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You're almost right, but "class" and "caste" are not synonyms and cannot be used interchangeably.
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Well, as social mobility between classes becomes increasingly difficult, they become more and more like castes...
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You can already hear the pseudo-theories, justifying the differences for eternity. Blue blooded, of lazy blood, etc. Apply yourselfs and you will win.. adding insult to injury, when you can not win, you must in addition be lazy with only yourself to blame.
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OP is right. Status games take many shapes, distinct castes is one special shape.
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Except in the United States it is true. Something like 80% of new military recruits come from military families (parent, sibling, uncle/aunt, or grandparent).

Similarly over the last few decades the number of medical doctors who have immediate family who are also doctors has grown.

Social and economic class in the US is increasingly set in stone and hereditary.

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Medical schools require a lot of volunteering and things like 'slinging hot dogs to pay tuition' don't count unless you grew up without clothes surviving on rabid dogs in the holler of W Virginia working the coal mines from age 8. We all know who has time to volunteer or do minimum wage healthcare instead of work the best paying shitty side job they can get: the rich.

It's set up heavily tilted so you have to be rich, or dirt poor enough for a sob story, or a desired minority. Even if you do volunteer a lot and are middle class, you probably didnt know anyone that could help you into the most prestigious positions. A middle class person of equal aptitude would likely go into something like engineering or law which have fewer class-signalling non-academic purity tests.

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That gating on medical training has always been there (at least for 40 years, if not more). But the number of doctors from doctor families has increased.

And just generally, socioeconomic mobility has decreased in the US across the population.

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Always been gated. But the slider has been dragged even further in the purity test direction. The intelligent un-pure now tend to become NP or PA, those programs still let you practice independently and slide more towards academics and less at whether a rich person set you up to be taken care of while you play mother Teresa until the switch flips the day you are accepted.
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> Medical schools require a lot of volunteering

But...why? Why not just let in the applicants that have the best grades?

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Because there are so many applicants that have good grades.

A more cynical view is that the governing boards want a way to pick and choose who they let in. So they create "holistic" application systems to get "360 degree view of the candidate".

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> Because there are so many applicants that have good grades.

So train more doctors.

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class, cast, scum... the tokens are not really relevant, only the facts:

"‘Absurd Corruption’: Disgust as Eric Trump Brags About Scoring $24 Million Pentagon Deal" - https://www.commondreams.org/news/eric-trump-pentagon-contra...

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The thing is, a LOT of people voted for this, knowing perfectly well what they were voting for.
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Peace, cheap energy, release of the Epstein files, ..
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Sounds like people’s lot in life is becoming hereditary. Caste can be used.
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soldiers are disposable, they prolly threw him under the bus hoping that would be the end of the matter and they could walk away with the rest of the money.
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Most Americans Can't Afford This Basic...Commodity?

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Zzwp_Ypsi9I

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> This is how a caste system works.

Not at all. In a caste system a lower caste person will get attacked if he (or especially she) has any success at all. Whether or not what they did was legal or not does not factor into the equation. First priority is that the highest up dalit is lower than the worst drunkard brahmin, even if they have to kill them.

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Tulsa once had what was known as Black Wall Street. There were too many successful black men, so 1921 in the whites massacred everybody. They even brought in planes and dropped bombs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre

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There were too many successful black men

That's absolutely not what Wikipedia says. There was indeed a horrible massacre, but why do you feel the need to falsify the reasons?

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The broader theme of antagonism to Black success motivating the thoroughness of the destruction is a common observation about Tulsa.
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honestly the entire country up until maybe 40 or so years ago
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Arguably happening right now due to a joke Obama made about Trump
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Here's a contemporary opinion, from the state attorney general at the time, the highest ranking person in a judicial apparatus that didn't prosecute anyone for participating in it. Looks like the fact that "the Negro" was so rich he didn't "accept the white man as his benefactor" was a pretty big deal...

