#underclass

[aidentitycrysis]

It's only gotten worse. Bob Hoskins is a hero to the working class of London for a reason, he really tried to raise his voice on our behalf <3 Gentrification is a not strictly a modern problem! They've been screwing us like this for over 100 years! That's how it's gotten so bad. Learn your history, learn how they fucked over your grandparents and your great grandparents, you can learn how they're coming for you too!

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

It's also a good sign that you're the ruling overclass, not the underdogs.

[grits-galraisedinthesouth]

I'm old enough to remember when:

Senator Hillary Clinton campaigned against Senator Barack Obama for the DNC nomination & Hillary demanded that Obama produce his birth certificate (Obama refused). When DJT requested he produce the birth certificate, Michelle labeled him a dangerous "birther."

Michelle Obama introduced the newly elected Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, as "...my baby's daddy." When a talking head repeated Michelle's own words, she was labeled "racist."

Michelle Obama was disbarred from practicing law in the state of Illinois and yet was offered a 6 figure HR job at The University of Chicago Hospitals in a field (health care) for which she had previously ZERO experience. #escalators

Elites, thy real name is Hypocrisy!

8/24 MO accidentally said the quiet part outloud: The only way for her "elitist class" to thrive is when the other classes are drowning.

MO: We couldn't thrive "... if everyone around us WASN'T drowning" 🧐🤔

So true Michelle, without a permanent underclass, you elites cannot RULE the world.

Despite Biden & Kamala currently running the executive branch, Michelle and Barack Obama want HOPE to make a comeback. What does that even mean when your own party is robbing our country and its citizens of hope!?

The Obama's no longer reside in Chicago. They blew into the Windy City, nicely tanned from vacations on their private, prestine beaches at one of their many US oceanside mansions: Martha's Vineyard, California or Hawaii.

After all these years, their anger and bitterness towards any and everyone who chooses to ignore and oppose their wishes & commands remains palpable.

They cannot understand why Americans insist on thinking for ourselves. When Hillary was defeated, Michelle scolded female non-Hillary voters with this elitist message: "...you're the kind of woman that doesn't like the sound of your own voice."

They have amassed multiple millions of dollars, much of it laundered through book deals and Netflix, but they are not about to share that wealth. Instead, they prefer to purchase land and other big ticket luxury items, while citizens in Democrat run cities (Chicago, San Francisco, LA, Lansing, D.C., Baltimore, Minnesota, NYC, etc) are robbed and burned out of their neighborhoods.

Several news outlets preferred to advertise a salt and pepper looking Barack as opposed to the 2024 fully gray haired former POTUS. Why?

In 1988 Oprah told Donald Trump that his opinions sounded "Presidential" and asked if he’d ever run. He said, "Probably not" but that he’d likely win if he did because "Americans [were] tired of getting ripped off."

The Obama's lying bff NOprah had to join the party for the sake of "decency." Oprah who pimped out girls to Harvey Weinstein and covered up the Hollyweird casting coach culture is now advocating for a return to DNC level of "decency."

"Donald - I received the book excerpt. I have to tell you, your comments made me a little weepy. It's one thing to try and live a life of integrity - Still another to have people like yourself notice... Too bad we're not running for office; WHAT A TEAM!" -Oprah Winfrey Jan 11th 2000

[theauthorpaula]

(via Writing Diversity: Creating Working Class and Underclass Characters)

[lgbtlunaverse]

The world exists in such a baffling state of simultaneous sex-aversion and sex-hegemony. Every social platform on the internet is trying to banish sex workers to the shadow realm but I can't post a tweet without at least two bots replying P U S S Y I N B I O. People are self-censoring sex to seggs and $3× but every other ad you see is still filled with half-naked women. Rightwingers want queer people arrested for so much as existing in the same postal code as a child and are also drumming up a moral panic about how teenage boys aren't getting laid enough. I feel like I'm losing my mind.

