victimhood

Sometimes those guys at the mill sound pretty backward with all that talk about sucks and 'radicals,' was it, and brainwashing.  Well I imagine they did pretty repetitive and boring jobs and that tends to get tongues wagging just to break the boredom.  What about this brainwashing?  Did they think it was a big joke or did they think it was something sinister?  You know when your employer pays you for your time and he expects you to do this and that, that is all fine, but when you suspect he is trying to tell you how to think, that sticks in the craw.  Moreso than when the preachers and the politicians do it because he has that forty hour a week and paycheck power over you. 

I don't know how much poor people thinking that that is their destiny to be poor, keeps them poor.  You can convince a guy otherwise, and he can try not to be poor, but the odds are still stacked pretty high against him. 

But there is something called victimhood which is generally used in a racial manner, which my ilk hates, but I think there is something to it.  This is where a black guy sees himself as the victim of white people and so there is nothing he can do but well, piss and moan.  If they get a job, I am thinking of some black employees my sister had, they feel like they got it because the company has to hire so many black people, so they don't feel like they should have to work that hard, and if the boss complains it is just another instance of whitey beating up on blacky.

Well my ilk is kind of responsible for that, everytime there is some black/white confrontation we like to bring up 200 years of slavery, and Jim Crow, and Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream.  Which is all good stuff, though it gets pretty boring, but maybe what we should be thinking of more is the here and the now, and the particulars of this particular confrontation. 

If you carry around this attitude of victimhood all the time, you are never going to get anywhere.  I'm not saying that black people aren't the victims of history, and that there still isn't a lot of racism around that will make their lives harder, but they are not going to get anywhere if all they do is keep harping on that.

I remember that part about spending the remainder of your budget at year's end, lest you get less in your budget the next year.  The end of the fiscal year was always Christmas for my state agency and we could all expect a new computer or whatever, because after all if the money didn't get spent it could somehow find its way back to the taxpayer, or as we phrased it, be wasted.

My state agency was big on SPC, (Statistical Process Control) and it's offspring ISO, and a whole plethora of alphabet systems, which I think were pretty good in their original incantation, but when applied by your average company blockhead, not so hot.  Well it gave the guy implementing it tremendous power because he was telling people how to act, and when you get to regulating things it's like eating potato chips, you just can't stop, and maybe you can regulate a few things in your favor, because don't you deserve it for doing all this hard work, and if anybody questions you, why they are against SPC, and therefore against Progress, and therefore against the American Way.

It has been brought up that most of the cops in the Baltimore thing were black, and my ilk replies that police brutality is police brutality.  That is another thing about these incidents, is it about police brutality, racism, classism, body cams, man's inhumanity to man, etc?

I think it's generally agreed by both our ilks that it is stupid to give shit to a cop, regardless of whether the cop was right or wrong, so there is a bad on the victim right from the start.  But this doesn't mean that this wrong gives the cop the right to kill the guy.  The issue seems to be generally did the cop actually kill the guy, but if he did, saying the guy had it coming, is not an excuse.

Social Engineering

Actually, "brainwashing" is not the correct term for what we have been discussing, but that's what a lot of people call it. A more accurate term would be "social engineering", or maybe "cultural engineering". That's when you are trying to change the way people look at things, and even at themselves. Part of the reason a lot of people are poor is that they think they're supposed to be poor. This has been programmed into them by generations of cultural conditioning, not necessarily on purpose, it's just the way "society" perceives them, and the way they have come to perceive themselves. The only way to change that is with more cultural conditioning, which probably would have to be deliberate to be effective. Both of our ilks are generally suspicious of that sort of thing when the other ilk is doing it. Of course, when our own ilk is doing it, it's okay because we are only doing it for their own good.

This might have been what the paper mill management had in mind when they gave us all those classes, but maybe not always. Rumor had it that they had a certain amount of money in their budget for training and, if they didn't spend it, they would get less next year. Of course no manager wants to see his budget cut for any reason. They used to send their managers to these seminars periodically. If one of them was particularly impressed, they might recommend that it was something that could benefit all of us at the plant. Some of those motivational speakers were undoubtedly snake oil salesmen, but I found some of the stuff they peddled to be interesting and useful out in the real world, if not in the plant. It might have been useful within the plant if any of it was ever implemented correctly, or even at all, but the post seminar enthusiasm quickly waned in the cold light of dawn, and it was soon back to business as usual.

