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Posted
24 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

No offense to anybody but this thread is pretty much what I expected and it’s disheartening.
This board is a pretty representative sample of mainstream progressive discourse, and this essay has proven to be a really interesting Rorschach test. My hope was that some class consciousness had crept back into this part of the left as we head into the next cycle, but the reaction here and other mainstream-left spaces to this demonstrates to me that class consciousness is still mainly symbolic if it exists at all, and nominal racial representation still trumps everything. Older affluent progressives (ie Mainstream white democrats) are still struggling to find empathy with voters they need to win. It’s troubling.

No offense, but I think the article and your posts on it are mostly bullshit. I get it. You've bought it. I don't. 

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Posted
41 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

I cannot make myself feel any empathy or sympathy for a group that has, for all living memory, been the most privileged group in the history of humanity, who are now pissed because they may have lost .000001% of that privilege.

But that’s not the point, which is the point. 

Posted (edited)
50 minutes ago, G650 said:

I mean, from my perspective you pretty much came to this conclusion before you posted it. People have given you some thoughtful responses.

Some people have, an I suspected most of the reaction would be recitations of the affluent white progressive catechism, which is what I got.

Edited by Bozo_Casanova
Posted (edited)
1 hour ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

No offense to anybody but this thread is pretty much what I expected and it’s disheartening.
This board is a pretty representative sample of mainstream progressive discourse, and this essay has proven to be a really interesting Rorschach test. My hope was that some class consciousness had crept back into this part of the left as we head into the next cycle, but the reaction here and other mainstream-left spaces to this demonstrates to me that class consciousness is still mainly symbolic if it exists at all, and nominal racial representation still trumps everything. Older affluent progressives (ie Mainstream white democrats) are still struggling to find empathy with voters they need to win. It’s troubling.

I work in trades and it's pretty white and almost exclusively men. If anything was keeping young, white men out of trades jobs it was white male boomers.

Edited by Schulz2.0
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Posted (edited)
5 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

Some people have, an I suspected most of the reaction would be recitations of the affluent white progressive catechism, which is what I got.

You're just ignoring the thoughtful posts and lumping everyone into a bucket that doesn't even really exist in this thread. The initial post was interesting. Now you're just being tiresome. 

Edited by Dahobbs
Posted
47 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

can’t do it. I just can’t. I cannot make myself feel any empathy or sympathy for a group that has, for all living memory, been the most privileged group in the history of humanity, who are now pissed because they may have lost .000001% of that privilege

One more thing, Brisket, you of all people should be able to understand the difference between population level effects of a social change and the way it might feel to an individual person , particularly when those individuals played no role in making things how they are. There’s nothing good about an individual getting shafted. 
 

 

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Posted
1 minute ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

One more thing, Brisket, you of all people should be able to understand the difference between population level effects of a social change and the way it might feel to an individual person , particularly when those individuals played no role in making things how they are. There’s nothing good about an individual getting shafted. 
 

 

There is very little evidence in your posts or the original article of mass discrimination against white men. 

Posted
1 minute ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

Some people have, an I suspected most of the reaction would be recitations of the affluent white progressive catechism, which is what I got.

I dunno man. I come at it from the exact opposite side of the coin, explicitly class based and someone who is around actual working people every day, and most of the points seem pretty fair to me.

 

If we are doing the no offense thing, you are always about working class this and that, and class, yet you are preoccupied for some reason by hiring practices in big tech, which in and of itself is a milquetoast upper middle nonsense, then specifically millennial white dudes of all things, so you and the author are the ones focusing on identity issues in the first place. If you want to get into the nuts and bolts of class identity and a real voting substantial bloc come down here in the mud with actual working stiffs. My biggest gripe with the article is the writer is a fucking pussy who couldn't hack it in my world. I acknowledge the need for the tent and all, and I hope we unite against the oligarch class, but I just don't see much juice to squeeze on this one man, millennials are the most liberal bloc already, so you are talking about fractions here of disaffected millennial men voting R in that cohort. And I will note millennials have had a ludicrously bad time of it for myriad reasons! But this ain't it.

