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> In the UK, class consciousness is woven into the national identity. In America, however, people often like to pretend that a class system doesn’t really exist

> In the UK, class consciousness is woven into the national identity. In America, however, people often like to pretend that a class system doesn’t really exist. But, of course, it does. This is the most insidious part. The media in the US has historically been 100% controlled by rich people, and all major media still is. The evil rich people figured out that if you start a gender and race war among the 99%, you can distract them from the fact that they're all being economically exploited and subjected to wage slavery. The US has gotten richer and richer, if it functioned properly everyone could have enough without resorting to any radical policies. But as long as 70%+ of Americans are wallowing in economic depression there will be no lasting social progress. Just the way most rich people hope it stays. The internet will almost certainly spawn a social movement to destroy the class system in the US. People are just waking up to how bad it is. The #MeToo movement only happened because rich people are losing media control, and it's just one of many to come.

untog 9y ago
> The internet will almost certainly spawn a social movement to destroy the class system in the US. I'm unconvinced. The class system is, at its core, money. And short of eBay allowing people to sell second hand items peer to peer, I really don't think the internet has enabled economic mobility all that much. A select few in Silicon Valley have gotten very rich, certainly, but an effect on the population at large? Maybe it'll happen one day, but even stuff like Bitcoin has somehow transformed from "the new cash" to "the new speculative investment that promises to make people with disposable income even richer".
- stctgion 9y ago
  The class system in the US might be about money but here in the UK you can be penniless and still look down upon someone by being born into the right family!
- noir_lord 9y ago
  Social movement encompasses rather more than just an economic movement, it also covers things like political unrest and direct action campaigns.
- danans 9y ago
  I think they are saying that the movement to confront the class structure will be social, not economic, fueled by shared outrage, not commerce.
- Consultant32452 9y ago
  I think you're undervaluing the impact of the internet on small business. Sure, a few guys at the tippy top of Uber-eats are the only ones getting fabulously wealthy, but I've discovered several wonderful mom and pop restaurants through that service. Sure, only a hand full of people at Google are getting fabulously wealthy, but most of the video content I consume these days are regular-ish people on Youtube who now make their living making those videos without having to go through Hollywood gatekeepers. There's been at least a half dozen small businesses I've hired based solely off their Craigslist ads, businesses I likely would've never heard of and might not have ever existed without the internet/Craigslist. I don't understand why people point to the few fabulously wealthy people and exclaim that because everyone else isn't fabulously wealthy that the system is failing us all. We still have a ways to go, but the internet to me has moved several things further down the democratized spectrum than they ever had been before.
  - sedachv 9y ago
    The Internet does enable easier local business discovery. Where are all the new small businesses though? The latest Census data is from 2015 and shows the number of new small businesses created is at a level not seen since the mid-1970s: http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/news/economy/us-startups-near-40-year-low/ http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/news/economy/us-startups-nea... Whatever combination of factors is at work suppressing small business creation since the 2008 recession is not being overcome by the advantages you listed.
    - Consultant32452 9y ago
      The economy tanked and just as it was starting to recover the government made it illegal to take on risk by having no or crappy insurance. Meanwhile healthcare prices skyrocketed. Simultaneously we doubled down on our immigration policy towards providing citizenship for unskilled, impoverished immigrants rather than the kind of means based immigration policy popular in most of Europe. That means we missed out on a lot of talented, educated immigrants who might have either started companies or been willing to work for startups. We cracked down on internships. And we allowed patent trolls to run amok. Let's also not forget the credible threats of doubling minimum wage.
- deleted 9y ago
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aje403 9y ago
Would you say that it's more likely that the rich are using the Illuminati OR the Greek Fraternity to collectively conspiring against the common man?
- balladeer 9y ago
  In my gated community the rich actually collude to keep the wages for maids, gardener etc low. When I moved to this place as a bachelor and attended couple of pool side parties I was surprised this was also one of the topics along with the ones like how bad Real played in last match.
  - aje403 9y ago
