The Elite (1 Viewer)

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    Optimus Prime

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    The elite are ruining the country

    The elite are completely out of touch

    The elite don’t understand what life is like for regular Americans

    But who are the elite?

    I can’t remember if I saw or read it but basically said “the Elite” are favorite boogeymen for both parties

    When the left talks about the elite they are talking about rich people

    When the right talk about the elite they are talking about educated or ‘cultured’ people

    I thought it was an interesting point

    And for both the elite is a small group of people who not only don’t understand your life they are about to come up with a bunch of laws that favor people like them

    What does “The Elite” mean to you?

    ==========================

    Louisiana Republican Sen John Kennedy made a memorable contribution to a Trump rally in his state on November 14, casting himself as a “proud deplorable” in contrast to the “goat’s milk latte-drinking, avocado toast-eating insider’s elite.”........

    =====================
    .........While Ross, who was worth $2.9 billion in 2016, might have a hard time understanding the economic plight of working Americans, the reality is that 40 percent of Americans can’t cover a $400 emergency expense and 25 percent have no retirement savings whatsoever.......

     
    All of that is just beautiful.

    It is beautiful because blackberries are free in my world I only buy out of season.

    You did not have to be elite to walk down the train tracks and pick them when I was growing up. If you don't eat them all mom would make a cobbler. Those were the days.

    Ok that is it gonna make an elite blackberry cobbler for tomorrow

    Makes me wonder what that guy would think of my ongoing jihad against the blackberries on my property.
     
    ......During his acceptance speech, Pitt cracked a joke about the president’s impeachment trial.

    "They told me I only have 45 seconds up here, which is 45 seconds more than the Senate gave John Bolton this week," said Pitt, referencing the former national security adviser who was not allowed to testify by the Senate during the proceedings that acquitted Trump.

    Pitt has not responded to the latest Trump attack. Following the Oscars, Eric Trump called Pitt a "smug elitist."...……...

     
    Makes me wonder what that guy would think of my ongoing jihad against the blackberries on my property.


    Nah your property. Kill at will. I don't have them growing at my house!

    They do kinda suck considering they only bear fruit on last seasons growth. So you have to so you have to put your hands deep inside and with thorns to pick them.

    In general all berries kinda suck to harvest that is why they cost so much.

    Accually not hard to kill. Any glyphosate type of herbicide will get rid of them. Just get good coverage don't spray to runoff because that is throwing money away.

    The birds are who are bringing them to your property any way.
     
    Nah your property. Kill at will. I don't have them growing at my house!

    They do kinda suck considering they only bear fruit on last seasons growth. So you have to so you have to put your hands deep inside and with thorns to pick them.

    In general all berries kinda suck to harvest that is why they cost so much.

    Accually not hard to kill. Any glyphosate type of herbicide will get rid of them. Just get good coverage don't spray to runoff because that is throwing money away.

    The birds are who are bringing them to your property any way.
    I was referring to the guy in your quoted tweet. The one who thought of blackberries as "rich people food".
    And here I am, dousing whole acres of them in Cornerstone Plus.
     
    I didn't realize that the corporate elite were all hipsters

    Not that Kennedy would know what a hipster was
     
    I’ve always viewed the elite in this context as people who thought they were better than the rest of society. Which could encompass highly educated people, rich people as well as otherwise normal people who drink tea with their pinkies extended.

    But just because people are educated or have material wealth doesn’t necessarily make them elite to me. It’s just a mindset. Many times I’ve considered people who use the phrase “pull yourself up from the bootstraps” as elitist, depending on the context in which the phrase is used.

    To me, it’s less about not being able to understand where others are coming from, but rather, not trying to understand where are others are coming from.

    Maybe "entitlement".... In the old days you might have said "Noblesse Oblige".
     
    ......During his acceptance speech, Pitt cracked a joke about the president’s impeachment trial.

    "They told me I only have 45 seconds up here, which is 45 seconds more than the Senate gave John Bolton this week," said Pitt, referencing the former national security adviser who was not allowed to testify by the Senate during the proceedings that acquitted Trump.

    Pitt has not responded to the latest Trump attack. Following the Oscars, Eric Trump called Pitt a "smug elitist."...……...


    LOLOL.. Brad Pitt is far more poised, and intelligent than Trump. So Pitt didn't respond to Trump's attack... I love that. All of us should ignore Trump.

    Meanwhile,
    Neon, the movie studio behind the South Korean hit "Parasite," fired right back, suggesting the president's criticism of the foreign language film stemmed from trouble with the subtitles.

    "Understandable, he can't read," Neon tweeted from its official account.

    The studio added the hashtag #Parasite #BestPicture #Bong2020 to honor the dark comedy, the first foreign language film to win best picture. It was one of four Oscars in the historic night, which included best International film and best director for Bong Joon-ho.
     
    All of that is just beautiful.

    It is beautiful because blackberries are free in my world I only buy out of season.

    You did not have to be elite to walk down the train tracks and pick them when I was growing up. If you don't eat them all mom would make a cobbler. Those were the days.

    Ok that is it gonna make an elite blackberry cobbler for tomorrow

    I LOL'ed at the blackberry is a rich person's food. Used to have an almost unlimited supply to pick for free from the vines growing on the Sunrise community club back fence....
     
    I LOL'ed at the blackberry is a rich person's food. Used to have an almost unlimited supply to pick for free from the vines growing on the Sunrise community club back fence....
    I remember as a kid in Mississippi my mom giving me a bowl and saying dill this up and I will make you a cobbler! Cotton mouths be damned I would fill up that bowl!!!
     
