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Strategies are supposed to be the motives of generals. But I don’t believe any military expert would claim that the idea of attrition was invented by generals. It was indeed the operating principle of the war almost from the first day to
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“As spaces of promiscuous proximity, often lit poorly if at all, where existential fear suddenly was converted to the euphoria of being still alive and no longer having anything to lose, bunkers were also places of uncontrolled sexual encounters. The concern to discipline sexual conduct seems to have played a greater role in Great Britain than in Nazi Germany. Contrary to an idea born in the 1950s, according to which Nazism was marked by sexual repression, the anti-bourgeois dimension of the Volksgemeinschaft implied certain possibilities of sexual liberation.37 The British ‘people’s war’, on the other hand, was based far more strongly on a community founded on the bourgeois family and the need to repress sexual deviance, imputable both to women and the lower orders. As a clear sign of the particular role played by the family, the British authorities were initially against the idea of collective shelters, fearing that, in this mixing of classes, bourgeois virtue might be contaminated by the bad habits of the ‘lower orders’, leading to moral dissolution followed by a challenge to the social order. The middle classes were thus encouraged to build shelters in their gardens, which had the additional advantage of privatizing part of the costs bound up with air-raid precautions – something unthinkable in Germany, where the collective ideology of the Volksgemeinschaft was paramount.”
― Governing from the Skies: A Global History of Aerial Bombing
― Governing from the Skies: A Global History of Aerial Bombing
“Laws and regulations that corporate lobbyists are unable to persuade national democratic legislatures to enact can be repackaged and hidden in harmonization agreements masked as lengthy trade treaties, which are then ratified by legislatures without adequate scrutiny. Whatever its minor benefits, legislation by treaty represents a massive transfer of power from democratic legislatures to corporate managers and bankers. Jean-Claude Juncker, the prime minister of the tax haven Luxembourg who became the president of the European Commission from 2014 to 2019, described how the European Council systematically expanded its authority by stealth: “We decree something, then float it and wait some time to see what happens. If no clamor occurs . . . because most people do not grasp what had been decided, we continue—step by step, until the point of no return is reached.”
― The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite
― The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite
“while the impact of social class, ethnicity, and religious socialization on marital choice has been diminishing, educational homogamy has been increasing.35 In general, the college-educated population (which encompasses the upper-middle class as defined in the present study) continues to show a high degree of similarity in its cultural practices and attitudes over a wide range of areas.36 The fact that a college degree remains the best predictor of high occupational status suggests that the boundaries that this population builds between itself and others are particularly significant.37 These boundaries are likely to be more permanent, less crossable, and less resisted than the boundaries that exist between ethnic groups, for instance. They are also more likely to survive across contexts, i.e., to be carried over from the community to the workplace, and vice versa. We see again, therefore, the importance of studying in a systematic fashion the boundaries produced by college-educated people.”
― Money, Morals, & Manners: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class
― Money, Morals, & Manners: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class
“Although few research projects have addressed the relationship between class origin and level of academic employment, the existing research shows, not unsurprisingly, that the higher the level of academic employment, the higher the socioeconomic origin. Working-class teachers will generally be found at the elementary and secondary levels (with women notably overpopulating the former). Academics with professional/managerial-class origins disproportionately constitute the professorate. Further, the more elite the institution, the higher the percentage of professors who come from the professional and managerial classes; working-class teachers who have managed to slip into the professorate will be more frequently found in community and state colleges than they will at Berkeley or Harvard.4”
― This Fine Place So Far from Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class
― This Fine Place So Far from Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class
“As Betsy Leondar-Wright put it in her 2005 book, Class Matters: Few middle-class people would say we have prejudices against working-class or low-income people, of course. Our classism is often disguised in the form of disdain for Southerners or Midwesterners, religious people, patriotic people, employees of big corporations, fat or non-athletic people, [heterosexual] people with conventional gender presentation (feminine women wearing make-up; tough, burly guys), country music fans, or gun users. This disdain shows in our speech.”
― Reading Classes: On Culture and Classism in America
― Reading Classes: On Culture and Classism in America
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