The only one I remember them following through on was Statistical Methods of Quality Control, and they went way overboard on that one. For years afterwards they tried to cram every aspect of paper mill life into the statistical model, and some things just don't fit in there. The concept was pioneered by Edwards Deming who, after failing to capture the interest of American businessmen, sold it to the Japanese, who used it to kick the shit out of the American auto industry. At least that's the story we were told, and there was probably some truth in it. Be that as it may, if Deming could have seen how our guys corrupted his teachings, he would have turned over in his grave.

I wonder how much of this alleged police brutality is more of a cultural thing than a racial thing. They showed pictures of the six cops who have been charged with murder in that Baltimore case, and three of them looked colored to me, maybe not Black, but some kind of colored. The cases of which I have heard all seemed to start with a cop telling some guy to do something, or not do something, and getting a defiant and/or violent response. I have always believed that you shouldn't argue with a cop out in the street, even if you think he's wrong. He might know something that you don't and doesn't have the time to explain it to you. We are paying these guys to maintain law and order, and we should generally cooperate with them in that effort. If you want to argue, that's what the courts are for. Of course this makes sense to me only because I am one of the good guys. If I was a member of the criminal subculture, I would perceive the cops as my enemies. Nevertheless, it's not a good idea to challenge an armed enemy with your bare hands. If you want to fight the cops, a more effective tactic would be to set up an ambush with a gun or a bomb. It makes me wonder what these alleged victims were thinking, or if they were thinking at all.

Like I said, though, each case is different and should be treated as such. There is always an investigation when something like this happens. We may not agree with it's findings, but we weren't there, and probably don't have a complete understanding of the evidence. It would help if all the witnesses told that same story, but maybe that's an  unrealistic expectation.

brainwashing at the mill

I wonder if that Hertz guy had kids, and I wonder what they thought about him.

The idea of confiscating inheritance wouldn't have worked out so well for me.  I might still be subbing.  But as a good liberal I am always in favor of soaking the rich.  I don't know how exactly we would enforce it, those rich guys have those smart sneaky lawyers and what about the family farm and stuff like that, and I don't know how the money would come out.

And even if those things could be figured out, there is the problem, as you pointed out, of the guy coming to us ants hat in hand (why hat in hand?  Oh like a beggar, I could have figured that out myself, if google hadn't been so near at hand) and a pocket full of bad lottery tickets, whining, but what about my kids? 

See that's the beauty of social security, the gummint just takes it out of your paycheck and you don't even see it.  And then you can't have it until you are old, and if you die before that, tough shit.  And then unlike those lottery winners, you cannot get it in a lump sum, you get so much once a month, and if you come hat in hand to the ants after blowing this month's check at the track, the ants just tell you not to do that next month.

Well I suppose you could give out that Hertz windfall once a month, although that wouldn't amount to much.  And of course we want the grasshopper to spend it on the right things like food, and housing. and healthcare and his kids.  As you pointed out, we could make the guy go to classes to teach him how to spend his money, but as you also pointed out, he would probably spend the whole class looking for an inkwell into which to dip Peggy from accounting's pigtail. 

Well what if we force him to spend his money on the right things?  What if we just took the money from his windfall and spent it on the right things for him, the food, the housing, the healthcare, education for his kids, without him ever seeing the money?  Wait a minute isn't that socialism?  You betcha.

I wonder about  those classes the mill gave its employees.  Particularly I wonder why your fellow millers thought of it as brainwashing.  How tiny were their brains that they could be washed by sitting in a lecture hall for like an hour a month?  There are those motivational speakers who ply all these rhetorical tricks to convince you of something, and of course there are the preachers and the politicians.  I could see the company trying to give you some speech that would get more work out of you, but cognitive dissonance sounds a little esoteric.  So what were these classes the mill gave you?  And why were your fellow millers so offended by it?  Didn't the company pay for your time?  Isn't a boring lecture better than actually working?  Well maybe not, but couldn't you sneak a nap?