[nicklloydnow]

“Violence, vulgarity, and educational failure: three aspects of modern English life that are so obvious and evident that it requires little observational power to discern them. Indeed, it requires far more mental effort and agility not to discern them, to screen them out of one's consciousness: the scenes in Blackpool, for example, being only slightly worse and more extreme than those to be seen in the center of every English town and city every Saturday night of the year.

It is worth examining the mental mechanisms that liberal intellectuals use to disguise the truth from themselves and others, and to ask why they do so.

First, there is outright denial. Increasing crime, for example, was long dismissed as a mere statistical artifact, before the sheer weight of the evidence overwhelmed the possibility of denial. It wasn't so much crime that was increasing, we were told, as people's willingness or ability to report it—via the spread of the telephone. As to educational failure, it was long denied by the production of statistics showing that more and more children were passing public examinations, a classic half-truth that omitted to say that these examinations had deliberately been made so easy that it was impossible to fail them (the concept of failure having been abolished), except by not turning up for them. But even the most liberal of university professors has now noticed that his students can't spell or punctuate.

Second, there is the tendentious historical comparison or precedent. Yes, it is admitted, violence and vulgarity are a large part of modern British life; but they always were. When English soccer fans ran amok in France during the European cup finals (the kind of behavior now universally expected of them), even the conservative Daily Telegraph ran an article to the effect that it was ever thus, and that Hanoverian England was a riotous, drunken era—thereby implying that there was nothing to be alarmed about. For some reason not fully explained, it is supposed to be a comfort—even a justification—that anti-social behavior has persisted unabated over hundreds of years. In the same way, intellectuals depict alarm over rising crime as unreasonable (and those who express it as lacking in historical knowledge), because it is not difficult to find historical epochs when crime was worse than it is now. I have even seen worry about a rising murder rate treated with mockery, because in medieval England it was very much higher than it is now. Thus historical comparison with a period hundreds of years ago is held up as more relevant than comparison with thirty or even ten years ago, as long as that comparison fosters an attitude of complacency towards undesirable social phenomena.

Third, once the facts are finally admitted under the duress of accumulated evidence, their moral significance is denied or perverted. Do children emerge from school as ignorant of facts as when they entered? Well, of course: this is because they are no longer taught by rote but instead are taught how to go about finding information for themselves. Their inability to write legibly in no way lessens their ability to express themselves but rather accentuates it. At least they have not been subjected to the learning of arbitrary rules. Vulgarity is liberty from unhealthy and psychologically deforming inhibition; it is merely the revival of popular bawdy, and those who oppose it are elitist killjoys. As to violence, any quantity of it can be explained away by reference to the "structural violence" of capitalist society.

A BBC television producer recently outlined the phases of liberal denial for me. His colleagues, he told me, regarded him as a maverick, a tilter at windmills, almost a madman. And what was his madness? He wanted the BBC to make unvarnished documentaries about life in the lower third of society: about the mass (and increasing) illiteracy, the mass (and increasing) illegitimacy and single parenthood, the mass (and increasing) hooliganism, violence, lawlessness, drug taking, welfare dependency, and hopelessness, so that the rest of the population might begin to take stock of what was happening on their very doorstep. And he wanted, in particular, to concentrate on the devastating effects of the fragmentation—no, the atomization—of the family that liberal legislation, social engineering, and cultural attitudes since the late 1950s have so powerfully promoted.

His BBC superiors greeted his proposals with condescension. First, they denied the facts. When he produced irrefutable evidence of their existence, they accused him of moral panic. When he proved that the phenomena to which the facts pointed were both serious and spreading rapidly up the social scale, they said that there was nothing that could be done about them, because they were an inevitable part of modern existence. When he said that they were the result of deliberate policy, they asked him whether he wanted to return to the bad old days when spouses who hated each other were forced to live together. And when he said that what had been done could be undone, at least in part, they produced their ace of trumps: the subject was not interesting, so there was no point in making programs about it. The British public would be left to sleepwalk its way undisturbed through the social disaster from which a fragile economic prosperity will certainly not protect it.

But why so insistent a denial of the obvious by the very class of people whose primary function, one might have supposed, was to be what the Russians called truth bearers?

The answer is to be sought in the causative relationship between the ideas that liberal intellectuals advocated and put into practice and every disastrous social development of the last four decades. They saw their society as being so unjust that nothing in it was worth preserving; and they thought that all human unhappiness arose from the arbitrary and artificial fetters that their society placed on the satisfaction of appetite. So dazzled were they by their vision of perfection that they could not see the possibility of deterioration.

And so if family life was less than blissful, with all its inevitable little prohibitions, frustrations, and hypocrisies, they called for the destruction of the family as an institution. The destigmatization of illegitimacy went hand in hand with easy divorce, the extension of marital rights to other forms of association between adults, and the removal of all the fiscal advantages of marriage. Marriage melted as snow in sunshine. The destruction of the family was, of course, an important component and consequence of sexual liberation, whose utopian program was to have increased the stock of innocent sensual pleasure, not least among the liberators themselves. It resulted instead in widespread violence consequent upon sexual insecurity and in the mass neglect of children, as people became ever more egotistical in their search for momentary pleasure.

If liberal intellectuals recalled their childhood experiences of education as less than an unalloyed joy, education had to become a form of childish entertainment: for who, in any case, were mere adults to impose their ideas on those equally sentient beings, their children? Were not grammar and arithmetic—indeed all disciplines—mere bourgeois (or, in America, racist) tools with which to maintain social hegemony? And self-respect being radically incompatible with failure, the very idea of failure itself had to go. The only way to achieve this was to do away with education altogether—an experiment that could be carried out in full only on that section of the population least concerned about education in the first place, thus creating a now hereditary caste of ineducables.

And if crime was a problem, it was only because an unjust society forced people into criminal activity, and therefore punishment constituted a double injustice, victimizing the real victim. By what right could an unjust society claim to impose its version of justice? Empathy and understanding were what was needed, provided they absolved the criminal of his responsibility. The creation of a universal disposition to do good, and not the creation of fear of the consequences of doing evil, was what was needed to extirpate crime. Not surprisingly, these were glad tidings to those tempted by the life of crime and demoralizing ones to those who upheld the law.

Every liberal prescription worsened the problem that it was ostensibly designed to solve. But every liberal intellectual had to deny that obvious consequence or lose his Weltanschauung: for what shall it profit an intellectual if he acknowledge a simple truth and lose his Weltanschauung? Let millions suffer so long as he can retain his sense of his own righteousness and moral superiority. Indeed, if millions suffer they are additional compassion fodder for him, and the more of their pain will he so generously feel.

And so the prescription is: more of the same. The Liberal Democrat Party, Britain's third party, which is dominated by the middle-class liberal intelligentsia and is gaining an unthinking popularity born of disillusionment with the government and of the patent incompetence of the official opposition, recently held its annual conference. And what were the most important proposals put forward there? The legal recognition of homosexual marriage and shorter prison sentences for criminals.

Nero was a committed firefighter by comparison.” - Theodore Dalrymple, ‘Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass’ (2001) [p. 251 - 256]

[visenyaism]

do you have any ideas about why so many students are struggling with literacy now? I know that illiteracy and reading comprehension have been issues for years and most americans read at like a 5th grade reading level but I’m curious why it seems to be worse now (pandemic? no child left behind?)

It is everything. There’s not one answer. I could talk about this forever so instead I set a five minute timer on my phone and wrote a list of as many of the many things that are causing this on a systemic level that I could think of:

It’s parents not reading with their kids (a privilege, but some parents have that privilege to be able to do this and don’t.)

It’s youtube from birth and never being bored.

It’s phasing out phonics for sight words (memorizing without understanding sounds or meaning) in elementary schools in the early aughts.

