how often do you interact with people from other class backgrounds

this is evidently not anything terribly new but a lot of english people seemingly have very little no non-phatic contact with people in other social classes, even though they will probably be well acquainted with people from many other cultural backgrounds. perhaps it's this increasing heterogeneity and 'tolerance' in other respects that makes this country's time honoured social stratiation seem more acute.

this probably resembles some owen jones comment is free post about social apartheid but anyway, i wonder how people elsewhere experience this.

I'm American so we're all middle class

this was by one recent example given by a not particularly close friend of mine who still lives at home smoking weed and being generally useless having quit his phd. his family has been having some unneccessary garden surgery done at their exurban pile and he was talking to one of the landscapers. this middle aged labourer has some work-induced condition and is on painkillers whose efficacy is fading. he still works fulltime in gardens and in a cemetery digging graves and is terrified of losing employment because the welfare system tries (or is forced) to fuck people over more and more

so this episode had fully engaged my feckless friend's liberal guilt complex about depending on blood relative welfare and i was sort of chiding him about his naivete when confronted with the indignity that our political settlement causes. its not like i am particularly acquainted with this sort of situation either but maybe general pessimism or realism helps. i remember as a child asking why the poor people dont kill the rich people and steal their things. anyway he couldnt believe that there were still people in this state of immiseration and precarity. its not like he is a rothschild or anything but his background (nonselective state school, 'good area' variety, private sixth form, six or seven years in universities) had entirely inoculated him against the reality of life for a substantial number of people in a country where social protection is being dismantled. he couldnt think of any working class people with whom he had had any meaningful contact since school. this is probably not untypical.

I ride the bus every day

i grew up comfortably middle class in a bedroom-community-ish part of agricultural america and mixed regularly with somewhat more rural but certainly not poor hunter and farmer types up til college, and spent the years thereafter up through a phd in various states of tolerable studenty poverty/skintness, pretty well ensconced in a version of comfort. but i've since also spent around three disjointed years completely unemployed and underemployed and variously paid when working, and i've come to the point where i'm barely making do with a grind of a job at which i would literally have to work all-out for more than full-time hours (which i can't throw myself into doing, yet) to bring in enough money not to be perpetually almost broke. despite thanks obama my insurance is still messed up / nonexistent and i do need some work done pretty seriously. i've more or less stopped buying anything but food and paying bills, and like never before i'm becoming acutely aware of how much things cost, taking a pass on coffee when it's not at sale at the store, feeling irked when i drop a few grains of rice down the drain by accident because I PAID FOR THAT AND I COULD HAVE EATEN IT, calculating when i can do without replacing necessities or not paying bills for a few more days, that kind of economizing out of absolute, fear-of-eviction necessity rather than virtue. when i was really hard pressed a couple months ago a college friend sent me a big check out of the blue to help me cover groceries. at the same time, more or less my whole family is now working fairly shitty manager-level service jobs so whatever ability to lend a hand or sympathy for hardship they had before has been steadily on the decline since their own lives were fucked over by the vicissitudes of the global financial whatsit.

i say all that just to say, since the world of my facebook friends and intermittent real contacts is still more or less populated by academics and college nerd friends, the worse my circumstances have become, the more incomprehensible and infuriating their lives have gotten to me. their feckless shows of concern, their narcissistic leisure time activities, their blase expenditures on toys and travel and restaurant meals and houses, their stupid petty life enrichment pastimes, their 'community involvement'. and above all just the growing sense of distance. like, i understand why, but when we share less of the same living conditions, it starts to seem like there can be less understanding between us. even with people with whom i otherwise retain more or less all of my class identifications but the economic/career ones.

all of which is pretty narcissistic of me anyway, because i'm sure it hasn't been easy for all of them, and i know my life is in certain ways a lot less miserable than it could be, and is for others. but it has made me more pessimistic about cross-class interaction.

i taught at an inner-city (that's misleading but apt enough) community college once and i had more interaction with extra-class people (mainly students, but also not) then than i had in any other setting for years. students who had been in jail, students who had to drop because they had violated parole, students with behavioral problems, homeless students, plus all kinds of less exceptional (for those reasons) students, bad in school, troubled home lives, working three jobs, working mothers, the rest. since it was still school, after all, in many ways they were more or less like all the students i've ever taught. but occasionally some differences would come out in things where, in my role as a teacher, i could customarily just assert impersonal authority and expect that something be done, and if it doesn't get done, then aside from really exceptional circumstances, one just looks at the student who didn't do it and says, well, you should have done that, why didn't you? i'm sorry it can't be helped any more. but with some of my community college students, it seemed faintly more absurd to wield that authority, in that way, as if the circumstances of their lives were irrelevant. of course, they generally wanted to succeed on academic terms and move on to the next thing, for whatever reasons, usually work- and career-related, so they didn't want their circumstances to hinder them any more than i did, or any more than one is supposed to recognize them to. but some of the things that were going on in their lives, atypical for upper middle class students and more typical for lower class life, were just, like, things NOTHING COULD BE DONE about, given their circumstances, their means, given the way that assistance to others is dispensed and distributed in the world. but they were things that kept them from being able to do things that more comfortable people just expect are doable, so that the range of exceptions meriting their concern or involvement is narrowed.

I would say very little, since I work from home and don't get out much. My wife would probably say "constantly" since she grew up really, really poor and has had a class-based chip on her shoulder all her life, and thinks I grew up rich. (Something we don't agree on.)

I think about this a fair amount.

i rarely interact with other people from the same class background. bit odd.

the english countryside is always a pleasant experience because people of different classes interact routinely there. as far as i can tell they all want to kill each other. the countryside makes me think of dostoevsky's fathers being supposedly being killed by his serfs.

oh btw for all the i-am-a-man-of-the-ppl-ness of pointing to public transpo as a form of extra-class interaction, i do think it is one. i rode the city bus more or less everywhere for about ten years, and i would routinely observe students new to town, people taking the occasional trip to the mall or a sporting event, etc., riding and feeling conspicuously uncomfortable around non-white riders and public behavior not circumscribed by middle class norms. we recently added a rail line to replace a city transport artery bus line, and with the slightly different conditions suddenly there's all kinds of enthusiasm for taking public transit, as if it's not nearly the same as riding the bus down that line had been for decades. finally, it's pleasant and comfortable etc. there's an 'if it can't be helped' element to riding the bus that dovetails nicely with its exposure to other things that can't be helped (delays, sharing seats, being accosted by homeless riders, etc.) and that is the opposite of the luxury of transporting oneself around in one's car whenever one wants.

most of the people i interact with regularly are from different class backgrounds than me but this wasn't always the case

i engage in shallow, meaningless discourse with people from all walks of life

can't be having with the poor at all at all

i feel estranged from the sort of people i grew up with and am related to but have matured enough to realize i've never been 'really' poor and dont really know anyone that is except vaguely

anyway i dont really know how to answer this w/o beginning to parse the various degrees of upper and upper-middle class that exist in america but dont articulate themselves very often

Used to be a fair amount, building things for rich people and working with recent immigrants.
Now, there's some range between working class and the top end of middle, but few extremes. My friend is dating a guy whose parents are crazy rich, talking to him was like talking to an alien.

