Exercising My Professional Privileges
Jan. 20th, 2025 12:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptOne of the things that my profession charges me with is maintenance and curation of the collections that are under my jurisdiction. There are several metrics to take into account when deciding whether a particular work stays or goes, including popularity, audience, condition of the material, and what kinds of messages the material gives to the reader. We're not supposed to approve or disapprove of any particular message or author in one part of the Library Bill of Rights, but also we're supposed to work toward anti-racism, anti-discrimination, and other pro-social goals in the ALA Code of Ethics. In any case, in the fiction section, I came across a work that was purportedly a tale of our reality, but was sufficiently wrong in both what it claimed and what it tried to get across as a message that even though it was correctly marked as fiction (and how), I exercised my professional prerogative and pulled it from the collection.
You can tell what kind of book this is going to be when the back matter, the thing that's supposed to attract readers, says this:
Polemics for children are a time-honored tradition in fiction, yes, but you can guess what kind of skill will be on display in the narrative of this story. Confirming that this is not going to be the best that "yay, capitalism" can give us, the book is dedicated to, and also has as a character, Thomas Sowell. No less, Mr. Sowell appears in this books after having been chased off a college campus by protesters who aren't willing to hear what he has to say. These protesters apparently are holding signs like "Diversity, Equity, Inclusion — Or Else!" and are throwing objects at Mr. Sowell as he gets herded into a car by police presence. The author has clearly never been around a campus protest, or, as is the case with so much of this book, is making sure their narrative is railroaded in properly by engaging in complete fantasy while claiming this actually happens.
However, Sowell doesn't appear until about midway through the book, so let's set up the scenario where the conservative lecturer gets to talk about Marxism. After introducing us ot the main characters and their athletic coach, who apparently has but one motto: "Be great!" and teaches the athletes that merit is the thing that matters. The coach defines merit as "the measurable results to achieve by being the strongest and fastest," which, erm, that may be one definition of the word, but it's not the most common one, I'd wager. (Merriam-Webster agrees. "a: a praiseworthy quality : virtue. b: character or conduct deserving reward, honor, or esteem. Also : achievement. c: a person's qualities, actions, etc. regarded as indicating what the person deserves to receive. d (obsolete): reward or punishment due." So, yes, there is a merit definition that is about conduct that deserves reward, honor, or esteem, and achievement, but it's surrounded by definitions that talk about qualities and virtues, and even the ones that mention actions also mention characteristics. This narrowed definition of merit is important because it sets up the contrast of this athletic coach's definition with the definition that the new athletic director imposes upon the students.
Anyway, so, now that we have our coach with simple philosophies and results-driven praise, we introduce the villain of this story, the new athletic director for the school, who has decided that athletic competitions will now be influenced by a points system that takes into account the various disabilities, life circumstances, and other things about the athletes that are not how fast they run, how far they throw, and other such. This is because the new athletic director is trying to reduce the amount of influence that privilege has on outcomes of athletics. In the author's words,
So, under the new system, there's a completely new set of people on top of the podium, because the people who can throw the farthest and run the fastest have their achievements offset by their privilege values, and therefore the least privileged are the ones who are the winners. This leads into the eventual appearance of Sowell, who has a name for this points system and their real opponent in this story: Marxism! That's right, a philosophical system about economics and the means of production has now been exported and is being used in this points system for athletic contests! Even though it's not actually spelled out in the story, the audience is supposed to nod sagely and understand that we're not talking about economic Marxism, but cultural Marxism. The story itself goes into a capsule summary of the Marxist economic critique, that capitalism, feudalism, and other systems of government accrue wealth to a privileged few, who then use that power and wealth to oppress everyone else. Marxism, on the other hand, demands that the workers get all the power and the wealth to use for their own mutual benefit. (So far, so good.) Then, Sowell tells us that every Marxist/socialist country in existence has instead created a system where the government owns everything, has all the wealth and power, and therefore has a privileged few using their wealth and power to oppress everyone else. Rather than acknowledge that none of these systems have achieved what Marx intended, we're supposed to conclude, as they do, that all attempts at Marxism will instead result in totalitarian control. Which, honestly, says more about humans and their desire for power and control than it says anything about Marx's ideas being good or bad. (While this goes on, the points are illustrated with capitalism as "the team carries the coach on their shoulders" and Marxism's dream of equality as "the coach carries the team on his body," which, as you might guess, ends in disaster. We're supposed to infer that, in a Marxist system, the people who are actual producers and good at what they do get weighted down by all the hangers-on that have a parasitic relationship with them. (That's Rand, not Marx.) And so, "forcing" equality only ends up with a government in total control, imposing its will on everyone and stopping them from being their best selves (That's Vonnegut, not Marx.))
