09-04-2020, 11:51 PM
(09-03-2020, 10:13 PM)beechnut79 Wrote: The reason there are a lot of bad bosses is obviously because they know they can get away with us because, thanks to right to work and at will legislation, they know that the law is on their side. When unions were stronger they usually had to have a just cause to fire somebody, even if you weren’t union. While some unions may have gone too far in protecting those they probably shouldn’t have, the axis now has been tilted too far the other way. We need to move towards a model where an employer would need a just cause to fire somebody. Yet no one is talking about this.
Over the last forty years we have had an ethos that requires mass poverty for maximal growth in the economic gain of elites -- landowners (both big farmers and urban landlords), tycoons, and executives. Plenty of low-paying jobs have been created, and the educational system seems dedicated to preparing people for such work. Consider No Child Left Behind: it effectively homogenizes the K-12 experience for kids so that they will be well prepared to be retail clerks, warehouse workers, fast-food workers, low-level mechanics, cleaners, and agricultural workers. So anyone who graduates from K-12 education can get a job, but that job has poverty as a reward. Teachers are teaching to the test, and whatever isn't necessary for the test gets shoved aside.
Obviously this level of teaching and education is well suited to churning out people who do cr@ppy jobs and have no idea of what to do with their lives off the job. There is no room for culture -- or any advanced learning. I'm not going to deny that we need plenty of retail clerks, warehouse workers, fast-food workers, low-level mechanics, cleaners, and agricultural workers, and that plenty of people can never legitimately aspire to anything more complicated in life. On the other hand, Man does not live by bread alone, and vegetating in front of the idiot screen while eating chips and drinking mass-market beer because one has no idea of anything better to do except to visit relatives and maybe take a trip to an amusement park every couple of years isn't what someone with any imagination and intelligence would want to do.
An aside: I have gone to some mass-market retailers of electronics to audition some stereo speakers (mine are now 25 years old)... and all that those places will let me listen to is country (which seems to sound alike whatever one plays it on) or rap (which isn't music). I had a neat trick, which was to use a work for string quartet (two violins, a viola, and a cello) which sounds as if it would offer little total variety... of course that group of instruments is the proportion of the bulk of the symphony orchestra. I listen (as if you hadn't guessed) to huge amounts of classical music, and if a string quartet does not sound good on a pair of speakers, then what else will sound good?
The idea, I suppose, is that most of us are expected to live cr@ppy lives so that a few people can live like sultans. We are to share crowded apartments, watch or listen to numbingly-awful entertainment, eat cr@ppy food and drink cr@ppy beverages... in the name of prosperity. If that is what is meant by prosperity, then I'm ready to go back to the 1950's. If you think that the 1950's were conformist, then think of how ugly the reality is now. OK, kids with talent in the K-12 system might as well train for something better and develop a knack for finding individual happiness -- except that the system has such low, rigid glass ceilings that the system must waste such talent. So maybe you watch PBS on television instead of more vapid entertainment.
The system is good at creating equality among the proles -- equality at a very low level, and as long as the proles don't see the pleasure palaces of the very rich they may have the illusion that they are living in an equitable world. Reality is anything but equitable.
OK... dull-normal people might be perfectly happy vegetating in front of the idiot screen while getting obese on chips and mass-market beer as a reward for doing mind-numbing, soul-crushing toil. But I see a pattern in one entity that demands that workers live such a life. I occasionally see them on break -- taking some puffs on a cigarette. How awful!
That sort of equality suggests something characteristic of 1984...and, yes, at least one part of the political spectrum uses plenty of Newspeak to pretend that life is wonderful when it is in fact miserable. But one is obliged to smile.
End of rant.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.