Interesting stuff

Blowin's picture
Blowin started the topic in Friday, 21 Jun 2019 at 8:01am

Have it cunts

stunet's picture
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stunet Monday, 17 May 2021 at 2:47pm

Is your comment in relation to mine somehow, or just an uncontrollable exclamation from some unrelated event?

Island Bay's picture
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Island Bay Monday, 17 May 2021 at 2:52pm

It was related to your "in some instances" remark, and just to say how far I think things come over here.

It wasn't a rant at you, Stu.

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stunet Monday, 17 May 2021 at 2:59pm

Ha ha...nah, I was replying to Blowin's seemingly out of place remark. Missed yours, IB.

Yeah, it's not that different here. It's gone over the top, but for mine, it won't stay that way, it's a societal phase we're passing through.

Right now, it's hard to talk back against something like, using your example, intersectionality, because in many instances those people have felt marginalised and no-one feels more self-righteous than a victim.

But counter-arguments will come, right-minded folk will regroup, and a sensible middle ground will be found that provides for everyone.

And then another issue will arise and the same dynamics will kick off all over again...

Blowin's picture
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Blowin Monday, 17 May 2021 at 3:09pm

Thing is, Stu, most of the Wokeness isn’t from the “victims” or the historically oppressed, it’s from others who’ve simply decided to use these issues to silence and delegitimise anyone who dares question their outrageous sanctimony.

The above comment about the day was an attempt to sidestep getting caught up in the cultural discussions again. Was a cracker day though.

Blowin's picture
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Blowin Monday, 17 May 2021 at 3:13pm

Saw my first whale today.

Island Bay's picture
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Island Bay Monday, 17 May 2021 at 3:24pm

Everyone is victim these days. It’s the age of extreme narcissism; me me me, never us.

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stunet Monday, 17 May 2021 at 3:28pm

Well, there's no such thing as society said some Iron Lady somewhere.

zenagain's picture
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zenagain Monday, 17 May 2021 at 4:57pm

Do you think that there is no such thing as a society or lack of fraternity in society these days is the result of no clear vision from our elected representatives? What I'm trying to say is there doesn't seem to be an end goal or something that people can work towards or aspire to. It's so true, everything is me me me and if I'm not heard, liked or acknowledged then I'm the victim and it's not my fault.

On a kind of micro level I think sometimes disasters bring out the best in people. For example the bushfires back home where everyone from all walks of life pulled together and contributed in any way they could to get the people worst affected somehow back on their feet. Witnessing first hand here when we had the big earthquake and tsunami how everyone came together to make sure people had not only the basics but on a more holistic level too. I was so proud of the human race at that time and thought to myself that there's hope for us yet. Rambling I know but the common thread in the examples above imo was there was clear and defined common goal that could be shared. What value do you put on that?

What do you have these days? Society seems so splintered, there doesn't seem to be much to aspire to. Kids are being bombarded 24/7 with images of these perfect lives that others lead without ever realising It's a facade, it's not real. This rapacious need to be liked, validated, to not conform to the norm. To be screamed at and howled down (not literally) if you dare question something that doesn't quite sit right inside you.

Fuck, I don't know where I'm going with this but I can tell you one thing, by golly it must be hard being a kid these days knowing that any step you take in any direction, in the eyes of others, you'll be going the wrong way (and you'll be told about it in no uncertain terms).

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Blowin Monday, 17 May 2021 at 5:29pm

The kids will be fine Zen.

I remember as a young bloke feeling all that pressure from society to look like the impossibly talented role models of the day with their bike pants, big shouldered suit jackets and designer dread locks and I turned out alright. Hardly ever wear shoulder pads these days.

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simba Monday, 17 May 2021 at 5:33pm

Anyway thank gawd the aussie cricketers are home safe and sound after that gruelling maldives detention.......

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Blowin Monday, 17 May 2021 at 5:37pm

Yeah, Simba.

Was a bit touch and go there for a while, what with the ongoing Maldivian tequila shortages I heard some of those cricketers had to watch the island sunsets over daiquiris instead of margaritas.

Heavy.

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velocityjohnno Monday, 17 May 2021 at 5:45pm

Very interesting photo:

In the pic you can see the interceptors beginning to weave on the left. High tech solution to cheap volume of fire.