    Of course - and that's the entire point. There's a single neighborhood rich people organizing to accomplish a single, small goal that they can agree on. That single neighborhood is probably spending millions of dollars in legal fees to fight against the next neighborhood of rich people to determine who has to get the power plant closer to their neighborhood. There is no collectivist, national (or global) hivemind or concensus among wealthy people about how to oppress the lower classes. The implication of the original post I've responded to is absurd. Wealthy people are more likely than not to be narcissistic and selfish, so any organization is really a prisoner's dilemma association of convenience, at best. Mark Zuckerberg in alone in a room with an angry mob would be much more civilized than Mark Zuckerberg in a room with Rupert Murdoch - there is just a bunch of wealth people whose voice carries far due to their organizations, wealth, and power, who generally have no allegiance to one other, each espousing their own disparate viewpoints, which generally do not involve wealth re-distribution Wealthy interests, like you are describing, and as the article portrays, exist in microcosms or small interests, and they conflict with other wealthy interests. One wealthy group might want to manipulate consumer group X to do Z and has to destroy organization B to manipulate consumer group X to do Y. That's just one portion of the comment I'm responding to - the rest is just some rambling from a psychotic someone who will be carrying a torch to something while snarling the gripe du jour some day.
  - walshemj 9y ago
    OMG talking about association football that's for Essex barrow boys who think they have made it and for 1st gen middle class types who think they are cool for following a team from the plush catered boxes.
lisper 9y ago
> The internet will almost certainly spawn a social movement to destroy the class system in the US. Right. I'm sure that the fact that the leading internet companies are run by Harvard (FB) and Stanford (Google) grads will not interfere with the Revolution in any way.
- ggg9990 9y ago
  It’s more that the Internet can enable the kind of coordination that a mass movement to revoke power needs.
  - killjoywashere 9y ago
    Oil could have enabled that kind of coordiation too, how'd that work out? For a mass movement, you need lots of leaders (of people) to band together and agree to steer the ship in a specific direction.
    - ggg9990 9y ago
      Hm? Oil isn’t a communications medium.
      - SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
        Not with that attitude its not.
    - deleted 9y ago
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  - confounded 9y ago
    And centralized surveillance, censorship, and control, too.
  - jstarfish 9y ago
    It can, but it doesn't. If anything it drives divisiveness on a scale we've never seen before. Before the internet it used to take 10-20 years to foment discord against a particular group. Now we have a new boogeyman every 18 months and it's always other plebes or pariahs-- never the ruling elite.
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PopsiclePete 9y ago
>The internet will almost certainly spawn a social movement to destroy the class system in the US. If the last two years have shown anything, it's that the "common man" in America is extremely susceptible to cheap propaganda and misinformation. Half the country would happily watch the entire thing burn down as long as "their team" is doing the burning. The "plebs", so to speak, have never been more controlled than they are today. If anything, I'm more pessimistic than ever. Powerful interests will be able to harness the massive amounts of data collected by social media to carefully formulate and craft the exact message they want to control who they want and people who I thought would easily see through that are now completely brainwashed into believing things that they would have laughed at 20 years ago. The rich will be fine, and the poor will eat each other alive, just as they're told to by the other rich men on the TV.
- jstewartmobile 9y ago
  CNN and FOX as living proof. Give people whatever disinformation they're inclined to believe to sell them advertised pills to treat maladies they picked up at the advertised restaurants--along with a side of advertised crap investments in the hopes of paying for the rest. Since it's broadcast, we at least know what they're up to. It keeps them relatively honest. Compare that to Google/FB where each person gets a catered experience. It would take an immense effort in data collection and analysis to find out just how hard they're screwing everyone. Going by all of the online scams I've had to ward friends and family away from (which came up on page-one Google searches BTW), my guess would be "very hard".
hsitz 9y ago
This reminds me of an entry from The Book of Life, on "Countries for Losers, and Countries for Winners": http://www.thebookoflife.org/countries-for-losers-countries-for-winners/ http://www.thebookoflife.org/countries-for-losers-countries-... I live in the U.S., but I think I'd prefer to live in one of the countries for losers.
- weisser 9y ago
  This is fantastic. For those unfamiliar, The Book of Life is an excellent online publication created with the assistance of Alain de Botton who wrote one of my favorite books, “The Course of Love”
- rsync 9y ago
  "I live in the U.S., but I think I'd prefer to live in one of the countries for losers." ... from the article: "Here is the list of the world’s top Loser Countries: (.nl, .de, .ch, .no, .dk)" As someone who travels to these countries frequently (rsync.net has a Zurich location) I can certainly get on board with the desire to move to Switzerland. It is a nicer country than the US. However, it is a ridiculous notion that the social success of these countries (and of Japan, which is conspicuously absent from that list) is due simply to some bad legislation here or there ... just a few technocratic choices made the wrong way. In reality, the reason things are so nice in Switzerland and Norway and Japan are because they have extremely homogenous populations and cultural legacies. It's easy to expand your circle of empathy to people whose names are also Lars Larson[1], just like yours is. They didn't invent jazz, though ... [1] Or Hiro Tanaka.
  - workthrowaway27 9y ago
    This is absolutely true, and obvious to anyone open-minded who has spent time in those countries, but good luck trying to have any discussion about the downsides of immigration in the US without getting shouted down as a racist.
    - ZeroGravitas 9y ago
      Unless your volunteering to deport your own ethic group to increase homogeneity (which you're obviously not) then you're probably advocating for the textbook definition of racism. Which may explain why you can't say that without being called a racist. Also, I'm not sure the facts back you up. Is the USA really more diverse than Canada? Is the UK really more diverse than Germany?
Veelox 9y ago
>But as long as 70%+ of Americans are wallowing in economic depression there will be no lasting social progress. Just the way most rich people hope it stays. What definition are you using for economic depression?
- notabee 9y ago
  Here's just a passing figure for starters: 63% of Americans can't handle a $500 or $1000 emergency expense. Now, if you're willing to actually enquire into this there are plenty of additional dismal statistics about average American life, regardless of the dizzying heights of stock prices. https://www.forbes.com/sites/maggiemcgrath/2016/01/06/63-of-americans-dont-have-enough-savings-to-cover-a-500-emergency/#786659b44e0d https://www.forbes.com/sites/maggiemcgrath/2016/01/06/63-of-...
  - Veelox 9y ago
    Using a kind of dubious site because it was the first one I found with the 63rd% of income [0]. That clocks in right at $79,954.00. I would say that a significant portion of that 63% is poor money management as opposed to lack of income. [0] https://dqydj.com/united-states-household-income-brackets-percentiles/ https://dqydj.com/united-states-household-income-brackets-pe...
    - notabee 9y ago
      The link you provided shows percentile by household, not individual. Just clicking on the link on that page to go to individual brackets, suddenly 63% drops to 50,000/yr. That's not a terrible salary, but as expenses have gone up much more rapidly than wages for quite some time, it becomes feasible that that would be eaten up quickly by debt burden and cost of living in many places to where saving is difficult. https://dqydj.com/united-states-income-brackets-percentiles/ https://dqydj.com/united-states-income-brackets-percentiles/
      - Veelox 9y ago
        Didn't mean to switch between household and individual, good catch. While part of my agrees with you that in some areas 50k/yr gets eaten up quickly we are looking at having $500 or $1000 on hand that is either 1% or 2% of annual income in savings. While I have sympathetic to a significant portion of the country ~20%-25% that cannot do that, I hard time believing 40% of Americans could not trim $500 off their expenses each year and save it.
emodendroket 9y ago
The Internet is, increasingly, controlled by a handful of companies, and in the event of serious unrest threatening the social order I don't find it hard to believe that the free exchange of information online would be curtailed.
mancerayder 9y ago
The internet will almost certainly spawn a social movement to destroy the class system in the US. People are just waking up to how bad it is. The #MeToo movement only happened because rich people are losing media control, and it's just one of many to come. I don't buy it. First of all, the class system is about material interests - real physical tangible interests - and not about feelings. Even if 99% of the people live in a world of ideas, the ruling class, by virtue of the fact that they have to bargain over laws (multi hundred page documents that decide taxation and allocation as well as employee and business rights), live in the world of the material. The American populace lives, and probably since at least the mid 20th century has lived, in a world of ideas. By this I mean, the country is torn asunder by feelings about abortion, race, gender and so forth, immigration [edit: and also celebrity-lead culture] -- all issues that, guess what, don't even touch the interests of the .01%. #MeToo poses no threat whatsoever to any class system.
- Helmet 9y ago
  I've known many "low-class" wealthy people. Likewise, I've met some incredible snobby, "upper-class" people who were not very wealthy, mainly intellectuals and artists.
afuchs 9y ago
> ... > The evil rich people figured out that if you start a gender and race war among the 99%, you can distract them from the fact that they're all being economically exploited and subjected to wage slavery. > ... Stated this way, this appears to handwave real problems away. Yes, racial and gender issues are often exploited for political gain; but these issues usually have a basis in real problems.
- marnett 9y ago
  Totally understood, and advancing social progress and acceptance is very important, however, issues of economic inequality and the associated policies and government decisions that aid this increasing gap affect nearly 99% of the US population - they are inarguably more pressing, more important issues. Thus, I can agree with GP when they say these smaller issues, ones that affect very few Americans, but warrant hours of newscast time and require every American to formulate an opinion on, are distractions.
  - padobson 9y ago
    I agree with you, but those social issue narratives are much easier to consume than the far more wonkish economic policy world. Why should a member of the bottom 70% care that the top marginal corporate rate was just cut from 36% to 21%?
callesgg 9y ago
It sounds insane/neurotic if you think some rich people sat in a meting deciding that would be a good way to suppress the poor. It might serve their richness but that does not mean they have hidden agendas in regards to it.
- balthasar 9y ago
  He speaking metaphorically. It makes little difference if the situation is contrived by a cabal versus many actors acting independently.
  - callesgg 9y ago
    What i believe makes a difference is whether it happens cause of some malevolent force or if it is just a inherit part of our common reality. If everyone willingly walked in to a pit of spikes it is their own fault. People should be allowed to act out their own free will as long as that act does not fuck with other people. If someone tricked them with lies to do that then there is a problem.
  - ericd 9y ago
    I think a good number of people actually believe that rich people get together to conspire to keep the lower classes divided. So saying this as a metaphor without any caveats is probably not a great idea.
stcredzero 9y ago
The internet will almost certainly spawn a social movement to destroy the class system in the US. Uh, have you been paying attention to campus protesters? The US has gotten richer and richer, if it functioned properly everyone could have enough without resorting to any radical policies. It's not quite that simple, due to human psychology. Even if people are wealthy on a global and historical scale, relative poverty will still cause problems. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3XYHPAwBzE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3XYHPAwBzE
maxxxxx 9y ago
If anything the internet has made it easier for the already powerful to control ever larger shares of the economy.
Hasz 9y ago
"The Revolution Will Not Be Televised", anyone?
- icebraining 9y ago
  Still sounds great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwSRqaZGsPw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwSRqaZGsPw
thescriptkiddie 9y ago
This is a major point in Class by Paul Fussell. https://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/dp/0671792253 https://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/...
cabalamat 9y ago
> The internet will almost certainly spawn a social movement to destroy the class system in the US. Maybe. A prerequisite would be for most people to realise that class is more important than gender and race.
cryoshon 9y ago
>The internet will almost certainly spawn a social movement to destroy the class system in the US it's called socialism. it's been spawned already, and it's growing. people can thank bernie sanders for its major popularization, but he won't be around when the dream is complete-- if it ever is.
CM30 9y ago
> The evil rich people figured out that if you start a gender and race war among the 99%, you can distract them from the fact that they're all being economically exploited and subjected to wage slavery. Yeah, this is something I've been thinking about for a while too. It's very convenient that the whole 'Occupy' thing got followed up by a huge push for social justice beliefs and comments about deplorables. Like someone didn't want the attention to be focused on the rich, and thought a bit of interclass warfare would be a nice distraction about now. You can see a huge media political shift about this time too. But hey, maybe I'm coming across as paranoid here.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Never mind having a candidate run on gender issues while being backed by the monied interest that ran the world economy aground...
randyrand 9y ago
Bernie basically ran on class warfare. It's not exactly a secret.
yakitori 9y ago
> The media in the US has historically been 100% controlled by rich people, and all major media still is. Things have gotten worse as capital consolidated all the industries. Now we have an illusion of choice. When you go to the supermarket, there seems to be tons of variety of products by many companies. After all, there are so many brands. But all these brands are owned by a handful of companies. The same thing with banking. The last financial crisis was used by the FED ( a banking cartel ) to get large multinational banks to buy up smaller regional banks. Regional newspapers are being bought up by major media companies like news corp. > The evil rich people figured out that if you start a gender and race war among the 99%, you can distract them from the fact that they're all being economically exploited and subjected to wage slavery. It's not just identity politics. It's also the bread and circuses. Nothing more poignant than the upcoming superbowl where the mindless stuff their faces while watching advertisements for 4 hours. > The internet will almost certainly spawn a social movement to destroy the class system in the US. That's naive. The internet will almost certainly be used to reinforce it. More distractions, more propaganda and more divisions. Look how quickly the wealthy has come down on the internet and social media already. Look at the amount of censorship. Look what happened to youtube trending page and google news. Youtube trending is now all SNL, major news channels and late night shows. Google news is now all washingtonpost, nytimes, etc. I hope you are right, but experience tells me money wins and the masses are not intelligent enough or united enough to challenge the wealthy. Our political system doesn't allow for it, nor does our education system or the media or anything else.

