I used my own experience because I know it illustrates the experience of others as understood through reams of research. I also did research on the topic, spending time with, not only unemployed people, but getting inside a corporation that had just downsized -- famously hitting the front page as among the decades' "corporate killers." But, once again, http://wstheasschomp.blogspot.com projects his own foibles on everyone else, assuming they make thoughtless, sweeping generalizations as he does every other post.
As I said at my blog, this crap matters to me because I spent my late teen and adult years living in a place like Flint. I did years of research on the topic. I know the lives of the unemployed better than nearly everyone here. And, when Manwich thinks he merely reveals himself capable only of understanding abstract journal articles on the same issue, and unable to actually understand the same theorizing refracted through the lives of an intelligent, self-reflective individual. He refuses to give anyone a benefit of a doubt and prefers instead to see people as he once saw himself: klewles about how he engaged, for years, in his own exploitation. He's so enabmored of his epiphany, he's convinced himself that no one else gets it and he must educatie and proselytize.
I guess it's hard to think someone's intelligent and self-reflective, so he thinks they are a drunk and is then too much of a chicken shit to say what he knows he shouldn't say in front of the gang.
Cary Asshat Tennis tells people to stop and think, maybe they try harder than they have to maybe. Maybe they are unreasonably wedded to perfection. Etc. Etc.
I guess I have a lot more faith in human beings than Wojtek - You are Barking at the Wrong Tree - Sokolowski (Doing the Yoshie: http://blog.pulpculture.org/2005/10/22/almost-won-the-worlds-biggest-asshat-award/ ) or Cary Tennis. I happen to believe they've actually thought long and hard about their situation and hardly need the advice of Salon's resident self-help industry representative: stop and think whether you really need to work that hard. I suspect 95% of people driven to the edge of insanity by such situations actually do that.
But, repeatedly, WS reveals that he thinks people are barking dogs. Hence his fondness for the double confessional I posted about at the blog. http://blog.pulpculture.org/2005/10/22/wrong-trees/
I'll reply to Martin at the blog. I have an mini-treatise on the way in which people use such expressions to rhetorically close themselves off from criticism. It's a perverse form of logical fallacy. An admission, a confession, that you've just made a personal attack on someone. By attacking yourself, too, it's somehow supposed to be acceptable.
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