It’s defunding public libraries that do all the community and youth outreach.

It’s NCLB and mandating standardized tests which center reading short passages as opposed to longform texts so students don’t build up the endurance or comprehension skills.

It’s NCLB preventing schools from holding students back if they lack the literacy skills to move onto the next grade because they can’t be left behind so they’re passed on.

It’s the chronic underfunding of ESL and Special Ed programs for students who need extra literacy support.

It’s the cultural devaluing of the humanities in favor of stem and business because those make more money which leads to a lot of students to completely disregard reading and writing.

It’s the learning loss from covid.

It’s covid trauma manifesting in a lot of students as learned helplessness, or an inability to “figure things out” or push through adversity to complete challenging tasks independently, especially reading difficult texts.

It’s covid normalizing cheating and copying.

It’s increasing phone use.

It’s damage to attention span exacerbated by increased phone use that leaves you without an ability to sit and be bored ever without 2-3 forms of constant stimulation.

It’s shortform video becoming the predominant form of social media content as opposed to anything text-based.

It’s starting to also be generative AI.

It’s the book bans.

what did I miss.

[somerandomg33k]

I have a soreness pain in my feet. I feel it more so on work days that I walk a lot. I have PTO I could use. But if I do, I clock in less overtime that week. Less overtime means less take home pay. Means less money for me to give to my disabled friends in need. Meeting everyone basic needs of food, healthcare, shelter, transportation, education, entertainment, internet, electricity, heating, & water will improve everyone's health and mental health. But the leadership of our society don't want to do that. Capitalism requires there to be an underclass. Capitalism requires poverty to exist to be a threat to those who don't want work the terrible underpaid jobs. "Sure you can choose not to work. You can choose to live on the streets." Making a choice between living or dying is not much of a choice. It is coercion.

Capitalism is a coercive unjustifiable hierarchy.

I didn't choose the job I have. I have to have a job to pay rent. And life is terrible for those who can't work. My disabled friends can tell you.

[pauldouglaslovell]

The premise of my memoirs, is mostly about the effects abandonment has on children. How growing up without a mother, in a loveless environment, impacts both emotionally and financially. How the desire to be included, to be like all the rest was continuously scuppered, due to lack of funds. Though the protagonist would vehemently deny he cares. Exclusion steers his every thought. It hints at Paul’s secret shame and shares his hopes, dreams and tentative plans for the future.

[questionphings]

I base my value on my salary

I am worthless

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Wokal Distance

Published: Sep 24, 2024

One of the worst developments in our society is the rise of victim-hood culture. The issue is that victim-hood status has, for a number of reasons, accrued an unjustified level of currency in modern political and social discussions. You can see this easily in social and political discussions where some person will get up and say things which establish their victim-hood before they attempt to speak on an issue. Some examples might be:

“as a victim of wrongful prosecution,” “As a survivor of abuse” “as Jewish, trans, black women” “as someone who was victimized by crime”

Further, we are often told that we need to allow “victims” to be the ones leading the discussion on such things as crime, sexual abuse, racism, sexism, healthcare, gun violence, and a number of other topics that are too numerous to name. A clear example of this comes from Allison Randall, the Principle Deputy Director of the Office of Violence Against Women, who said “Empowering survivors to lead in addressing domestic violence, sexual assault, dating violence and stalking means creating spaces where their voices are central to shaping the solutions.”1

In our culture a person who is a victim is thought to have something approaching moral authority and pristine knowledge on the matters relating to the situation which caused their victim-hood. This leads to a situation in which a person is thought to have some sort of special insight with regard to how the problems occurs, and to have the moral wisdom to determine which solutions are acceptable, what sorts of intervention are sufficient, and what if any restitution is needed. The intuition guiding this seems to be that victims have a front row seat from which to see their own situation, and therefore have the best vantage point from which to determine what it is they need to recover from their awful circumstances. So we end up with a “victims know best” mentality which says victims know best why things happened to them, victims know best regarding what supports they need, and victims know best about what justice will look like. This gives the victim a place of prominence within the conversation that allows them to determine which sorts of solutions are taken up for consideration, and which solutions are taken to be “not enough.”

