I've been thinking that what we're dealing with is white trash racism, by which I mean racism against what's seen by liberals as white trash. Coming from Appalachia myself, where I've been fixing up my childhood home, there's a pervasive sense of being rejected by the degreed class, especially if you're white and male. Meanwhile in the liberal bastion I call home now, they're throwing the book at two young kids who drove over and left tire marks on a Black Lives Matter mural (consisting only of those words) that stretches on pavement in front of city hall. Prosecutors want damages over $100K plus five years in prison. Black residents say that it's traumatized them so much and made them feel so unsafe, they can't go to work somedays. The black population of my county is 1%. We're 33% Latino but they seem able to go to work. If these kids had felt that it was a statement their lives didn't matter, haven't we just proven them right? If it was a statue they felt demeaned their ancestors, we'd be celebrating them--if they were black. Instead, no one cares what led them to burn rubber on the city's most prominent declaration that they had no right to exist.
This contempt for the untouchable class of “white working class” is palpable. My own uncle serves it to me every time we discuss politics. I’m a married blue collar guy who owns a home. He’s an unemployed former book warehouse worker with a college degree so by his logic he’s the elite bourgeoisie and I’m the lumpen pleb.
One time I happened to run into Santa Cruz neighbors while I was at the Farmer's Market of my hometown, Cumberland. They were riding a bike trail that went through it. This was before Trump's election and they sneered at all the Trump signs as proof of our backwardness and degeneracy. They'd met another professor from a nearby college town who called it 'Scumberland,' which they thought appropriate and apparently thought I should too. They dismissed the town as racist (I have yet to meet a kid there who isn't biracial) and yet saw no contradiction in calling everyone who lived there scum.
My Cumberland is the one in western MD, across the bridge from W Va and a stone's throw from PA. I used to describe it as the little part of MD that juts out into the middle of nowhere, and that was where I was from. But I'm claiming it as somewhere these days.
Sorry, but I still believe that most white people, who voted for Trump, twice, are racists. If not, then why do they support a racist? Who, by the way, betrayed all his promises and did zilch for the white working class. Unless you think putting three white nationalist extremist Christians on the Supreme Court is doing something for the working class.
Is Trump a racist? As his son said, the only color my dad sees is green. He's willing to make deals that enrich him with blacks, Muslims, Jews, Latinos, Native Americans. That doesn't make him a good person but doesn't fit the definition of a racist--if words are held to have meaning and not just 'people we don't like.'
I don't vote so I didn't and would never have voted for Trump. But neither would I have ever voted for Hilary, based on her war crimes in Libya and Honduras.
And I've been wondering how people who voted for Biden feel now, with Hunter's laptop and Ashley's diary revealing him to be one of the most morally degenerate people who've ever lived. Caligula and Nero have nothing on him! But what he's done to his own family pales by comparison to what he's done to whole populations, like the people of Ukraine, and to us in the US.
You may not be feeling the effects of him selling off our oil reserves to China but my handyman's uncle in W. Va did. He took his life because he couldn't make a living as a trucker because of the cost of diesel. He was about to lose his house and left three grandchildren and a wife who were all financially dependent on him.
I'm sure you're a well-meaning person, Joni, but the knee-jerk liberalism that buys into political opposition as a moral position is killing people.
Well, you are a racist too, we all are racists, as we know well. Joe Biden has been a main cog in the system that produced systemic racism for decades. He was an architect of the criminal justice bills in the early 90s that created the iniquities that are cited as problematic today. So, how did people justify voting for him? He definitely couldn't pass the implicit association test for racial bias, of course, almost no one does pass it. So, answer your own question, why support a racist?
My son is a lawyer, but before he decided to be one he worked short-term at a number of blue-collar jobs. I told him that if he took nothing else away from that experience, he should have a deep and abiding respect for the hard work done by blue-collar workers.
By the way - my husband and I both have university degrees.
What I envision, and what my book, Substack and YT lay the foundation for, is a world in which we are all farmer-philosopher-professors and plumber-intellectual-poets. Work is life. The problem with manual labor jobs is that they're doing all the work that the rest of us are shirking. I'm sure your son is doing fine things for the world but if all the lawyers disappeared tomorrow, life would go on. Not so for those who do real work. Our system traps us so that we can't afford our own labor. I think with the collapse of the petrodollar, that's going to change.
All work is "real work." We need lawyers and accountants and economists and other white-collar workers as well as oil drillers and drywallers and electricians. After all - how could you ever claim you owned a piece of property if you didn't have the paperwork to prove it?
However, some things that are currently called "work" are, in my opinion, more vanity projects than work.
The late David Graeber has an excellent book called Bullshit Jobs. It shows how many white-collar jobs are entirely make-work and often recognized to be by those employed in them, who are desperate to keep up the facade that they're doing anything important. Graeber's point was made amply in the recent designation of 'essential workers.' Everyone else could be paid to sit on their hands and life went on.
There are only two jobs in the current system: making the rich richer or serving those who make the rich richer. If you have the opportunity, the former is the better choice. But we should have better choices.
Your example of land titles is especially pertinent to Appalachia. There's an amazing historian named Steven Stoll who wrote Ramp Hollow: the Ordeal of Appalachia. He talks about Robert Morris 'owning' over 8M acres in Appalachia, much of it given to him by the legislature in return for nothing. Meanwhile settlers developed this land and wrote their own deeds to it.
Economist Hamilton first tried to destroy agrarian sovereignty with the Whiskey Tax on rye, forcing people who didn't use currency into debt. But it was land titles and lawyers, a century later, that was used to claim the 200,000 acre coal bed for strip mining after clear cutting turned it into an alien landscape.
Like I said, we can't afford to do real work and I couldn't get back to a desk job fast enough after my foray into it. But that's not what we do.
I agree with you that there are white collar "jobs" that are make-work projects - but so are some blue-collar jobs. (How many people are needed to stand around and watch one guy do the road repair?)
I'm a professional bookkeeper, and you are telling me that the work I do isn't "real work" because I don't peel railroad ties with an axe like my grandfather did. Sorry, but I don't agree.
I'm also a small business owner - actually a micro-business owner, because I employ fewer than 5 people. I'm not rich, and neither are most small business owners. But I do provide well-paying jobs for 3 people including myself - and we're very good at what we do. Small and micro-businesses make up most of the economic activity in Canada, and probably in the US too.
Beat me to it on the late great David Graeber’s “Bullshit Jobs.” I also recommend his “Debt: The First 5,000 Years.” I live in Montana and most deals amongst ranchers are handshakes and disputes are settled i without lawyers. But transferring land still demands you get a lawyer. My stepson hated being a lawyer and went back to school and became an environmental engineer. His firm cleans up riverfronts and makes those bike trails.
Yeah no. If we run out of mechanics, electricians and plumbers we are screwed. Lawyers, education PHDs, liberal arts majors… not so much.
Interesting how Republicans are now the working class party (even working Latinos) while Dems have become the party of urban educated liberals. And I swung along with the tide. I’ll always side with the party that stands up for the working man.
"If America could be, once again, a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers, and artists, then the rich would have little power to dominate others. Neither to serve nor to rule: That was the American dream."
(solicited-but-rejected NYT editorial on the occasion of Earth Day 20)
Ben Franklin, whose economic system for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is what my model is based on, said something similar. He felt that a self-managed means of employment was the goal of life and working for someone else was a phase, like being an apprentice while learning your trade.
I also quote Wendall Berry in my book when he says the commonwealth is the "foundation and practical means" of most people being self-employed most of the time. Through a character in Jayber Crow, he writes "I watch and I wonder and I think. I think of the old slavery, and of the way The Economy has now improved upon it. The new slavery has improved upon the old by giving the new slaves the illusion that they are free. The Economy does not take people's freedom by force, which would be against its principles, for it is very humane. It buys their freedom, pays for it, and then persuades its money back again with shoddy goods and the promise of freedom."
But here's the Wendall Berry quote I was looking for in my book, from The Gift of Good Land:
"What one thinks of this disintegration and decline will depend on one's opinion of the US economy, and on one's confidence in it. If one believes that it is better to buy food than to grow it, then one is not going to worry about the decline of any particular farming community, especially if that community is based on subsistence farming.
"... I am worried about the decline of farming communities of all kinds, because I think that among the practical consequences of that decline will sooner or later be hunger.
"In some respects, the traditional subsistence agricultures are ... the best assurances of a continuous food supply, simply because they are not--or were not--dependent on outside sources that must be purchased. To exchange these locally self-sufficient subsistence agricultures for the 'good life' of a consumer economy is like climbing out of a lifeboat onto a sinking ship."
"The problem with manual labor jobs is that they're doing all the work that the rest of us are shirking."
It's only shirking if you can't be bothered to learn how to do basic R&M stuff, for example. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses is important. My husband can do lots of plumbing fixes, but he won't do toilets, because after a couple of times installing them, he has come to the realization that he is simply unable to ensure they don't leak.
Yes and the demonization runs both ways. Some right wingers will scoff at a college degree but practicing law and passing the bar exam is comendable . I do feel the elite coastal lib strain of smug condescension to be especially potent.
It’s passing the bar/being a lawyer that is commendable, NOT where one got their law degree from.
Gerry Spence, the greatest defense lawyer ever-Randy Weaver/Ruby Ridge, undefeated in his career w/ jury trials!!-said he always preferred to hire obviously smart lawyers from 2nd tier law schools as opposed to blue bloods-they are obviously smart and scrappy.
I have a masters, but I work in an e-commerce facility-not Amazon. I just associate myself with Office Space and Eric Hoffer-your job is not your intellect, and your degree doesn’t give you a greater degree of human dignity than someone with less education. Morons exist in their own sphere that isn’t defined by degrees!
Watch any Star Trek episode featuring The Borg. Now substitute "Amazon" for "Borg" during the dialog. It will send chills down your spine. "Assimilate, or die".
Yeah, Amazon has enough of a monopoly that they don’t have to give a shit about how they treat workers (the same problem workers experienced in the USSR, btw). My company doesn’t have that problem, imo.
I’d say they are just Eastern European markers-there were more Serbian gangsters and terrorists on CBS dramas for the past 30 years than in Belgrade!!!
Yes, I’m just saying Eastern Europeans are the de facto bad guys-Arabs/Muslims are basically no go due to pc considerations, Eastern Europeans have a veneer of plausibility with the benefit of being white, Christian males.
I’m Ukrainian, I’m fully aware of how f-Ed up civil society in my homeland is-Ukraine ostensibly has socialized medicine, but everyone knows you have to pay cash at the hospital b/c criminals have seized all official hospital funds allocated by the government.
Axtually, what brought the issue to mind was the description of the Dursley family in the Harry Potter books.
Besides being Muggles (i.e. common) J.K. Rowling is at great pains to describe the family as "fat", in addition to other signifiers of not being members of The Better Classes.
Serbs and Russians are OK to hate, of course. Not Ukrainians, they are Our Special Friends. But Russians can be described in crude and reductionist stereotypes that Goebbels would think were over the top and nobody says a peep in protest.
I’m an Untermenschen-and my people also got screwed over by Moscow. Ukraine literally means “country”-what is happening now is straight out of The Hunger Games-Cap City vs. District 12……fwiw, I have never read a complete Harry Potter book
A deep-dive underwater welder or the owner of a car repair place can make hefty amounts of money, more than any college professor, but they are treated quite differently in terms of class.
Does racism still exist? At a structural level I would argue no (at the individual level, absolutely).
Asians earn more than every other racial group in the country, including whites. There is a trend of anti-Asian violence primarily committed by poor black perpetrators--Asian wealth is a primary motivator there I think.
What I'd like to see is someone do a History of the American Deplorables focusing on the last 45 years in particular, although intractably poor whites have existed in Appalachia and other places much longer than that. I don't want to downplay the latter, especially as they may be the model of a multigenerational, white lower class on its way to exploding in size. The last 45 years is interesting because it was a turning point for folks, like me, who came from blue-collar families and graduated high school in the 1970s. There were two groups of us: those who were determined to go to college to better ourselves, and those for whom working in a factory was good enough because it was good enough for Dad. Those in the first group prospered, some becoming very wealthy and transferring their social advance to children and grandchildren. What about the second group? The factories shut down, moving to non-union states and eventually overseas. The work that was left was less stable and lower paying. They and their kids often succumbed, and continue to succumb, to alcohol, heroin, or opioids. Some of their kids do manage to crawl out of the hole but college is now much more expensive, and the overall atmosphere in once-thriving blue-collar towns is not encouraging, very different from what it used to be.
Historically, a large underclass living on the edge is the norm, not the exception. The aberration was World War II, which solved the Great Depression problem and left the U.S. alone at the top of the world. We enjoyed several decades of blue-collar prosperity as a result that would have been very unlikely to occur otherwise. It may be one of the greatest social experiments ever. The deplorables are the inevitable reality just delayed in time. Being deplorables, they don't articulate their political philosophy with much educated polish or pretention, which is why a shallow thinker like Krugman dismisses it as nonexistent. It has a soft spot for crude aphorisms, it can fall into racism, and it is susceptible to demagogues. But the core of it is the economic insecurity of many people who are never going to learn how to write Python or C++ programs.
Wow, Bob. "Intractably poor whites ... multigenerational white lower class on its way to exploding in size." History of the American Deplorable is a right catchy title. But, unless I'm misunderstanding you, you're proving my point in spades that the academic professional class are blind to their own 'white trash' bias.
But I get it. There was a time that I felt like I had escaped Cumberland by going to college then grad school in CA. It wasn't until my parents went into decline that I started going back regularly and developing an adult relationship with my hometown. And I realized I had been an elitist snob, who was basing my own value on my ability to make the rich richer--the same job as the factory worker except C++ programmers are paid better.
I want us all to have different choices than the white collar or blue collar or no collar worker. On this last trip, I published an op-ed in Cumberland talking about how we could take back the economy to make it serve the community. In Cumberland, incomes are too low. But in Santa Cruz, I wrote an op-ed about the insane cost of housing. The result, and the formula to solve it, is the same in both places. I'll attach the post I did talking about it. And the drugs have been inflicted. I'll attach my piece on opioids as the new opium war. Since then Robert Malone confirmed my research showing how opioids are pushed on these communities--whether for eugenics or just for profit is an open question.