His best friend is really into adventure hunting films, so he went on a South African safari and hired a film crew to follow him around to make a short. That seemed completely normal to the guy.

there's a vast difference between "interacting with" as a matter of necessity or course (say, through work, school, out-and-about-ness) and actively choosing to socialize with, welcoming into one's come-over-for-dinner circle. i'm middle class. upper middle to full-on upper in terms of my family's cultural background, but somewhat alienated from the rarefied reaches, by both choice and circumstance. my friends have tended not to come from blue-blooded stock, but from the great gray middle. the casually privileged. liberals, readers, artists and bohemians, only children and youngest siblings. a narrowly-defined group, though i don't consciously seek that out.

day to day, though, i interact with everybody.

A lot hinges, as always, on the definition of classes, i suppose. I grew up culturally middle-class but economically poor and it's definitely the former that dominates now. I'd guess that 90% of the people i work with went to university and it's probably close to 100% for the people i socialise with, though i'd assume that a proportion of both would still self-define as "working class". The creep of university-educated people into service roles probably means that my phatic contact with people from other backgrounds is more limited now as well.

I rarely interact with people.

every fucking time i go to work

the vast majority of my friends/social circle are working class, i do still feel instinctively more comfortable in that company but i have to point out that there are an infinite number of complexities and caveats there

How often do I interact with people who come from a different class background to me? Every day.

How often do I interact with people who currently exist outside of the nebulous group of retail/service/student/teacher/office/arts/[insert job that is kind of badly paid but traditionally middle class here]? Eh, never, really. But I'm not sure that all those things really are the same class, or are the same experience for people who come from different classes.

most people who self-identify as middle class today are proles in a Marxist sense anyway

afaik virtually none of my friends or colleagues have any meaningful idea of my class background or upbringing, which I take a possibly irrational comfort in

in answer to the actual question the first sentence of Lamp's post more or less covers it for me also, maybe excepting a few ppl who work in bars/kitchens and are locked into that for better or worse

afaict to the extent that ppl in the country do want to kill each other, it isn't necessarily along class lines

I slip into a rural drawl and pepper my convo with y'alls and yups.

Oh wait, I misread the thread title as "how do you interact with people from other class backgrounds"?

also, guy fawkes isn't french

^gets it.

This thread makes me think of the times I've employed the services of a chimney sweep. He was way more middle-class than me though, honest

(Real answer: what class I think I am depends on where I am. At work I feel distinctly common but in prev jobs I felt like a snob)

I'm American so we're all middle class

― heck (silby), Tuesday, August 19, 2014 9:56 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Use other more accurate facts.

I currently work in downtown Washington, DC, and ride a bus to get to there, so I routinely come into contact with all classes except the true 1% (which I define for the purposes of this discussion as people who drive to work without having the reason of needing to pick up their children before their daycare providers close).

For what it's worth (considerably less than what you paid to read this), I am mindful that I have made some "good choices" (good = reflecting 21st-century capitalist values) regarding my life. I am also mindful that many other people do not have the options that would make it easier to make those choices.

this was always a weird situation for me. i grew up interacting with people ranging from future criminals to the last living heiress of an old New England dynasty. so from the bottom all the way to the top. i never really belonged to any of it, though, but since i was exposed to a lot of different classes i can move through different circles pretty easily. but it can only ever go so far since i was always sort-of an outsider. i can blue collar it up until they think i'm a prep school snob, and i can blue blood it until they think i'm poor. it's not always easy finding people who come from mixed backgrounds like that, and it caused no end of misery growing up, so i've just accepted my dodgy outsider status.

http://i.imgur.com/dTogrQq.jpg

Hello! I'm Carla, a dachshund/pug cross or a daug. I don't like the word 'daug', and much prefer 'dachspug', though. Pleased to meet you. *shakes paw*

I live in a really big house full of people. Some of them sit at tables and talk loudly into telephones, or sometimes go down the hill to the beach, or go on a boat. Others bring plates and food to the ones who sit at tables. I belong to one of these people! But it's ok because everyone loves me and wants to be my friend, especially the young ones.

http://i.imgur.com/X4BZqBV.jpg

I think it's fair to say that I see people from all sorts of backgrounds. I mean, the people I belong to were brought up in small houses and didn't have much money, but you should see how they live now! They have to work very hard and do everything they're told, but they don't complain, or at least, I don't hear them complain much.

Anyway, today a funny thing happened. Two young adult people turned up, to work with the young ones! Apparently they came yesterday and the day before too, but I hadn't seen them yet. They spoke confidently and displayed the mannerisms of the richer people, but they were here to serve them. All very strange.

Here I am with one of them:

http://i.imgur.com/6XQoLR1.jpg

…and here I am with the other:

http://i.imgur.com/u8xjesJ.jpg

Later, of course, the two of them went and sat in the eating space, where they served themselves food. Served themselves food! Nobody does that in this house! Even I am served. Although not by them, try as I might (I have a very winning charm!)

http://i.imgur.com/Y9kSO3K.jpg

Trusting these new people was difficult at first. I've not always had it easy with people. Some of them have hit me in the past. I'm wary with meeting strangers. When they first turned up, I approached them to be petted, but submissively, fearing a wrath which never came.

http://i.imgur.com/El2YPFw.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/3nNTVEj.jpg

My life is mostly good, though. I can play with whomever I want, and nobody gets too angry at me any more. And what's more, I don't care what background these people have! In the sunlight of Sardinia, nobody is truly unhappy.

http://i.imgur.com/pLdI8Dm.jpg

http://31.media.tumblr.com/38cc2407d2ff51dbe34e83b92a4de414/tumblr_n1vgm6vArq1skygwqo1_400.gif

http://i.imgur.com/NBtzmv5.png

I grew up in a poor-ish Southeast Asian immigrant neighborhood, bordered by a neighborhood of old white Irish Catholics who hadn't succumbed to white flight yet

Economically, probably lower-middle class

Formative school experiences were at a magnet, so was exposed to a wide range of classes, ended up hanging out with what I'd guess you'd call working-class kids

Attending an Ivy was a real shock, basically the opposite of the experience described above

Now on a trajectory where it'll basically be upper crusters from here on out

Still not entirely comfortable, like what You Care About is not what I Care About

People talk about planning and going on vacations and "investing"

IDK I just wanna stay home and read books and watch movies

you could chill with a random person drawn from the social stratus every ten mins for a week and What You Care About might never hit their gong, ime

^^^ a lot like my story, except I like vacations

(and I'm Latino rather than Asian)

(did I just racist-y zing myself?)

er xp

Yeah for sure - but IDK the disconnect seems to be on a deeper level

Like a person will be like "this [x] event involved the lacrosse team at my high school"

And I'd have been like, shit what's lacrosse

Obv now I know all about siiiiiiiiiick laaaaaaaaaaax

xp to darragh

its weird to me that someone would think of vacations or investments as particularly estranging

smh at ppl who haven't read about Mallory towers, that's the real disconnect here

Magic Faraway Tree was the only Blyton i fucked with tbh

yeah well, sure, if you had to pick only one......

'The Land of Do-As-You-Please' is basically a middle class nightmare abt unruly proles

Chalet School = upper middle class

vacations were few and far between when I was a kid, and 99% of the time it meant driving to a neighboring state and seeing a few attractions over part of a week then driving home

so yeah, the idea of multiple-per-year vacations or actually traveling long distance was pretty foreign to me as a kid. and I really doubt 90% of the people I went to, say, high school with, ever are able to consider investments.

