poverty and class standards

It is an insidious predjudice though, I just tried to buy some furniture and the saleswoman kindly steered me toward all the cheapest, oldest, tattiest things. I was unreasonably offended: "What do you think I am, some kind of lowlife student scum?" even though for most of my life I have been lowlife scum and know that there should be no shame in wanting to buy a cheap couch.

I'm a little surprised by your experience, though, Donna -- I thought class distinctions of the snobbish variety tended to revolve more around your behavior and your comportment than your actual income or wealth. And I'm sorry to hear you've been having troubles.

One could be that utility providers and supermarkets might just be employing nastier people, or the people they are employing might have got so sick of dealing with people who are either up themselves or scum that they treat everyone badly (I reckon this is happening in Aus anyway).

Another could be that you do feel a bit bad inside about being poorer and you are therefore being more paranoid.

Another is that whatever circumstances have affected you finances may have had some toll on your self-esteem as well (although it sounds pretty good) and other people are perceiving you differently to how they might have in the past (despite you dressing the same etc.) and this is what is making them treat you less nicely.

nabisco I felt that the UK (maybe regarded as a class-stratification-obsessed society) also swung towards that attitude during the Thatcher Govt. of the 80's.

Seriously, Sarah, Nabisco and Ned are right about the American myth of upward mobility. It may have some truth in individual people's histories. However, the simple formula of hard work -> prosperity; laziness -> poverty is thrown off by so many variables that I don't know how anyone can take it seriously. Yet during the 1980s and 1990s this myth took root in Europe and probably in other regions.

As for snotty service industry types, I try to remember that some customers can be a pain (I've seen people blow up at a pharmacist because their doctor wouldn't authorize a refill or the insurance company wouldn't copay for a certain medication).

I don't know how relevant this is, but a lot of what I've heard about service sector training seems to ignore logic. Someone I knew was editing a training manual for cell phone salespeople. According to the manual, when a customer says "I'm just looking," that means that the customer needs help and the salesperson should stick by their side and ask questions about what the customer is looking for. Wrong; when I say that I want to look over the merchandise myself, and if I have questions about an item I'll ask.

The family shelter here can't afford to operate anymore. Fuck this.

It's one of those things that you really can't do anything about. (I have actually tried to help fwiw).

Fuck poverty. Fuck how people treat poor people.

I'm having an angry afternoon here.

I don't think people in the U.S. are more impressed by wealth, I think they are suspicious of it. It is common to attack someone based on how large their salary is. At the same time, we have people who have what is by global standards a lot of money who don't seem to think so.

I am alarmed at how relatively LITTLE our public servants make (of course they are often worth much more than that). Their salaries are often smaller than those of invisible professionals.

I have less resentment toward the very wealthy than middle-class folk who don't view themselves as fortunate, I guess that is me feeling disappointed at my own "kind". We're very fortunate to benefit from opportunities here, I think we should demonstrate our gratitude by working to expand those opportunities or at least make living in poverty more bearable. No one should feel ashamed or less private or as if they have less dignity because they live in public housing or have to rely on public services.

Being poor when you've been raised middle class sucks. You suddenly have to deal with people who've been poor alot longer than you, who know how to fight and rip you off.

think they are suspicious of it. It is common to attack someone based on how large their salary is.

how so? are you thinking of, say, actors or athletes, who don't deserve the money they make?

lol

good post

even better post fucktard

best post, asshole

<3 u guyz

greatest country in the world

OK Boomer: US has 7th-highest elderly poverty rate among richer countries. https://t.co/0aTYJmv2s5

— Doug Henwood (@DougHenwood) December 19, 2019

so i've been having these thoughts lately that are kind of a bummer, though i'm wondering if there's some theorist out there who is talking / writing about this kind of thing, because that would be interesting

there is a globalized war that subsumes all other wars. it's being waged all the time. it's a war against people who do not support oligarchy enough, through some combination of circumstance and choice. one of the major developments of this war that sets it apart from other wars in history is how advanced it's become at removing any trace of an aggressor. it employs all kinds of disappearing acts to do so, things like the fact that homeless people are seen as vermin by many, or that mental health and suicide are seen as individualized failures. it makes it appear as though the victims choose to die or put themselves in the position to die. it also disperses the subjectivity of an aggressor across a very diverse network of effects so that one can never point to a single node and say "that right there is the problem." in fact, the act of trying to do so just strengthens the other parts of the network.

this is the war that will be waged through climate change.

is this different from Marxist definitions/writing on ideology or something else? or are you just interested in the specifics of the contemporary period and an articulate take on it?

No war but class war innit?

yeah, that's not a new idea at all.

maybe the effects of removing any perpetrators and weaponizing mental health are just ideology and tbh they probably aren't even that new.

maybe this is just me just being continually shocked by how every situation, i.e. this current war, and the pandemic before it, seems to end up with the same overall effect, and yet every time most of the supposedly intellectual class including idiots on this board who should know better will never see it.

