Kinja reply list

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cheerful_exgirlfriendKen Layne
8/30/13 3:17pm
..the mythological Joseph, the cuckold in the tale of Mary's supernatural pregnancy, was the patron saint of going along with the system even though you're utterly dead inside.

As a formerly deeply devout "good" Catholic girl, I appreciate this line so much, very good work.
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  lilkevcheerful_exgirlfriend
  8/30/13 3:22pm
  I think its particularly mean spirited. But you know, whatever, as long as you chuckled at someone else's expense I guess.
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  cheerful_exgirlfriendlilkev
  8/30/13 3:24pm
  Whose expense? Joseph? Mary? I'm pretty sure that being dead/never alive and pretty fucking famous means they don't give two figs about what I laugh at.
  
  ETF grammar
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JohnMcClanesSmirkKen Layne
8/30/13 3:18pm
That the parties for whom Labor Day was intended are required to work (bottom rung workers: service jobs, retail) and the parties for whom labor day was meant to check (managers, white dollar, bankers) are given the day off, has to be either one of the cruelest and most ironic accidents of history ever or a deliberate and cynical "fuck you" by the man. I'm inclined to believe the former but after reading this I'm open to the latter.
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  WilliamShatnerPantsJohnMcClanesSmirk
  8/30/13 3:27pm
  EXACTLY. Was coming to make the same point. The people who need a day off to celebrate the "worker," or "laborer" don't get one.
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  JohnMcClanesSmirkWilliamShatnerPants
  8/30/13 3:35pm
  I still remember waiting tables in midtown on Labor day for a bunch of yuppie assholes making peanuts thinking "wasn't this a fucking socialist holiday at some point?"
  
  But then I got a white collar job and now I'm the (wannabe) yuppie asshole who has the day off. I've promised myself I wouldn't indulge in any activities requiring service or retail labor but I may get a hankerin' for some bloody marys so who knows.
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AugustusSaintCloudKen Layne
8/30/13 3:18pm
The u-scan machines will never ever replace cashiers because there will always be a requirement for cashiers to be there to press the override button when a dumb shit soccer mom doesn't realize the entire thing is a scale and that her awful spawn climbing on it is throwing off the censors.

And the sign says fifteen items or less you asshole, that's a full cart.
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  Ken LayneAugustusSaintCloud
  8/30/13 3:56pm
  They've already fixed this at most of my local stores. There's *one* cashier/assistant standing near four self check-out stands. In a couple of years you'll see one watching over a whole store's worth of check-out lanes.
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  AugustusSaintCloudKen Layne
  8/30/13 3:58pm
  When I was in high school back around 2000 or so they started rolling them out at the store I worked at and I'd often get stuck as the one person at the desk next to them, somehow it was far worse than working the normal register just because of how furious people get when they screw up the machine.
  
  Still don't have that old IBM commercial level of automation with the guy walking out after stuffing things in his coat then the cashier runs after him to give him his receipt, guess they saw NFC coming from a mile away.
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BearDownCBearsKen Layne
8/30/13 3:49pm
Argh, the few have too mich. I want a Gawker series of stuff we should nationalize. Short list:
Natural resources
Colleges
Pensions
Prisons
Health care
Detroit
???
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  Johnny ChundersBearDownCBears
  8/30/13 3:55pm
  toilets
  roller coasters
  country music
  cake
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  Perry DowningBearDownCBears
  8/30/13 4:51pm
  Day Care
  Banks
  Utilities
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tito_swinefluKen Layne
8/30/13 4:24pm
I think one of the most brilliant tools the capitalist class ever came up with for suppressing the righteous rebellion of the working class is the American dream. Everyone believes that they themselves will be the one to make it. They all have tickets to a lottery that never even holds a drawing. They all police one another so that no-one messes up this lottery that none of us will ever win.
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  Tar Bendertito_swineflu
  8/30/13 5:11pm
  The beauty was that it was once basically true (not for minorities of course). But that dream died in 1980.
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  MeanMrMustardtito_swineflu
  8/30/13 5:31pm
  Really? You can't make it? You can't become wealthy? What's stopping you?
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DiscoInfernoSupressionSystemKen Layne
8/30/13 3:26pm
The anti-labor movement has done a spectacular job of convincing American workers to desire a lower standard of living than the one enjoyed by their parents.

Retirement? Only for the greedy!

Health insurance? You clearly don't deserve it!

Wages linked to productivity? Greed! Greed! Greed!

American workers are like battered spouses. Always being told how worthless they are. How they deserve less and should demand less. How they need to attack those who dare to ask for anything. How they need to apologize and avoid inciting billionaire "job creators" who lay them off to raise that quarter's stock price and then turn around and campaign against unemployment benefits and student loan forgiveness.

Non-executive wages have been flat since the 1970s. Productivity has doubled.

Meanwhile, the ratio of wages earned by CEOs to the rank-and-file has gone from 195-to-1 in 1993 to 354-to-1 in 2012.

We're being manipulated by sociopaths and told that everything is our fault.
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  Hannibal the CannibalDiscoInfernoSupressionSystem
  8/30/13 3:38pm
  Not only are people convinced that they should accept a lower standard of living, but also that the value of their lives is directly linked to their productivity. Artistic types, people in low wage occupations, the sick and elderly and disabled, and the unemployed are all shuffled off into the "lazy and worthless" category, while high-earners and people in the "right kind" of occupations (usually those most beneficial to major corporations) are seen as more deserving of assistance and support than their less fortunate counterparts.
  
  And that's not even scratching the surface of where minorities fall on the scale.
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  Commander13Hannibal the Cannibal
  8/30/13 3:55pm
  "...the value of their lives is directly linked to their productivity..."
  