Xp The vacations thing might just be a familial quirk

Like looking back we took a few trips to China but those were more familial obligation, visiting family

Other than those there was a trip to Niagara Falls when I was like 4

And we went on a cruise to celebrate college graduation

Between those two trips I can't recall a single other family vacation

Investing is like, idk, I'm basically just learning now that it's a good idea to do something with your money so that you 'beat' inflation

And that letting your money sit in a bank account (or a safe deposit box which my parents used to do) is bad

Imma learn it tho and get sick ROI

Watch and see

the wedding I attended last weekend definitely had a split in class, although not as evident as it could have been. the groom's father has worked in manufacturing (factory floor, union job, still reasonable wages and benefits) his whole life and I think the majority of the bride's immediate family has a master's degree or are doctors.

the groom's family were talking about the other side of their family having a wedding where people wore jeans and their nicest harley davidson t-shirts

chinese symbol, i felt some of that pressure when i was in law school. it's keeping up with the joneses. you can notice people who work really hard to cobble together a respectable upper middle class life when you're in the professional field. pressure to buy finer foods, have finer things, take vacations that sound good to talk about, have the right hobbies and interests, etc. i also witnessed the death of the upper middle class side of my family, who built up all that stuff a few generations ago, so i've also seen how stupid and pointless it all is. i'm with you on just trying to enjoy life on your own terms. but i've got a pretty apocalyptic mindset, so ymmv.

Glad that you understand me, http://i.imgur.com/yJ0EzoB.gif

yeah, i'm an idiot

my folks "worked their way up"; i guess they've always been middle class but i've never been 100% sure what my parents' wealth + income were at any given time. they were never extravagant spenders + were very investment-minded. now it feels like i spend a lot of my time around friends who spend a lot of their money on alcohol + art + music + eating out and it's just a totally different world.

^ Having friends in college who would regularly 'eat out' instead of getting all their meals from the meal plan was definitely weird to me

I spend a lot of money on alcohol + art + music + going out to eat and I feel like there's a lot of baggage wrapped up in the why. denial of responsibility + class guilt in some cases? idk

Probably a good poll for US ilxors would be whether or not they shop at Wal-mart

Have shopped at Wal-mart since I was a kid, because they have the cheapest prices

Never really encountered the viewpoint until college that people would choose not to save money because of ethical principles

(Have also since met people who have never ever stepped foot inside a Wal-mart in their entire lives)

Still shop at Wal-mart, because sometimes they still have the cheapest prices

from what I saw your school's meal plan seemed to have better food than most of the eating out options xp

Never really encountered the viewpoint until college that people would choose not to save money because of ethical principles

otm

Hah that was largely after me tho

When I was there all the dining halls were still run by Aramark, and there was only one doing stuff with sustainable organic food (they started rolling out dishes to other dining halls by my junior year)

when i got my first real out-of-the-family, manager-and-uniform job, it was located in the city and i would drive right over to the quickest place to cash my paychecks on the way to the bookstore to buy records and occasionally books. and i stayed more or less constantly profligate in that way up through the mid 00s, when i think it was more a matter of there being no more things to buy / having an easier time stealing free music.

that was something that my parents always seemed to regard as basically foolish. good sometimes because it seemed to stimulate me, culture, life of the mind whatever, but they were always modest about 'entertainment'. tv and the radio, for the most part.

when i was firmly ensconced among academic types on the other hand it was just sort of presumed to be good: why would you not want a massive library and the musics of the world etc?

spend a lot of my time around friends who spend a lot of their money on alcohol + art + music + eating out and it's just a totally different world.

I feel like I know a lot of actually-poor people who do this, perhaps it's a generational thing where everyone's secretly thinking 'well I'm never going to buy a house so whatever'

I don't think our city had Wal-mart until I was in middle school -- when they expanded, they tended to do so to small communities before cities, so by the time they opened near me there was already the idea that they blew up small town commerce and some minor stigma

I knew a guy in high school whose mother (an immigrant to the area, his dad was from the midwest and was mostly on disability) worked at wal-mart and probably still does.

the mix of younger people spending money on going out is definitely a weird mix of people who have middle class backgrounds and will probably age into financial stability and people who plan to live that way indefinitely with no real long-term plan

or people who have middle class backgrounds and secretly assume that they'll age into financial stability because hey it happened to everyone else right

shh, you're hitting too close to home

@龜 - fwiw i was mostly commenting on my own privilege i guess. like obviously i want to think im less oblivious than nak's acquaintance or the dude in that 'i cant make small talk with my contractor' essay (which i remember smdh at) but i still think of my own experiences and prejudices as 'normal' which is obv not that insightful but sort of useful to be reminded of

and like i think of how the people i grew up with, work with and still mostly socialize with are part of the sort of 'professional class' in america do think of themselves (mostly) as generic. and ime you look at the people one rung up - the 'executive class' in my case - as kind of being a world apart and really keenly aware of the sort of class distinctions that exist btw you and those people and then youre less aware of the gap btw you and the people at the very top - the private island, related to royalty set - but know theyre there. but theres this compression downwards where its like homeless people - me and people like me - people that are mostly like me but seem much better off for a host of reasons that will seem insignificant to 85% of the population - joan tisch

I don't know the backgrounds of my co-workers but by virtue of them being software developers I and they are all upper-middle-class now no matter what we were before (and I guess this is the stereotypical UK vs. US difference in what "class" is, whether it's how much money you make now or who your family was or something). But my friends from college have somewhat of a variety of family histories and are now a number of different kinds of marginally to stably employed.

I always feel kind of oddly out of place at cultural events that code as upper-class because if there's a mingling of artists/performers and audience then there's often a shared cultural vocabulary but not an economic one -- the artists are broke and the audience is widely monied and I'm there because I value paying the price of admission but am not really part of either group since I work an office job.

In that sense, I appreciate my current work group in that there's a variety of interests represented, even if they don't really align with my own.

When I worked near only middle-class people who all lived in suburbs and talked only about shuttling their kids around, mowing their lawns, and reality television gossip I felt like an alien

(which is ridiculous because I still had much more in common with them than most people in the world)

the notion of class being solely income-based in the US is really fogged up by race, region, family & social relations, values, etc

and disability/disease - i know my life would be way different if i didn't have crohn's

depending on your background, we have entire industries dedicated to derailing your class mobility

maybe the most salient feature of class stratification in english life is how people who aren't very far apart in most objective (marxist rather than weberian say) class terms have no interaction with each other. so the lower grade civil servant has no work contact with manual labourers, and through socialization via university etc probably would not interact with them outside of work. there are all sorts of complications via deskilling, proletarianization of the lower middle and even middle class etc. and the usual shout out to the self-employed electrician/builder/london taxi driver type of class who are like the new yeomanry/kulaks, can earn fair amounts and have substantial working autonomy.

the london upper middle class can be almost entirely separated from the working/lower middle. their au-pair is likely to be a foreign graduate student, the rare person they know who still works in a cafe at 35 is someone they went to university with and is now a cultural worker of some description. in terms of class ~backgrounds~, their co-workers and friends are likely to be from the middle class too, since 'social mobility' is by most indicators declining to something more like the south american than the nordic level.

When I think about it, I actually don't know very many people who grew up middle class, they might well be now of course. Recently I spent a very middle class evening with some very middle class people in a very middle class environment and it weirded me out a bit.

Having said that, weirding me out isn't difficult.

I'm totally liminal anyway - my relatives span the entirety of US middle-class types, but during school my (divorced) mother was out of work for health reasons and had food stamps for a while. I *never* had an allowance. We nearly lost our house when I was 15. Mom would sooner eat nails than go into a Wal-Mart (and barely deigns to visit Target). Once you're in your 30s, there's this call to return to the middle-class mothership that goes out to people you hung out with in their more egalitarian 20-something years: their parents give them deposits once they settle down with a partner, they start having kids and/or management jobs, and their world shrinks to people who are doing the same things in the same way as them. If you're leading a more precarious/single-person/freelancer lifestyle, that suddenly becomes apparent and is reflected socially.