untog 9y ago

> The internet will almost certainly spawn a social movement to destroy the class system in the US. I'm unconvinced. The class system is, at its core, money. And short of eBay allowing people to sell second hand items peer to peer, I really don't think the internet has enabled economic mobility all that much. A select few in Silicon Valley have gotten very rich, certainly, but an effect on the population at large? Maybe it'll happen one day, but even stuff like Bitcoin has somehow transformed from "the new cash" to "the new speculative investment that promises to make people with disposable income even richer".

stctgion 9y ago
The class system in the US might be about money but here in the UK you can be penniless and still look down upon someone by being born into the right family!
noir_lord 9y ago
Social movement encompasses rather more than just an economic movement, it also covers things like political unrest and direct action campaigns.
danans 9y ago
I think they are saying that the movement to confront the class structure will be social, not economic, fueled by shared outrage, not commerce.
Consultant32452 9y ago
I think you're undervaluing the impact of the internet on small business. Sure, a few guys at the tippy top of Uber-eats are the only ones getting fabulously wealthy, but I've discovered several wonderful mom and pop restaurants through that service. Sure, only a hand full of people at Google are getting fabulously wealthy, but most of the video content I consume these days are regular-ish people on Youtube who now make their living making those videos without having to go through Hollywood gatekeepers. There's been at least a half dozen small businesses I've hired based solely off their Craigslist ads, businesses I likely would've never heard of and might not have ever existed without the internet/Craigslist. I don't understand why people point to the few fabulously wealthy people and exclaim that because everyone else isn't fabulously wealthy that the system is failing us all. We still have a ways to go, but the internet to me has moved several things further down the democratized spectrum than they ever had been before.
- sedachv 9y ago
  The Internet does enable easier local business discovery. Where are all the new small businesses though? The latest Census data is from 2015 and shows the number of new small businesses created is at a level not seen since the mid-1970s: http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/news/economy/us-startups-near-40-year-low/ http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/news/economy/us-startups-nea... Whatever combination of factors is at work suppressing small business creation since the 2008 recession is not being overcome by the advantages you listed.
  - Consultant32452 9y ago
    The economy tanked and just as it was starting to recover the government made it illegal to take on risk by having no or crappy insurance. Meanwhile healthcare prices skyrocketed. Simultaneously we doubled down on our immigration policy towards providing citizenship for unskilled, impoverished immigrants rather than the kind of means based immigration policy popular in most of Europe. That means we missed out on a lot of talented, educated immigrants who might have either started companies or been willing to work for startups. We cracked down on internships. And we allowed patent trolls to run amok. Let's also not forget the credible threats of doubling minimum wage.
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aje403 9y ago

Would you say that it's more likely that the rich are using the Illuminati OR the Greek Fraternity to collectively conspiring against the common man?

balladeer 9y ago
In my gated community the rich actually collude to keep the wages for maids, gardener etc low. When I moved to this place as a bachelor and attended couple of pool side parties I was surprised this was also one of the topics along with the ones like how bad Real played in last match.
- aje403 9y ago
  Of course - and that's the entire point. There's a single neighborhood rich people organizing to accomplish a single, small goal that they can agree on. That single neighborhood is probably spending millions of dollars in legal fees to fight against the next neighborhood of rich people to determine who has to get the power plant closer to their neighborhood. There is no collectivist, national (or global) hivemind or concensus among wealthy people about how to oppress the lower classes. The implication of the original post I've responded to is absurd. Wealthy people are more likely than not to be narcissistic and selfish, so any organization is really a prisoner's dilemma association of convenience, at best. Mark Zuckerberg in alone in a room with an angry mob would be much more civilized than Mark Zuckerberg in a room with Rupert Murdoch - there is just a bunch of wealth people whose voice carries far due to their organizations, wealth, and power, who generally have no allegiance to one other, each espousing their own disparate viewpoints, which generally do not involve wealth re-distribution Wealthy interests, like you are describing, and as the article portrays, exist in microcosms or small interests, and they conflict with other wealthy interests. One wealthy group might want to manipulate consumer group X to do Z and has to destroy organization B to manipulate consumer group X to do Y. That's just one portion of the comment I'm responding to - the rest is just some rambling from a psychotic someone who will be carrying a torch to something while snarling the gripe du jour some day.
- walshemj 9y ago
  OMG talking about association football that's for Essex barrow boys who think they have made it and for 1st gen middle class types who think they are cool for following a team from the plush catered boxes.

