Britain's Ruling Elite

[SWP's back]

Re: Britains Ruling Elite

Now get your dicks back out and wave em about again

It was alleged earlier that this might present, erm, a little difficulty.

It was baseless :-)

 

[dronefromsector7g]

Re: Britains Ruling Elite

Now get your dicks back out and wave em about again

It was alleged earlier that this might present, erm, a little difficulty.

wrong thread - that was the Frank Maloney one.



I'm sorry.

 

[sir baconface]

Re: Britains Ruling Elite

Now get your dicks back out and wave em about again

It was alleged earlier that this might present, erm, a little difficulty.

It was baseless :-)

I had no doubts, mate. Sorry to, erm, bring it up. ;)

 

[SWP's back]

Re: Britains Ruling Elite

Stop answering my posts then if you don't care less.

I do care less.

You and TMQ are miles apart on what really matters. It isn't rocket science. I just happen to feel more comfortable with TMQ's take on things.
As someone said earlier, you need to learn a little humility.

In your opinion of course. I'm happy with with how I am, there are many things I think you need to learn but I don't go into it.

I just don't project my short comings on things I can't control, such as the family or region I was born into is all which is the point of this thread.

Only on Bluemoon would someone be castigated for stating that application and talent is all you need to succeed. You've already agreed that it is given how successful the rest of your family appear to sound. Remember that was the point TMQ disagreed with when he stated I knew fuck all about the real world.

 

[mackenzie]

Re: Britains Ruling Elite

I do care less.

You and TMQ are miles apart on what really matters. It isn't rocket science. I just happen to feel more comfortable with TMQ's take on things.
As someone said earlier, you need to learn a little humility.

In your opinion of course. I'm happy with with how I am, there are many things I think you need to learn but I don't go into it.

I just don't project my short comings on things I can't control, such as the family or region I was born into is all which is the point of this thread.

Only on Bluemoon would someone be castigated for stating that application and talent is all you need to succeed. You've already agreed that it is given how successful the rest of your family appear to sound. Remember that was the point TMQ disagreed with when he stated I knew fuck all about the real world.

I think your stance about welfare recipients was naive to say the least. And it isn't good to gloat about how much you earn, the view from your window or whatever when people are really struggling with bills to pay for utilities and such like. Do you realise the hardship (and I mean real hardship) that people are going through?
You do yourself no favours with stuff like that. I'm not expecting you to apologise but I do wish you would stop being such a smug git.

 

[Bill Walker]

Re: Britains Ruling Elite

This thread brings to mind the old adage about knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Brings to mind the fact that so many like to complain about others rather than put in the work to better their own lot.

But I guess that's what one should expect on a Mancunian based left leaning forum.

I think its a bit low to take the piss out of someone who owns an old Astra, its possible to love an old cheap car more than a shiny Lexus.............I think your up your own arse a bit, success in life isnt measured purely by money, I have held good professional jobs but my hobby as a musician has led me to meet many more interesting people who have very little (usually by choice), they are simply not materialistic.
Everyone is different, you have to live and let live (not condemn)

 

[ChicagoBlue]

Re: Britains Ruling Elite

I thought the current debate might be able to use this contextual piece from today's New York Times....

NY Times, August 9, 2014

Is a Hard Life Inherited?

By NICHOLAS KRISTOF

YAMHILL, Ore. — ONE delusion common among America’s successful people is that they triumphed just because of hard work and intelligence.

In fact, their big break came when they were conceived in middle-class American families who loved them, read them stories, and nurtured them with Little League sports, library cards and music lessons. They were programmed for success by the time they were zygotes.

Yet many are oblivious of their own advantages, and of other people’s disadvantages. The result is a meanspiritedness in the political world or, at best, a lack of empathy toward those struggling — partly explaining the hostility to state expansion of Medicaid, to long-term unemployment benefits, or to raising the minimum wage to keep up with inflation.

This has been on my mind because I’ve been visiting my hometown of Yamhill, Ore., a farming community that’s a window into the national crisis facing working-class men.

