[lbo-talk] I don't get it?

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Sat Feb 28 04:17:15 PST 2009


At 09:08 PM 2/27/2009, Jordan Hayes wrote:
>>What I don't follow is why you and shag actually pay the extortion demand.
>
>I guess if your time is worth nothing, it'd be worth fighting.
>
>You've never unjustly paid for something just to make it go away?
>
>You've got more time than I have, apparently.
>
>/jordan

uh, why yes sir, i have! but you make more directly my point about time. I figure my time's worth, lessee, $65/hr, not including mnc or mny. :)

If I paid $350 to make it go away, that's about 5 hrs of my time, not including the original $25 and, oh, whatever interest and late fee might be reasonable. So, let's say it's more like 4 hrs. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that $350 to make it go away so I could spend my free time on other, more interesting things than making the lives miserable of some peons in some credit collection agency's call center. Not to mention the headaches entailed in trying to find a place to live with a bad credit mark on your record. Or having to deal with the cranky phone calls asking for the money.

I'd note that I had to do the same thing with the business, when some joker wouldn't pay the money he owed. Small claims court is a joke, hardly worth my time for the $500 or whatever it was he owed. In the time I'd waste in small claims court, I could have been on the phone, stirring up some gigs or job hunting.

as for solidarity, that's a load of malarkey. It reminds me of the discussions on a freelancer's list. They piss and moan about people not paying a living wage to and trying to get freelancers to work for $10/hr. Then, they'd declare anyone who *did* pick up those gigs something akin to scabs. Except there was no unionized effort to ensure a living wage, so all it was was moralizing horse shittery where the goal is to try to shame and shun people into refusing low wages.

or, perhaps more aptly, it reminds me of the "liberatory gardening" crap I've seen floating around the blogosophere. growing a garden is liberation! think of your brethren and sistren, stooping in fields, picking for 25cts a bushel and you end up paying $4 a bushel. Robbery! Theft! Grow your own veggies and stop paying the thieves.

Yeahsureright. Like the stoop migrant labor actually *asked* anyone to stop buying fruits and vegetables they picked. Like there's a labor movement that has called for a boycott on green beans and strawberries. Not.

It's just a personal frickin' choice as to how to spend your time, and how best to spend your money -- in other words, it's just *another* consumer *choice* about *consumption* turning consumption into a pathetic, sad form of politics -- only dressed about in moralizing language about what *should* be done, ostensibly in the name of solidarity with a movement that doesn't actually exist. Resisting the banks is yet another form of politics aimed at the point of consumption and personal freakin' choice.

Moishe Postone indeed. Speaking of, Robert, if you are reading: How do people say Postone's last name?

shag

-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws



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