The narrative takes a break to have Sowell articulate his three reasons why he stopped believing in Marxism and instead started believing in the need for certain fundamental freedoms that let everyone live up to their full potential ad be rewarded for the use of that potential. Once its done with that digression, then they finally turn back to the athletic competition and brand it as Marxist because the athletic director is attempting to "force equality" on everyone and, at least according to the coach,
Foul! a: fairness or justice in the way people are treated. Often, specifically : freedom from disparities in the way people of different races, genders, etc. are treated. This twisting of equity to mean "forced equal outcomes" rather than "fairness or justice" is meant specifically to feed into the idea that "equity, diversity, and inclusion" is secret code for "quota systems" and "the unqualified being hired and rewarded." Most people who aren't interested in arguing against their straw persons recognize that equal opportunities don't general equal outcomes, and therefore it is in the interest of both capitalists who want to hold on to power and wealth and socialists who want a better distribution of power and wealth to put a thumb on the scales of "equality" so that people who don't have privileges accorded to them by the accident of their family situation can not only access, but effectively use resources that will help them get onto a competitive footing with the people who are privileged.
At least now we can see how this book sets up the idea of the college admissions system, as applied to athletics, results in the spectre of Marxism having ruined the athletic competitions, because the director is interested in removing and reducing the influences of privilege on the competition. The kids, their coach, and Sowell hatch a plan to show just how wrong this current system is and to restore the competition as based on the merits of the competitors. How do they do this?
They create the Paralympics. Not such as named, but their "merit" plan involves changing the athletic competition so that instead of it being only about a certain subset of athletic skills, it creates a wider set of possible excellence. This happens after the chair-using daughter decries her championships as not having been determined by her abilities, but her disabilities, and she wants something better than that. And this plan, according to the author, would show "what diversity, equity, and inclusion looked like in the real world."
What would normally be a straight speed competition relay has a second leg that instead turns into a strength competition, where the competitor has to haul one of their teammates in a wagon behind them. Thus, the strong, but not particularly fast, competitors find themselves at advantage. The third stage of the relay is a hurdling competition, but instead of being about jumping over the hurdles, this leg is about going underneath them, which allows the student with dwarfism to shine. (At this point, one of the other coaches needles the athletic director about that child's "privilege [putting] the others at a disadvantage," which is certainly what I would expect from a book that is looking to score points instead of recognizing what they've done.) The final stage of the relay is a chair race, where the chair-using student is very clearly at advantage - although the chair that's used in all of the illustrations to this book is the pushing chair, the medical chair, and not the actual kinds of chairs that people who use them use to get around. After all, it would be weird for this book to have done a complete lack of research about everything except Thomas Sowell and also to have gotten the bit about chairs correctly. The athletic director, finally getting to see her daughter in a competition where she can excel, is very happy to see her daughter excel. Her daughter, after the end of the race, says "I'm sorry, Mom. But I didn't want to win with fake credits—I wanted to earn it and win for real." And the athletic director sees the error of her ways in trying to make it fair, and praises her daughter for being "amazing and strong without my help!"
This is supposed to be a major dunk on Marxism and EDI and all of those other things that are about reducing the influence of privileges and trying to close the gaps between everyone, and what it actually did was showcase the effectiveness of the Paralympic movement, and of various other competitions that are set up to pit competitors according to their strengths, instead of trying to make them compete according to their weaknesses. The Paralympic classification system, for the flaws and issues that it has, does a rigorous job of trying to make sure that each competitor in their classification competes from somewhere around the same starting point - chair racers are together, those with limb differences are together, everyone has to wear blackout shades in goalball, only the goalkeeper is sighted in blind soccer, but the keeper's area is severely restricted to prevent sight from being too much of an advantage, and so forth. This entire "merit relay" proves at least that if you can make "from each according to their ability" work out, you can do pretty awesome things. It also proves that sometimes, to make that awesome happen, you need accommodations or inequalities to bring out the best in someone, so, y'know, "to each according to their needs" is important as well. Guess that means this book that's supposed to be about proving how wrong Marxism is and how it results in terrible outcomes…shows that if you do it right, and put in the effort and resources to make it so that everyone can perform at their peak, Marxism works out just fine.