You have to want to see it and to take on board what that might mean for you, is the thing

difficult to get a man to understand something when his posts depend on etc

otm. i think about this a lot!

it's nice to know other people think about it too, sometimes feels like i'm living in crazy land tbh. and to be completely honest, part of it is that i am poor, and if at some point i start making a little more money i'm not sure i trust myself not to "shift perspective" and become a little more blind to all of this myself.

anyway, another galaxy size stoner thought: is ritual sacrifice somehow a phenomenon that ties human history together? or is it "read into" the past in order to justify the present? hang around my boyfriend is baking some cookies.

rebecca west:

I knew this rock well. I had lived under the shadow of it all my life. All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretense that pain is the proper price of any good thing. Here it could be seen how the meaning of the Crucifixion had been hidden from us, though it was written clear.... The cruel spirit that informed it saved itself by a ruse, a theological ruse.... Since its earliest days Christianity has been compelled to seem its opposite. This stone, the knife, the filth, the blood, is what many people desire beyond anything else, and they fight to obtain it.... The grinning and consequential man standing on the rock... is made a personage necessary to the spiritual world...

We are continually told to range ourselves with the crucified and the crucifiers, with innocence and guilt, with kind love and cruel hate. Our breasts echo forever with the cries 'In murdering goodness we sinned' and 'By murdering goodness we were saved.' 'The lamb is innocent and must not be killed,' 'The dead lamb brings us salvation,' so we live in chaos.

tbh map for the last 14 months i've been on the highest salary of my life, nothing spectacular but a decently lower middle class sum that looks like a fortune to me. i don't think it's made me a reactionary melt yet.

is ritual sacrifice somehow a phenomenon that ties human history together?

Bataille's Thr Accursed Share has some fun with this thought

thanks for the pointers all.

xp i'm gonna attempt to read that now, dlh. i read some more excerpts/reviews stuff and i must have it

René Girard wrote about the transition in cultures from human to animal to symbolic sacrifice. As per Wikipedia:

All conflict, competition and rivalry therefore originate in mimetic desire (mimetic rivalry), which eventually reaches destructive stages of conflict both between individuals and social groups that requires them to blame someone or something in order to defuse conflict through the scapegoat mechanism. Unable to assume responsibility or engage in self-reflection to recognize their own part in the conflict, humans individually and cross-tribally unite, to defuse conflict, by murdering the king or whoever appears to have the least support in the conflict, and then recognizing when the person has died how much less stress they have, and the unification leads to them eventually thinking of the deposed dead king as a god, i.e. deification or sanctification. Or, guilt is ascribed to an innocent third-party, whose murder permits the creation of a common unifying mythological underlay necessary for the foundation of human culture.

i knew i had read about this before and yes it was girard in college

you see some of these tendencies in police killings etc. it's kind of nasty to say though. iirc girard presents it in kind of a naturalized anthropological descriptive way that feels a little totalizing.

in any case wikipedia led me to charles taylor who seems like a decent sort

xp i'm gonna attempt to read that now, dlh. i read some more excerpts/reviews stuff and i must have it

frustrating book, frequently lapses into sentimentality and/or orientalism (often at times when not doing this might lead to a sharp critique of the british empire) but many many excellent passages (an incredible ~100pages on the assassination of franz ferdinand) and a bracingly aggressive thesis about the legacy of empire-in-general (just... not the british one, quite so much). also "constantine" and his nazi wife are good/unreal enough to be in a novel (maybe they are).

tbh map for the last 14 months i've been on the highest salary of my life, nothing spectacular but a decently lower middle class sum that looks like a fortune to me. i don't think it's made me a reactionary melt yet.

Can't say I've noticed but I'll be sure to look out for the signs.

i'll accept my purging with good grace if it happens

I used to have a friend who went through a rough time on Universal Credit after the bookie firm he worked for closed their doors. I gave him loads of support when he was feeling down and out, going on humiliating courses and unsuccessfully applying for low paid shit-jobs. He got a driver delivery job at ASDA and was so grateful for it, he applied himself with such enthusiasm + zeal to delivering fucking shopping he got a promotion to a better paid mid-level supervisory role. Then he turned into a complete bell-end and started saying racist stuff then qualifying it as not racist because 40% of his work colleagues are 2nd gen S Asian + all love him. And baiting me with opinions such as perhaps this country would be in a better state if it didn't spend so much on its overgenerous benefits system. His job is probably pretty low level shite tbf, but it still happened!

The most I ever earned was £140 a day, but this was short term cash in hand work that finished when the job was completed. Never really stable enough for me start believing I'm a superior being and fuck everyone else! My brother is a high earner and a total bullshit melt when it comes to politics.

I've avoided talking about politics with my brother for years, the only thing I can rely on as a constant is he hates Tories.

René Girard wrote about the transition in cultures from human to animal to symbolic sacrifice

okay, i need to read this, thank you ilxor!

nothing spectacular but a decently lower middle class sum that looks like a fortune to me. i don't think it's made me a reactionary melt yet.

there is a new burger place in my neighborhood in a newly renovated building with a big bright sign, and it is called "Melt" ... and when I drove past it yesterday, I thought about you, calzino, and gyac and whether I should avoid this restaurant in solidarity ... though i probably won't eat there anyway because it looks expensive for what it is

well the target market is there in the name

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuN6gs0AJls

big fan of this use of 'melt' btw

Map, join the UK politics thread, you will be welcome there

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSlRe-nHnJ_wSvycU74FeZp0rSG21JRordO9g&usqp=CAU

one of my fave Siouxsies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6-TgUFMPYo