It reminds her of slavery. Melissa Harris-Perry keeps a picture of slaves working in a cotton field to remind her what hard work really means.
She makes a thoughtful point.
A very fine point from a pinched perspective through polarized sunglasses peeking through leveler window slats while wearing horse blinders and holding a toilet paper tube up to one eye with a kaleidoscope extender and a prism taped on the end, the other eye pinched shut. But a point.
Harris-Perry told a Republican Latino to be careful using the term when he spoke about Paul Ryan. She presumed to lay out precise terms Republicans can and cannot say and why that is so delivering the customary critical race theories with added sexist positioning.
Crackpot. I think something rude and dismissive and move on.
But no, conservative people find this interesting. They actually respond. And boy, do they. Thoughtfully so. More thought than it is worth, actually but nonetheless thoughtful. Mike Rowe delivers an excellent rebuttal, unfortunately published on FaceBook. I'll summarize so you don't have to click over there.
He displays a photo of his face leaning on wall next to another photo of himself scrubbing a horrible toilet.
No longer a limit to what people can be offended by.
She's put off that hard work is linked with success. And that hard workers are not so successful as Paul Ryan. There is inequality between hard work and realized success introducing the term "relative privilege" and then introducing unfairness in sexes and hard work using an example of woman without healthcare.
She says we call them failures
She says we call call them sucking from the system.
Mike Rowe responds that Harris-Perry having pictures of slaves to remind her what hard work really looks like is the same thing as hanging pictures of rape and bondage to remind one of the true nature of human sexuality looks like.
Rowe thinks a few things are glaringly obvious to anyone other than a Wake Forest professor type so he must back up and point out a few fundamentals.
There is a difference between regular hard work and forced labor. There is a big difference between modern options available and concomitant choices made regarding career paths, marriage and divorce, child bearing and family rearing, contrasted with what went on back then in history.
Conflating hard work and forced labor minimizes the importance of decent work ethic while diminishing the horror of slavery. And we do this all the time with phrases like "my boss sure is a slave driver" and my paycheck is a "slave's waves." Melissa comes corkscrewing in from the back side of things by seeing certain hard workers not prospering as other hard workers so be "super careful" about overly-praising hard work.
"Relative privilege" is a way of recognizing life is unfair. The term prepares unsuspecting viewers for the suggestion that slavery is proof that hard work doesn't pay.
His response receives its own mostly positive responses but FaceBook being Facebook there will be some expected uncomprehending. One commenter writes, "I don't see where Melissa Harris mentions anything about slavery. So Rowe's whole explanation is based on something Harris didn't say."
I have to get off FB and delete its tracking cookies.
Michelle Malkin also writes only in academia is the color-coding of one's work ethic seen as the apex of progressive enlightenment, while gender weighted too.
The center of Michelle's position is a recent trip she took to College of Ozarks, Hard Work U. It's founder, James Forsyth, received inspiration from a young boy who told him he had to drop out of school due to poor finances. Forsyth founded a private Christian four-year school for economically disadvantaged. 90% of students demonstrate financial need. All are required to work for the campus group or institution. The college carries no institutional debt and codifies debt avoidance into its character education. Michelle counters white privilege is a cynical construct of liberal elites dependent on grievance narratives to stoke controversy. She says she saw kids doing all kind of slave-labor-y things all over the college, mowing lawns, making beds, sweeping floors, washing dishes. Many are first in their family to attend college. And during that trip and making these observations it never occurred to Michelle Malkin to rank the industriousness of hard-working young people all around her by race.
54 comments:
"A very fine point from a pinched perspective through polarized sunglasses peeking through leveler window slats while wearing horse blinders and holding a toilet paper tube up to one eye with a kaleidoscope extender and a prism taped on the end, the other eye pinched shut. But a point."
LOL
Perry saying this reminds me of the time Timothy Noah said on Blogginheads (before Obama was elected the first time) that it was racist to comment on Obama's thinness. I could never take him seriously after that.
