I don't really see anything in the article that talks of the fluffy man waiting at home with a cup of tea and the kids occupied. Technically I might well be such a man as I struck a career with a better work/life balance but I've consistently dated women richer than me without much issue. My flaw being that I'm more of an ugly bore.

It talks instead of women in their late-30s who are fed up with the blokes on offer. It's not particularly vicious by the standards of the Grandium and, having read previous work by the author (which focuses on the US), the issue is particularly pronounced in areas of the US where the men are outright lazy unambitious arseholes in post-industrial communities where the women simply view it as better to not have them in their lives. It's about not being a manchild ultimately and while that correlates with lots of money it certainly doesn't stop someone getting their leg over with passions.

>Then there were those who simply didn’t want to. “I learned the term ‘the Peter Pans’, you know the men who will never grow up. They may be educated men who have money and so forth, but they want to play around and have a lot of fun and may not partner at all, or may not partner well into their 40s and 50s,” she says.

It's strange that I can recognise myself in this deep-down but on a conscious level want the opposite. I think like most blokes, deep-down I want to screw hordes of women and only want to settle down with someone I really know is right. The problem is that we then approach things the opposite to women where we really evaluate continuing the relationship after we've been fucking for awhile whereas birds tend more to click with you pretty early on and then end up disappointed.

>>40216
>If you keep waiting for the perfect partner, you'll end up with no partner. It's always been that way.

You can reverse that though, you get the partner but then you're trapped in an exhausting marriage. Go out to Lidl on a Monday afternoon and ask yourself how many people in the shop you'd be able to build a happy marriage with.

I reckon if we ever unlock biological immortality and stay young forever we might end up with a population crash as people deduce that everyone around them is a cunt and they have forever to wait it out until that fact improves. I have more faith in humanity than I'm perhaps letting on but I understand that a marriage is basically a decision that will impact you in some way forever.

>More than 150 interviews later, her research – the largest anthropological study to date into why women freeze their eggs – concluded that it was men, not women, who were the problem. The biggest driving factor for women in the US was a shortage of suitable educated men, a problem which she terms in her forthcoming book, Motherhood on Ice, the “mating gap”.


I call bullshit. It's not our fault if women's standards are too high. And that's not even considering the fact that boys and young men aren't falling behind in academic education because they're lazy sods, but because the education system systematically disadvantages them.

Also, many women who are less educated take for granted or at least expect highly educated men of high social status to marry down. I know there's still that whole bit about men being the provider and breadwinner, but why should men settle for less when a lot of highly educated women think a plumber is beneath them.

And if you are highly trained and expect to find somebody within those circles, then that narrows your pool of potential mates to begin with. For both genders actually, as only about 22 percent of adults over the age of 25 in the UK have a university degree. But not only that, but as a single woman, by the time you've finished all your degrees and have climbed up the career ladder to where you can afford to settle down comfortably, you'll probably be pushing 30, if you're not over already, at which point you are competing with younger women, who have a much bigger chance of attracting successful 30something men.

You're essentially pricing yourself out of the market. And it's not men's fault if you go down that road.

I'm not saying don't become a high professional career woman. But if you want that for yourself and you want to be married with kids as well, then start looking early while you're still at university, or be ready for compromise.

If all women hate one man, that man's probably a cock. If a woman hates all men, she's probably mental. I think that since society still has certain ideals about women raising the kids, but now women have to get jobs too, maybe that is now too much pressure and too much effort, and it's just not worth it to go through all that. Also, look at the planet: we're full. It's not like there is any pressure to continue the human race single-handedly, while in the past I guess that might have been the case, what with all the polio and bubonic plague.

It's true that most of my friends don't have kids, but that's because people with kids don't have friends. If this academic has made such an egregious sampling error, I'm going to develop some longstanding issues of my own. I hope she cooks better than she researches. But from a more honest angle, I think my first point about employment being better than childrearing and the two together not being worth it, is the most likely explanation.

>>40213
I think this completely missed the point
Its more expensive than ever to raise children here and I assume the USA is not much different, a womans expectation to maintain the same living standards and be there to care for their children is perfectly reasonable, but to achieve that means their partner needs to be on a much higher income to support a wife and children.

The conclusion from this survey should not be "woman aren't having children because their standards are much higher than they used to be", it should be "women aren't having children because a median salary cannot support a family like it used to"

Womens standards have not gone up at all, what has changed today are still hoping the the ideal nuclear family that their parents and grandparents in the boomer generation and to a lesser extent in generation x had, an ideal that

Pretty much what I'm always saying about feminism having being a bourgie ideology captured by capital since the very start. It has not liberated women, it has only put them in the same shackles as men.

This is as a few of you have pointed out, a primarily material issue of the discrepancy between the nature of our work, our levels of qualification and specialisation, our productivity as workers, and the lifestyle this ultimately affords us and our hypothetical families. You can spin it as a confusing and controversial mess of gender standards and expectations if you want, but that will only ever be assumption and assertion. The hard economic facts however, paint a picture.

Anyway now for the sexist bit to piss fisherlad off- Women don't know what they want, you can ask them, but their answers are meaningless because what they think they want is often entirely unrelated to what they really want. So this survey doesn't really tell us a lot.

There are some things we just need to accept about human nature and stop lying to ourselves about- One of them is that women always desire a man who is a provider. Much like men always desire a woman who is nurturing and kind, women ultimately always seek a man who can give them what they can't get, and do things for them they can't do. That doesn't necessarily mean financially, that's just the most base form of "providing" in today's world; but it is always true.

Trouble is in letting the tail of capitalism wag the dog of society, the case is often that men don't have anything else to provide, other than their value in hard currency as a unit of production.

>>40206
So, what is the quarantine period for?

And how much do you get for each beefy load?

So if you've caught anything it will have time to show.

>And how much do you get for each beefy load?

Its quite strict that they'll pay you £35 if it covers travel expenses, accommodation and/or childcare. Presumably all the money the private clinic makes on using the sperm goes into a whimsical masturbatory aids.

>>40208

>masturbatory aids

You can't get that from a wank.





I'll get my coat.

>>40209
>You can't get that from a wank.
Not with that attitude.

>>40210


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEN7UP4o6LE

There are few things more suspiscious to me than pricks who post news stories on here with no opinion of their own alongside. I think the OP should be shot through the face for subversion, but unfortunately the moderators have gone soft. They used to call him Purpz, but now they're saying "Mr Softy", it's true.

>>40157
>They used to call him Purpz, but now they're saying "Mr Softy", it's true.

Usual cretins are yelling about it being DEM JABZ M8.
Not the possibility that the fella just ran 26 miles.

>>40159

>Not the possibility that the fella just ran 26 miles.

In his mid-40s, no less.

I'm about that age, and while I still like to go out for a strenuous ten-mile mountainbike ride once or twice a week, I wouldn't kid myself into thinking that I could run a marathon.

It's one thing to want to stay in shape in middle age, and you should. But you also need to know your limits. There are 50 year olds who still run marathons or half marathons, and it can be done. Just saying, the risk of something going wrong and your body just not being able to take it is much higher at 45 than at 25.

>>39212
Which one? The invented one or the real one?

>>39213

What's the difference?

Shamima Begum, who left the UK for Syria as a teenager to join the Islamic State group, was a victim of human trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation, a court has heard.

Ms Begum travelled to Syria in 2015, with her citizenship stripped on national security grounds in 2019. A five-day immigration hearing is considering a new attempt to challenge the removal of her UK citizenship.

The Home Office insists she continues to pose a threat to national security. The case is being heard at the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC), which can hear national security evidence in secret if necessary. Lawyers for Ms Begum, now 23, told the court that a decision by the then home secretary, Sajid Javid, to remove her British citizenship was unlawful, as it did not consider whether she had been a child victim of trafficking.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-63699503

>Shamima Begum, who left Britain as a schoolgirl to join Islamic State (IS), has lost an appeal against the decision to remove her British citizenship.

