Category: class

Rich people are the f**king worst: The 1 percent’s vile new war on us all – Salon.com

The wealthy and their GOP apologists talk about poor people as the takers. They have it completely backward

Source: Rich people are the f**king worst: The 1 percent’s vile new war on us all – Salon.com

This article is a fairly direct takedown of the entitlement culture shared by many wealthy people. I disagree with its conclusion though:

Wealth, it’s worth noting, isn’t the enemy. The problem is the attitude of the wealthy, the contempt, the indifference, and the lack of anything resembling civic virtue.

No, that’s not the problem. Here’s the dirty little secret about money and wealth: it is a social construct. We have a socially trained impulse to recognize hierarchy and class. We have a socially trained impulse to defer to wealthy people.

The same way racism rests on the social construct of white superiority, the problem of class entitlement rests on the social construct of wealth. Stop recognizing wealth and watch the corresponding privilege vanish.

 

University of N. Texas College of Law: For Lawyers Who Want to Do Good

I personally like this a lot. Quite a while ago, I started to think (again) that it would be cool to go to law school, but I was already over 40 and couldn’t realistically take that much time (and money) away to study any time soon. After a while I realized my main motivation was “to go to bat for others,” as the founding dean of UNT Law put it.

It still isn’t a practical career change for me, but I appreciate that younger and less encumbered people will have one more path to pursuing a similar vocation.

There’s a story that Judge Royal Furgeson likes to tell, about a young boy whose brother was killed in an accident with an 18-wheeler. The parents spoke no English, so it fell to the boy to navigate the aftermath. He sought out a lawyer, who shepherded the family through the tragedy. Now, years later, the […]

Source: University of N. Texas College of Law: For Lawyers Who Want to Do Good