And this is where the trouble starts.

That “victims know best” is something that is asserted and never proven. We are never told exactly [why] we ought to think the victims know best about the cause of their victim-hood and how to prevent it from happening again. Many of the situations which lead to a person being a victim have causal antecedents that are extraordinarily complex and understanding the causes that lead to someone’s being victimized is extraordinarily difficult. It is simply not the case that being victimized means that one knows or understands all the causes that have lead to their victimization.

Here is a simple example that illustrates the point:

Through the 80’s and 90’s there were a number of people who were abused, robbed, beaten, murdered and defrauded by organized crime in New York City. These people surely deserve our sympathy, but it would be an enormous mistake to think those people are in a position to understand the factors that lead to the rise in violent organized crime in NYC. Questions like “why do young men join gangs,” “what is the internal incentive structure that allows the mafia to function,” and “how do very complicated money laundering schemes get carried out,” are not easily answered and that a person was the victim of organized crime does not put them in a position to properly answer those questions. If one wants to understand organized crime there is a whole host of social, cultural, economic, and legal factors that one needs to grasp before they can properly explain why organized crime has emerged in a particular way and taken a particular form in a given community. It is a mistake to think that on the basis of being a victim of mafia activity one has a full grasp on all the issues in play and therefore knows best how to respond to increasing mafia activity.

The second issue is closely related to the first. When a person is victimized often we think part of the injury they endure is a loss of agency and that part of the process of remediation is to return to that victim a sense of agency as a way to combat the feelings of helplessness that can accompany victim-hood. Giving the victim a say in the process of justice and in the process of determining the social and political response to the pathology that was the source of ones victimization is often thought to be a matter of justice insofar as it returns to the victim a sense of agency that was taken. We want victims to feel like they are no longer helpless and having to stand by and watch as things happen to them, so we give them a chance to actively participate in the response to the social ill in question. However, because victim-hood has such strong social currency people are very often much more deferential to the wishes of the victim than is justified. This may lead to attempts at remediation that adopt a course of action that the victim likes or suggests even when that course of action is counter-productive and unhelpful.

The third problem occurs when the first two problems are pointed out.

There tends to be a moral stigma around questioning the epistemic and moral authority of a victim with respect to the causes of their victim-hood, and there tends to be an equal strong stigma associated with refusing to follow the course of action that a victim would prefer. This leads to a situation where a victims’ knowledge and authority go unquestioned even when they step outside the scope of what they actually know and understand. For this reason victims are given far more influence when it comes to selecting solutions to social problems then they should actually receive. Put bluntly, there is a strong social incentive to not question a victims knowledge claims or their moral authority, and thus people with victim-hood status who may not actually understand all the social, cultural and economic issues in play around a given social problem are still able to get an outsized voice in determining how society responds to that social problem.

This can lead to a political strategy where cynical operators use the stigma surrounding the criticism of victims as a tactic to silence of discredit ones opponents. A bad-faith activists can use a victim-hood narrative to pre-empt any objections to the chosen course of action by getting a victim to endorse that course of action. Once a given solution has been endorsed by a victim, any objection to that course of action can be used as evidence that the objector is heartless, cruel, and is “blaming the victim.”

Needless to say, this doesn’t help anyone.

There are a large number of difficult social problems that need solving, and they are not going to be solved by simply outsourcing the solution to the victims of those social problems. That one is that victim of a social pathology does not mean that one has insight into the cause or solutions to that social pathology. Lots of social problems are intractable, and more often than not the best response to those social problems involves trade-offs rather than solutions. As much as it might appeal to our sense of justice to “let victims lead” there is often no justification for doing so. While it is important to give voice to the effects of injustice and to allow a victim to explain how they have been impacted by various social pathologies, it does not follow from this principle that victims have the moral authority and knowledge required to determine the best course of action in response to those questions.

