Labor Day [DOT 2/9/24]

2/9/24 MegMegMcGee 34

Hey guys I hope you’re all having a great long weekend, if that applies to your jurisdiction. It’s 10pm on Sunday night and I’m home with no power and no internet. I’m typing this on my phone. So you all will have to fill in the blanks! Thanks!!

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34 Comments

  1. Shall we consider some pearls of wisdom from VP candidate JD Vance? The whole article is worth a read.

    “You have women who think that truly the liberationist path is to spend 90 hours a week working in a cubicle…instead of starting a family and having children,” Vance told American Moment’s president and founder Saurabh Sharma and its COO Nick Solheim. “…What they don’t realize—and I think some of them do eventually realize that, thank God—is that that is actually a path to misery. And the path to happiness and to fulfillment is something that these institutions are telling people not to do.”

    Let us not forget that he and his wife Usha met at Yale Law School and up until very recently she worked for a law firm. While he was in DC causing mayhem Usha must have been responsible for the childcare (they have three kids), although no doubt with heaping dollops of help. It is possible to have it all, JD!

    https://www.newsweek.com/jd-vance-remarks-rebuked-social-media-professional-women-1947083

    • Fucking entitled prick. In my entire life, I’ve never been in a position to operate as a one-income family. The few times we have been forced to do it (after the birth of my daughter and through various periods of unemployment), we’ve had to dig into savings, including retirement savings.

      One-income families are rich people. Try doing it on a Walmart salary, JD, you asshole.

      • The whole “Trad” wife culture on YT and Tiktok came from that. Most of them seem to have rich hubbies (among them is Ballerina Farm where the son is the hier of Jed Blue.)

      • hey…ive been one income family for like 15 years now and im hardly rich

        granted cost of living and wages are somewhat more in tune here than they are your side of the pond

    • My mother was parrotting that bullshit a few months back, suddenly she was all “well I don’t know if the feminist movement was really good for women, now we’re forced to work.”

      To which I was like Mom, I didn’t realize Gloria Steinem was the reason the cost of living went up so much?

      Also, women have always worked in addition to being Suzy Homemaker. Always. Upper class and middle class women have had the luxury in the past of not necessarily working. But women have always worked as maids and laundry and in shops etc etc, I was like you’re telling me, mom, that your aunts didn’t work in the grocery store your family ran back in the 40s? “well, that was different.”

      Anyways, a few weeks ago she watched a movie with Kelsey Grammar about the feminist movement in the 1960s and she was shocked that women couldn’t get their own bank accounts and now she’s back on board with being pro-feminist movement. For reference, she’s 70. So it’s not like she shouldn’t have been aware of what the feminist movement was pushing for.

        • I had a great aunt who was a telephone operator which was great, because somehow my parents knew how to get through to her and she’d patch them through to wherever they were calling and it would be free, not the equivalent of $20/minute.

      • I’ve never quite understood why men had to drag themselves off to work every day but it’s cool for women to hang around the house. It’s never seemed either fair or appropriate to me. And I’ve spent enough time unemployed to know exactly how much time it takes to keep a house spotless and handle all the meals (plus do all the yard work), and it’s not the same as a day of work. Small kids change the equation but once they’re in school it shifts back.

        I’ve also had some acquaintance with trad wives and they resented the hell out of it. I remember one saying “the kids are in school all day and she could be working part-time and we could save it for their college, but every day I get home and hear about what neighbor said mean things about another neighbor.”

        • When I was growing up, it was a way for men to peacock to other men about how much money they made. Oh sure, all 3 kid are in school, but Mary Eileen doesn’t need to work.

          In a similar vein, I had friends growing up where their mothers weren’t allowed to work. Allowed. Because they were supposed to basically be at the beck and call of their husbands and have no resources of their own.

          I don’t have any acquaintances or friends in my generation or younger (so basically, under the age of 45) where the wife was a stay at home mom once the kids were in all-day school. It was just economics with the cost of daycare usually – it runs about $300/week/kid here and up, and some of the *fancy* daycares have waitlists and down payments to get a kid in there.

          • Yeah, my father-in-law wouldn’t allow my MIL to work. I think he figured she’d find somebody richer/better looking. So she sat around the house and smoked while the maid took care of things. Also he used work as an excuse to get away from her and run around with other women. Ozzie and Harriet, those two.

      • Nonsense. I look forward to your three-part “The John Major Years: A Reappraisal.” I also have, and have read, William Hague’s massive biography of William Pitt the Younger, and I could loan it to you. Ditto Charles Moore’s bio of Margaret Thatcher. I’d rather saw my hand off with a rusty hacksaw than read a bio of Bill Clinton manqué Tony Blair.

  4. Pursuant to my reply to farscy the other day about how Trump supporters are almost entirely racists at this point (and yes, you can be racist and misogynistic, homophobic, and so on — one doesn’t preclude the other), we’ve got an interesting pattern for his hate rallies.

    Trump is visiting a succession of ‘Sundown Towns’

    Sundown towns are called that because they required Black people to be out of town by sundown. So his primary strategy against Harris is leaning hard into racism.

    • Just for the group at large, I want to stress that sundown towns weren’t limited to the southern states. My college town, about 45 minutes south of the Iowa border, had a billboard back in the day saying “(n word), don’t let the sun hit your back in Kirksville” as a reminder to get out by dusk. Also, KKK marches through the town square.

      • There were a lot of them in Florida. And the signs were almost exactly the same.

        When I worked for a community bank, we had Black managers that would refuse to work at certain branches because it wasn’t safe for them to be there after dark. And this is 10 years ago.

    • Ticketmaster can suck a bag of dicks.

      Four times this year I have gone to events that used Ticketmaster for the seller. Every fucking time, it was significantly cheaper – even with service fees – to go buy tickets on stubhub. Because of Ticketmaster’s assholic “surge-pricing” bullshit. And when I say significantly cheaper – I mean like the mezzanine seats for the Dancing With The Stars tour were $80 cheaper a seat through stubhub. When I saw Earth, Wind, and Fire in July? $30 cheaper a seat through stubhub.

      • And, of course, what do I get after I use Ticketmaster all of one time to go see John Oliver live during the writers’ strike last year? A notice of data breach about a month and a half ago!

        Of course, my SSN’s apparently available on the dark web, and a couple of weeks ago some asshole hacked into my eBay account (which had an expired credit card number on it because I hadn’t used it for a couple of years) to post a fraudulent listing for a digital camera selling for $175 – or at least about 10 or 20 times less than what seems to be its legit retail price. (I didn’t find out until I got a message from eBay saying that they’d changed my password and suspended my account due to “suspicious activity,” by which time four or five people out there and had already fallen for the scam.)

        So, yeah, don’t mind me. I’m just sitting here at the table with my bowler hat on and my tail wagging, placidly enjoying a cup of tea while the walls burn down in the background there.

        • If it makes you feel better?

          My personal data was still in that ticketmaster breach because I had to make an account to get access to the digital tickets transferred from the person who sold them to me through stubhub.

          Really, ticketmaster can fuck right off and die in a fire.

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