I love this little town, but the news is somber — and so different from the world I now inhabit in a middle-class suburb. A neighbor here just died of a heroin overdose; a friend was beaten up last night by her boyfriend; another friend got into a fistfight with his dad; a few more young men have disappeared into the maw of prison.

One of my friends here, Rick Goff, 64, lean with a lined and weathered face and a short pigtail (maybe looking a bit like Willie Nelson), is representative of the travails of working-class America. Rick is immensely bright, and I suspect he could have been a lawyer, artist or university professor if his life had gotten off to a different start. But he grew up in a ramshackle home in a mire of disadvantage, and when he was 5 years old, his mom choked on a piece of bacon, staggered out to the yard and dropped dead.

“My dad just started walking down the driveway and kept walking,” Rick remembers.

His three siblings and he were raised by a grandmother, but money was tight. The children held jobs, churned the family cow’s milk into butter, and survived on what they could hunt and fish, without much regard for laws against poaching.

Despite having a first-class mind, Rick was fidgety and bored in school. “They said I was an overactive child,” he recalls. “Now they have name for it, A.D.H.D.”

A teacher or mentor could have made a positive difference with the right effort. Instead, when Rick was in the eighth grade, the principal decided to teach him that truancy was unacceptable — by suspending him from school for six months.

“I was thinking I get to go fishing, hang out in the woods,” he says. “That’s when I kind of figured out the system didn’t work.”

In the 10th grade, Rick dropped out of school and began working in lumber mills and auto shops to make ends meet. He said his girlfriend skipped town and left him with a 2-year-old daughter and a 4-year-old son to raise on his own.

Rick acknowledges his vices and accepts responsibility for plenty of mistakes: He smoked, drank too much for a time and abused drugs. He sometimes hung out with shady people, and he says he has been arrested about 30 times but never convicted of a felony. Some of his arrests were for trying to help other people, especially to protect women, by using his fists against bullies.

In that respect, Rick can actually be quite endearing. For instance, he vows that if anyone messes with my mother, he’ll kill that person.

A generation or two ago, Rick might have ended up with a stable family and in a well-paid union job, creating incentives for prudent behavior. Those jobs have evaporated, sometimes creating a vortex of hopelessness that leads to poor choices and becomes self-fulfilling.

There has been considerable progress in material standards over the decades. When I was a kid, there were still occasional neighbors living in shacks without electricity or plumbing, and that’s no longer the case. But the drug, incarceration, job and family instability problems seem worse.

Rick survives on disability (his hand was mashed in an accident) and odd jobs (some for my family). His health is frail, for he has had heart problems and kidney cancer that almost killed him two years ago.

Millions of poorly educated working-class men like him are today facing educational failure, difficulty finding good jobs, self-medication with meth or heroin, prison records that make employment more difficult, hurdles forming stable families and, finally, early death.

Obviously, some people born into poverty manage to escape, and bravo to them. That tends to be easier when the constraint is just a low income, as opposed to other pathologies such as alcoholic, drug-addicted or indifferent parents or a neighborhood dominated by gangs (I would argue that the better index of disadvantage for a child is not family income, but how often the child is read to).

Too often wealthy people born on third base blithely criticize the poor for failing to hit home runs. The advantaged sometimes perceive empathy as a sign of muddle-headed weakness, rather than as a marker of civilization.

In effect, we have a class divide on top of a racial divide, creating a vastly uneven playing field, and one of its metrics is educational failure. High school dropouts are five times as likely as college graduates to earn the minimum wage or less, and 16.5 million workers would benefit directly from a raise in the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour.

Yes, these men sometimes make bad choices. But just as wealthy Americans inherit opportunity, working-class men inherit adversity. As a result, they often miss out on three pillars of middle-class life: a job, marriage and a stable family, and seeing their children succeed.

One of Rick’s biggest regrets is that his son is in prison on drug-related offenses, while a daughter is in a halfway house recovering from heroin addiction.

The son just had a daughter who was born to a woman who has three other children, fathered by three other men. The odds are already stacked against that baby girl, just as they were against Rick himself.

This crisis in working-class America doesn’t get the attention it deserves, perhaps because most of us in the chattering class aren’t a part of it.