Recently I spent a very middle class evening with some very middle class people in a very middle class environment and it weirded me out a bit.

And, no, it wasn't an ILX FAP (remember them?)

I'm from a working-class background, but most of my friends's background is middle class/upper middle class, so if I take the thread question literally, all the time. But I haven't really felt like a working class person ever since I moved out of my mom's place and started studying at the uni. Experiencing class can be pretty weird for "social climbers" like me: most of my habits are probably firmly middle class now, but the working class upbringing still shines through in various odd ways: having an inherent distrust of rich people and the bourgeoise, feeling more at home in the shabby parts of the city where people piss on streets, feeling weirded out and not really knowing how to behave in places like the opera or a fancy restaurant, and so on...

how far apart in distance is opera or fancy restaurant from the pee district?

i've been increasingly aware lately about how i'm somewhere between lower-mid and mid, in habits of speech, reflexive identifications, etc. i guess i interact fairly often with people from lower classes if riding the bus counts, usually pretty obliviously though.

it feels like most of my friends are a half-step above me in terms of class. my partner is sort of on my level though. i've tended to try to dodge or be better than class which has just meant i'm bad at being any class or relating to people from any class, frustrated by not getting the benefits of belonging to one. still sort of internalizing that lesson / very tentatively feeling out where i am and how i can make that work for me, which i guess is a very low-mid to mid class thing to say.

also, j., i thought your post was honest and evocative and i think you are a very good writer.

how far apart in distance is opera or fancy restaurant from the pee district?

in SF it's about a block lol

I def felt weird the last time I went to a black tie classical perf (I've never been to the opera why because opera is an abomination)

OMG CARLA THE DACHSPUG

lol

Based on recent experience, I'd say it's: 'Surprising how quickly class barriers seem - seem - to break down if you share something with somebody; horrifying how suddenly the barriers can manifest, even though you share something with somebody'

yeah

(I made a total social fuckup when, having been told that a friend's boyfriend wasn't currently working, I assumed he was in the same went-to-college-couldn't-get-a-job hole that I had just got out of. It turned out that he just didn't need to work because he had so much family money. Friendship was basically torpedoed beneath the waterline by that misunderstanding and unwise openness of mine)

really? that seems like a mistake that'd be easy to make and apologize for, unless they're so ashamed of being independently wealthy that they couldn't reply to you

imo if you are so unable to say, "oh, my my monetary needs are taken care of" that you are screwing up conversations, then you should probably get a job, even if it's a volunteer position

i work at a major research university and most people here range from lower-middle to upper-class, with most probably in the upper-middle. it's one of those universities that is wealthy enough to give shit loads of funding to underrepresented groups so the lower-middle class population here is probably higher than most research universities.

i love in a traditionally pretty solidly middle-class neighborhood that is transitioning slightly to a wealthier neighborhood. since i live in the northeast, home prices are high, so the lower-middle class people who live nearby have been there for a while and the newer people are wealthier.

it's funny how education can be such a greater dividing factor between people than class. i make probably less money than most of the lower-middle class or working class people who live in my neighborhood but i probably have a more similar family of origin to the wealthier families.

i love live in a traditionally pretty solidly middle-class neighborhood that is transitioning slightly to a wealthier neighborhood

really? that seems like a mistake that'd be easy to make and apologize for, unless they're so ashamed of being independently wealthy that they couldn't reply to you

This was one of those situations where one expresses a sort of camaraderie then it dawns on the people in conversation that in fact ...

imo if you are so unable to say, "oh, my my monetary needs are taken care of" that you are screwing up conversations, then you should probably get a job, even if it's a volunteer position

if you have so much money that you don't need to work, you should still work because don't be a fucking leech

It's good form to invent an occupation, like blogger or DJ, to cover in these situations.

or music writer

the self-employed electrician/builder/london taxi driver type of class who are like the new yeomanry/kulaks

I was reading a book about the Russian revolution recently and thought Gorky seemed like a solid dude. He came from a peasant background and suffered much hardship but still had an undimmed passion for culture and loathed proley philistinism equally as much as upper class snobbery. He sheltered and fed lots of bourgeoisie persecuted arty types and spoke out against their persecution in dangerous times. Good role model imo.

In the most basic way, a lot of those sole trader/small business dudes are manifesting their insecurity about people on state benefits. There's an undertow of them being not far removed from the people they denigrate, so the harsh words are like an incantation they say over and over again as if to inoculate from those outcomes. I always feel 'that could be you' whenever I'm witness to one of them starting up about the scum beneath.

Oh, and wanna make a person with a private income/upper middle class person uncomfortable enough to drop you, or not really bond with you? They hate putting the spotlight on money; it's just there. To do otherwise is to draw attention to their privilege in a way that marks you out as lower middle class.

if you have so much money that you don't need to work, getting a job is not gonna change your leechness

At one point, it was considered gauche for a person with sufficient private means to take a paying job, because there were people who needed to support themselves with those available jobs. I remember that being a ~thing~ in The Group (which takes place amongst NYC-based Vassar grads in the Great Depression).

Taking a job from someone who may need it being gauche is the opposite side of the coin from admitting wealth being gauche, because you are in fact acknowledging your resources.

They hate putting the spotlight on money; it's just there. To do otherwise is to draw attention to their privilege in a way that marks you out as lower middle class.

Oh no, I've inadvertently noticed privilege I had no idea exists! Shun me and be ashamed, because lower classes exist.

I didn't say anything about a paying job. Your job could be giving away all your money as far as I'm concerned. I just have that American Puritan streak that values work for it's own sake, as a way to contribute to society and improve yourself and the lives of those around you. I have no sympathy for people who sit around doing nothing.

I am actually simpatico with those who prize sitting around doing nothing

Jesus wept. I preferred as a fucking Morrissey apologist :O=

you

under current economic organization sitting around and doing nothing is a political action

I was depressed and miserable when I was sitting around doing nothing but I've got a job now and so I'm merely miserable. Don't really think there's any inherent merit in working, automate everything and redistribute the wealth IMO.

but no one is never doing nothing xp

hey rich layabouts! make an uber for porta potties so people can pee in them instead of all over the streets before they hit the opera.

xp matt yeah also absolutely, "doing nothing" is a perverse notion of capitalist industriousness

my having a job is doing little in the way of contributing to society/improving myself and the lives of those around me, everyone would probably be better off if I could afford to sit around doing nothing tbh

Given how easy it is for rich ppl to actively make the world worse, either through engagement in capitalist enterprise or via terrible artistic endeavours, I've always been highly supportive of those who just swan about reading novels.

can't argue with that!

I've got lots of acquaintances with old money. They've got the same surnames as the ones I see on the billboards outside of construction sites or on the campaign signs. When we were in high school and in our 20s, we all ran around in the same places. It'd be closing time and Charlie would say, "let's go back to my place for a pool party!" and as I'm going through the house to find the bathroom, I spot a photograph of Charlie when he was 12, with his family in the Oval Office standing next to the president. "Yeah, that's right, Plains!" he says appearing at my side. "You see how I roll!"

I work for a business publication. Each year, we compile the 40 influential people under 40 years of age, or the 20 in their 20s, or the power list... Lots of Jrs and III's and IVs. It's got to be weird working for one of those companies where you know one day the man at the top will be replaced by his son -- no matter how much hard work you put in. Don't like it? Create your own company and maybe your grandson in 2105 can take over.