I can't say I really understood the dynamics of this country properly before, considering it very divided - with passes to cross from one side to the other for work, for example. But with mixed cities rising up (first time since 1948?) this would be precarious and terrible for everyday people on all sides.

D-Rex's picture
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D-Rex Monday, 17 May 2021 at 5:50pm

Deafening silence from the lefties re Lidia Thorpe and Craig McLachlan says it all.

stunet's picture
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stunet Monday, 17 May 2021 at 5:59pm

You've posted this a few times now D-Rex and I've no idea what point you're making.

indo-dreaming's picture
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indo-dreaming Monday, 17 May 2021 at 6:22pm
AndyM wrote:

Highly recommend listening to the following podcast, it discusses the "woke vs liberal" issue (as in, the real definition of liberal).

12.45 - the left-left divide
25.10 - general issue relates to a critique of structure and power
38.22 How woke tactics build compliance through intimidation

https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/theminefield/is-cancel-cul...

Listened to this today, it was okay but a bit babbly.

The thing i have noticed from that podcast and other podcast and even here in this thread is it's no longer a right Vs left thing, it's actually become a far left v's everyone else thing.

I guess because it no longer just affects the right anymore those that see themselves as quite left leaning are being affected and cancelled.

Seems like a lot of push back from society in general, but at the same time it seems to have gotten worse on a more corporate type level.

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sypkan Monday, 17 May 2021 at 6:21pm

"...The Woke project appears to me to be way less organic and way more premeditated and systemically imposed than you seem to appreciate, Stu."

exaxtly!

t's so contrived and manufactured it's nauseating, then when woke corporations - woke corporations dealing in slave labour -sponsor proud marxists groups like blm, who's whole schtick is based around slavery, we get well past the nausea stage, ...blaaah ...vomit...

"...The papers have swallowed it whole, and all normal debate has been quashed. Every HR dept in every organisation is gleefully in on it, and are growing exponentially through it.

It's not fun, and not funny."

exactly again!

as if HR departments weren't already parasitic and self serving enough... it's created a whole new corporate business model, not least within academia. a whole microcosm, a macrocosm, of useless fucks pontificating, moralising, and cancelling... destroying people's lives... and no debate, no scheric of right of reply, will ever be entered into...

"...You keep referring to dismissal of awoke as something reserved for the right wing, but that’s completely discounting those who’ve voiced their opinions above as representative. You think that Island Bay, Freeride, Sypkan , Zen or VJ are right wing?"

I believe this is the biggest problem the wokesters have, they have demonised anyone who doesn't subscribe to the dogma as 'right wing' ...well look how that's working out for you...

(not you stunet)

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sypkan Monday, 17 May 2021 at 6:48pm

whereever you're going it's spot on zen!

this is what 'the left' seems to have lost sight of in their race to the wokest... once upon a time they appealed to people's better nature, made rational arguments about the oppressed and the oppressors. aimed for some sort of solidarity for a greater good for all... now they're just all negative and labelling and stuff. dogmatic, absolutist, and righteous about how stuff is, ...ironically, guided by theory that teaches the opposite...

they once just aimed for us all to be nicer and to strive for a more equal society, now it's all demonising and name calling... all hate and division...

all whilst peddling the lip service of 'appealing to our better angels'

sorry joe and co., not buying it

freeride76's picture
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freeride76 Monday, 17 May 2021 at 6:43pm

"When you have a young generation that are economically hobbled, who realise they'll never buy their own house, who see diminishing employment projects and increasing work insecurity, who feel ostracised from the 'Australia project' and unsurprisingly have more allegiance to corporations like Apple and Facebook because that's what parents and politicans have allowed, making them the first fully birthed products of the Great Neoliberal Project, then what power do thay have?

Their identity.

Their gender.

Things the state and society can't touch."

No, but which modern surveillance techno-capitalism can continually package up and sell to them.

Modern Techno-capitalism has been the greatest beneficiary of woke ideology and more importantly it's mode's of crushing dissent, which rely on mobs on social media platforms.

indo-dreaming's picture
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indo-dreaming Monday, 17 May 2021 at 7:06pm
velocityjohnno wrote:

Very interesting photo:

https://twitter.com/nktpnd/status/1393019878374887432

In the pic you can see the interceptors beginning to weave on the left. High tech solution to cheap volume of fire.