Tereza, I’m more in support of your point than I think you realize. But when I said intractable I meant it. I see it with my own eyes and I saw the start of it in my own community. The economy won’t serve the community as long as workers have to compete in wages with workers in a repressive, communist country who have no labor rights.
Oh I'm glad. I thought you might have been using terms like deplorables for effect. In my Third Paradigm community of viewers and commenters, we've been working out the policies that could solve our problems--which are different in different areas. It starts with taking back the power to create mortgages from private bankers and pricing mortgages in a community digital currency I call a caret. This gives the commonwealth the power of distributing carets, taxing them and setting their exchange rate.
The problem you raise, which is absolutely real, I deal with by making carets used in local exchange free of income and sales tax (but not Soc Sec), allowing a set amount of dollars to be exchanged 1:1 for carets monthly but taxing expenditures in dollars at 50%.
I also deal with hedge funds buying up the real estate by making exchanging 2 dollars to 1 caret, giving local residents and workers a 2:1 advantage and making rents extracted worth half as much.
As things "progress" and more jobs are automated, people who once thought themselves immune from being de-jobbed, are going to be de-jobbed, deracinated, and derided. Just like the "deplorables". I mean lawyers, accountants, architects and wait for it, college professors.
Oooh, I learned from Russell Brand that 'deracinated' means severed from the roots. I've wanted to tell him that radical means to go to the roots of an issue, but he probably already knows, as a fellow etymology nut.
You're so right. At the lower level of service jobs, every self checkout kiosk is one paycheck more going to profits. Do the professors think that this push to online learning is to make their jobs easier? Already they hire people at criminally low 'salaries'--they would make more if paid by the hour--to monitor online classes. It certainly isn't teaching.
And doctors are next, with online appointments and bots, even for 'counseling.' Russell did one of his videos on the robot nurses they've developed for elder care.
Bombing China would only cut off our remaining source of goods produced by real people, until they stop accepting dollars because they've already used their Treasury bills to buy up all the US real estate. What did Putin call dollars and Euros? Bubble gum wrappers?
Your great title led me to check out your Substack--brilliant article on Russia, Bill. VERY funny: "President Placeholder; the old man formerly known as ‘biden’." And facts I hadn't put together, that the US has been militarily involved with 98% of countries recognized by the UN (maybe 99% if we're including Palestine, that's not). Some of your quotes were shocking, on Buck Turgidson: “Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks." Is that recent? And Ramsey Clark: "If necrophilia exudes a tone, then the prevailing mood in that war room was necrophilia. The clear warning is that we have allowed civilization to drift into the hands of necrophiliacs."
I'll be subscribing ASAP and reading your other posts. I have several episodes on Russia that quote some of the same sources, like Matt and Aaron. Do you know Caitlin Johnstone? She's definitely with you on the insanity of nuclear brinksmanship. And Kanekoa has info I haven't found elsewhere, along with Moon of Alabama. And your compatriot, Matt Ehret, writes extensively about Russia, where he teaches at Moscow University. Here's one of mine that quotes Aaron extensively:
Not to dispute this broad outline, but we must include the role of labor unions. Widespread organizing during the 1930s helped blue collar workers win a larger part of the economic and political gains than might otherwise have been expected during the New Deal and World War II. The gains have slipped away not just due to broad global trends but due to a concerted effort by corporations and their owners to limit, undermine, demonize and corrupt the union movement (an essentially keep it out of many states) and its political power. It's also true that the too many workers forgot the need for unions and too many union leaders sold out their members. This anti-union effort, which continues, eventually made it easy for the Democratic Party under Clinton to abandon both the unions and blue collar in favor of the college-educated professional managerial class. None of this was accidental and the fact that it's mostly forgotten is testimony to the success of the campaign. This did not occur in Europe, where unions remain a significant force and the working class has not been written off and marginalized to the extent it has in the USA.
That is truly horrible! I grew up in WVa, near the Ohio border in a coal and steel town that is now mostly boarded up. I had to go back for awhile in the early 2000s to look after Mom. A lot of people were resentful I left and went to college and caused me a lot of trouble. But...all my liberal friends, here, in Philly, never stop going on about the repulsive 'deplorables' who all ought to be shot.
It's a dilemma, isn't it? I went to school at LaSalle in Philly and came back one summer to work. The line of applicants to sell fire alarms door-to-door stretched around the block. I bought into that rejection of my roots and tried to be as non-provincial as I could. There were times that got me into trouble.
I was just texting with my handyman whose W Va uncle just took his life. Mid 50's and was losing his house, gas too high to make a living as a trucker. Damn, I'm sick of this. Left a mother to bury her son, a daughter and three grandkids. And six brothers and a sister who wish he had asked for help.
I saw a lot of tragedies in my town, but didn't see any obvious addicts, at lesst not then. Most of the people I knew from childhood had fallen on hard times, and seemed shell -shocked, no idea what to do. Our neighborhood of nice suburban houses was mostly abandoned, overgrown with weeds. There is no way to even leave without a car--no bus or train. The exterminator said the whole town was crawling with rats and roaches from all the abandoned buildings. Along the river, there were rusty trailers with hand painted signs of 'GIRLS'. Never saw that there before! There should have been some kind of help to transition after shutting the steelmill and mine. Instead, they were tossed like a used rag.
You describe it really well, Roxan. My town transitioned from coal mining and the railroad to Kelly Springfield and Celanese plants. When they shut down, all the money in circulation dried up. Now it's relying on tourism, because the low cost of housing attracts artists and it's about 2.5 hrs from Baltimore and DC.
When I decided to fix up my childhood home, I thought about some little girl being born there and not having the chance to escape like I did. In my economic plan, mortgages and student loans become local currency for food production, wellcare, education and home improvement. Extractive industries like plants can be repossessed through eminent domain. All ways that money is made from money, like insurances and infrastructure loans, are owned by the community and debts to itself--creating jobs.
I think that one of the consequences of the planned food shortages will be a reverse migration from big cities to small towns. Your liberal friends (and mine) are one chess move away from those repulsive deplorables who ought to be shot. It would be good to have a plan to use that rage constructively.
@ Tereza Coraggio & the 99 ❤'s that appear to think⁉ this comment has something to do with this enlightening discussion between Matt Taibbi and Alex Lee Moyer about her extraordinary latest documentary film about....... "Alex Jones".🎯
I liked her incel movie. I hadn’t heard of her until recently and it was well worth the 4$ rental. I went back and read critiques of the film and besides normal things like it didn’t have a great arc/ too much smash cuts ( it doesn’t imo), I noticed some people seemed to dislike it because it made the incel dudes seem human. A few actually by the end are lifting weights and have girlfriends. I suspect some liberals might not like the idea of redemption for these seeming white male losers and think they need to be banished/jailed
Thank you, Ethan, I'll enjoy watching this interview of Alex Moyer. I did an episode of my own that talked about this thread and some of the comments back and forth. It's called Appalachian Rage. It isn't so much about Alex's work, as you may be inferring, but a similar topic, I think: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/appalachian-rage
Yeah, I think it’s interesting that Tereza keeps referencing a book she’s written, but doesn’t even understand that she’s talking about classism and not racism. I’m pretty curious what her book’s like, but not nearly enough to read it haha.
And to sit there and say,”Oh, those teenagers burning rubber all over a BLM thing couldn’t POSSIBLY be motivated by racism,” seems a little disingenuous. I mean, I’ve been unemployed for five years, I think? Six years, maybe? Actually, yeah, it’ll be six years this August. I’m white. I’m male. And I have no desire to go “burn rubber” all over a BLM thing.
The fact that these attitudes keep being blamed on the media, social media, “The Elites,” etc etc just leads me to the conclusion that,”Uhhhh, if you don’t like what they’re saying about you, if you don’t like their ‘attitude’ towards you, why do you keep paying attention to it?” I mean, it’s one thing if you feel left behind and you can’t get a job or whatever, I get that. Because I’m one of those people. But that doesn’t mean that I have to turn on the news or log on to social media or whatever. I don’t have to do that. So I don’t. It’s like they’ve got a shitty girlfriend that they just can’t quit or something…
My wife is from Moundsville, WV and her family is all over that region of WV, PA and OH. Please elaborate on how the "degreed class" (other than the Sackler family - staunch Republicans) has "rejected" white males. I've been up there too many times to count, am a white male, dress like a slob, and have never been "rejected" by anyone. I need examples.
The question isn't whether YOU are rejected by THEM, when you travel into the hinterlands dressed like a slob and then return to civilization and the job that enables you to own a home, a car, have a college education, and travel. The question is whether the white males who never left those places, never got a degree, can't get a good-paying job, can't buy a house, and can't imagine traveling to where you live, feel that you feel superior to them.
I'm not saying that you do feel that way. But Alex's point is that is that THEY feel the liberal degreed class does look down on them as less than dirt, and this is AMPLY proven in the media and in comments like my Cal professor neighbors. It's proven in Hillbilly Elegy and Deliverance. It's proven in the uproar against the two white kids driving over the BLM sign as a racist hate crime.
As someone who lives and works in the heart of Hillbilly Ellegy territory, I can say that local reaction to the book is not the same as it was nationally. People don’t see it as some anguished cry of the Appalachians, they are more like “Oh yeah, I knew them/I know that place/my family is from Kentucky. Stay the hell off drugs”.
Everyone was mostly disappointed that they didn’t have more recognizable exterior shots in the movie.
As for the author, JD Vance-he is a craven opportunist who is pivoting from being a materialistic Never Trumper to a panderer who doesn’t come around locally. He literally says “Mexicans made my mom a junkie”, and people locally will roll their eyes. I’m not voting for him or the D in the 22’ Senate election.
Surely any argument about structural racism that posits that white males benefit from the privileges associated with whiteness and maleness is glossing over the plight of people that form Trump's base.
Where are you more likely to see that argument deployed? In WV? Or Brooklyn?
Not sure where you're going there, but as a white male myself, with way more interactions w/ law enforcement (on the receiving and deserving end) than many here, I've experienced the benefits and privileges that I know the average Black person wouldn't have received.
How do you know it was your white privilege? And if you had white privilege why did they even interact with you? Did they think you were black? But when they saw you were white, did they apologize and say sorry we were looking for blacks carry on.
Also I don't think you're understanding white privilege correctly. If they were "looking for" a black person, that would be specific to a crime committed and only covers probably 0.0001% of cases where alleged white privilege might be invoked. It's more in the way that you are treated courteously or given second or third chances in situations where other people - especially Blacks or Hispanics - aren't. Don't get me wrong, if we were to confine the conversation to interactions with police, the cops get away with killing everyone, from black to white to asian to latino. It's just that in those instances, they're less likely to shoot you in the back while fleeing or immediately open fire on you without even saying more than a few words when you're white and look "non threatening" despite the fact you could easily be as threatening as any black person.
But in other areas its more obvious and at the same time more hidden. The financial crisis in 2007/8 was in no small part due to the practice of banks intentionally pushing blacks and minorities into bad mortgage loans when they clearly qualified for better ones. Was that "racism"? I don't know; depends on how you define that term, but when you look at the big picture, objectively, what starts to emerge is a clear pattern of discrimination based only on perception of skin color where all other things were equal (income, credit history/score, etc.). Personally I did get a mortgage loan in that time period and I know OF (don't know personally, but through social media and my wife's acquaintances) several black individuals and families who were the victims of these sub prime loans. And again, this greed and corruption by the banks wasn't confined just to blacks or any other group, but the stats show that disproportionately they were the ones who bore the brunt of this kind of loan practice.
Do you deny that there's such a thing as "white privilege" at all, or do you think it exists but is overblown?
I don't deny that it exists. But it's so overblown. Instead of looking inward and asking why. It's much easier to blame outside forces like white privilege.
LOL, because (and this is just one of perhaps a hundred incidents) 1) I was drunk , 2) weaving in and out of every lane on I-10, 3) speeding, 4) had two friends in the back of the pickup truck and 5) Told the cops to fuck off and approached them anyway despite them telling me to keep my hands on the rear liftgate. I was let go without even a warning after a jovial conversation with 4 of the city's finest.
On other occasions, I asked for exceptions at school which I know for a fact were denied to my Hispanic friends and which I was granted.
On yet another, in a different Texas city, I was with a Black friend and we were merely walking down the street near the university and a couple of undercover/plainclothes officers approached us and started haranguing my friend for absolutely nothing while being completely courteous to me.
I tell you I could write a book; there just isn't enough room here to go through them all. If it helps you form a mental image, I'm blonde, blue eyed and look like a cop.
Well, I was blonde, green eyes, good looking female. I have been pulled over for drunk driving, and arrested for it. Same with fighting with them, arrested, caught with drugs, arrested. Deserved everyone.
What relevance do the cops have to do with what I'm talking about? Blacks make up 12% of the US population but commit 50% (probably more) of the homicides. Given the disproportionate numbers of black criminals it makes sense that they are overrepresented in arrestees and prison inmates.
On the other hand arguing that all white males benefit from systemic racism is somewhat questionable in light of the experiences of poor whites.
Good point. A lot of this uproar is froth. It is also true, though, that certain discrete elements in the massive fabric of American society have a much higher public profile than other, much larger, groups. But, as Taibi points out in his recent book “Hate Inc”, the juice is running hot in media in ways that it didn’t used to, and that’s a big part of what fuels the culture clash hype that many have allowed to cloud their judgement.
"...there's a pervasive sense of being rejected by the degreed class,"
Come on. Give that shit a break already. I've got a BS in electrical engineering and had to work to pay for college, with a little help from my folks who couldn't afford to pay for me, and I had to earn my degree, it wasn't handed to me. Also, I have never "rejected" anyone without a degree and know no one with a degree who "rejects" anyone without one either. I have worked as a busboy, dishwasher, stocker, plumber's assistant, and handyman until I landed my first job out of college and so understand work. Most of us do as we didn't come from money.
