Featured Image:
What the Image is, is a story of the cowboy employment industry in Australia and how governments have continued to allow a deregulated industry to rip off the taxpayer.
It is time for accountability against the corrupt (intellectually if not by law). In this example, are three images of emails sent to me by the Adzuna (A.I.) machine.
The first email in this series began well. An Education Support Officer job was advised. This was at the beginning of the month (1 August). By the end of the next week, the communications between me, “the client” and the Adzuna machine degraded horribly. They say “ValueMyCV” but the machine-thinking, “they,” have not read or acknowledged my own CV. The message is to apply for a job as a ‘Plant Operator’. There is nothing wrong with being employed as a ‘Plant Operator’, but that is not my list of high-skills and experience. One is tempted to swear and call these “cowboys” insulting names, but the best I have is “stupid” in the full academic-scholarly semantics of the term.
Let’s be clear, and make the scholarly dismissal of the idiocy of the anti-intellectual dismissal. The problem is the systems function and NOT A GLITCH! (idiot, even if you trying to be clever by being dishonest). Governments have allowed this foul game to grow in civil society, damaging our civility in creating a ‘slavery employment national system’. Increasingly are those who are ending up paying for their own highly-skilled and experienced professional jobs. And society and governments go along with this corruption since there is a strong anti-intellectual cultural paradigm in Australia – cultural blindspots and cognition failures (of thinking) beyond the Nietzschean herd. And the cynics will say, “Oh well, it is a pity, but nothing will change.” On the comprehensive knowledge, “no, idiot, the claim is false.” The systems are determined by the choices of many persons, and, “no, hard determinism has not been established as knowledge and in most cases, the claim is mocked, even by politicians who want to instrumentally use the schema criticism (instrumental rationality; in these cases, politicians are being hypocritical).” The problem is that employers and the employment industry want professional thinkers and practitioners to do the job in exactly how they want the job done. This may not be all employers but the vase majority of the fool population are narrow thinkers and cannot comprehend the big picture. You have to understand that the professional work is self-directed and self-understood, and self-responsible. You have to ask, what is the damage being done in the Australian economy? John Quiggin?
“Oops, no matches found at the moment!” says the Adzuna machine two weeks later. Is this only a personal experience? Is this the rantings of a maverick? Well, the educated and intelligent world does not think so.
Kelly (1991) demonstrates that this “ranting,” if “ranting” it be, goes back into four centuries of clear (intellectual) thinking. Jonathan Swift (1666-1745) was criticizing the Irish Economy in the 1720s, in the same way as my criticism of the Australian culture-economy in the 21st century.
Currently, the Australian government is being faced by a forceful societal criticism of policies and practices around gambling. The Australian government policies (of both major parties) on employment and higher education are the same model as their policy on gambling (to date). The Australian governments took a bet on “job-ready,” and similar policies, and the bet was lost. The contrast in the better thinking over policies on employment and higher education is reflected in better thinking over the abuses in the gambling industry. Eadington (1998) explains the better thinking for gambling:
The first argument goes to the core of the motivation for gambling. If consumers are gambling for the entertainment value derived, then they are purchasing gambling as entertainment in the same sense as people who are entertained by going fishing, by attending the opera or theater, or by reading popular books. On the other hand, if consumers are primarily motivated by an expectation or hope that gambling will raise them to a higher economic status, then such behavior may indeed be foolish. This elicits still another question, however: Should foolish behavior be prohibited or otherwise penalize. (58)
…
Individuals are far more prone to define their own concepts of right and wrong at the present time than, say, two or more generations ago. The ability of organized religions and the state to dictate values to and influence the behavior of their constituents has diminished in the face of many challenging and controversial topics, including divorce, abortion, homosexuality, euthanasia, and birth control. Furthermore, governments and some religions have themselves become important purveyors of gambling services in the form of lotteries, bingo, and other forms of charitable gambling. (58)
…
…one can challenge the underlying motivations for gambling as foolish, irresponsible, or irrational. As a result, gamblers need to be protected from their own folly or stupidity with prohibition or with various constraints…(59)
You have to ask why do Government Ministers not “get it”, or is it wilful ignorance, that they do not want to “get it”. Australian citizens need to be protected from their own folly or stupidity with prohibition or with various constraints against the cowboy employment industry and their cowboy employers, as just as much from the corrupt gambling industry.