11 minutes ago, Schulz2.0 said:

I work in trades and it's pretty white and almost exclusively men. If anything was keeping young, white men out of trades jobs it was white male boomers.

Precisely

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Posted
2 minutes ago, Dahobbs said:

There is very little evidence in your posts or the original article of mass discrimination against white men. 

I haven’t presented any. I added my personal experience to what’s in the essay and so did @956 Worldwide. Others said they had not observed something like that, which is also fine. The other responses group into the following two major categories:

1) the author is lying 

2) ok, maybe some of this did happen to millennial men but probably they are just mediocre white guys angry because their privilege was taken

#1 is simply nonresponsive

#2 illustrates the disconnect in this bubble- millennial men aren’t mad because their privilege got taken away- they were not in the workforce to experience anything like good times for mediocre white men. And the vast majority of you are still enjoying your privilege, which is why you have the luxury to dismiss them as “mediocre white men.”

Posted
11 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

There’s nothing good about an individual getting shafted. 

No disagreement there.

Posted
2 minutes ago, G650 said:

I dunno man. I come at it from the exact opposite side of the coin, explicitly class based and someone who is around actual working people every day, and most of the points seem pretty fair to me.

You did, and that’s appreciated. 

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Posted
1 hour ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

No offense to anybody but this thread is pretty much what I expected and it’s disheartening.
This board is a pretty representative sample of mainstream progressive discourse, and this essay has proven to be a really interesting Rorschach test. My hope was that some class consciousness had crept back into this part of the left as we head into the next cycle, but the reaction here and other mainstream-left spaces to this demonstrates to me that class consciousness is still mainly symbolic if it exists at all, and nominal racial representation still trumps everything. Older affluent progressives (ie Mainstream white democrats) are still struggling to find empathy with voters they need to win. It’s troubling.

No offense taken. But what exactly were you hoping to hear?

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Posted (edited)
10 minutes ago, chainsaw said:

No offense taken. But what exactly were you hoping to hear?

Hoping? I’m hoping that progressives begin to admit the possibility that their political project should go back to welcoming and advocating for any person who is getting the short end of the stick. 

Edited by Bozo_Casanova
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Posted (edited)
20 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

I haven’t presented any. I added my personal experience to what’s in the essay and so did @956 Worldwide. Others said they had not observed something like that, which is also fine. The other responses group into the following two major categories:

1) the author is lying 

2) ok, maybe some of this did happen to millennial men but probably they are just mediocre white guys angry because their privilege was taken

#1 is simply nonresponsive

#2 illustrates the disconnect in this bubble- millennial men aren’t mad because their privilege got taken away- they were not in the workforce to experience anything like good times for mediocre white men. And the vast majority of you are still enjoying your privilege, which is why you have the luxury to dismiss them as “mediocre white men.”

#3 the data does not match his argument.  I posted the statistical data that shows that during the timeline he documents the hiring of women in that field matched the percentages of those attaining degrees in that field.  So Ascribing the outcome to DEI without taking into account the pool of candidates available is leaving out a significant factor in that outcome that was inconvenient for the author.

 

If he wanted to continue to see a 57:43 M:F ratio in hiring when the new graduate pool was 34:66 what he was really arguing for was more male bias not an even playing field. 

Edited by TexasEd
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Posted
11 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

Hoping? I’m hoping that progressives begin to admit the possibility that their political project should go back to welcoming and advocating for any person who is getting the short end of the stick. 

I'm not sure progressives have adopted a political project that wouldn't. A broader point, and perhaps where you're missing what the other posters are saying, is that not every person who claims they were wronged has actually been wronged. We want to be a big tent political movement, yes. At the same time, we lose credibility when there's an obvious strike and we call it a ball. When I see white millennial men unable to receive undeserved career opportunities at the same rate their Gen X and Boomer counterparts received them, I don't feel sorry for them, I feel sorry for the qualified nonwhite and women Gen X and Boomers who got passed over.

