#classism discussion

[orchidvioletindigo]

I love that we have callback technology now that means no one needs to stay on hold anymore yet the Social Security Administration with hold times exceeding two hours is still like "Nah you have to listen to our blown out hold music the whole time because our budget is $3 and we love tormenting poor people and wasting their time"

[orchidvioletindigo]

Hey if you get refunded for an Etsy purchase and receive U.S. government benefits you need to save the email identifying it as a refund because your benefits office might try to claim that the $10.10 refund you received for a faulty button is undeclared self-employment income that you have to explain if you want to continue receiving food stamps.

[orchidvioletindigo]

Speaking of attacks to U.S. welfare, the Social Security Administration is talking about cutting off phone services and requiring massively more in-person visits by applicants and recipients while also firing a bunch of staff and shutting down offices. Wait times for in-person SSA appointments already average over a month. My local office is only open 9-4 on weekdays and closed on weekends. Some folks' closest offices are over 100 miles away. A lot of people who need social security benefits are too disabled to travel.

[orchidvioletindigo]

Yeah this checks out with what I feel, paired with a general impulse to be as un-bothersome as possible to others. It's at its worst when I start a new job because I'm in a totally new environment where I don't know the procedures or all the vocabulary yet and I'm surrounded by people whose communication styles I'm not yet familiar with, piled on top by the pressure to not look stupid in front of the people who could affect my ability to earn an income.

What I've noticed adds onto this even more is being asked to communicate with people over something like an all-channels handheld radio or intercom system because then I also have to worry about taking up shared air space trying to stumble through a question or request in front of a huge audience, the person I'm trying to talk to can't cut in while I'm speaking to help interpret my thoughts, and I can't use any nonverbal cues to better explain myself or see how the other person is reacting to my words (also an issue with asking for help over the phone).

I realized the other day that the reason I didn't watch much TV as a teenager (and why I'm only now catching up on late aughts/early teens media that I missed), is because I literally didn't understand how to use our TV. My parents got a new system, and it had three remotes with a Venn diagram of functions. If someone left the TV on an unfamiliar mode, I didn't know how to get back to where I wanted to be, so I just stopped watching TV on my own altogether.

I explained all this to my therapist, because I didn't know if this was more related to my then-unnoticed autism, or to my relationship with my parents at the time (we had issues less/unrelated to neurodivergency). She told me something interesting.

In children's autism assessments, a common test is to give them a straightforward task that they cannot reasonably perform, like opening an overtight jar. The "real" test is to see, when they realize that they cannot do it on their own, if they approach a caregiver for help. Children that do not seek help are more likely to be autistic than those that do.

This aligns with the compulsory independence I've noticed to be common in autistic adults, particularly articulated by those with lower support needs and/or who were evaluated later in life. It just genuinely does not occur to us to ask for help, to the point that we abandon many tasks that we could easily perform with minor assistance. I had assumed it was due to a shared common social trauma (ie bad experiences with asking for help in the past), but the fact that this trait is a childhood test metric hints at something deeper.

My therapist told me that the extremely pathologizing main theory is that this has something to do with theory of mind, that is doesn't occur to us that other people may have skills that we do not. I can't speak for my early childhood self, or for all autistic people, but I don't buy this. Even if I'm aware that someone else has knowledge that I do not (as with my parents understanding of our TV), asking for help still doesn't present itself as an option. Why?

My best guess, using only myself as a model, is due to the static wall of a communication barrier. I struggle a lot to make myself understood, to articulate the thing in my brain well enough that it will appear identically (or at least close enough) in somebody else's brain. I need to be actively aware of myself and my audience. I need to know the correct words, the correct sentence structure, and a close-enough tone, cadence, and body language. I need draft scripts to react to possible responses, because if I get caught too off guard, I may need several minutes to construct an appropriate response. In simple day-to-day interactions, I can get by okay. In a few very specific situations, I can excel. When given the opportunity, I can write more clearly than I am ever capable of speaking.

When I'm in a situation where I need help, I don't have many of my components of communication. I don't always know what my audience knows. I don't have sufficient vocabulary to explain what I need. I don't know what information is relevant to convey, and the order in which I should convey it. I don't often understand the degree of help I need, so I can come across inappropriately urgent or overly relaxed. I have no ability to preplan scripts because I don't even know the basic plot of the situation.

I can stumble though with one or two deficiencies, but if I'm missing too much, me and the potential helper become mutually unintelligible. I have learned the limits of what I can expect from myself, and it is conceptualized as a real and physical barrier. I am not a runner, so running a 5k tomorrow does not present itself as an option to me. In the same way, if I have subconscious knowledge that an interaction is beyond my capability, it does not present itself as an option to me. It's the minimum communication requirements that prevent me from asking for help, not anything to do with the concept of help itself.

Maybe. This is the theory of one person. I'm curious if anyone else vibes with this at all.

[orchidvioletindigo]

^^^ Walmart has been doing this for decades. In the worst cases they close up shop after they've destroyed all the competition in town and ruined the local economy to the point where being there is no longer profitable enough to corporate, leaving the area a food desert.