>At a five-day hearing in November, Begum, who was 15 when she left her home in east London with two school friends in 2015 to travel to Syria, challenged the decision taken by the then-home secretary, Sajid Javid, in 2019. On Wednesday, the special immigration appeals commission (Siac) decided the revocation of her citizenship, which occurred after she was discovered in a refugee camp in north-east Syria in 2019, was lawful.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/feb/22/shamima-begum-loses-appeal-removal-british-citizenship

>>39995
Then the law is an ass. I'm sure the suits have written the law to make things like this legal, but I still don't agree with it.

>>39681
A yoof repeatedly called me a "baldy twat" while I was waiting for a bus a couple of weeks ago. Could I get him arrested?

>>39682

Section 5, Public Order Act 1986.

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1986/64/section/5

>>39681

This thing is already illegal, but people are complaining that it's still happening, so we're going to make it extra illegal. We aren't going to give the police any more resources to enforce that law, we aren't going to give the CPS any more resources to prosecute and we aren't going to make any more court time available. We don't actually need to enforce laws, right?

>>39683
>Section 5, Public Order Act 1986.
Would require the prosecution to prove that the baldy twat is a sensitive snowflake who gets distressed and has a teary when someone calls him a baldy twat, or alternatively run an empty-chair argument offering up a little old straw lady.

>We aren't going to give the police any more resources to enforce that law
Sure, let's give the police more resources and broader powers to enforce one of the most widely-abused bits of law on the books. There's no way that can possibly go wrong, right?

>>39681

Anyone with common sense can see what bollocks this is, but when it comes to fisherpersonry I don't think common sense is allowed.

Perfect example of the sort of petty authoritarianism to appease Mumsnet arseholes I was alluding to in the other thread. Doesn't do much of anything in real life, but makes the Karens feel like they've been listened to, which is all that matters.

>>39684

I'd be distressed if someone repeatedly called me a baldy twat. I think most people would, regardless of whether they were bald or indeed a twat. I think you'd be hard pressed to argue that "baldy twat" isn't a term of abuse when directed at a stranger. What >>39682 describes is a textbook example of public disorder.

I did think that to begin with, worrying that it would be some noble and righteous citadel like Library Genesis. But it sounds more like they pirate those self-published ebooks written by disabled women about time-travelling sex aliens or whatever. My sister actually used to write books like that, and she stopped because there's just no money in it. She got really rich off the first couple, but her subsequent releases all got pirated and she barely made anything. Now she works in some hipster shop for minimum wage. So fuck these Russkies.

>>39653
Congrats on your sister finding a proper job. Z-lib had an even larger selection of textbooks than libgen.

>>39654
> Z-lib had an even larger selection of textbooks than libgen.

Given how easy it is to disperse a library like that, it'll be back soon under another guise.

There are medical problems that sound like what the gimp was doing. When you get real proper diabetic hypoglycaemia, as I have experienced, you can find yourself stumbling around on the ground thrashing strangely. So all I can do is worry that the gimp had something like that, and needed help rather than mockery.

How odd, somebody asked me just the other day if the Somerset gimp was still around.

>>39600
I think there was something in the news about the coppers looking into it again. If it was before those reports you might have been talking to the Somerset Gimp.

I'd heard about similar things in the past and I thought it was common knowledge that China had operatives in other countries keeping tabs on their ex-pats, I think all this report really adds that we didnt know is the specific locations of the bases.
Closing them down is only a temporary disruption as they can easily open new offices posing as shell companies if it comes to it.

cHinA Is fiNIsheD!

t. peter zeihan

Weird that that massive monitoring network we have permanently snooping on everyone's WhatsApp messages and shit doesn't alert our security services to things like this. Or that our security services don't seem to be quite as bothered as you would think that stuff like this is going on.

Back in the old days spies had to go undercover, nowadays they are basically just businessmen.

I take it as a tacit acknowledgement that we live under a shadowy illuminati one world government already, and geopolitical drama is just pantomime to keep us all in the dark. Putin isn't invading Ukraine to prop up his regime or fight back against nato encroachment or any of that, what it really is Os that global capital wanted the ground ploughed up fresh so they could go in and plant the seeds of investment and Putin is the heel. Just look at him, he plays the baddie all too gleefully.

This has been an issue in Canada as well. But this neoliberal age isn't like the 1950s anymore, and our governments will turn a blind eye to it because... money.

