America..............it seems we hardly know you.....

One little-known element of that gap is that the white working class (WWC) resents professionals but admires the rich. Class migrants (white-collar professionals born to blue-collar families) report that “professional people were generally suspect” and that managers are college kids “who don’t know shit about how to do anything but are full of ideas about how I have to do my job,” said Alfred Lubrano in Limbo. Barbara Ehrenreich recalled in 1990 that her blue-collar dad “could not say the word doctorwithout the virtual prefix quack. Lawyers were shysters…and professors were without exception phonies.” Annette Lareau found tremendous resentment against teachers, who were perceived as condescending and unhelpful.

-Joan C. Williams, as excerpted from this read-worthy essay, "What So Many People Don't Get About the U. S. Working Class"

Thanks Michael

Rigidity................................

For the white working class, having had their morals roundly mocked, their religion deemed primitive, and their economic prospects decimated, now find their very gender and race, indeed the very way they talk about reality, described as a kind of problem for the nation to overcome. This is just one aspect of what Trump has masterfully signaled as “political correctness” run amok, or what might be better described as the newly rigid progressive passion for racial and sexual equality of outcome, rather than the liberal aspiration to mere equality of opportunity.

-Andrew Sullivan, as culled from here

On reforming class warfare........................

Not "the rich versus the non-rich," but "the workers versus the looters."

-as taken from this blog post

via

Commonalities.................?

     "The EU is a failure of good people whose culture, goals, values, expectations and languages are as diverse as cheese and chalk.
     "Great civilizations become great because of their commonality;"
-Malcolm Berko, as excerpted

Groupthink.....................

The Saint Consulting blog offers insights into the failures of "group
think"  The question:


Have you ever wondered how a group of very smart people could make a very bad decision?  Or how a group could reach a conclusion that isn’t wiser than the sum of its parts?  It could be the result of groupthink.


Part of the answer:


.....The first symptom is an overestimation of the group, characterized by an illusion of invulnerability and a belief in the inherent morality of the group.  The second symptom is closed-mindedness, which involves the stereotypes of out-groups and collective rationalization that causes group members to ignore the reconsideration of their thoughts and actions.  The third symptom is the pressure toward uniformity that is manifested in self-censorship, an illusion of unanimity, the presence of self-appointed mindguards, and direct pressure on dissenters.


Full post is here

A bit confused about money....?

"The moment that barter is replaced by indirect exchange mediated by money, ready intelligibility ceases and abstract interpersonal processes begin that far transcend even the most enlightened individual perception.
     "Money, the very 'coin' of ordinary interaction, is hence of all things the least understood and - perhaps with sex - the object of greatest unreasoning fantasy; and like sex if simultaneously fascinates, puzzles, and repels.  The literature treating it is probably greater than that devoted to any other single subject; and browsing through it inclines one to sympathise with the writer who long ago declared that no other subject, not even love, has driven more men to madness.  'The love of money,' the Bible declares, 'is the root of all evil' (1 Timothy, 6:10).  But ambivalence about it is perhaps more common; money appears as at once the most powerful instrument of freedom and the most sinister tool of oppression.  This most widely-accepted medium of exchange conjures up all the unease that people feel towards a process they cannot understand, that they both love and hate, and some of whose effects they desire passionately while detesting others that are inseparable from the first."

-F. A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit