don’t apply to them because they’re special, who blame poor employees for their own blatant mistakes because they can’t or won’t admit they screwed up (and said poor employee is usually punished by spineless managers who refuse to risk losing a customer for any reason), you get the idea.
I guess, in a way, society is to blame: because we as a society tolerated this behavior for far too long, and now it’s gotten completely out of control. We’ve sowed the wind, now we’re reaping the whirlwind.
And while I agree with all of your points, Sarah, I still like the song. Somewhere on the internet there’s video of me absolutely murdering it (poor Elvis was rolling in his grave) during karaoke night in an Irish pub in downtown Salzburg.
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Yeah, the premise is baloney, but the tune and arrangement are catchy, and I’m guessing that plus some sense of guilt over being immensely successful were what motivated Elvis to sing it. I don’t expect advanced economics and social philosophy from a musical performer with a drug problem.
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There were a lot of really poor ideas about people, society and whatnot back in Elvis’ day. (Not unlike today to be fair.)
I remember watching a movie he was in which included a story line about girl who was autistic because her mother didn’t hug her or pay attention to her. A nun “cured” the girl’s autism by forceably holding her and hugging her until she was cured.
Even as a kid I thought that was pretty stupid. But it was widely believed at the time that autistic kids were like that because of parental neglect.
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Yes, they mention that in the Temple Grandin movie.
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Clarence Darrow used it in court to argue against the death penalty for Leopold and Loeb.
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The failures or those who believe they are failures, like the excuse that it wasn’t my fault I failed, or became a criminal, it was predestined, or because I was oppressed. not because you are a lazy bastard who wanted the easy way out and didn’t want to work for it. It’s easy to blame others and not take responsibility for your own life. You have earned what you have in life, sometimes fairly sometimes unfairly. But it was your choices that brought you where you are, don’t like where you are make better choices.
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As a slight tangent, I wonder how certain mindsets factor into the raising of the Entitled Twits. The obvious one—that the parents know their offspring can Do No Wrong is, of course, a large one.
But what about the families where failure is not an option? Does pushing off responsibility elsewhere come with a Get Out Of Jail Free card for those kids? “Well, I would have an A if it weren’t for my classmate not helping with the group project,” (when the speaker is, in fact, the one who didn’t help.)
You have to train people young. What is cute in a child (the “boys will be boys” mentality when applied to getting out of consequences) becomes a problem in adults. And a lot of so-called adults don’t bother or actively sabotage efforts to turn children into functional adults.
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Starts to type, changes mind. B. D., you are so right. Actions or lack thereof need to have consequences, starting young enough to understand.
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Suggest to them that therefore they need institutionalization.
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I look back on my life and see many a crossroads that had I taken a different path I’d be in prison or worse. When I was a kid I was known as a good boy, but some of the people I ran around with not so much. Same in college, and after. A decision here, a decision there, and things would have been much different.
As an example, one of my best friends from junior high/high school ended up in prison and is a registered sex offender. One of my friends from my freshman year of college got pregnant first quarter and never went back to school. One of the girls my roommate after college dated crashed her truck drunk and was a quadrapalegic for the next 5 years. A couple of the people I partied with ended up strung out on meth, one tried dunking herself in the deep fat fryer one night, not sure where the other one disappeared to after crashing the wrecker.
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If you think about it, a belief in the lack of agency of those who are trapped in social classes fit beautifully with the left’s concurrent belief in all wealth being a closed system. They can try to manipulate the items within the “closed system” to be “equitable” (with some people being more equal than others, namely themselves–like the Soviet high party members shopping in “closed stores” where they spent money other countries considered hard currencies, instead of “certificate rubles.”) But it all assumes a closed system. Agency means pulling something outside of the closed system into the equation. Perhaps that’s why innovation is anathema to socialism.
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Good grief – this hits home for me. I grew up with two lovely parents and an older sister. We were “Leave it to Beaver” for real. Dad went to work, Mom stayed home and sis was just like Wally helping me, the young little guy figure stuff out. Heck, my sisters best friend lived across the street and she was Eddie Haskell to a T.
I grew up, did some really stupid stuff, paid for it and then did some really smart stuff and earned the rewards that came with that. Nothing was “pre arranged” or set in stone and that idea was never a part of my thinking and growing up. Today, I’m a happily retired official ‘old fart’ with a wonderful wife and great little dog! The kids and grandkids are a ways off in the big cities and turned out OK so something went right there too.
I spent a lot of my work life in “criminal justice” working the street, jails and prison while doing a bunch of staff training in there. It never ceased to amaze me that the majority of prisoners and ner-do-wells who had fallen afoul of the justice system didn’t seem to “get it” that it was something they did. The truly mind blowing example was when I sat in on a prisoner group counseling meeting (all criminal sex convictions, mostly against children) and one con in a flash of insight said” “I’ll be able to stay straight when I get back on the street, all I have to do is stay away from horny five year olds!” Scary part is that he was serious. Yeah… near as I know that sub-human is still locked up and we’re better off for that. The whole sub-group of cons that had domestic abuse issues were also in total denial – “She made me do it!” was always a favorite excuse. So some, they could / did figure it out but the substantial majority never took responsibility for anything and most continue to do “life” on the installment plan. Sigh… I’m glad I’m out now and my greatest issue is to be sure the dog’s dish has water in it.