I bear no hard will toward them. I'd hate them if they were donating to the Koch Brothers or bulldozing lower-class neighborhoods, but just for making money or having the right name - bah. I'm lucky my parents didn't abuse me or that I was born in a country where the janitor drives his own car to work. I've never been around any class environments that were more rigid or done any time hanging out with Vinklewoss twins, but my personal experience interacting with higher-class folk has always been whatever.

thinking about this a little more, i'd like retract some of the things i said here. i'm sure you're all scribbling this down in your notebooks, but i just realized i learned my family history from pathological liars, so i have no idea what's true or not. probably half truths exaggerated to the moon. oh well, live and learn i guess.

that's how we've learned your family history, too

errr, do you think i'm a pathological liar? or is it because i'm transmitting things i learned from pathological liars? the stuff about my aunt, my uncle met her when he was at MIT and she was at Wellesley, and i know she's some sort-of money money type, but i don't know the degree beyond what i was told, i just had it romanticized when i was a kid. guess i sorta felt like a clown talking about it, and trying to sort out my upbringing is confusing as all hell. i should probably find another outlet for it and peace out for a while.

my darragh impersonation needs work

right

to add to carla's salient posting above, the nature of class is shifted by contexts, power relationships, venn sets where working-class individuals can be subsumed into luxury lifestyles with near totality, while retaining their performative working-class duties

my job is spent drawing money from the exceptionally wealthy in exchange for mental cachet which they think (perhaps to an extent rightly) that i accumulated while passing through educational systems themselves festooned with privilege, some of which required real actual hard cash to access (scholarship or otherwise)

in that sense, i'm a service industry (semi)pro operating within an extremely privileged realm. what this buys me is time. i do not have to work more than 4 or 5 hours a day to stay above water. i do not have savings & i do not spend lavishly, but i appreciate & adore my free time. i also enjoy the job.

extending this, the other service industry pros i meet on the job are also privileged. they might not have the same (mendacious) educational cv as me but they have 'worked in the family for 40 years' etc and would find another similar placement without much difficulty - they are qualified by association

last night i had quite an experience. my fellow tutor and i got drinking with one of our hotel staff, a young working-class woman from sardinia who plans to visit europe over the next few months after completing her studies. through the benefaction of google translate on various mobile devices we pieced together a conversation, and gained quite a few free drinks. at which point, she took me to a bar up the road. i had assumed that the town simply wasn't for me - a hellishly overpriced luxury resort stuffed with bloodless clothes mannequins - but she got me to a neon-signed joint whose clientele were half young wealthies, half off-duty service industry pros - and not just those who find themselves ensconced effectively for life within the mansion's ambit. we were joined by the head chef of one of the town's many restaurants - a lovely, bearded young man with a skateboard who knew some english - and subsequently repaired to one of the large rows of what i'd assumed to be luxury houses. it was a squat. three or four individuals were already there amongst the concrete and sheeting, smoking weed. i joined in, while stroking their large, old, affectionate dog, hedu. then the hotelier and i went back, to our respective rooms.

this might seem like patronising crap but i think it helps to tease apart miniature class differentials within 'working class'. right now i feel very much on the side of those tethered to luxury in more than a merely tangential, this-hotel-i-work-at-happens-to-be-in-regencyville manner. i don't think i can claim to be full working-class qua working-class (i'm a luxury, not pivotal to the running of ideal society), but i think it's very important to be able to demonstrate solidarity, even if by socialising or attempting to communicate through language barriers.

back in britain, this solidarity comes forth in my cricket, where i play with a broad selection of individuals from across the class (and religion, and gender) spectrum, in my attendance of football matches, in my posting to webforums, in my dating & in my geographical location. i am very proud of the solidarity i show, and it gives me the comfort of thought that i'm probably not doing it wrong, or at least, very wrong.

allow me to filter that through my class filter:

I work as an tutor in a country where I don't really know the language. Since I work in a job that doesn't involve manual labor and involves working directly with the wealthy, I feel privileged. The other day I was able to use Google translate to work out a conversation with someone I think of as _actually_ working-class and went to go chill somewhere with her that wasn't fancy where I petted a dog and smoked their weed.

p much. your point being

you're viewing the world through a monocle

"I spoke to a poor person. SOLIDARITY, COMRADES."

nevermind lj's quizzical interactions with dogs and sardinians, two groups who no englishman can ever hope to understand, it's interesting to get his insights on the plutocracy at close quarters, he is probably the only ilx poster who spends a substantial amount of time with the gulfstream and romanée conti class

and i don't think he is using solidarity in a strong marxist sense just an expression of camaraderie in that english way

he is probably the only ilx poster who spends a substantial amount of time with the gulfstream and romanée conti class

oh, most certainly, and it's enlightening how different their life experiences truly are

Just teasing the boy, nakh. His musing on the subject is perfectly valid, even if he does suffer from an aggrandisement of the everyday (this is imago, of course he does).

oh man, i'm totally confused here, nakh is a parody account, right?

that reminds me of how much i hate 'solid blokes', the avantgarde of yeomanry

last week i had a cab driver who exemplified the worst sense of homosocial blokely solidarity, mindless sarcasm, mosleyite opinions, marbella tan, chelsea headcunter haircut, having a shouted phatic conversation of the most insipid blokeliness with an another cab driver 30 yards away trying to go in the other direction on a blocked street

i don't actually think these cunts are more than minority, if a substantial one, of london cab drivers but they are the noisiest and emptiest of vessels

Sadly my adventures among the elitny are behind me but I've always found it interesting how much more aware of their exceptional status European and Asian ppl with extreme wealth are in comparison to upper class Brits. Still remember the amazement of a posh dude at university when he was first told that his estimate of seventy five percent of British kids going to private schools was off base.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7C9RQiUdXc

now I long for a downer cover of this w/ someone singing "maybe general pessimism or realism will help"

nobody escapes being a parody, we all suffer the fate of unwitting parodic reanimation of dead historical forms, taxi drivers become yeomen, russian kleptocrats become sardinian aristos, stantons becomes spectra, i am merely the ghost of a forgotten brazilian football player last seen somewhere in qatar

how often do you interact with people who love the word 'phatic'

right now

that last post was beautiful btw *tick*

this thread is emphatically ours

*tick* is the best phasis obi

*obv

that was an accidental misspelling of 'chelseaa headhunter' rather than delightful wordplay by the way

kinda want mh to explain his monocle given my concessions to status & privilege, but I fear it'd be an exercise in lazy zinging

your subsequent post was the one I feted, stantons becoming spectra being my favourite wordplay on here in some time

are any of the belgravia types whose scions you instruct born into that class? they are all 'nouveau riche' right?

need some popcorn for this l8 streak of nakh nabobs

i believe so, yes - the occasional brush with international royalty aside (the pretending greek royal family, who've so seamlessly slipped into nouveau riche lifestyle mode that it's hard to imagine them as reigning monarchy)

the oldest-money clientele of mine have mostly been british & generally less actually-wealthy than the nouvies. but they have been, probably, more generous with tips & residential perks & so forth, present company excluded

obviously none of this is fascinating coz they're all hoarding greedy scum* or something

*parodic, but it's not like they're not. it's complicated

imago, what exactly makes that good wordplay? it's totally shoe-horned in and doesn't even make any sense. nakh fronts an attitude of power, strings together dime-store words and crappy undergrad theory, and creates an appearance of wittiness and sense-making. it's basically just a drama.

i mingle a lot with the cultured southside dubs of the trinity set these days but only v tangentially and occasionally brush with the extreme higherups

different to having money (didnt we all have money a few years back?) first cousins range from subsistence farmers in famine counties to captains of industry worth in the several dozens of millions and circle of friends ranges broadly over the same range, but i chill more by choice with those that go to the indie cinema as preference

it sounds like 'spectre'. you are the ghost of asspartners past, bringing some faint ruckus xp

imago there was a looming q of what this cross-class solidarity might mean or be based on or signify and to whom

esp if yr solidarity w/ nakh is more ...solid than that w/ any given token member of the working class, irrespective of ideological understanding/differences

xp, if you have to change the words around to make it make sense, then it's definitely not good wordplay.

god i spent a mostly embarrassing evening with 'trinners' girls a while ago, most of whom could walk on high heels with a blood alcohol level that would leave the average russian vagrant comatose, they had the confidence of british sloanies but were endearingly direct and vulgar

the irish side of my family insofar as they went to university were ucd as you would expect of the provincial catholic petit bourgeoisie

ah yeah the ucd/trinity divide is a little elusive to me yet but I'm getting there with exposure

it's interesting to get his insights on the plutocracy at close quarters, he is probably the only ilx poster who spends a substantial amount of time with the gulfstream and romanée conti class

i dont think this is true

the never-ending whirlpool of not getting parody claims us all

wait what is happening in this thread now, I'm confused, is this what "old-ILX" was supposedly like

idk lamp i would have placed you as perhaps one of the only others who might spend time with those but you already seemed to discount it

i don't think i can claim to be full working-class qua working-class

Get away

= 'the private island, related to royalty set' as you had it

imago there was a looming q of what this cross-class solidarity might mean or be based on or signify and to whom

esp if yr solidarity w/ nakh is more ...solid than that w/ any given token member of the working class, irrespective of ideological understanding/differences

― ogmor, Thursday, August 21, 2014 5:27 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

my solidarity w/ nakh (or to give him his school-tie nom de fraternite, nakhers) has everything to do with his written content and little to do with his upbringing and education which few people on ilx seem to have the foggiest idea of

away from the context of ilx, where my solidarity is largely with those i can hold decent discussions with, i take this cross-class solidarity to be a concerted mental effort to comprehend, appreciate and avoid excluding any perspective i come into contact with - moreover, to actively seek such perspectives in various social settings. what does it signify? to me, it signifies cooperation & community - to another, it might signify some posh-school wanker immersing himself in prole culture without contributing to it - the truth may lie between. there are vectors of sympathy that must be exercised and refined by all concerned

little to do with his upbringing and education which few people on ilx seem to have the foggiest idea of

I say, what school did that bally rotter, Nakhchivan, attend?

^exactly

Surprisingly, I don't even know what school LJ attended! I'm really not trying hard enough.

obv written content has quite a lot to do w/ upbringing & education, latin puns & all that shit

I'm sympathetic to the quest for empathy & worldliness, esp as a way of increasing self-awareness, which helps keep you honest when yr refining your vectors of sympathy or w/e, but you are surely the world is teaching you differences more than absolving you of guilt

my solidarity with lj is a venn diagram where the area of coherence is all about content, certain elective affinities in the realm of content and obviously he is a perspicacious young lad and all that, in personality terms and idelogically we are quite distant

idk what exactly ogmor is going for although you are also a poster with whom i share coherence in the area of content and of being able to understand things while i think being quite ideologically far apart

xp as in, superficial camaraderie w/ gravediggers allaying the sense of moneyed liberal guilt alluded to upthread, if that's not clear

rare documentary evidence of nakhchivan practising ilx posting style at school:

http://www.artvalue.com/photos/auction/0/38/38282/searle-ronald-william-fordham-the-peason-molesworth-atommic-1307292.jpg

i studied latin and ancient greek, you people are just dull and living in a cloud of your own farts. if you guys are some obscure British parody, then I don't get it, but I thought you'd be sharper and funnier tbh, hence why i tried to get some verbal sparring going on with ole nakhy boy here. instead it's all bluh bluh bluh. i'm done.

nakh's witty repartee not up to spectrum's standards :( rip

theres always a de haut en bas risk but i think lj is being sincere in trying to forge connections across various experiental divides

i don't think he has any need for moneyed liberal guilt because he isn't some sort of rich kid waster at all, if he feels guilt because of his proximity to ludicrous wealth than that is a category error

idk lamp i would have placed you as perhaps one of the only others who might spend time with those but you already seemed to discount it

haha i was thinking more certain old-ilx old-etonians but also pplains was posting about palling around w/ southern aristocracy like a few posts above imagos incomprehensible ramble. otoh the american upper classes have geographical divisions that muddy the waters of class distinctions - i remember laughing about 'texas rich' with people cuz its kindof a whole other thing - they have their own traditions and institutions and costumes - that are grounded in regionalism and that dont translate v well to say east coast moneyed class (i think the traditional idea of 'rich americans') or the elites of the midwest and west coast. fwiw i feel like the american professional class is much more homogeneous in its totems and thus better represented in peoples imaginations but they just kind of proxy themselves as 'middle class' or 'everyone' or w/e

ppl of all classes & creeds are welcome to join the fartcloud

america has too much new money. i spent some time w/ very wealthy new orleans ppl and they were tacky as fuck. their home was decorated w/ mardi gras beads + other paraphernalia. i had a conversation with a woman about her huge-ass texas home w/ a generator powering her pool. they all dressed in trashy clothing and spoke w/ heavy accents.

never got to study latin but the quasi-posh secondary school on the island did i didnt notice they were any more interesting but their disgraced pupils did shit like told a teacher to fuck off once or w/e whereas ours charged the school doors in with an improvised battering ram after being locked out three days in a row so i guess there must have been some invisible barrier to entry there somewhere idir an dha

an affected version of their dress will someday be the attire of kings xp

alright chill out m8 xps to spectre

lovely stuff fizzles

um

'superficial camaraderie'

superficial? look back at the examples i provide in my long post - that's a non-negligible amount of my time & energy. you'd still say superficial?

Ime the "elites" of the Midwest dress like dads whose wives bought their Nautica plaid business shirts at JC Penney's.

Is studying latin and greek the shorthand version of assuming a classical education, or is it just an affinity for being able to hold over others that they can't speak the same (dead) language?

fwiw i would encourage the teaching of latin at all levels of schooling in the uk as an excellent linguistics primer. learnt more about the structural classification of the english language in latin classes than in full schooling & a degree of eng lit

obv knowing latin + greek indicates intense sophistication - i wouldn't argue w/ that. almost every classics major i knew tho in the academy were pretty dull?

haha i was thinking more certain old-ilx old-etonians but also pplains was posting about palling around w/ southern aristocracy like a few posts above imagos incomprehensible ramble.

― dark sorcerer wallenstein (Lamp), Thursday, 21 August 2014 18:51 (1 minute ago)

the people pplains was talking about don't seem to me to be like the people lj works for, certainly not 'international' enough and in most cases probably not rich enough either, country club old money but not north shore country clubs

xxxp there are "elites" of the midwest but they are few and far between, and while that business shirts anecdote is right for a large portion of the country club membership set, there are definitely pockets of people who wear nice suits (although possibly not bespoke) and have personal shoppers

apt that nakh jumped into the country club references just as I was typing!

xxxxp to myself My parents happened to see the elder DeVoses at a marina somewhere and my dad was somewhat admiring that they seemed "just like anybody else" EXCEPT THEY HAVE BILLIONS OF DOLLARS AND A CRUSADE TO CONTROL DOMESTIC POLICY.

like i get the impression pplains is more talking about people who have houses which have titles but whose titles contain the word ranch, rather than eggleston/faulkner grandees who live in plantation houses their great^8 grandfather built in 1832

ppl of all classes & creeds are welcome to join the fartcloud

New board sitewide description please.