That feeling is all you. You made your life decisions and if they weren't that good and didn't produce the outcome that you expected out of life, don't blame the "degreed class", which isn't a class, it's comprised of people who chose to go to college and earn a degree just like you chose not to. So, stop the whining and fess up to the consequences of your own actions and decisions.
Okay buddy, I've got an abd Ph.D., coming from no money, and I bought my CA house before I met my husband because I was the 10th employee at a high tech company that became one of the top for that era. They hired me in spite of being overeducated but because I'd been a waitress and they knew waitresses worked hard. I eventually became their Director of HR and have put three daughters through college and one Master's with no debt. I'm fine with "the consequences of my own actions and decisions."
And everywhere I turn in Appalachia or CA, I see people who are just as hardworking as you and me who haven't had our luck. If you don't think luck is involved and the US is a meritocracy where any industrious person has the same chance, I don't know where to start. But if you read my comment about my neighbors calling my hometown 'scum,' how are you saying the bias is all in my head? You don't hear what liberals say about ignorant Trump supporters? Matt has some older articles that could refresh your memory if you check his archive.
OK, so you read the book "Meritocracy", so did I. You make an allegation about the "degreed class" that is without substance, just a chance for you to blame others about your situation. I worked on site at Motorola when it laid off degreed electrical engineers here because it hired Polish degreed engineers who worked for less. So, the problem isn't the "degreed class", as you allege, it's the libertarianism that has been in vogue since Reagan.
Libertarianism and conservatism, Calvinism, both posit that the wealthy are more deserving as their riches are god's reward for righteousness, for those religious, or more industrious, for those secular. Listen to Ayn Rand's radion show about makers and takers:
While libertarianism is liberal, it is but a segment in the liberal spectrum. I, a liberal, do not accept libertarianism for a number of reasons that include its meritocracy and selfishness is a virtue doctrine. The GOP has been working since Reagan to make government incapable such that their wealthy donors can do what they want without fear of being held accountable and that has had a lot of support from Americans, including many of those that you're defending.
Reagan was the turning point. He appealed to Americans' sense of entitlement and enacted much of the policies that has directly led to this situation, from the deregulation that led to all financial crises since 1980, to trickle-down economics that has led to the erosion of the middle class, to tax changes that led to offshoring. What you're whining about is due to libertarianism, not people working for and getting an education that requires higher education.
Jeff, your degree didn't seem to enable you to read. Where do you get that I'm "blaming others about [my] situation"? I'm as financially secure as it's possible for an honest person to be in the US, which means my future is still hanging by a thread. As is yours. My first thought when I wake up is how much I love my life, and how much I want everyone to have the same--the ability to take responsibility for the people and places that have been entrusted to them. I've been very competent in that and it's given me beautiful places to live and daughters who take responsibility for their own lives and who I could depend on, if I needed to. Everyone should have that.
What I see both in Appalachia and in California is a waste of human life, potential and joy because our economic system INCLUDING ACADEMIA makes the rich richer. A friend just sent a NY Times article that makes a point I've made repeatedly: "Letting the university take care of all of students’ needs — food, housing, health care, policing, punishing misbehavior — can be infantilizing for young adults. Worse, it warps students’ political thinking to eat food that simply materializes in front of them and live in residence halls that others keep clean."
Your original comment was "I have never "rejected" anyone without a degree and know no one with a degree who "rejects" anyone without one either ... You made your life decisions and if they weren't that good and didn't produce the outcome that you expected out of life ... stop the whining and fess up to the consequences of your own actions and decisions."
Rather than changing the subject to Reagan, look at the derision in your opinion of me when you thought I was some loser without a degree. You still haven't been able to shake the idea of my 'bad situation'. You've completely proven my point.
Note that the wealth disparity started to really grow after 1980, when Reagan was able to implement his libertarian policies. Before that, we had above average inflation that caused the fed to raise interest rates in an attempt to control borrowing and some tax changes were implemented to reduce the loss on savings to inflation, which helped the rich who had far more savings, but also helped middle class people stem those losses. However, Reagan cut the upper marginal tax rates that increased the gap between rich and everyone below them:
What you're complaining about is the result of Republican governance as a result of their libertarian, pro-wealthy policies, not liberals in general. In fact, libertarianism is a big problem in California, with their anti-high rise, affordable housing zoning that made sprawl worse and forced housing costs higher.
You don't know what you're talking about. Reagan is THE subject because he and the Republican libertarians created this situation with their policies. Due to the success amongst those that you're defending, the Democrats made a sea change with the New Democrats that courted those same voters that elected libertarian Republicans, those Clinton Democrats.
This is a fact. That you see me deriding you proves my point, you don't get it and you blame me for your failures and your poor decisions, such as voting Republican. Own up to your mistakes, don't blame me or degreed professionals.
fwiw, as Dan Baum's 1996 book Smoke And Mirrors points out, it was President Reagan who quadrupled the Federal War on Drugs budget in the early 1980s, which pretty much disqualifies him from being a "libertarian" in the civil liberties sense. https://archive.org/details/smokemirrorswaro00baum
Also, David Stockman (who does qualify as a big-L libertarian, for better or worse) quit his post as economic advisor for the Reagan administration when it became clear to him that Reagan was going to base his economic agenda on perpetuation of Congressional earmarks and status quo spending policies financed by deficit spending (Reagan was the first president to push the national debt over $1 trillion.) https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1986-04-13-8601260815-story.html
When controlling for STEM degrees the college wage premium shrinks substantially or vanishes altogether depending on the degree. I think that some non-stem trust fund kids with basket weaving degrees do look down on blue collar jobs. You’re In engineering I wouldn’t think those in your field would scoff at hands on work. If anything it goes the other way (ask an auto mechanic what they think of an automotive engineer)
"Some non-stem trust fund kids" is not the same as "the degreed class." My argument is with her use of "degreed class" as a stereotype, it isn't.
EDIT: From reading about California's housing cost problem, I do think that there is a problem with attitudes of the wealthy who may be the "degreed class" that she complains about. For the most part they are libertarians who, as I've stated in previous posts, are concerned with their experiences, not the well being of others. For example, as I've mentioned, they are the reason that housing costs and sprawl is so bad as they've zoned regions to keep people out of their neighborhoods.
"Some non-stem trust fund kids" is not the same as "the degreed class."
I was making a more nuanced argument based on what she said. I agree “the degreed class” is not a monolith.
I live in California and I’ve lived from NorCal to Socal. I don’t know where you got the idea that most Californians are “libertarian” they are virtue signaling lefties mostly who pay lip service to progressive values and then do exactly what you just said. The zoning is worst in the most liberal areas. NIMBY is not strong enough of an acronym . I prefer to call these people BANANAS. Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything. That’s not consistent with being libertarian
" don’t know where you got the idea that most Californians are “libertarian”"
The articles that I read mentioned that they were libertarian liberals and were the NIMBY problem, not most Californians. They liked what they had and didn't want it spoiled, so go somewhere else. The article made it sound like the people she was complaining about and in addition to that they were also the cause of extensive environmental damage due to sprawl that could've been ameliorated from high density development built near mass transit. My experience with libertarians is that they are all anti-environmental to a person, while they believe in rights that doesn't extend to nonhuman animals, ecosystems, or the right of people to a functional ecosystem and clean environment. So, I never questioned what I read.
Thank you Mr. Taibbi. I don’t have extra funds, but I subscribe to you because you do interviews like this. If we are brave with words now, maybe the children will not have to be brave with bullets later.
That's what's so terribly sad about identity politics - it's driven by a desire to demonstrate compassion and understanding towards one particular subculture of disenfranchised people, while at the same time showing absolute scorn towards another disenfranchised group. The end result is a mad scramble for allies and a deepening of the divisions that are poisoning our society.
"...identity politics [is] driven by a desire to demonstrate compassion and understanding towards one particular subculture of disenfranchised people, while at the same time showing absolute scorn towards another disenfranchised group."
"Desire to demonstrate" is the operative phrase that explains the contradiction. It's all about LOOKING like you care - not about actually DOING something that might inconvenience you.
It's easy to post a tweet saying how awful this or that is. It's much harder to put in the work and time and effort to become a de facto Mom or Dad to a kid whose parents are unwilling or unable to fulfill that role, or to quietly (and privately) explain to a co-worker why you think a carelessly uttered phrase is inappropriate, or whatever.
Ummm...well I never watched the show called "Jones' Audience." Maybe you could send me the link.
Jones has been around since the 90s. He's attacked Democrats as well as Republicans in that time. And yep, he's said tons of crazy shit. Just because he says it doesn't mean anyone has to believe it.
I mean, there were tons of people who continuously said Joe Biden wasn't a little girl hair sniffing, hallway finger diddling, senile old wreck of a man with the ethics of a sociopath, but I didn't believe them either.
And it's true that Jones' hobby horse was the New World Order but it's also apparently the hobby horse of many US presidents including Joe Bob "Dribble Cup" Biden.
And you are right about Lemon & Cuomo. Their audience was more like upscale white liberals who live in all white neighborhoods yet who virtue signal endlessly about diversity. & inclusion.
OH come on. I knew Alex Jones when he was small time in Austin. He graduated from not attacking anyone from a political angle to strictly attacking Democrats around the same time Obama got elected. I didn't pay much attention to him during the Bush years other than that he put forward some to me compelling theories about 9/11 when nobody else was doing it, but to claim that he was some sort of entertaining bi-partisan attacker is just not true.
Do you think left-leaning people who champion human rights could simultaneously support more constant war and the untold suffering of the entire global south while vilifying half of the people around them?
Yes, this is stolen Nazi tech from the 1930s regarding mass formation psychosis and guess what? You have front row seats to the brain games version of it.
Lol. So, you're claiming one dude doing dime store antisemitism and racism, which inspires and radicalizes individuals, is immune to criticism because our society has large issues.
Big "Hmm! Yet you live in a society" energy on this one.
I'm not so sure about that. Not overtly but that audience tends to be the globalist and elitist supporters of US Imperialism whose violence far exceeds your most enthusiastic Jones fanatic.
I don’t think he is pretending, per se, I think he is like a pro wrestler who can’t get out of character outside of the ring, due to some weird psychological block.
Agreed. I used to watch Infowars for levity & entertainment, Roger Stone’s antics , etc My dad would’ve appreciated these guys. Back in the day, the 700 Club came on Sunday’s before NFL games , so we’d watch Jim & Tammy Fay & laugh.
I agree that for a good long while, in his early days in Austin, Alex Jones was hilarious and entertaining. When he made the official foray into accusations of "crisis actors" and political partisanship, he became on one hand a boring clown and on the other (which I'm guessing Alex Moyer's film will address) a dangerous lunatic that held sway over an increasingly deranged and out-of-touch w/ reality group of idiots who literally believed every word of his "entertainment."
Yes, his appearance in A Nobel Lie surprised me. I wasn’t aware of where he came from before watching the movie; by the way IMDB doesn’t even have a review $ Amazon sells it for $83! 😂🥁🛎Speaking of which https://archive.org/details/aj2010-07b
Serfdom started b/c pre-mechanize agricultural policy has always been f-ed up. Even Touissant L’Ouverture (an awesome and misunderstood historical figure) complained about how nobody wanted to work in the wake of the Haitian Revolution!!!!
Not arguing any of that. But serfdom did start out as a temporary emergency measure, that was restricted and extended and eventually became permanent.
L'Ouverture was an interesting character. I thought it was Henri Christophe that re-instituted forced labor in Haiti, since L'Ouverture was killed before the Haitian Revolution was finished? Or do I misremember?
EDIT: Dessalines. Not Henri Christophe. Bad kitty!
L’Overture did indeed die in French captivity, he just complained about the ex-slaves, he was a former barnyard foreman-he wasn’t down w/ laziness on the farm.
Sound familiar? "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." - H.L. Mencken, 1921
I actually stole it almost directly from this guy: Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) was a prominent Lutheran pastor in Germany. In the 1920s and early 1930s, he sympathized with many Nazi ideas and supported radically right-wing political movements. But after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Niemöller became an outspoken critic of Hitler’s interference in the Protestant Church. He spent the last eight years of Nazi rule, from 1937 to 1945, in Nazi prisons and concentration camps. Niemöller is perhaps best remembered for his postwar statement, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out…”
I was referring to an excerpt from Gerry Spence's book, that was reprinted as an article. It is his play on words in the title, but the sentiment is much the same.
He also made another pithy quote: “Although we give lip service to the notion of freedom, we know that government is no longer the servant of the people but, at last, has become the people's master. We have stood by like timid sheep while the wolf killed -- first the weak, then the strays, then those on the outer edges of the flock, until at last the entire flock belonged to the wolf.”
“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”
Every time Matt features an actual journalist I always feel like I just saw a Sasquatch in the wild.
I can't help wondering about the New Scientist piece on SSRIs. Millions of people are on them. They're found in the water supply and, consequently, in fish and other animals that comprise our food supply.
Yet the reason for their existence, managing serotonin in an effort to alleviate depression, has no real relationship to depression. So what do these powerful psychotropic drugs actually do to people?
I remember reading an article years ago that said the serotonin connection to depression was debunked almost immediately after it was made but that debunking was buried by pharmaceutical companies because they saw big profits in those pills.
Of course I'm completely sure that it's all innocent and healthy & above board just like mandated vaccines on demand, face masks and endless lockdowns.
Otherwise that would make me a (gasp) conspiracy theorist.
No, no, no, not me. I eat my Prozac with a nice Rexulti chaser, self vaccinate & live alone in a fucking closet, so no conspiracy theorizing here, no-sir-ee-bob..nah uh...
"So what do these powerful psychotropic drugs actually do to people?"
I was on an SSRI for years - far longer than I think I should have been. I finally just decided to ditch it. You have to wean off over a period of time.
I believe the major effect is to dampen emotions - all emotions. And the effects are lasting, even after you have stopped taking the drugs.