>>39587

>Or that our security services don't seem to be quite as bothered as you would think that stuff like this is going on.

The job of the security services is to know what's going on. What to do with that knowledge is a political matter. Historically, our position has been to avoid messing with China because they make nearly all of our stuff; trying to start a fight with China is almost literally biting the hand that feeds you. We've tolerated China's authoritarian tendencies because we didn't see what we could do about it and we didn't want to jeopardise the flow of stuff.

That position has changed over the last few years, at least in terms of rhetoric. That's possibly because Western governments are worried about the rise of Xi Jinping and China's increasing willingness to project their power beyond their borders. It's also possibly because our governments don't actually care whether we've got any stuff.

I realise that's an X-Ray and is probably on the mirror website too but can you not.

>>39242
What's wrong with it?

>>39184

The Soviet Union fell largely because the U.S. was outspending the Russians many times over in the early 80s nuclear arms race. It was something that the Soviets just had no way of keeping up with. Add to that the debacle in Afghanistan, where the Soviets spent ten years accomplishing absolutely nothing and again only hemorrhaging military budgets, and you had a Soviet Union which had next to no funding to modernise its entire system. Which would have been badly needed, because the Communist Bloc and its satellite states were still greatly relying on heavy industries in a continuation of Stalin's doctrines, but had no money for innovation that would have ensured the competitiveness of Soviet products on the global market.

Also, the Soviet method of quelling dissent in its republics and its satellite states was on numerous occasions to send in troops and/or ratchet up political repression. Which was also no longer a possibility under its strapped finances. The peaceful revolutions in 1989 in the satellite states didn't just happen without Soviet military intervention because the Soviet Union suddenly would have taken a more benign view on them. Although you shouldn't put that idea past a man as moderate in character as Gorbachev. But really, they just couldn't afford to send troops into half a dozen satellite states all at once. It probably only would have accelerated the Soviet Union's downfall, which the Soviets must have known. The Soviets did try to intervene with their military in Lithuania in 1990 when the country pushed for independence, but it didn't turn out too well for the Soviets.

Is the world better off without the Soviet Union? If you ask many people in the former Communist Bloc, then probably yes. If you look at how other socialist or communist states have fared since then, they tend to have to keep up political repression and stagnation, while allowing their citizens just enough freedoms to keep them from revolting entirely, but they are not really free citizens as we in the West would understand it. Just look at China and the way it spies on its entire population. Countries like North Korea, on the other hand, have just simply put all of their efforts into repression, indoctrination and self isolation.

On the international level, it's probably problematic that after the implosion of the Soviet Union, the U.S. was able to brand itself as the only remaining superpower which had "won" the Cold War and was therefore God's chosen country to lead the world to bigger and greater things. Which comes with its own problems to this day in terms of the Americans' desire for global domination. A potent nuclear rival to NATO and the U.S. keeping close watch on the countries in its own sphere of influence could have kept the Americans more in check. But it would have come at the expense of making the risk of global nuclear war once again more likely. As we are seeing today, where Russia and the West are facing off against each other in a way not known since the mid-80s.

>>39187

Hence "albeit a reformed one".

The state Russia has devolved into (and therefore the way we are currently facing off with them right now, because those things are directly connected) was pretty much the worst possible outcome. A sham democracy that's basically a dictatorship in all but name, just like the other global baddies.

The later years of the Soviet Union, while not without their problems (much like modern day China, or, frankly, America or Europe. Let's not pretend we live in complete freedom in a not at all dysfunctional democratic utopia either) could have continued moving in a more liberal direction if it hadn't collapsed first. I think the sentiment was there, at least.

It's not impossible to imagine a more open, modernised Soviet Union, while retaining the institutional strength to stop a bloke like Putin taking over and transforming the place into a complete oligarchy. A gradual "decolonisation" of the satellite states like Britain transitioning to the Commonwealth.

>>39188

Russia has been described as a failed state in recent years, which is probably very true.

You also have to factor in that Russia has no democratic tradition. They had 70 years of communism, and before that, the Tsars ruled for centuries with varying degrees of an iron fist.

