"Rigid Class System in Europe" Bob Roll Comments

"Bob Martin" wrote in message
...
in 523553 20060817 151817 "Tom Kunich" cyclintom@yahoo. com wrote:

To compare a wealthy man in one country with a struggling person in
another
country is completely pointless.

I was comparing two people of approximately the same social and economic
standing in their relative countries. The woman was successful as were the
Parisian shop keepers. And they were more or less happy as well. (Well, the
shop keepers pretty much were - the woman was an American who had lived in
Paris for 20 years). But the economic difference between them and their
American counterparts was quite pronounced.

Mind you, this isn't exactly a criticism. The French obviously don't have as
high opinion of income as Americans do. But from my American point of view,
there are a lot of things that money CAN buy. And French with money are in
no hurry to get rid of their own.

Incidentally, I lived in the USA for a year and I saw poverty the like of
which I have
never seen in Europe.

Then you sure never looked far. The life span of a man on the street in
Paris is said to be a single winter. In the US it's something like 15 years.

wrote in message
oups.com...

I am not aware of these studies, nor am I a statistician able to make
sense of any results. I think my observations may be usefull for people
to think about what sorts of information is useful to compare, and what
sort of questions can be raised given what we do know. Any statistics
that show what actually happens does not necessarily give a picture of
what is possible. Income mobility in the upper 3/4 of income is not
very interesting, It is what "keeps the poor down" that is interesting.
This is obviously an unanswerable question, but consider this: A poor
2nd generation kid from Guatemala who lives in LA in a crap neigborhood
with crap schools, and a 2nd generation Algerian kid who lives in a
crap suburb of Paris. If they both stay out of trouble and g oto
school, which one is going to have more obstables to attaining a
"normal" life? The kid in LA has to "act white" and wear a shirt and
tie at some call-center job and work his way up to manager after a few
years and then he is there. I contend that the Algerian kid will have
more obstacles with "acting French", getting a job, getting promoted,
etc. There are obvioulsy racial/ethnic issues that compound this, but
they are part of the picture.

While I'm not exactly sure that I agree with your particular examples I do
agree with your thought.

As for the examples themselves - the USA is white. Got that? That's the
STANDARD. If people want to relate to whites they have to act white. And
acting white isn't betraying your race as you seem to imply. It means being
clean and polite and speaking in clear English. Other than that there is
essentially NO LIMIT to what a man can do. The pretense that someone that
sits on their ass and does nothing and claims that it's because he's being
discriminated against ain't going to hack it.

"Curtis L. Russell" wrote in message
...

Bragging on the best
relative poverty is about as silly an approach as I can imagine.

The Scene:
Four well-dressed men are sitting together at a vacation resort.
'Farewell to Thee' is played in the background on Hawaiian guitar.

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Aye, very passable, that, very passable bit of risotto.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
Nothing like a good glass of Château de Chasselas, eh, Josiah?
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
You're right there, Obadiah.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Who'd have thought thirty year ago we'd all be sittin' here drinking Château
de Chasselas, eh?
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
In them days we was glad to have the price of a cup o' tea.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
A cup o' cold tea.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Without milk or sugar.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Or tea.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
In a cracked cup, an' all.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Oh, we never had a cup. We used to have to drink out of a rolled up
newspaper.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
The best we could manage was to suck on a piece of damp cloth.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Because we were poor. My old Dad used to say to me, "Money doesn't buy you
happiness, son".
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Aye, 'e was right.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Aye, 'e was.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
I was happier then and I had nothin'. We used to live in this tiny old house
with great big holes in the roof.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
House! You were lucky to live in a house! We used to live in one room, all
twenty-six of us, no furniture, 'alf the floor was missing, and we were all
'uddled together in one corner for fear of falling.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Eh, you were lucky to have a room! We used to have to live in t' corridor!
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Oh, we used to dream of livin' in a corridor! Would ha' been a palace to us.
We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woke up every
morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House? Huh.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Well, when I say 'house' it was only a hole in the ground covered by a sheet
of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
We were evicted from our 'ole in the ground; we 'ad to go and live in a
lake.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
You were lucky to have a lake! There were a hundred and fifty of us living
in t' shoebox in t' middle o' road.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Cardboard box?
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Aye.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank.
We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a
crust of stale bread, go to work down t' mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in
week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us
to sleep wi' his belt.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at six o'clock in the
morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of 'ot gravel, work twenty hour day
at mill for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would thrash us to sleep
with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Well, of course, we had it tough. We used to 'ave to get up out of shoebox
at twelve o'clock at night and lick road clean wit' tongue. We had two bits
of cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at mill for sixpence every
four years, and when we got home our Dad would slice us in two wit' bread
knife.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour
before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours
a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when
we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our
graves singing Hallelujah.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
And you try and tell the young people of today that ..... they won't believe
you.
ALL:
They won't!