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Posted

And to continue my previous post if I dug deeper I would probably find that even though the % of Female Communications graduates passed 60% in the 1980s that statistics would show a significant number of them selected out of the labor pool shortly after to start families through the peak in the 1990s.  In the 2000-2010s we might see the delayed family starts coming into play where those women stayed in the workforce exacerbating the problem for the outnumbered white men who were previously advancing when the women left the workforce.

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Posted
19 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

Hoping? I’m hoping that progressives begin to admit the possibility that their political project should go back to welcoming and advocating for any person who is getting the short end of the stick. 

Sure. Has it occurred to you that we simply don't believe white males are getting the short end of the stick? Certainly I don't think the guy who spends his time scalping tickets is getting the short end of anything, at least not unfairly. 

Posted
28 minutes ago, TexasEd said:

#3 the data does not match his argument.  I posted the statistical data that shows that during the timeline he documents the hiring of women in that field matched the percentages of those attaining degrees in that field.  So Ascribing the outcome to DEI without taking into account the pool of candidates available is leaving out a significant factor in that outcome that was inconvenient for the author.

You made a very good point on #3, which I addressed directly. 

Posted
16 minutes ago, Dahobbs said:

Sure. Has it occurred to you that we simply don't believe white males are getting the short end of the stick?

Forget the fact the author's choice of profession and personal weaknesses make him a poor representative of his own viewpoints--the issue that @Bozo_Casanova keeps raising is that HE believes it, and he's not a unicorn in his belief.  

Posted
13 minutes ago, Dahobbs said:

Sure. Has it occurred to you that we simply don't believe white males are getting the short end of the stick?

No doubt. But what this thread presupposes is, maybe some of them do? Because that would explain a lot.  

White males are obviously in control of a an oversized share of the money and power in our society, but that doesn’t translate to any single person. The entire premise that a white man never gets shafted essentially asserts that me, the guy unloading the truck at the carpet store and Donald Trump Jr. all have the same privilege relative to any non-white person or any woman.

Posted (edited)
8 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

The entire premise that a white man never gets shafted essentially asserts that me, the guy unloading the truck at the carpet store and Donald Trump Jr. all have the same privilege relative to any non-white person or any woman.

Hasn't that premise ALWAYS been true.  There have always been white males on the "losing side" of things.  We still probably had a better chance to win starting out than others did.

I do agree it's hard for most to take the premise of white privilege on faith if you can't point to a real, concrete example of it in your life.  That doesn't mean it didn't exist for you, though.

Edited by Surly Bevo
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Posted
2 minutes ago, LCHorn said:

Forget the fact the author's choice of profession and personal weaknesses make him a poor representative of his own viewpoints--the issue that @Bozo_Casanova keeps raising is that HE believes it, and he's not a unicorn in his belief.  

Ok? I I honestly don't give a shit if he believes it. I'm willing to commit that DEI programs shouldn't unfairly discriminate. But 'm not going to agree it is happening without evidence. He seems to want us to jump to that point prior to providing any real evidence. 

Posted
5 minutes ago, LCHorn said:

Forget the fact the author's choice of profession and personal weaknesses make him a poor representative of his own viewpoints--the issue that @Bozo_Casanova keeps raising is that HE believes it, and he's not a unicorn in his belief. 

If you are asking what I think- I don’t think “white males” get shafted at the population level.
I think that individual white males under about 45 who do not have money or connections or good luck get shafted sometimes, and when they do, progressives either don’t care or blame them.

Posted
3 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

No doubt. But what this thread presupposes is, maybe some of them do? Because that would explain a lot.  

