Who are the ‘working classes’?

In my post yesterday, I quoted Michael Moore saying that nowadays 70% of the working class consists largely of women, people of color, and people between the ages of 18-35. He seemed to equate ‘working class’ with lower income workers. In a comment drken said, ” I always thought “working class” meant middle and lower-middle class people. They don’t have a lot of money, but they’re not impoverished.”

It is clear that there is no unanimity regarding the terminology to use since there are three factors that are being considered and they cut across each other: income level, nature of work, and attitude. When it comes to income classes, one can quantify the levels in terms of quintiles. Starting with lower income class, one goes up to lower middle, then middle, then upper middle, to finally upper income class. But the other two categories are not that easy to discriminate between.
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Michael Moore shreds the image of who makes up the working class now

Politicians love to talk about how they support the working class, the people who are seen as the backbone of any nation, the ones who keep things going. But if one has a mental image of the working class, it might be that of a middle-aged, white man working in a factory or on a farm who is in the middle-income bracket, definitely not wealthy but not poor either. It is this demographic that is much sought after by politicians, and it is their supposed steady defection from the Democratic party to the Republicans, a process accelerated by Donald Trump, that is blamed for Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016.
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Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault

Via Aeon I came across this fascinating excerpt of a conversation held in 1971 between these two highly influential thinkers about social and political power structures and what we might seek to achieve through them.

From the Aeon description of the exchange:

In 1971, Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault met at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands for their first and only debate. Produced by the Dutch Broadcasting Foundation as a part of their International Philosophers Project, the programme featured discussions with eminent thinkers on the topic of ‘human nature and ideal society’. In recent years, their debate – the fourth and final of the series – has been somewhat overshadowed by events surrounding it. Namely, it’s rumoured that the programme’s host, the Dutch philosopher Fons Elders, paid Foucault for his appearance in hashish, and repeatedly encouraged him to put on a bright red wig to spice up the proceedings.

However, the debate itself – seen here excerpted and translated by the YouTube channel Philosophy Overdose – has appeal beyond the pleasures of watching the provocative Foucault spar with the professorial Chomsky. With the Vietnam War near its height, Chomsky and Foucault agree that contemporary power structures need to be attacked and dismantled. However, while Chomsky advocates for a system of ‘anarcho-syndicalism’ rooted in justice, sympathy and human creativity, Foucault argues that these concepts are products of the same bourgeois system that needs replacing. Probing age-old philosophical questions as well as the politics of the moment, the interview offers a revealing glimpse of the divergent styles, attitudes and outlooks of two enduringly influential thinkers.

The weird Marianne Williamson boomlet

When I was scanning the news headlines after the first night of the Democratic debate, I was surprised to see several mention Marianne Williamson as having done something noteworthy, apparently by saying that Donald Trump could not be defeated by wonky policy proposals because he can harness dark psychic forces or something. She had a similar moment after the first round of debates last month. Of course, since she eschews policy wonkiness in general and is apparently some kind of spiritual guru, this psychic forces terrain is something that she would relish campaigning on.
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The second Democratic debate

Once again, I did not have time to watch the second night of the Democratic primary debate. To be quite honest, there was really nobody on the stage last night that I was particularly interested in, except for Julian Castro whom I’d like to learn more about. The top three in the polls of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Cory Booker tend to leave me cold. I see them all as party establishment candidates, with Biden and Harris having very problematic records as well, while it is not clear exactly what Booker stands for. Booker strikes me as a charismatic, highly skilled and ambitious politician but one who will be too willing to accommodate powerful interests.
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Elizabeth Warren puts Chris Matthews in his place

After the debate, Chris Matthews of MSNBC kept badgering Elizabeth Warren about how much Medicare for All will raise taxes. That is the Republican talking point and the one pushed by the corporate mainstream media and the political establishment who are defenders of the private health insurance companies. Warren refused to accept his framing of the question and instead focused laser-like on the fact that she and Bernie Sanders have been emphasizing, that overall health care costs will go down and people will not go bankrupt or suffer serious financial hardship because of medical bills.

Mathews is a blowhard and a shill for corporate America.

Yesterday’s Democratic debate

I have been busy on a tight deadline with the book proofs and creating an index. These are two crashingly boring tasks, requiring close attention to detail and the only thing that keeps me going is because of my desire to make the end product as free from errors as possible. But as a result, I just could not spare the two hours or so to watch the first night of the second round of debates. So this post is based on second-hand information, so read at your peril!

However, from what I could read after the debate, it seemed to consist of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren staking out and reinforcing their progressive visions on major issues, while John Hickenlooper, Steve Bullock, Tim Ryan, and John Delaney tried to dismiss those as unrealistic and election losers. Trying to straddle the space in-between were Pete Buttigieg, Beto O’Rourke, Amy Klobuchar, and Marianne Williamson. The impression was that O’Rouke needed a big night to boost his campaign and remain viable but he did not achieve it.

[UPDATE: Robert Mackey describes how Warren and Sanders effectively swatted away the right-wing framing of the questions that looked to him like a planned ambush by CNN to discredit especially their health care plans that threaten the private health insurance industry. Mackey’s piece is well worth reading.

Rolling Stone magazine also had a good breakdown of each person’s performances in the debate.]
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How English became the language of science

These days, pretty much everyone who works in science research is proficient in English. This is, of course, unfair to those scientists who grew up in places where it is not their native language because they are forced to learn a second language in order to read the literature and spread their own ideas. Fortunately, it is a little easier to read and write technical material because one does not have to deal with the pitfalls of metaphors and idioms and colloquialisms, as one might have in other areas. In science, one usually eschews flowery language in favor of directness and the crucial technical terms are usually unambiguous in meaning. In my own career, I have met many scientists from all over the world with whom it was difficult to have general conversations but with whom one could communicate on science quite easily.
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The weird world of social media: Part infinity

I have commented before about how some people make a living by being social media personalities and ‘influencers’, whom people contribute money to in return for them live streaming about themselves and/or companies paying them to push their products on their followers.

Now comes a weird story of a Chinese woman who used a filter to make herself look younger but a glitch in the filter resulted in her real face being revealed as a middle-aged woman and now she has lost a lot of followers.

There are so many lessons that can be drawn from this one single story, and one that is being debated is about the unrealistic standards of beauty that people seek to attain in order to attract a following, and the lengths that they must go to maintain that following, since China has strict controls on what people can do on the internet.

China has more than 425 million live-streamers and the use of face filters is something that is common across the myriad of social platforms.
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[M]any live-streamers simply sing karaoke in their bedrooms, or eat snacks for hours on end.

And the highly lucrative industry is saturated by young female users, who will go to extreme lengths to stand out.

425 million livestreamers? How on Earth can one stand out in such a crowd simply by singing karaoke or eating snacks? There is a market for this?

It is now official. The world has passed me by.