I think the cops have long been beating up on the black community.  Some of it is surely racist because some people are racist and some of those people are cops.  Speaking of racism, I remember it being as common as being a White Sox fan back in Gage Park, but now in my rarefied downtown community I seldom come across it, but I still do every now and then.  I see some vile racist crap on fb, that surprises me in this day and age.

Anyway racism aside, the black community is also a convenient place to beat up on people because they are not likely to hire fancy lawyers.  I think it has always happened a lot.  Why this sudden eruption right now about something that has been going on for years, I don't know.

And there is all this talk about we need to have a national conversation about race, and how many of those have we had?  I think we all know where we stand.  And I hear some talk from my ilk about how these riots are like a good thing, about how nobody listens to nonviolence so violence is the way to go, and I think that is a big load of shit.  Burning down the local Taco Bell means you now have no nachos belle grande in your neighborhood, and you lose whatever jobs it provided, and it will give other fastfoods pause before they move into your hood, and it will harden white hearts and make it harder for you to get your political demands. 

I do think these body cams are a great idea.

It Takes Money to Make Money

The only reason you and I are not poor is that we were lucky, and a little bit smart. Neither one of us planned for our old age when we were young, we just lived paycheck to paycheck like a lot of other people. We both came into some unexpected money later in life, and we both had the presence of mind to invest it rather than blow it. If everybody could be like us, there would be no poverty in the world.

The first problem is how to make it so everybody gets some kind of nest egg to invest. I read a book a long time ago called "The Biography of a Peasant". I forget the author's name, but I seem to remember that he was the founder of the Hertz Rent-a-Car business. The book wasn't really about peasants, that's just what the guy called himself and everybody else who worked for a living.  It wasn't really a biography either, it was this guy's plan for how to hold civilization together when everything goes to hell in the future. One of his proposals was what he called a "universal inheritance". People could not leave their money to anybody but their spouse and, when the spouse died too, the remainder of the estate would go into a fund which would be used to give everybody the same amount of money when they reached the age of majority. I don't remember when the book was written, but the guy had calculated that it would come out to about $20,000 per person at the time. The recipient could use the money any way he wanted, but if he blew it, too bad for him because there would be no other welfare programs except for disabled persons who couldn't work. There would be government jobs for the able bodied unemployed, but they would have to go wherever they were sent to work. If a guy didn't like his government job, he could only quit if he managed to find another job someplace.

Leaving the government job thing alone for now, let's try to identify the problems with the universal inheritance thing. First off all, a lot of people would just blow the money and then have a bunch of kids. I don't remember what, if anything, the author would have done about the kids, but let's move along for now. To keep people from blowing their universal inheritance, you would have to give them classes or counseling about financial matters like they gave us at the paper mill before it closed down. As a former teacher, I'm sure you know that a lot of students don't pay attention in class and, even if they do, there's no guarantee they will utilize their knowledge once they get out in the real world. The lady who did the taxes for a lot of the former paper mill workers told me that many of her clients went through their severance money in a few years. She didn't give me their names, or tell me how many of them there were, but she said that I did pretty well with my money compared to a lot of  other people.

Speaking of the paper mill, they gave us a class once about how the subconscious mind works. I'm not sure why they did this, most of the other guys called it "brainwashing", but I paid attention and learned a few interesting things. Your subconscious mind has this image of who you are and, if your situation changes, it causes something called "cognitive dissonance". Your subconscious doesn't like cognitive dissonance, so it tries to reconcile its image of who you were with the image of who you have become. This is why people who win big in the lottery frequently end up broke after awhile. Your subconscious sees you as a poor person, since that's what you were before. One way to reconcile the dissonance is to get you to blow your money and turn yourself back into the poor person your subconscious thinks you are supposed to be. This is why I have said that just giving the poor more money would not help much. You would also have to somehow condition them to not think of themselves as poor people anymore. So, first we brainwash them, and then we give them the money. Now how do we get them to let us brainwash them?

I don't know what to tell you about all that Ferguson and Baltimore stuff. I find it hard to believe that all those cops have declared open season on colored people. They have been dealing with them for a long time. Why would they suddenly declare war on them now? I suppose each case is different, but it seems a lot of people on both sides assume that the Black guy or the White guy is always wrong in every case. Maybe the solution is to hire a bunch of Black cops and only send them into the Black neighborhoods.

revelers and reeks and wrecks

I don't think we are ever going to eliminate poverty, there are always going to be some poor people around.  I just want to make it a little better for them.  Maybe give the unfortunate some means to climb out of the hole, make the nutsos a little more comfortable in their pitiful states, and the lazy, well it's hard to tell them from the unfortunate and nutsos, so I guess they get to skate a little. 

