(hat tip to DeAnander)

Starvid said:

Re: The sky ain’t falling (none / 0)

That’s a good follow-up question…

“The middle class” should be a reasonable if controversial answer.

I mean, you need both fairness, social mobility and rewards for entrepeneurs and people who want to study and work hard.

Without losing sight of the veil of whatever Rawls called it.

A hugely complex issue, permeating everything we discuss here.

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
by Starvid (arvid.hallen at gmail.com) on Tue Nov 6th, 2007 at 06:04:12 PM EDT

DeAnander said:

Re: The sky ain’t falling (none / 1)
social mobility

isn’t social mobility one of those growth myths though? if everyone is upwardly mobile, then who picks the fruit, who sweeps the streets, who washes the floors?

the technotopian answer to that is “robots of course”, whicm merely means substituting energy slaves for human slaves. and energy is now an increasingly scarce resource, alont with enojgh other resources that we know “social mobility” cannot continue to mean “aspiring to live like ozzie and harriet” let alone paris hilton.

why should rewards only go to inventors and entrepreneurs and similar [mho] growth fantasists? why should not rewards go to good stewards of land, producers of good food and high quality durable goods? or even to people who keep the streets clean or fix bike tyres or cook a magnificent blintz?

for people who like to study, isn’t studying a reward in itself? do they also need to be bribed with positional goodies galore? surely the reward of studiousness is to be let loose in a library: the maintenance of a library being a net-positive benefit to everyone instead of a privatised position good to reward only the elite few deemed worthy.

and so on.

The difference between theory and practise in practise …
by DeAnander (de_at_daclarke_dot_org) on Tue Nov 6th, 2007 at 06:41:25 PM EDT
[ Parent ]

melo (living an agrarian life in italy) said:

Re: The sky ain’t falling (4.00 /

picks brain up off floor…

how long will people hold onto an adamant ideology when reality contradicts it daily in more and more painful and immediate ways?

how long is a rubber band?

the metaphor of torture, one we are being asked daily to contemplate, leaps out of this…

it’s like the media is a voyeur at a torture session, and we are invited to draw lots on 0how long can folks endure sweepstakes, complicitly staring along too…

how long can gazans get hammered before they roll over and get that they are subhumans and don’t deserve anything?

how long can we see our fellow humans acting out without something snapping inside ourselves?

how long can cognitive dissonance be the status quo?

i think the root bitterness is found in the childbirth question…

we discipline ourselves not to have kids, or have few, and we resent the fact that the third world is out-reproducing us. now, they caddy on our golf courses, pretty soon they’ll want to build shanty towns on them!

we ‘get ahead’ and want our way to go on forever….inside the gated communities, don’t care how many guards and armies it takes to defend us.

we expect and feel entitled to a colonial viewpoint, where coolies do the dirty stuff and serve us mint juleps on the terrace.

we are afraid, because we know we’ve been living on the backs of the poor, but we are terrified we’ve lost the skills to work hard, while taking that cushy job in uncle’s insurance firm.

oh i know it’s not conscious… but it eats away at the happiness they thought they could buy, it literally kills the natural joy of life, and their lives become a gilded sitcom, rotting from within.

pitiful…

as pitiful as the plight of the poor, in a different way.

and what about the middle class? (which i disparaged so much as a teenager, finding the values totally materialistic and moneygrubbing, the precursor to the positional consumerism we see as operant capitalist model today.)

what i failed to see was the benefits of education accorded to the emerging middle class…

the poor started work too early to get academic passe-partouts, and the rich never sweated it too hard in class, they knew that job in the family tea plantation, or dickie’s recommendation for some cushy foreign office job was a given.

the middle class saw the sting of poverty too closely for comfort and whipped itself to ascend the greasy pole, by hook or by crook, while their baby boomer kids were studying history and civics, building an idealism that was too fuzzy to be concrete, but too tonic to be ignored.

so the middle class had (has) the incentive to push themselves, and the education to enable a global viewpoint.

take away the awful part of being a bourgeois, the part poets and beats railed against, the part that was too constipated or entrenched to ‘get’ the 60’s, the part that made the sterile conformism of the ozzie and harriet era such a rebellious kick to try and upend, and what do you have?

our last best hope…the grown up children might not wear paisley or stargaze-with-bongos any more, but they have been exposed to the embryonic western ‘enlightenment’, they spent their halcyon days with whitman and emerson in their backpacks, and as long as they could, they dreamt big.

the poor have so few voices, the digital revolution is still a generation away, (if we’re lucky,) it is rare to see great leaders coming up from their ranks, the whitefella media machine doesn’t find them sexy enough to promote unless they are blingy rappers or sports heeerose.

the rich are silent, all the way to the bank, they buy pols to to the tiresome job of lying to a spun public why 2+2 =3, and why though we’re in a ‘boom’, (gotta believe!!!), the crumbs are getting sparser, and the only thing that’s tricking down is due to incontinence…

woo woo, it’s the world cup…maybe britney with no panties….

largesse… the luxury of having enough time away from the plough for one’s children to get that precious ‘eddication’…

then what?

oh yeah, that’s right….blog!

participate in intelligent discussions, realtime, worldwide…

use whatever privilege we were born into to dis- and remantle the operating system, with a lot of help from mother nature to help prove points that should have been compulsory viewing 40 years ago, but were already so hairy to contemplate, it drove millions off screaming into the night, and what almost became a playful upending and recoding of the rules we live by, instead became what we see today, an oncoming pitched battle between the haves’ private armies, and their cousins behind the barrios.

but worldwide…

many times education strips us of conscience, as the sheer repetition of cultural superiority narratives condition us to conveniently overlook what society doesn’t feel good seeing in the mirror.

to recover one’s personal stake in group sanity entails looking hard at these myths, and so many here are helping me unwind them…

ORIGINAL EXCHANGE AT ET