DonkeyCigars

That has to feel like a slap in the face that I was meaning when I said "resentment".

If a child is not born with hate but taught, then doesn't it logically stand that a child is not born with hope but that too is taught? I say this with the caveat that I actually don't know what exists in the baby/child's brain before the wicked inertia of the world crushes the bigness a child is born with into a cruel little ego. I read an interesting article*** about psychedelics (link at the bottom if you care) that reminds me to be humble in that aspect-- I'm just a world-worn and weary sojourner abused and marked by the world and my own journey. But that said, I find it a reasonable position to be in disagreement with you-- just as reasonable as any other position, at least. Why would a child not be born with hope anymore than be born with it as an innate part of their brain? I feel like you have to make a spiritual or psychic argument to imply that a child is downloaded with certain intangibles such as hope and love and fear and hate, etc. ***https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/tripping-in-lsds-birthplace-a-story-for-e2809cbicycle-daye2809d/

Jokes aside, I keep coming back to when the movie Parasite came out and Bad_Teammate fanboi'ed and stanned all over it on the movie thread. I didn't get it at the time but I think what he was saying and what the movie was saying is what we are talking about-- dehumanizing a person through social ostracism and making them see that they are so obviously less than from a macro-perspective so they give up hope, and any microaggression (e.g. holding your nose at their "poor and other" stink) causes someone to snap. I guess I see what that would look like and the applications in our society, is my point, now. Elfenix-- what is the 2% I am missing?

Yea essentially this. Our poor aren't any poorer, they are just made to feel humiliation or indignity due to our social traditions (mythologizing and hero worship of the rich, shaming of the poor, etc.). It's basic human condition stuff-- you disrespect, shame, insult someone enough and you will create dynamics where violence and murder take on a pragmatism that make it look like tools in the toolkit. You devalue life and sell it cheap, you can't expect people to not start treating it as such. And that is America-- a violent city on a hill. Edit to add: the disillusionment point is a really good one. Disillusionment is the last bastion before a complete loss of hope, which is when the real death numbers start to get registered.

It's resentment. Poverty rates in America are in line with the rest of the world, but wealthy rates are not. When you have half of the country living in a way that is an insult, and in your face about it, the only response left in a human is to disregard social mores to keep ones dignity. Use any analogy you want, but the only reason one "breaks bad" or pivots to a "get rich or die trying" strategy is being worn down by resentment to a state of desperation where they cease to value even their own life-- their own existence overhearing how bad they stink. Then there are the ones born into the culture of resentment which is so infected there is no hope. Child soldiers like what we saw in poor Louisiana in the 90's and Southside of Chicago now. They've never known anything different but violence and they learned their life has an expiration date already baked in, at an early age, to kill and be killed for the culture.

Say what you want about communism, but... "You know who used to put out readable translations? The East Bloc, that’s who! I stand in awe of the East German Eugen Onegin. Drafted decades before under the forbidding regime of the Wilhelminian Empire, polished by trained Marxist-Leninists, its sparkling verse blends the wit and power of Byron with the grace of Heine. The charm of the GDR Platonov, the eloquence of the GDR Tolstoy . . . There’s simply no comparison with, say, the bumbling of the UK Flaubert, whose characters pursue “romantic assignments” because the translator doesn’t know assignations are a thing. The GDR seated unwitting dissidents on gamma ray sources that gave them cancer, but its translations were brilliant. Coincidence? I think not. Under communism, an ex-Soviet friend explained to me, the best writers couldn’t publish their own stuff, so they translated and edited to survive. Imagine if the Confederacy had won and Paul Beatty had to get work translating Paulo Coelho. That’s what it was like. There’s no compromise between getting it wrong and never trying in the first place. In this way it resembles all worthwhile endeavors—peace, justice, conservation, et cetera. You can approach it with a mix of laziness and demoralization, get ugly results, and still be doing the right thing."

This is amazing. Cubans are our friends. I'm rooting for you, compadres!

But not as good as Jim Carrey! Right?