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Know someone that started down the wrong path. Lost father at age 8. Five older siblings, 3 still home with him and mom. The other two already married with children. Not a wealthy life, but not dirt poor either. Ran with the wrong crowd. Tried to get out. Failed. Did time, and release probation outside of where got into trouble. Became a prominent business owner, and president of business state agency. Thirty years after finishing probation because of everything after, got a full pardon from governor granting full rights back (including firearm ownership, not that this family ever will). FYI, have no idea what exactly caused the incarceration, wasn’t “old enough to be told” (actually said). Wasn’t murder, pedophile, or even drugs. Although I suspect if individual been in deeper, the last was possible eventually. Also know individual headed off step daughter from a similar fate. When confronted by married to biological parent, her mother, the response was “Been there. Did that. Paid the price. Not happening to My Daughter!” (FYI, while the biological father had visitation rights, he really wasn’t in the step children’s life. Let alone paying a shred of child support. What step dad said was correct.) The individual in question is very wealthy. Now at 70+ is selling out business (none of the children, step or biological, want to continue). Last 4 years haven’t made it easy to sell off the business assets.
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And those who don’t accept their own responsibility are the ones “they” want to release back into society. /sigh
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Chronic recidivism in sex offenders is easily resolved by welding shut the cell door.
A .22 in the ear also works.
Sadly, lesser methods are the usual.
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A .45ACP JHP is much more certain. Messier, I’ll admit.
———————————
“Two innocent people are dead, a dozen more are being held hostage, because coddling a violent psychopath made you feel better about yourself.”
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If you cannot put down a rabid critter with a .22 at or near contact distance, a .45 wont improve things, just make more mess.
(grin)
That is partly why one uses a .22 up close, so as not to get brain matter all over oneself. Icky.
(grin)
Long ago, I knew someone who took deer with a .22 from up in a tree. Brained the critters for maximum yield of meat. -Never- came back empty handed. (Yes, technically poaching if you do not use the “approved” arm and ammo.)
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Old Yeller isn’t a popular movie anymore, none of the city kids understand it. Similar to the Noem thing and putting down a dog that wouldn’t stop attacking chickens, and then turned on her. Nobody from the city seems to understand, while everyone in rural areas nods their head, “Yup.”
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Nah. the noem thing was retarded. It was putting down a puppy she never bothered train, after ONE offense. She deserved the ratio. Find her original account. She’s cracked. (And I’m a rural kid.)
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I haven’t seen the book yet. I just saw all the fainting couches about how the dog ruined the hunt and then she shot it. Only to later find another, fuller account, about how after the hunt the dog went after and killed a bunch of her neighbor’s chickens and then turned on her.
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Nah. Her account is stupid. Apparently the breed isn’t supposed to be taken on a hunt till it’s 2. And it didn’t go after the neighbor’s chickens. She had unsecured in the back of a pick up and stopped by the neighbor’s chickens.
PLUS it only GROWLED at her, as it pulled a chicken away, which any untrained puppy would.
She then insisted on putting that incident in the book, because apparently she thought it made her sound “tough” or country of soemthing.
She took her career to the gravel pit, and I hope the puppers ghost is laughing from the rainbow bridge.
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Nah. That pup bounded off into the meadow of play. Pup isn’t waiting for anyone from this family let alone her to join them at the Rainbow Bridge.
Not only that, there isn’t a hunting breed out there who isn’t trained to the work. Yes certain breeds are breed for the activity and less likely to fail. Doesn’t mean they won’t fail in one aspect or another. A six month pup. The pup didn’t deserve to be shot, she did. (Yes, while I am urban I am not naive on what can happen to dogs in rural settings.)
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Get this, the are bred to hunt birds. And the idiot thought the “older dogs would teach it.” The actual normal thing was for her to want to play with the older dogs, which she did.
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Not what are considered individual hunting dogs, which birding dogs are. Not a chance in heck.
Pack hunting dogs? Like beagles? Maybe. The packs that don’t have any individual dog human training tend to lose a lot of dogs.
It is a technique with livestock guardian dogs. Put the pup in with a mature older dog with the stock (not cattle), and with some human help, the older dog does teach the younger dog proper guardian protocol. But even that isn’t always innate. There is a Instagram account (encountered into one posting, so not bothering to look up) where someone is detailing how he is working with a new guardian pup and the huge difference between the one he already has, and this newer pup. How the older immediately settled in with the sheep, with human reinforcement. While the newer pup just wants to play with the older dog, and the sheep. Points out that the pup should eventually get there as it gets continued training and matures but definitely night and day, for the same guardian breed. Even innate training breeds require human training to succeed.
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Theodore Dalrymple, when he worked in prison, could always tell who would, and would not, be back. Just before their release, he would ask whether he would see them again. Those few that said “No,” he would not. The rest said — “It depends.” And he would, because what it depended on was never them.
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Chesterton’s comment on the materialistic determinists of his generation was something to the effect that every last one of them would blame the cook if the food wasn’t done right.
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O Lord, we beseech Thee, tell us who croaked the bishop of Leicester
The one in the braces, he done it.
It’s a fair cop, but society is to blame.
Alright, we’ll arrest them instead.
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“Which Diocese?”
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It’s tattooed on the back of his neck.
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Of course it was Mac Davis who wrote the song that Elvis made famous. Elvis was a performer not a songwriter, but that’s beside your point. Yes, the song is well-to-do liberal comfort food, so they can feel good about themselves and take pity on those poor less-fortunate beings. Fast Car by Tracy Chapman is a much more realistic song as I explain in my post about Haters Gonna’ Hate.
As for the lottery, I used two things to talk myself out of the lottery. One was simple math and the realization that lotteries are a hack to subvert the instinctive human risk-taking algorithm. Most gambling exploits either that or math illiteracy. The other reason I didn’t play the lottery is my faith. Why would God have me win the lottery? Winning the lottery would either lead me into a life on indolence or just deter me from the path I believe God put me on this earth to fulfill.
That sense of unease you mention in regards to covidiocy even before you learned the facts is the same one I felt when, within a day, everybody who was anybody was waving a Ukrainian flag as soon as Putin attacked. I feel more along the lines of Kissinger’s thoughts about the Iran/Iraq war. Can’t they both lose?