In article . net,
"Tom Kunich" cyclintom@yahoo. com wrote:

I suggest you shut you pie hole idiot. I came from the bottom of the class
system to rise to upper middle class. All along the way I met people who had
started at the bottom and become rich and in some cases famous. And all
along the way I watch people who started at the top with silver spoons in
their mouths become homeless dope addicts sleeping in doorways in Berkeley
and San Francisco.

Tom, there are a lot of people who started at the bottom and have been unable to
move up much, if at all. Circumstances, you know? Poor = rich and famous -
sometimes it's a matter of hard work, sometimes it's being in the right place at the
right time. And there are a big group of people who started out the top and stayed
there by doing nothing at all (Paris Hilton ring a bell?). Your generalizations are
absurdly broad and pointless.

--
tanx,
Howard

Never take a tenant with a monkey.

remove YOUR SHOES to reply, ok?

Montesquiou wrote:
"Bob Martin" a écrit dans le message de news:
...
in 523429 20060816 222509 "Tom Kunich" cyclintom@yahoo. com wrote:

This is the class system that people in the United States are decrying.
Moreover, EVERY person in the USA can move up to the limits of their
ability
if they wish. In Europe that simply isn't the case as you can discover
simply by talking to any factory worker.
********, Tom (as usual).

Both Margaret Thatcher and John Major came from humble beginnings.

The majority of Britain's wealthy people are "self-made".

It is possible Sarkozy to became the next French President.
He is nothing but a son of an immigrant ....
Just for the fun, this is a short list of immigrant's sons in France (in the
Show Business for example) :

Jean-Paul Belmondo (Italian fathers)
Isabelle Adjani (algérian father, german mother)
Coluche (Italian fathers)
Julien Clerc (Mother from the French antilles)
Serge Gainsbourg (russian parents)
Yves Montand (Italian fathers)
Daniel Prévost (algérian khabyle father)
Louis de Funès (Spanish parents)
Barbara (Central Europe)
Charles Aznavour (arménian)
Marina Vlady (Russia)
Lino Ventura (italien)
Sylvie Vartan (arménian and bulgary)
Georges Moustaki (grec, born in égypte)
Serge Reggiani (italiens fathers)


Well, OK, but what about _FAMOUS_ french people? Are there any of those
who started out poor? For that matter, are there any of those who
started out rich?

In article ,
William Asher wrote:

Robert Chung wrote:

snip
If that's your question, then you're talking about individual income
mobility. For that particular measure, the US tends to rank behind
most European countries.

Yeah, but the difference is that in the USA, all those poor people are poor
because they are lazy and don't want to earn money. In contrast, the
European poor are held down by the jackboot of Europeanism and can't earn
money because of rampant socialism. My guess is if Europe had more
firearms and less socialism, they would get more economic growth, less
crime, public transportation that didn't impede important bicycle races,
analytical laboratories that weren't an international joke, and an
appreciation for bathing. It would sort of be like Canada, only I still
wouldn't understand a word the train conducter was saying.

If only you could have found a way to work in "helmets"...

--
tanx,
Howard

Never take a tenant with a monkey.

remove YOUR SHOES to reply, ok?

