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Old 05-01-2009, 07:07 PM   #15 (permalink)
Willravel
... a sort of licensed troubleshooter.
 
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The peasant mentality I speak of involves blaming everyone but those responsible. They want to blame the pro-choicers, the ivy league intellectuals, the community organizers, ACORN, Clinton, the House and Senate, all of the evil "leftists", but they refuse to judge anything connected with business. I'm more than willing to admit freely that the government has had some catastrophic screw ups not only in the past but even presently, but they're unwilling or unable to admit that AIG execs don't really deserve big bonuses. They refuse to admit that big business is out to screw them just as much as any politician. They refuse to admit that some government is necessary. They're peasants, and they bow every time the duke rides by on his steed. When they're dissatisfied, they blame everyone but the person that's directly causing them that discomfort.

I think there was a recent article about this on Smirking Chimp.

Edit: Found the article:
Quote:
...actual rich people can’t ever be the target. It’s a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the master’s carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in the fields. You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit. Whatever the master does, you’re on board. When you get frisky, he sticks a big cross in the middle of your village, and you spend the rest of your life praying to it with big googly eyes. Or he puts out newspapers full of innuendo about this or that faraway group and you immediately salute and rush off to join the hate squad. A good peasant is loyal, simpleminded, and full of misdirected anger. And that’s what we’ve got now, a lot of misdirected anger searching around for a non-target to mis-punish… can’t be mad at AIG, can’t be mad at Citi or Goldman Sachs. The real villains have to be the anti-AIG protesters! After all, those people earned those bonuses! If ever there was a textbook case of peasant thinking, it’s struggling middle-class Americans burned up in defense of taxpayer-funded bonuses to millionaires. It’s really weird stuff. And bound to get weirder, I imagine, as this crisis gets worse and more complicated.
"http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/21289"

Last edited by Willravel; 05-01-2009 at 07:09 PM..
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