Of course your major point about Marx believing the very thing that he claimed to despise–that people are widgets who have no free will, or ‘agency’ as the psychologists like to put it to keep as far away from historical and religious associations as possible–is what makes it so prevalent now among all the ‘right-thinking’, ‘elite’, ‘thinking class’.
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For what it’s worth, I received messages all day today to go buy a lottery ticket. No, they were not advertisements. They were from multiple, different sources. But here’s the thing. It might not (probably not) be about the ticket itself, but the journey and the interactions with people as I bought it. You never know when someone needs a smile, or some “common” courtesy, such as a thank you. For all I know, it was a message to get me out of the house today, and not just to shovel dirt or move rocks either.
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But shoveling dirt and moving rocks are good for you, dontcha’ know. LOL! I didn’t know there is a lottery losers club. That might actually be worth the weekly subscription.
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Make no mistake, I did a hour or so of shoveling today before the rain drove me back inside. I have a 6×4 foot hand screen that sifts out everything bigger than pebbles that I’m using to convert unworked glacial till into a foot or so of just plain dirt. The large gravel, cobbles, and up to 100 pounders are going into a levelish tractor path down through the woods filling in between boulders than can’t be moved or deep mudded areas that can’t be gotten around. Some of the prettier, more interesting rocks end up in a line on top of the rock wall.
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Marxism is self-induced sociopathy. Everyone else is a widget, not a person.
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Smart money is secret money.
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The period of time when I bought a lottery ticket regularly was when I worked in an office where most of the people were kicking in to buy tickets for the Power Ball etc.
I was NOT going to be the only that had to report to work if they scored a winning ticket.
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Hubby did the same at whatever location he was working at. Not just his company coworkers assigned there, but the operators of the company whose yard they were assigned to. Won zilch. Now when someone wins, it is “they won our lottery, if we’d played”. Or it is up over $100 million, time to think about a ticket. Which we never do.
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Same here. I was at a ~60 person company for a couple of years, and about a dozen folks would chip in a dollar, and then the security guard would go buy the tickets. One time we won a small amount ($20?) and it was rolled back in to buy more tickets. It basically was something social to do, where one pitched in a dollar and shot the breeze on the way in or out or at lunch or whatever. We jokingly referred to it as “the company retirement plan” since we were VC funded. None of us REALLY had any expectations to come out of it (well, maybe some folks did); it was cheaper, safer, and more fun (for me anyway!) than drinking.
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When I buy it’s when things look grim. It gives me the right to dream. That’s all.
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I buy a $20 ticket when it’s over $300 million, and just one ticket. No more.
Daydreaming about what I’d do when I win is cheaper than the movies and costs less on a per-hour basis than just about anything else for entertainment.
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I used to want a quiet life in an A-frame cabin in the woods next to a stream or a river where I could retire from my job and read comics and write all day. But then someone else said that it would be fun to use lottery winnings to buy expensive cars from Bring-a-Trailer and show up in a NASCAR t-shirt and jorts and drive the thing away from perplexed sellers. Now I wish that was God’s path for me to walk.
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I want some time travel,
I want for the SF Bay Area to go back to the ’90s, when you had lots of AWESOME places to go to, feral nerds were roaming free, and the women were attractive.
Now…I don’t know. I know that if I did win, I wouldn’t be in California for very long…
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we buy a $2 one, same.
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I’ll pitch in with a couple of coworkers when it gets near $1B, otherwise my lottery buys are stocking stuffers at Christmas, everyone gets $10 worth from “Santa”. So far Santa has won back $5 from the ~$200 spent over the years.
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The lottery math isn’t as bad as one might think. Risk/reward is a ratio. Once the reward gets big enough, the ratio evens out. If your odds of winning are one in a million, when the reward hits a million, it’s even. The odds of winning don’t go up, but the rationale to play changes – especially when the cost/risk is trivial.
If I happen to notice a payout over $500 million, I’ll spend a dollar to get a one-in-billion chance at it. I usually don’t notice.
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Yep, that’s the risk-taking hack I was talking about. Our brains are hard-wired to weigh potential reward against known cost. That part of our brain doesn’t do math. It serves us well if we have to weigh risking our life against all the lives of our whole tribe, or even whole civilization. That’s why the torpedo pilots at Midway attacked even if it meant almost certain death with no friendly air support. The reward of sinking a carrier meant so much more no matter how unlikely you, personally, were going to survive.
Other math hacks are craps and roulette. The house pays out 35-1 for a single square but there are 37 squares, the first two are just labeled 0 and 00, so people miscalculate their odds. Likewise craps. Two dice, twelve outcomes because you add the dice up, but, when you add them together the odds of each outcome change significantly.
Also, climatistas shout that atmospheric CO2 will double, but they neglect to tell you that doubling would be from .0004% of Earth’s atmosphere to .0008% of Earth’s atmosphere. Oooh, I’m scared.
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Actually, it’s currently around 0.04%, up from 0.03% 100 years ago. About 400 parts per million. It’s 0.0004 if 1.0 is the whole atmosphere.
As the CO2 content of the atmosphere increases, various processes that consume CO2 become more active, starting with plant growth. Satellite images show 15% more green today than there was 50 years ago. The higher it gets, the more it takes to increase it further. Doubling to 0.08%? Damn near impossible.
Besides, CO2 levels have been much higher in the past, and the Earth is still here.
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You are correct. I should have dropped the % sign or two of the leading 0’s. Of course, when I say it that way, it kind of taunts the climatistas to shout I’m wrong, and then demonstrate my point by correcting what I wrote.
Yeah, that’s the ticket. I did it deliberately. LOL.