Our whole family landed on Wake Island for a few hours. It is a remarkably un memorable experience, nevertheless I remember the whole thing. Not a place for kids. Nothing of real and immediate interest. One inch of water elevation and the whole island will disappear under the waves (possible exaggeration of 5,000%). I don't even know why it's there. Why the base is there. It's a strategic dot. Jet planes land there to catch their breath. Blue footed booby birds come in for amusingly disastrous landings and lay eggs there. Nothing around to make decent nests.
The most boring tour ever. Rock fever in ten minutes. The most interesting thing is a boat a guy made from scrap steel. Wow, he said the fishing is world class because AF doesn't allow commercial anywhere around. Ain't that a bitch?
Come on, booby birds, wake island. Oops sorry, that was Galapagos island. My mistake. Got mixed up there.
To compensate for lack of blue footed booby birds, here's a Gulfstream 4 landing on Wake Island and you see the shape of the place is weird, like a horseshoe tossed into the Pacific.
Slaves only worked as hard as was absolutely necessary as long as somebody was looking.
The guy working for money and advancement will always work harder.
God Bless Mike Rowe. What a national treasure he's become, really.
Chip, I wish you'd tag this with the Mike Rowe tag so that it could join the others.
I have to get off FB and delete its tracking cookies.
Using Facebook just enables and enriches Mark Zuckerberg.
He has brilliant sentence that I missed the second time reviewing it. He said, "there is no honor to the work of slavery." Something like that, something along the lines of finding dignity in the work impossible, that is what Harris is missing. Her picture of slaves as reminder is a constant scratching at resentment, not an understanding of work as work is understood today.
I felt like a slave held captive in a system unfair to me with shifting rewards.
And the roots of my resentment are worse now than then, I can see people feeling that way. They student who flipped out about mac and cheese with bacon and jalapeño for instance (that still sounds good). He is trapped as a slave is trapped in a system, one that has him by his cajones, held in bondage to unimaginable debt before even starting off with his career. In bondage also to a system enforcing good manners about the whole thing. "And you will behave pleasantly while putting yourself in debt up to your eyeballs for decades for the opportunity to participate. That's slavery. The option, not participating, dropping out. No fair. It's hard work. No relative ease, not special entitlements. No help from his sex. No unique opportunity. Slavery. Tossed in jail for drinking and rudeness, literally prisoner.
Tagged.
I think by "hard work" connies mean work that doesn't pay nearly enough to get someone ahead in any way economically, despite being physically, mentally, or morally debilitating. Either that, or it's a political reference to a Mohs scale rating of the member entering the ass of that person.
At some point, I think Chip's incoherent manifestos will have to undergo some editing. A political faction that thinks in short sound-bites needs equally short rants. If they can't fit on the side of a highway overpass, they need to be redacted. Entire paragraphs require the editorial kill switch. Someone will go old and sprout a gray beard before they finish with his thoughts, which probably explains the feeble state of their support and their supporters. Constipated assholes produce quicker, more succinct and more labor intensive finishes than Chip's posts do. But the pain they endure and the points tortuously edging their way out of them provide similar experiences in the meantime.
Rhythm and Balls said...
I think by "hard work" connies mean work that doesn't pay nearly enough to get someone ahead in any way economically, despite being physically, mentally, or morally debilitating. Either that, or it's a political reference to a Mohs scale rating of the member entering the ass of that person.
Ritmo, ever the lurker, tries to be funny and again goes down in flames.
PS "connies"? Apparently, all the hard work of hipsters have gone for naught and "cons" hasn't caught on as derogatory for Conservatives.
So Ritmo goes for something that sounds rather, (dare I say?) homophobic?
I did hard physical work my whole life. I never complained about it. Hard work sets you free.
Very funny, Allen.
I too have worked hard my whole life, but I do complain about it.
Did. Back then when I worked. full time.
So much of that slavery was put on me, volunteered me, by others. I resented people assuming my contribution to work. It just pisses me off. So much of the umbrage originated from being male, young and athletic and healthy and not realizing what a tremendous commodity that is for everyone else who isn't all that at once. Removing just one of those things creates a vacuum. Now that I'm not such I realize, those creatures are rare. And I am mightily impressed with the gents who jump right in the hard thing because they know all that or sense it and appreciate it themselves without complaining as I did. That impresses me. They just gleefully and joyfully jump right in and do the hard thing. Be the hero of every little story. The guy called on to do the hardest thing, because they are guys. who are young, strong and healthy.