One of the reasons the Weimar Republic failed was that Germany, too, had had no democratic tradition. Yes, in some ways, Germany was democratic since 1871 when the German Empire was founded, but the Reichstag and its publicly elected members had no actual parliamentary powers as we know them today. On paper, it was a constitutional monarchy much like ours, but the Kaiser's power and that of the aristocracy close to him were near-absolute. Effectively, no laws could be passed by the Reichstag without the approval of the aristocracy, who could decide on a whim.

Having lost the monarchy as such after WWI probably didn't set up the Weimar Republic for failure in and of itself, but crucially, many citizens, including publicly elected officials, rejected the new parliamentary democracy with its deposed aristocratic class, because to them, it was a humiliating step down from Germany's former glory. Which in practice meant that many of the old cliques maintained their channels and networks, united by their disdain for the new democratic state. Add to that the fact that Germany was one of the hardest hit countries internationally by the 1929 Wall Street stock market crash, because the country was rebuilt extensively after WWI with the help of American banks, who then suddenly had to call in their loans from Germany companies. And so you suddenly had impoverished millions in a faltering young democracy, who felt like they had nothing to gain from the latter.

I think you see where I am going with this. Russia after the fall of communism had a fragile democracy where many of the old cliques were still dominant, including people like Putin. And many ordinary Russians who aren't part of the new money elite have complained for years that under communism, at least they had a steady job and always enough food on the table. It was kind of a shit life where you had few freedoms, but at least one where your most basic needs were met.

This has not been a good foundation for what is still a fledgling democracy with respect to the centuries that came before it. And similar to post-WWI Germany, it has been a breeding ground for totalitarianism and the dismantling of democratic structures and institutions. Putin didn't suddenly usurp power in what was until then a poster child of a newly democratic Eastern European country. He is the result of decades of democratic rot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFgcqB8-AxE

I can't believe this exists. Two of my favourite men from cold countries, together in one place.

>>39167

>I don't know enough about macroeconomics to offer an authoritative view, but my understanding is that raising everyone's wages just pushes inflation even higher, so it's ultimately self-defeating.

The thing is, I don't actually buy that argument. And I don't just mean that in the usual delusional lefty principled kind of way, I mean it doesn't add up, and it drastically oversimplifies the matter. It's just the standard line of argument Conservatives always bring out about paying anyone better.

Compare it to raising the minimum wage, for example. The argument has always been basically the same there too- I've watched with interest as several states in the US have gone through that debate. And you know what? The evidence actually points the opposite way. Increasing people's wages increases their spending power, which makes businesses better off, in a greater margin than it impacts their overheads. Everyone prospers because there's more money circulating. It might inflate values slightly, but not enough to be self defeating. The thing about economics is that it's not about how much money we have, or how much money a business makes, it's about money circulating. Money being spent. Money changing hands. The more transactions are taking place, the better everyone does- The actual numbers are all pretty arbitrary. It's like the difference between speed and velocity, if that makes sense.

And the thing is in this particular circumstance, raising people's wages wouldn't even actually be raising them. We're just coming out of a decade of real terms wage stagnation. We wouldn't be just handing people money for nothing- Wed be putting their wages back where they already should be.

And I mean, beyond that, you do have to notice it's only the paupers this argument gets brought out against isn't it. Nobody bats an eyelid when the execs and the banks hand themselves six figure payrises on the back of fuck all. Somehow that doesn't cause inflation does it, eh?

Anyway I think you get my point.

I'll tell you whose side I'm on: I was on the side of MY bloody strikes thread that I made a couple of months ago. But fine. No, it's fine, really. It's totally okay. I told you it's fine.

Anyway, my big concern is that these strikes will be really successful, and people in those jobs will get massive raises, and the rest of us won't. If all wages everywhere went up by, say, 10%, then we'd all be groovy. If inflation goes higher and a few people have a much smaller real-terms wage drop, well, these things happen in economic crises. Sometimes you just have to deal with it. But I work for a small company and I don't want to leave. I like working there, mostly. They can afford raises now because we're doing well, and we're not getting them. There is plenty of discussion at work that we should all join a union, but as it stands, nobody has, I don't think, and I don't see how that would help us when there are less than ten of us. Anyway, this is just blogposting now. My point is that not everyone will go on strike. If all the strikers get big raises, good for them, but that will make things even worse for the people who don't strike. Nurses and care workers, and people on benefits, and doctors, and the fire brigade, are just going to be even more fucked. We either need a general strike (that would also cause a recession, which in turn would stop inflation, so it is unequivocally a great idea) or we need to literally rob the rich in any way possible to get our bloody money back. The money can't come from the government, or that would mean more inflation. Instead, it has to be redistributed fairly and equally. And violently, if it comes to that. Strikes are really the last thing to try before actual revolution.