My parents happened to see the elder DeVoses at a marina somewhere and my dad was somewhat admiring that they seemed "just like anybody else"

classic dad

as a potentially ironic addendum, having latin has ameliorated my relations with the non-anglophonic sardinian service personnel i've made it my business to identify with & befriend

yeah, pplains can chime in, but I was thinking more "son or grandson of guy who started a successful business post-World War 2" and not southern gentry

imago 'superficial camaraderie' was in relation to easily chatting w/ ppl working in yr house, a skill some ppl might imagine is possessed by all members of the lower orders. my suggestion was that if yr motivated by curiosity & openness (rather than guilt) then whatever situational commonality brings you together w/ ppl should give you a better grasp of your differences rather than blind you to them

i've had many lovely conversations w/ ppl from all over the social strata in philadelphia about local sports teams.

just reminding any arrivistes who have got to this thread late that a poster in this actual thread uttered this actual phrase not more than an hour ago

i studied latin and ancient greek, you people are just dull and living in a cloud of your own farts

i studied latin and ancient greek, you people are just dull and living in a cloud of your own farts

i studied latin and ancient greek, you people are just dull and living in a cloud of your own farts

i studied latin and ancient greek, you people are just dull and living in a cloud of your own farts

i studied latin and ancient greek, you people are just dull and living in a cloud of your own farts

the people pplains was talking about don't seem to me to be like the people lj works for, certainly not 'international' enough and in most cases probably not rich enough either

ime some of those people are rich enough they just spend their money getting fringe republican candidates elected and buying antique winchesters and not more... conspicuous things. i mean i agree with/understand the distinction yr making (and think its important in understanding how ~these people~ process class) but will stick to my assertion that people of that level of wealth in america are less homogeneous/distinguishable than in europe and the popular imagination. not sure how interesting any of this is though

i keep thinking about the part in 'lucky jim' where the insufferable bertrand rhapsodizes about the wonderful qualifies of the rich and about idk soothing a certain idea of the 'i share an atelier with queen rania' class is but theres a countervailing (partly regional) tradition of the cheapskate billionaire in america (warren buffet) that maybe is hard to articulate but also works to flatten notions of class a kind of 'were all the same' sensibility

xp that's exactly what i'm talking about! can't match wits, so you use shitty power strategies. i was totally right about you. i know it's rude for me to poke around like that, i was just curious what you were made of.

"fart," from the old germanic

when a new ilx poster wants to make his bones and establish his reputation, he will frequently pick a high profile target to takedown, thus demonstrating both his will + courage.

yeah i can definitely buy that there is the odd koch brothers type among them

nfl owners are fascinating to me, so many of these people who look like fertilizer salesmen but who own a billion dollar franchise and maybe a midsized business loans company on the side

my public school ("nb" for britz: these are poor) offered latin! i didn't take it tho; i took four years of french and forgot it all. but i often interacted with people who'd taken other classes.

lol

a match of wits implies retention of the same in both parties

damn mh u bringing the realness today mayne

imago 'superficial camaraderie' was in relation to easily chatting w/ ppl working in yr house, a skill some ppl might imagine is possessed by all members of the lower orders. my suggestion was that if yr motivated by curiosity & openness (rather than guilt) then whatever situational commonality brings you together w/ ppl should give you a better grasp of your differences rather than blind you to them

― ogmor, Thursday, August 21, 2014 6:09 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what part of my post demonstrated blindness to differences? you've also confused the house i work at (where i observe the other domestics from a distance and exchange pleasantries) and the hotel i'm staying at (where i have a pleasant and mild holiday crush on one of the staff). in short, i don't get your point at all - you're accusing me of something that was categorically refuted in the initial post

ty, dmac

pretty sure a lot of actual ancient latin and greek speakers were living in clouds of their own farts too, unless you want to contend that the open-air architectural styles and invigorating mediterranean air somehow mitigated the characteristic human tendency to live within fart clouds of our own making

some more than others

http://www.interestingtopics.net/storage/4c74049e25b70ad6fb4686cd32011993.jpg

archimedes only copped to the displacement of fluid after farting in latin in the bath

rich people these days all have their kids learning chinese, no

wow, i definitely made a mistake here, i had no idea this guy was so loved on here. lesson learned i guess.

nakh is more feared than loved, you did the right thing spectrum

archimedes only copped to the displacement of fluid after farting in latin in the bath

― duff paddy (darraghmac), Thursday, August 21, 2014 11:24 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

eu-reek-a ok done

xp that's exactly what drew me to this situation. but mob rules i suppose.

message boards make strange bedfellows

rich and middle class types alike learning chinese

the uk right is hugely into pacific rim vibrant dynamic enterprise capitalism and 'asian values' as lee kuan yew has it

contra 'sclerosis' of europe

theres a book some wasteman at the economist micklethwaite or something wrote recently which harked on this theme

*farts*

i've not noticed clients of mine learning chinese. but then they're largely russian or arabic, so have no need for yet another language bloc

chinese was pretty popular at my fancy, private, east coast high school

i took spanish

why u choose spanish treesh?

its a damn sight easier to learn the chinese which would be reason enough i suppose

lj the first bit of that about workmen in yr house was going back to nakh's anecdote way upthread, an illustration of the peculiarities of class guilt that is unrelated to yr sardinian sojourn unless you also suffer from it. if yr using solidarity to just mean being open to/interested in ppl then none of this is really relevant

xp yeah, there was that and i had already taken it in middle school. i was never very good at spanish because i wasn't a diligent student but i did believe back then, and still do, that all americans should learn spanish.

solidarity is probably a spectrum (but not - aha - a Spectrum)? it demands unpacking at least, yeah - the extent to which is is attempted, achievable, etc

idk if lj would be nearly so surprised to be confronted with how harsh life can be in the uk in 2014

yh i do live on the edge of one of the biggest council estates in s london tbf

f/more i've experienced localised poverty - walking across london due to having no oyster cash, pawning £15 gold necklace for pregnancy test etc

My upper-mid/upper best friend in DC has her daughters doing Mandarin, possibly also Japanese - as well as Spanish and French. Although her dad was from the British upper middle/Oxbridge class, she lived in the shittiest part of South Minneapolis and wore Goodwill clothes until she was about 12, so much of this is about giving her kids the stuff she, in hindsight, wishes her parents would have given her instead of the huge 'great man with PRINCIPLES' drama she actually lived through. OTOH, she's glad her parents were not materialistic in any way and is trying to keep that going for her girls in the midst of a conspicuously consuming DC suburb.