When I see young guys jump in and do the hard thing I am mightily impressed because I was not like that. Pick somebody else. Don't you have somebody else who can do that? That was my attitude. And when it was assumed that I am the guy who does the thing because of all the elements mentioned, then I'd get pissed off. Nobody bothers anymore. Now it's more, "you go stand over there. " and "I'll let you off at the front and park the car."
Hard work sets you free.
Sure does, until I need some more money.
I was drafted into the Army. I never complained about that, either. Made a little over $1,600 in 1967 while in the Army. But, hey, free food, free lodging, free clothing, free gun, free bullets, free exotic hand grenades. There was a lot of free shit, man.
Hard physical labor makes beer taste better.
Harris Perry Harris should write a handbook for whitey.
Whitey's PC handbook of words and phrases that are off-limits and racist
*updated weekly.
FU-Balls. What has obamacare done to our economy? Wrecked it. Made it worse. Removed free markets and replaced it with crony capitalism. How many millions out of work under YOUR prez? How many democrats are rich now? Debbie Wasserman Schultz has a new summer home in New Hampshire. Cool! Your preferred policies wreck lives, industry, small business. Your preferred polices get people on welfare or on the hunger games bureaucratic gov pension cog that is wrecking our nation one community at a time. all while infrastructure crumbles and your party wants to shake us down for loose change.
Shorter R&B: "Arby's Makes Fries."
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
If you need a photo of slaves to remind you what hard work is, then maybe you should just try it once. Hillary keeps a photo of the Three Stooges to remind her of what fun is.
I don't know anyone who is better off because of Obamacare, and I buy insurance for about 100 people, which has doubled in price and greatly diminished in quality over the last 3 years, after being stable with single digit increases for many years before that. It's a scam sold on lies, and pushed through by brute partisan force combined with abandonment of respect for legislative custom or the American people.
The historical record shows that people were willing to sell themselves and their children into slavery in order to get a meal. There are worse fates than slavery.....,There was quite a lot of starvation in Ireland in the 19th century and in the Soviet Union and China in the 20th century. Blacks may have been on the bottom of the American totem pole, but the bottom of the American totem pole was actually pretty comfortably situated........,,American blacks have some legitimate complaints but they are far, far from the most oppressed people in the history of the world.
The other day Obama actually said that he wouldn't accept anything on party line vote. (GOP party line vote)
Democrat fascist party line vote is still A-OK.
FU-Balls. What has obamacare done to our economy? Wrecked it. Made it worse.
Hilarious. So at which point during the Republicanism Induction Ceremony do they wave those fancy devices in front of your face and erase all memory of the year 2008?
I don't know anyone who is better off because of Obamacare...
That's because you made a conscious effort to not know and pretend away the existence of the 50,000,000 who lacked insurance altogether before it.
And you continue to endorse no productive proposals for improving it, despite all his invitations to entertain suggestions for doing so.
And that's because to you, not being insured is not a problem.
So you have no serious contribution to make, and then whine about not being given any input into fixing it.
Why do you even bother complaining about something you don't want to do anything helpful about? Is that how your company is run? Everyone getting the chance to scrap every imperfect operation just because they're unhappy that it replaced something worse?
Again, the mindset of people not fit to lead or even fit to choose the country's leaders.
What do they wave in Ritmo's face to erase the memories of '10 and '14?
And how does he get past the idea little Barry can't win without vote fraud?
It takes a very special, Republicanist brand of brainwashing to believe that higher uninsurance rates help improve the economy.
These are the people who put band-aids on gaping wounds and say "all better."
They only fixes they understand are cosmetic fixes.
They are political cosmetic surgeons. If you want an idea of what it is they actually do for the country (besides NOT running it and bashing the jobs they get hired for) then take a close look at Michael Jackson's face or a Real Housewife's tits.
Or Caitlyn Jenner.
They are political equivalents of what Republicans do to the country.
Again, there goes ed - proving for everyone that not having any responsibilities in life will make you willing to say anything.
He is like the GOP candidates. Don't want the jobs they're running for and don't want to take any responsibility for what they'd say to get them.