lisper 9y ago

> The internet will almost certainly spawn a social movement to destroy the class system in the US. Right. I'm sure that the fact that the leading internet companies are run by Harvard (FB) and Stanford (Google) grads will not interfere with the Revolution in any way.

ggg9990 9y ago
It’s more that the Internet can enable the kind of coordination that a mass movement to revoke power needs.
- killjoywashere 9y ago
  Oil could have enabled that kind of coordiation too, how'd that work out? For a mass movement, you need lots of leaders (of people) to band together and agree to steer the ship in a specific direction.
  - ggg9990 9y ago
    Hm? Oil isn’t a communications medium.
    - SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
      Not with that attitude its not.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- confounded 9y ago
  And centralized surveillance, censorship, and control, too.
- jstarfish 9y ago
  It can, but it doesn't. If anything it drives divisiveness on a scale we've never seen before. Before the internet it used to take 10-20 years to foment discord against a particular group. Now we have a new boogeyman every 18 months and it's always other plebes or pariahs-- never the ruling elite.

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PopsiclePete 9y ago

>The internet will almost certainly spawn a social movement to destroy the class system in the US. If the last two years have shown anything, it's that the "common man" in America is extremely susceptible to cheap propaganda and misinformation. Half the country would happily watch the entire thing burn down as long as "their team" is doing the burning. The "plebs", so to speak, have never been more controlled than they are today. If anything, I'm more pessimistic than ever. Powerful interests will be able to harness the massive amounts of data collected by social media to carefully formulate and craft the exact message they want to control who they want and people who I thought would easily see through that are now completely brainwashed into believing things that they would have laughed at 20 years ago. The rich will be fine, and the poor will eat each other alive, just as they're told to by the other rich men on the TV.

jstewartmobile 9y ago
CNN and FOX as living proof. Give people whatever disinformation they're inclined to believe to sell them advertised pills to treat maladies they picked up at the advertised restaurants--along with a side of advertised crap investments in the hopes of paying for the rest. Since it's broadcast, we at least know what they're up to. It keeps them relatively honest. Compare that to Google/FB where each person gets a catered experience. It would take an immense effort in data collection and analysis to find out just how hard they're screwing everyone. Going by all of the online scams I've had to ward friends and family away from (which came up on page-one Google searches BTW), my guess would be "very hard".

hsitz 9y ago

This reminds me of an entry from The Book of Life, on "Countries for Losers, and Countries for Winners": http://www.thebookoflife.org/countries-for-losers-countries-for-winners/ http://www.thebookoflife.org/countries-for-losers-countries-... I live in the U.S., but I think I'd prefer to live in one of the countries for losers.

weisser 9y ago
This is fantastic. For those unfamiliar, The Book of Life is an excellent online publication created with the assistance of Alain de Botton who wrote one of my favorite books, “The Course of Love”
rsync 9y ago
"I live in the U.S., but I think I'd prefer to live in one of the countries for losers." ... from the article: "Here is the list of the world’s top Loser Countries: (.nl, .de, .ch, .no, .dk)" As someone who travels to these countries frequently (rsync.net has a Zurich location) I can certainly get on board with the desire to move to Switzerland. It is a nicer country than the US. However, it is a ridiculous notion that the social success of these countries (and of Japan, which is conspicuously absent from that list) is due simply to some bad legislation here or there ... just a few technocratic choices made the wrong way. In reality, the reason things are so nice in Switzerland and Norway and Japan are because they have extremely homogenous populations and cultural legacies. It's easy to expand your circle of empathy to people whose names are also Lars Larson[1], just like yours is. They didn't invent jazz, though ... [1] Or Hiro Tanaka.
- workthrowaway27 9y ago
  This is absolutely true, and obvious to anyone open-minded who has spent time in those countries, but good luck trying to have any discussion about the downsides of immigration in the US without getting shouted down as a racist.
  - ZeroGravitas 9y ago
    Unless your volunteering to deport your own ethic group to increase homogeneity (which you're obviously not) then you're probably advocating for the textbook definition of racism. Which may explain why you can't say that without being called a racist. Also, I'm not sure the facts back you up. Is the USA really more diverse than Canada? Is the UK really more diverse than Germany?