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I am not surprised by Hunter Biden at all-he simply did what a lot of children do when there is a family business; he joined it. It just so happens that the Biden family business is political corruption and graft.
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“Now, Phantom? NOW? The left has always been about discrediting free well or what we now call individual agency.”
Okay, granted. ~:D More accurate would have been “again” or maybe “still”.
“In the same way it took me decades to understand that those who frustrate me, because they could better themselves and won’t are perfectly happy where they are.”
You know, one of the things Odds find very hard to understand is that A) other people really DO NOT see what we see, and B) other people don’t live in an environment of unceasing disapproval.
Normies fit in. Fitting in is what they do. In a lot of cases it’s ALL they do. One of the downsides to “bettering yourself” is that if you leave De Ghetto, as they say in the song, now you don’t fit in.
Weirdos like myself do not see that as a downside. When you’re masking your autism, you’re never not masking it. -Nobody- approves of your unmasked weirdness, and they will let you know instantly. That’s the reality for us. Hometown, big city, herding yaks in Mongolia, all the same.
Some Normie who did good and left the South Side to move into Park Slope, he’s got to mask all the time now. That’s a lot to expect out of a Normie. That’s why they don’t do it. Normies hate not fitting in, it drives their little Nomie brain crazy. (Bitter? Me? C’est impossible.)
“… the left has always thought humans had no agency, because if they did it left precious little room for bossing them around…”
Yeah, the Left has always had “convenient” beliefs and philosophies. The “meat robot” thing is super convenient for them, no investment and no responsibility. But as we’ve become increasingly aware, they’re just !@#%ing lying, and this is no different. There’s the BS they feed the Party, then there’s the real stuff for the Inner Party.
Seeing this perniciously stupid notion coming back into vogue after languishing in well-deserved obscurity for a while however is particularly annoying. Plus friggin’ Saplosky is a typical Ivory Tower bullsh1tter. Cherry-picks his evidence, ignores contrary facts that don’t support him, the usual.
More and more I’m coming to the opinion that refuting these liars is not what we should be doing. I’m leaning strongly to the tar-and-feathers side of the equation for liars and communists. But I repeat myself. >:(
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The “meat robot” thing is super convenient for them.
“hackable animals”
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The man I met in Charleston sweeping the driveway in front of a ritzy hotel (I had just auditioned for Jeopardy) had that problem. He was willing to take a menial job as a way to better himself and maybe take care of his mother….and the rest of the family was piling on him for doing it. Essentially, he was making them “look bad,” and they blamed him for doing so instead of joining in so they could “look better.”
How rough was it on him? Rough enough he stopped a white woman exiting the hotel wearing a cross, so he had one person who’d listen to him.
I hope he made it. Living well would definitely be the best revenge in his case.
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Then you have the cultures that as one gets ahead, the rest expect their cut for their privileges, which wipe out any gains.
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“Now,” said the Little Red Hen, “who shall help me eat this bread?”
“I will!” said the dog.
“I will!” said the pig.
“I will!” said the cat.
And the Little Red Hen replied “You did not help me till the ground, you did not help me plant the wheat, you did not help me harvest the wheat, you did not help me grind the wheat into flour, or bake the bread. Yet now that all the work is done, you want to eat the bread? You shall not.”
So the Little Red Hen ate the bread herself. And it was very good.
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So they applied to the government for relief, and the government took the Little Red Hen’s bread, kept most of it and gave just enough to the pig, dog and cat to buy their votes.
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At which point, the Little Red Hen placed a quiet phone call….. 8-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtrJwLfNQPs
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DAMMIT! Hot tea through the sinuses and out the nose freaking HURTS!
Thank God I missed my laptop…
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XD
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I pretty much wore out my parents’ Ray Stevens records. The Streak still kills me.
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And the Little Red Hen said “F- this!” and walked away, leaving them all to starve as they jolly well deserved to do.
Which is about where we are right now in Canada, I think. The government is weeping that “Canadian Productivity” is at an all time low, even as the job numbers are massaged to make everything look lovely.
The reality is that getting some of the gutters replaced on your not-huge house costs about the same as an 85″ Samsung television. Not the whole eves, mind you. Just the eves troughs.
Gutters cost two grand?! Since when?!
Well, since 2020, pretty much. A guy with a truck -costs- nearly two hundred bucks a day now, given fuel, vehicle depreciation, maintenance and minimum wage. A guy with a clue, might be three hundred bucks a day just to show up. Actually working and getting the job done, using expensive specialized tools like you need for doing gutters, and ladders, raw material and all that, two grand for a morning’s work from three guys.
And can you -find- a guy to do it for that money? Maybe. That’s why it’s two grand, he doesn’t have to low-ball to get the work. My highest quote was $3500 for the same job. Lowest was $1300 and he looked like the type I didn’t want hanging around my house, frankly.
Do those guys get to keep that money? Doing it officially, they take about a 50% hit. Guess how many guys do it officially.
Little Red Hen said F- this and walked away.
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It wasn’t the hen that was red.
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When I wasn’t being helpful as a child, Mom would quote that story to me. Of course, in the version I was familiar with, the Little Red Hen ate the bread with her chicks. So I pointed out to Mom that I was certainly one of her chicks and would get the bread anyway. Poor Mom, I’m sure I wasn’t the easiest child to raise.
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Yes, there were chicks.
Though, as I remember it, if one looked closely at the illustration, the chicks were at least with her as she was doing the work, no doubt “helping” as only young children can. XD
Which is close enough, if one is teaching them things.
I’m not sure that quoting it at an unhelpful child would be the most… useful… way to teach the lesson, though. That’s one of those thing that might be better to let the child read, and apply in their own minds.
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Those are too numerous to count, and fill most of the world.