Oops. Try again next time, I guess? (All the same, a book that is this divorced from reality, this misleading in its principles and twisting in its definitions, even though it's claiming to be in our reality, doesn't deserve a place on my shelves.)
As an extra-hilarious stinger on the end of this, not soon after I discovered and withdrew this particular work of fiction from my shelves, someone commented on one of my fics, taking one of the jokes out of its context as an opportunity for scolding. The setup is that Marinette Dupain-Cheng is complaining about economics homework, and earlier in the fic, Ladybug has announced that if she sees the world's power-brokers moving more toward cleaning up their climate mess, she'll see about using her Miraculous Cure to help fix some of the climate mess. The relevant bit from the fic:
It's a good quip, and we'll set aside the part where in the world of the Miraculous, it's entirely possible that someone could force the entire world's population into behaving and thinking the same kinds of things.
Here's the comment I received:
The short reply I gave to it: "What a charmingly zero-sum comment." and then asked if there was anything they liked, or whether they were just there to criticize.
I found it funny that I had such close exposure to two different insistences that Marxism/socialism/communism only ever results in totalitarian tragedy and that free market capitalism is the only true way for anyone to experience the freedom to do their own lives. I realize that saying "there's never been a true socialist government!" is perilously close to, if not already well into, the No True Scotsman fallacy. What it might mean, more practically, is that humans are not capable of true socialism in an environment where there is scarcity, manufactured or otherwise. The gay space communism of the future may rest on there being so much of an abundance of everything that even if someone decides they want to hoard and try to amass as much resources as possible to themselves, there's still an overabundance for everybody else and they can safely ignore the hoarder as someone who has a particular mental quirk about it. In one of the Pi'maat stories, there's a line about one of the members of the clan of a Vulcan main character having maxed out the personal wealth limits of herself and all of her clan, and continuing to play the game because she enjoys doing so, even though all of what comes from it is redirected into the social coffers for redistribution to others. That might be the kind of thing that works for humans, where we can strive to make our own numbers go up, to a point, and that we do so with the backdrop of knowing that even if we don't make our numbers go up particularly much or quickly, the basics of our existence will be taken care of. We keep finding out in the UBI experiments that those who receive the UBI use it to their best advantages immediately, and they are able to stabilize their lives, improve upon them, and otherwise join capitalist society as productive members, having managed to clear enough of the Vimes Boots hurdles that they can start rolling downhill, instead of pushing uphill.
Aiming for socialist ideals generally results in improvements of society, even if we won't be able to achieve those goals. The most powerful forces against improvement of basic society (and the funding of those improvements) are people who want to hoard their excesses and people who believe in the supremacy of their own group and that no other group should be afforded anything that they have been able to take advantage of. Those people have not been meaningfully dislodged from societal or governmental power in any iteration of the United States, even if they have had their power wax and wane over time, or have decided that they occasionally need to throw bread and circuses to the masses to prevent themselves from being forcibly dislodged. The freedoms that many of them espouse as the best in the world are the freedoms that come from having power, privilege, and resources to ignore everyone else and not suffer any consequences for their ignorance and malice. Whenever it happens that most of the U.S. stops believing themselves temporarily embarrassed billionaires and starts understanding themselves as the exploited and discarded population being pit against others who are similarly so, there will hopefully be more progress, but until then, I guess I'll have to keep sporking terrible books.
You can tell what kind of book this is going to be when the back matter, the thing that's supposed to attract readers, says this:
Despite a century of Marxist catastrophes throughout the world, a new brand of Marxism is rearing its ugly head and taking the world by storm. Join [the main characters] as they learn about these flawed ideas and how we can stop them from spreading in our day!
Polemics for children are a time-honored tradition in fiction, yes, but you can guess what kind of skill will be on display in the narrative of this story. Confirming that this is not going to be the best that "yay, capitalism" can give us, the book is dedicated to, and also has as a character, Thomas Sowell. No less, Mr. Sowell appears in this books after having been chased off a college campus by protesters who aren't willing to hear what he has to say. These protesters apparently are holding signs like "Diversity, Equity, Inclusion — Or Else!" and are throwing objects at Mr. Sowell as he gets herded into a car by police presence. The author has clearly never been around a campus protest, or, as is the case with so much of this book, is making sure their narrative is railroaded in properly by engaging in complete fantasy while claiming this actually happens.
