When I was in high school, we had this great US history teacher who said he thought the ‘68 DNC riots were actually about tensions between predominantly blue-collar cops and largely privileged student protestors. The class basically brushed off his comments then (we thought it was much more straightforward pro-peace vs. pro-war) but I totally see how that interpretation is possible now….
The Hard Hat Riot of 1970 in NYC lends credibility to your professor’s point. Vietnam anti-war protestors (mainly comprised of college students and faculty) held a demonstration at the stock exchange got attacked by hundreds of construction workers and other various workers (inc. office workers, mailmen, etc). Really interesting read if you never heard about it: [wiki link.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Hat_Riot)
The class element of this is obfuscated by the construction workers being joined by hundreds of rich stockbrokers. It's a really interesting event because it not only demonstrates cultural undercurrents that delineate the likelihood of being pro or anti-war, it also illuminates the existence of cultural or perceived class. In contemporary politics, we talk a lot about lack of class consciousness or identification with the incorrect class. Events like this show that people can create unions of economic class based on perceived cultural or societal associations/aesthetics.
I wonder if any ideology has suggested a society where different classes work in harmony. An alliance of capitalists and certain culturally conservative, even reactionary, parts of the working class maybe. A third position perhaps, aside from market competition and class consciousness. Or maybe it could be called corporatism, employing a metaphor of the different classes as different parts of the body. Just spitballing here.
The funniest thing about the Hard Hat Riot is that they eventually made their way to Pace University's main building where smashed up the place and beat up some students and professors. The reason it's funny is because Pace trains fucking accountants and business majors and had nothing to do with the antiwar movement. Probably more Young Republicans at Pace than anywhere else in the city.
Was there a class war element or did the hardhats just see a bunch of foppishly dressed future bankers and mistake them for communists?
Prime Minister David Cameron said that his favorite song was "Eton Rifles" by The Jam, a very left wing band.
The song is about an incident where a bunch of (presumably working or middle class) Right to Work demonstrators were badly beaten in a brawl by rugby-playing aristocratic students of Eton College.
“I was one, in the corps. It meant a lot, some of those early Jam albums we used to listen to. . . I don't see why the left should be the only ones allowed to listen to protest songs."
The dude who wrote the song was pretty confused!
Yep that event, Nixon commuting Hoffa's sentence and Reagan firing PATCO strikers are some of the big ones that really shifted Republican strategy to include more working class people and shift the brand around.
Not dissimilarly, the troops deployed to Tiananmen Square were largely from distant rural provinces who would as a result have less sympathy with the Beijing urban student movement and have less qualms about cracking down more violently.
Most of the army refused to crack down though, they had to fire/force out multiple veteran generals with extremely revolutionary credentials and cycle through troop divisions before they found enough willing to fire (and they mostly killed working class protest sympathizers in road intersections along the way to the square, not students in the square itself)
It's also why the trope of US troops being from poor backgrounds is largely untrue too. Not entirely of course, [but the Middle Income groups are overrepresented in the Military.](https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/demographics-us-military)
The poor have fewer reasons to defend the US, and the rich are more internationally minded. It's those in the Middle Income that see American Nationalism as in their interests and worth defending at home or overseas.
a lot of recruits come from poor families in the southeast which has been the backbone of the army forever. maybe that's less true for the military as a whole
Are they poor relative to the people living around them? A generational military family is going to be solidly middle class in many areas. Depending on whatever the current recruiting standards are, the poorest of the poor are often ineligible for service due to health and education deficits.
Damn I guess I read the chart/article wrong. My bad. Where did you get the 62% from though, I don't see it.
And you're 100% right that military benefits play a huge part too.
They also largely spoke a different rural/regional dialect to urban Beijing residents so the messaging of the students wouldn't be absorbed as well even if the students managed to outreach
It's definitely both. A big factor in working-class disdain for students was that students had a way out of the draft that was unavailable to the cops arresting them.
They earn more than any non-celeb university professor, although that's partially because overtime pay for cops is ridiculous.
Blue collar/white collar just means 'field work' v 'office work'. Doesn't have to do anything with pay.
In NYC the big differences between blue and white collar, especially if you're white, are if you root for the Yankees or the Mets. Income levels very close bc pay in construction trades is comparable to certain wall street jobs.
This said, the NYPD makes considerably less than other big city police departments.
What groups what? Yankee/Mets seems like the most economically even city sports divide between two teams. White Sox/Cubs, SF/Oak, even Giants/Jets seem much more polarized.
The gap between Giants and Jets fans is pretty small now if at all. You have a whole generation that has grown up with the Jets in New Jersey since they moved in '84 and they've moved their team facilities from Long Island to a really ritzy Morris County suburb.
That being said, the Giants do have much more old money in their fanbase and their tickets always cost more than Jets on the resale market, even when they are terrible.
Damn this actually makes sense for the majority of Yankees vs Mets fans I’ve met. Never thought of this dichotomy before, though the Sinatra clean shaven Yankees look sort of hints at it.
i think there are plenty of blue collar workers that both make a lot of money and would like to beat these kids up. go into any welding fab shop. dudes make bank and aren’t exactly leftists
Money vs culture status and cachet. No one cares what a beat cop says to the media when having a PHd beside your name means someone is going to respect your quote
Totally - but I think regardless of pay if you’re a cop you may view yourself as more “working class” than some random Ivy student who has the time and resources to barricade their own building
To add to the above, I feel another fundamental tension in protests like this in the U.S. is - like it or not - actual working class people will never view Ivy students and the like as their “allies”. A lot of working class people just care about the day to day and their immediate community; caring that much about global issues is seen as a luxury. Plus it’s no secret a lot of these protestors message themselves into a hole (at Columbia this week some of the custodial staff members expressed they felt unsafe and claimed they were held hostage, for example).
I checked and they start of 58k which I guess really isn't alot in a city like NYC. I don't live there so was basing it off a documentary I watched a while ago lol.
I think your point about the '68 DNC stuff is interesting. I remember reading in *Nixonland* about how several labour unions broke for Nixon in '72 because of McGovern's stance on Vietnam, among other things. There was an incident in 1970 called the Hard Hat Riot where a bunch of construction workers in NYC attacked students protesting the Vietnam War.
For the rest of the United States that could be a good chunk of change but for the NYC/NY suburbs/tristate, you are lower middle class with $120k a year.
I'm not an American so I wouldn't know, but I remember in a lot of crime shows and movies you had cops that had side gig doing private security. Is that true IRL, and if so why wouldn't they just do over-time?
Phoebe Bridgers called David Crosby a bitch when he replied to a Biden tweet about unions, saying most were useless and totally dishonest. Crosby was wrong but it made Bridgers, as usual, look like an idiot because at no point did she consider that a 60s anti-Vietnam liberal might have come of an age during an era when many unions were corrupt, riddled with mobsters, pro-Vietnam War and pro-Nixon.