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“Weirdos like myself do not see that as a downside. When you’re masking your autism, you’re never not masking it. -Nobody- approves of your unmasked weirdness, and they will let you know instantly. That’s the reality for us. Hometown, big city, herding yaks in Mongolia, all the same.”
This! Although in my case, masking is odd since I also dislike people pretending to be what they are not.
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Meant that to be a reply to Phantom. WPDE.
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Masking isn’t exactly pretending to be something you’re not.
It’s speaking a foreign language.
“Masking” is how you speak the local dialect to say “hello, I am a person, too; these are the behaviors to expect from me.”
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“Masking isn’t exactly pretending to be something you’re not.”
Masking is what you do when you are the kid who doesn’t know the Forbidden Tile. The Normies all know which tile on the floor the land mine is under. It changes minute by minute, but they always know where it is. Like it’s the one red tile on the white floor.
Weirdos like myself are blind, all the tiles look the same. Masking is when you stand where all the other kids are standing, to make sure you don’t step on that thing.
Growing old means not giving a f- and walking where you want. >:D
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That is one use.
It’s also learning what signals to offer so they know that, if you do step on a Forbidden Tile, it must have been a mistake or accident.
Or, for places that aren’t utterly insane like the random forbidden tile that’s deliberately moved, it’s doing the things that signal that you are not deliberately transgressing and are not a threat.
Like how bathing and grooming will make people treat you differently, because it shows a respect for civil norms.
It is the exact opposite of the folks who, say, roll into D&D and then throw a fit because there are blond barbarians, Drow exist, Orcs are evil, etc.
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Orcs aren’t evil! Ask MHI; everyone there knows they make great helo pilots! 😆
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Think more like this kind of orc-revision.
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Orc bodice-rippers. O-o-o-o-o-kay…
I think I’ll stick to the MHI version. Or even the Tolkien sort. 😉
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Well, I like the David Weber version.
IE Bahzell and his race of Men. 😉
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:swoon:
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Only the ones with a special pilot talent. Edward or Gretchen could learn to fly helicopters but they wouldn’t be supernaturally proficient at it, any more than Skippy would be a legendary swordsman (swordsorc?) or healer.
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Point. Of course, the same thing applies to humans. In any field. Training can make you competent, but innate talent is required for the sort of performance exhibited by a Michael Schumacher. Or a Jerry Miculek.
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Meh. I’d dispute this. There is a bleed between extreme training and talent.
Otherwise explain ME. I suck at languages. No, seriously. I have to use much more effort than 90% of people learning other languages.
And yet, writing creatively in a language one is not native in is considered impossible by all the luminaries….
And yet–
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There are always outliers, but in general I stand by what I wrote. The two examples I gave exhibit reflexes and hand-eye coordination so far outside the normal run of humanity that there’s no way someone who is average in those aspects can match them through training alone. Maybe “talent” is the wrong word for this, but I can’t think of a better one. 🤔
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Ask the Fermi Resolution. Moe Lane has some nice stuff in it. If you read in publication order — I recommend that — the first orc you meet is Father Michael, the Catholic priest the narrator turns to for help when he meets up with magic that needs blessings to counter.
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Since I turned 40 my giveadamn is more busted EVERY SINGLE YEAR
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#MeToo.
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North of 60. My give a damn is not only broke, it is long gone.
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Sixty one. Getting there.
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Likewise.
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As a Ukrainian I once heard put it: “I don’ give ass rat’s.”
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Right? Mine broke at age 45, when I discovered hospitals were run by vindictive overaged cheerleaders who put office politics -way- ahead of their patients, the people who were paying their salaries.
Since then, I go find that frigging forbidden tile and dance on it. Bring it on, beeotches.
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Masking is just so exhausting. I can do it but it always wipes me out.
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The analogy I use is my bad knee. I wear a brace and walk with a pronounced limp. I can remove the brace and force a normal gait…for a while. It hurts more and I’ll pay for it later, but I can do it.
People are generally more understanding of physical issues like the bad knee than about neurological issues like those associated with autism or ADHD or what have you so there’s little need to “mask” them in that way. But I find the analogy gets the idea across to some people who otherwise don’t “get it.”
The big difference, however, is that I’m currently in treatment to see if we can get the knee fixed up enough that I can return to “normal activities” (which in my case includes figure skating). Neurological issues like autism are for life.
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Here’s hoping the knee clears up.
Autism isn’t really a “disorder” in high functioning people, IMHO. (I have a lot of problems with the “spectrum” formulation, its seriously wrong from what I can see.)
It’s a -difference- in how they are, how they solve problems and how they see the world. Left alone, for the most part they get along just fine and they excel in their areas of strength. Top end programmers often have more than a touch of autism. To them it is an advantage that allows them to do things Normies simply can’t do.
Unfortunately the world is full of people who just can’t keep their hands to themselves. Always gotta peck the one brown pigeon.
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A lot of people misunderstand the autism spectrum as running from “a little autistic” to “a lot autistic.” It’s more that there are a “spectrum” of traits that vary from individual to individual. I think of it like a sound engineer’s mix board with the various sliders that can be low or high (and they can move). For instance, I’m usually highly verbal. But there are times where I go completely non-verbal (selective mutism). Usually briefly, but times when words just will not come out of my mouth. And this is one reason why the “functioning” labels are not really very good. They’re usually more of an indication of other mental issues (like intellectual deficits). Even the current “support levels” are of limited utility but they’re what we’ve got right now.
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I’m good for about the length of a job interview. I can put on the suit and get the job, sit through the presentation, whatever. Longer than that and it just isn’t worth it anymore.
I don’t have any overtly weird behaviors, but people do start looking at me sideways after a couple hours. Inappropriate stance, probably. I’m big, I move funny, and I have a dorky sense of humor.