However, Sowell doesn't appear until about midway through the book, so let's set up the scenario where the conservative lecturer gets to talk about Marxism. After introducing us ot the main characters and their athletic coach, who apparently has but one motto: "Be great!" and teaches the athletes that merit is the thing that matters. The coach defines merit as "the measurable results to achieve by being the strongest and fastest," which, erm, that may be one definition of the word, but it's not the most common one, I'd wager. (Merriam-Webster agrees. "a: a praiseworthy quality : virtue. b: character or conduct deserving reward, honor, or esteem. Also : achievement. c: a person's qualities, actions, etc. regarded as indicating what the person deserves to receive. d (obsolete): reward or punishment due." So, yes, there is a merit definition that is about conduct that deserves reward, honor, or esteem, and achievement, but it's surrounded by definitions that talk about qualities and virtues, and even the ones that mention actions also mention characteristics. This narrowed definition of merit is important because it sets up the contrast of this athletic coach's definition with the definition that the new athletic director imposes upon the students.
Anyway, so, now that we have our coach with simple philosophies and results-driven praise, we introduce the villain of this story, the new athletic director for the school, who has decided that athletic competitions will now be influenced by a points system that takes into account the various disabilities, life circumstances, and other things about the athletes that are not how fast they run, how far they throw, and other such. This is because the new athletic director is trying to reduce the amount of influence that privilege has on outcomes of athletics. In the author's words,
"But all the other kids were faster and stronger than me. My mom couldn't afford nice running shoes, gym memberships, or even good food like some of the other kids had. Their privileges gave them an advantage over me. So, I gave up." [The athletic director's] voice choked on the words. Her childhood experience obviously still hurt her.The points system asks about things like "ethnicity, estimated family income, political affiliation, and gender identity," which makes me think that the author really wanted to talk about college admissions rather than athletic competitions, but the main characters of the story, nor the readers of these stories, aren't old enough to be applying for college, and therefore this nonsensical points system is being shoved into athletics competitions instead. The author does at least understand how privileges work in top-tier athletics, and that those who have the money and privilege to spend on additional training and equipment usually have better results. But because they've put this idea into the mouth of their straw person, someone who is so sensitive to criticism of their new system that they deduct points for competitions from anyone who criticizes the system, in addition to removing all the achievement plaques and other indications of difference in the school, we're supposed to see her and her ideas as ridiculous. (Admittedly, trying to impose the college admissions systems on athletics is ridiculous, because college admissions systems aren't designed for athletics competitions.)
"Fast forward to today," she said. "I have a disabled daughter who would never know what it's like to be a winner because the system isn't fair. It rewards the strong and privileged. That changes now."
So, under the new system, there's a completely new set of people on top of the podium, because the people who can throw the farthest and run the fastest have their achievements offset by their privilege values, and therefore the least privileged are the ones who are the winners. This leads into the eventual appearance of Sowell, who has a name for this points system and their real opponent in this story: Marxism! That's right, a philosophical system about economics and the means of production has now been exported and is being used in this points system for athletic contests! Even though it's not actually spelled out in the story, the audience is supposed to nod sagely and understand that we're not talking about economic Marxism, but cultural Marxism. The story itself goes into a capsule summary of the Marxist economic critique, that capitalism, feudalism, and other systems of government accrue wealth to a privileged few, who then use that power and wealth to oppress everyone else. Marxism, on the other hand, demands that the workers get all the power and the wealth to use for their own mutual benefit. (So far, so good.) Then, Sowell tells us that every Marxist/socialist country in existence has instead created a system where the government owns everything, has all the wealth and power, and therefore has a privileged few using their wealth and power to oppress everyone else. Rather than acknowledge that none of these systems have achieved what Marx intended, we're supposed to conclude, as they do, that all attempts at Marxism will instead result in totalitarian control. Which, honestly, says more about humans and their desire for power and control than it says anything about Marx's ideas being good or bad. (While this goes on, the points are illustrated with capitalism as "the team carries the coach on their shoulders" and Marxism's dream of equality as "the coach carries the team on his body," which, as you might guess, ends in disaster. We're supposed to infer that, in a Marxist system, the people who are actual producers and good at what they do get weighted down by all the hangers-on that have a parasitic relationship with them. (That's Rand, not Marx.) And so, "forcing" equality only ends up with a government in total control, imposing its will on everyone and stopping them from being their best selves (That's Vonnegut, not Marx.))