I can't say I really understood the dynamics of this country properly before, considering it very divided - with passes to cross from one side to the other for work, for example. But with mixed cities rising up (first time since 1948?) this would be precarious and terrible for everyday people on all sides.

Watched this last night, it's pretty cool system.

stunet's picture
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stunet Monday, 17 May 2021 at 7:11pm

@Steve,

Bit of a non sequitor.

Sure it can be packaged up and sold, a great many things can, but the point is that when social and cultural capital is stripped away, individuals will zealously take agency over that which no-one else can touch.

It's a form of overpowerment, and as inequality rises we'll see much more of it.

zenagain's picture
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zenagain Monday, 17 May 2021 at 7:28pm

Have to agree with you there Stu.

Nobody can take away your dreams.

On the same token as quoted by my favourite philosopher Oprah Winfrey- "I know for sure what we dwell on is who we become."

Ha ha, we're fucked.

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stunet Monday, 17 May 2021 at 7:34pm

Just realised Oprah backwards is Harpo.

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zenagain Monday, 17 May 2021 at 7:46pm

No, we are not relations Sir.

sypkan's picture
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sypkan Monday, 17 May 2021 at 7:46pm

you clearly don't watch enough oprah...

Harpo productions

zenagain's picture
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zenagain Monday, 17 May 2021 at 7:54pm

Oprah having Daves baby.

Blowin's picture
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Blowin Tuesday, 18 May 2021 at 7:58am

Woke industry trying its damnedest to get a foothold in Australia. Constructing a neo-segregationist mindset from which they can squeeze profits through administrative and bureaucratic oversight. Get fcked you evil cnts.....trying to divide our country and erode social cohesion so you can generate profits.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/language-used-to-describe-culture-risks-...

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udo Tuesday, 18 May 2021 at 9:13am
AndyM's picture
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AndyM Tuesday, 18 May 2021 at 12:53pm

"when social and cultural capital is stripped away, individuals will zealously take agency over that which no-one else can touch."

Stu, surely Steve's point still stands - individuals think that their "lived experience" is inviolate and untouchable but it can be, and is, refined as a commodity and sold back to them.

freeride76's picture
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freeride76 Tuesday, 18 May 2021 at 12:57pm

Exactly, for digital natives who have been raised since they could talk on the steady diet of images/ads/etc etc fed to them by algorithms their so-called identity is as much of a construction of Big Tech as anything inviolate and part of their inner nature.

It's a construction, a very, very useful and profitable one.

Agency over this construction is largely an illusion.

stunet's picture
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stunet Tuesday, 18 May 2021 at 1:15pm

Maybe, though it's a distraction to the point I was making, which is as applicable to wandering 18th Jews as the digital natives of today.

When people have no buy-in to society, no cultural capital to transact, their sense of self is distilled to the most essential essence: gender and identity.

Hence we see an amplification of it today from young folk, and we will continue to see it unless govts invest in them so they're invested in the national project.

Blowin's picture
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Blowin Tuesday, 18 May 2021 at 1:35pm

Oh oh. You just mentioned the national community as something that may be a positive.

Must be hard to type whilst you’re goose stepping, Stu?

wally's picture
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wally Tuesday, 18 May 2021 at 1:40pm

Stu, the govt hears you and is investing. Like the planned $500m expansion to the National War Museum.

AndyM's picture
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AndyM Tuesday, 18 May 2021 at 1:41pm

Absolutely agree Stu but I think it’s vital to understand that these people may be heavily self-deluded if they think they have full agency over the identities they are sharing with the world.

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freeride76 Tuesday, 18 May 2021 at 1:54pm

I agree with everything Stu, except the cultural capital bit.

Identity politics, Woke ideology is the dominant cultural capital for these young people now.

From Hollywood, to all the literary publishers, sporting franchises, the academy, music and most major corporations.

From the perspective of neoliberal capitalism, IP is a godsend. It enables effortless and endless low cost virtue signalling and emotional capture of the supposed vanguard while maximising brand loyalty and profit.
It can summarily dismiss any competing narratives by cancelling them.
It's probably the most stunning co-opting of the "counter" culture ever seen.

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stunet Tuesday, 18 May 2021 at 2:03pm

Cultural capital, as in national cultural capital.

i.e when people are told a sense of being Australian is owning a family home, and yet they never will, they become marginalised from the culture at large. A matter that compounds when the state retreats from protecting work conditions, education levels, or anything that advocates for security and allows younger people to buy into the national project.