>>39171
> It's like the difference between speed and velocity, if that makes sense.
Not to me it doesn't. Are you thinking of the difference between weight and mass? I remember learning at school that those are different, but I don't think they ever told me that speed and velocity are different.

>>39172

In physics terms, velocity is a vector of acceleration over time, speed is distance over time.

>>39171

>The thing about economics is that it's not about how much money we have, or how much money a business makes, it's about money circulating. Money being spent. Money changing hands. The more transactions are taking place, the better everyone does- The actual numbers are all pretty arbitrary. It's like the difference between speed and velocity, if that makes sense.

We do use the term "velocity of money" in economics and I'd encourage you to look it up.

The thing you're overlooking is the most fundamental concept in economics - supply and demand. Increasing the supply of money without increasing the supply of goods will inevitably lower the value of money relative to goods. Gas prices are going up right now because there isn't enough gas. House prices are insane because there aren't enough houses. Money is just a society-level IOU and the only value it has is the goods it can be exchanged for. Giving everyone (or close to everyone) more money achieves nothing except undermining confidence in money, because you haven't changed the underlying quantity of goods in the economy.

Of course, none of that should be read as an argument against redistribution, just an argument against the fallacy that we can make people better off without making anyone else worse off just by pumping money into the economy.

>Compare it to raising the minimum wage, for example. The argument has always been basically the same there too

Nobody is particularly concerned about minimum wage increases being inflationary within normal ranges - it'd only be a concern if you implemented massive and sudden increases that are occasionally bandied about. People do worry about the effect on employment; that's a very controversial debate, but we do have reasonably good evidence that increasing the minimum wage tends to increase unemployment, particularly youth unemployment.

The Low Pay Commission who set the rate of the minimum wage explicitly consider the impact of wage rates on employment, which is why there's a much lower rate for young people. Despite that, we've seen a significant increase in youth unemployment since the introduction of the NMW despite the overall labour market being quite buoyant. Many of our European peers with stronger labour rights also have higher rates of unemployment - hiring unskilled or inexperienced workers is less attractive when they cost more and they're harder to sack.

Message too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>39174

>Of course, none of that should be read as an argument against redistribution, just an argument against the fallacy that we can make people better off without making anyone else worse off just by pumping money into the economy.

Aye, but therein lies the rub, doesn't it. Nobody's asking for money to be pumped in to the economy for free. It's bordering upon dishonest misrepresentation to talk about it that way. They're asking companies that are making very healthy profits to make very slightly less profits and instead put some of it in their staff's pockets.

It's a different line when it comes to public services, but compared to the wider economy or the benefits system, it's still a drop in the ocean to pay them properly. Especially when you can commit £21bn out of nowhere to bribe pensioners to vote for you.

As fir the supply/demand etc etc stuff. The common argument about a "wage price spiral"- I don't but that in today's economy. It may have been true in the 70s and the great depression or whenever else. But we live in a globalised world now. Inflation in this country isn't as directly affected by wages in this country, because the things pushing inflation are imported anyway- A pack of pasta costs twice what it did in 2020, for instance, and that comes from Italy. Raising the wages of British workers won't impact on that.

I think part of the reason this country is in the mess it's in is because we've been stagnant for so long, and there's never been a jolt of stimulus to get the economy going. The government have been miserly Scrooge figures for over a decade, they begrudgingly did a bit of socialism-for-businesses during the pandemic, but they've let the ordinary people- ie consumers- become increasingly hard up. They've effectively starved the economy.