Ed, you have a great debate tactic. And one that I can't defeat: The ability to say and believe anything. And a hatred for taking responsibility for it.
Just do yourself a favor and stick with the few remaining responsibilities in life that you do have -- whatever those are.
Let's start with something that actually has some substance.
So what are you saying, ed? That 2010 - 2014 is the time period over which you lost your own job?
Remember, the personal isn't always political. Some things aren't part of a wider problem.
Do you honestly think me or Obama caused your situation?
I guess this is the part of personal responsibility that Republicans really don't actually believe in.
It takes a very special brand of arrogant foolishness to believe that a bunch of mostly young and inexperienced congressional aids working with hundreds of others all with their own agendas could write thousands of pages of law that a bunch of lazy congress people interested only in their own reelection would vote on without ever reading it,and it would end up being something that would manage 1'6th of the American economy without enormous graft, corruption and incompetence ruling the entire thing. That is just a batshit crazy level of head-in-the-sand leftist fantasy. Now, of course, the infrastructure is a shambles of failed websites, bankrupted government insurance exchanges and billions lost into the either.
Of course we have the payoff of a few million people now insured with policies that they still can't afford to use, and can't get a doctor to access. They actually have less access to actual heathcare, since the emergency rooms and clinics they used to use are now even more overcrowded than they were before with people looking for their free cheese.
The supposed "benefit" received for this immense mess could have been purchased at a fraction of the cost by just buying the uninsured a policy. Then we actually could have kept our insurance and our doctors as was promised and lied about.
You might get the idea that getting people insured wasn't actually the objective after all. That's the generous assumption. The embarrassing one is that people actually believed they were going to accomplish what they said they were doing, which was incredibly stupid, but not as dumb as still thinking they did.
"50,000,000" This number seems to be as prone to inflation as the runaway costs. Are sure it wasn't 5,000,000,000,000,000,000?
I don't think I ever really see you this angry, Bags. I'll skip the malarkey and just note that you still haven't come around to accepting that:
1. The uninsurance rate was embarrassingly high.
2. It's come down substantially.
3. No Republican seems to care.
Some of the complaints I can actually manage to read through your fog of bitching, seems to boil down to decreased access - as if overuse of negligibly effective access was never a problem. I'm supposed to believe you really care about crowded EDs? Build a new ED! Opportunity, man.
But no one believes anyone any more who imaginatively carves out the quality/access/cost problems from the uninsurance problem. No one. And no one believes that some phony baloney layman's "perception" of quality access is an informed one. You live in California. They perceive that crystals have curative powers. A cynic might say an employer out there could send his workers to one of them or someone to re-align his chakras if lay opinion of healthcare access was the entire point.
"And you continue to endorse no productive proposals for improving it,"
There have been tons of suggestions about improving it, and the most effective would be getting government out of it, but that's not gonna happen when people think that doing anything is always better than nothing.
The truth is that "better than nothing is a high standard". If you ever ran and managed anything other than your sock drawer, you would realize this is an indispensable wisdom, and gets more true the more complex the system. If you do need to do something, you don't get inexperienced incompetents with personal agendas and their hands in the cookie jar to do it, and then just close your eyes and hope they got it right for millions of free people,in the most personal and important aspects of their lives. The arrogance of that is appalling.
"50,000,000" This number seems to be as prone to inflation as the runaway costs. Are sure it wasn't 5,000,000,000,000,000,000?
I guess that unlike you, I notice a difference between factors of 11. But then, you're the one who keeps wondering why that "serious point you had to make" wasn't being taken seriously.
There have been tons of suggestions about improving it, and the most effective would be getting government out of it, but that's not gonna happen when people think that doing anything is always better than nothing.
That's:
1. Not specific (again illustrating what you don't know)
2. Not realistic
3. No different from telling Californians that going to faith healers (doing anything) is as effective as "doing... nothing."
The arrogance of that is appalling.
As arrogant as getting angry over the likelihood that someone out there might actually know more than you know about something?
I have a hundred employees and their families, my friends, my family, I know dozens of business people with thousands of employees that they have to manage healthcare for, and I talk regularly with insurance professionals. Everyone, and I mean everyone, knows it's a mess. At least everyone who actually has to deal with it rather than cheerlead for it, because they can't admit they were wrong, got lied to, and that the critics were right .
