Posted on 04/15/2006 2:42:14 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
$6 / HR for construction work?
It's a REAL general contractor's (not a relative) job to find the tradesmen to do the work. He'd be bonded and have to finish the job or the bonding company would.
Building a new house piecemeal, acting like your own GC as the author descrubes is risky at best.
You get what you pay for.
Absolutely! My thoughts exactly.
I've had many similar experiences, like someone said before, there has to be a prototype before a stereotype.
But the issue is, "What are marriages about?" My answer is that Marriage is about fatherhood, and full siblinghood, within families. True, that makes it about sex - but that is different from saying that marriage is defined by sex. The principle of marriage is that all children shall know - and be able to trust and rely on - their fathers. That is marriage's societal rasion d' etre.The principle of marriage (whether or not perfectly adhered to) is that, for the sake of succeeding generations, there be no sex apart from marriage. The effect of failure of heterosexual marriage reverberates through generations; it may be a hard saysing but society has only so much control it is willing to exert on its members, and society has no comparable interest in gay men being married. Society is part of a conventional marriage. friends, most of whom usually attend the wedding and the reception - support the new faily by their gifts. The parents of the bride traditionally throw a party to celebrate the marriage of their daughter, and in practical terms the cost of the reception will be of similar order of magnitude to the value of those gifts.
You could have the agreement of the bride and groom without any societal participation, but with the same support of the bride's parents - and in principle the couple would be about as well off materially. What such a couple lacks, however, is society's manifested blessing of their union. What they lack, in short, is the experience of having committed to their union in front of all their friends and family.
Advocates of gay marriage attempt to bludgeon society into backing a new institution in which society has, relatively speaking, no important stake. That in itself is morally objectionable. Advocacy of gay "marriage" is advocacy of an "it's all about sex" attitude toward marriage. That attitude subverts marriage as society understands it.
I once was privy to a discussion among men started by a married man who compared sex unfavorably to other bodily functions. As a man who was young and single at the time, I was probably the target of the statement. But the other married man demurred, and he used interesting phraseology, "You talk about your girlfriend and I'll talk about mine."
Now if the first man was sincerely denigrating the pleasure of sex, it only seems reasonable that he would not have a girlfriend outside of marriage. And there is no reason to take it that in fact the second man was unfaithful to his wife, either. So why did he put it that way?
Simply because marriage is so much more than sex. To have said "You talk about your wife and I'll talk about mine," would have been deeply offensive. Sex is just naturally undignified and funny, but society has to respect it nonetheless. The trouble, for advocates of gay marriage, is that homosexuality does not (and so long as we are all products of heterosexuality probably never can) command the respect of society.
Academic researchers used to believe that poverty condemned students to mediocre test scores. Indeed, there is a direct correlation between family income and test scores: the higher the family income, the higher the student is likely to score, generally.
Correlation is not causation. Many people live in poverty because they screwed off in school. Failure to achieve in school resulted in poor earning capability later on. The problem becomes generational as poor achievers have children and pass on the poor habits. The problem may also have a genetic components e.g. dumb parents rarely produce brilliant offspring. That observation holds no matter what racial group is examined. I've run into plenty of white morons.
But researchers have also found that a white student from a family earning $75,000 a year will still score higher than a black student from a family earning $75,000 a year. What creates that gap?
I would lay the blame for this case on peer pressure. Academic achievement results in castigation for being "too white". I work with a number of black PhDs who obviously decided the peer pressure didn't outweigh their desire to succeed.
More class warfare. You can only give tax cuts to people who actually pay taxes. The bottom 50% pay only 5% of the taxes. The top 1% pay 33% of the taxes. The money retained as a consequence of tax cuts gets spent in the community. That means jobs for people on the bottom e.g. restaurant servers, domestic cleaning help, construction.
an inevitable result of our culture creating the viable possibility of living in relatively comfortable conditions without having to labor.
I was assigned to help a white guy try to learn to read again. He had a terrible brain injury from a motorcycle accident. He wanted desperately to be able to read again so he could accept a job as janitor. Being able to read the labels on the bottles was critical. Sadly, there just wasn't enough gray matter left to do the job. The desire was there, but the assets were not. He did find work as an assistant janitor...on condition that he had a "senior" assistant who could read the containers so he didn't make a mistake.
Women have as much an obligation to keep their legs closed as much as men do to keep their zippers closed so as not to make unwanted children. But it is the woman who is seduced by the welfare socialist state. And it is she who becomes the the one to keep fathers out of the family to meet the obligations of the welfare socialist state. It starts with socialism. Women who become dependent upon the socialist state are its linchpin. The feminist socialist state tells women that men are bad and need to be put in their place by the socialist state.
Yes, women are at mainly at fault here.