>>39142

Where we've really cheated the working class out of their ability to participate is that everything indeed needs a degree nowadays. Some 30 or 40 years ago, you could go relatively far up the career ladder even if you left school at 16. A friend's dad was a factory floor manager, who had come from humble beginnings in that he left school after his GCSEs and worked his way up from being a lowly assembly line worker. And by the looks of it, his salary was well enough to provide for a family. Nowadays, you have to be a production engineer with a B.Eng. at least, which is not a bad thing as such, but it means you'll have some 23 year old who's never picked up a wrench in his life running a factory floor. And probably for a lot less money too.

The problem isn't that you fast track people into positions like that, it's that university degrees in and of themselves are still unattainable for a lot of people in that kind of work environment, and by requiring a degree, you are excluding them from reaching those positions as a result of years of hard manual work, like in the old days.

That isn't to say that a working-class chap can't simply be encouraged to take his A levels and study engineering. But if you've ever spent time with a few people from that social strata, you'll realise that their educational deficit is structural. It spans several generations, where nobody ever had access to higher education.

I once met somebody who was an office assistant, and he was the wunderkind of his family, because he was the first person in generations to leave school with proper GCSEs and get a respectable nine-to-five job. All the rest of his family were dolefolk who got by hustling and shoplifting. There's no point telling somebody like that, hey, get a degree, and everything will be fine.

>>39143

This really doesn't get talked about enough.

Workplace progression is non-existent nowadays unless you have the requisite qualifications in the first place. A degree doesn't start you off any higher on the food chain- It merely permits you the ability to move up. If you don't have one you'll be stuck at the bottom no matter how experienced and knowledgeable you are. It's the worst of both worlds really.

And the thing is people will turn around and say "oh well it's never too late to go to uni!" "oh you can get grants and student loans as an adult!" and shite like that when that totally misses the point. You shouldn't have to fuck about doing 5 years as a part time student on top of working just to earn the right to progress in your field. It's a waste of time for everyone involved when that person could just be getting stuck in.

90% of jobs flat out don't need a degree, even at the higher levels. Even a lot of scientific and technical stuff can be just as well, if not better, learned on the job as it can taught in a lecture hall. it's become an arbitrary gatekeeping method that doesn't actually benefit anyone, not employers, not employees, nobody except the uni. Who, obviously, make loads of money.

And I wonder if that's got something to do with it.

>>39144

>You shouldn't have to fuck about doing 5 years as a part time student on top of working just to earn the right to progress in your field. It's a waste of time for everyone involved when that person could just be getting stuck in.

And that's not even addressing that a substantial percentage of those students fail. Because they have to work for their living.

You hear a lot of people say that mature or working students who already have an established career are more focused than some 18 year old who's really just at uni to party and get laid. And I guess that is true, having met people like that when I was a student. And from being that exact 18 year old myself. But the flip side is that a lot of working students just end up not managing to juggle a career that's temporarily on the back burner, studying for gruelling exams, and somehow paying their bills to boot. Which may even include their half of a mortgage and a financed family car.

>>39143

>The problem isn't that you fast track people into positions like that

I think that's very much the problem when combined with the massive expansion of white collar work.

In Ye Olden Days, the vast majority of workers were blue collar. They could end up being promoted to a quite senior technical or supervisory role, they might end up attending meetings with the most senior management, but they never became management. It was arbitrary and unfair, but everyone knew that the men in bowler hats were born into a fundamentally station in life than the men in flat caps. Nobody born outside of that sphere held any illusions that they could ever transcend their place in the class hierarchy.

In the modern workforce, we still have the born-to-rule pricks at the top and we still have the permanently disenfranchised at the bottom, but we've got a vast middle class of people who are allowed to imagine that they have limitless prospects for upward mobility. They don't, of course, outside of a token few who are allowed a seat at the top table pour encourager les autres, but the prospect is just real enough that they feel no solidarity.

Back in the 70s, a supervisor who genuinely sided with management was tantamount to a scab. They had the duty to relay orders from the officers, they had a duty to ensure that those orders were carried out satisfactorily, but they had no duty to respect those orders or the men who made them. The only way to become a supervisor was to work your way up from the bottom, which naturally bred solidarity - some supervisors might have been snivelling sycophants, but they were never naive about the reality of life on the shop floor.