[awretchedthing]

i think a lot of people will forget or gloss over the fact that Viktor's disability made him an outsider both topside and in the undercity. we see it in his childhood flashback - he tells corin reveck as much. he is alone because of his disability.

if you look at the character designs, season 1 Piltover characters costumes are all symmetry. for Viktor, even in act 1 when he's wearing a uniform - the exact same thing as Jayce - Viktor is asymmetrical and marked as other. not because he's kitted out like a zaunite but because of his visible disability.

i do see some arguments that Zaun is a lot more friendly to disability and pointing out the use of prosthetics. i'd argue that the only time we see this is act 2 onwards - after Silco has flooded the undercity with shimmer. after Viktor is already working on hextech with Jayce.

[orchidvioletindigo]

Surprised I haven't seen anyone point out how much it says about U.S. society that the murder of a private health insurance company's CEO is considered an assassination.

[orchidvioletindigo]

There's a certain grocery store chain in my town that I refuse to go back to because their anti-shoplifting security systems have reached an intolerable level of hostile.

The self-checkouts have cameras that flag you as a potential shoplifter if you have a coat on the bottom of your cart, if you have other bags (e.g. larger purses, unused reusable bags, bags from previous shopping) sitting inside your cart at the end of scanning, if you bag a scanned item while holding another unscanned item in your hand, if you try to scan your payment card in a way it thinks is sus. One of the last times I went, I saw a third of the people trying to do self-checkout all held up alongside me waiting for the one employee on the station to come punch in codes to let us continue our purchasing. Meanwhile there was one single regular checkout lane open; sometimes there aren't any of those open at all.

Then the door alarms at these stores go off when you leave the store with everything paid for and when you enter the store with an item to return.

>go to cvs for toothpaste and cold medicine

>hit button for employee to open the toothpaste case

>grabs it before i can

>"i have to hold this at the front for you until you check out"

>go to cold medicine aisle

>ring bell for employee to open the cough medicine case

>nobody shows up

>ring again

>nobody shows up

>check case

>case is unlocked

>take cold medicine and go to check out

>grab toothpaste from unmanned register

>have to use self checkout

>scan cold medicine

>"age verification needed please wait for employee"

>employee comes over and cards me and then leaves

>finish self checkout

>walk through literal piles of discarded receipts at exit door

another beautiful non hostile day in our great country

[orchidvioletindigo]

I think a lot of the things in those stores used to cost a dollar (not including sales tax), and that's where the names came from. Reasoning for this is I remember that in the 2000s stores like Target had dollar sections full of similar things you could buy for $1 before sales tax, and many fast food restaurants had fairly extensive dollar menus with items that also cost $1 before sales tax. Then they all gradually changed into "value sections" or "value menus" where the items cost between $2-4 before tax, until the value sections and some value menus were eliminated entirely. I believe a similar thing happened with dollar stores except that they didn't rebrand or shut down.

They are going to shut down this app

[taylorvaughnsaidso]

So interesting, as an American I just had this conversation not too long ago with a friend from the UK - we were talking about the latest season of You and their depiction of classism of the UK vs US. To put in plainly she explained this exactly, what James is saying.

Michael Gambon seems a little out of touch with that perception if you ask me.

^^^^

[delumineight]

a lot of the ron weasley hate is solely based around classism. so many people have said it before but somehow none of you seem to get it. especially when the hate comes from a shipping perspective, insinuating that hermione would be better with harry or draco who have insane amounts of money to their name.

a main reason why there are so many romione antis comes from the idea that ron isn’t enough for her. but what exactly do you mean by not “enough” for her? what is he lacking. it’s not intellectual ability; throughout the series ron is the only one to challenge hermione and her point of views while it seems, in a way, that everyone else is too scared to do so. it isn’t attractiveness, as if that really matters, he’s canonically the [one of] tallest completely human characters, covered in freckles, with a boyish grin, and other features that aren’t too shabby. his loyalty isn’t in question, even though he leaves during the horcrux hunt he comes back, and harry and hermione are downright miserable without him. people argue his “jealousy” and things of that nature, but all in all that roots back to classism. people say that he ruined “the best night of hermione’s life” in reference to the yule ball… let’s be real, do we really think that was the best night of her life? it’s literally wizard prom, and anyone who has been to a prom knows it just for the photos and to say you went after three hours of dancing and sweating around your peers.

the real reason ron weasley is hated is because he’s poor. which, you think, would not be an issue considering how much he is downright bullied for it throughout the series. he’s hated because he’s not rich, because people don’t think he can provide hermione with “what she needs” (which also begins to destroy hermione’s character), and because some of you base his entire personality around how he acted at 14 and when a piece voldemort himself was controlling a great deal of his soul.

[orchidvioletindigo]

Same explanation applies to why airports and airlines are so lackadaisical about losing your checked luggage themselves. Your wheelchair and your grandma's ashes aren't bombs so who gives a shit if they disappear?

[orchidvioletindigo]

I once again want to say fuck every charity that requires recipients to participate in Christian rituals or classes in order to receive badly needed basic necessities. I don't believe in hell but if I did I think holding survival needs for ransom so you can try to coercively convert poor people would get you sent there. No god worth following would sign off on telling people they must either pray or starve.

[orchidvioletindigo]

Indiana also has vote by mail. I've been voting that way for years.

I was today years old when i found out that i was allowed time off to vote. Something no boss has ever told me.

[wonder-worker]

people really do not know what they're talking about when it comes to Elizabeth Woodville's social status, huh?