like i know these people are technically meant to be our allies because they don't own the means of production, but how the fuck do you spend more than my family's annual income on fast food? how are we meant to find common ground with people who are able and happy to do this? 
edit: turns out this is a repost. sorry. but still, i standby my disgust
Jason Steen isn’t middle class. He owns a massive media business and despite that, has been arrested several times because his hobbies include wage theft, posting about wage theft, bragging online about how rich wage theft has made him (see above) and drunk texting his highly educated employees taunting them about wage theft.
He’s obnoxiously ostentatiously bourgeois.
Yeah reading over the article he's not middle-class at all, he's in the upper-class with that behavior
Imagine spending 25 THOUSAND DOLLARS and not realizing because it didn't impact your quality of life or housing or ability to obtain food
Preach.
And what we do is probably 10,000x more important to humanity than whatever the fuck this ghoul does
I don't know what the guy in this pic does but I already know your job is more important
That provides value to people who play the game. It’s a fuck lot more valuable then wasting the day posting such ridiculous things on Twitter in a laughable attempt to distance yourself from the working class
A starbucks barista would be 1000 times more valuable to peoples lives than whatever shit this person could possibly be doing
people like coffee and someone has to make it, making coffee is good and based
This is why people think "oh just stop eating out" is valuable advice. They have no idea that people are trying to live with smaller incomes than what the middle class spends on just food alone. Telling an entire class of people to "just get better job" is not a solution either. This just admits that the job is required but people doing the job aren't worthy of comfort or savings.
Seriously. It's like, okay, I'll spend $15 less per week on food and that will magically solve everything, I guess.
ordering hooters food for delivery is more perverted than actually going to hooters
Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims. This is a regime of total equivalency, where cultural products need no longer even pretend to be real in a naïve sense, because the experiences of consumers' lives are so predominantly artificial that even claims to reality are expected to be phrased in artificial, "hyperreal" terms. Any naïve pretension to reality as such is perceived as bereft of critical self-awareness, and thus as oversentimental.
Middle class isn’t really a thing. Rich kid could be either bourgeois or wealthier working class but the idea of a middle class is not as it’s not a thing. The middle class was an invention by the bourgeois to divide the working class and create divisions. We should resolutely oppose the usage of such terminology
I mean there are working people who get all their money from wages and but still make 10x more than some of the working class. Those people could be considered middle class.
They aren’t a different class. Those people still don’t own the means of production and are hence working class
Yep, class is a concept built on what reproduces society, in our capitalist case that means how you interact with production. There might be some highly specific classes, technically, but those will be reduced to their simplest forms when the tensions of the society are heightened.
Guy seems to be a shitty person and wage thief from other context provided in the comments. Also, terrible taste in food.
However, without that context and going by the post comment, it really seems a bit like unproductive bucket-crabbing and othering of fellow working-class people for winning the genetic lottery and not being born in poverty in a shit, hierarchical system based on inequality. Basically, to me, it seems like doing the work of promoting division in the working-class for free.
Should someone stuck under the thumb of an agricultural or meat processing plant wage-slaver think the same of yourself? World's shit enough without the in-fighting.
Dunk on this guy because he's a wage thief or has no culinary taste, not because he makes at least enough to rent a cardboard box in a nice part of Stockton.
If he was sharing this like "hey look at this" maybe, but they say "wow I had NO CLUE"
Who the fuck doesn't realize theyve spent more than 25k in 1 year, thats more than I make even!
Solid point. Makes me think the original post was intended as something like a "humble brag". I highly doubt that anyone making less than 7 figures is not going to realize that they spent $25k.
I wasn't trying to other anyone, i was being kind of genuine: how are we as communists meant to find common ground with people so disconnected from the concept of economic hardship that they can throw money around like this? normally you can communicate your ideas to people and be understood (even by conservatives if you phrase it right) because at the end of the day, most people under capitalism are fucked over and living under capitalism sucks, but for this guy it presumably doesn't suck. how do you get it through to someone like this that the current system is unbearable? because surely it doesn't feel unbearable from where he's standing.
I'm a leftist (anarchist) and have experienced poverty, middle income, and various places in between. I have colleagues that absolutely don't notice that they're being fucked and have made organizing a pipe dream because of it (might be a good change to come from the LLM parasitism but I'm not holding my breath).
how do you get it through to someone like this that the current system is unbearable?
I'd suggest that, in many cases, we can't. It's like a cult for some, being in denial that the rug can be yanked out from under them inspite of numerous examples in the last decades, and they may never snap out of it until they get burned. Others may be well aware or open to learn. Best to build postive mutually-supportive community, educate, and welcome those that wish to help.
