Comment by Frieren
9 hours ago
Only aristocrats can play that game. The soldier is being punished for doing something not allowed for his class status.
This is how a caste system works. People is not judged based on their actions but their relationship to power.
You're almost right, but "class" and "caste" are not synonyms and cannot be used interchangeably.
Well, as social mobility between classes becomes increasingly difficult, they become more and more like castes...
You can already hear the pseudo-theories, justifying the differences for eternity. Blue blooded, of lazy blood, etc. Apply yourselfs and you will win.. adding insult to injury, when you can not win, you must in addition be lazy with only yourself to blame.
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OP is right. Status games take many shapes, distinct castes is one special shape.
Except in the United States it is true. Something like 80% of new military recruits come from military families (parent, sibling, uncle/aunt, or grandparent).
Similarly over the last few decades the number of medical doctors who have immediate family who are also doctors has grown.
Social and economic class in the US is increasingly set in stone and hereditary.
I've noticed the same trend with SWEs tbh. Many new grads from the top schools have parents who were SWEs or SWE adjaent
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Joining Military isn't really a "class" thing - unless you mean lower income people join the military more often to get started in life.
Military academies are more of a upper class thing though.
Medical schools require a lot of volunteering and things like 'slinging hot dogs to pay tuition' don't count unless you grew up without clothes surviving on rabid dogs in the holler of W Virginia working the coal mines from age 8. We all know who has time to volunteer or do minimum wage healthcare instead of work the best paying shitty side job they can get: the rich.
It's set up heavily tilted so you have to be rich, or dirt poor enough for a sob story, or a desired minority. Even if you do volunteer a lot and are middle class, you probably didnt know anyone that could help you into the most prestigious positions. A middle class person of equal aptitude would likely go into something like engineering or law which have fewer class-signalling non-academic purity tests.
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caste and class reinforce each other.
class, cast, scum... the tokens are not really relevant, only the facts:
"‘Absurd Corruption’: Disgust as Eric Trump Brags About Scoring $24 Million Pentagon Deal" - https://www.commondreams.org/news/eric-trump-pentagon-contra...
The thing is, a LOT of people voted for this, knowing perfectly well what they were voting for.
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Sounds like people’s lot in life is becoming hereditary. Caste can be used.
soldiers are disposable, they prolly threw him under the bus hoping that would be the end of the matter and they could walk away with the rest of the money.
Most Americans Can't Afford This Basic...Commodity?
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Zzwp_Ypsi9I
> This is how a caste system works.
Not at all. In a caste system a lower caste person will get attacked if he (or especially she) has any success at all. Whether or not what they did was legal or not does not factor into the equation. First priority is that the highest up dalit is lower than the worst drunkard brahmin, even if they have to kill them.
Tulsa once had what was known as Black Wall Street. There were too many successful black men, so 1921 in the whites massacred everybody. They even brought in planes and dropped bombs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre
There were too many successful black men
That's absolutely not what Wikipedia says. There was indeed a horrible massacre, but why do you feel the need to falsify the reasons?
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Are we now not at all allowed to reference problems in other societies? We can complain about western society, and complaints from 100 years ago, when even my grandfather wasn't born yet, are valid criticism of America/Europe/... but things that happen today in India, Pakistan, Turkey are off limits?
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That's the urban myth, yes.
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> their relationship to power
The word "power" is so ironic in human cultures:
It's the people with the guns (and muscles) that have the literal physical power. They could shoot the aristocrats dead if they wanted to.
The aristocrats' "power" is make-believe like the rest of their papers and numbers: The various psychological barriers which dissuade the gun-bearers from ever reaching the "want to" part.
Which is why power is much more complex than brute force. Sheer physical or military power is not the be-all and end-all, just a facet of the total picture (and in fact, social creatures that humans are, even just adversarial aspects of power are a subset of power).
> It's the people with the guns (and muscles) that have the literal physical power. They could shoot the aristocrats dead if they wanted to.
What matters is not raw power, it’s balance. The power of one guy with guns is kept in check by the power of other guys with guns who stand to benefit from the status quo. The aristocracy’s game is to play with this balance to make sure that no other rival force emerges. They do not need any actual physical power themselves to play it.
Historically aristocracy was the military class. Nowadays in authoritarian societies it looks like it's mostly matter of time before military takes the lead.
> Nowadays in authoritarian societies it looks like it's mostly matter of time before military takes the lead.
See, e.g., Iran's IGRC. Counterexamples: China, Russia — and the U.S.?
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Exactly this. They live in houses with glass windows. We could take this world any time we choose.
But the people almost never do, and that reason is power.
Chill out brother. Life's good.
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People with guns don't stand much of a chance against people with armies. Sure armies can turn on an individual, but that just means that particular individual has lost power, and that power has been transferred to whatever new individual commands the loyalty of the many. It's not imaginary, it's emergent.
People vastly overestimate the power of armies.
Trump has gotten shot once, almost twice.
Shinzo Abe got murked by some pipes from the hardware store.
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Power resides where men believe it resides. It’s a trick. A shadow on the wall. And a very small man can cast a very large shadow.
Not so much class or caste, but a dual-state where an elite have a normative or lawless state, and specific or arbitrary others suffer a parallel prerogative or punitive state. This is the essence of corrupt authoritarianism.
Most Americans share a delusion of perpetual glory days like a former star high school football quarterback with the refusal to accept factual reality that their country isn't uniformly excellent and is terrible in many ways including being extremely superficial, corrupt, dangerous, unhealthy, unhappy, paranoid, over-reacting, immature, selfish, unfair, disinformed, and unequal.
More like three. One class where you can do whatever you can pay for, another with a set of annoying but almost reasonable rules and the last one for whom any actions and their mere existence is illegal, but whose presence is very much relied upon to do things.
Frank Wilhoit: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
Yes. This is why we have the firearm. The great equalizer of pressures. There are so few "aristocrats" and they are not well protected. That's the game we must play.
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