Or as Blowin thinks I should say it, zee nationale projekt.

PS: Very droll, Wally.

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freeride76 Tuesday, 18 May 2021 at 2:19pm

yeah, ok.

I see that as economics not culture, but I see your point.

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velocityjohnno Tuesday, 18 May 2021 at 3:34pm

I get Stu's point - but why is the rage of the young not directed at the economic conditions that see them locked out of this "national project"? IP seems an incredibly quixotic response; if there was ever a time for the class-based purely economic Marxist stuff I was taught at uni, surely it's now?

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stunet Tuesday, 18 May 2021 at 4:06pm

I think, at least partly, it's because they don't know any other world. The world that we grew up in, the one we hold forth as a model state, hasn't existed for over forty years. They've never known the welfare state, never understood the role govts could play if they imposed themselves on corporations and not the other way around.

I mean, I can even recall one commenter on here, similar age I think, not realising that Western govts have become ever more right-leaning since WW2. Dunno if he's not aware of history or the shift was imperceptible, but if people of my generation don't perceive the slide, how can someone who's never lived in that world even imagine it?

Also doesn't help that the teaching of history is becoming a historical footnote.

indo-dreaming's picture
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indo-dreaming Tuesday, 18 May 2021 at 5:19pm

In regard to linking wokeness or identity to housing affordability

Aren't the most woke more likely to be university students or university educated that are most likely to get a good paying job and be able to still buy into the real estate market, while the least woke are more likely to be those that just finish high school and often have a lower paying job and less chance of buying a house/unit. (it's a generalisation but i think its a fair one)

Identity has always been important to young people through every generation, feeling special and unique, belong to a tribe finding their place in society, most of us here have done it through surfing or music.

If you want to link wokeness or even an increase in need for idenity to something in young peoples modern lifestyle, i think you would be better looking at what makes up a big part of young peoples life's these days.

Which is the online world which is the new society/community, especially social media which is all about creating an identity, and a lot of it is worrying about how people perceive you, deleting/blocking people when they dont agree with you and creating a bubble around yourself where you only get feed the views you want to hear.

IMHO a lot of that online world habits are just being taken from online into to the real world or the line between the two is totally blurred..

For example: If I don't like what you have to say, online if i dont want to debate it or even hear it, i block or delete you or even report you, at best i give you a thumbs down, this gets taken to the real world where they also feel the need to cancel/delete the views and person they dont want to hear.

Ironically IMHO the online world has created more intolerance from those who are often originally seeking tolerance.

stunet's picture
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stunet Tuesday, 18 May 2021 at 5:34pm

You think a uni degree helps kids get ahead?

Here's a few anecdotes shared by my wife who tutors in law and criminology. Of the latter, there are approx 400 students (just at UoW) who at the end of the degree will be applying for, at best, four jobs per year in the police force.

Also, there are now ten times more people studying law than when my wife studied it two decades ago. Even back then there weren't enough roles in the profession to satisfy all graduates meaning in the future we'll have the most well-qualified Uber drivers in the world.

It's become a joke that law is the new arts degree. What isn't funny is the expense that kids will be lumbered with for a vocationally useless degree.

Frodo and Scomo have done few things I agree with, but their pre-pandemic announcement of aligning university placements with future job demands was good. Controversial but good. Just commonsense really - drop prices in degrees we'll need, raise them in ones we won't.

Shame it all appears destined for the dustbin now.

indo-dreaming's picture
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indo-dreaming Tuesday, 18 May 2021 at 6:57pm
stunet wrote:

You think a uni degree helps kids get ahead?

Im sure those that go to university on average end up earning more than those that don't, there is many different career paths were you need to be university educated to get the job, there is areas where we even have shortages for very good paying jobs like Doctors or Dentist etc (at-least in regional areas, where housing is also more affordable)

stunet's picture
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stunet Tuesday, 18 May 2021 at 7:05pm

Doctors?

Jeez Indo, you been to a hospital lately? It's a United Nations gathering in gowns. Brings its own ethical issues, and not just matters of immigration, shipping in people to do jobs that with forward planning could've been filled by Australian kids, but also the resource drain on developing countries who have an urgent need for trained medial staff. Said countries foot the bill to train, then lose the doctor to Australia.

