loosecannon
Senior Member
- May 7, 2007
- 4,888
- 269
- 48
I hadn't made the connection to conceit.ed...
I started working full time in the mid 60s.
Ten years later, one single minimum wage job enabled me to pay rent on a brand new one bedroom apartment and maintain a 6 year old Chevy Malibu.
At that time the apartment rented for $175/month.
Today it would rent for ten times that amount.
I haven't been able to afford a one bedroom apartment or a car of any age since 1993, and I see things getting much worse.
There is one last, vast store of wealth Wall Street has yet to get its hands on, and that's Social Security and private pensions.
Slick Willie apparently had Social Security in his sights after repealing Glass-Steagall.
Luckily for most of us Monica and the blue dress came to our rescue.
Obama may well have the same "success" with Social Security "Reform" as he had with health care.
Yup. I remember those days, too.
The problem here is that we are too often talking to kids who truly do not understand what life reall used to be like.
Well that and they cannot imagine that their life is their life and cannot be duplicated, of course.
Take Skull pilot, for example.
I don't doubt that the man worked for everything he has.
What he apparently has difficulty understanding is that many people worked just as hard but for one reason or the other, didn't have his string of successes.
Its the WILLIE MAYS school of thinking.
Since Willie Mays made it as a BLACK MAN, why didn't ALL BLACK men make it?
Basically what they're doing is living in (and demanding that we join them in, too) denial.
It's a conceit, you see, to assume such a preposterous thing as:
I made ergo, everybody can make it.
That's so obviously absurdly untrue than one must assume that they're either dumber than hammers or simply being provocative so they can remind us how successful they've been.
Not everybody has the same ANYTHING, so claiming that we ALL have the same chances in life is just pure self agrandizing, right wing bullshit.
That is one characteristic of most blue-collar conservatives I've ever met. Conceit and racism which may be related.
The need to remind others of their "success" is another conservative trait I've encountered over the years.
Do you think their tendency for self aggrandizement makes it impossible for conservatives to see the effects of tax bias on their level of "freedom"?
The conservative's moral code is based on obedience to authority that's always assumed to be legitimate. Does their inflated sense of self worth make it impossible for conservatives to even consider the possibility that freedom doesn't always come from obedience?
Or maybe they actually ARE dumb as hammers...
Money is power and power corrupts. Why drag conceit into it when Occam has a more direct explanation?