Sorry missed linking the article. But also interesting is the article is attempting to cast this as a broader democratic foretelling: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-local-correspondents/eric-adamss-victory-and-the-uncertainty-of-the-biden-era-democratic-party The demographics were easy enough to see on a map. Garcia, a pragmatist who received the coveted endorsement of the Times, won Manhattan and the museumgoer belt: Brooklyn Heights, Riverdale in the Bronx. Wiley, whose campaign emphasized racial justice and cutting the police budget, won the gentrifying neighborhoods of North and central Brooklyn. Yang was strongest in Queens, where there are many Asian American voters, and in certain Hasidic neighborhoods in Brooklyn. The poorest parts of the city all went to Adams: the eastern and southern ends of the Bronx, Brownsville and East New York, in Brooklyn—a centrist coalition of working-class Black and Latino voters that broadly mirrored Biden’s core voting bloc in New York. The political analysts who made a case for Adams’s victory generally emphasized the strength of this coalition in a party whose heroes often entice only voters with college degrees. Howard Wolfson, once a leading aide to Michael Bloomberg, predicted recently that Adams’s “message of ‘justice and safety’ and ‘possibility and opportunity’ will resonate far beyond NYC and will chart a course for Democrats around the country.” But even that endorsement suggested an uncertainty that is quickly coming to characterize the Democratic Party during the Biden years: it can see how important working-class voters are to its electoral prospects much more easily than it can figure out how to help them.

Interesting read: New York isn’t really a tabloid city anymore. But in recent weeks, as Eric Adams came into focus as the city’s likely next mayor, he did so as a kind of political character familiar from the tabloids: the provocateur, the media’s gleeful antagonist. As the summer heat reached Orchard Beach, in the Bronx, Adams posed shirtless for the news cameras—sixty years old, vegan and ripped. He said that he might have to carry a handgun in Gracie Mansion, for protection. On the campaign trail, he told outsized-sounding stories about himself: that he had been a squeegee man; that, after the birth of his son, an enemy within the N.Y.P.D. had shot out the windows of his car. On primary night, David Freedlander, a reporter with New York magazine who had questioned stories like these, tweeted that he had been excluded from Adams’s June 22nd victory event in retribution. (The campaign said that this wasn’t true.) From the podium, Adams made a point of chastising “younger” reporters for following Twitter more closely than the politics of the city’s poor neighborhoods—his base. His supporters chanted, “The champ is here.” The next day, still weeks before the final tally in the primary, Adams—a Brooklyn machine pol, longtime cop, state senator, borough president, and up-by-the-bootstraps centrist—declared himself “the face of the Democratic Party.” Across a year of Zoom debates and candidate forums, Adams proved to be the best talker of the candidates, the most adept at condensing politics into tangible images and phrases. His rivals spoke about the necessity of including “Black and brown communities” in the city’s prosperity. But when Adams said, “We don’t want fancy candidates,” everyone knew what he meant. Adams is the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York, which probably assures him of election in November, as the second Black mayor in the city’s history. (His Republican opponent will be Curtis Sliwa, a radio host and founder of the Guardian Angels, who is most famous for having once staged his own kidnapping.) The national press has mostly not taken up Adams’s claims that he is a figure of national significance, in part because the election often seemed, given the sheer scale of the city, quite small. An ex-cop of no real ideological distinction (Adams), the city’s former sanitation commissioner (Kathryn Garcia), the general counsel to the current mayor (Maya Wiley)—it sounded like a strong field in a small Midwestern city, and the candidates frequently struggled to catch attention in a race often conducted via Zoom. The city’s most prominent progressives (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jumaane Williams) did not run, which left the proceedings without a vivid ideological dimension. The designated celebrity candidate, Andrew Yang, turned out to be less interesting up close, and faded to fourth place. Demographics favored Adams, and they proved to be destiny, if only barely: a decisive tabulation released Tuesday evening, after the final round of ranked-choice voting, gave him the victory over Garcia by all of eighty-four hundred votes.