I have a hundred employees and their families, my friends, my family, I know dozens of business people with thousands of employees that they have to manage healthcare for, and I talk regularly with insurance professionals. Everyone, and I mean everyone, knows it's a mess. At least everyone who actually has to deal with it rather than cheerlead for it, because they can't admit they were wrong, got lied to, and that the critics were right .
Again, for you this always comes down to, "Pretend the uninsured don't exist, and the problems magically go away." I don't think so.
My parents are both self-employed and lost untold income in the form of disastrously inflating premiums year-to-year through the nineties and aughts. Premiums that eventually surpassed a thousand dollars a month. They now continue working and staving off financial ruin in old age courtesy of Medicare. Go tell them what your private sector "fix" is for that one, or which knowledgeable, well-intentioned insurance "critic" is going to explain, lobby for and implement it - because we know that the party you love to pretend you belong to has no shortage of those, either.
We already had a system for people like your parents. It was expensive because of government mandates, and reduced competition due to regulation, and of course health care is just an expensive item, which is all the more reason to not do it in such a wasteful, incompetent, and unfocused way.
You don't overhaul 1/6th of the economy to solve a problem for a few, unless you are actually trying to do something else. How does blowing billions of dollars on websites and bankrupt exchanges, while reducing the number of doctors help your parents. This was an enormously wasteful solution that created far more problems than it solved, and very importantly in a democracy, it was knowingly fraudulently sold, as well as carelessly and undemocratically enacted. Even if it was a success, which it clearly is not, it still was not the right way to do something in this nation. So that makes it pretty much an embarrassment.
It reminds me of mafia guys bragging about how they help the community that they rob and terrorize by helping some old lady with her bills.
It's a question for the old lady and her family that was helped by the local Don: Do you care how much other people are hurt by the people who helped you? Do you think it's worth it?
When I was packed off to a parochial private boarding school (co-ed thank gawd) by my parents, at age 13, because I was rapidly becoming what was then called a "hoodlum" (they were right, I was...) this line resonates, because all of us there had to do those things & more: ...kids doing all kind of slave-labor-y things all over the college, mowing lawns, making beds, sweeping floors, washing dishes. And that was just high school. Got me off the block and I screwed up and actually learned something. Surprise. Surprise.
Rhythm and Balls wrote:
1. The uninsurance rate was embarrassingly high.
For every uninsured now insured there is another uninsured thanks to Obama's open borders immigration policy. This is intentional. This is called Cloward -Piven.
Fifty million is only "a few" to someone who would confuse that number with five quintillion. And it's absurd to talk about 1/6th of the economy with someone who presistently writes off 1/6th of the U.S. population.
The "system" you spoke of did not and does not exist. It was called being at the mercy of the insurance companies. You don't know about that, just like I don't purchase insurance for your employees. But the difference between me and you is that unlike you, I don't claim that your insurance purchases or your employees don't exist. You OTOH pretend that the uninsured or exorbitant premiums for the self-insured didn't (and don't) exist.
So I'll continue to give your examples just as much consideration as you do mine: None.
That gets no one anywhere - including your own employees. But since you seem to like things that way, there's no reason why anyone needs to listen to your complaining about it.
It's a question for the old lady and her family that was helped by the local Don: Do you care how much other people are hurt by the people who helped you? Do you think it's worth it?
Exactly. You don't care how much the uninsured were hurt by your preference for the previous regime, so there's no reason why people helped by the current regime should care about you. It's you deciding not to give an inch to others and then whining about how they don't care about you when you amply demonstrate how little you care for attending to the needs of both.
When you want to make things a zero-sum game you can't whine about when it's your turn to get bopped. That's basic ethics. The golden rule. Things your parents might have taught you if they'd actually cared. If you want something better than the law of the jungle then you're going to have to show that you care to get to a better way of doing things. But you don't. You only care about yourself. Good luck.