Anyway, for good coin on minimal training tradies come up trumps every day of the week.

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I focus Tuesday, 18 May 2021 at 7:15pm

"Woke" great example of the nut case right wing grabbing a word demonising it then become obsessed with it.

FFS it SFA means nothing and is doing nothing.

Mean while the lower incomes have penalty rates stripped, wages growth fu(king zero while government trials in secret are becoming the norm while the punters are cheering it all on.

Corporate sponsors quietly happy... paying FA tax.

Blowin's picture
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Blowin Tuesday, 18 May 2021 at 7:57pm

“Anyway, for good coin on minimal training tradies come up trumps every day of the week.”

Minimal training? Those Picture magazines didn’t just read themselves you know.

Big shout out to all those Home Girls out there. Thanks for the smoko time memories.

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Blowin Tuesday, 18 May 2021 at 8:00pm

Follow up piece by Taibbi. Touching on the discussion here already:

“Is Slack Destroying American Companies? Q&A With Antonio Garcia-Martinez
Bounced from Apple over complaints about his book Chaos Monkeys, the author questions the wisdom of conflating your entire "political, moral, and religious being with your professional persona."
Matt Taibbi
May 17

Late last week, amid a Slack-driven furor over his confessional memoir Chaos Monkeys, Apple fired ads engineer Antonio Garcia-Martinez. I wrote Friday about the specific hypocrisy of Apple’s move — the company has the author of Bitches Ain’t Shit on its board but claimed it fired Garcia-Martinez as a statement of its devotion to “inclusivity” — but over the weekend spoke to Antonio about the larger issue of his case, which extends past his own predicament.

“This business of Slack at work,” he said.

After George Floyd’s death last summer, corporate leaders found themselves in an unusual position. With water-cooler conversations turbo-charged by chat programs like Slack, many firms saw outpourings of anger. Employees demanded their employers do something, or at least be seen doing something, to “confront racism.”

In some shops, employers were asked to recognize Juneteenth as a paid holiday. In others, there was a demand for more diverse hiring procedures. Significant donations to political organizations, scholarship funds, or product lines targeted to African-Americans were expected.

Responses became more idiosyncratic. Walmart, CVS, and Walgreens pledged to stop putting “multicultural cosmetic products” behind locked cases in retail outlets. YouTube delated 100,000 videos and 100 million comments as part of an expanded hate speech policy. HBO Max took down Gone With the Wind, then restored it with a disclaimer that it showed “ethnic and racial prejudices” that “were wrong then and are wrong today.” Disney later did something similar with The Muppet Show, Lady and the Tramp, The Jungle Book, The Aristocats, Dumbo, Peter Pan, and Swiss Family Robinson.

In some places, the connections between the companies’ core businesses and structural racism were apparent. For instance, many of the banks that made the most ostentatious pledges of support for Black Lives Matter were the same firms that targeted black communities with exotic subprime mortgage products, Wells Fargo’s “ghetto loans” episode being among the more infamous.

In other places, the connection was less clear. What should FitBit be doing to fix police brutality? How could Pinterest contribute? (They ended up removing ads on Black Lives Matter search results, so readers could “focus on learning about the movement”). Was it axiomatic that every company had a political role to play?

Soon, a new type of controversy arose, ironically at some of the companies with the reputations for most progressive management. The questions were less about race than workflow. At cryptocurrency firm Coinbase, employees demanded that CEO Brian Armstrong make a statement in support of Black Lives Matter. Armstrong, for a while, demurred. Then some employees and executives began what Wired called a “virtual walkout,” in which “senior engineers encouraged junior staff to close their laptops in solidarity.”

Armstrong quickly got religion, or so it seemed. He went on Twitter to announce, “I want to unequivocally say that Black Lives Matter.” Then, within weeks, Armstrong and Coinbase leadership flipped completely, announcing that the firm would no longer engage in “social activism,” and any employee who didn’t like the new policy could get the fuck out.

Coinbase offered 4-6 months of severance (depending on service time) and six months of COBRA, in a statement saying — in the thickest corporate sarcasm — that the arrangement could be a “win-win” for the politically minded, as “life is too short to work at a company you’re not excited about.” Only about 60 of the company’s 1,200 employees took the buyout.