SSRIs were my niece's introduction to the wonderful world of self medication. Many of her fellow high schoolers traded doctor prescribed psychotropics like I used to trade baseball cards.
From those she graduated to opioids, another drug that was plentiful in her social circle.
That eventually led to her father finding her dead from a fentanyl overdose on her bedroom floor after years of rehab & backsliding & rehab & arrests & rehab.
I have read about that emotion dampening effect of SSRIs from a number of different people.
Didn't they only stop lobotomizing people after those drugs were developed?
I was an adult when this was prescribed, and I did need help at the time. Talk therapy would probably have worked, but I didn't know who to talk to. So I had to figure things out on my own.
Her younger sister is now working towards her Masters in psychology primarily because of the pain she saw her sister attempting to cope with in all of the wrong ways.
Still, it was a waste. She was a good kid at heart. Just took some wrong turns that ended up being fatal.
That's how it usually happens. It's the drugging of a nation. I've lost three nieces and nephews, a husband and two brothers. From the age of seventeen until the age of thirty one I was in the abyss of addiction, homelessness, jails, prisons, and psyc wards. I gave up a full ride softball scholarship to the University of Michigan. My only saving grace was I took welding in high school and really enjoyed it. So when I got clean and sober, I had a skill that was in demand. Never underestimate what drugs will do to you. But also remember what grace, forgiveness, and redemption, can do too.
I was in no way trying appear unique. I don't know anyone who hasn't lost someone to drugs. Opioids were always pretty prevalent even before pharmaceutical companies decided to become pushers.
Anyone who comes back from that trip is a bad ass as far as I'm concerned. Good luck.
Check out “Lost Connections” a book by Johann Hari published 2018. Uncovering the real causes of depression-and the unexpected solutions. Is on point with Alex’s movie.
Jimmy Dore recently dug up that old clip of Matt Lauer & Tom Cruise, where Cruise was debunking SSRIs as a solution for depression.
From the folk that I've known who use SSRIs, they wholly embraced the serotonin theory. Many wouldn't even talk about being depressed. They'd just say "my serotonin levels are off today." I think they liked the idea that it was just a chemical imbalance rather than something that may have deep causes requiring a lot of work to uncover. It was the solution of convenience that came with a nice fat medical stamp of approval.
Nourishment for starving souls. There’s more of that in a single Matt article/ interview than in a week of scheming manipulative propaganda BS heaped up in WaPo or NYT.
This is brilliant, thanks for informing - I'm going to check out both of these documentaries. This is how hard the mainstream wants nuanced thought to cease to exist - if you talk about how mainstream society tries harder and harder to devalue and alienate men every year, you're a fascist. If you talk about the impact that (pick a thing: economy, loss of jobs to automation, addiction) has on men - Nazi. If you call attention to the male suicide rate and how it is a reflection of how society is failing us on a massive scale - you must love Trump and Hitler. Remember when Andrew Yang casually mentioned that some of these topics were a concern of his on the campaign trail? Welcome to headlines about Asian White Supremacist Runs for President. That and the populist message and not being bought by the usual oligarchs and donors, of course. And granted, nowadays the majority of discussion is like playing "Gotcha Last!" by shouting "Racist!" Yes, some men (just like some women) are potentially a danger to themselves and others - this is why countries need functioning mental healthcare systems, and economies that present options to have jobs and hope rather than meds-for-profit, crushing despair and faceless dystopia.
I had a similar experience when talking about the VA governor’s race. I am ( mostly) pretty far left but mentioned once what I had read here and elsewhere how some Asian- American parents were concerned that programs for gifted children might be cut back in the name of equity. No matter where one falls on that subject, arguments about how to allocate the money spent on schools is or should be seen as normal politics. People will have legitimate disagreements.
But no, it was a question of good vs evil, racism vs anti racism, and so these Asian parents had to be racists. There is no arguing with people when they take that stance.
Absolutely. It amazes/depresses me that people can’t see through these obvious ploys at pitting people against each other. Ironically, the same mechanisms employed by actual racists to justify their bullshit ideologies are now found elsewhere in society: the race to victimhood and the myth of scarcity go hand in hand. “You can’t have Thing X because it would make it less available to Group Y” - but why can’t we simply make Thing X available to everyone?
If we don't honestly try to understand people, if we don't use empathy and compassion to try to reach them, how are we ever going to come together as a community?
We seem to be in a simplistic place that suggests that, if you try to communicate, try to talk, to the "wrong" kind of people, you're on their side and you're "platforming" them.
It's ridiculous and counterproductive, because so many of the "wrong" people are really just trying to reach out and to be understood. If we keep pushing them away and shoving them into the corner while making them wear dunce (or "incel") caps, should we be surprised when they act up and out?
How can we come to any sort of resolution of a problem if (at least) one side refuses to acknowledge the reality of the situation, and if we’re simply yelling past one another and not listening? I’ve often said that as a libertarian, I understand the importance of taking your allies on a position wherever you can find them. If you want to end the war on drugs, let’s work together — your position on other issues is irrelevant as it pertains to the war on drugs. But it today’s political climate, the politicians are too busy demonizing the other side to ask for their support on important matters. Since we don’t actually interact and discuss, we’re basically living in two separate realities.
The most recent example I can think of involves the definition of recession. For as long as I can remember — and certainly during Donald Trump’s presidency — the definition of recession was two consecutive quarters with negative growth. But now the administration is trying to alter the definition of recession so that we’re not in one — because they see the problem as admitting reality, not the fact that the economy is in the toilet. They somehow think as long as we’re not ‘in a recession’, people won’t get upset spending $100+ to gas up their car or going broke trying to keep up with rent increases.
I don't know who exactly they think they're gaslighting Re: denial of reality. Who but Democrats are going to buy that? Who is buying "Putin's Price Hike"? Who is buying the spin on congressional insider trading? Who is buying that Democrats are smart to back 1/6 Trumpsters over sane Republicans because they think they have a better chance of winning?
Bit o/t, but remember when Matt wrote that piece about Russia is not going to invade Ukraine? He got that wrong, but not everything. In an earlier piece, he said some now verboten stuff about Ukraine. I suspect he's going to be vindicated at some point down the line.
And they swallow the talking points whole. But again, they can keep droning on with the talking points, but it's not convincing anyone outside their Democratic bubble.
(sorry, had to do that, this comments section was missing that obligatory comment. Can we get the substack back end to just randomly add that comment in all Taibbi's reporting ?)
Brilliant interview, brilliant insights. Like a fine cook who finds the most interesting ingredients, let’s them breathe, and stands out of the way, Taibbi’s style is such a relief from Times/Guardian showboating.
And the filmmaker shows herself to be an artist to watch, actually speaking clear sentences, expressing strong ideas.
Her work sounds interesting, and I hope to see both movies. She was spot-on in terms of how white men are tossed aside.
Just before taking a break from work to read this piece, I came across a press release from Dicks Sporting Goods introducing a new policy that gives preferential treatment to "diverse" suppliers who fit the following criteria: "women, LGBTQ+, veterans, persons with disabilities and/or Black, Indigenous and People of Color." They could have saved themselves the effort and said "everyone but straight, white men." How is this okay?
Thanks, Matt, for promoting this journalist. We need more like her telling forbidden stories to a world struggling to avoid honest discussion of ugly truths.
It's a lot more than incels; it's what Margaret Thatcher said and the unnatural un, no, anti social thing we've become. Remember "there's no such thing as society, there's only individuals and family". Only a very sick sociopath could believe that and she was PM of the UK. Most leaders have some degree of sociopathy and are clever enough not to reveal their mentality/sickness like she did or Hillary cackling because she killed someone or Obama "turns out I'm really good at killing people"! We, the acedemics primarily destroyed childhood, childhood, the ability to play with your friends independently and maybe get hurt. The don't talk to strangers movement, more acedemic sickness. Now, it's come to pass in a fearful easily controlled society, the fear porn is everywhere and the real human connections are rare. Read a little book by Sebastian Junger.."Tribe" which explains why soldiers that were no where near combat come home and get PTSD because they were exposed to tribal life, or I call it, normal human life and then they lost it in the anonymous non society called America and most of the rest of western non societies for that matter. The long tentacles of American popular culture and anti social media have reached around the world. "Lost connections" by Johan Hari explaining why depression and alienation are omnipresent today. I have no idea if or how this can be turned around or even if the ruling classes want it turned around.
Thatcher's infamous quote has I think been taken out of context (disclaimer: I'm a Brit and hated her and her politics). She was being interviewed specifically about government assistance to the unemployed, for housing etc with regards policy and said:
“I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!” or “I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!” “I am homeless, the Government must house me!” and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people – and people look to themselves first…”
From that, you could interpret it as saying that government policy has to be specific – it can't target "society", but individuals and families. Which is in fact what the benefits system does.
As I said, she was a hateful and blinkered leader but the claim that she was some sort of sociopath goes too far. IMHO.
Meh, she was a sociopath no doubt about it. But that's far from unusual at those echelons of power. Ronny Raygun and every president after have all been sociopaths too.
Maybe, but if all leaders turn out to be sociopaths, we should perhaps just include the word in the job description. The point stands that her quote was taken out of context.
I never met or dealt with PM Thatcher but I stand by my comment that most leaders, certainly high level leadership are sociopaths to some degree. It really couldn't be otherwise and the indoctrination, the omnipresent indoctrination we get from birth makes us vulnerable to them. Just think of all the things you were taught that turned out not to be true and then wonder, what else was I taught that might not be true. Society functions on stories and who chooses the stories control's society and that's not you or me.
I've been thinking that what we're dealing with is white trash racism, by which I mean racism against what's seen by liberals as white trash. Coming from Appalachia myself, where I've been fixing up my childhood home, there's a pervasive sense of being rejected by the degreed class, especially if you're white and male. Meanwhile in the liberal bastion I call home now, they're throwing the book at two young kids who drove over and left tire marks on a Black Lives Matter mural (consisting only of those words) that stretches on pavement in front of city hall. Prosecutors want damages over $100K plus five years in prison. Black residents say that it's traumatized them so much and made them feel so unsafe, they can't go to work somedays. The black population of my county is 1%. We're 33% Latino but they seem able to go to work. If these kids had felt that it was a statement their lives didn't matter, haven't we just proven them right? If it was a statue they felt demeaned their ancestors, we'd be celebrating them--if they were black. Instead, no one cares what led them to burn rubber on the city's most prominent declaration that they had no right to exist.
This contempt for the untouchable class of “white working class” is palpable. My own uncle serves it to me every time we discuss politics. I’m a married blue collar guy who owns a home. He’s an unemployed former book warehouse worker with a college degree so by his logic he’s the elite bourgeoisie and I’m the lumpen pleb.
One time I happened to run into Santa Cruz neighbors while I was at the Farmer's Market of my hometown, Cumberland. They were riding a bike trail that went through it. This was before Trump's election and they sneered at all the Trump signs as proof of our backwardness and degeneracy. They'd met another professor from a nearby college town who called it 'Scumberland,' which they thought appropriate and apparently thought I should too. They dismissed the town as racist (I have yet to meet a kid there who isn't biracial) and yet saw no contradiction in calling everyone who lived there scum.
Which Cumberland?
My Cumberland is the one in western MD, across the bridge from W Va and a stone's throw from PA. I used to describe it as the little part of MD that juts out into the middle of nowhere, and that was where I was from. But I'm claiming it as somewhere these days.
Sorry, but I still believe that most white people, who voted for Trump, twice, are racists. If not, then why do they support a racist? Who, by the way, betrayed all his promises and did zilch for the white working class. Unless you think putting three white nationalist extremist Christians on the Supreme Court is doing something for the working class.
Is Trump a racist? As his son said, the only color my dad sees is green. He's willing to make deals that enrich him with blacks, Muslims, Jews, Latinos, Native Americans. That doesn't make him a good person but doesn't fit the definition of a racist--if words are held to have meaning and not just 'people we don't like.'
I don't vote so I didn't and would never have voted for Trump. But neither would I have ever voted for Hilary, based on her war crimes in Libya and Honduras.
And I've been wondering how people who voted for Biden feel now, with Hunter's laptop and Ashley's diary revealing him to be one of the most morally degenerate people who've ever lived. Caligula and Nero have nothing on him! But what he's done to his own family pales by comparison to what he's done to whole populations, like the people of Ukraine, and to us in the US.
You may not be feeling the effects of him selling off our oil reserves to China but my handyman's uncle in W. Va did. He took his life because he couldn't make a living as a trucker because of the cost of diesel. He was about to lose his house and left three grandchildren and a wife who were all financially dependent on him.
I'm sure you're a well-meaning person, Joni, but the knee-jerk liberalism that buys into political opposition as a moral position is killing people.
Well, you are a racist too, we all are racists, as we know well. Joe Biden has been a main cog in the system that produced systemic racism for decades. He was an architect of the criminal justice bills in the early 90s that created the iniquities that are cited as problematic today. So, how did people justify voting for him? He definitely couldn't pass the implicit association test for racial bias, of course, almost no one does pass it. So, answer your own question, why support a racist?
https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/sonicyouth/heyjoni.html
My son is a lawyer, but before he decided to be one he worked short-term at a number of blue-collar jobs. I told him that if he took nothing else away from that experience, he should have a deep and abiding respect for the hard work done by blue-collar workers.
By the way - my husband and I both have university degrees.
What I envision, and what my book, Substack and YT lay the foundation for, is a world in which we are all farmer-philosopher-professors and plumber-intellectual-poets. Work is life. The problem with manual labor jobs is that they're doing all the work that the rest of us are shirking. I'm sure your son is doing fine things for the world but if all the lawyers disappeared tomorrow, life would go on. Not so for those who do real work. Our system traps us so that we can't afford our own labor. I think with the collapse of the petrodollar, that's going to change.
All work is "real work." We need lawyers and accountants and economists and other white-collar workers as well as oil drillers and drywallers and electricians. After all - how could you ever claim you owned a piece of property if you didn't have the paperwork to prove it?
However, some things that are currently called "work" are, in my opinion, more vanity projects than work.
