[lbo-talk] Re: lbo-talk Digest, Vol 36, Issue 174

[Jim Straub]

Here here.  All opinion polls of what workers are most trusted rank the same
two jobs at the top of the list: firefighters and nurses.  All my experience
in a healthcare workers union is that those polls reflect reality: people
really do trust nurses, because nurses really do have generally high ethical
standards that probably spring in part from the psychological makeup of a
working-class person who decides they're going to take a very demanding
high-skill job in healing people.  The many awful and broken aspects of our
healthcare system aren't the fault of the nurses or other workers in it.  I
will take a look at that study, but any gobbledygook about althusser and
anxiety in institutions etc etc misses the obvious reality that nurses are
seen as, and are, beloved and trustworthy high-skill workers.  A great,
great deal of our big-picture strategy on rebuilding the labor movement
involves putting nurses front and center on a lot of our battles, bc the
public is less likely to turn against nurses than "lazy overpaid
public-sector workers" or whatever.  Sciensism and anti-humanism in
althusser?  What on earth do these words mean?  This is why I always fly off
the handle and say things like leftists need to get out of the academy and
rejoin planet earth.


>
>
> Just think a little.  Nurses were liked and respected among the people
> I knew in my Schnectady childhood mostly because they were the only
> "profession" the General Electric workers and the shopkeepers could
> relate to.  The nurses were all from the same social background as my
> family people where-as the doctors were often respected and feared but
> were obviously educated and from a different class.  Friends of my
> mother often aspired to be nurses as the one "profession" truly open
> to them, which could provide them with independence.  In many ways
> nursing was considered a "working class profession.
>
> Further, it was nurses that did most of the caring, that actually
> talked to patients about what the doctors said.  The attitude of my
> mother and my family toward nurses remained just about the same for
> many years.
>
> Anecdotal for sure, but where does any of what Ted presents fit into
> any of this?
>
> >
> > This will also explain the association between psychotic psychopathology
> and
> > the misidentification of "science" with "anti-humanism" as in Althusser.
> >
>
> Oh, yes you are so silly, my dear boy.
>
>
>
>
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