In article , "Robert Chung"
wrote:

William Asher wrote:

It would sort of be like Canada, only I still wouldn't understand
a word the train conducter was saying.

It's sort of like pig latin but instead of adding "ay" to the end of each
word they add it to the end of each sentence.

Well, they also add "right?" and okay?" at the end of sentences. At least the
guys I knew from BC did.

--
tanx,
Howard

Never take a tenant with a monkey.

remove YOUR SHOES to reply, ok?

Tom Kunich wrote:

While I'm not exactly sure that I agree with your particular examples I do
agree with your thought.

As for the examples themselves - the USA is white. Got that? That's the
STANDARD. If people want to relate to whites they have to act white. And
acting white isn't betraying your race as you seem to imply. It means being
clean and polite and speaking in clear English. Other than that there is
essentially NO LIMIT to what a man can do. The pretense that someone that
sits on their ass and does nothing and claims that it's because he's being
discriminated against ain't going to hack it.

Hey, it's Senator George Allen! Welcome to America and
to rbr, Senator Allen!

I didn't previously know that "acting white" meant being clean
and polite and speaking in clear English. That's because all
white people do that, and all non-white people don't, in Kunich's
corner of the woods anyway. Also, I didn't know that white
people are only able to relate to people who act white. Are
these white people learning disabled or something, so they
can't understand people who look or speak differently from
them? What do they do when they go to Europe and meet
all the funny people who don't speak clear English - I guess
those must be non-white.

A funny thing about "white" is that its meaning has changed
over time. In the late nineteenth and into the 20th century,
many people from newer immigrant groups were not
considered white, including Irish, Italians, eastern Europeans,
and Jews. Perhaps in another 50 years, "white" will mean
something else again, and there will be so many
multi-racial kids that we'll have to develop a whole new
set of insults. But you and those who think like you will still
be ignorant racist troglodytes.

Ben

In article om,
" wrote:

Tom Kunich wrote:

While I'm not exactly sure that I agree with your particular examples I do
agree with your thought.

As for the examples themselves - the USA is white. Got that? That's the
STANDARD. If people want to relate to whites they have to act white. And
acting white isn't betraying your race as you seem to imply. It means being
clean and polite and speaking in clear English. Other than that there is
essentially NO LIMIT to what a man can do. The pretense that someone that
sits on their ass and does nothing and claims that it's because he's being
discriminated against ain't going to hack it.

Hey, it's Senator George Allen! Welcome to America and
to rbr, Senator Allen!

Macaca! Allen is either an ignorant bigot (was a neo-confederate in high school,
you know) or a clever one - using the clever code words so the rest of the bigots
can tell he's down with them.

A funny thing about "white" is that its meaning has changed
over time. In the late nineteenth and into the 20th century,
many people from newer immigrant groups were not
considered white, including Irish, Italians, eastern Europeans,
and Jews. Perhaps in another 50 years, "white" will mean
something else again,

"The term White refers to people having origins in any of the original peoples of
Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa." It includes people who indicated their
race or races as "white" or wrote in entries such as Argentine, Chilean, Irish,
German, Russian, Italian, Israeli, Syrian, Lebanese, Iraqi, Polish, Spanish, or
Uruguayan."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_%2...ates_Census%29

and there will be so many multi-racial kids that we'll have to
develop a whole new set of insults. But you and those who think
like you will still be ignorant racist troglodytes.

He sure went a long ways toward proving that, didn't he?

--
tanx,
Howard

Never take a tenant with a monkey.

remove YOUR SHOES to reply, ok?

Howard Kveck wrote:
Macaca! Allen is either an ignorant bigot (was a neo-confederate in high school,
you know) or a clever one - using the clever code words so the rest of the bigots
can tell he's down with them.

It was so coded no one knew what the **** he was talking about until
it was explained to them.

Allen probably knew what the implictions of the word were, but it's
highly unlikely that it was calculated to appeal to the audience. It
went straight over their heads.

Romatic sympathy for the Confederates isn't exactly rare in the
south. Allen's opponent, Jim Webb, also engages in it.