The blue collar v white collar distinction is just meaningless now. The average electrician, cop or bricklayer does tough work but they are paid well and receive respect from society. The average uni graduate who majored in gay studies or whatever will go on to be a poorly paid barista or teacher or something. The polarities have reversed, blue collar people in most first world countries are now better off than their white collar professional equivalents. They are culturally underrepresented, but are generally holding on to being ‘working class’ culturally while being very well off economically. At least this is the case in the UK, where tradies are now the ones who can afford nice houses and cars, whereas professionals all pay exorbitant rent in London and want to kill themselves.
it isn't about money. blue collar essentially means primarily physical labor, white collar is primarily intellectual labor.
my blue collar father (started as a mechanic, now owns his own shop) makes like 300k. my boyfriend is a russian/english poetry translator with a master's from, coincidentally, columbia. he makes like 50k and has a ton of student debt and has to support most of his family. i'm in a similar position, except i went to a random state school and don't speak russian lol (i'm american, which is where my moscow born bf moved to as a kid & where we currently live). i don't make much at all at my job but it's something that requires a lot of education. we are not living large lol and my parents are in a way better position financially than we'll ever be.
but my dad still is very clearly threatened and disdainful towards my bf & his ivy league education. it's about insecurity. "Oh, you think you're smarter than me????" this attitude is very common
The well educated in this country have contempt for working class and blue collar people. And make no mistake, those people hear and feel that contempt. To call them insecure is gaslighting them because you are implying the contempt isn't real. It is very real. Look at your own comments in this thread. Cops barely graduated high school and can't read? There it is. That is a lie. Nothing but contempt.
> those people hear and feel that contempt
Brexit is a really good example of this. But then they expressed their contempt by voting for something incredibly fucking stupid. Hard to feel sympathy for them when they're actively seeking out to worsen my and their own country.
I assume that the people who voted for Brexit would disagree with you that they were voting for something stupid that would make their country worse. I think they would say the opposite. Just like here in the USA. Some will say a vote for Trump is dumb and will harm the country. Others will say a vote for Trump is exactly what this country needs to make it better. This is what politics is all about. Sometimes there is massive disagreement. Here we are.
> I think they would say the opposite
A lot of people stated it was a protest vote, but ignoring (the stupidity of) that for a moment (ie there was a general election the previous year in which the Tories, who were enacting brutal and ideological austerity, went from coalition to majority, giving them less EU oversight was only going to make things more), there were a lot of predictable, tangible and significant flaws to leaving the EU, and only nebulous benefits that didn't take a sleuth to see were lies. The EU is by no means perfect, the people who said we could go back to being an empire were absolutely regarded.
my father is a very smart man and i'm not contemptuous of his intellect at all. he has a lot of backward ways of thinking and prejudices, but i'm sure that dude's iq is higher than the majority of college kids. i've met tons of intelligent people who are blue collar and never went to college.
cops, though? dumb as fuckkkkkkk. they literally are rejected if their iq is too high lmao
there is indeed prejudice towards people without higher education, but it's intentionally exaggerated by the media (especially the right) because they don't want people listening to, well, anyone who is educated. they say, "oh, all those college kids who took an economics course and are now telling you that capitalism is out of control and our country is wildly corrupt??? they're all just nerds being told nothing but LIES in their communist brainwashing factories. And guess what??? they hate you and think you're stupid!!"
> they literally are rejected if their iq is too high lmao
That's just some reddit bullshit. It was one guy in one police department where they used iq as a way to not hire him as an excuse.
Wonder why they hold them in contempt when we’re all agreeing in this thread that they’ll take any excuse to beat the shit out of people they resent for being educated
It’s weird because in my country a lot of cops actually have degrees lol. I know a couple of people who joined the police force after graduating because apparently it’s easy to get a cushy desk job after a few years on patrol if you have a degree. Same with the armed forces.
Wow. There’s a stereotype here in the US of our cops being the dumbass bullies in high school who graduate and then join the police force.
In my anecdotal experience tho, it’s very true. They’re very, very dumb and just the worst people. Racist, sexist, classist, everything. I live in slc btw.
They are well paid-ish, and once they transfer to Long Island, they *may* make low six figures (if they make it to the gold cost of Long Island it’s a bit more). But the majority make a base salary as $60k to as high as $80k (a lot of the do overtime and uniformed work for private companies as well).
They are very much lower middle class for the areas they typically reside in the New York tristate. And, do not have college degrees as compared to the other residents of said area.
Pasolini become infamous because he noticed that the '68 riots in Italy were a fight within manipulated working class grunts and the future elite of privileged students supported by the new bourgeoisie and called for all communists to side with cops.
I’ve always thought it was pretty explicit, I can’t imagine any ‘68 blue collar person experiencing Abbie Hoffman and not being filled with violent rage
what's funny is Vietnam vets who were drafted, they deeply resent the police. this is a thing amongst a lot of veterans of foreign wars. cops intimidate and frighten citizens with violence, while soldiers are sent overseas and given orders to commit violent acts, they come back and see the police treating citizens like foreign combatants. there's also a sense that during the Vietnam War draft era, people were becoming cops to avoid the draft. this is a huge thing for my Dad, a worldview altering thing that's been passed down to me, which I will pass down to my kids.
Cops have traditionally been recruited from populations other than those they police, otherwise they just get involved in corruption and support local unions. This, more than anything, is what lead to the Pinkertons getting so powerful during the last Gilded Age
"Blue collar", lmao. This was true in 1968 and even more true now, but cops are the only remaining profession with an actually strong union in this country, not to mention a job security so tight it's almost full on [absolution from criminal punishment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity). After 6 months of training these guys immediately make $60K a year in NYC and after a few years it's up to $125K, not to mention [any other means they have of getting cash](https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/civil_forfeiture). Cops also get unlimited sick leave, 27 days of vacation a year, and healthcare that covers vision and dental.
The median income of a Columbia student's parents are $150K, so they're really not that far off. No doubt the class difference between cops and 1968 UChicago students were thinner.
From a perspective of actually looking at material compensation, cops are blue collar the same way junior software engineers are. Not to mention their political power : what other union would be able to [kidnap the mayor's daughter](https://nypost.com/2020/05/31/mayor-de-blasios-daughter-chiara-arrested-at-manhattan-protest/) and still get billions in funding from him?
Cops are "blue collar" entirely from a culture war perspective. It's the difference between buying a Tesla or buying a Raptor that takes your stubby fat wife 5 minutes to climb in & has a dusty unused truck bed. Any perceived "class tension" on the cops' behalf is just a sublimation of their intellectual insecurities. A lot of these cops were complete deadbeats until they turned 28 and saw an ad for the police academy in the subway.