White males are obviously in control of a an oversized share of the money and power in our society, but that doesn’t translate to any single person. The entire premise that a white man never gets shafted essentially asserts that me, the guy unloading the truck at the carpet store and Donald Trump Jr. all have the same privilege relative to any non-white person or any woman.

I get you're presupposing it. Why don't you prove it if you want someone else to agree with you? That's how this typically works. As to your non-sequitur, I can agree that poor people get shafted generally without agreeing that there is some sort of systemic discrimination against white males. 

1 minute ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

If you are asking what I think- I don’t think “white males” get shafted at the population level.
I think that individual white males under about 45 who do not have money or connections or good luck get shafted sometimes, and when they do, progressives either don’t care or blame them.

Those examples have nothing to do with them being white males. 

Posted (edited)
6 minutes ago, Dahobbs said:

Why don't you prove it if you want someone else to agree with you?

Because I don’t think one can prove the reality of other people’s lived experience. It’s like when my wife’s cousin, a very wealthy Biden donor from SE Texas, looked at a poll of people saying they were worse off financially in 24 than in 2022 and he said “they’re lying!” There’s not much to say. 

I posted something to see the extent to which people here could relate it. The answer is not very much. It is what it is. 

Edited by Bozo_Casanova
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Posted
8 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

Because I don’t think one can prove the reality of other people’s lived experience. It’s like when my wife’s cousin, a very wealthy Biden donor from SE Texas, looked at a poll of people saying they were worse off financially in 24 than in 2022 and he said “they’re lying!” There’s not much to say. 

I posted something to see the extent to which people here could relate it. The answer is not very much. It is what it is. 

Do you also need to know how we relate to flat earthers? I don't understand what you're trying to accomplish and I suspect that neither do you. 

Posted
2 minutes ago, Dahobbs said:

Why don't you prove it if you want someone else to agree with you?

On the one hand I understand your point, on the other I'm personally a little weary of this "what does the data show?" skepticism that has forced everyone to be mini-economists in order in order to justify "correct" beliefs and I think sometimes it gets in the way of having a north star politically.  

If you think there's electoral value in entirely de-legitimizing the author's complaint, be my guest.  My concern is that this mentality is what led to Trump 2.0, and whether it's white males, the working class, or farmers who live in the dildo of consequences thread, I'd like the Democrats and progressives to not treat any group at least somewhat sympathetic as apostates.  

 

Posted

We can commit to helping the disadvantaged poor, including the white males in that group, without agreeing that DEI policies have systematically and unfairly hurt a subcategory of white males. If that is all you want, you got it. 

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Posted
1 hour ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

I haven’t presented any. I added my personal experience to what’s in the essay and so did @956 Worldwide. Others said they had not observed something like that, which is also fine.

I rejoined "Big Tech" 8 years ago and can 100% confirm I saw what you saw, and pretty much exactly as you described it. At one point I recall thinking, "man, I'm fucked next time I look for a job"- not because my skills weren't top notch but because I'm a white male (50+ these days) and everything I was seeing/hearing during out hiring cycles was going super out of the way to not hire white males. 

I'm not complaining here, just reinforcing that what Bozo witnessed was/is very much a real thing in some fields. 

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Posted
1 hour ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

I haven’t presented any. I added my personal experience to what’s in the essay and so did @956 Worldwide. Others said they had not observed something like that, which is also fine. The other responses group into the following two major categories:

1) the author is lying 

2) ok, maybe some of this did happen to millennial men but probably they are just mediocre white guys angry because their privilege was taken

#1 is simply nonresponsive

#2 illustrates the disconnect in this bubble- millennial men aren’t mad because their privilege got taken away- they were not in the workforce to experience anything like good times for mediocre white men. And the vast majority of you are still enjoying your privilege, which is why you have the luxury to dismiss them as “mediocre white men.”

Why do you keep talking about angry millennial white men? White millennial men are the least racist generation of white men there is. 