Some like it, most are confused, and Karen absolutely -hates- it. I’ve had middle-aged dominant female Bellwether types going off on me since I was a little kid. Super fun at eight years old.
These days I just laugh. My field is baren, I have no f-s left to give for Karen and her delicate, lilac-scented feelings.
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Same females AND their male “executive” counterparts hate the pee out of me. :D
At this point I tell them to put it up their jumpers.
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In general, I was that way too. However, I experienced a lot of all day interviews, after an initial one or two hour phone screening interview. Exhausting doesn’t even come close to covering afterwards. I never had a one or two hour interview. Every single job required screening phone interviews, plus either an all day interview, or series of interviews across multiple days. The latter was a lot easier on the nerves.
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(Note: my mom actually sat down and explained this to us. I wouldn’t have figured it out for another couple of years from now, otherwise. :D It’s HARD to identify “I don’t like this– it is trying to hide important information they have a right to” vs “This is fine, it is trying to explain stuff they need to know,” if you don’t already have that framework.)
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Yes, we are ALL the guy from the wrong side of the tracks who did good, trying to fit in at the rich lady’s garden party. We wear the right suit, we smile and don’t say much, we nibble at the canapes the way we see all the other people doing.
But we’re doing it wrong. We stand funny, we walk funny, we don’t know what the latest gossip is, when we do speak our accent is funny. And they let us know by their condescension and superior attitudes, even if they’re being “tolerant”.
And it does not matter how successful or powerful you become. Because you still look funny, and some society matron is going to sniff at you even if you own the hotel.
So to us, walking into an unwelcoming atmosphere is any Tuesday afternoon at the local supermarket. We harden ourselves to it at a young age, or we end up in the loony bin at a young age. (Then we get old, and we’re kinda mean about it.)
Normies actually FIT in that place where they come from. Dorothy’s example of the hotel guy being called out for getting above himself is the perfect expression of collective action impacting the individual. Which is what makes collectives suck and Individualism powerful.
In a FREE country, the guy sweeping can safely ignore those worthless layabouts calling him out for getting uppity. As an individual he is empowered by the laws and customs of the nation to do as good as he wants, and become great. In Communism he has to make sure he’s not the nail that sticks up, or a hammer will be coming to beat him down.
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Lefties think only they deserve free will since other people would clearly make wrong choices.
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How could we mere mortals ever make the right choices without their divine guidance? /sarc
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Believes reality is created by human speech, huh? That mentality would certainly explain the insane language games the other side likes to play.
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CC4C
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Eric Hoffer, the author of “True Believer” saw all this decades ago. I think if he were alive now, he’d be wondering how he became a psychic.
“It is as if ivied maidens and garlanded youths were to herald the four horsemen of the apocalypse.”
The “ivied maidens and garlanded youths” are currently screaming threats and curses against Jewish students on campuses across the country. They are now the four horsemen.
“Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.”
I really need to go re-read the book.
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There are many ways to take a rider off a horse. (grin)
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“Look, I look at the way a lot of other people — richer and poorer than I, to be fair — live and I don’t want that. I also don’t understand why anyone would like that.”
One of the conscious choices I made in my most recent job change is that it is an individual contributor position – not a management position like I have held for the past 20 years in this part of the work. Does it pay less? Sure. Do I have less responsibility and can walk out the door at 8 hours and change without feeling guilty? Sure.
Given that I am closer to “getting out” than building a career, that sort of thing does not matter to me anymore. I value my time and lack of stress levels far above the title and accompanying work it would bring.
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As a senior engineer at [Giant Defense Co] I was offered management positions 3(? maybe 4; it’s been decades) times over about 25 years. I was polite about it, but my answer each time was effectively “Not only no, but hell no!”. I much preferred being productive.
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It’s not being born in poverty that makes you more likely to commit crimes, it’s growing up without a father. (Technically the research is single-parent households vs two-parent households, but the vast majority of single-parent households are mother-only.) And it’s true that single-parent households tend to be less wealthy than two-parent households, for a variety of reasons (not least the fact that the two-parent household can either have two incomes, or have one parent stay home full-time and not have to pay for childcare, which is a big cost). So if you squint and ignore the proximate cause, it can look like growing up in poverty makes you more likely to commit crimes. But the actual cause is growing up without a father.
What the Democrats have done to encourage fatherlessness via the welfare system and other means, especially in certain ethnicities that traditionally vote Dem, is truly despicable. Some of them probably understand what they’re doing, and should be judged as harshly as those racists who don’t try to hide their attitudes. Others are clearly so stupid that they don’t understand first-order effects (if you reduce welfare when a woman gets married, then most will choose to just shack up instead of paying the marriage penalty), let alone second-order effects (people shacking up are more likely to split up than married people are to divorce) and third-order effects (kids whose parents split up are more likely to end up committing crimes that land them in jail). Those people are not knowingly and deliberately inflicting problems on the very communities they claim to serve… but they’re still inflicting those problems, and should at the very least be judged for gross negligence.
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They don’t care about their voters, or any voter for that matter. They will exterminate the lower classes and poor blacks just like Margret Sanger told them to do. Because they are the anointed ones chosen to lead society, and if you don’t like it the full force of the Democrat Liberal Government will destroy you, utterly and completely.
That is what they are trying to do to Trump, I don’t want them tar and feathered, I want them hanging from the gallows after trial. We will give them the same trial they gave to the Jan 6 political prisoners, we should start with Queen Nancy and work down from her Whore of Babylon ass until Mitt Romney is hanging with her and Liz Cheney and all the liberal media are burning ashes at their feet.
Now you know why I don’t run for political office, I am not a nice person.
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After trial? I’d say that their record over the past several decades was their trial, and they demonstrated themselves to be guilty.