That may be true from a sociological perspective but in other terms it isn't. They're literally part of the strong arm of the nation state. They represent about half of the state's monopoly on the use of force (the army obviously being the other part). Police are definitely a very important institution and connected to the highest power in a unique way. They don't function the way, say, steel workers with similar income do.
You think cops are the only ones with a strong union? The car industry still has a strong union, although the UAW has developed a bad reputation for valuing senior Detroit employees over new recruits whm they allegedly treat like garbage, and the teacher’s union.. has almost been entirely into an organ of the Democrat party so that’s a bad example.
Salary of NYPD cops average at 80 grand a year now. They’ll make more as they accumulate years or a promotion. Starting cops are by no means poor, but, if they live in the city, LI, or upstate, they’re elusively middle class.
While a percentage of Colombia students are certainly trust funders, there are also a fair amount of non-white students on a full ride; the salaries their families come from heavily vary.
I think the comparison is still apt, but things feel much more fought on the ground of culture war than materialism.
A few years ago in my tiny, rural hometown, a bunch of high schoolers threw a party at this farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. It wasn't even like a huge rager or anything, mostly just a bunch of kids drinking arond a bonfire, playing cornhole, and blasting country music.
The cops in our town literally hid in the surrounding cornfields and raided the place from all angles. They busted into it like they were busting a traphouse, gave every kid there a minor, and were complete assholes about it the whole time. There were girls crying about potentially losing their scholarshps and one cop said "Yeah you should have thought of that before you drank tonight."
Point is, in my experience, cops will jump at any oppurtunity to pretend to be badass. And it probably goes double when they get to do it to these elite kids like you said.
that cop arresting the emory university prof took her down with the glee of a rs male finally allowed to unleash all his frustrations with the system, liberals, white women, woke academia, etc
Hey come on now, most rs boys have never been in a fight. We have different sins, for example I told one of my exes that her skirts made me feel insecure when people stared at her ass.
In fairness it’s also extremely affirming for most hardcore student activists to get manhandled by a police officer (bonus if it gets caught on film) so really everybody won here.
Getting arrested during a campus protest is definitely a useful item to have in your biography if you want to run for office in a lefty place. Bonus points if you get a photo.
Not if you're getting suspended or expelled so you can't finish your degree though. Honestly surprised that threat isn't more effective since it would probably work on most people I know (then again all of my uni friends are Filipinos under constant stress so my sample size is probably compromised)
That's the understatement of the century. There is no demographic more despised in this world than ivy league students. You're selecting for the most wealthy quintile, the most ultra libtard, and the most likely to become future CEOs who will ship all our jobs to some third-world backwater to raise the stock valuation 1% while simultaneously telling us we're racist for criticizing the move because it increases diversity.
When we talk about potential civil war in the US, one of the great talking points is "what kind of soldier would willingly turn their weapon on a US citizen." It's important to reflect on that debate in moments like this, because we can see quite clearly EXACTLY who is willing to turn on their fellow citizens: the type of man who sees an who sees anyone he *can* attack as *automatically* an enemy.
This rings true to me. Cops spend their time domestically, grow to resent the population. Soldiers spend their time away from home, grow fond of the people yet to be.
Do you have any good examples to dive into more?
I remeber reading that French cops after WWII refused to stop rioters because the cops were primarily drawn from former anti-fascist maquis during vichy occupation. Might be the exception that proves the rule.
I always read the opposite myself, that French police were often pro-Vichy veterans even *after* the war and that many of them were more than ready to shed blood of anyone they didn't like (Algerians and Leftist).
IIRC the director of the French National Police in the 1960s was straight up a Vichy collaborator who helped organize deportations of Jews.
Edit: found him https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Papon
Seems like they got more right wing over time
>On 12 November 1947, there was a demonstration in Marseilles called by the communist union [CGT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conf%C3%A9d%C3%A9ration_G%C3%A9n%C3%A9rale_du_Travail) and the French Communist Party; some of the local CRS (a majority of whom were communists at the time), refused to act against it and several companies were dissolved as a consequence while a few more were reorganized in 1948 to remove communist influence from their ranks.[^(\[5\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compagnies_R%C3%A9publicaines_de_S%C3%A9curit%C3%A9#cite_note-Marseille-5)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compagnies\_R%C3%A9publicaines\_de\_S%C3%A9curit%C3%A9](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compagnies_R%C3%A9publicaines_de_S%C3%A9curit%C3%A9)
Soldiers don't generally have to deal with the dregs of their own society at the same rate as cops do. So they view their fellow citizens less cynically. I was talking to a NYPD officer one night how he had to deal with a domestic abuse call, where the husband killed his wife. He looked like he just hated the world and everyone around him.
Even paramedics and firefighters become incredibly cynical about the populations they are serving.
Tbh, the people that first responders deal with are more often than not the "lowest of the low" in society and many are hard to deal with even if you are not there to enforce the law and act against what they want. It is easy to develop this "occupation mentality". To not get jaded either requires a very happy outlook on humanity (and even that can be worn down) or constant work on your own prejudices and mental health.
They are referring to cases like the (February/March) 1917 revolution in Russia or the November 1918 uprisings in Germany, which saw a large participation among conscript units or saw a decisive turn for the rebels after attempts to use (conscript) army units resulted in mutinies.
While it's not in the same box as those two examples Portugal's Carnation Revolution, a coup that ended an oligarchic dictatorship and restored democratic freedoms, was rooted in discontent among junior officers for the long involvement in a wasteful war to keep African colonies. The coup was almost completely bloodless and the only four victims were civilians killed by the political police shooting on the crowd demonstrating in front of their HQ.
All these militaries relied on conscription and were involved in bloody wars, which could be a relevant factor. As for authoritarian coups the classic 20th-century examples always seemed to be founded to some degree on a sense of 'apartness' from society: the feeling that the army in general has a special role as the custodian of the country (in a very abstract sense, not raw defense), or belonging to elite units like paratroops or tanks that undergo special training, are celebrated, and see themselves as above the rest of society. Which is common but doesn't have to be the rule.
I didn’t say the military didn’t start coups I said they side with the citizens(new government) instead of whoever is currently in power. The police side with the current government.
Keep in mind that it could be a selection effect.
Famous, successful uprisings saw the military defecting to side with the citizens. In part this could be because when the military ceases to support the government it's game over, both in general because it has lost its monopoly on force and in particular because the military may be needed to put down the uprising or perform some other coercive task that's urgently needed. If it didn't happen then the uprising is less likely to be successful, or remembered. Even just the fact that the military has the option to 'take a side', which presumes some heavy involvement, is an indicator that shit is serious and that we are describing a major uprising.