The late David Graeber has an excellent book called Bullshit Jobs. It shows how many white-collar jobs are entirely make-work and often recognized to be by those employed in them, who are desperate to keep up the facade that they're doing anything important. Graeber's point was made amply in the recent designation of 'essential workers.' Everyone else could be paid to sit on their hands and life went on.
There are only two jobs in the current system: making the rich richer or serving those who make the rich richer. If you have the opportunity, the former is the better choice. But we should have better choices.
Your example of land titles is especially pertinent to Appalachia. There's an amazing historian named Steven Stoll who wrote Ramp Hollow: the Ordeal of Appalachia. He talks about Robert Morris 'owning' over 8M acres in Appalachia, much of it given to him by the legislature in return for nothing. Meanwhile settlers developed this land and wrote their own deeds to it.
Economist Hamilton first tried to destroy agrarian sovereignty with the Whiskey Tax on rye, forcing people who didn't use currency into debt. But it was land titles and lawyers, a century later, that was used to claim the 200,000 acre coal bed for strip mining after clear cutting turned it into an alien landscape.
Like I said, we can't afford to do real work and I couldn't get back to a desk job fast enough after my foray into it. But that's not what we do.
I agree with you that there are white collar "jobs" that are make-work projects - but so are some blue-collar jobs. (How many people are needed to stand around and watch one guy do the road repair?)
I'm a professional bookkeeper, and you are telling me that the work I do isn't "real work" because I don't peel railroad ties with an axe like my grandfather did. Sorry, but I don't agree.
I'm also a small business owner - actually a micro-business owner, because I employ fewer than 5 people. I'm not rich, and neither are most small business owners. But I do provide well-paying jobs for 3 people including myself - and we're very good at what we do. Small and micro-businesses make up most of the economic activity in Canada, and probably in the US too.
Beat me to it on the late great David Graeber’s “Bullshit Jobs.” I also recommend his “Debt: The First 5,000 Years.” I live in Montana and most deals amongst ranchers are handshakes and disputes are settled i without lawyers. But transferring land still demands you get a lawyer. My stepson hated being a lawyer and went back to school and became an environmental engineer. His firm cleans up riverfronts and makes those bike trails.
I looked up David Graeber, and apparently he espoused Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a solution to BS Jobs.
We've just had an excellent 2-year example of UBI in action (the government called it "covid relief"). It's been an unmitigated disaster.
I won't waste my time and money on his book.
Graeber was a lifelong anarchist with an agenda and his scholarship is extremely suspect.
Yeah no. If we run out of mechanics, electricians and plumbers we are screwed. Lawyers, education PHDs, liberal arts majors… not so much.
Interesting how Republicans are now the working class party (even working Latinos) while Dems have become the party of urban educated liberals. And I swung along with the tide. I’ll always side with the party that stands up for the working man.
Tereza, I like the way your mind works.
As Ed Abbey said:
"If America could be, once again, a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers, and artists, then the rich would have little power to dominate others. Neither to serve nor to rule: That was the American dream."
(solicited-but-rejected NYT editorial on the occasion of Earth Day 20)
Ben Franklin, whose economic system for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is what my model is based on, said something similar. He felt that a self-managed means of employment was the goal of life and working for someone else was a phase, like being an apprentice while learning your trade.
I also quote Wendall Berry in my book when he says the commonwealth is the "foundation and practical means" of most people being self-employed most of the time. Through a character in Jayber Crow, he writes "I watch and I wonder and I think. I think of the old slavery, and of the way The Economy has now improved upon it. The new slavery has improved upon the old by giving the new slaves the illusion that they are free. The Economy does not take people's freedom by force, which would be against its principles, for it is very humane. It buys their freedom, pays for it, and then persuades its money back again with shoddy goods and the promise of freedom."
But here's the Wendall Berry quote I was looking for in my book, from The Gift of Good Land:
"What one thinks of this disintegration and decline will depend on one's opinion of the US economy, and on one's confidence in it. If one believes that it is better to buy food than to grow it, then one is not going to worry about the decline of any particular farming community, especially if that community is based on subsistence farming.
"... I am worried about the decline of farming communities of all kinds, because I think that among the practical consequences of that decline will sooner or later be hunger.
"In some respects, the traditional subsistence agricultures are ... the best assurances of a continuous food supply, simply because they are not--or were not--dependent on outside sources that must be purchased. To exchange these locally self-sufficient subsistence agricultures for the 'good life' of a consumer economy is like climbing out of a lifeboat onto a sinking ship."
"The problem with manual labor jobs is that they're doing all the work that the rest of us are shirking."
It's only shirking if you can't be bothered to learn how to do basic R&M stuff, for example. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses is important. My husband can do lots of plumbing fixes, but he won't do toilets, because after a couple of times installing them, he has come to the realization that he is simply unable to ensure they don't leak.
All work is ennobling.
Yes and the demonization runs both ways. Some right wingers will scoff at a college degree but practicing law and passing the bar exam is comendable . I do feel the elite coastal lib strain of smug condescension to be especially potent.
It’s passing the bar/being a lawyer that is commendable, NOT where one got their law degree from.
Gerry Spence, the greatest defense lawyer ever-Randy Weaver/Ruby Ridge, undefeated in his career w/ jury trials!!-said he always preferred to hire obviously smart lawyers from 2nd tier law schools as opposed to blue bloods-they are obviously smart and scrappy.
I have a masters, but I work in an e-commerce facility-not Amazon. I just associate myself with Office Space and Eric Hoffer-your job is not your intellect, and your degree doesn’t give you a greater degree of human dignity than someone with less education. Morons exist in their own sphere that isn’t defined by degrees!
Stxbuck-There's an e-commerce facility other than Amazon?
Yes, but we are now cooperating partners with them, lol….like the pug, btw…
It is a very cute pug ...
The noble Pug, greatest of the pint-sized dictators. I highly recommend them!
Watch any Star Trek episode featuring The Borg. Now substitute "Amazon" for "Borg" during the dialog. It will send chills down your spine. "Assimilate, or die".
And no one even trying to stop them.
Can anyone stop them?
Not under the present system.
Neither party is at all interested.
I will order from Amazon today, as I have no choice. The articles I want are completely unobtainable locally.
Yeah, Amazon has enough of a monopoly that they don’t have to give a shit about how they treat workers (the same problem workers experienced in the USSR, btw). My company doesn’t have that problem, imo.
Shopify here in Ottawa. They just lost $1.2b last quarter though and will lay off people.
Racism is Very Very Bad, but discrimination based on social class is applauded.
Look how often the cues used to designate the "good guy" or the "bad guy" in TV, movies and books are also class markers.
I’d say they are just Eastern European markers-there were more Serbian gangsters and terrorists on CBS dramas for the past 30 years than in Belgrade!!!
There are plenty of heroes and villains in contemporary pop culture that have nothing to do with Eastern Europe one way or the other,
Yes, I’m just saying Eastern Europeans are the de facto bad guys-Arabs/Muslims are basically no go due to pc considerations, Eastern Europeans have a veneer of plausibility with the benefit of being white, Christian males.
I’m Ukrainian, I’m fully aware of how f-Ed up civil society in my homeland is-Ukraine ostensibly has socialized medicine, but everyone knows you have to pay cash at the hospital b/c criminals have seized all official hospital funds allocated by the government.
For a no go zone Hollowood sure goes there a lot.
https://youtu.be/gQtBWfRIDm4
Axtually, what brought the issue to mind was the description of the Dursley family in the Harry Potter books.
Besides being Muggles (i.e. common) J.K. Rowling is at great pains to describe the family as "fat", in addition to other signifiers of not being members of The Better Classes.
Serbs and Russians are OK to hate, of course. Not Ukrainians, they are Our Special Friends. But Russians can be described in crude and reductionist stereotypes that Goebbels would think were over the top and nobody says a peep in protest.
One of the many things that Orwell got right was the rotating enemies list. I'm sure you know who was on that list.
I’m an Untermenschen-and my people also got screwed over by Moscow. Ukraine literally means “country”-what is happening now is straight out of The Hunger Games-Cap City vs. District 12……fwiw, I have never read a complete Harry Potter book
Discrimination based on social class = Capitalism.
Not exactly, if you read Paul Fussell or others.
A deep-dive underwater welder or the owner of a car repair place can make hefty amounts of money, more than any college professor, but they are treated quite differently in terms of class.
Treated quite differently in terms of class how, and by whom?
Are they redlined out of property ownership?
Pushed into sub-prime ARM loans when they qualify for better ones?
Stopped and frisked by racially profiling police?
Surveilled on a regular basis by law enforcement?
Do they make up a far larger portion of the prison population than their actual numbers in society would indicate?
Given worse health care options and treated differently by doctors and hospitals based on the color of their skin?
I'm looking for concrete, real world examples here, not something like "the mean old Democrat corporate media makes fun of them!"
Have you read "The Divide" by one Matt Taibbi?
P.S. as a percentage of underwater welders, how many are non-white?
P.P.S. I know there are NUMEROUS working class careers that are quite lucrative.
Nobody said that racism doesn't exist, so there is no need to throw out red herrings.
Does racism still exist? At a structural level I would argue no (at the individual level, absolutely).
Asians earn more than every other racial group in the country, including whites. There is a trend of anti-Asian violence primarily committed by poor black perpetrators--Asian wealth is a primary motivator there I think.
Where did I throw out "red herrings"? I asked for specific examples and provided some specific examples...as examples.
Racism exists in left wing societies. South Africa got the idea for apartheid from Joe Stalin’s ethnic policies….
Feral you’re out of the bag. Time we join forces to revive Fussell!
Mrrowp?
There's a culture war element now that I think is separate from the economic aspect.
No, elite guilt + materialism. Poor $$$$ spends just like rich $$$.
Capitalism is human nature, materialism is being an asshole with $$$ you didn’t earn.
Not as much anymore see the book by Vivek Ramaswamy “Woke INC.”
He and I are alumni of the same HS, his net worth is just several thousand times mine, lol.
What I'd like to see is someone do a History of the American Deplorables focusing on the last 45 years in particular, although intractably poor whites have existed in Appalachia and other places much longer than that. I don't want to downplay the latter, especially as they may be the model of a multigenerational, white lower class on its way to exploding in size. The last 45 years is interesting because it was a turning point for folks, like me, who came from blue-collar families and graduated high school in the 1970s. There were two groups of us: those who were determined to go to college to better ourselves, and those for whom working in a factory was good enough because it was good enough for Dad. Those in the first group prospered, some becoming very wealthy and transferring their social advance to children and grandchildren. What about the second group? The factories shut down, moving to non-union states and eventually overseas. The work that was left was less stable and lower paying. They and their kids often succumbed, and continue to succumb, to alcohol, heroin, or opioids. Some of their kids do manage to crawl out of the hole but college is now much more expensive, and the overall atmosphere in once-thriving blue-collar towns is not encouraging, very different from what it used to be.
Historically, a large underclass living on the edge is the norm, not the exception. The aberration was World War II, which solved the Great Depression problem and left the U.S. alone at the top of the world. We enjoyed several decades of blue-collar prosperity as a result that would have been very unlikely to occur otherwise. It may be one of the greatest social experiments ever. The deplorables are the inevitable reality just delayed in time. Being deplorables, they don't articulate their political philosophy with much educated polish or pretention, which is why a shallow thinker like Krugman dismisses it as nonexistent. It has a soft spot for crude aphorisms, it can fall into racism, and it is susceptible to demagogues. But the core of it is the economic insecurity of many people who are never going to learn how to write Python or C++ programs.
Wow, Bob. "Intractably poor whites ... multigenerational white lower class on its way to exploding in size." History of the American Deplorable is a right catchy title. But, unless I'm misunderstanding you, you're proving my point in spades that the academic professional class are blind to their own 'white trash' bias.
But I get it. There was a time that I felt like I had escaped Cumberland by going to college then grad school in CA. It wasn't until my parents went into decline that I started going back regularly and developing an adult relationship with my hometown. And I realized I had been an elitist snob, who was basing my own value on my ability to make the rich richer--the same job as the factory worker except C++ programmers are paid better.
I want us all to have different choices than the white collar or blue collar or no collar worker. On this last trip, I published an op-ed in Cumberland talking about how we could take back the economy to make it serve the community. In Cumberland, incomes are too low. But in Santa Cruz, I wrote an op-ed about the insane cost of housing. The result, and the formula to solve it, is the same in both places. I'll attach the post I did talking about it. And the drugs have been inflicted. I'll attach my piece on opioids as the new opium war. Since then Robert Malone confirmed my research showing how opioids are pushed on these communities--whether for eugenics or just for profit is an open question.
https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/home-is-where-the-hearth-is
https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/opioids-and-the-new-opium-war
Tereza, I’m more in support of your point than I think you realize. But when I said intractable I meant it. I see it with my own eyes and I saw the start of it in my own community. The economy won’t serve the community as long as workers have to compete in wages with workers in a repressive, communist country who have no labor rights.
Oh I'm glad. I thought you might have been using terms like deplorables for effect. In my Third Paradigm community of viewers and commenters, we've been working out the policies that could solve our problems--which are different in different areas. It starts with taking back the power to create mortgages from private bankers and pricing mortgages in a community digital currency I call a caret. This gives the commonwealth the power of distributing carets, taxing them and setting their exchange rate.
The problem you raise, which is absolutely real, I deal with by making carets used in local exchange free of income and sales tax (but not Soc Sec), allowing a set amount of dollars to be exchanged 1:1 for carets monthly but taxing expenditures in dollars at 50%.
I also deal with hedge funds buying up the real estate by making exchanging 2 dollars to 1 caret, giving local residents and workers a 2:1 advantage and making rents extracted worth half as much.
I go into more detail in my recent YouTube: https://youtu.be/fhMFYeJHUVY.
Thanks for responding!
As things "progress" and more jobs are automated, people who once thought themselves immune from being de-jobbed, are going to be de-jobbed, deracinated, and derided. Just like the "deplorables". I mean lawyers, accountants, architects and wait for it, college professors.
Then what?
Bomb China?