I kind of don't want to give anything at all to the lazies, I mean doesn't that make me a sucker?  Nobody wants to be a sucker.  But then you know, they go ahead and have kids, and then what about the kids, should they suffer for the shortcomings of the parents?  But then all kids suffer from the shortcomings of their parents, but in the case of the poor, the suffering is pretty brutal, so maybe slipping a few bucks to their shiftless parents is not such a waste.

Well you know I read a science fiction book once, The Star Seekers by Milton Lesser.  It was one of those books from the science fiction book club which were meant for preteens, but then I was a preteen.  Anyway in the book they are all traveling to some distant star in a hollowed out meteor.  This has taken many generations and they have all forgotten what their mission is.  The meteor is divided into four levels.  On the outside are the engineers who maintain the machines but clearly they don't know what those machines are for anymore.  The next level in is the jungle where they grow all their food.  The next level down is the revelers, and at the center are the scientist philosophers, who it turns out really do know what is going on, and at the end they alert the farmers and the revelers and the engineers just as they are approaching a nice little planet and they land there and everything is hunky dory, and the young kid who was at the center of the story, gets the girl.

What a strange word, revelers.  Anyway in the book what they were supposed to be doing was entertaining everybody else on the long trip through the gloom of space.  As it turned out, once everybody forgot the purpose of the mission the revelers were just entertaining themselves, but that was in the book.

Here's my barely thought through idea.  There are never going to be enough jobs for everybody.  The government should do make work.  Actually there is another science fiction book, Vonnegut's Player Piano, where they have the reeks and wrecks which is where the people not smart enough to run the machines go.  Well something like that, they serenade us at the bus stop, and sweep the streets and they get paid moderately well for it.  That is all the deeper I am going to think about it this morning.

As I was watching the news last night, a difference occurred to me between right wingers and left wingers.  You know how sometimes you have a problem with say, your car door?  It doesn't open quite right, you have to give it an extra push or something.  You can still get in and out of the car, but that extra push is a pain in the ass.  So do you put up with it, or do you get a new door?  Do you muddle through or do you fix the problem for once and for all?

I think the left wingers (not all the left wingers, just the liberals, not the commies, who like the right wingers, think they have an answer for everything) are more like the muddlers, let's just do something to make the problem better.  Let's make a deal with Iran to make things better for both of us as opposed to the right wingers who want to bomb them off the map and solve that problem for once and for all.

Well I haven't thought this one out either.  I will put it through the crucible in the fullness of time.

Just one other thing.  They were talking about Baltimore on the news last night, the politicos were droning on, and they really had no programs or anything, and so they trailed off mumbling about education.  You know we Americans love education, it is like the solution to everything.  But whenever a bill comes to spend more on education it is always voted down.

Work May Not Be the Answer

Some time ago, Michigan "reformed" their welfare system. As usual, I may not have all the details right but, last I heard, it went something like this: The way it was before, by the time you paid for childcare and transportation, you could actually lose money by getting a job and going off welfare. Some people believed that the welfare programs were too generous, but I think the problem was that the jobs didn't pay enough, and still don't. The first thing they did was change the name of the welfare department to "The Family Independence Agency". Then they made it so that you could go to work and, if your job didn't pay as much as you had been getting on welfare, they would make up the difference. They also require that, unless you are disabled, you have to either work or go to school at least 20 hours a week. I think they subsidize your childcare and tuition costs, but I'm not sure about that. The intent was that welfare would be a bridge to financial independence instead of something you become dependent on for the rest of your life. It was probably a good idea, and I'm sure it has helped some people, but the jobs still don't pay enough. My plan was to give people jobs that pay substantially more than welfare and, if the private sector couldn't or wouldn't do it, then the state should do it. You're right, though, it would cost more than the present system, and Michigan allegedly can't even afford to properly maintain their roads and bridges as it is. (Actually, I think that they could if they did it right, but that's a whole nother story.)