"What you eat in private, you wear in public"

I completely agree with you if you are saying that avoiding micro-aggressions is being empathetic. What I'm saying is tough, is not accidentally or unintentionally micro-agressing (is that the term?) someone because it is so very subjective. A comment or specific word for one person might be a micro-aggression to someone and to someone else it might not be, even if those someone's are seemingly the same on the surface. I've been trying to put in some self-work as a human and have joined some employee group meetings as an "ally" for things that don't, on the surface, pertain or impact me. I will use pro-nouns as requested which has been a change recently, and am just generally trying to be more empathetic to your overall point.

The tough thing about micro-aggressions is that they are so very subjective. One they's microaggression is another they's not.

When those that have things want to keep them and to keep the have nots at bay, you fund the police. Interesting how that works: https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/atlanta-community-buckhead-crime-wave-police-forcehttps://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/atlanta-community-buckhead-crime-wave-police-forcehttps://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/atlanta-community-buckhead-crime-wave-police-force I believe this has long been the critique: by defunding police or decriminalizing petty crime and things like shoplifting and car jacking, you are going to actually create a bigger disparity in the haves and have nots as those with resources and means will distance themselves even further than those without. People are not inherently altruistic, you won't find people wanting to lean in to painful, transitionary periods of anything (when push comes to shove) to get to the other side. They move (white flight) or apparently segregate and create their own public utilities and police with their tax base?

The answer if you don't want to defund police and you want to feel safe (note I said feel, which is an emotional state and not always representative of reality), then you just get a divorce apparently: https://nypost.com/2021/06/18/atlanta-community-moves-to-separate-from-city-amid-crime-spike/ Ritzy Atlanta community moves to separate from city amid crime spike

I thought this thread was going to be about the Allen & Co. Sun Valley Camp for Billionaires: https://www.npr.org/2021/07/05/1012587989/moguls-deals-and-patagonia-vests-a-look-inside-summer-camp-for-billionaires

He's not that, but I've followed him for a while and if you don't allow for or recognize that there is obviously a lot of self-interested/self-promotion going on with this guy, then you aren't being completely honest. He's building his "brand" on this topic; good for him. And I'm not saying he's all phony balogny, I'm sure he is rooted in a passion or belief about the cause and he's created a business to live it out, which is awesome. Acknowledging he has a fair amount of "attention horse" in him isn't discrediting, but it is informing of the overall picture.

I thought of you when I read this: Take the opening of Meditations (Marcus Aurelius, of course): “When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly.”

Well that tears it. You can blaspheme Ronald Reagan all you want, but I will not sit here and let you bad mouth Mitt Romney. Every Bainie and every one from a Bainie coaching tree from Manny M. to back office support staff owe their livelihoods to that gallant man. If it weren't for his leadership, and yes personal investments along with some other key shareholders, during our darkest hour-- we would all have come out of it worse for the wear and a joke of what once was-- like Accenture or something gross like that.

I don't think that makes the point you think it's making. I, too, like the status quo and think this is good. Here is our shared poem: Keep same; no change Hit records, banks gain. Celebrate daily, ignore the ire As Centrist Biden tends the fire

Corporations pay in compliance to what is legally allowed. Tax evasion is illegal; tax avoidance isn't. But yes, let's talk about about how government controlling business is awesome. Didi the ride sharing app (down 20-30% today?) probably has an opinion about that. As does Tencent and Ant Group

My belief is people are not inherently altruistic and when it comes to making tough economic decisions about allocation of personal or shared resources in a world of scarcity, there will naturally be conflict. That conflict can be managed through a centrally planned power (communism) or it can meet the lowest common denominator of consensus (in the surfside case, this was inaction) which is always going to be an inferior overall situation for particular individuals of means and capabilities, but perhaps a better minimum for the group than would be for the worst individual, otherwise. https://slate.com/business/2021/06/miami-condo-collapse-florida-building-industry-crisis.html In other words, it's your classic utilitarianism vs libertarianism. You know, basic freshman year stuff.

Also, kudos to you on the getting fit and weight loss! Awesome to hear and great job. Maybe you can be an inspiration or source of hope to your SIL and other family members too.