You raise a good question. I suppose the answer lies in utility or at least the perception thereof. I chose the NASA example as representative of Cold War era Big Science. I could just as well have connected the dots between Operation Paperclip to NASA & the DoD getting GPS up in the sky, then Reagan opening it up to civilian usage to smart phones and car navigation.
Perceived utility or not, the simple answer might be perceived achievement. Millions around the world watched/listened to the Apollo moon landing while its highly likely that even the best gender studies paper is never read by even a tiny fraction of those numbers.
I acknowledged that where I referred to my own “useless” humanities degree and my career unrelated to said degree.
I strongly disagree here. That may have been true in the past but not any more. What you describe here is the prevailing wisdom here in Japan and the result is that fresh college grads, even from the local elite universities are woefully unprepared for even the basics which are required for OJT to be of any use.
Some yes, some no. I never proposed to do away with or devalue all non STEM studies and clearly stated that I think they are an important part of human development.
It doesn’t have to be. That is to say, it is not an intrinsic part of “unionism”. It all depends on what the union chooses to call for at the bargaining table. If the workers think to say “Seniority can have an effect elsewhere, but promotions should be based on ability as much as it is possible to do so.” then that particular problem may be avoided (if incompetencies elsewhere don’t come into play).
Well, to be honest, if I were actually near these guys I’d be pretty scared of them too.
But to your point, I know, the antisemitism in some leftwing groups is really disturbing. No sugar-coating it, the world has plenty of people of all political stripes who utterly lose contact with reality when people of Jewish faith or Jewish heritage are discussed, and groups that claim to value diversity need to do a better job of holding themselves to their own standards on this front.
I think a lot of people have very quickly (that is, over a century) forgotten the extent to which unions created the lives we have now. I see debate over whether we should thank unions for the weekend and the 40-hour work week, and so on but even if someone doesn’t believe that a substantial amount of current labour law was put in place because of union-based political pressure, unions still need to be thanked for creating the advocacy for workers that normalized a lot of these ideas.
So now we are in a position where you have a right to refuse unsafe work (do you have this in the US? does it vary by state?) and that’s great and I think people don’t imagine that would actually go away if unions went away. I think one day it would. I think, when I see people going after unions, that one day a "scab"s house is going to get torched and the police are going to find that the union workers in town outnumber them and we’ll be back into the situation that brought about a lot of these laws to begin with.
At this point we need an understanding that we are all in it together. If unions seem obsolete it’s because we don’t need better wages for auto workers we need better wages for everyone. We don’t need unions so much as we need democracy. But unions have a history of fighting that fight for everyone. I only think they are obsolete if they stop fighting for others and look entirely inwardly
I hope you arent referring to violence between police and union members. My often mentioned grandfather was there for the Detroit labor riots and never hesitated to say there was nothing heroic about it.
I drove through rural Pennsylvania over the weekend. Any unemployed Trump voters depending on him to come and save the town are going to be thoroughly disappointed. In the end, nobody cares as much about you as you.
Specifically among the circles that really don’t want to see those people get better jobs, because translating it as something they can trivially reject makes it a lot easier to do so.
I certainly haven’t seen that sentiment among anyone who actually does want to offer these people more and better work opportunities.
I think there is little doubt that union pressure indeed gave us those things. Also, an end to child labor (with the help of feminist and other progressive groups). [quote=“anon50609448, post:84, topic:90096”]
If unions seem obsolete it’s because we don’t need better wages for auto workers we need better wages for everyone.
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I am, but I’m not saying violence between police and unions was a good thing. I’m saying we should always remember that kind of violence and enact the kinds of policies that will prevent repeats of it. “Right to work” laws are turning back the clock to darker times.
Driving through PA I thought of what the people of “Alpine Helen” – a former logging town – did.
I know there’s only room for so many Bavarian themed towns but the idea stands. Good on them on making this work. It is fun to visit once. It’s on on the tourist circuit my parents take visitors on.
This is and isn’t true to some extent. There’s an element of othering here for sure, but I know someone who studies labor, has a working class background, is a veteran activist, and who very much is part of this sentiment. If you ask him, he says he’s happy to work with anyone who isn’t an overt racist. But if you read his rhetoric on Facebook, it really doesn’t come across that way. There’s a kind of cognitive dissonance there, but it’s also hard to describe in real terms.
I’m a bit confused by your post, can you clarify how it comes across? Do you mean it comes across as him willing to embrace racism and homophobia? How, exactly?
Personally speaking I’m happy to work with anyone, overt racists included, in pursuit of an end goal that makes life better for everyone. It doesn’t mean I embrace or support racism or homophobia, and I won’t work with them if it requires supporting or enabling either of those things - but I also believe that we can work towards shared interest even with horrible people, to the extent our interests are shared. Also I’ve managed to convince an overt racist to support forced bussing integration in the past by explaining how much it upsets many prominent New York Liberals that supported Hillary, if we phrase our arguments right we can probably get even overt racists to support all sorts of important social justice stuff, just like how we managed to convince many of the overt homophobes in black culture to support a party that backs LGBT rights.
Coalition politics is not a bad a thing, and it’s not embracing homophobia or racism despite that being something I’ve been accused of several times now.
I see how that was confusing. It comes across as him having a disdain for working-class whites (despite his background) and having an unwillingness to meet them halfway.
I can’t say that I’m happy to work with overt racists because overt racists have an obnoxious tendency of being unable to work with others. If the suppress their racism, then they cease to be overt racists.
Although YMMV on “actually does want”, an example:
It is a known pattern; whenever the call goes out for the Dems to do more to attract working class people, the party establishment interprets that as “be more racist/homophobic/misogynist”.
Probably because playing for the bigot vote doesn’t harm the profits of their corporate sponsors, whereas actually doing something useful about wages and taxes might cost them money.
That is because there isn’t an easy answer. Even bringing industry back does not bring the same amount of jobs as robots are cheaper and it doesn’t take as many people to fix/monitor the robots.