And being a nice person is a disadvantage when dealing with leftists., as with any (other) criminal.
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When niece met her bio-family, the oldest said “You were the lucky one.” Sis & BIL weren’t super wealthy when they were raising their 4 girls. But the girls got music, dance, and sports, including golf, so they weren’t poor either. Now that they are retired, they are much better off. Not only did they do what we did, pay ourselves first, then BIL and his sister split what was left of their parents estate after house sold (Oregon City) and their mom being in alzheimer facility medical care for a couple of years, not exactly a fortune, but not chump change (did trigger Oregon taking their estate fee, but not even close for the feds to get a bite). But that is now, not when raising their children.
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First of all…there are some people that lifetime management might be required for them. Mostly because they never learned how to manage themselves. Been reading some horror stories and I can understand why there should be some kind of a test for breeding, and not just the practical. Because some people should never be allowed to risk an innocent child’s future.
And I’m having a variation on this argument with my father. Right now, I’m working for a friend in a start-up and hopefully we’re going to take off soon. If not, it looks good on my resume and maybe the State of California will implode in such a way as to want to actually hire Odds like me. Since I’m not one of the various kinds of wizards (and the few kinds I am…well, I’m here and do you think anybody from here would ever get a job in Hollywood?), that’s not easy, either.
Dad, on the other hand…thinks that I should have had a job by now. A job with the State of California (or another government agency) and been working to build up my CalPERS pension. And I’ve been applying for jobs, but because I’m an Odd, male, white, and (somehow, they know) heterosexual…I make it past the first round of interviews and get bounced in the second. My sister has a State job, and her big issue for getting any kind of raise or large job role is that she would probably have to lateral to Central or Southern California, and any raise she makes would be lost in finding a place to live and paying for that.
(I lied, slightly-she got offered a promotion at her current location. If she took it, when she maxed out at that promotion, she would be earning $400 more a month. Not a week-a month. When she maxed out at the position in a few years. For nearly three times the work, management of a dozen people, etc, etc, etc…)
It doesn’t help that I can tell what my damage is from the Crow Flu-I always found people a little tedious. Now I just find them completely tedious and dealing with most of them without performing anal orthodromic surgery eats my energy like nothing else. (Which is why I’m not taking any retail jobs, even part-time-they’ve folded/eliminated a lot of the backroom positions and eight hours of dealing with Karens is a recipe for violence.)
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“It doesn’t help that I can tell what my damage is from the Crow Flu-I always found people a little tedious.”
Yeah. They’re intolerable. Willfully ignorant -and- stupid.
That’s because they’re “fitting in” and you’re not. A Normie does the “fitting in” thing with them and smooths down all their ruffled feathers. You just address whatever problem they came in with, which was probably never their problem in the first place.
That’s what makes you a wizard. You FIX THE PROBLEM without all the “fitting in” bullsh1t. Because your attention is on the problem. You weirdo. ~:D
Suggest you look into welding and some other trades stuff. Mighty nice sideline, welding. There’s a guy around here who makes a hearty paycheck extracting broken head studs from engine blocks. If you are the one guy in town who can reliably get a broken fastener out of an expensive part without dismantling the whole machine and sending the part to a machinist, you can charge whatever you want. Guys will beg you to take their money.
Also, welding stuff like aluminum and stainless steel. Nobody seems able to do this, for some reason. You can clean up at a marina welding stainless. The Normies will not care if you are the weirdest goat in town if you only charge them five grand for ten minutes work welding up a crack on their two million dollar boat, airplane, mansion, whatever. Because everybody else wanted fifty grand to replace the broken piece with a new one.
There is an interesting sideline growing in the high-end automotive biz, by the way. 2004 was twenty years ago, and things like a 2004 Rolls Royce, Maserati, Ferrari, Lambo etc. are full of little electronic CanBus boxes that go bad. Things like the box that controls the power windows, or the turn signals, or the air conditioning. If you’re the guy who can fix those damn things, you are worth your weight in gold because the dealerships want obscene money for them. The parts themselves are trivial, its the coding that is the problem. Hack your way to riches.
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First check, someone who thinks they’re qualified to decide who should be allowed to reproduce, shouldn’t be allowed to do so.
It’s nonsense on par with “if guns didn’t exist, there would be no violence.”
If someone is too dangerous to be allowed to have a child? Then they are too dangerous to be allowed around other people.
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Yes, but I’d prefer to know this little fact BEFORE there were innocent children involved somewhere in the process. And God knows I’m not qualified, I just don’t like seeing the bad ends that happen.
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Great, stick to wishing death on them, rather than declaring they shouldn’t be “allowed” to breed.
People are at least a little hesitant to apply that as a “just in case” because they’re feeling super emotional at the moment, and it protects the “innocent children” that don’t happen to be related to them, rather than “protecting” someone via forcibly preventing their existence.
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Speaking of “Magical Thinking”:
Denver News. Now there’s an oxymoron…..
https://twitchy.com/amy-curtis/2024/05/16/study-says-social-distancing-saved-800000-lives-n2396271
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dear Lord.
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As noted, that is not what the study said; it said that the combination of everthing saved 800k lives. That’s ridiculous, and (also as noted) it fails to account for the number of lives lost bacause of the idiocies mandated, from lockdowns to patients untreated for real health problems to untested “vaccines”, but even so the liars tried to spin it as an issue of (anti)”social distancing” alone. May the fleas of a thousand camels infest their nether regions.
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There was a suicide on my street and the ME who talked with us neighbors made a comment about shutdowns being “the last straw” in a way that heavily implied he’d been seeing a lot of those cases.
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I’m not surprised; removing all contact with society really is the last straw for vulnerable people already “on the edge”.😒
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That’s a hoot!