The narrative takes a break to have Sowell articulate his three reasons why he stopped believing in Marxism and instead started believing in the need for certain fundamental freedoms that let everyone live up to their full potential ad be rewarded for the use of that potential. Once its done with that digression, then they finally turn back to the athletic competition and brand it as Marxist because the athletic director is attempting to "force equality" on everyone and, at least according to the coach,
"today's Marxists want to change any system where some people have an advantage."
"They want equal outcomes in education, sports, and employment, regardless of merit. Guaranteeing outcomes isn't equality—this is called equity."
Foul! a: fairness or justice in the way people are treated. Often, specifically : freedom from disparities in the way people of different races, genders, etc. are treated. This twisting of equity to mean "forced equal outcomes" rather than "fairness or justice" is meant specifically to feed into the idea that "equity, diversity, and inclusion" is secret code for "quota systems" and "the unqualified being hired and rewarded." Most people who aren't interested in arguing against their straw persons recognize that equal opportunities don't general equal outcomes, and therefore it is in the interest of both capitalists who want to hold on to power and wealth and socialists who want a better distribution of power and wealth to put a thumb on the scales of "equality" so that people who don't have privileges accorded to them by the accident of their family situation can not only access, but effectively use resources that will help them get onto a competitive footing with the people who are privileged.
At least now we can see how this book sets up the idea of the college admissions system, as applied to athletics, results in the spectre of Marxism having ruined the athletic competitions, because the director is interested in removing and reducing the influences of privilege on the competition. The kids, their coach, and Sowell hatch a plan to show just how wrong this current system is and to restore the competition as based on the merits of the competitors. How do they do this?
They create the Paralympics. Not such as named, but their "merit" plan involves changing the athletic competition so that instead of it being only about a certain subset of athletic skills, it creates a wider set of possible excellence. This happens after the chair-using daughter decries her championships as not having been determined by her abilities, but her disabilities, and she wants something better than that. And this plan, according to the author, would show "what diversity, equity, and inclusion looked like in the real world."
What would normally be a straight speed competition relay has a second leg that instead turns into a strength competition, where the competitor has to haul one of their teammates in a wagon behind them. Thus, the strong, but not particularly fast, competitors find themselves at advantage. The third stage of the relay is a hurdling competition, but instead of being about jumping over the hurdles, this leg is about going underneath them, which allows the student with dwarfism to shine. (At this point, one of the other coaches needles the athletic director about that child's "privilege [putting] the others at a disadvantage," which is certainly what I would expect from a book that is looking to score points instead of recognizing what they've done.) The final stage of the relay is a chair race, where the chair-using student is very clearly at advantage - although the chair that's used in all of the illustrations to this book is the pushing chair, the medical chair, and not the actual kinds of chairs that people who use them use to get around. After all, it would be weird for this book to have done a complete lack of research about everything except Thomas Sowell and also to have gotten the bit about chairs correctly. The athletic director, finally getting to see her daughter in a competition where she can excel, is very happy to see her daughter excel. Her daughter, after the end of the race, says "I'm sorry, Mom. But I didn't want to win with fake credits—I wanted to earn it and win for real." And the athletic director sees the error of her ways in trying to make it fair, and praises her daughter for being "amazing and strong without my help!"
This is supposed to be a major dunk on Marxism and EDI and all of those other things that are about reducing the influence of privileges and trying to close the gaps between everyone, and what it actually did was showcase the effectiveness of the Paralympic movement, and of various other competitions that are set up to pit competitors according to their strengths, instead of trying to make them compete according to their weaknesses. The Paralympic classification system, for the flaws and issues that it has, does a rigorous job of trying to make sure that each competitor in their classification competes from somewhere around the same starting point - chair racers are together, those with limb differences are together, everyone has to wear blackout shades in goalball, only the goalkeeper is sighted in blind soccer, but the keeper's area is severely restricted to prevent sight from being too much of an advantage, and so forth. This entire "merit relay" proves at least that if you can make "from each according to their ability" work out, you can do pretty awesome things. It also proves that sometimes, to make that awesome happen, you need accommodations or inequalities to bring out the best in someone, so, y'know, "to each according to their needs" is important as well. Guess that means this book that's supposed to be about proving how wrong Marxism is and how it results in terrible outcomes…shows that if you do it right, and put in the effort and resources to make it so that everyone can perform at their peak, Marxism works out just fine.
Oops. Try again next time, I guess? (All the same, a book that is this divorced from reality, this misleading in its principles and twisting in its definitions, even though it's claiming to be in our reality, doesn't deserve a place on my shelves.)
