Capitalism in the West and especially in the United States is basically dead. It has turned into a government-sponsored griftopia where a small filthy rich class with government sanction uses their control over capital to force the worker class to turn over the majority of the wealth they produce to their owners. For the majority of workers it is little different from slavery, except that you can choose slavemaster A or slavemaster B.
Whenever I read this kind of thing, I always wonder if the author of these words would have the courage of his opinions to approach a black person and say, “Oh, your ancestors were slaves? That’s totally like working in a warm, cozy office 8 hours a day 5 days a week. I, like, totally know all about slavery because I once had an office job.” I mean, if he really believes what he is saying, then it shouldn’t be a problem, should it?
These spoiled little losers keep whining about the imaginary horrors of their useless lives and imagining themselves as some sort of heroes who bravely resist great adversity. It would be funny if it weren’t so offensive.
If you manage to get through the rest of the article by this intellectual impotent, you will see that it contains an absolutely hilarious explanation of why Soviet economy failed. The idiot’s answer: because consumers couldn’t provide enough feedback.
Clarissa's Blog 
Sometimes I wonder if there’s a failure of historical education to provide a proper bank of metaphors for these rants
In addition to slavery there’s sharecropping, indentured labor, the company store, and guest workers, to name some.
And you’re right, it’s people in very comfortable jobs who don’t even suffer carpal tunnel syndrome who engage in pseudo-Marxist rubbish.
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And what a great way to feel radical, subversive and important, eh? Facebook activism is the worst.
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This form of forced labor, however, had a lot of similarities to slavery including a complete absence of any choice.
http://jpohl.blogspot.com/2014/02/72-years-since-gko-order-1281ss.html
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well if your heart isn’t in what you are doing and you have to do that job day in and day out, that is degrading to the mind and body. Certainly it is not “slavery” in the sense of being owned by a particular person and being required not to leave the premises. But it can be very degrading.
I do think people need to start using words with greater care, so that they do not make their own emotional concerns seem to be at the centre of the universe, though. Supposing I communicate to others, as the author may be trying to do, my sense of degradation at work, but I can’t take into account greater extremes of oppression, or variations of it, because I have already used the available words with too great a rhetorical effect in service of myself — well then I have exhausted communication even before I have begun engaging with others.
That is perhaps the problem with most forms of political correctness today. They immediately exhaust the possibilities of communication though the extreme use of language as a rhetorical device. One either agrees with the speaker or walks away shaking one’s head.
But outside the world of narrow, perspectival manipulation, reality opens up. At least, it has the potential to do so. Really, I think the problem with much of contemporary academia, in the humanities, is that it is stuck in this mode of limited, perspectival management. And this tendency toward socially engineering what kinds of meanings are permitted to be expressed is deeply entrenched in much of general society as a whole. That is why I have not been able to express very simple and even banal things about my past, but had to write a book to get thse things out of my system. People would stop me and imply I’m not permitted to speak of them. And then they would go to work on me, trying to manipulate my perspective so that I would take in reality in a much more narrow and socially contrived filter.
And in fact, that was quite traumatising, not because of the views I was expected to embrace as such, but because I was not permitted even to say the very plain and trivial things I wanted to relate about my past experiences in Africa. If you can’t relate even matter of fact things, you cannot make a cultural transition from one state of mind to another.
So, in fact that was why I chose not to pursue an academic career, because I can’t walk around in that kind of a straitjacket. It’s not only uncomfortable, but is is unhealthy. One would have first be mad enough to accept it. Some people are, and they comply to a limited degree.
But most people in the humanities are taught to use language to keep out what they sense to be “evil”. Under the label of “evil”, put the unknown, the wild that is just beyond the borders of suburban consciousness, the capacity for free thinking, experiences that happen to have grown up in locations where the gardeners of the contemporary, modern soul have not cultivated anything. Also place most of reality itself. It’s too tough and too wild and too wicked for the contemporary mind to try to come to terms with.
It’s not so much that the contemporary, educated person cannot come to terms with the historical existence of slavery, but they actively resist acknowledging even the slightest thing that is not already part of their purview. They view it as evil and undigestable. They may even downvote any attempts to communicate to them about it, on YouTube.
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“So, in fact that was why I chose not to pursue an academic career, because I can’t walk around in that kind of a straitjacket. It’s not only uncomfortable, but is is unhealthy. One would have first be mad enough to accept it. Some people are, and they comply to a limited degree.”
– I don’t know about Australia, but in US academia everybody speaks like the linked loser and not like me. The apocalyptic, self-aggrandizing speech patterns of the linked blogger are trademark US academia. Maybe Australian academics are schooled to be more careful with language, but in the US it’s the opposite. If you look at our professional publication Chronicle of Higher Ed, you will see why I feel so alien to this world. Every overfed, spoiled, rich idiot who never experienced any real hardship is a VICTIM of MULTIPLE OPPRESSIONS experiencing SLAVERY and INDENTURED SERVITUDE while being TERRORIZED and TORTURED and suffering from a variety of DEBILITATING DISORDERS.
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Australian academics are definitely schooled to be more careful with language, but we also suffer, as I posted above, from extreme political correctness, which does not seem so extreme until you are fully out of the system and realize how much you had been muffled.
I imagine that the whininess of US culture is directly related to its passivity. One complains not because one has something that needs to be fixed, but because one does not expect it to be fixed. It’s a way of relaxing into one’s state of being more fully.
As for me, me ethos is different. If I say something is a problem, it really is one. If something isn’t addressed as a problem, I start to apply the same standards to others as they do to me. They think bullying is not an issue? Let me address them exactly how I have been addressed, and see how they like it. (I actually did this as an experiment for a while, because I really didn’t know whether people could put up with some really harsh treatment and shrug it off. My findings were that they couldn’t.)
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Funny thing about all this: I gather that Australia is still a predominately suburban middle-class society. This is no longer true of the U.S. The confusion is overwhelming.
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I’ve actually seen educated and well-heeled people tell a group of black Americans that the war on drugs is ‘modern slavery’ and refuse to back down.
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I would classify the paragraph you quoted as hyperbole, perhaps written by someone experiencing an anxiety attack. “Slavery” is one of a few emotionally loaded words, like “Hitler” or “holocaust,” that are best avoided except in history class.
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This has got to be the longest anxiety attack in history because this guy always writes this way. 🙂
And you are absolutely right, it really bothers me when people say, “My boss is worse than Hitler.” The boss might be genuinely horrible but who is going to want to listen to the story about the boss after Hitler is mentioned?
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Has capitalism ever been anything else than a governement-sponsored gritfopia where a small filthy rich class with governement sanction use their control over capital to force the worker class to turn over the majority of the wealth they produce to their owners?
Does this person really believe in this pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstrap bullshit and that you can make it if you just work hard enough?!
That person sounds like one of those people that swoon over communism and tell everyone how great a communist society would be. The kind that when reminded of the systematic inequalities and corruption in communist societies will tell you that they “did it wrong”.
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Go see The Lego Movie and you will understand that everything is awesome.
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I already understand that. At my age, what choice is there?
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