5O Million is a bullshit number, and whatever the number is, everyone else (many times the number) were hurt by whatever benefit the much smaller number got. More importantly, the benefit cost 10 times what it should have in wasted and stolen money. The main beneficiaries are not who you imagine they are. Those people you want to help could have been helped better for far less, but that was never really the objective. The mafia ain't gonna take care of the old lady for nothing, and they can always count on their occasional handouts convincing people to overlook the bigger damage they do to the neighborhood.
I'm sorry to drag the mafia through the mud, by comparing it to the corruptocrats who pulled this fraud. The mafia robs far fewer people.
You don't have a citation for any number. You haven't even provided a number. Regardless, whatever the number is, and it is great (and affected a number of self-employed small business-owners), you don't care about them - DESPITE you wanting them to care about YOU. Keep fucking that chicken. You hate the uninsured, only care about your underinsured or expensively insured (but not about others who had high or unaffordable premiums), and the rest is commentary. You don't care about people who have less than you or yours but you want everyone else to care about you or yours instead. It's not going to work and is the height of moral corruption. You are as arrogant as you are selfish and don't have the brains to see why. Go fix your own company's "problem" if you're so smart. You believe those less fortunate should help themselves. So go help your own self and STFU leave everyone else alone.
Bag wants the ER doc to stop attending to the amputee so that he can get his own minor bedsore looked at instead. Amazing.
He has a disease called, "Why can't you see that I'm more important than everyone else?!" and it is terminal.
Best prescription: Social amputation. Excommunication.
Like the tail excised from a distressed lizard, it will writhe and flail from excess neurological activity for a few moments.
But then it will go quiet and die. And the body of the creature will survive. And in that survival, it will live to grow a new tail one day.
Bye-bye, Bag o' Discarded Lizard Tails.
Keep humping that chicken that tells you that whatever it cost or whoever it hurts, it's worth it. I suppose that's why the number keeps growing. The costs and foolishness of Obamacare keeps growing more everyday, so the number it supposedly helped has to grow too to justify it. While there is no end to the rising Obamacare costs, there are only so many humans on earth. Soon I suppose we will start including the future people it might help on the Mars colony.
Eventually the admission will be made that we had to destroy health care to save it.
"You don't have a citation for any number."
That's hilarious. How's this for a citation of fact from the government: "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor". Or "The average premium will be reduced by $2500".
Would you like me to get a number from the internet, or maybe a government study, or one of those "peer reviewed" studies that we now know are rarely reviewed at all, and are often complete fabrication, yet are used everywhere to justify anything you want.
Do you even know how often you have been totally snowed by "facts"?
He's a helpful hint: If the study tells you what you want to hear, you need to be extra suspicious.
Have you noticed how every fraud perpetrated - like every single one advertised on late night TV - all have one central thing? They all have "studies that show, bla,bla,bla".
You were totally down with that Pelosism "We have to pass it to see what's in it."
You were willing to accept that, weren't you? So don't tell me about data and facts. They were entirely irrelevant to people pushing this crapfest on us.
You don't get it. You still think that only the groups you claim to care about exist or matter.
Admit that.
There's no discussion to be had with someone whose bad faith extends to refusing to admit that he doesn't care about the problem or acknowledging who it extends to.
Disputing the rate of the pre-ACA uninsured is on the level of tinfoil had bubble thinking - which is beside the point because no matter how many there are or were, you refuse to acknowledge their existence let alone their plight. There's just no discussion to be had.
You are as bad as Donald Trump. Worse, even. At least he's able to admit that other problems besides his own exist. It seems you can't even do that. But you are just as narcissistic with your own blind spots.
How would an orange comb-over wig go with that 'stache and glasses?
You were totally down with that Pelosism "We have to pass it to see what's in it."
More bad faith accusations.
Boy, it must really suck to work for/with someone as willing to lie as you are.
I rest my case. And I bid you good day.
I SAID GOOD DAY!
Happy Halloween!
Me and my wiccan princess are taking an Uber to Hollywood tonight to be one with the weirdotariot. In the spirit of Trump and all of us evil capitalists, I will be Lucifer. You can call me Lucy.
Crony capitalism is the evil capitalism. Privatize the gains and socialize the losses!
"Crony capitalism is the evil capitalism. Privatize the gains and socialize the losses!"
Wait a second. I thought you were arguing FOR Obamacare.
I thought you were arguing FOR special treatment over others.
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