In my opinion, productivity is not always measured in tons or gallons. I like your idea that it should make the world a better place, but we can't all save the world singlehandedly, so anything that makes the world even a little better should be considered productive. When you were tending bar you must have been helping to make your customers happy because they were willing to pay for your services. Of course too much happiness can make a person sick, but part of your job must have been to tell them when they'd had enough happiness for one night. I agree that, if somebody is willing to pay you to do it, it's probably productive. Picking up litter and sweeping the streets may not be necessary for the survival of civilization, but they certainly make the world a better place.

I agree that different people have different levels of ambition. They tend to call others who have less ambition than themselves "lazy", and call the ones who have more ambition than themselves "workaholics". That's just human nature, "I'm normal, it's everybody else who's weird".

 I'm starting to get the impression that ending poverty will require more than just putting everybody to work, if that's even possible. I think it's unlikely that automation will ever make human labor totally unnecessary. If the machines ever get to the point that they don't need us anymore, they might turn against us and kill us all. Smarter people than you and I have already thought of that, so I'm sure they won't ever let it go that far. Well, I hope they're smart enough to never let it go that far. Nevertheless, the demand for human labor has been declining for some time, and will continue to decline until it bottoms out somewhere. We need to find some other way for people to make a decent living. Welfare and low paying jobs will never lift people out of poverty, the best they can do is maintain people at their current level of poverty and keep them from sliding backwards. Education isn't the magic bullet either. I understand that a lot of college graduates are currently working in low paying jobs that don't even require a college degree. We need something else, and I don't know what that is.

ants and grasshoppers

I guess you were planning on paying the poor more than I was.  Was your choice for the poor, work the good paying job or stay on welfare?  My choice was more cruel, in order to get the welfare you were getting for free, you will have to work for it.  The problem with your plan is it would cost a lot of money, the problem with mine is, how do you make them work?  I don't want to kick them off of welfare because they probably have kids and stuff, but without that threat how do I make them work? 

I think I have a different definition of work than you do.  To me work is something that you have to do to get a paycheck.  It may be productive or it may not.  What about those advertising guys who work at making you buy a product that is no better than any other product?  Where is the productivity in that?

You know I put in twenty hours a week painting, but I don't get paid for it.  Oh I may sell two or three paintings a year, but that's peanuts, and if a fortune teller told me that I would never sell another one I'd keep on painting.  I do feel productive after a painting session (look how I smeared that Prussian blue, all over that window, was that great or what?), but as far as the rest of the world is concerned I might as well be watching Perry Mason reruns. 

Your fishing and chopping may keep you well fed and warm in the winter. so it's certainly productive, but unless you are selling your fish or wood, I'm not inclined to call it work.

There is that other meaning of productivity, in that does it make the world any better.  I don't think my bartending made the world a better place, and contrary to our Mission Statement, I don't think we did anything to make the world a better place in my state job.  And even if we did, i imagine any other guy could have done the same job as I did.  The only job I had where I felt I was making the world a better place was in subbing.  The kids didn't want to be there and neither did I, but I think I did a pretty good job of making the experience less painful.

Well anybody can make up a definition, and it's not like any one is inherently better than any other one.  I chose my particular one because I don't think the poor are all that interested in doing something productive, what they want is a paycheck.  So I wouldn't want to make them do something necessarily productive, makework would be fine, picking up papers, sweeping the streets.  My idea would be since they have to work to earn their welfare any, they might as well get a real job and make real money.

I have this vague idea where some people are just driven to work, those people who put in sixty hours a week, and maybe they sometimes wonder what does it all mean.  And there are other people who just kind of wander around and think about things, and it would be their job, for which they would get paid a living wage taken from the taxes of the of the hard chargers to explain what it all meant.  Let's call the hard chargers the ants, and the dreamy wanderers the grasshoppers.  Well this sounds more like a science fiction story, but see, the grasshoppers write the science fiction stories and the ants read them and put them into action.

Well this concept needs a lot of work, but then so does our plan for the poor, as the blog keeps rolling along.

You're right and I was wrong about that race thing.  It is species that can't mate with each other.  It was races where you had the white and the yellow and the black and sometimes they made little subraces for the native Australians and Polynesians.