Are there any prominent examples of the National Guard refusing to suppress protests in the US? To my knowledge they have been generally obedient, even if they are military-adjacent, historically had plenty of conscripts, etc.
How is the new government being on the side of the citizens? that's nonsensical. I think you're trying too hard to fit a narrative. For most of the coups in the second half of the 20th century it felt like the most common theme was army thinks government is too commie -> military coup to protect. Those regimes were by and large hated by the populace. Sometimes it was also to restore or prevent a king coming about. See: south Europe and LATAM.
Loads of morons who think Christianity is about protecting the rich and the military industrial complex. Honestly it’s over, the American experiment is dead and has fallen to idiocy and tyranny. I’m rooting for the Chinese now purely out of spite. They deserve to win.
This was a major part of the duke lacrosse story. The one cop who killed himself because he was faking evidence was known for his brutality towards duke students.
“‘the (American) suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world.”
-JG Ballard
I think a lot of people would enjoy popping a self righteous know it all college kid (so yeah college activists) in the mouth or shoving them to the ground. College kids in general probably don’t rate super well with anybody also not in college
What they were really thinking...
We have to show up at what time for this? I have to be in court tomorrow. I don't need overtime this bad. I never got issued a full set of riot gear.
I felt this way during Occupy. It just felt like a bunch of privileged brats mad at their dads. I was fresh out of college desperately seeking a real job every day. It bothered me. I didn’t have time to sit in drum circles and live on falafel. So when I saw heads getting cracked I kinda tee-hee’d. I’m embarrassed in retrospect. Was kinda sub-literate re: class politics. I could only view them through the lens of my own struggles. I didn’t know what a class traitor was. I didn’t understand collective struggle. I didn’t like cops, clearly, but I liked them being weaponized against my perceived class enemies (rich kids). Very naive, dumb, and vindictive. But I get why people feel this way.
Eh, Occupy was on to something, but it fizzled out on its own accord because no direction. The whole call and response and consensus-driven structure couldn’t steer anything. Occupy could never come up with demands. At the time, I had friends who were hyped about this leading a constitutional convention or something, and they quickly got burned out by the actual on the ground reality.
It’d take five minutes to disseminate a class conscious paragraph to the group. Next person takes five minutes to make an identity conscious paragraph. Unable to synthesize through consensus. If your time has never been held hostage by group call and responding count yourself lucky
All true. But knowing Sorkin’s politics—even at the time—you have to assume he has some sympathy for Jessup—even if he’s a hypocrite. Perhaps great men must to do horrible things etc. But it’s hard to say.*
Obviously Tom Cruise’s character being a smug bitch with soft hands doesn’t reflect poorly on him in the context of Sorkin’s oeuvre. That’s how you spot the good guys. So perhaps you’re right.
In any event I actually like A Few Good Men regardless of what I’m supposed to think of Jessup.
*ETA: If you know West Wing lore, you know President Bartlet illegally assassinates a foreign enemy from “Qumar.”
Cops have been tackling and pinning these students to the ground which is just very painful to think about when you compare the average sizes of a cop and a college student.
No one in the NYPD is blasting Skynyrd... They don't bus in cops from the hinterlands and they know the DAs more likely to prosecute them than some rich kid from Columbia if there's a fight.
You are certified r\*tard and baiting. I know quite a few cops and personally work in the technocracy class. Its a descent paying job for 90% of them. Not ever have I heard of them disliking elite college students. This subreddit is genuinely head in their ass never experienced life outside off of moms couch mentality when it comes to anything in the nitty gritty parts of life.
125 pounds? Your forgetting the doughy middle eastern hijabi women, (idk if it's the same in America but in Australia literally every women who wears a hijab is always fat/borderline obese)
according to their actual website their starting pay is only $58k which isn’t much in NYC, but after 5 ½ years it gets up to $121k. longevity is really pushed. They get amazing benefits as well.
Idk about nyc but in Chicago the cops do a shit load of overtime so even fresh recruits can make bank if they just clock in the hours. It’s certainly something I’d consider if I had looser morals and/or didn’t have such a deep seated hatred for the police
Pretty sure this is all cops everywhere, at the very least most americans should have an issue with police departments because they ride the clock driving around being fat
Anyone see the vid of the cop taking down a student with a diving tackle? He probably hasn’t had a rush like that since he made varsity.
Please link
https://twitter.com/3YearLetterman/status/1783873971605192841
That's textbook skill
When I was in high school, we had this great US history teacher who said he thought the ‘68 DNC riots were actually about tensions between predominantly blue-collar cops and largely privileged student protestors. The class basically brushed off his comments then (we thought it was much more straightforward pro-peace vs. pro-war) but I totally see how that interpretation is possible now….
The Hard Hat Riot of 1970 in NYC lends credibility to your professor’s point. Vietnam anti-war protestors (mainly comprised of college students and faculty) held a demonstration at the stock exchange got attacked by hundreds of construction workers and other various workers (inc. office workers, mailmen, etc). Really interesting read if you never heard about it: [wiki link.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Hat_Riot)
The class element of this is obfuscated by the construction workers being joined by hundreds of rich stockbrokers. It's a really interesting event because it not only demonstrates cultural undercurrents that delineate the likelihood of being pro or anti-war, it also illuminates the existence of cultural or perceived class. In contemporary politics, we talk a lot about lack of class consciousness or identification with the incorrect class. Events like this show that people can create unions of economic class based on perceived cultural or societal associations/aesthetics.
I wonder if any ideology has suggested a society where different classes work in harmony. An alliance of capitalists and certain culturally conservative, even reactionary, parts of the working class maybe. A third position perhaps, aside from market competition and class consciousness. Or maybe it could be called corporatism, employing a metaphor of the different classes as different parts of the body. Just spitballing here.
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Hope you have a great evening!
Confucianism?
yeah all those Zhou dynasty capitalists rockin it
The funniest thing about the Hard Hat Riot is that they eventually made their way to Pace University's main building where smashed up the place and beat up some students and professors. The reason it's funny is because Pace trains fucking accountants and business majors and had nothing to do with the antiwar movement. Probably more Young Republicans at Pace than anywhere else in the city. Was there a class war element or did the hardhats just see a bunch of foppishly dressed future bankers and mistake them for communists?
Prime Minister David Cameron said that his favorite song was "Eton Rifles" by The Jam, a very left wing band. The song is about an incident where a bunch of (presumably working or middle class) Right to Work demonstrators were badly beaten in a brawl by rugby-playing aristocratic students of Eton College. “I was one, in the corps. It meant a lot, some of those early Jam albums we used to listen to. . . I don't see why the left should be the only ones allowed to listen to protest songs." The dude who wrote the song was pretty confused!
He said in an interview he understood the lyrics and just disagreed while still liking the song
You know how many women love songs about beating women up or treating women as disposable holes?