At another tech firm, Basecamp, CEO Jason Fried — long the owner of a rep as a progressive corporate leader, as his company has published five books on workplace culture — put the kibosh on controversial talk at work, banning “societal and political discussions.” Shopify, an e-commerce firm that broke ground after the January 6th riots by closing online stores tied to Trump or MAGA merchandise, has now become a symbol of corporate pushback. CEO Tobi Lütke just sent an email to employees explaining that work is not life and life is not work, and employee demands should be adjusted accordingly:

Shopify, like any other for-profit company, is not a family. The very idea is preposterous. You are born into a family. You never choose it, and they can't un-family you. It should be massively obvious that Shopify is not a family but I see people, even leaders, casually use terms like “Shopifam” which will cause the members of our teams (especially junior ones that have never worked anywhere else) to get the wrong impression. The dangers of “family thinking” are that it becomes incredibly hard to let poor performers go. Shopify is a team, not a family…

Shopify is also not the government. We cannot solve every societal problem here.

There’s a Frankensteinian irony to all this. Our biggest corporations spent decades steeping the public in weird Me Generation propaganda stressing the primacy of personal fulfillment, which fast became our real national faith as traditional religion lost influence. The result was a work-centric culture most of the rest of the world looked on as a kind of insanity. Alone among peoples who have a choice in such matters, Americans have long bragged about working themselves to death, feeling real pride in putting off distractions like marriage, kids, or “meaning” as they ran hamster wheels in pursuit of status and rock-hard abs, alone and at full speed toward the great beyond.

Americans in my age group, Gen-Xers, were poorly prepared for corporate jobs in that a lot of us were somehow surprised to learn our ethnomusicology or (in my case) creative writing degrees were fairly useless for finding paying work. In conjunction with the huge sums many people borrowed to get those educations, the whole thing was a bit of a scam, though of course we should have known better.

Millennials had it worse. They attended the same academic resort spas, and were handed the same oft-preposterous degrees, but were additionally indoctrinated in affirming ideological oat-baths stressing the righteousness of their lived experiences. If the big surprise my generation faced was that our educations were worth bupkes to employers, the next generation had to deal with the shock of corporate bosses being indifferent to their emotional needs.

Meaning, we’ve come full circle. After training generations of Americans to forego personal lives and work their brains to mush in service of bigger profits, corporate leaders are waking up to find their companies staffed by people so psychologically dependent upon validation from work that they’re a net minus from a production standpoint, forcing bosses to beg them to shut up, go home, and get lives. Not many modern Americans know how to do any of those things, however, as can be seen in cases like that of Garcia-Martinez, where 2,000 employees claimed to be literally incapable of sharing a vast corporate structure with someone who once wrote a book containing passages they might have disagreed with, if they’d actually read it.

“The thought of conflating your entire political, moral, social, family, and religious being with your professional persona,” Garcia-Martinez says, “I think is extraordinarily fraught and difficult.”

Another irony: despite the progressive sheen of these campaigns, Slack agitation doesn’t represent a resurgence of labor. Unions used the strength of the whole workforce to protect the rights of the individual employee, among other things insisting that management not act without due process, evidence, etc. Slack, as has been seen in cases like Antonio’s, or the oustings at the New York Times of editor James Bennet and reporter Donald McNeil, often urges companies to bypass process and act in the heat of the moment. In any case, it’s a weird kind of liberalism that tries to override management to get employees fired, but that’s where we are in the modern American workplace.

I asked Antonio about these and other issues, from his perspective:

TK: You’ve had multiple careers, and clearly took writing seriously. How will episodes like this affect people who might try to write or take creative detours in their careers?

Antonio Garcia-Martinez: Kat Rosenfield was tweeting about this and I love her and it’s great that she’s defending me. Do you want art? People are saying, “Well, you should have realized the consequences… I feel like saying: “Do you realize if an artist went into producing their art, whatever it is, literary or nonfiction or whatever, and thought about the consequences, the art would be total shit?”

Looking at it bigger, there’s a lot of political ideologies like Nazism and communism that thought that art should be subservient to politics, and that art can only serve a political end. Those movements did not end well. I don’t think we want that in our liberal democratic society. I think that’s a bizarre ideological way of looking at the world, from the wokesters who treat this as a quasi-religion.“

velocityjohnno's picture
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velocityjohnno Tuesday, 18 May 2021 at 8:52pm
stunet wrote:

You think a uni degree helps kids get ahead?