    I LOL'ed at the blackberry is a rich person's food. Used to have an almost unlimited supply to pick for free from the vines growing on the Sunrise community club back fence....

    We used to go pick them in the Spillway.
     
    I haven't had one for 30+ years and I don't even know if they still make them

    But in grade school we assumed that the parents of the kids who had Capri Sun every day were millionaires

    (with their Trapper Keepers and 128 color Crayola boxes)

    Yes, they still make them, I normally get them for 6 bucks for 2 boxes of 8 each.
     
    Elite(s) is a white noise term serving only to obfuscate. As for who runs what, may I suggest David Rothkopf’s “Superclass”. It is not some shadowy cabal whispering and pulling levers. It is soft power and access. The end result is the same. There is tension between competing interests. The competing interests seek power. The Superclass decides, so to speak, which interests get which power, how much power and the when that they can wield said power. The underlying issue is that change doesn’t actually change anything. Note the commercials for this company or that saying they donated so many meals or pieces of clothing or whatever. The underlying system which created the conditions requiring said charitable actions are sacred and not to be touched.
     
    from a few years ago
    =================

    ......One of the great political riddles of recent years is that declining trust in “elites” is often encouraged and exploited by figures of far more dubious moral character – not to mention far greater wealth – than the technocrats and politicians being ousted. On the face of it, it would seem odd that a sense of “elite” corruption would play into the hands of hucksters and blaggards such as Donald Trump or Arron Banks. But the authority of these figures owes nothing to their moral character, and everything to their perceived willingness to blow the whistle on corrupt “insiders” dominating the state and media.

    Liberals – including those who occupy “elite” positions – may comfort themselves with the belief that these charges are ill-founded or exaggerated, or else that the populists offer no solutions to the failures they identify. After all, Trump has not “drained the swamp” of Washington lobbying. But this is to miss the point of how such rhetoric works, which is to chip away at the core faith on which liberalism depends, namely that power is being used in ways that represent the public interest, and that the facts published by the mainstream media are valid representations of reality...........

    But one thing that these diverse professions and authorities do have in common is that they trade primarily in words and symbols. By lumping together journalists, judges, experts and politicians as a single homogeneous “liberal elite”, it is possible to treat them all as indulging in a babble of jargon, political correctness and, ultimately, lies. Their status as public servants is demolished once their claim to speak honestly is thrown into doubt. One way in which this is done is by bringing their private opinions and tastes before the public, something that social media and email render far easier. Tensions and contradictions between the public face of, say, a BBC reporter, and their private opinions and feelings, are much easier to discover in the age of Twitter............

     
    Also from a few years ago
    ====================

    Our new president is a private-jet-setting billionaire Ivy League graduate, a real estate tycoon, a TV star and a son of inherited wealth. But he is no longer, by his own calculations, a member of the “elite.” Nor are the men (and the few women) now joining his inner circle — 1-percenters and corporate executives, Harvard and Yale alumni, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and Goldman Sachs bankers. The true elite apparently sits elsewhere, among those who, in Sarah Palin’s notable 2008 formulation, think “that they’re — I guess — better than anyone else.”

    As an adjective, the word “elite” still conveys something positive, even aspirational: elite athlete, elite model, elite travel services. But as a noun, embodied by actual living people, it has become one of the nastiest epithets in American politics. “Elites have taken all the upside for themselves and pushed the downside to the working- and middle-class Americans,” complains Trump’s adviser Steve Bannon (of Harvard, Goldman Sachs and Hollywood). In this formulation, elites are a destructive, condescending collective, plotting against the beleaguered masses outside their ranks.

    And in these attacks, the president-elect and his team are deploying one of the most effective partisan political stereotypes of the modern age. For most of American history, anti-elite sentiment was a matter of up versus down, not left versus right. But about half a century ago, the conservative movement set out to claim anti-elite politics as its own.

    That meant redefining the term away from class and toward culture, where the “elite” could be identified by its liberal ideas, coastal real estate and highbrow consumer preferences. The right-wing Club for Growth captured this type in a famous 2004 attack ad, instructing the Democrat Howard Dean to “take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont where it belongs.”........

    The notion that distant elites might be conspiring against the people comes straight from the Founding Fathers, whose Declaration of Independence lamented the “long train of abuses and usurpations” inflicted upon ordinary Americans by an arrogant British king. From there on, United States history might be seen as a repeating cycle of anti-elite revolt. The Jacksonians rebelled against the Founders’ aristocratic pretensions. Northern “free labor” went to war against the oligarchical slavocracy. And the Populist revolts of the late 19th century adapted this story to modern capitalism, with farmers and laborers rebelling against robber barons, bankers, time-management experts and college-educated professionals........

    Lyndon Johnson won that election in a blowout, but Reagan’s vision of a smug and detached liberal elite helped spark the oncoming “culture wars,” pitting a supposedly indignant Middle America against the liberal snobs of the coasts. By the 1990s, with the rise of right-wing media stars like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, bashing the “liberal elite” had become a favorite blood sport of the American right............


     
    I haven't had one for 30+ years and I don't even know if they still make them

    But in grade school we assumed that the parents of the kids who had Capri Sun every day were millionaires

    (with their Trapper Keepers and 128 color Crayola boxes)

    arugula is a weed you can pick in an unkempt yard. Blackberries are sticker bushes.

    Clearly these people have never heard of chantrelles you pick out of the honey island swamp or, god forbid, redfish.
     

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