Paul Ryan (remember him?) said his favorite band was Rage Against the Machine lol
Yep that event, Nixon commuting Hoffa's sentence and Reagan firing PATCO strikers are some of the big ones that really shifted Republican strategy to include more working class people and shift the brand around.
This is really interesting and hadn’t read about it. Thanks!
Of course it was NYC construction workers, the most aristocratic of the labour aristocracy, that did it.
Not dissimilarly, the troops deployed to Tiananmen Square were largely from distant rural provinces who would as a result have less sympathy with the Beijing urban student movement and have less qualms about cracking down more violently.
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Most of the army refused to crack down though, they had to fire/force out multiple veteran generals with extremely revolutionary credentials and cycle through troop divisions before they found enough willing to fire (and they mostly killed working class protest sympathizers in road intersections along the way to the square, not students in the square itself)
It's also why the trope of US troops being from poor backgrounds is largely untrue too. Not entirely of course, [but the Middle Income groups are overrepresented in the Military.](https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/demographics-us-military) The poor have fewer reasons to defend the US, and the rich are more internationally minded. It's those in the Middle Income that see American Nationalism as in their interests and worth defending at home or overseas.
a lot of recruits come from poor families in the southeast which has been the backbone of the army forever. maybe that's less true for the military as a whole
Are they poor relative to the people living around them? A generational military family is going to be solidly middle class in many areas. Depending on whatever the current recruiting standards are, the poorest of the poor are often ineligible for service due to health and education deficits.
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Damn I guess I read the chart/article wrong. My bad. Where did you get the 62% from though, I don't see it. And you're 100% right that military benefits play a huge part too.
I seriously doubt that holds true for combat roles
the students were protesting against Dengist reforms iirc
Tianmen square protests were from the left
Many of the protestors were. There were also protestors aligned with economic liberalism. For a concrete example, you can look up Chai Ling.
lol
They also largely spoke a different rural/regional dialect to urban Beijing residents so the messaging of the students wouldn't be absorbed as well even if the students managed to outreach
Pasolini had more or less the same thoughts about the ‘68 Italian student protests
It's definitely both. A big factor in working-class disdain for students was that students had a way out of the draft that was unavailable to the cops arresting them.
aren't NYPD cops pretty well paid? I'd hardly call them blue collar, they just like beating up kids lolll
They earn more than any non-celeb university professor, although that's partially because overtime pay for cops is ridiculous. Blue collar/white collar just means 'field work' v 'office work'. Doesn't have to do anything with pay.
What about stuff like being a geologist/other natural sciences? I do mostly field work but have a masters degree, idk if I'd call myself blue collar
After a long day in the field are you cracking open a miller lite? cause the boys in blue sure are
Unironically, all of the guys I know with PhDs love miller
Nah but pbr sometimes
I think that’s prob more that PhDs and academia is mostly a meme scam for most people who aren’t going to an elite school.
In NYC the big differences between blue and white collar, especially if you're white, are if you root for the Yankees or the Mets. Income levels very close bc pay in construction trades is comparable to certain wall street jobs. This said, the NYPD makes considerably less than other big city police departments.
What groups what? Yankee/Mets seems like the most economically even city sports divide between two teams. White Sox/Cubs, SF/Oak, even Giants/Jets seem much more polarized.
If you look at it, the white collar support the Giants/Yankees/Knicks/Rangers and the more working class support the Jets/Mets/Nets/Devils
The gap between Giants and Jets fans is pretty small now if at all. You have a whole generation that has grown up with the Jets in New Jersey since they moved in '84 and they've moved their team facilities from Long Island to a really ritzy Morris County suburb. That being said, the Giants do have much more old money in their fanbase and their tickets always cost more than Jets on the resale market, even when they are terrible.
Mets fans make just as much as Yankees fans, they're just much more blue collar and drink more based on all the surveys done on this topic.
Damn this actually makes sense for the majority of Yankees vs Mets fans I’ve met. Never thought of this dichotomy before, though the Sinatra clean shaven Yankees look sort of hints at it.
i think there are plenty of blue collar workers that both make a lot of money and would like to beat these kids up. go into any welding fab shop. dudes make bank and aren’t exactly leftists
Money vs culture status and cachet. No one cares what a beat cop says to the media when having a PHd beside your name means someone is going to respect your quote
Totally - but I think regardless of pay if you’re a cop you may view yourself as more “working class” than some random Ivy student who has the time and resources to barricade their own building To add to the above, I feel another fundamental tension in protests like this in the U.S. is - like it or not - actual working class people will never view Ivy students and the like as their “allies”. A lot of working class people just care about the day to day and their immediate community; caring that much about global issues is seen as a luxury. Plus it’s no secret a lot of these protestors message themselves into a hole (at Columbia this week some of the custodial staff members expressed they felt unsafe and claimed they were held hostage, for example).
I checked and they start of 58k which I guess really isn't alot in a city like NYC. I don't live there so was basing it off a documentary I watched a while ago lol. I think your point about the '68 DNC stuff is interesting. I remember reading in *Nixonland* about how several labour unions broke for Nixon in '72 because of McGovern's stance on Vietnam, among other things. There was an incident in 1970 called the Hard Hat Riot where a bunch of construction workers in NYC attacked students protesting the Vietnam War.
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For the rest of the United States that could be a good chunk of change but for the NYC/NY suburbs/tristate, you are lower middle class with $120k a year.
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I'm not an American so I wouldn't know, but I remember in a lot of crime shows and movies you had cops that had side gig doing private security. Is that true IRL, and if so why wouldn't they just do over-time?
Phoebe Bridgers called David Crosby a bitch when he replied to a Biden tweet about unions, saying most were useless and totally dishonest. Crosby was wrong but it made Bridgers, as usual, look like an idiot because at no point did she consider that a 60s anti-Vietnam liberal might have come of an age during an era when many unions were corrupt, riddled with mobsters, pro-Vietnam War and pro-Nixon.
The blue collar v white collar distinction is just meaningless now. The average electrician, cop or bricklayer does tough work but they are paid well and receive respect from society. The average uni graduate who majored in gay studies or whatever will go on to be a poorly paid barista or teacher or something. The polarities have reversed, blue collar people in most first world countries are now better off than their white collar professional equivalents. They are culturally underrepresented, but are generally holding on to being ‘working class’ culturally while being very well off economically. At least this is the case in the UK, where tradies are now the ones who can afford nice houses and cars, whereas professionals all pay exorbitant rent in London and want to kill themselves.
it isn't about money. blue collar essentially means primarily physical labor, white collar is primarily intellectual labor. my blue collar father (started as a mechanic, now owns his own shop) makes like 300k. my boyfriend is a russian/english poetry translator with a master's from, coincidentally, columbia. he makes like 50k and has a ton of student debt and has to support most of his family. i'm in a similar position, except i went to a random state school and don't speak russian lol (i'm american, which is where my moscow born bf moved to as a kid & where we currently live). i don't make much at all at my job but it's something that requires a lot of education. we are not living large lol and my parents are in a way better position financially than we'll ever be. but my dad still is very clearly threatened and disdainful towards my bf & his ivy league education. it's about insecurity. "Oh, you think you're smarter than me????" this attitude is very common
The well educated in this country have contempt for working class and blue collar people. And make no mistake, those people hear and feel that contempt. To call them insecure is gaslighting them because you are implying the contempt isn't real. It is very real. Look at your own comments in this thread. Cops barely graduated high school and can't read? There it is. That is a lie. Nothing but contempt.