A middle manager is something fundamentally different to a supervisor, despite basically doing the same work. They've come in straight through a graduate programme, they've never worked on the shop floor, they've never been assimilated into the culture of workers but have been directly indoctrinated into the culture of management. They don't belong to the same class as the people above them in the hierarchy, they will never be equal to them, but they don't know it.

To someone from a previous generation, a 21st century job advert reads more like indoctrination into a cult. It's not enough to just turn up and do your shift, you're expected to be passionate, you're expected to share a corporate vision. It doesn't matter whether you actually believe that bullshit, because the mere act of pretending will corrode your soul.

>>39147

>It's not enough to just turn up and do your shift, you're expected to be passionate, you're expected to share a corporate vision.

That kind of nonsense has always boiled my piss. No, I'm not going to share your vision, and whether I'll show even an inkling of being passionate about my work will depend on whether the money you pay me is enough to make me forget about all the cunts I will have to deal with every day when I go home at night.

You're probably right that the working class are being shit on just so that the middle class can fulfill their delusional aspirations of social mobility. If you're upper class and come from a lineage of people who have always had say over others, then you needn't worry about any kind of downward social mobility. You'll always be part of that strata unless you utterly and completely fuck things up. But the middle class know that only a few cancelled paychecks stand between them and a sudden move downward on the social ladder.

George Carlin once said, The upper class keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class pays all of the taxes, does all of the work. The poor are there just to scare the shit out of the middle class.

>>39074

"Jews did it" is not much of an argument.

>>39075
If it's good enough for Ronaldo.

>>39074

Bit much.

This thread sucks.

>>39082

Make your own thread then.

>>38950

I think the thing is more that when your perspective is rooted in class analysis, it's easier to take the blinkers off over the more emotional, feelings rooted stuff, that generally results in the "muslamics are rapists and fanny mutilators" versus "ooh this is mean and wacist" stalemate.

The issue most working class people individually have with immigrants is not that they're brown or that they're stealing jobs they otherwise wouldn't want or whatever. It's that they can't get doctor's appointments, their kids can't get houses, services and communities in general are overcrowded. Those tensions exacerbate the more emotional, rhetorical side of the debate, in part because those people aren't quite articulate enough to really voice their concerns in ways that the middle class cultural gatekeepers find acceptable.

If we'd have been able to have the conversation about if we ought to invest more in services to accomodate a growing population or else think about slowing down the inflow of migrants, and acknowledge that they are, whichever way you slice it, at least related; we would be in a much better place today.

Of course, we didn't have that conversation because neither side of the debate at the higher echelons of power actually wanted to frankly confront things that involve spending more money and keeping poor people's lives comfortable.

>>38950

>In fairness, class based politics doesn't really offer many direct answers on immigration.

You get a lot closer to having answers if you acknowledge that immigration doesn't benefit everyone. Immigration probably is positive-sum, but there are clear externalities and it's totally unfair to just dump those externalities on the people least able to bear them. Even if you don't morally object to that on a utilitarian basis, the political and societal risks should be fairly obvious.

IMO the emotive dichotomy described by >>38951 is really just a bourgeois smokescreen - it's convenient for the kind of people who describe themselves as anti-racist if the working class blame immigrants rather than blaming them.

It's convenient to caricature people as racist morons, rather than recognising that the kind of people who bear the negative externalities of immigration have also been denied the kind of education that would allow them to phrase their concerns in acceptable middle class language. It's convenient to divide-and-rule the council estates rather than addressing the underlying issues. The BNP weren't anti-establishment, they were allowed to flourish as a containment strategy. Someone who is trying to TEK ARE CUNTRY BACK from the immigrants isn't trying to take it back from the people who actually stole it. I think buy-to-let bastards quietly breathe a sigh of relief every time someone blames the housing crisis on immigration.

>>38946
I'm not trying to excuse the noncing. I'm calling you out for trying to excuse their racism.

>>38951
>their kids can't get houses
That's a middle-class problem. Class has nothing to do with it. Have you tried not being a class-obsessed reductionist? And when you take into account that it affects every social class, why is only one class racist and why is that excusable?

>>38954

Bait harder lad