TirithRR wrote:
You know... what I read on these boards, where the majority of people (or at least those most out spoken) seem to be in favor the the democratic choice this election, is completely different than what I hear around the shop floor at work from the employees.
These are middle class blue collar workers living in Michigan, and there seems to be an overwhelming majority who are talking in favor of McCain.
I don't know what to think about it.
Welcome to Social Science in action.
I won't go into what the old "Lower", "Middle" and "Upper" Classes used to mean, and the old divisions within those.
In modern Australia we are taught that we are NOT a "Classless" society. However, movement between "Classes" is now much more fluid, and can often happen on people's own personal preferences and decision making, and also, what we have is now much more like a mosaic of social groupings, instead of a rigid, linear, ladder-like, hierarchy. Of course, some social groupings still sort of have a relationship with the old definitions of Lower, Middle, and Upper Classes, but you have to look carefully, because they might not be what you expect.
Take for example a social grouping that is filled with people who love cars and sports, swear and drink a lot, wear very relaxed, informal clothes on most occasions, party quite a bit, hate reading, don't have huge vocabularies, are bored to death by the arts, particularly opera or ballet, and don't care much for politics, and who have a lot of very wealthy members of that group, and/or members who also incidentally personally socially know a lot of people
in politics, who are running the country, (they bump into each other and party with each other at The Grand Prix, the races, the football final) and therefor the first lot have quite a bit of real if informal political power, by shaping the perceptions of the second lot about what is popular and wanted by the "common man", not to mention what they have an unconsious bias towards because their friends like it.
In one way, all your fellow people on the shop floor are there from self-selection. In another way, they are also there from selective pressures that their environment put on them while they were growing up. Both their own self choices and the outside pressures on them put them where they are at work at the moment.
In exactly the same way, self-selection and outward pressures put all of us game-forum people into THIS computer-based, long-distance, Social Forum in our leisure time.
If you did a study on all the people here in The Asylum/OOT, and a study on all the people at your place of work, you would probably find that on average The Asylum people share certain similarities in backgrounds, life-histories, and personal tastes. On average your work-mates would share with each other a different set of backgrounds, life-histories, and personal tastes. With those two different sets of backgrounds/tastes, it is NOT surprising that there are two (on average) sets of social philosophies, and therefor two (on average) sets of political beliefs about
what means will successfully secure the safety, wellbeing, and happiness of the American people.
Edited, Sep 25th 2008 9:16am by Aripyanfar