Veelox 9y ago

>But as long as 70%+ of Americans are wallowing in economic depression there will be no lasting social progress. Just the way most rich people hope it stays. What definition are you using for economic depression?

notabee 9y ago
Here's just a passing figure for starters: 63% of Americans can't handle a $500 or $1000 emergency expense. Now, if you're willing to actually enquire into this there are plenty of additional dismal statistics about average American life, regardless of the dizzying heights of stock prices. https://www.forbes.com/sites/maggiemcgrath/2016/01/06/63-of-americans-dont-have-enough-savings-to-cover-a-500-emergency/#786659b44e0d https://www.forbes.com/sites/maggiemcgrath/2016/01/06/63-of-...
- Veelox 9y ago
  Using a kind of dubious site because it was the first one I found with the 63rd% of income [0]. That clocks in right at $79,954.00. I would say that a significant portion of that 63% is poor money management as opposed to lack of income. [0] https://dqydj.com/united-states-household-income-brackets-percentiles/ https://dqydj.com/united-states-household-income-brackets-pe...
  - notabee 9y ago
    The link you provided shows percentile by household, not individual. Just clicking on the link on that page to go to individual brackets, suddenly 63% drops to 50,000/yr. That's not a terrible salary, but as expenses have gone up much more rapidly than wages for quite some time, it becomes feasible that that would be eaten up quickly by debt burden and cost of living in many places to where saving is difficult. https://dqydj.com/united-states-income-brackets-percentiles/ https://dqydj.com/united-states-income-brackets-percentiles/
    - Veelox 9y ago
      Didn't mean to switch between household and individual, good catch. While part of my agrees with you that in some areas 50k/yr gets eaten up quickly we are looking at having $500 or $1000 on hand that is either 1% or 2% of annual income in savings. While I have sympathetic to a significant portion of the country ~20%-25% that cannot do that, I hard time believing 40% of Americans could not trim $500 off their expenses each year and save it.

emodendroket 9y ago

The Internet is, increasingly, controlled by a handful of companies, and in the event of serious unrest threatening the social order I don't find it hard to believe that the free exchange of information online would be curtailed.

mancerayder 9y ago

The internet will almost certainly spawn a social movement to destroy the class system in the US. People are just waking up to how bad it is. The #MeToo movement only happened because rich people are losing media control, and it's just one of many to come. I don't buy it. First of all, the class system is about material interests - real physical tangible interests - and not about feelings. Even if 99% of the people live in a world of ideas, the ruling class, by virtue of the fact that they have to bargain over laws (multi hundred page documents that decide taxation and allocation as well as employee and business rights), live in the world of the material. The American populace lives, and probably since at least the mid 20th century has lived, in a world of ideas. By this I mean, the country is torn asunder by feelings about abortion, race, gender and so forth, immigration [edit: and also celebrity-lead culture] -- all issues that, guess what, don't even touch the interests of the .01%. #MeToo poses no threat whatsoever to any class system.

Helmet 9y ago
I've known many "low-class" wealthy people. Likewise, I've met some incredible snobby, "upper-class" people who were not very wealthy, mainly intellectuals and artists.

afuchs 9y ago

> ... > The evil rich people figured out that if you start a gender and race war among the 99%, you can distract them from the fact that they're all being economically exploited and subjected to wage slavery. > ... Stated this way, this appears to handwave real problems away. Yes, racial and gender issues are often exploited for political gain; but these issues usually have a basis in real problems.

marnett 9y ago
Totally understood, and advancing social progress and acceptance is very important, however, issues of economic inequality and the associated policies and government decisions that aid this increasing gap affect nearly 99% of the US population - they are inarguably more pressing, more important issues. Thus, I can agree with GP when they say these smaller issues, ones that affect very few Americans, but warrant hours of newscast time and require every American to formulate an opinion on, are distractions.
- padobson 9y ago
  I agree with you, but those social issue narratives are much easier to consume than the far more wonkish economic policy world. Why should a member of the bottom 70% care that the top marginal corporate rate was just cut from 36% to 21%?