There are steps that could help, including a higher minimum wage, early childhood programs, and a focus on education as an escalator to opportunity. But the essential starting point is empathy.

Like everyone else here, I could very easily have been Rick. However, I was fortunate enough to make the best choices I could for myself, with the support of a decent family in case I fell. I kept my head down, worked hard, borrowed money to get education when there was no other money to be had and got lucky enough for the hard work to pay off.

That said, we should not castigate the person whose hard work paid off, just as we should not sneer at the one for whom things did not go as well. However, life's "race" doesn't end at 18, 25, or even 40, so for anyone wishing to "keep score," we are going to need a bigger piece of paper to keep track.

Personally, I'm on my third "career" (Professional Footballer, Financial Analyst, Airline Pilot) and I'm not sure what my "score" is. I know I'm luckier than some and not quite as fortunate as others. I don't have a metric by which the "score" is measured, nor do I wish to presuppose one for myself or others. However, I do speak to my children regularly about what I think is important in life, both to me and their Mum and what I hope will be important to them. Money is not it and I don't know how to quantify happiness for others, so I simply tell them they have to find their own way in the world and whatever path they take needs to try to fulfill all their needs....happiness, passion, fulfillment, love, friendships ............and maybe even a little money.

I travel all over the world and it is a very harsh place. Those who are able to find their version of fulfillment are very fortunate. Commercials sell it to us every day in order to take whatever money we have and tell us we will feel better for it. Therefore, we have been taught to believe that money somehow helps us buy the things that will make us happy. I'm not so sure, but we all have to make up our own minds.....here on BlueMoon and in the "real world".....even if it is hard to figure out and the answer is different for each of us.

 

[Bill Walker]

Re: Britains Ruling Elite

I thought the current debate might be able to use this contextual piece from today's New York Times....

NY Times, August 9, 2014

Is a Hard Life Inherited?

By NICHOLAS KRISTOF

YAMHILL, Ore. — ONE delusion common among America’s successful people is that they triumphed just because of hard work and intelligence.

In fact, their big break came when they were conceived in middle-class American families who loved them, read them stories, and nurtured them with Little League sports, library cards and music lessons. They were programmed for success by the time they were zygotes.

Yet many are oblivious of their own advantages, and of other people’s disadvantages. The result is a meanspiritedness in the political world or, at best, a lack of empathy toward those struggling — partly explaining the hostility to state expansion of Medicaid, to long-term unemployment benefits, or to raising the minimum wage to keep up with inflation.

This has been on my mind because I’ve been visiting my hometown of Yamhill, Ore., a farming community that’s a window into the national crisis facing working-class men.

I love this little town, but the news is somber — and so different from the world I now inhabit in a middle-class suburb. A neighbor here just died of a heroin overdose; a friend was beaten up last night by her boyfriend; another friend got into a fistfight with his dad; a few more young men have disappeared into the maw of prison.

One of my friends here, Rick Goff, 64, lean with a lined and weathered face and a short pigtail (maybe looking a bit like Willie Nelson), is representative of the travails of working-class America. Rick is immensely bright, and I suspect he could have been a lawyer, artist or university professor if his life had gotten off to a different start. But he grew up in a ramshackle home in a mire of disadvantage, and when he was 5 years old, his mom choked on a piece of bacon, staggered out to the yard and dropped dead.

“My dad just started walking down the driveway and kept walking,” Rick remembers.

His three siblings and he were raised by a grandmother, but money was tight. The children held jobs, churned the family cow’s milk into butter, and survived on what they could hunt and fish, without much regard for laws against poaching.

Despite having a first-class mind, Rick was fidgety and bored in school. “They said I was an overactive child,” he recalls. “Now they have name for it, A.D.H.D.”

A teacher or mentor could have made a positive difference with the right effort. Instead, when Rick was in the eighth grade, the principal decided to teach him that truancy was unacceptable — by suspending him from school for six months.

“I was thinking I get to go fishing, hang out in the woods,” he says. “That’s when I kind of figured out the system didn’t work.”

In the 10th grade, Rick dropped out of school and began working in lumber mills and auto shops to make ends meet. He said his girlfriend skipped town and left him with a 2-year-old daughter and a 4-year-old son to raise on his own.

