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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   26601 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024

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Are the rich really so attracted to the idea of cheap servants that they would see their communities destroyed?

But who is going to landscape their estates if they have to pay grubby white Americans to do it, darling?

Landscaping is actually one of the easier things to replace illegal labor in; the American elite reticence towards mass deportations goes much farther down the social ladder than people who have estates landscaped precisely because everyone middle class and higher understands that there aren't enough parolees(yes, parolees. No Americans will do those jobs without being required to by law) to replace the illegals picking fruit and killing chickens and digging ditches.

Might they prefer Hondurans to be flown into their meatpacking plant in the midwest or rural south, and then flown right back out when their contract ends, UAE-style? Yes. But American income inequality being what it is, their children don't compete with each other economically, so it's not that big a deal.

I do realise that agricultural work is the huge soak-pit of illegal immigrant labour, and the farm owners who have the supply cut off are now looking to mechanisation, rather than raising wages to attract native workers, because they claim they will go under if they have to pay going rates.

But my view of "why don't the rich care?" is because the truly rich don't interact with the illegals competing for jobs with native working-class, and if they do encounter them it's in the aspect of 'working on the landscaping crew' or 'contract cleaners who arrive to clean the house every week' - that is, their staff hire them to do the jobs so the rich only glimpse them as figures toiling in their peripheral view but never around for a long time. So it's easy to be compassionate in the abstract, about "no human is illegal", like the Martha's Vineyarders with their signs - until those same immigrants and refugees start physically turning up in the community, and then it's a different question.

C'mon. You know better than to talk like that.

You might be able to justifiably claim that the "rich" may consider poor white Americans as being somehow worse than illegal Hispanic immigrants. You can't get away with being condescending to someone you disagree with, not when it's a habit.

I won't construe this is a formal warning or anything, but you got 5 AAQCs last month, surely you can adhere to better standards.

Edit: Never mind, I'm taking the mod hat off this thing, it's not an infraction that is worth it really.

Mod hat on, mod hat off? I'm sorry to be confusing you at this early stage in your moderatorhood, I wasn't intending to be condescending, more referencing this meme.

Welcome to dealing with the Awkward Squad! And believe me, I'm even more confused than you about how the heck I managed to garner five AAQCs, I genuinely never set out to deliberately write anything that might be nominated, so it's a mystery to me!

I did take the mod hat off by my own initiative, it's not like the others yelled at me haha.

You're a regular here, we might bicker but I can't ever deny that your net contribution is very positive, even if you have your own quirks that make me raise an eyebrow, or on certain topics, want to claw my eyes out.

So my initial annoyance that motivated me to put the mod hat on was swiftly overruled by me sighing deeply and accepting that it wouldn't make a difference plus it wasn't a big deal in the first place. I suppose the fact that you were referencing a meme from a show that I haven't watched does make sense!

I haven't even watched the show myself, it's just been floating around on social media for years about "people so far removed from the actuality of the situation they may as well be living on another planet".

It has also been a favourite gambit of media in the UK to ask politicians who try to lean too hard on the "man of the people" bit questions such as "so how much does a litre of milk cost?" and watch them squirm as they have no idea, never having gone grocery shopping themselves or if they have, never having to care about the cost of whatever they want to grab off the shelves.

Do most people who buy groceries every week know the current price, offhand, of every single one of the 30+ items they buy?

Of the staples like milk and bread? yeah.

Maybe not the exact price, but they do have a general idea of the staple groceries and will notice if the price of milk goes up by more than a few cents (and they can't switch to the cheaper version because that's gone up too).

Not to the cent, but they'd probably have a few brackets that they break items into and be able to say "a buck each, something like that" or "about $5", especially for frequently-recurring purchases like milk. Particularly people for whom the price of groceries is a meaningful fraction of their budget.

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