It is not that these Ideal truths are not known, they are very well known by the educated and intelligent classes, but not the political classes – most being opportunists (a few exceptions). Even very conservative sources speak of, and condemn, the lie that most of us no longer want to live with. Indeed, Naím (2005) calls it out as corruption in a Foreign Policy article, called, “Missing Links: It’s the Illicit Economy, Stupid: How Big Business Taught Criminals to go Global.”
It is, also, not that my article on stupidity, for politics and sociology, is so new. Dexter (1962) published on exactly the same question, in 1962 (!!!! ; the analysis in 1962 is out of date, but not the critical cognition).
More recently Peterman (2018) sums up the argument for abandoning cowboy industries, introduce more intelligent employment policies through the best of what we know in the benefit and risks, and of the vicious harms and human flourishing, that the economy could produce:
This Article makes the case for protecting socioeconomic status (SES) under discrimination statutes that govern employment, housing, education, voting, public accommodations, and credit/lending. While others have argued that poverty should be a protected class under the Fourteenth Amendment, the courts have rejected this idea. The possibility of protecting SES under discrimination statutes has received little consideration. I argue that this idea deserves more serious attention. I advance four arguments in favor of adding SES to the list of protected traits. Two moral, one political, and one legal.
First and most straightforward, the values animating discrimination law apply to poverty: Existing discrimination laws protect traits that are subject to pervasive and illegitimate social bias. They cover both immutable and mutable traits. The logic animating these laws applies to poverty, regardless of whether a person was born poor or falls into poverty later in life.
Second, due to the association between race and poverty, SES-based discrimination reinforces and perpetuates racial inequality. A comprehensive strategy for addressing racial discrimination must also address SES-based discrimination.
The third argument is political: Many policies that have an adverse racial impact have an adverse impact on poor people of all races— e.g., voter ID laws or zoning laws restricting multi-unit housing. Framing disparate-impact claims in terms of SES would highlight the extent that lower-SES people of all races share common experience of marginalization. This might be a step toward building a multiracial coalition focused on economic inequality—a longstanding goal of many progressives.
The fourth argument is legal: Some have argued that racial disparate- impact law should trigger scrutiny under the Fourteenth Amendment because it requires racially motivated decision making. Because poverty is not a suspect class under the Fourteenth Amendment, disparate-impact provisions targeting socioeconomic disparities would not raise the same constitutional concern.
I explain how protections against SES discrimination could be administered, as a practical matter. Prohibiting SES discrimination would not be as impractical as it might initially seem. Indeed, the practical questions associated with protecting SES are not really different from those associated with protecting race, disability, age, and other traits.
“Personal poverty may entail much the same social stigma as historically attached to certain racial or ethnic groups. But . . . personal wealth may not necessarily share the general irrelevance as a basis for legislative action that race or nationality is recognized to have.” [San Antonio Indep. Sch. Dist. v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 1, 121 (1973), Marshall, J., dissenting]
“[S]ociety’s unexamined embrace of class discrimination reflects the irony that class is both the preferred method for and the hidden obstacle to racial justice. [Audrey G. McFarlane (2009), Operatively White?: Exploring the Significance of Race and Class Through the Paradox of Black Middle-Classness, 72 Law & Contemp. Probs. 163, 163]
This is an American analysis but the fool is the one who does not think that the criticisms does not unmasks how many Australian politicians and members of our political classes mistakenly think; those who speak and think, and act, in pervasive and illegitimate social bias.
A worker is worth of his hire, give me a paid job now.
REFERENCES
Eadington, W. R. (1998). Contributions of Casino-Style Gambling to Local Economies. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 556, 53–65. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1049329
Dexter, L. A. (1962). On the Politics and Sociology of Stupidity in Our Society. Social Problems, 9(3), 221–228. https://doi.org/10.2307/799232
Kelly, J. (1991). Jonathan Swift and the Irish Economy in the 1720s. Eighteenth-Century Ireland / Iris an Dá Chultúr, 6, 7–36. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30070906
Naím, M. (2005). Missing Links: It’s the Illicit Economy, Stupid: How Big Business Taught Criminals to go Global. Foreign Policy, 151, 96–96. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30048236
Peterman, D. E. (2018). Socioeconomic Status Discrimination. Virginia Law Review, 104(7), 1283–1357. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26790710
Neville Buch
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