Oooh, I learned from Russell Brand that 'deracinated' means severed from the roots. I've wanted to tell him that radical means to go to the roots of an issue, but he probably already knows, as a fellow etymology nut.
You're so right. At the lower level of service jobs, every self checkout kiosk is one paycheck more going to profits. Do the professors think that this push to online learning is to make their jobs easier? Already they hire people at criminally low 'salaries'--they would make more if paid by the hour--to monitor online classes. It certainly isn't teaching.
And doctors are next, with online appointments and bots, even for 'counseling.' Russell did one of his videos on the robot nurses they've developed for elder care.
Bombing China would only cut off our remaining source of goods produced by real people, until they stop accepting dollars because they've already used their Treasury bills to buy up all the US real estate. What did Putin call dollars and Euros? Bubble gum wrappers?
Roots are so so important.
Your great title led me to check out your Substack--brilliant article on Russia, Bill. VERY funny: "President Placeholder; the old man formerly known as ‘biden’." And facts I hadn't put together, that the US has been militarily involved with 98% of countries recognized by the UN (maybe 99% if we're including Palestine, that's not). Some of your quotes were shocking, on Buck Turgidson: “Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks." Is that recent? And Ramsey Clark: "If necrophilia exudes a tone, then the prevailing mood in that war room was necrophilia. The clear warning is that we have allowed civilization to drift into the hands of necrophiliacs."
I'll be subscribing ASAP and reading your other posts. I have several episodes on Russia that quote some of the same sources, like Matt and Aaron. Do you know Caitlin Johnstone? She's definitely with you on the insanity of nuclear brinksmanship. And Kanekoa has info I haven't found elsewhere, along with Moon of Alabama. And your compatriot, Matt Ehret, writes extensively about Russia, where he teaches at Moscow University. Here's one of mine that quotes Aaron extensively:
https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/the-west-vs-the-rest
Increasingly, a college degree is no guarantee of upward mobility, either.
When controlling for STEM degrees the college wage premium essentially vanishes
Not to dispute this broad outline, but we must include the role of labor unions. Widespread organizing during the 1930s helped blue collar workers win a larger part of the economic and political gains than might otherwise have been expected during the New Deal and World War II. The gains have slipped away not just due to broad global trends but due to a concerted effort by corporations and their owners to limit, undermine, demonize and corrupt the union movement (an essentially keep it out of many states) and its political power. It's also true that the too many workers forgot the need for unions and too many union leaders sold out their members. This anti-union effort, which continues, eventually made it easy for the Democratic Party under Clinton to abandon both the unions and blue collar in favor of the college-educated professional managerial class. None of this was accidental and the fact that it's mostly forgotten is testimony to the success of the campaign. This did not occur in Europe, where unions remain a significant force and the working class has not been written off and marginalized to the extent it has in the USA.
Great comment. Truth.
That is truly horrible! I grew up in WVa, near the Ohio border in a coal and steel town that is now mostly boarded up. I had to go back for awhile in the early 2000s to look after Mom. A lot of people were resentful I left and went to college and caused me a lot of trouble. But...all my liberal friends, here, in Philly, never stop going on about the repulsive 'deplorables' who all ought to be shot.
It's a dilemma, isn't it? I went to school at LaSalle in Philly and came back one summer to work. The line of applicants to sell fire alarms door-to-door stretched around the block. I bought into that rejection of my roots and tried to be as non-provincial as I could. There were times that got me into trouble.
I was just texting with my handyman whose W Va uncle just took his life. Mid 50's and was losing his house, gas too high to make a living as a trucker. Damn, I'm sick of this. Left a mother to bury her son, a daughter and three grandkids. And six brothers and a sister who wish he had asked for help.
I saw a lot of tragedies in my town, but didn't see any obvious addicts, at lesst not then. Most of the people I knew from childhood had fallen on hard times, and seemed shell -shocked, no idea what to do. Our neighborhood of nice suburban houses was mostly abandoned, overgrown with weeds. There is no way to even leave without a car--no bus or train. The exterminator said the whole town was crawling with rats and roaches from all the abandoned buildings. Along the river, there were rusty trailers with hand painted signs of 'GIRLS'. Never saw that there before! There should have been some kind of help to transition after shutting the steelmill and mine. Instead, they were tossed like a used rag.
You describe it really well, Roxan. My town transitioned from coal mining and the railroad to Kelly Springfield and Celanese plants. When they shut down, all the money in circulation dried up. Now it's relying on tourism, because the low cost of housing attracts artists and it's about 2.5 hrs from Baltimore and DC.
When I decided to fix up my childhood home, I thought about some little girl being born there and not having the chance to escape like I did. In my economic plan, mortgages and student loans become local currency for food production, wellcare, education and home improvement. Extractive industries like plants can be repossessed through eminent domain. All ways that money is made from money, like insurances and infrastructure loans, are owned by the community and debts to itself--creating jobs.
I think that one of the consequences of the planned food shortages will be a reverse migration from big cities to small towns. Your liberal friends (and mine) are one chess move away from those repulsive deplorables who ought to be shot. It would be good to have a plan to use that rage constructively.
@ Tereza Coraggio & the 99 ❤'s that appear to think⁉ this comment has something to do with this enlightening discussion between Matt Taibbi and Alex Lee Moyer about her extraordinary latest documentary film about....... "Alex Jones".🎯
An earlier, and similarly poignant film she "worked on", readily available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=268rpjw2e5A👍
may provide more topical coherence for those inclined to actually watch and listen to Ms. Moyer's "work" before opining on its imagined substance.👀💡
As Usual,
EA☠
I liked her incel movie. I hadn’t heard of her until recently and it was well worth the 4$ rental. I went back and read critiques of the film and besides normal things like it didn’t have a great arc/ too much smash cuts ( it doesn’t imo), I noticed some people seemed to dislike it because it made the incel dudes seem human. A few actually by the end are lifting weights and have girlfriends. I suspect some liberals might not like the idea of redemption for these seeming white male losers and think they need to be banished/jailed
Thank you, Ethan, I'll enjoy watching this interview of Alex Moyer. I did an episode of my own that talked about this thread and some of the comments back and forth. It's called Appalachian Rage. It isn't so much about Alex's work, as you may be inferring, but a similar topic, I think: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/appalachian-rage
You're describing classism, not racism.
Yeah, I think it’s interesting that Tereza keeps referencing a book she’s written, but doesn’t even understand that she’s talking about classism and not racism. I’m pretty curious what her book’s like, but not nearly enough to read it haha.
And to sit there and say,”Oh, those teenagers burning rubber all over a BLM thing couldn’t POSSIBLY be motivated by racism,” seems a little disingenuous. I mean, I’ve been unemployed for five years, I think? Six years, maybe? Actually, yeah, it’ll be six years this August. I’m white. I’m male. And I have no desire to go “burn rubber” all over a BLM thing.
The fact that these attitudes keep being blamed on the media, social media, “The Elites,” etc etc just leads me to the conclusion that,”Uhhhh, if you don’t like what they’re saying about you, if you don’t like their ‘attitude’ towards you, why do you keep paying attention to it?” I mean, it’s one thing if you feel left behind and you can’t get a job or whatever, I get that. Because I’m one of those people. But that doesn’t mean that I have to turn on the news or log on to social media or whatever. I don’t have to do that. So I don’t. It’s like they’ve got a shitty girlfriend that they just can’t quit or something…
My wife is from Moundsville, WV and her family is all over that region of WV, PA and OH. Please elaborate on how the "degreed class" (other than the Sackler family - staunch Republicans) has "rejected" white males. I've been up there too many times to count, am a white male, dress like a slob, and have never been "rejected" by anyone. I need examples.
The question isn't whether YOU are rejected by THEM, when you travel into the hinterlands dressed like a slob and then return to civilization and the job that enables you to own a home, a car, have a college education, and travel. The question is whether the white males who never left those places, never got a degree, can't get a good-paying job, can't buy a house, and can't imagine traveling to where you live, feel that you feel superior to them.
I'm not saying that you do feel that way. But Alex's point is that is that THEY feel the liberal degreed class does look down on them as less than dirt, and this is AMPLY proven in the media and in comments like my Cal professor neighbors. It's proven in Hillbilly Elegy and Deliverance. It's proven in the uproar against the two white kids driving over the BLM sign as a racist hate crime.
As someone who lives and works in the heart of Hillbilly Ellegy territory, I can say that local reaction to the book is not the same as it was nationally. People don’t see it as some anguished cry of the Appalachians, they are more like “Oh yeah, I knew them/I know that place/my family is from Kentucky. Stay the hell off drugs”.
Everyone was mostly disappointed that they didn’t have more recognizable exterior shots in the movie.
As for the author, JD Vance-he is a craven opportunist who is pivoting from being a materialistic Never Trumper to a panderer who doesn’t come around locally. He literally says “Mexicans made my mom a junkie”, and people locally will roll their eyes. I’m not voting for him or the D in the 22’ Senate election.
Surely any argument about structural racism that posits that white males benefit from the privileges associated with whiteness and maleness is glossing over the plight of people that form Trump's base.
Where are you more likely to see that argument deployed? In WV? Or Brooklyn?
Not sure where you're going there, but as a white male myself, with way more interactions w/ law enforcement (on the receiving and deserving end) than many here, I've experienced the benefits and privileges that I know the average Black person wouldn't have received.
How do you know it was your white privilege? And if you had white privilege why did they even interact with you? Did they think you were black? But when they saw you were white, did they apologize and say sorry we were looking for blacks carry on.
Also I don't think you're understanding white privilege correctly. If they were "looking for" a black person, that would be specific to a crime committed and only covers probably 0.0001% of cases where alleged white privilege might be invoked. It's more in the way that you are treated courteously or given second or third chances in situations where other people - especially Blacks or Hispanics - aren't. Don't get me wrong, if we were to confine the conversation to interactions with police, the cops get away with killing everyone, from black to white to asian to latino. It's just that in those instances, they're less likely to shoot you in the back while fleeing or immediately open fire on you without even saying more than a few words when you're white and look "non threatening" despite the fact you could easily be as threatening as any black person.
But in other areas its more obvious and at the same time more hidden. The financial crisis in 2007/8 was in no small part due to the practice of banks intentionally pushing blacks and minorities into bad mortgage loans when they clearly qualified for better ones. Was that "racism"? I don't know; depends on how you define that term, but when you look at the big picture, objectively, what starts to emerge is a clear pattern of discrimination based only on perception of skin color where all other things were equal (income, credit history/score, etc.). Personally I did get a mortgage loan in that time period and I know OF (don't know personally, but through social media and my wife's acquaintances) several black individuals and families who were the victims of these sub prime loans. And again, this greed and corruption by the banks wasn't confined just to blacks or any other group, but the stats show that disproportionately they were the ones who bore the brunt of this kind of loan practice.
Do you deny that there's such a thing as "white privilege" at all, or do you think it exists but is overblown?
I don't deny that it exists. But it's so overblown. Instead of looking inward and asking why. It's much easier to blame outside forces like white privilege.
LOL, because (and this is just one of perhaps a hundred incidents) 1) I was drunk , 2) weaving in and out of every lane on I-10, 3) speeding, 4) had two friends in the back of the pickup truck and 5) Told the cops to fuck off and approached them anyway despite them telling me to keep my hands on the rear liftgate. I was let go without even a warning after a jovial conversation with 4 of the city's finest.
On other occasions, I asked for exceptions at school which I know for a fact were denied to my Hispanic friends and which I was granted.
On yet another, in a different Texas city, I was with a Black friend and we were merely walking down the street near the university and a couple of undercover/plainclothes officers approached us and started haranguing my friend for absolutely nothing while being completely courteous to me.
I tell you I could write a book; there just isn't enough room here to go through them all. If it helps you form a mental image, I'm blonde, blue eyed and look like a cop.
Well, I was blonde, green eyes, good looking female. I have been pulled over for drunk driving, and arrested for it. Same with fighting with them, arrested, caught with drugs, arrested. Deserved everyone.
Cops are the ones advancing the CRT arguments? Or is it more likely to be teachers and academics in upper middle class enclaves?
Is there any cop in the country who knew what "intersectionality" was five years ago?
WTF does CRT have to do with who the cops target and who gets far worse outcomes in the criminal justice system?
What relevance do the cops have to do with what I'm talking about? Blacks make up 12% of the US population but commit 50% (probably more) of the homicides. Given the disproportionate numbers of black criminals it makes sense that they are overrepresented in arrestees and prison inmates.
On the other hand arguing that all white males benefit from systemic racism is somewhat questionable in light of the experiences of poor whites.
Good point. A lot of this uproar is froth. It is also true, though, that certain discrete elements in the massive fabric of American society have a much higher public profile than other, much larger, groups. But, as Taibi points out in his recent book “Hate Inc”, the juice is running hot in media in ways that it didn’t used to, and that’s a big part of what fuels the culture clash hype that many have allowed to cloud their judgement.
"...there's a pervasive sense of being rejected by the degreed class,"
Come on. Give that shit a break already. I've got a BS in electrical engineering and had to work to pay for college, with a little help from my folks who couldn't afford to pay for me, and I had to earn my degree, it wasn't handed to me. Also, I have never "rejected" anyone without a degree and know no one with a degree who "rejects" anyone without one either. I have worked as a busboy, dishwasher, stocker, plumber's assistant, and handyman until I landed my first job out of college and so understand work. Most of us do as we didn't come from money.
That feeling is all you. You made your life decisions and if they weren't that good and didn't produce the outcome that you expected out of life, don't blame the "degreed class", which isn't a class, it's comprised of people who chose to go to college and earn a degree just like you chose not to. So, stop the whining and fess up to the consequences of your own actions and decisions.
Okay buddy, I've got an abd Ph.D., coming from no money, and I bought my CA house before I met my husband because I was the 10th employee at a high tech company that became one of the top for that era. They hired me in spite of being overeducated but because I'd been a waitress and they knew waitresses worked hard. I eventually became their Director of HR and have put three daughters through college and one Master's with no debt. I'm fine with "the consequences of my own actions and decisions."
