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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. 
 

 

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
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
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. 

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. 

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. 



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