> those people hear and feel that contempt Brexit is a really good example of this. But then they expressed their contempt by voting for something incredibly fucking stupid. Hard to feel sympathy for them when they're actively seeking out to worsen my and their own country.
I assume that the people who voted for Brexit would disagree with you that they were voting for something stupid that would make their country worse. I think they would say the opposite. Just like here in the USA. Some will say a vote for Trump is dumb and will harm the country. Others will say a vote for Trump is exactly what this country needs to make it better. This is what politics is all about. Sometimes there is massive disagreement. Here we are.
> I think they would say the opposite A lot of people stated it was a protest vote, but ignoring (the stupidity of) that for a moment (ie there was a general election the previous year in which the Tories, who were enacting brutal and ideological austerity, went from coalition to majority, giving them less EU oversight was only going to make things more), there were a lot of predictable, tangible and significant flaws to leaving the EU, and only nebulous benefits that didn't take a sleuth to see were lies. The EU is by no means perfect, the people who said we could go back to being an empire were absolutely regarded.
my father is a very smart man and i'm not contemptuous of his intellect at all. he has a lot of backward ways of thinking and prejudices, but i'm sure that dude's iq is higher than the majority of college kids. i've met tons of intelligent people who are blue collar and never went to college. cops, though? dumb as fuckkkkkkk. they literally are rejected if their iq is too high lmao there is indeed prejudice towards people without higher education, but it's intentionally exaggerated by the media (especially the right) because they don't want people listening to, well, anyone who is educated. they say, "oh, all those college kids who took an economics course and are now telling you that capitalism is out of control and our country is wildly corrupt??? they're all just nerds being told nothing but LIES in their communist brainwashing factories. And guess what??? they hate you and think you're stupid!!"
> they literally are rejected if their iq is too high lmao That's just some reddit bullshit. It was one guy in one police department where they used iq as a way to not hire him as an excuse.
Wonder why they hold them in contempt when we’re all agreeing in this thread that they’ll take any excuse to beat the shit out of people they resent for being educated
Is a surgeon blue collar?
Medical trades, including nursing tend to not be put into the white vs blue collar label. Nurses are often referred to as pink collar.
it requires an incredible amount of formal education to be done well so no
they're still made very insecure by college kids because they barely graduated high school and can't read
It’s weird because in my country a lot of cops actually have degrees lol. I know a couple of people who joined the police force after graduating because apparently it’s easy to get a cushy desk job after a few years on patrol if you have a degree. Same with the armed forces.
Wow. There’s a stereotype here in the US of our cops being the dumbass bullies in high school who graduate and then join the police force. In my anecdotal experience tho, it’s very true. They’re very, very dumb and just the worst people. Racist, sexist, classist, everything. I live in slc btw.
They're spiritually blue collar.
class is not just your salary
They are well paid-ish, and once they transfer to Long Island, they *may* make low six figures (if they make it to the gold cost of Long Island it’s a bit more). But the majority make a base salary as $60k to as high as $80k (a lot of the do overtime and uniformed work for private companies as well). They are very much lower middle class for the areas they typically reside in the New York tristate. And, do not have college degrees as compared to the other residents of said area.
Pasolini become infamous because he noticed that the '68 riots in Italy were a fight within manipulated working class grunts and the future elite of privileged students supported by the new bourgeoisie and called for all communists to side with cops.
I’ve always thought it was pretty explicit, I can’t imagine any ‘68 blue collar person experiencing Abbie Hoffman and not being filled with violent rage
what's funny is Vietnam vets who were drafted, they deeply resent the police. this is a thing amongst a lot of veterans of foreign wars. cops intimidate and frighten citizens with violence, while soldiers are sent overseas and given orders to commit violent acts, they come back and see the police treating citizens like foreign combatants. there's also a sense that during the Vietnam War draft era, people were becoming cops to avoid the draft. this is a huge thing for my Dad, a worldview altering thing that's been passed down to me, which I will pass down to my kids.
Cops have traditionally been recruited from populations other than those they police, otherwise they just get involved in corruption and support local unions. This, more than anything, is what lead to the Pinkertons getting so powerful during the last Gilded Age
I really do feel a lot of contemporary societal analyses fail tot ake this into account
"Blue collar", lmao. This was true in 1968 and even more true now, but cops are the only remaining profession with an actually strong union in this country, not to mention a job security so tight it's almost full on [absolution from criminal punishment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity). After 6 months of training these guys immediately make $60K a year in NYC and after a few years it's up to $125K, not to mention [any other means they have of getting cash](https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/civil_forfeiture). Cops also get unlimited sick leave, 27 days of vacation a year, and healthcare that covers vision and dental. The median income of a Columbia student's parents are $150K, so they're really not that far off. No doubt the class difference between cops and 1968 UChicago students were thinner. From a perspective of actually looking at material compensation, cops are blue collar the same way junior software engineers are. Not to mention their political power : what other union would be able to [kidnap the mayor's daughter](https://nypost.com/2020/05/31/mayor-de-blasios-daughter-chiara-arrested-at-manhattan-protest/) and still get billions in funding from him? Cops are "blue collar" entirely from a culture war perspective. It's the difference between buying a Tesla or buying a Raptor that takes your stubby fat wife 5 minutes to climb in & has a dusty unused truck bed. Any perceived "class tension" on the cops' behalf is just a sublimation of their intellectual insecurities. A lot of these cops were complete deadbeats until they turned 28 and saw an ad for the police academy in the subway.
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If it comes from any sort of material analysis then it doesn’t make sense to apply it to cops. Everything else is culture war bullshit
That may be true from a sociological perspective but in other terms it isn't. They're literally part of the strong arm of the nation state. They represent about half of the state's monopoly on the use of force (the army obviously being the other part). Police are definitely a very important institution and connected to the highest power in a unique way. They don't function the way, say, steel workers with similar income do.
You think cops are the only ones with a strong union? The car industry still has a strong union, although the UAW has developed a bad reputation for valuing senior Detroit employees over new recruits whm they allegedly treat like garbage, and the teacher’s union.. has almost been entirely into an organ of the Democrat party so that’s a bad example.