What I'd say is a good thing to keep in mind is that all working-class people, regardless of income, face some kind of struggle. Economic, health, family, or any number of other things. If it weren't known that this guy was a shit person with shit taste, I could think of a number of reasons from my experiences and those of people that I've known that could result in similar expenses.
For example, if one were a sole provider, with a disabled spouse, needing to commute 3-4 hours to afford to support their family in a high COL area, I can see such costs being accrued as it would be the only way to keep everyone fed.
That's one of the "lovely" features of the currently widespread economic systems, wherever your income lands, there's something waiting to worry about to keep you from spending too much time thinking about reorganizing society to allow everyone to benefit from technological advances, rather than a hereditary oligarchy. Solidarity is how we win.
Copy-pasting my comment from the previous thread:
At first, I assumed it was satire.
Then, I went to his Twitter profile and it didn't look like satire but I couldn't understand how an editor for (what I assumed to be) a local newspaper could make enough to blow $25K/year on delivery.
But looking through the replies, I found someone link to this article
Jason Steen, the owner of hyper-local, digital media operations critics say sensationalize arrests that are minor, violent, graphic, bizarre or just embarrassing, is preparing for his own public brush with criminal and civil legal matters.
Steen's former employees at Scoop: Clarksville claim he owes tens of thousands in wages, dating to November. He's facing at least four pending civil suits. His next court date is scheduled for March 31.
and this one
Rising comedian Josh Black has set his sights on Scoop: Nashville, the local outlet most notorious for posting mugshots of recent and embarrassing arrests. Black also takes aim at the site’s founder, Jason Steen, for recent disparaging comments made about Black women activists — and in response, Steen posted a since-deleted tweet that he would "restart" the practice of publishing victims' names and addresses.
“For some reason, Scoop: Nashville likes to attack poor and working class people,” says Black in the opening of a new video, citing the mugshot-shaming that grew the website’s brand. He adds that the website especially targets Black people, people experiencing homelessness and those struggling with substance abuse. “He’s consciously assisting in the mass incarceration of Black people.”
Black also points to the shockingly high incarceration rate in North Nashville, saying, “Scoop: Nashville is handing out a hotline number … so you can get more of them locked up.” The comedian also mentions that Steen has a criminal record as well — a felony theft charge against Steen came up during his bid for circuit court clerk in Montgomery County.
The mugshot-posting has also been a source of profit — as Black notes, the site and others owned by Steen charged money for the removal of such posts. (The options no longer appear to be on Scoop sites, though Steen’s defense of the practice out of state remains online.) Steen is also pleased with the advertising he gets from bail bond companies.
and it all started to make sense...
previous thread
oh fuck i've been really online lately but i still wasn't online enough
i even checked the last few pages of new before i posted this in case someone had done it firstNo worries, it happens!
This might be little pie-in-the-sky, but I'd love to see something like automatic OCR'd alt text for images containing text on Lemmy (with the option to correct/provide manual alt-text). Not only would it greatly improve accessibility, it could also be leveraged for repost/relevance detection.
lemmygrad has an OCR bot that we can summon now courtesy of @CannotSleep420@lemmygrad.ml
But building it into lemmy would be very neat ngl and would open up things like repost detection
to try it out tag @OCRBot@lemmygrad.ml (purposefully unlinked this to not trigger it which I guess didn't work lmao)
I can't believe anyone still uses twitter, I just tried to look this clown up but twitter keeps shitting itself and not loading anything correctly
What kind of sick person likes the food from Hooter's enough to buy it on Door Dash?
Actually paying to have hooters and cracker barrel delivered????
Suddenly I feel less bad about the amount of money I spend on forty year old computers
I probably have my own set of disagreeable vices, but this is a wild amount of cash for marked up, shit food.
I know this isn’t the main point of the post but I don’t think we should use the term middle class. It is based around the division of the working class and isn’t actually a different class as the people still have the same relation to the means of production. (As well as implying upper and lower class which are a judgement). If we mean those who work with the bourgeois, they are still working class but just class traitors. Being a class traitor doesn’t mean someone changed class
What you are describing seems to be more petite-bourgeois. By using the term middle class, we are essentially trying to create a new class by dividing the working class
Hey, if jason wasn't spending $3000 at chili's, who's going to help our teachers make ends meet?
This dumbass spends my family's restaurant budget on Applebee's alone, jfc. That, and it's delivery Applebee's.