The cause of this riot was not Tulsa. It might have happened anywhere for the Negro is not the same man he was thirty years ago when he was content to plod along his own road accepting the white man as his benefactor. But the years have passed and the Negro has been educated and the race papers have spread the thought of race equality.

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Nice to see sealioning is alive and well on HN.
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But do we actually have a proof that ** bombed *, maybe they bombed their own school to make you feel sad?
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Would you feel bad if it was actually true? Would it pose even a minor inconvenience for your life if that was exactly the case? What's the problem anyway.
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>Mobs of white residents, some of whom had been armed and appointed as deputies by city government officials, attacked black residents and their homes and businesses. The attackers burned and destroyed more than 35 square blocks of the neighborhood—at the time, one of the wealthiest black communities in the United States, colloquially known as "Black Wall Street.

What part of this paragpraph are you having a hard time with?

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Well, I am also having trouble with stating it as a fact, that the reason was they were too wealthy. Might have played a role later, but that is not clear to me from what is stated on wiki:

"The massacre began during Memorial Day weekend after 19-year-old Dick Rowland, a black shoeshiner, was accused of assaulting Sarah Page, a white 21-year-old elevator operator in the nearby Drexel Building.[25] He was arrested and rumors spread that he was to be lynched. Several hundred white residents assembled outside the courthouse, appearing to have the makings of a lynch mob. A group of approximately 50–60 black men, armed with rifles and shotguns, arrived at the jail to support the sheriff and his deputies in defending Rowland from the mob. Having seen the armed black men, some of the whites who had been at the courthouse went home for their own guns. There are conflicting reports about the exact time and nature of the incident, or incidents, that immediately precipitated the massacre.

According to the 2001 Commission, "As the black men were leaving, a white man attempted to disarm a tall, African American World War I veteran. A struggle ensued, and a shot rang out." Then, according to the sheriff, "all hell broke loose."[26] The two groups shot at each other until midnight when the group of black men was greatly outnumbered and forced to retreat to Greenwood."

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So you take issue with the idea that an out of mob that burned down 35 blocks of a mid sized city was motivated by envy and resentment of the prosperous black community.

Instead, you assert it was a mob that assembled to lynch a young man who was arrested for assault after he stepped on the foot of or grabbed the arm of a white female elevator operator when he tripped in the elevator. I guess they got out of hand when there was resistance to their murdering the kid.

Why is that distinction so important to you?

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I take issue with the statement "There were too many successful black men" and wikipedia as proof for that. Honest representation of facts is important to me in general.
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Oh it was becuase of their race for sure. For the type of man who joins a lynch mob, the only thing worse than a black man being black was him being “uppity”.

The black community resisted the lynching and stood up for the poor bastard they wanted to murder. Their prosperity as a community and individually gave them the fortitude to fight back.

It wasn’t “because they were rich”. It was because they had agency and dared to stand for their rights as a community. For a person who believes that the color of your skin makes you an inferior or superior human, that is an unforgivable affront.

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you are incredibly naive, ignorant or oblivious if you dont think a primary reason was because of their race in TULSA in 1921. Cmon man -read some history
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I don't think you're replying to who you think you are, for I've specifically said it was because they were black, and not due to other factors.
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It's... pretty simple.
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Yes, precisely. The facts, the escalation, what happened, the report, it's all very simple and laid out at wikipedia. So why the need for fabricated reasons?

It is very simple.

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Your refusal to interact with subtext has me guffawing. I wonder if you even recognize what you're doing.

In the history of revolution, there is never (except in elementary school) all that much weight put on the singular act which instigated the final result. The conditions in place (Jim Crow laws, Southern pride, etc.) lead up to a final moment which our monkey brains like to point to as the cause but in reality there is a simmering cultural froth which could boil over in any number of ways: it just happens that one of the ways is what's described in the Wikipedia article, but it could have started many other ways. All of our understanding about the experience of being Black in the US during that time helps to contextualize the extreme and disproportionate outburst of violence by the White population as racially motivated, serving under an ideology best described as ur-"Great Replacement Theory".

