re: NYT's David Brooks reaches unprecedented levels of woke in his Op-Ed

quote:

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American upper-middle-class culture (where the opportunities are) is now laced with cultural signifiers that are completely illegible unless you happen to have grown up in this class. They play on the normal human fear of humiliation and exclusion. Their chief message is, “You are not welcome here.”

In her thorough book “The Sum of Small Things,” Elizabeth Currid-Halkett argues that the educated class establishes class barriers not through material consumption and wealth display but by establishing practices that can be accessed only by those who possess rarefied information.

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ok this is hilarious for 2 reasons

first, he's basically calling out the culture of the upper-middle class. this whole piece is one big "culture" assassination and it's hilarious and just downright stupid. this is like "nuclear family privilege" where they flip reality in order to create marginalized classes and demonize the more optimal behavior. oh upper-middle class people invest in their children more? THE HORROR. instead of trying to get people lower than them to do the same, we should criticize this behavior! the huge assumption is that those lower than the upper-middle class are incapable of adopting this culture, which is utter hogwash.

second, this little "rarefied information" angle is even more bullshite. why? we hold near super computers (historically speaking) in our pockets. when i'm at a restaurant and i don't know what a dish or ingredient is, i do this advanced behavior known as "Googling it". my phone even has a bar on its home screen where i can type in the item and it immediately brings me to pages explaining what it is, its history, and i can click another link and get pictures of it. in about 10 seconds.

this argument is utter insanity compared to reality

quote:

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To feel at home in opportunity-rich areas, you’ve got to understand the right barre techniques, sport the right baby carrier, have the right podcast, food truck, tea, wine and Pilates tastes, not to mention possess the right attitudes about David Foster Wallace, child-rearing, gender norms and intersectionality.

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a progressive-liberal criticizing this behavior is the height of irony

just like the zoning, this sort of behavior is square within his own socio-political group, however he keeps the actual group he's criticizing nameless and faceless. he's creating an "other" out of his own people and at most calling it the "educated class" without any real discussion into the demos or people involved.

quote:

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Status rules are partly about collusion, about attracting educated people to your circle, tightening the bonds between you and erecting shields against everybody else. We in the educated class have created barriers to mobility that are more devastating for being invisible. The rest of America can’t name them, can’t understand them. They just know they’re there.

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again, this ignores the fact that information is more available and cheaper than ever before. you cannot "collude" using information when information is available to everyone in this country with hardly any effort. if the barrier to entry is simply knowledge of certain information, then there is no barrier whatsoever. they are not "invisible" or beyond understanding, as he writes. the literal exact opposite is true. at no point in human history have such meaningless "barriers" been accessible to the lowest classes