Posted

I'll agree that there is a population of white males that believe they have been shafted because they believe the things that Rush, Hannity, Trump and others have told them.  They don't like it and they lash out by voting to hurt other people and because having a guy that offers lip service to their perceived grievances who has the same skin tone, if not a little more Ochre, instead of a black man or a bi-racial woman is one of the ways they would predictably lash out.

Kamala had no chance of bringing in this disaffected group and probably widened the gap over a generic white guy because in that group's mind every woman and woman of color is a DEI hire. 

So they may be wrong about the cause but do we need to cater to their misguided fears?  Maybe some of us are just too tired of the bullshit whoa is me mindset of the perpetual grievance machine and just want those complainers to pull themselves up.  They wont because complaining and blaming is easier.

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Posted
27 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:


I think that individual white males under about 45 who do not have money or connections or good luck get shafted sometimes, and when they do, progressives either don’t care or blame them.

 

I definitely think there is something to this, to be sure. I just think the example you are giving in this essay is not that.

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Posted

If you want me to say I can empathize with his point of view even if I think his casual analysis is faulty, I can. I get why he might feel that way. I think other progressive policies attempt to address the root cause of the problem (e.g., higher progressive tax brackets, universal healthcare). 

Posted
27 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

If you are asking what I think- I don’t think “white males” get shafted at the population level.
I think that individual white males under about 45 who do not have money or connections or good luck get shafted sometimes, and when they do, progressives either don’t care or blame them.

I actually usually chalk it up to shit luck. But if they write an article in Compact about how they just know they were secretly discriminated against for being white, then I'm going to start thinking it might be something else.

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Posted
9 minutes ago, Dahobbs said:

We can commit to helping the disadvantaged poor

He isn't talking about the disadvantaged poor though is the problem.

Posted (edited)
4 minutes ago, G650 said:

He isn't talking about the disadvantaged poor though is the problem.

Everyone is poor compared to the truly wealthy. That's what I mean. If we want to fix the decline of real wage growth and how all economic growth has been captured by the top 1% of the top 1%, I'm here for it. I'm not here for pretending that white men are disadvantaged because they are white men. 

Edited by Dahobbs
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Posted (edited)

I qualify as a millennial (about to cross 40), and I'm pretty comfortable admitting that some of my career advancements have come, in part, to me being a tall, relatively handsome, socially competent white dude. Mechanical Engineer FWIW.

If we're throwing around isolated anecdotes.

Edited by aggie08
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Posted
26 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

Because I don’t think one can prove the reality of other people’s lived experience. It’s like when my wife’s cousin, a very wealthy Biden donor from SE Texas, looked at a poll of people saying they were worse off financially in 24 than in 2022 and he said “they’re lying!” There’s not much to say. 

I posted something to see the extent to which people here could relate it. The answer is not very much. It is what it is. 

Again, I agree that they believe they were worse off, they believe that they were shafted.  But IIRC I think everyone was better off in 2024 than 2022.  Now were they conflating 2022 with 2019 and comparing 2024 to pre-covid, maybe.  If that was the case then they were not answering the wquestion asked but responding more on feelings.

Again, no doubt, Biden lost the messaging war over inflation, the causes and the remedies.  Just because people feel a thing does not make it right, but your point is valid in that we have to do a better job of addressing what they feel or believe.

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Posted
Just now, aggie08 said:

I qualify as a millennial (about to cross 40), and I'm pretty comfortable admitting that some of my career advancements have come, in part, to me being a tall, relatively handsome, socially competent white dude. Engineer FWIW.

If we're throwing around isolated anecdotes.

Nope. You've been unfairly discriminated against. Bozo out front should have told you. 

Posted
3 minutes ago, Dahobbs said:

Everyone is poor compared to the truly wealthy. That's what I mean. If we want to fix the decline of real wage growth and how all economic growth has been captured by the top 1% of the top 1%, I'm here for it. I'm not here for pretending that white men are disadvantaged because they are white men. 