In simpler words, the destruction of Black Wall Street is not without precedent, indeed this was merely one of the more famous and complete examples of destroying the wealth that Black people enjoyed, if only briefly due to the hate of those visiting violence upon them.

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> I wonder if you even recognize what you're doing.

"Don't feed the trolls". They absolutely do know what they're doing.

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You really read a single wikipedia article and think you understand what happened and why? Impressive levels of dunning-kruger on display.

Go read a book about it, and then if you still want to, you can tell us why this interpretation is wrong.

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But you are doing the same as what you are complaining about.

Racism is a complex phenomenon not limited to the simplistic view "they don't like black people". This representation is doing a disservice when some truly racist people are then justifying their actions and beliefs by saying "I cannot be racist, I'm friend with the garbage man who is black: he is a good black man, is polite to me and stay at his place. So, if I'm not racist, what I'm doing is just legitimate".

In the context of Tulsa, it is difficult to believe that the frustration of racist people seeing black people more successful than them has not contributed to the situation. It seems very natural and logical (and that's even the core of "white supremacy": it clearly states that white people deserve a better position in the social hierarchy than black people: white supremacy framing is all about how some classes are reserved to white people and not black people), and if you are claiming that it is not the case, you are the one with the burden of the proof.

While you have a point on raising that racism should not be reduced to only a class issue, you should have raised that as a precision around the discussion instead of presenting it as if racism has absolutely nothing to do with class and class sentiment.

To take back your parallel, what you do can be seen as: "A person entered a bar and was raped" (what you say) vs "A woman entered a bar and was raped". While nobody here claims that men cannot be raped, there is social phenomenon that create a gender imbalance, and it is important to not reduce the situation to "it has nothing to do with gender and the social norms around it".

In the rest of your comment, you, yourself, are doing a lot of interpretations. The fact that someone noticed that a class factor may have had an impact does not mean that they or all readers will conclude that it is the only way racism can happen (that is a huge stretch: if they know what happened at Tulsa, they very probably know a lot of other cases where the "only due to class" theory does not hold up). Same for "victim blaming": the fact that they were successful were obviously not used to excuse the massacre or pretend that somehow it was the black people's fault, the context is clearly to condemn the white racist people (and the success of the black people seems to be presented as an obvious additional factor on the racists, as it is obviously unfair to pretend that some people don't have the right to be successful).

I think the first comment was not totally perfect and would have been 100% fine if they would have simply added "class was one of the factor". But I think your reaction has way more problems and does a bigger disservice by reducing racism to a framework that can easily be instrumentalised by real racist people.

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It is not difficult to believe that the frustration of racist people seeing black people more successful contributed to it. In fact, it's the most obvious and straightforward explanation for it, given the fact that it's 1)1921, 4 or so decades before the Civil Rights act, and in freaking TULSA lmao
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Are we now not at all allowed to reference problems in other societies? We can complain about western society, and complaints from 100 years ago, when even my grandfather wasn't born yet, are valid criticism of America/Europe/... but things that happen today in India, Pakistan, Turkey are off limits?
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Who complained about bringing up the foul stuff that goes on outside the US?
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That's the urban myth, yes.
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Well documented historical events aren’t urban myths.
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Not so much class or caste, but a dual-state where an elite have a normative or lawless state, and specific or arbitrary others suffer a parallel prerogative or punitive state. This is the essence of corrupt authoritarianism.

Most Americans share a delusion of perpetual glory days like a former star high school football quarterback with the refusal to accept factual reality that their country isn't uniformly excellent and is terrible in many ways including being extremely superficial, corrupt, dangerous, unhealthy, unhappy, paranoid, over-reacting, immature, selfish, unfair, disinformed, and unequal.