Here's a few anecdotes shared by my wife who tutors in law and criminology. Of the latter, there are approx 400 students (just at UoW) who at the end of the degree will be applying for, at best, four jobs per year in the police force.

Also, there are now ten times more people studying law than when my wife studied it two decades ago. Even back then there weren't enough roles in the profession to satisfy all graduates meaning in the future we'll have the most well-qualified Uber drivers in the world.

It's become a joke that law is the new arts degree. What isn't funny is the expense that kids will be lumbered with for a vocationally useless degree.

Frodo and Scomo have done few things I agree with, but their pre-pandemic announcement of aligning university placements with future job demands was good. Controversial but good. Just commonsense really - drop prices in degrees we'll need, raise them in ones we won't.

Shame it all appears destined for the dustbin now.

Great quote Stu, this has been going on since the 90's. Bro did really well - only 1 out of 52 aquaculture grads in his class to get a job in the field (he did TAFE first, so could practically run a fish farm anyway, and this was the difference). My young one would work with econs grads in hospitality in town in his teens - they couldn't get work in their field. I've heard the same for biomed general degrees. Niece graduated in a class of 300 in marine science - 6 jobs per year. A job in history? Forgeddaboudit. Tears welled up in my eyes visiting the Maritime Museum in London when I saw history grads actually working in their trained field. We used to get enviro science grads and the best they could do was label eskies out the back in the lab - to start with. It can be really tough graduating. Now young one is in a trade, I am very relieved. With what's slated to go on here and a lot of commercial/RE experience, he's poised to clean up in the next 20 with a sound business plan behind him. A lot of the pain is caused by an oversupply of graduates - so opening up education further and attaching a means to citizenship with degrees, for the whole rest of the world, is bonkers. Agree that gov changes proposed were actually a good thing.

I also wonder how business owners will welcome graduates if they bring the woke IP into a workplace... how do you like chaos?

90's joke:
What did the econs graduate say to the arts graduate?
Big Mac please
What did the law graduate say to the econs graduate?
Fill 'er up.

adam12's picture
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adam12 Tuesday, 18 May 2021 at 9:11pm

I did my law degree in the early 80's. Back then, first lecture they said "Look at the student on each side of you, if you are here at the end, they won't be". 1 in 3 got through, they would cull students each year, just set an arbitrary line and if you were under it you were excluded, it was brutal. The profession was oversupplied with graduates back then. Most of my mates that graduated before me were driving taxis or doing something else, no work for young barristers unless you were connected. I got told to grab my wig and gown and ride the lifts in the County Court and hang around the foyer hoping some instructing solicitors noticed me. I never did.
These days I'm told they don't fail people, just churn them through, even the dummies get degrees, especially the OS students who pay more. A Law degree is still a good degree, having that understanding is valuable in life. Just don't expect to be the next Rumpole of the Bailey.

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GuySmiley Tuesday, 18 May 2021 at 10:18pm

5-D516548-E8-A5-4-D36-8328-86177-FAD874-A

Blowin's picture
Blowin's picture
Blowin Wednesday, 19 May 2021 at 2:05am

I haven’t listened to Joe Rogan in a while, but I’m sure if you listened to the podcast in question any mention of the quote would be discussed in an eminently balanced and reasonable manner. Maybe I’m wrong? Maybe he has actually morphed into the drooling and irrational neo Nazi / unhinged right wing freak that those who’ve never listened to him and hated the idea of him liked to fantasise he really sounded like? I’d respect an attempt by yourself to listen in order to gain credibility for your post, Guy.

Alternatively we could all just sit here and slap each other on the back thinking “Cool grab - context be damned!”

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garyg1412 Wednesday, 19 May 2021 at 8:23am

"Im sure those that go to university on average end up earning more than those that don't"

Indo I can't back this up with facts but at a Master Builders Association seminar I went to some years back there was mention of a study the MBA did whereby they compared a law degree to an apprentice carpenter who went on to be a successful builder. The lawyer was financially streaks ahead until around age 40 but then the builder pulled ahead and the lawyer never caught up.

Yes you see the lawyers driving around in their flashy Porsche Cayennes but the successful builder is the bloke driving his tricked up V6 Amarok around with a $150k Stabicraft hitched on the back.