I have no problem with victims being given an opportunity to tell their stories and to advocate for social change; it is important to hear from people who have been harmed by various social pathologies. The problem occurs when the victim-hood status of a person is elevated to the point that it has the effect of stopping or shutting down debate, or results in cynical actors using their victim-hood status as a way of putting on trial the empathy of people who disagree with a victims proposed solutions. Using victim-hood as a shield for bad ideas, as a method of shutting down debates, or as a tool for creating a social stigma around objecting to the particular solutions preferred by victims is a great way to make sure problems go unsolved.

Sincerely,

Wokal_distance.

==

It's reliably the case that those who live in western countries while claiming to be oppressed victims are in reality the privileged members of the ruling class.

This is easily demonstrated. Is a false accusation of "bigotry" levelled by someone of the purported "oppressed" class at someone of the purported "oppressor" class more damaging to the accused or the accuser? Can the "oppressed" trivially destroy the "oppressor" with a false accusation of "bigotry"? Or simply expect that they can do so (and outraged if it doesn't work)? Can the "oppressor" do the same to destroy the "oppressed"? Would an accusation by the "oppressor" even be taken seriously, or are the "oppressed" given the authority to simply declare such a phenomenon to be completely non-existent?

You can't claim to be "oppressed" while holding societal and cultural - we might even call it systemic - power to destroy those you claim to "oppress" you, demonize them with impunity or tell them to sit down and shut up. That makes you part of the power-wielding overclass, not a beleaguered underclass. If you were actually "oppressed," your "oppressors" would be silencing you, not the other way around.

Remind me; how does that "prejudice + power" arithmetic go again?

We're supposed to pretend this obviously isn't the case, yet we all know it is.

[talkingpictures2020]

Glenn Sloggett Damaged Goods

Glenn Sloggett has built a unique and insightful body of work documenting the parts of the city no-one wants to think about: the streets of the suburban underclass. As an artist, he is drawn to the dysfunctional and the dispossessed, and, in particular, to the last glimmers of dogged hope that linger amid the ashes of the most dismal situation. He frames and celebrates the things we would rather turn away from. There is no nostalgia here, just the forward plod of life without expectations. Here, beauty lies not in the roses (which are diseased) or the wedding dress (which is cast off) or the Pavlova (which is NQR: not quite right), but in the tenacity of an underclass who keep going while their world is crumbling around them. And at the end, there is a pink hearse that promises ‘BUDGET BURIALS – Cheaper & Deeper!!’

Glenn Sloggett discusses his approach to life and photography at Talking Pictures.

[rjptalk]

LOSING OURSELVES

We had lofty pretensions when we created the United States. Despite that, we had lunch with the devil and included slavery to soothe the south and more than a little to also soothe the north. The importation and sale of human beings was a big money-maker. “All men are created equal” was the most ironic comment ever written into a declaration and constitution. Battle of Lexington & Concord –…

[bakaity-poetry]

The Invention of the ‘Underclass’: A Study in the Politics of Knowledge"

[thepoemeater-blog]

“Let him stay out there a hundred nights,                                                with his thin blanket and his cold armor and his                                                              useless sword, until he understands exactly how  the glory of the protagonist is always paid for                                         by a lot of minor characters.

In the morning he will wake and gallop back to safety; he will hear his name embroidered into                                                    toasts and songs.

But now he knows                there is a country he had not accounted for,                                        and that country has its citizens: 

the one-armed baker sweeping out his shop at 4am;

the prisoner sweating in his narrow cell;

and that woman in the nursing home,                                        who has worked there for a thousand years, 

taking away the bedpans, lifting up and wiping off the soft heroic buttocks of Odysseus.”

–– Tony Hoagland, from “The Hero’s Journey,” Application for Release from the Dream