callesgg 9y ago

It sounds insane/neurotic if you think some rich people sat in a meting deciding that would be a good way to suppress the poor. It might serve their richness but that does not mean they have hidden agendas in regards to it.

balthasar 9y ago
He speaking metaphorically. It makes little difference if the situation is contrived by a cabal versus many actors acting independently.
- callesgg 9y ago
  What i believe makes a difference is whether it happens cause of some malevolent force or if it is just a inherit part of our common reality. If everyone willingly walked in to a pit of spikes it is their own fault. People should be allowed to act out their own free will as long as that act does not fuck with other people. If someone tricked them with lies to do that then there is a problem.
- ericd 9y ago
  I think a good number of people actually believe that rich people get together to conspire to keep the lower classes divided. So saying this as a metaphor without any caveats is probably not a great idea.

stcredzero 9y ago

The internet will almost certainly spawn a social movement to destroy the class system in the US. Uh, have you been paying attention to campus protesters? The US has gotten richer and richer, if it functioned properly everyone could have enough without resorting to any radical policies. It's not quite that simple, due to human psychology. Even if people are wealthy on a global and historical scale, relative poverty will still cause problems. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3XYHPAwBzE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3XYHPAwBzE

maxxxxx 9y ago

If anything the internet has made it easier for the already powerful to control ever larger shares of the economy.

Hasz 9y ago

"The Revolution Will Not Be Televised", anyone?

icebraining 9y ago
Still sounds great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwSRqaZGsPw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwSRqaZGsPw

thescriptkiddie 9y ago

This is a major point in Class by Paul Fussell. https://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/dp/0671792253 https://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/...

cabalamat 9y ago

> The internet will almost certainly spawn a social movement to destroy the class system in the US. Maybe. A prerequisite would be for most people to realise that class is more important than gender and race.

cryoshon 9y ago

>The internet will almost certainly spawn a social movement to destroy the class system in the US it's called socialism. it's been spawned already, and it's growing. people can thank bernie sanders for its major popularization, but he won't be around when the dream is complete-- if it ever is.

CM30 9y ago

> The evil rich people figured out that if you start a gender and race war among the 99%, you can distract them from the fact that they're all being economically exploited and subjected to wage slavery. Yeah, this is something I've been thinking about for a while too. It's very convenient that the whole 'Occupy' thing got followed up by a huge push for social justice beliefs and comments about deplorables. Like someone didn't want the attention to be focused on the rich, and thought a bit of interclass warfare would be a nice distraction about now. You can see a huge media political shift about this time too. But hey, maybe I'm coming across as paranoid here.

digi_owl 9y ago
Never mind having a candidate run on gender issues while being backed by the monied interest that ran the world economy aground...

randyrand 9y ago

Bernie basically ran on class warfare. It's not exactly a secret.

yakitori 9y ago

> The media in the US has historically been 100% controlled by rich people, and all major media still is. Things have gotten worse as capital consolidated all the industries. Now we have an illusion of choice. When you go to the supermarket, there seems to be tons of variety of products by many companies. After all, there are so many brands. But all these brands are owned by a handful of companies. The same thing with banking. The last financial crisis was used by the FED ( a banking cartel ) to get large multinational banks to buy up smaller regional banks. Regional newspapers are being bought up by major media companies like news corp. > The evil rich people figured out that if you start a gender and race war among the 99%, you can distract them from the fact that they're all being economically exploited and subjected to wage slavery. It's not just identity politics. It's also the bread and circuses. Nothing more poignant than the upcoming superbowl where the mindless stuff their faces while watching advertisements for 4 hours. > The internet will almost certainly spawn a social movement to destroy the class system in the US. That's naive. The internet will almost certainly be used to reinforce it. More distractions, more propaganda and more divisions. Look how quickly the wealthy has come down on the internet and social media already. Look at the amount of censorship. Look what happened to youtube trending page and google news. Youtube trending is now all SNL, major news channels and late night shows. Google news is now all washingtonpost, nytimes, etc. I hope you are right, but experience tells me money wins and the masses are not intelligent enough or united enough to challenge the wealthy. Our political system doesn't allow for it, nor does our education system or the media or anything else.