And everywhere I turn in Appalachia or CA, I see people who are just as hardworking as you and me who haven't had our luck. If you don't think luck is involved and the US is a meritocracy where any industrious person has the same chance, I don't know where to start. But if you read my comment about my neighbors calling my hometown 'scum,' how are you saying the bias is all in my head? You don't hear what liberals say about ignorant Trump supporters? Matt has some older articles that could refresh your memory if you check his archive.
OK, so you read the book "Meritocracy", so did I. You make an allegation about the "degreed class" that is without substance, just a chance for you to blame others about your situation. I worked on site at Motorola when it laid off degreed electrical engineers here because it hired Polish degreed engineers who worked for less. So, the problem isn't the "degreed class", as you allege, it's the libertarianism that has been in vogue since Reagan.
Libertarianism and conservatism, Calvinism, both posit that the wealthy are more deserving as their riches are god's reward for righteousness, for those religious, or more industrious, for those secular. Listen to Ayn Rand's radion show about makers and takers:
https://courses.aynrand.org/campus-courses/ayn-rand-at-columbia-university/the-money-making-personality/
While libertarianism is liberal, it is but a segment in the liberal spectrum. I, a liberal, do not accept libertarianism for a number of reasons that include its meritocracy and selfishness is a virtue doctrine. The GOP has been working since Reagan to make government incapable such that their wealthy donors can do what they want without fear of being held accountable and that has had a lot of support from Americans, including many of those that you're defending.
Reagan was the turning point. He appealed to Americans' sense of entitlement and enacted much of the policies that has directly led to this situation, from the deregulation that led to all financial crises since 1980, to trickle-down economics that has led to the erosion of the middle class, to tax changes that led to offshoring. What you're whining about is due to libertarianism, not people working for and getting an education that requires higher education.
Jeff, your degree didn't seem to enable you to read. Where do you get that I'm "blaming others about [my] situation"? I'm as financially secure as it's possible for an honest person to be in the US, which means my future is still hanging by a thread. As is yours. My first thought when I wake up is how much I love my life, and how much I want everyone to have the same--the ability to take responsibility for the people and places that have been entrusted to them. I've been very competent in that and it's given me beautiful places to live and daughters who take responsibility for their own lives and who I could depend on, if I needed to. Everyone should have that.
What I see both in Appalachia and in California is a waste of human life, potential and joy because our economic system INCLUDING ACADEMIA makes the rich richer. A friend just sent a NY Times article that makes a point I've made repeatedly: "Letting the university take care of all of students’ needs — food, housing, health care, policing, punishing misbehavior — can be infantilizing for young adults. Worse, it warps students’ political thinking to eat food that simply materializes in front of them and live in residence halls that others keep clean."
Your original comment was "I have never "rejected" anyone without a degree and know no one with a degree who "rejects" anyone without one either ... You made your life decisions and if they weren't that good and didn't produce the outcome that you expected out of life ... stop the whining and fess up to the consequences of your own actions and decisions."
Rather than changing the subject to Reagan, look at the derision in your opinion of me when you thought I was some loser without a degree. You still haven't been able to shake the idea of my 'bad situation'. You've completely proven my point.
See: https://apps.urban.org/features/wealth-inequality-charts/
Note that the wealth disparity started to really grow after 1980, when Reagan was able to implement his libertarian policies. Before that, we had above average inflation that caused the fed to raise interest rates in an attempt to control borrowing and some tax changes were implemented to reduce the loss on savings to inflation, which helped the rich who had far more savings, but also helped middle class people stem those losses. However, Reagan cut the upper marginal tax rates that increased the gap between rich and everyone below them:
https://money.cnn.com/2010/09/08/news/economy/reagan_years_taxes/index.htm
What you're complaining about is the result of Republican governance as a result of their libertarian, pro-wealthy policies, not liberals in general. In fact, libertarianism is a big problem in California, with their anti-high rise, affordable housing zoning that made sprawl worse and forced housing costs higher.
You don't know what you're talking about. Reagan is THE subject because he and the Republican libertarians created this situation with their policies. Due to the success amongst those that you're defending, the Democrats made a sea change with the New Democrats that courted those same voters that elected libertarian Republicans, those Clinton Democrats.
This is a fact. That you see me deriding you proves my point, you don't get it and you blame me for your failures and your poor decisions, such as voting Republican. Own up to your mistakes, don't blame me or degreed professionals.
fwiw, as Dan Baum's 1996 book Smoke And Mirrors points out, it was President Reagan who quadrupled the Federal War on Drugs budget in the early 1980s, which pretty much disqualifies him from being a "libertarian" in the civil liberties sense. https://archive.org/details/smokemirrorswaro00baum
Also, David Stockman (who does qualify as a big-L libertarian, for better or worse) quit his post as economic advisor for the Reagan administration when it became clear to him that Reagan was going to base his economic agenda on perpetuation of Congressional earmarks and status quo spending policies financed by deficit spending (Reagan was the first president to push the national debt over $1 trillion.) https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1986-04-13-8601260815-story.html
When controlling for STEM degrees the college wage premium shrinks substantially or vanishes altogether depending on the degree. I think that some non-stem trust fund kids with basket weaving degrees do look down on blue collar jobs. You’re In engineering I wouldn’t think those in your field would scoff at hands on work. If anything it goes the other way (ask an auto mechanic what they think of an automotive engineer)
"Some non-stem trust fund kids" is not the same as "the degreed class." My argument is with her use of "degreed class" as a stereotype, it isn't.
EDIT: From reading about California's housing cost problem, I do think that there is a problem with attitudes of the wealthy who may be the "degreed class" that she complains about. For the most part they are libertarians who, as I've stated in previous posts, are concerned with their experiences, not the well being of others. For example, as I've mentioned, they are the reason that housing costs and sprawl is so bad as they've zoned regions to keep people out of their neighborhoods.
"Some non-stem trust fund kids" is not the same as "the degreed class."
I was making a more nuanced argument based on what she said. I agree “the degreed class” is not a monolith.
I live in California and I’ve lived from NorCal to Socal. I don’t know where you got the idea that most Californians are “libertarian” they are virtue signaling lefties mostly who pay lip service to progressive values and then do exactly what you just said. The zoning is worst in the most liberal areas. NIMBY is not strong enough of an acronym . I prefer to call these people BANANAS. Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything. That’s not consistent with being libertarian
" don’t know where you got the idea that most Californians are “libertarian”"
The articles that I read mentioned that they were libertarian liberals and were the NIMBY problem, not most Californians. They liked what they had and didn't want it spoiled, so go somewhere else. The article made it sound like the people she was complaining about and in addition to that they were also the cause of extensive environmental damage due to sprawl that could've been ameliorated from high density development built near mass transit. My experience with libertarians is that they are all anti-environmental to a person, while they believe in rights that doesn't extend to nonhuman animals, ecosystems, or the right of people to a functional ecosystem and clean environment. So, I never questioned what I read.
Libertarian liberals.... I'll just stick with hypocrites. I agree with the rest of your criticism of libertarians generally.
Thank you Mr. Taibbi. I don’t have extra funds, but I subscribe to you because you do interviews like this. If we are brave with words now, maybe the children will not have to be brave with bullets later.
That's what's so terribly sad about identity politics - it's driven by a desire to demonstrate compassion and understanding towards one particular subculture of disenfranchised people, while at the same time showing absolute scorn towards another disenfranchised group. The end result is a mad scramble for allies and a deepening of the divisions that are poisoning our society.
"Performative".
The word you are looking for is "performative".
"...identity politics [is] driven by a desire to demonstrate compassion and understanding towards one particular subculture of disenfranchised people, while at the same time showing absolute scorn towards another disenfranchised group."
"Desire to demonstrate" is the operative phrase that explains the contradiction. It's all about LOOKING like you care - not about actually DOING something that might inconvenience you.
It's easy to post a tweet saying how awful this or that is. It's much harder to put in the work and time and effort to become a de facto Mom or Dad to a kid whose parents are unwilling or unable to fulfill that role, or to quietly (and privately) explain to a co-worker why you think a carelessly uttered phrase is inappropriate, or whatever.
First, they came for Alex Jones.
This was very shrewd and entirely intentional, since Alex Jones is someone that no respectable person wanted to be seen defending.
Good thing I'm not respectable since I always found Jones hilariously funny. Sorry.
Ditto, I do as well think he’s a hoot.
He’s like a ‘monster drink’ amped up version of Rush Limbaugh.
There's also the parts that he got right.
Also I think his detractors suffer from the disease of literalness. They miss the whole performance art aspect of his schtick.
Having said that, if you'd put Cuomo or Lemon on one channel and Jones on the other, I'd watch Jones every time.
Yes, the parts he got right. Spot on.
Apparently, they are ‘making the frogs gay.’
https://youtu.be/i5uSbp0YDhc
Ahh yes. In a 30 year career broadcasting daily he got <checks notes> one thing kind of right! He’s clearly a genius.
What was it that he got right?
I think it was sarcasm.
Because nobody in Cuomo or Lemon’s audience is radicalized and embraces violence.
Ummm...well I never watched the show called "Jones' Audience." Maybe you could send me the link.
Jones has been around since the 90s. He's attacked Democrats as well as Republicans in that time. And yep, he's said tons of crazy shit. Just because he says it doesn't mean anyone has to believe it.
I mean, there were tons of people who continuously said Joe Biden wasn't a little girl hair sniffing, hallway finger diddling, senile old wreck of a man with the ethics of a sociopath, but I didn't believe them either.
And it's true that Jones' hobby horse was the New World Order but it's also apparently the hobby horse of many US presidents including Joe Bob "Dribble Cup" Biden.
And you are right about Lemon & Cuomo. Their audience was more like upscale white liberals who live in all white neighborhoods yet who virtue signal endlessly about diversity. & inclusion.
In other words, the living dead.
OH come on. I knew Alex Jones when he was small time in Austin. He graduated from not attacking anyone from a political angle to strictly attacking Democrats around the same time Obama got elected. I didn't pay much attention to him during the Bush years other than that he put forward some to me compelling theories about 9/11 when nobody else was doing it, but to claim that he was some sort of entertaining bi-partisan attacker is just not true.
Go listen to Knowledge Fight. Jones is a conman and bigot. And if you believe him you’re pretty fucking lost.
Oh, but they ARE radicalized.
Do you think left-leaning people who champion human rights could simultaneously support more constant war and the untold suffering of the entire global south while vilifying half of the people around them?
Yes, this is stolen Nazi tech from the 1930s regarding mass formation psychosis and guess what? You have front row seats to the brain games version of it.
Indeed, you are the subject of this test.
Alex Jones? A mere symptom. He's nobody.
Alex Jones may be a nobody to you and I, but he's not a nobody to the strike-crisis actors-/strike I mean PARENTS of Sandy Hook victims.
Lol. So, you're claiming one dude doing dime store antisemitism and racism, which inspires and radicalizes individuals, is immune to criticism because our society has large issues.
Big "Hmm! Yet you live in a society" energy on this one.
I'm not so sure about that. Not overtly but that audience tends to be the globalist and elitist supporters of US Imperialism whose violence far exceeds your most enthusiastic Jones fanatic.
The way I see it, Alex Jones is basically like a pro wrestler: A grown man who makes money by pretending to by angry at things.
I don’t think he is pretending, per se, I think he is like a pro wrestler who can’t get out of character outside of the ring, due to some weird psychological block.
Agreed. I used to watch Infowars for levity & entertainment, Roger Stone’s antics , etc My dad would’ve appreciated these guys. Back in the day, the 700 Club came on Sunday’s before NFL games , so we’d watch Jim & Tammy Fay & laugh.
I agree that for a good long while, in his early days in Austin, Alex Jones was hilarious and entertaining. When he made the official foray into accusations of "crisis actors" and political partisanship, he became on one hand a boring clown and on the other (which I'm guessing Alex Moyer's film will address) a dangerous lunatic that held sway over an increasingly deranged and out-of-touch w/ reality group of idiots who literally believed every word of his "entertainment."
Yes, his appearance in A Nobel Lie surprised me. I wasn’t aware of where he came from before watching the movie; by the way IMDB doesn’t even have a review $ Amazon sells it for $83! 😂🥁🛎Speaking of which https://archive.org/details/aj2010-07b
Exactly. I was going to bring up the 700 Club in re: the Alex Jones comedy experience. Ya beat me to it.
First they came for the communists and socialists, but that was too long ago for anyone here to remember, apparently.
"We swear it's just this one time!" was the justification back then. Turns out there was no slippery slope; just a cliff.
Tyranny often starts as a temporary emergency expedient.
That is how serfdom started in Russia, how the Reichstag Fire made The Enabling Act possible in Third Reich Germany.
Serfdom started b/c pre-mechanize agricultural policy has always been f-ed up. Even Touissant L’Ouverture (an awesome and misunderstood historical figure) complained about how nobody wanted to work in the wake of the Haitian Revolution!!!!
Not arguing any of that. But serfdom did start out as a temporary emergency measure, that was restricted and extended and eventually became permanent.
L'Ouverture was an interesting character. I thought it was Henri Christophe that re-instituted forced labor in Haiti, since L'Ouverture was killed before the Haitian Revolution was finished? Or do I misremember?
EDIT: Dessalines. Not Henri Christophe. Bad kitty!
L’Overture did indeed die in French captivity, he just complained about the ex-slaves, he was a former barnyard foreman-he wasn’t down w/ laziness on the farm.
Sound familiar? "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." - H.L. Mencken, 1921
, and I said nothing because....
because humans ignored my meowing and set their dogs on me.
I knew from the get-go that it was never intended to stop with Alex Jones.
...because the local commissar at my child's school would have me dragged to the gulag.