You'll get no argument from me

Posted
6 hours ago, G650 said:

I also have to add, I can't think of a more pie in the sky career dream than screenwriter.

Marine biologist.  But screenwriter may be worse.

Posted
18 minutes ago, aggie08 said:

I qualify as a millennial (about to cross 40), and I'm pretty comfortable admitting that some of my career advancements have come, in part, to me being a tall, relatively handsome, socially competent white dude. Mechanical Engineer FWIW.

If we're throwing around isolated anecdotes.

Yeah, white engineers are typically male and kinda have it made, even to this day.

Make it a little more rarified and slap a law degree on there and it's still white dude heaven.

In firms, we always highly prized women and POC applicants because they were pretty rare.  And, as brisket notes, in a field where academics are prioritized, women are highly likely to have beat all the male asses.

Posted

To set my POV, I'm an elder millenial (b. 1981) white woman with a journalism degree who has exclusively worked in big tech marketing and PR my entire career. I understand what Bozo is getting at re: addressing why so many younger men are disillusioned with progressive politics and that we need to better address it if we want to win them over from the MAGA side. This article, however, is a poor avenue for a good discussion around this because the author is a whiny ass bitch. For much of this article, I kept thinking "no shit, that's something every generation of non-white, non-male has felt at some point. It's not poignant just because now YOU personally are feeling this pain." Some of it made me laugh out loud at the lack of self-awareness. Allow me to provide examples:

Quote

The demographic shift reshaped not only who told the stories, but which stories got told.

Quote

If you’re a white man, you gotta be the superstar  

Quote

It’s taken a toll on Ethan’s personal life. He’s been with his partner for seven years, but they’ve spent much of that time treading water. They want kids, but without the financial security of a tenure-track position, it’s daunting. “That decision is on hold and may never happen,” he said. He’s always anxious the grant money might dry up. “I don’t feel like my career path is leading anywhere. It feels like a dead end.”

Quote

The world is not rooting for you—in fact, it’s deliberately rooting against you.

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It’s strange and more than a little poisonous to see yourself buffeted by forces beyond your control. 

Quote

The truth is, I’m not some extraordinary talent who was passed over; I’m an ordinary talent—and in ordinary times that would have been enough.

Quote

What do I say when my boys ask about my old hopes and dreams? What do I tell them when they ask about theirs?

I also have two boys - Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Straight white males. What do I say when they ask about their hopes and dreams? Something along the lines of: "The world isn't fair, but in the vast majority of scenarios you already have a leg up being straight white boys. You do have to work hard, and you might get passed up sometimes for objectively unfair reasons. You might lose when you deserve to win. This happens to most people and is not unique to you or your circumstances. When it happens to you - and it will - you will not improve things by getting angry and spiraling and creating viral TikToks about it. All that gets you is surrounded by more anger and hatred. Look for ways to effect change without wallowing in your hurt. Talk to people in real life and not just online."

I don't know what to say to guys like Jacob Savage. I'm sorry that attempts to reverse hundreds of years of discrimination against others have resulted in you feeling like sometimes you got passed over for jobs because of who you are?

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Posted
2 minutes ago, austingirl said:

This article, however, is a poor avenue for a good discussion around this because the author is a whiny ass bitch

The Office Thank You GIF

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Posted
9 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

Fucking hell. That this country not only still doesn’t understand the multi-generational holdback caused by institutionalized racism, but now actually bans even talking about it in any educational context? Yeah, we’re going to turn into a shit-flinging civil war, and we fucking deserve all the pain that’s coming our way.

Understood.  Not sure why one can't understand all of that teach all of that, and still make sure that one isn't discriminating on an individual basis or drafting policies that appear to do so.

Posted
1 hour ago, wildcat09 said:

Why do you keep talking about angry millennial white men? White millennial men are the least racist generation of white men there is. 

They can be obsessed with their own victimhood and still not be racists.  If there is any conclusion that might ring true it is that.



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