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More like three. One class where you can do whatever you can pay for, another with a set of annoying but almost reasonable rules and the last one for whom any actions and their mere existence is illegal, but whose presence is very much relied upon to do things.
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Frank Wilhoit: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
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> their relationship to power

The word "power" is so ironic in human cultures:

It's the people with the guns (and muscles) that have the literal physical power. They could shoot the aristocrats dead if they wanted to.

The aristocrats' "power" is make-believe like the rest of their papers and numbers: The various psychological barriers which dissuade the gun-bearers from ever reaching the "want to" part.

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Which is why power is much more complex than brute force. Sheer physical or military power is not the be-all and end-all, just a facet of the total picture (and in fact, social creatures that humans are, even just adversarial aspects of power are a subset of power).
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> It's the people with the guns (and muscles) that have the literal physical power. They could shoot the aristocrats dead if they wanted to.

What matters is not raw power, it’s balance. The power of one guy with guns is kept in check by the power of other guys with guns who stand to benefit from the status quo. The aristocracy’s game is to play with this balance to make sure that no other rival force emerges. They do not need any actual physical power themselves to play it.

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Historically aristocracy was the military class. Nowadays in authoritarian societies it looks like it's mostly matter of time before military takes the lead.
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> Nowadays in authoritarian societies it looks like it's mostly matter of time before military takes the lead.

See, e.g., Iran's IGRC. Counterexamples: China, Russia — and the U.S.?

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China dervies a ton of authority and Legitmacy from the PLA (peoples liberation army) and Russia is run by from Inteligence service members of the KGB low level ones to be sure but I don't see how China and Russia are counter examples. The US isn't their yet we will see if the backslide happens in the next two years but I think its of a different qualia than we see in the "typical" Authorithian State.

Ironically I was watching Nuremberg last not and is is schocking how close some of the leaders of this country are to characters like Hermann Göring, or Hitler himself in talking points. They are certainly populists but the language they used is MGGA (make german great again) so to speak. And factually that were not particular that good at it either most of Germans recovery is really due to the liberal government that pass laws that built the Autobahn were laws not by the Nazi party. They certain jumped on them and accelerate them but effective governence is not really for the populist

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A military coup in the U.S. is imaginable, which probably explains some of the top brass purges (until recently, where it's probably an attempt to deflect blame for the massive Iran fuck up).

Putin did it better; he kept the military weak and aggressively managed the risk via the FSB.

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I don't think it's plausible, but an authoritarian president invoking emergency powers and deploying military and paramilitary forces to exert control on the streets is, on the basis it's already going on at a limited scale. All it takes is for that scale to gradually dial up over time until the frog's cooked.

The problem you have is these elected kings. Not just any king, pretty specifically the majority of the powers enjoyed by George III in the 1790s. The fact that you still have this, unreformed over 200 years later and still think that somehow your constitutional system is modern, is a matter for despair. Get yourselves a proper parliamentary system, with maybe a head of state as a figurehead.

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Exactly this. They live in houses with glass windows. We could take this world any time we choose.
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But the people almost never do, and that reason is power.
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Chill out brother. Life's good.
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Don't worry nobody here said anything even remotely political, it wouldn't even occur to them, so your status quo is safe.
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People with guns don't stand much of a chance against people with armies. Sure armies can turn on an individual, but that just means that particular individual has lost power, and that power has been transferred to whatever new individual commands the loyalty of the many. It's not imaginary, it's emergent.
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People vastly overestimate the power of armies.

Trump has gotten shot once, almost twice.

Shinzo Abe got murked by some pipes from the hardware store.

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> Trump has gotten shot once, almost twice.

No, he staged those demonstrations to win the election.

There is absolutely no picture evidence of any damage to his ear.

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Yes. This is why we have the firearm. The great equalizer of pressures. There are so few "aristocrats" and they are not well protected. That's the game we must play.
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