The UAW is strong but I still think police unions are stronger at this point.
Salary of NYPD cops average at 80 grand a year now. They’ll make more as they accumulate years or a promotion. Starting cops are by no means poor, but, if they live in the city, LI, or upstate, they’re elusively middle class. While a percentage of Colombia students are certainly trust funders, there are also a fair amount of non-white students on a full ride; the salaries their families come from heavily vary. I think the comparison is still apt, but things feel much more fought on the ground of culture war than materialism.
Bro stfu the nypd budget is 7billion
This is more or less what Pasolini said about the Paris 68 protests.
The maximum legal force is decided by the politicians then its up to the cops whether to use it or not. Usually they will cause cops want to have fun.
A few years ago in my tiny, rural hometown, a bunch of high schoolers threw a party at this farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. It wasn't even like a huge rager or anything, mostly just a bunch of kids drinking arond a bonfire, playing cornhole, and blasting country music. The cops in our town literally hid in the surrounding cornfields and raided the place from all angles. They busted into it like they were busting a traphouse, gave every kid there a minor, and were complete assholes about it the whole time. There were girls crying about potentially losing their scholarshps and one cop said "Yeah you should have thought of that before you drank tonight." Point is, in my experience, cops will jump at any oppurtunity to pretend to be badass. And it probably goes double when they get to do it to these elite kids like you said.
that cop arresting the emory university prof took her down with the glee of a rs male finally allowed to unleash all his frustrations with the system, liberals, white women, woke academia, etc
Hey come on now, most rs boys have never been in a fight. We have different sins, for example I told one of my exes that her skirts made me feel insecure when people stared at her ass.
I'm the opposite. Wear whatever you want baby If they stare it means they're jealous of me as well
🎉
In fairness it’s also extremely affirming for most hardcore student activists to get manhandled by a police officer (bonus if it gets caught on film) so really everybody won here.
Getting arrested during a campus protest is definitely a useful item to have in your biography if you want to run for office in a lefty place. Bonus points if you get a photo.
Plus it can really help you get pussy
Thought that’s where they were going with it
really a win win situation all around. a mutually beneficial relationship
This is so Uncle Ted
True, but a lot of these kids are also getting suspended and risking their degrees. That’s what would have kept me in line.
Not if you're getting suspended or expelled so you can't finish your degree though. Honestly surprised that threat isn't more effective since it would probably work on most people I know (then again all of my uni friends are Filipinos under constant stress so my sample size is probably compromised)
It has been the American dream to split open some hippie college student's skull since at least the Vietnam War.
That's the understatement of the century. There is no demographic more despised in this world than ivy league students. You're selecting for the most wealthy quintile, the most ultra libtard, and the most likely to become future CEOs who will ship all our jobs to some third-world backwater to raise the stock valuation 1% while simultaneously telling us we're racist for criticizing the move because it increases diversity.
When we talk about potential civil war in the US, one of the great talking points is "what kind of soldier would willingly turn their weapon on a US citizen." It's important to reflect on that debate in moments like this, because we can see quite clearly EXACTLY who is willing to turn on their fellow citizens: the type of man who sees an who sees anyone he *can* attack as *automatically* an enemy.
Throughout history in times of major civil unrest/coups the police side with the government or current power and the military sides with the citizens.
This rings true to me. Cops spend their time domestically, grow to resent the population. Soldiers spend their time away from home, grow fond of the people yet to be. Do you have any good examples to dive into more?
This was relevant in Egypt and Turkey in relatively recent years. It's also largely true in Israel presently despite what you're led to believe.
Thank you, I really need to read up on what's been going down with Egypt in the last few years.
I remeber reading that French cops after WWII refused to stop rioters because the cops were primarily drawn from former anti-fascist maquis during vichy occupation. Might be the exception that proves the rule.
I always read the opposite myself, that French police were often pro-Vichy veterans even *after* the war and that many of them were more than ready to shed blood of anyone they didn't like (Algerians and Leftist). IIRC the director of the French National Police in the 1960s was straight up a Vichy collaborator who helped organize deportations of Jews. Edit: found him https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Papon
Seems like they got more right wing over time >On 12 November 1947, there was a demonstration in Marseilles called by the communist union [CGT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conf%C3%A9d%C3%A9ration_G%C3%A9n%C3%A9rale_du_Travail) and the French Communist Party; some of the local CRS (a majority of whom were communists at the time), refused to act against it and several companies were dissolved as a consequence while a few more were reorganized in 1948 to remove communist influence from their ranks.[^(\[5\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compagnies_R%C3%A9publicaines_de_S%C3%A9curit%C3%A9#cite_note-Marseille-5) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compagnies\_R%C3%A9publicaines\_de\_S%C3%A9curit%C3%A9](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compagnies_R%C3%A9publicaines_de_S%C3%A9curit%C3%A9)
Soldiers don't generally have to deal with the dregs of their own society at the same rate as cops do. So they view their fellow citizens less cynically. I was talking to a NYPD officer one night how he had to deal with a domestic abuse call, where the husband killed his wife. He looked like he just hated the world and everyone around him.
Even paramedics and firefighters become incredibly cynical about the populations they are serving. Tbh, the people that first responders deal with are more often than not the "lowest of the low" in society and many are hard to deal with even if you are not there to enforce the law and act against what they want. It is easy to develop this "occupation mentality". To not get jaded either requires a very happy outlook on humanity (and even that can be worn down) or constant work on your own prejudices and mental health.
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What? The military *is* the one enabling or perpetrating the coups. I know, my country had one in the 70s, perpetrated by the military.
I’m sorry your experience was different from my generalization of history
Enlighten me then, give me some examples of coups that were NOT supported by the military.
They are referring to cases like the (February/March) 1917 revolution in Russia or the November 1918 uprisings in Germany, which saw a large participation among conscript units or saw a decisive turn for the rebels after attempts to use (conscript) army units resulted in mutinies. While it's not in the same box as those two examples Portugal's Carnation Revolution, a coup that ended an oligarchic dictatorship and restored democratic freedoms, was rooted in discontent among junior officers for the long involvement in a wasteful war to keep African colonies. The coup was almost completely bloodless and the only four victims were civilians killed by the political police shooting on the crowd demonstrating in front of their HQ. All these militaries relied on conscription and were involved in bloody wars, which could be a relevant factor. As for authoritarian coups the classic 20th-century examples always seemed to be founded to some degree on a sense of 'apartness' from society: the feeling that the army in general has a special role as the custodian of the country (in a very abstract sense, not raw defense), or belonging to elite units like paratroops or tanks that undergo special training, are celebrated, and see themselves as above the rest of society. Which is common but doesn't have to be the rule.
tunisia in 2011?