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Here’s the thing, though: most people who are born at whatever level tend to stay at that level. Downward movement is slightly more likely than upward, but even that is not extremely likely.
I beg to differ, Sarah. You are absolutely and utterly wrong on this. I mean, demonstrably wrong.
The general topic you refer to here is income mobility, and, statistically, it flies in the face of the idiocy which leftists have been trying to sell for the last several decades. Which is why you never hear anything about it. Because it puts paid to their entire basis for arguing that “they need to help people”.
When you break up people into “income quintiles” (or deciles, whatever, as long as there are a reasonable number of them), America has an amazing — as in, “no one else comes close” — amount of such income mobility. The number of people who happen to be in one quintile THIS year and who are in the SAME quintile in 10 years is generally a lot lower than people would expect from modern teachings. They aren’t taught to ever think about this as the true measure of people doing better for themselves — not “how many people are in ‘x’ quintile”, but, instead, “how many people move around in the quintiles?”
Dr. Mark Perry, a professor of Economics, runs an excellent blog about economic things
About 12 years ago, he did a piece about income mobility:
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/income-mobility-for-all-income-groups-is-significant/
From 1996 to 2005, for people in the bottom 3 quintiles:
=====================================
Lowest: 57.8% moved to a higher quintile.
2nd Lowest: 49.5% moved to a higher quintile.
Middle: 42% moved to a higher quintile.
Similarly, the “Rich Bastards” (well, “income“, not “wealth“):
=======================================
Top 1% in 1996: 57.5% moved to a lower quintile by 2005
Top 5% in 1996: 45.5% moved to a lower quintile by 2005
Top 10% in 1996: 39% moved to a lower quintile by 2005.
In America, people are most certainly not “stuck where they are”. They have more chances for self-betterment than just about any other nation.
“Inequality” is a complete bill of goods to excuse ripping everyone off for more taxes.
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Okay not most but still a large number stay stuck. Because they like where they are.
I wasn’t, btw, thinking of Income as such but of “ways of living among people I know.”
Which is marginally different.
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Thomas Sowell goes into that in a number of his writings. The problem with comparing quintiles over time is that the quintiles in one time do not represent the same people as the quintile in the other.
Sometimes, however, things can be a bit…confusing…because of short-term effects. For instance, the company where I work is closing down as of the end of this month. (Yep, I’m about to be unemployed.) However, I’m getting a fairly nice severance package and, well, my income for this year will actually be up from last year. That will be enough to push me up from middle quintile to second highest…for this year only (pretty good for someone who, most of his life, was in the bottom two quintiles). And that’s leaving aside any success I might have in finding new work. Any money I earn after that severance will be on top of that.
Next year, however, might well be a whole other ballgame depending on what I’m able to find. (I could almost…almost retire. Between VA disability and early Social Security, I could almost do it.)
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we’ve had that.
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The shutdown I got caught in also had a wonderful severance package: Two months in lieu of notice, 2 weeks / year service (14 weeks for me), plus dislocated workers benefits (bunch of hoops to jump through but got some seminars for skills updating), plus unemployment while the severance was paying out. Then annual salary increased $15k/year. Total time without a paycheck? Two weeks. Now the company bankruptcy 6 years later, was different: two weeks severance and a no compete clause (probably not enforceable, given my role, especially in Oregon).
OTOH better than what I’ve heard of other tech people encountering. (Go to lunch and come back with office doors locks changed. Have to make an appointment to retrieve personal items left, not limited to car keys, because walked to lunch (yea, that one they’d never catch me at). Not to mention loss of pay, at least until state departments get involved.)
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Good luck. Hope you find what you want to do.
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What I want to do is keep myself, my daughter, and our dogs fed and a roof over our heads. I have modest desires. ;)
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Dude…. you just used percent-of-current-state to prove that there will always be a top X percent.
Which, as Sarah pointed out, is somewhat similar but not the same subject.
Bcause the coffee isn’t completely kicking in, I’ll try to explain it htis way:
If you have 100 people, it doesn’t matter if the range of income goes from 10-1000 dollars down to 1-100 dollars, the top ten percent are still making the top ten percent.
Similarly, if you have 100 families, and the kids grow up fairly late in the income arc… they aren’t going to start out at the same point in the income arc.
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Yeah. Both our kids are “poor” including the one in the high-earning-potential career, in their early thirties. This might and probably WILL change, and they’ll match and maybe exceed our middle-middle class status.
BUT they don’t start out that way.
I’m not saying classes are immovable, though. Only that people mostly live a certain way. It actually has very little to do with income. For the longest time, with ONE income Dan and I matched OR EXCEEDED the lifestyle of friends who made twice as much. Because of habits and the things I made/did rather than pay for them.
… Look, I just recently realized FRIENDS who are relatively close thought our income MUST be a lot higher. Like, they assumed we always bought new cars. We’ve NEVER bought a new car. We buy used, take care of and drive till it dies.
I don’t know if this is because when they see us we’re driving rentals (Every time we go out of state) or if we just give off that air. I suspect a combination.
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It’s not class, it’s… well, culture.
Income is a cruddy way to identify that!
I am super amused at the tempest in a teacup over that Catholic football player at a Catholic school saying Catholic things that got some twists talking about how the “guys” defending it are “too stupid” to realize they’ll never make enough to have a wife that stays home.
It’s a different STYLE of living. Not needing public schools frees up a lot of choice, too.
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But but… He’s a Christian Nationalist! [Sarcastic Grin]
And yes, some idiots went there. [Angry]
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I find In the Ghetto catchy, like Imagine, or Scotty Doesn’t Know. The tune is catchy and gets you into a certain mood, just don’t pay too much attention to the lyrics.
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Paying attention the lyrics ruins so many song.
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