BTW there are important non-arts reasons to study Greek and Latin at school (I didn't because my school didn't offer it) and they are all to do with taking up sciences and/or medicine (as BFF's ancient mad-scientist dad was fond of telling us).

the regional rich in utah, us have to contend with being rich, mormon, and somewhere always shifting along the rancher/cowboy divide. i imagine it's very difficult. there are only like 3 truly rich people in the state. chinese and arabic would be impressive languages to acquire due to mba culture, but other than that internationalism seems limited to resort vacations in mexico, or thailand if you're thinking of the more liberal monieds with camps in park city who tend to be l.a. cast-offs in love with their ski town white playground retreatedness. run-off from p.c. is where slc gets its favored leisure arts, soft-media and fashionable bourgeoisie real estate culture, though there are hipsters here along the portland-nyc axis, still with capital obv. there is a more anarchic-seeming tradition of expressive history tied to the mining towns and the railroad. not to romanticize our lower classes too much, they're generally as conservative and closed-minded as anyone and beset by the demands of service industry / telemarketing exploitation and general dislocation, alienation, cultural problems of poverty, in which an appealingly symbolic way forward which is favored by nearly everyone here is to start producing offspring. it's pretty close to home as i mentioned upthread, it's my striver father's background. doctors tend to be well-represented among the rich in this place, thanks to a huge and kafkaesque medical-industrial complex managing life and drugs for the repressed and insane populace.

^awesome post

oh i guess there is now tech money here too, thank god xp

It's true that American Sports Teams are a way for Americans of different classes to relate to each other

We can all agree that the Phillies stink, for example

☑

rich and middle class types alike learning chinese

the uk right is hugely into pacific rim vibrant dynamic enterprise capitalism and 'asian values' as lee kuan yew has it

contra 'sclerosis' of europe

theres a book some wasteman at the economist micklethwaite or something wrote recently which harked on this theme

― tao lin comment boxing (nakhchivan), Thursday, August 21, 2014 1:29 PM (34 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this whole affinity is super fascinating to me. all the trv kvlt weirdo hard right types are fretting about how these capital enclaves have sub-sub-sub-replacement birthrates

anyway my answer to this is not often

service industry / telemarketing

what my enormous mass of posts above was trying to do was tease apart the differences within this axis, but in your post it works as an immanent whole - teasing apart the cultural cachets instead is maybe a better way to go

not that they're mutually exclusive (profession/culture)

Asian capital also seen to be too focused on primogeniture and consolidating conglomerates to be truly dynamic in some quarters. Xps

there was an executive of the corporation I work for who, having been in charge when the company was sold (and had already been taking a salary according to this speculation), had excessive signs of wealth. a large house in the older, more regal part of town dating back to the early 1900s that had been fully remodeled, including the expansive guest house. a fine porsche, custom upholstered in a style designed by his wife. the company, for a brief period under his reign, had a showcase office in a downtown building, occupying two stories with a spiral marble staircase connecting the two and a large wood-paneled and -tabled conference room.

such opulence was entertaining but after he took his leave, his home was incredibly difficult to sell, and the flagship office location removed, as it made no sense (especially given the humble beginnings of the company and its customers). such things have no place in some cities and industries.

sports sort of drifts away from baseball in some red state hinterlands imo, but yes, generally it is our great unifier xps

Think the stingy billionaire trope above is interesting- but rather than say, stingy, I'd say habitual

Warren Buffet eating for lunch every single day a hamburger with vanilla milkshake, Ikea's CEO habit of flying coach and driving a Volvo from 1993, Li Ka Shing's $150 Seiko watch

As if the drive to make money were some sick affliction that they could strive towards curing through expression in excess but the bough of the fruit tree always recedes

Book came out last year about the new Asian superrich, purportedly based on the author's lived experience

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/01/books/kevin-kwans-crazy-rich-asians-depicts-a-cult-of-opulence.html?_r=0

what my enormous mass of posts above was trying to do was tease apart the differences within this axis, but in your post it works as an immanent whole - teasing apart the cultural cachets instead is maybe a better way to go

― imago, Thursday, August 21, 2014 1:20 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think there are differences but tbh i'm not close enough to see them. suspect there's just kind of an interplay though. and obviously we have a sea between us but these service industry exploitation centers probably all look very similar when it comes down to it, including the various means employed to stick people in them. i mean i've had some of these jobs but disassociated myself because i never wanted to like anyone there, kids from layton with contractor dads, etc. now i just want to see and relate, separate the people from the market from a nomadic pov.

:)

xp to 龜 i think in america it's a badge related to puritanism one can display to make oneself more socially real. ironically symbols of prudence or practicality are usually employed by richer whiter people while lower-class people who are making money, that is not necessarily a built-in instinct, which could be one reason among many why their wealth tends not to last.

i'm going to remedy any interclass shortcomings i have by sinking into late-life poverty

when the truly finer things like film baseball beer and boys are all somewhat available maybe it's not such a bad tradeoff.

Asian capital also seen to be too focused on primogeniture and consolidating conglomerates to be truly dynamic in some quarters. Xps

― Wristy Hurlington (ShariVari), Thursday, 21 August 2014 20:23 (Yesterday)

the reality and consensuality and embdeddedness in earlier social forms of capitalism in most of those countries is less important to 2010 entry conservative mps of the very lowest intellectual order is less important than the sense of relentless growth -- if china can grow at 9% p/a, why can't established wealthy nations? -- given by photographs of skyscrapers and FT reports of gucci opening new shops in chengdu or whatever, and the fact that they mostly have less social protection than europe

got through the first few pages of that economist shitheads book and it was mostly just like inane time articles from 1950 talking about incipient soviet technocratic ascendancy or 1980s time articles talking about the imminent rise of japan to be the #1 economy of the world, alongwith a sort of inverted 'yellow peril' racism in the guise of infatuation

1 x is less important than

this whole affinity is super fascinating to me. all the trv kvlt weirdo hard right types are fretting about how these capital enclaves have sub-sub-sub-replacement birthrates

anyway my answer to this is not often

― goole, Thursday, 21 August 2014 20:20 (Yesterday)

the recurrent assertion that northeast asians are the only ally of the white race in the eternal struggle against domination by lesser races in the work of those truly deranged post-humanist philosophers and cranks like john derbyshire is never less than fascinating and awful

feel like goole is the only person on ilx who i can relate to in spending time reading about the very worst shit on the internet be it on t4k1m4g.com or on sites other than t4k1m4g.com

oh dude, thats...

...

flattering, really.

i wonder (not really) why my penchant for extremity comes out in politics websurfing rather than, idk, music or other personal habits. something to be thankful for probably.

anyway, yeah, the inverted use of Leonard Jeffries' typologies, guaranteed lols

lj do u have any updates re carla

had the chance to keep teaching that family but turned it down to preserve my weekends

maybe worth just a quick email to see if she is ok? or just a trinket or two off her amazon wishlist, should she have been allotted one

I think I'm kind of lucky I attended a middle school with busing from poor parts of town, a magnet school with people from every walk of life, and a public college. I grew up somewhere middle to upper middle class -- professional dad, mom who didn't work for years, 3BR house in a good school district, two non-fancy cars, regular vacations, lots of *cultural capital* (exposure to classical music, museums, literature, etc.). I notice that today I tend to naturally chat with people at every level of office staff much more than I see other people in my field do (it tends to be stratified), and this is in spite of me being a slightly awkward person. Not saying it makes me any great humanitarian, but I feel able to talk with and relate to most kinds of people.

I'd probably compare myself class-wise to a college professor's kid -- comfortable, but greater "wealth" in terms of access and culture than in actual money.

i always thought i was ok with this but i find it pretty difficult to talk to my french canadian girlfriend's hick ass family

could just be a cultural thing

is there a language barrier?

french is my second language and i'm kinda rusty yeah

rural quebec is definitely a thing, I have had limited interactions but it's a pretty wild time out there in the boondocks

do Canadian hicks drive trucks around and wave the French flag?