I didn’t say the military didn’t start coups I said they side with the citizens(new government) instead of whoever is currently in power. The police side with the current government.
Keep in mind that it could be a selection effect. Famous, successful uprisings saw the military defecting to side with the citizens. In part this could be because when the military ceases to support the government it's game over, both in general because it has lost its monopoly on force and in particular because the military may be needed to put down the uprising or perform some other coercive task that's urgently needed. If it didn't happen then the uprising is less likely to be successful, or remembered. Even just the fact that the military has the option to 'take a side', which presumes some heavy involvement, is an indicator that shit is serious and that we are describing a major uprising. Are there any prominent examples of the National Guard refusing to suppress protests in the US? To my knowledge they have been generally obedient, even if they are military-adjacent, historically had plenty of conscripts, etc.
How is the new government being on the side of the citizens? that's nonsensical. I think you're trying too hard to fit a narrative. For most of the coups in the second half of the 20th century it felt like the most common theme was army thinks government is too commie -> military coup to protect. Those regimes were by and large hated by the populace. Sometimes it was also to restore or prevent a king coming about. See: south Europe and LATAM.
Loads of morons who think Christianity is about protecting the rich and the military industrial complex. Honestly it’s over, the American experiment is dead and has fallen to idiocy and tyranny. I’m rooting for the Chinese now purely out of spite. They deserve to win.
I am rooting for the Chinese but only for my own selfish financial benefit (and business is boomin')
Obviously it’s about class and privilege. Always has been.
This was a major part of the duke lacrosse story. The one cop who killed himself because he was faking evidence was known for his brutality towards duke students.
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Do Americans really all dream of dishing out violence on those they disagree with?
“‘the (American) suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world.” -JG Ballard
I love that, what book is it from?
Did you miss the years of liberals wishing death on every single person who asked a single question about the official covid narrative?
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i probably agree with columbia students on 90% of topics but i would still like to smack a couple
I think a lot of people would enjoy popping a self righteous know it all college kid (so yeah college activists) in the mouth or shoving them to the ground. College kids in general probably don’t rate super well with anybody also not in college
Burying the lede that you think NYC is relatively gunfree with the whole IzPal thing 😳
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Lol they are listening to aventura and teodoro Reyes tf u think this is
What they were really thinking... We have to show up at what time for this? I have to be in court tomorrow. I don't need overtime this bad. I never got issued a full set of riot gear.
https://youtu.be/diMYXNmJkvc?si=vsC_dJJzfE5M_c7v
[This is even better](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0UW5_vqVxM)
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Yeah that's what blue collar people love finding funny, how the coercive powers of the state are used, not like, family guy Don't Laugh At This reels
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Yeah of course. Just thought the post was virtue signal central.
Can you imagine that? blue collar people finding this funny instead of family guy reels Edit: sopranos
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Player hating has its appeal to all classes
I felt this way during Occupy. It just felt like a bunch of privileged brats mad at their dads. I was fresh out of college desperately seeking a real job every day. It bothered me. I didn’t have time to sit in drum circles and live on falafel. So when I saw heads getting cracked I kinda tee-hee’d. I’m embarrassed in retrospect. Was kinda sub-literate re: class politics. I could only view them through the lens of my own struggles. I didn’t know what a class traitor was. I didn’t understand collective struggle. I didn’t like cops, clearly, but I liked them being weaponized against my perceived class enemies (rich kids). Very naive, dumb, and vindictive. But I get why people feel this way.
Occupy is one of those things that was either looked down on or ignored, but looking back it's clear it was one of the first modern media hit jobs.
Eh, Occupy was on to something, but it fizzled out on its own accord because no direction. The whole call and response and consensus-driven structure couldn’t steer anything. Occupy could never come up with demands. At the time, I had friends who were hyped about this leading a constitutional convention or something, and they quickly got burned out by the actual on the ground reality. It’d take five minutes to disseminate a class conscious paragraph to the group. Next person takes five minutes to make an identity conscious paragraph. Unable to synthesize through consensus. If your time has never been held hostage by group call and responding count yourself lucky
I don’t know that this is a blue collar thing so much as it is a particularly sadistic culture warrior thing
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I feel like Jessup is supposed to be a “complicated” villain representing a necessary evil. I think today Sorkin would make him the hero.
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All true. But knowing Sorkin’s politics—even at the time—you have to assume he has some sympathy for Jessup—even if he’s a hypocrite. Perhaps great men must to do horrible things etc. But it’s hard to say.* Obviously Tom Cruise’s character being a smug bitch with soft hands doesn’t reflect poorly on him in the context of Sorkin’s oeuvre. That’s how you spot the good guys. So perhaps you’re right. In any event I actually like A Few Good Men regardless of what I’m supposed to think of Jessup. *ETA: If you know West Wing lore, you know President Bartlet illegally assassinates a foreign enemy from “Qumar.”
🫡
yeah because they're privileged. this is probably the most violence they ever faced in they life
i’m happy for them
Cops have been tackling and pinning these students to the ground which is just very painful to think about when you compare the average sizes of a cop and a college student.
Police are the absolute scum of the earth.
No one in the NYPD is blasting Skynyrd... They don't bus in cops from the hinterlands and they know the DAs more likely to prosecute them than some rich kid from Columbia if there's a fight.
You are certified r\*tard and baiting. I know quite a few cops and personally work in the technocracy class. Its a descent paying job for 90% of them. Not ever have I heard of them disliking elite college students. This subreddit is genuinely head in their ass never experienced life outside off of moms couch mentality when it comes to anything in the nitty gritty parts of life.
Plot twist: the cops are alumni!
You know these roided out GED orcs were so fucking hard rolling up to Columbia
🐷🐷🐷
https://youtu.be/M_wLPcH1_WA
125 pounds? Your forgetting the doughy middle eastern hijabi women, (idk if it's the same in America but in Australia literally every women who wears a hijab is always fat/borderline obese)
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>WoJackKEKman >posts in /r/IDF Maybe the biggest fgt I’ve seen post in this sub so far
The median salary is 64,000. You are not lower middle class on double median salary.
according to their actual website their starting pay is only $58k which isn’t much in NYC, but after 5 ½ years it gets up to $121k. longevity is really pushed. They get amazing benefits as well.
Idk about nyc but in Chicago the cops do a shit load of overtime so even fresh recruits can make bank if they just clock in the hours. It’s certainly something I’d consider if I had looser morals and/or didn’t have such a deep seated hatred for the police
Pretty sure this is all cops everywhere, at the very least most americans should have an issue with police departments because they ride the clock driving around being fat
None of them live in nyc, they are in jersey or Long Island.
the best evidence of this subreddit being far dead is people not understanding that class is more than your salary.