Can’t argue with that. He wouldn’t be the first tech-smart guy lacking in common sense. (Or empathy.)
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It’s not a sacrifice. It’s a guilty pleasure. I sometimes read the conservative subreddits to try and make some sense of their position. But I also sometimes read it when they suffer some sort of political defeat in hopes of getting a little strength and pleasure from their tears. (I’m not proud of that, necessarily, but it’s what I do.)
I checked this morning after I heard the news about Cain and was hoping to see some ray of light dawning in the minds of the people who really do seem to truly believe that Covid is some kind of liberal hoax. I suspect that some of them have decided that it’s a hoax because no one they know has contracted or died from the disease. I was hoping to see that some of them would be shaken of that position.
As usual, with my trawling of those subreddits, I came away disappointed.
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So in Trump’s public statement of condolences to Cain’s family he said Cain died of “a thing called the China Virus.”
He can’t even offer a few words of respect to a black man without saying something racist.
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I’m going to call that population that we should care less about “Covid denialists”. If you decided to go maskless, decided to not social distance, or lobbied for early re-opening, you’ve not only endangered yourself, but the population as a whole, and while it may not be the compassionate thing to do, I refuse to give a rat’s ass when karma bites you in the tuckus.
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F
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Good one!
I find that to be the exact opposite of inspiring. In fact, it’s kind of enervating, to realize that once again, the superficial (but crucial for survival) rewards of this world go to the biggest jerk, not the most deserving person. He’s one more data point showing that to ‘make it’, one seems to have to be an awful human being.
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I know this is going to sound like a weird tangent, but this reminded me of when I was an office manager in a suite of financial offices and was responsible for hiring secretaries and other support staff. Every Black woman who applied had gap(s) in her CV due to family obligations. Apparently that made them appear to be less hire-able to others; I felt it showed loyalty and commitment and a willingness to work hard at whatever came their way. Never regretted hiring any woman fitting that description. But as a result, over time I got to know a lot about the extended families, and let me tell you: even more than in white families, if a Black man is doing well in life, it’s the Black women in his life doing all the heavy lifting to make that possible for him. All while getting no credit, no pay, and incurring gaps in their work history.
So before giving Cain too much credit, I’d like to know what his grandmother(s), mother, aunt(s), and sisters/cousins did to facilitate his success. There is NO WAY he did it alone.
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Nobody does it alone. His parents, for example, worked like hell so he could go to a good college (Morehouse). But, for an African-American to get advanced degrees from good schools in tough STEM fields, and parley those into a career, in that era, that was no small thing.
But yeah, he married right out of college, and his wife devoted herself to Cain’s life and career instead of pursuing one of her own.
As he rose through the ranks at Pillsbury and beyond I assume he did what many (or all) managers do who rise that rapidly, and climb there on the backs of colleagues and subordinates, and that’s when he evolved into the person we like to vilify properly speak ill of today.
(ETA: edited as per comment below to remove any suggestion criticism of Cain is unwarranted)
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This is a big problem with the “self-made man” narrative. The successes of those men are often built on the unpaid (or sometimes paid, but often unacknowledged) labor of women. This is less unacknowledged in the Black community, generally speaking, I’d argue, but still often the case, at least in terms of how we understand success as a larger society… Not sure if that’s making sense, but you get me, I think?
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Cain isn’t being “vilified;” he wasn’t a good person and he did far more damage in his life than he did any good.
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Yeah, probably not good word choice on my part. Will change.
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He was definitely a bad person in later life. While Cain’s professors taught him math and CS, it’s clear that they didn’t teach him how to be a decent human being. That’s all too common in academia – especially in STEM fields but really anywhere a professor is more interested in self-glorification, self-congratulation (sometimes in the form of “white saviour” complex), and focusing mainly on outcomes of money and power and prestige rather than studying a discipline for its own sake.
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As my Gram always said:
It’s not where you start out in life that really matters, it’s where you end up.
Herman Cain, despite being a ‘self-made’ Black man who was a Morehouse alumnus, ended his life as an ass-kissing, racism-enabling toady who died of his own carelessness.
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Yeah, they would all love to have healthcare, but brown people would get it too, so they are against it based on that alone.
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You mean maths and CS don’t fix all our problems and we need other forms of knowledge outside of those!!! Say it ain’t so!!! /s
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You think math professors should put “how to be a decent human being” on their course syllabi? I limit this to discussing what constitutes cheating, and requiring our majors to meet an ethics requirement and take a good selection of core courses in other departments, such as two semesters of global and multicultural perspectives.
You think the faculty at Morehouse have “white savior complex”?
Oh the humanity! Er, I mean, the humanities!
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I think all professors should put it on their personal agendas to encourage their students to be empathetic and to use whatever they’re learning to make life better for their fellow human beings. Decades later I still remember the teachers and profs who took that approach to education. But I understand that’s beyond the ken of a lot of academics – they tend to go unremembered, at least as teachers.
Obviously not. Perhaps you missed the word “sometimes” in that phrase.
Or the pseudo-STEM field of economics, which at least one distinguished member of the field (former Fed economist Claudia Sahm) thinks has very serious problems, ones that start in academia and end up screwing us all over.
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