As an extra-hilarious stinger on the end of this, not soon after I discovered and withdrew this particular work of fiction from my shelves, someone commented on one of my fics, taking one of the jokes out of its context as an opportunity for scolding. The setup is that Marinette Dupain-Cheng is complaining about economics homework, and earlier in the fic, Ladybug has announced that if she sees the world's power-brokers moving more toward cleaning up their climate mess, she'll see about using her Miraculous Cure to help fix some of the climate mess. The relevant bit from the fic:
"Why do I have to learn about all the ways a small privileged few try to fuck everyone else over?"
"Well, until Ladybug ushers in the great socialist revolution, it's what we're stuck with," Alya said, grinning.
It's a good quip, and we'll set aside the part where in the world of the Miraculous, it's entirely possible that someone could force the entire world's population into behaving and thinking the same kinds of things.
Here's the comment I received:
Alya needs to study her history better. Socialist revolutions ALWAYS result in "a small privileged few" taking advantage of everyone else. Always.
If you want to make your own choices about your own life, free market capitalism is the only game in town. Of course, most modern economies are mixed, with both free market aspects and government-controlled aspects, but the more there is of the latter, the less there is of the former.
The short reply I gave to it: "What a charmingly zero-sum comment." and then asked if there was anything they liked, or whether they were just there to criticize.
I found it funny that I had such close exposure to two different insistences that Marxism/socialism/communism only ever results in totalitarian tragedy and that free market capitalism is the only true way for anyone to experience the freedom to do their own lives. I realize that saying "there's never been a true socialist government!" is perilously close to, if not already well into, the No True Scotsman fallacy. What it might mean, more practically, is that humans are not capable of true socialism in an environment where there is scarcity, manufactured or otherwise. The gay space communism of the future may rest on there being so much of an abundance of everything that even if someone decides they want to hoard and try to amass as much resources as possible to themselves, there's still an overabundance for everybody else and they can safely ignore the hoarder as someone who has a particular mental quirk about it. In one of the Pi'maat stories, there's a line about one of the members of the clan of a Vulcan main character having maxed out the personal wealth limits of herself and all of her clan, and continuing to play the game because she enjoys doing so, even though all of what comes from it is redirected into the social coffers for redistribution to others. That might be the kind of thing that works for humans, where we can strive to make our own numbers go up, to a point, and that we do so with the backdrop of knowing that even if we don't make our numbers go up particularly much or quickly, the basics of our existence will be taken care of. We keep finding out in the UBI experiments that those who receive the UBI use it to their best advantages immediately, and they are able to stabilize their lives, improve upon them, and otherwise join capitalist society as productive members, having managed to clear enough of the Vimes Boots hurdles that they can start rolling downhill, instead of pushing uphill.
Aiming for socialist ideals generally results in improvements of society, even if we won't be able to achieve those goals. The most powerful forces against improvement of basic society (and the funding of those improvements) are people who want to hoard their excesses and people who believe in the supremacy of their own group and that no other group should be afforded anything that they have been able to take advantage of. Those people have not been meaningfully dislodged from societal or governmental power in any iteration of the United States, even if they have had their power wax and wane over time, or have decided that they occasionally need to throw bread and circuses to the masses to prevent themselves from being forcibly dislodged. The freedoms that many of them espouse as the best in the world are the freedoms that come from having power, privilege, and resources to ignore everyone else and not suffer any consequences for their ignorance and malice. Whenever it happens that most of the U.S. stops believing themselves temporarily embarrassed billionaires and starts understanding themselves as the exploited and discarded population being pit against others who are similarly so, there will hopefully be more progress, but until then, I guess I'll have to keep sporking terrible books.
no subject
Date: 2025-01-20 08:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-20 08:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-20 09:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-20 09:27 pm (UTC)(And to be clear, I was invoking the idea of the Paralympics, not the author of the book.)
If I missed other important things, though, let me know.
no subject
Date: 2025-01-20 09:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-20 10:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-21 02:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-21 05:14 pm (UTC)You're absolutely right. People don't understand how the average person in the USA, i.e. not one of the 0.1% billionaire class, has been exploited for decades and it is not going to end. Restoring that 90% top tax rate that we had in the '50s would be a step in the right direction.
no subject
Date: 2025-01-21 05:27 pm (UTC)A high tax rate would be useful, yes, although it would need to be paired with enforcement resources so that the dodgers get caught and pay up.
no subject
Date: 2025-01-21 09:28 pm (UTC)They've got to get rid of the dodges of paying executives thru stock dividends and letting them take loans against stocks for their pin money.