They are the first to claim men use brute force to put them in place and need the protection of the state while in the next breath they claim they can perform tough guy jobs (policemen, firemen, and soldiers) equally well.
I took my 9th grade science class in summer school after 8th grade. It was the first time I had ever taken summer school. My class happened to also have the only black student in the school. That was just fine until the teacher handed out the first graded test. He stood up and shouted that she was a racist for marking the items answered incorrectly. Not exactly a stellar example of behavior. As previously observed, education is not an osmotic process. It requires effort on the part of the student.
I had a second similar experience during a summer school organic chemistry class. We had a student from Kenya. It was a very intense class. M-F, 8 AM to 5 PM with lunch from 12-1. Labs were T-Th 6 PM to 9 PM.
I often chatted with the Kenyan student. We went up at lunch time to retrieve our graded tests. After picking his test up, he proceeded change an answer and knocked on the prof's door. He demanded that his grade be raised as he was falsely marked off on the item he changed. Very bad move. His paper was the last paper the prof graded. He was expelled from UCSD for cheating and deported back to Kenya.
UCSD is very strict with respect to cheating. My calculus class was all white students. After 10 weeks, the class had dwindled to 15 students. The prof knew everyone by name. He saw an unfamiliar face at the final exam. This unfamiliar person finished the exam quickly and turned in the paper. Bad move. The prof picked up the paper and noticed that student was still seated. Moments later the student named on the paper quietly rose and left the room. He didn't turn in a paper. The prof apologized for interrupting the exam, but he made a very public announcement. He announced the name of the cheater and proceeded to put a big "F" with magic marker on his paper. He too was expelled from UCSD.
One more 'war' story from UCSD. I had a visiting sociology prof from Princeton. All quarter I had scored perfect scores on every quiz. A couple hours before the final, I visited the library to see if the one book on the booklist that was never in stock at the bookstore had been returned. It was there. I ravenously read it cover to cover just in case the exam had any material from the book. Upon entering the room for the final, the prof looked really pissed off. When all were seated, he announced that one of our classmates had retrieved the ditto master from the trash can at the provost's office. He then announced that the exam stolen from the trash would not be the final exam. He wrote the questions in chalk on the board. Half of them came from the book I had just skimmed before the test. He then announced that he was enroute to the airport to return to Princeton. The TAs would grade the final and that result would be the total material considered for your final grade. No appeals would be permitted. Yikes. I got a C in that class. Almost everyone else got an F. Not a very fair way to do business.
While I believe that the US must control its borders and am against amnesty for illegals, the reason I am against the guest worker program is that we should be bringing people like this into the United States on a citizenship track, not a guest worker plan.
What about the labor unions? The unions are there to protect America's honest, hard working, middle class laborers.
The union leaders are good liberals that support 100% the liberal Democrats that Cynthia supports and adores, yet she stiffs them when the money is coming from her family's pocket.
No new shoes for the working union man's young children on Cynthia's dime!
Wow.
There won't be any legal reform on that front, simply because the same people complaining about illegal immigration will complain about "cultural dilution" and "the race to the bottom" if we raise the legal quotas from Mexico to rational levels. Reading this thread, I was wondering if here on FR which meme would win out - the immigrants-are-taking-black-people's-jobs meme or the black-people-are-lazy-and-ignorant meme.
Nah. She just doesn't get down to the 'hood much anymore. The dispirited black man described here is the greatest waste of human resources, possibly in human history, certainly in American history, and yet it just seems insoluble. Where to start? It didn't used to be this way, but after the predations of liberal welfare policies destroyed the black community from the family on up, how do you put Humpty Dumpty back together again?
Her sister and father-in-law should have known $6/hr wasn't going to get them good labor.
Many years ago it was true, I remember the statistic, there were seven times as many black physicians as there were black pro athletes, in all sports together. I suspect the ratio is much higher now, but the only role model many black kids relate to is jocks and rap stars. When I tell them their odds of success are pretty slim, they just shrug it off. A lot of them buy mega-lotto tickets too.
The perception of incompatibility between two cognitions, which for the purpose of cognitive dissonance theory can be defined as any element of knowledge, attitude, emotion, belief or value, as well as a goal, plan, or an interest. In brief, the theory of cognitive dissonance holds that contradicting cognitions serve as a driving force that compels the mind to acquire or invent new thoughts or beliefs, or to modify existing beliefs, so as to minimize the amount of dissonance (conflict) between cognitions.
Culture does matter, and race is largely a matter of culture. Each school has a culture. If that culture is one that gives great weight to achievement in class as well as on the atheltic field or in the arts, then the student will be pressed to "go along." If, however, his self-image is protected by a clique, so that he can fail and take cover, then he might as well nopt be there. It is like going to church and hanging out with the least religious.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.