Rick acknowledges his vices and accepts responsibility for plenty of mistakes: He smoked, drank too much for a time and abused drugs. He sometimes hung out with shady people, and he says he has been arrested about 30 times but never convicted of a felony. Some of his arrests were for trying to help other people, especially to protect women, by using his fists against bullies.

In that respect, Rick can actually be quite endearing. For instance, he vows that if anyone messes with my mother, he’ll kill that person.

A generation or two ago, Rick might have ended up with a stable family and in a well-paid union job, creating incentives for prudent behavior. Those jobs have evaporated, sometimes creating a vortex of hopelessness that leads to poor choices and becomes self-fulfilling.

There has been considerable progress in material standards over the decades. When I was a kid, there were still occasional neighbors living in shacks without electricity or plumbing, and that’s no longer the case. But the drug, incarceration, job and family instability problems seem worse.

Rick survives on disability (his hand was mashed in an accident) and odd jobs (some for my family). His health is frail, for he has had heart problems and kidney cancer that almost killed him two years ago.

Millions of poorly educated working-class men like him are today facing educational failure, difficulty finding good jobs, self-medication with meth or heroin, prison records that make employment more difficult, hurdles forming stable families and, finally, early death.

Obviously, some people born into poverty manage to escape, and bravo to them. That tends to be easier when the constraint is just a low income, as opposed to other pathologies such as alcoholic, drug-addicted or indifferent parents or a neighborhood dominated by gangs (I would argue that the better index of disadvantage for a child is not family income, but how often the child is read to).

Too often wealthy people born on third base blithely criticize the poor for failing to hit home runs. The advantaged sometimes perceive empathy as a sign of muddle-headed weakness, rather than as a marker of civilization.

In effect, we have a class divide on top of a racial divide, creating a vastly uneven playing field, and one of its metrics is educational failure. High school dropouts are five times as likely as college graduates to earn the minimum wage or less, and 16.5 million workers would benefit directly from a raise in the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour.

Yes, these men sometimes make bad choices. But just as wealthy Americans inherit opportunity, working-class men inherit adversity. As a result, they often miss out on three pillars of middle-class life: a job, marriage and a stable family, and seeing their children succeed.

One of Rick’s biggest regrets is that his son is in prison on drug-related offenses, while a daughter is in a halfway house recovering from heroin addiction.

The son just had a daughter who was born to a woman who has three other children, fathered by three other men. The odds are already stacked against that baby girl, just as they were against Rick himself.

This crisis in working-class America doesn’t get the attention it deserves, perhaps because most of us in the chattering class aren’t a part of it.

There are steps that could help, including a higher minimum wage, early childhood programs, and a focus on education as an escalator to opportunity. But the essential starting point is empathy.

Like everyone else here, I could very easily have been Rick. However, I was fortunate enough to make the best choices I could for myself, with the support of a decent family in case I fell. I kept my head down, worked hard, borrowed money to get education when there was no other money to be had and got lucky enough for the hard work to pay off.

That said, we should not castigate the person whose hard work paid off,

that said ...showing a picture of the view from your flash apartment suggests being up one's own rectum

 

[ChicagoBlue]

Re: Britains Ruling Elite

That said, we should not castigate the person whose hard work paid off

that said ...showing a picture of the view from your flash apartment suggests being up one's own rectum

No supporting either antagonist's viewpoint, but everything provides us with a new data point. From these, we build a mental picture. Not everyone shows their best in every post, so hopefully they have provided other data that provides a counterpoint. Regardless, we are all free to feel whatever we want about everyone else. People I admire are hated and vice versa. To each their own.

This thread devolved pretty quickly and it reminded me of a story Bono told. Paraphrasing, when he was a kid there was a fancy house on the hill that people walked by, looking up, shaking a fist, would say, "That fucker up there in his fancy house!" Whereas, when he traveled in America, people seeing the same house on the hill, would look wistfully and say, "one day...that'll be me!" Perception is everything.

 

[wayne71]

Re: Britains Ruling Elite

I think some like to use the fact they were born into poor/disadvantaged families as an excuse for not amounting to much.