Your comment, reminded me of a Jerry Spence piece decades ago called "First they came for the Fascist" about his legal defense of Randy Weaver.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerry_Spence
http://eindtijdinbeeld.nl/EiB-Bibliotheek/Boeken/First_They_Came_for_the_Fascist.pdf
Here's the full quote:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
—Martin Niemöller
I actually stole it almost directly from this guy: Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) was a prominent Lutheran pastor in Germany. In the 1920s and early 1930s, he sympathized with many Nazi ideas and supported radically right-wing political movements. But after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Niemöller became an outspoken critic of Hitler’s interference in the Protestant Church. He spent the last eight years of Nazi rule, from 1937 to 1945, in Nazi prisons and concentration camps. Niemöller is perhaps best remembered for his postwar statement, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out…”
I was referring to an excerpt from Gerry Spence's book, that was reprinted as an article. It is his play on words in the title, but the sentiment is much the same.
He also made another pithy quote: “Although we give lip service to the notion of freedom, we know that government is no longer the servant of the people but, at last, has become the people's master. We have stood by like timid sheep while the wolf killed -- first the weak, then the strays, then those on the outer edges of the flock, until at last the entire flock belonged to the wolf.”
Yep. The people to listen to are the ones who were saying that it wouldn't stop at Jones.
Alex Jones is just a shill for prepper food products and bong hit health supplements. InfoWars is basically an ad for an f-ed up Walgreens/GNC!
Fine, but free speech isn't just for those deemed deserving.
“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”
― H.L. Mencken
Agree completely. Jones should absolutely not have been censored-but he does deserve to have his ass sued into bankruptcy by the Sandy Hook parents.
I like her.
Every time Matt features an actual journalist I always feel like I just saw a Sasquatch in the wild.
I can't help wondering about the New Scientist piece on SSRIs. Millions of people are on them. They're found in the water supply and, consequently, in fish and other animals that comprise our food supply.
Yet the reason for their existence, managing serotonin in an effort to alleviate depression, has no real relationship to depression. So what do these powerful psychotropic drugs actually do to people?
I remember reading an article years ago that said the serotonin connection to depression was debunked almost immediately after it was made but that debunking was buried by pharmaceutical companies because they saw big profits in those pills.
Of course I'm completely sure that it's all innocent and healthy & above board just like mandated vaccines on demand, face masks and endless lockdowns.
Otherwise that would make me a (gasp) conspiracy theorist.
No, no, no, not me. I eat my Prozac with a nice Rexulti chaser, self vaccinate & live alone in a fucking closet, so no conspiracy theorizing here, no-sir-ee-bob..nah uh...
"So what do these powerful psychotropic drugs actually do to people?"
I was on an SSRI for years - far longer than I think I should have been. I finally just decided to ditch it. You have to wean off over a period of time.
I believe the major effect is to dampen emotions - all emotions. And the effects are lasting, even after you have stopped taking the drugs.
SSRIs were my niece's introduction to the wonderful world of self medication. Many of her fellow high schoolers traded doctor prescribed psychotropics like I used to trade baseball cards.
From those she graduated to opioids, another drug that was plentiful in her social circle.
That eventually led to her father finding her dead from a fentanyl overdose on her bedroom floor after years of rehab & backsliding & rehab & arrests & rehab.
I have read about that emotion dampening effect of SSRIs from a number of different people.
Didn't they only stop lobotomizing people after those drugs were developed?
If so, does that make them lobotomies in a pill?
Wish I knew the answers.
I'm so sorry for your loss.
I was an adult when this was prescribed, and I did need help at the time. Talk therapy would probably have worked, but I didn't know who to talk to. So I had to figure things out on my own.
Thank you.
Her younger sister is now working towards her Masters in psychology primarily because of the pain she saw her sister attempting to cope with in all of the wrong ways.
Still, it was a waste. She was a good kid at heart. Just took some wrong turns that ended up being fatal.
That's how it usually happens. It's the drugging of a nation. I've lost three nieces and nephews, a husband and two brothers. From the age of seventeen until the age of thirty one I was in the abyss of addiction, homelessness, jails, prisons, and psyc wards. I gave up a full ride softball scholarship to the University of Michigan. My only saving grace was I took welding in high school and really enjoyed it. So when I got clean and sober, I had a skill that was in demand. Never underestimate what drugs will do to you. But also remember what grace, forgiveness, and redemption, can do too.
I was in no way trying appear unique. I don't know anyone who hasn't lost someone to drugs. Opioids were always pretty prevalent even before pharmaceutical companies decided to become pushers.
Anyone who comes back from that trip is a bad ass as far as I'm concerned. Good luck.
Spider baby. How tragic for you & yours. “Lost Connections” may help.
Thanks.
Check out “Lost Connections” a book by Johann Hari published 2018. Uncovering the real causes of depression-and the unexpected solutions. Is on point with Alex’s movie.
Thanks. Will check it out.
Jimmy Dore recently dug up that old clip of Matt Lauer & Tom Cruise, where Cruise was debunking SSRIs as a solution for depression.
From the folk that I've known who use SSRIs, they wholly embraced the serotonin theory. Many wouldn't even talk about being depressed. They'd just say "my serotonin levels are off today." I think they liked the idea that it was just a chemical imbalance rather than something that may have deep causes requiring a lot of work to uncover. It was the solution of convenience that came with a nice fat medical stamp of approval.
Nourishment for starving souls. There’s more of that in a single Matt article/ interview than in a week of scheming manipulative propaganda BS heaped up in WaPo or NYT.
This is brilliant, thanks for informing - I'm going to check out both of these documentaries. This is how hard the mainstream wants nuanced thought to cease to exist - if you talk about how mainstream society tries harder and harder to devalue and alienate men every year, you're a fascist. If you talk about the impact that (pick a thing: economy, loss of jobs to automation, addiction) has on men - Nazi. If you call attention to the male suicide rate and how it is a reflection of how society is failing us on a massive scale - you must love Trump and Hitler. Remember when Andrew Yang casually mentioned that some of these topics were a concern of his on the campaign trail? Welcome to headlines about Asian White Supremacist Runs for President. That and the populist message and not being bought by the usual oligarchs and donors, of course. And granted, nowadays the majority of discussion is like playing "Gotcha Last!" by shouting "Racist!" Yes, some men (just like some women) are potentially a danger to themselves and others - this is why countries need functioning mental healthcare systems, and economies that present options to have jobs and hope rather than meds-for-profit, crushing despair and faceless dystopia.
I had a similar experience when talking about the VA governor’s race. I am ( mostly) pretty far left but mentioned once what I had read here and elsewhere how some Asian- American parents were concerned that programs for gifted children might be cut back in the name of equity. No matter where one falls on that subject, arguments about how to allocate the money spent on schools is or should be seen as normal politics. People will have legitimate disagreements.
But no, it was a question of good vs evil, racism vs anti racism, and so these Asian parents had to be racists. There is no arguing with people when they take that stance.
Absolutely. It amazes/depresses me that people can’t see through these obvious ploys at pitting people against each other. Ironically, the same mechanisms employed by actual racists to justify their bullshit ideologies are now found elsewhere in society: the race to victimhood and the myth of scarcity go hand in hand. “You can’t have Thing X because it would make it less available to Group Y” - but why can’t we simply make Thing X available to everyone?
Team D autobots: "We demand more diverse oppressors!"
My dumb self: "Why do we need oppressors in the first place?"
Team D cultists: "Why you hate diversity?"
If we don't honestly try to understand people, if we don't use empathy and compassion to try to reach them, how are we ever going to come together as a community?
We seem to be in a simplistic place that suggests that, if you try to communicate, try to talk, to the "wrong" kind of people, you're on their side and you're "platforming" them.
It's ridiculous and counterproductive, because so many of the "wrong" people are really just trying to reach out and to be understood. If we keep pushing them away and shoving them into the corner while making them wear dunce (or "incel") caps, should we be surprised when they act up and out?
The MSM seem to be promoting a very childish binary, black and white, good and evil version of that complex thing known as reality.
I literally just wrote about this!
https://simulationcommander.substack.com/p/failure-to-agree-on-reality
How can we come to any sort of resolution of a problem if (at least) one side refuses to acknowledge the reality of the situation, and if we’re simply yelling past one another and not listening? I’ve often said that as a libertarian, I understand the importance of taking your allies on a position wherever you can find them. If you want to end the war on drugs, let’s work together — your position on other issues is irrelevant as it pertains to the war on drugs. But it today’s political climate, the politicians are too busy demonizing the other side to ask for their support on important matters. Since we don’t actually interact and discuss, we’re basically living in two separate realities.
The most recent example I can think of involves the definition of recession. For as long as I can remember — and certainly during Donald Trump’s presidency — the definition of recession was two consecutive quarters with negative growth. But now the administration is trying to alter the definition of recession so that we’re not in one — because they see the problem as admitting reality, not the fact that the economy is in the toilet. They somehow think as long as we’re not ‘in a recession’, people won’t get upset spending $100+ to gas up their car or going broke trying to keep up with rent increases.
Right on cue - the memo went out yesterday to the MSM in anticipation.
Paul Krugman - We Are Not in a Recession
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/28/opinion/recession-inflation.html
Ok then, that settles it.
I don't know who exactly they think they're gaslighting Re: denial of reality. Who but Democrats are going to buy that? Who is buying "Putin's Price Hike"? Who is buying the spin on congressional insider trading? Who is buying that Democrats are smart to back 1/6 Trumpsters over sane Republicans because they think they have a better chance of winning?
Bit o/t, but remember when Matt wrote that piece about Russia is not going to invade Ukraine? He got that wrong, but not everything. In an earlier piece, he said some now verboten stuff about Ukraine. I suspect he's going to be vindicated at some point down the line.
Maybe it's not a way to convince us, but to keep Democrats in line or give them talking points?
And they swallow the talking points whole. But again, they can keep droning on with the talking points, but it's not convincing anyone outside their Democratic bubble.
Matt, what happened to you !?
(sorry, had to do that, this comments section was missing that obligatory comment. Can we get the substack back end to just randomly add that comment in all Taibbi's reporting ?)
LOLz.
Brilliant interview, brilliant insights. Like a fine cook who finds the most interesting ingredients, let’s them breathe, and stands out of the way, Taibbi’s style is such a relief from Times/Guardian showboating.
And the filmmaker shows herself to be an artist to watch, actually speaking clear sentences, expressing strong ideas.
What a nice way to start the day.
Quel surprise that there are a slew of disaffected white boys and men. Let's see, society has, over the last 30 years:
- Drugged them
- Slandered them
- Passed them over to support every other group in school, work, government, etc.
- Made fun of them in Hollywood and modern culture.
- Devalued what men, generally and genetically, bring to the table
It a good thing that boys can now 'transition' into girls, to escape the societal torment.
"It a good thing that boys can now 'transition' into girls, to escape the societal torment."
Hadn't thought of it that way. Pretty perceptive Sniggles.
I love the comparison of woke journalism to Reefer Madness pearl-clutching.
Her work sounds interesting, and I hope to see both movies. She was spot-on in terms of how white men are tossed aside.
Just before taking a break from work to read this piece, I came across a press release from Dicks Sporting Goods introducing a new policy that gives preferential treatment to "diverse" suppliers who fit the following criteria: "women, LGBTQ+, veterans, persons with disabilities and/or Black, Indigenous and People of Color." They could have saved themselves the effort and said "everyone but straight, white men." How is this okay?
It’s about time we had an American Herzog
Yes. He's one of my all-time favorite directors.
Can someone explain the reference? I thought he was referring to Katie Herzog, which actually seems appropriate, but apparently that’s not it.
Google: Werner Herzog.
Thank you.
Thank you -- kept thinking Saul Bellow novel which also didn’t fit.
Alex Jones the Rain King.
Loved that reference as well... Finally, I got one.
Thanks, Matt, for promoting this journalist. We need more like her telling forbidden stories to a world struggling to avoid honest discussion of ugly truths.
It's a lot more than incels; it's what Margaret Thatcher said and the unnatural un, no, anti social thing we've become. Remember "there's no such thing as society, there's only individuals and family". Only a very sick sociopath could believe that and she was PM of the UK. Most leaders have some degree of sociopathy and are clever enough not to reveal their mentality/sickness like she did or Hillary cackling because she killed someone or Obama "turns out I'm really good at killing people"! We, the acedemics primarily destroyed childhood, childhood, the ability to play with your friends independently and maybe get hurt. The don't talk to strangers movement, more acedemic sickness. Now, it's come to pass in a fearful easily controlled society, the fear porn is everywhere and the real human connections are rare. Read a little book by Sebastian Junger.."Tribe" which explains why soldiers that were no where near combat come home and get PTSD because they were exposed to tribal life, or I call it, normal human life and then they lost it in the anonymous non society called America and most of the rest of western non societies for that matter. The long tentacles of American popular culture and anti social media have reached around the world. "Lost connections" by Johan Hari explaining why depression and alienation are omnipresent today. I have no idea if or how this can be turned around or even if the ruling classes want it turned around.
Thatcher's infamous quote has I think been taken out of context (disclaimer: I'm a Brit and hated her and her politics). She was being interviewed specifically about government assistance to the unemployed, for housing etc with regards policy and said:
“I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!” or “I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!” “I am homeless, the Government must house me!” and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people – and people look to themselves first…”
From that, you could interpret it as saying that government policy has to be specific – it can't target "society", but individuals and families. Which is in fact what the benefits system does.
As I said, she was a hateful and blinkered leader but the claim that she was some sort of sociopath goes too far. IMHO.
Meh, she was a sociopath no doubt about it. But that's far from unusual at those echelons of power. Ronny Raygun and every president after have all been sociopaths too.
Maybe, but if all leaders turn out to be sociopaths, we should perhaps just include the word in the job description. The point stands that her quote was taken out of context.
Most quotes are taken out of context to fill the agenda's of those who write them and their bosses.
I never met or dealt with PM Thatcher but I stand by my comment that most leaders, certainly high level leadership are sociopaths to some degree. It really couldn't be otherwise and the indoctrination, the omnipresent indoctrination we get from birth makes us vulnerable to them. Just think of all the things you were taught that turned out not to be true and then wonder, what else was I taught that might not be true. Society functions on stories and who chooses the stories control's society and that's not you or me.
Read your post after I posted reference to same book. Thanks