  No, it's far worse than that- we are more productive now, than EVER. We are being told that the value of life in America is the amount of WEALTH that you have, regardless of how you cam by it. Therefore, hedge fund managers are more "successful" job creators, than the local small company than just doubled its personnel by hiring two people. And, since our wealth is being siphoned off along with our productivity by the finance sector, our "value" diminishes without us having to do anything at all.
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sparklyunicornvomitKen Layne
8/30/13 3:34pm
At what percent unemployment will people be hanging on the gates of private communities? I'd think that would be an incentive to the 1%, hmmm?
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  Ken Laynesparklyunicornvomit
  8/30/13 4:13pm
  It's weird, isn't it? I remember in the Occupy weeks how there was this really visible and aggressive security suddenly visible uptown. It's always there if you pay attention but this was *beyond* the quiet security. It was meant not only for protecting the apartments and museums and the rich people but for being seen and talked about, so that the Occupy marchers would have it in their heads that it wasn't going to go well if they started storming Bloomberg's apartment building or whatever the target might be.
  
  The desirable cities are now so crazily expensive that people who might be driven to action are generally very far away. It's the reverse of the gated community away from the violent city scenario of the 1980s. Now it's the poor and underemployed stuck out in the shitty suburbs, far from the action.
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  GrimkeKen Layne
  8/30/13 7:18pm
  Ugh, I hate the truthiness of what you say.
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raincoasterKen Layne
8/30/13 7:07pm
There's another layer to this: Hands up, how many people here actually have Labour Day off? Not me. I've worked every Labour Day that I wasn't sick for probably the last twenty years.
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  saucissonraincoaster
  9/01/14 12:54pm
  The fact that you're spelling Labor with a "u" suggests the root cause of your not getting an American holiday off...
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  raincoastersaucisson
  9/02/14 11:01am
  The fact that you assume this is Only In America suggests that you attended American schools. Poor thing.
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Not A SnortKen Layne
8/30/13 3:19pm
I think this essay contains an excellent allegory: if you want your country back, average American citizens, be willing to chew on a blasting cap and blow most of your head off rather than let the ruling class slowly execute you and you just might stand a chance.
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  Crash CometNot A Snort
  8/30/13 3:57pm
  Capitalists may sell you, as Lenin said, the ropes with which you intend to hang them, but let's not forget that the obvious unsaid aspect of this is that capitalists have a whole lot of hangin' rope lying around.
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  sad-radNot A Snort
  8/30/13 7:15pm
  Maybe the American citizenry should know more about how our government works, not just on the federal level but more importantly, on the city and country district level. Those are the levels that has the most immediate impact on people's lives. Maybe if we can vote more reasonable "moderates" into congress/senate, we would not have such gridlock on the legislative branch. People have this weird idea that the President = king/ruler of the land and the other parts of government are just there to give people headaches or something.
  
  As you all know, the legislative, executive, and judicial branches can only work intertwine and if one of them is busted, the government isn't going to work properly, full stop. If the government is not working, we only have no one else but ourselves, the American populous, to blame for not doing two things an American is reasonable for doing: 1. being an INFORMED CITIZEN and 2. VOTING. The second one is not suppose to be hard, especially if one takes the time to do the first thing. Being an informed citizen is the hard apart. You have to sift through all the information out there to make inferences about issues surrounding a local community, county district, state, or the whole country.
  
  You have to make critically reasoned connections between what you experience in life, what others experience in their lives and the information that is presented to you. People have to make connections of what they know about the sciences, history, politics, law/justice, ethics/morality and humanity to be able to do this. And for what? So that we can keep having this democracy that people are so crazy about having. To "sustain" it. There are only two main governmental options: democratic or authoritative. We can have a bad democratic government, so people would say that we already do, but its still a democratic one. We can make it better. We need a 1. highly educated public to understand our governments(federal, state, city/municipal), what it can and cannot do and the influence that it has on our lives and 2. high quality information, that is suppose to be provided by impartial objective journalism, to be the citizenry's watch dog of any kind of shenanigans going on in our governments: nepotism, corruption, misuse of power, conflict of interest, money having influence on politics. That is one of the many reasons why freedom of the press is so vitally important for a democracy to function properly and stay on the straight and narrow.
  
  TL;DR: just remember these political science equations:
  
  QI -> WICs ->(r) -> QPP -> SD;
  
  and
  
  PQI -> UICs -> (n.k r) -> PPP -> USD
  
  Quality Information leads to Well Informed Citizens who VOTE/KNOW THEIR REPRESENTATIVES leads to Quality Public Policies leading to a SUSTAINED DEMOCRACY
  
  on the other side, equation 2:
  
  Poor Quality Information leads to UnInformed Citizens who may not bother vote, or vote poorly or not have many options on who to vote for/ Don't know their representatives leads to Poor Public Policies leading to an UNSUSTAINABLE DEMOCRACY
  
  Remember: Democracies are not destroyed by outside forces/influences, they are destroyed from the inside.
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gerrycomoKen Layne
8/30/13 3:12pm
Personally, Labor Day means the beginning of the end of the warm season and slow descent into the lame, seemingly never-ending, VERY HATED colder ones.
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  swampmangerrycomo
  8/30/13 3:29pm
  wow, what an insightful comment about the weather. you know, i wish i had more time in my life to spend talking with people like you about how the summer is hot but the winter is cold. fascinating stuff.
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  gerrycomoswampman
  8/30/13 3:35pm
  wow, what an insightful comment about the weather. you know, i wish i had more time in my life to spend talking with people like you about how the summer is hot but the winter is cold. fascinating stuff.
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