#inequality

In a capitalist society there are always inequalities of class and wealth. People who inherit money and property will always see themselves as being superior to those who have to work for it. ↗

— Sally Wentworth

#equality #inequality #equality

[M]en, though they know full well how much women are worth and how great the benefits we bring them, nonetheless seek to destroy us out of envy for our merits. It's just like the crow, when it produces white nestlings: it is so stricken by envy, knowing how black it is itself, that it kills its own offspring out of pique. ↗

— Moderata Fonte

#dignity #empowerment #envy #feminism #gender

Le privilège économique détenu par les hommes, leur valeur sociale, le prestige du mariage, l'utilité d'un appui masculin, tout engage les femmes à vouloir ardenment plaire aux hommes. Elles sont encore dans l'ensemble en situation de vassalité. Il s'ensuit que la femme se connaît et se choisit non en tant qu'elle existe pour soi mais telle que l'homme la définit. ↗

— Simone de Beauvoir

#gender-roles #men #women #men

Let louts learn [their] lesson and stifle their malicious talk! When they are enjoying themselves on the pub bench, with a jug and a glass and a barman there to serve up, then their chatter and their fun is to pass judmgent on some innocent girl -- would to God they'd drown in a beer barrel for it! ↗

— Anonymous

#gender #inequality #men #misogyny #morality

The great hatred of capitalism in the hearts of the oppressed, ancient and modern, I think, stems not merely from the ensuing vast inequality in wealth, and the often unfair and arbitrary nature of who profits and who suffers, but from the silent acknowledgement that under a free market economy the many victims of the greed of the few are still better off than those under the utopian socialism of the well-intended. It is a hard thing for the poor to acknowledge benefits from their rich moral inferiors who never so intended it. (p.272) ↗

— Victor Davis Hanson

#economics #income-disparity #inequality #military-history #progressivism

At its most basic, the logic of 'meritocracy' is ironclad: putting the most qualified, best equipped people into the positions of greates responsibility and import...But my central contention is that our near-religious fidelity to the meritocratic model comes with huge costs. We overestimate the advantages of meritocracy and underappreciate its costs, because we don't think hard enough about the consequences of the inequality it produces. As Americans, we take it as a given that unequal levels of achievement are natural, even desirable. Sociologist Jermole Karabel, whose work looks at elite formation, once said he 'didnt think any advanced democracy is as obsessed with equality of opportunity or as relatively unconcerned with equality of condition' as the United States. This is our central problem. And my proposed solution for correcting the excesses of our extreme version of meritocracy is quite simple: make America more equal ↗

— Christopher L. Hayes

#injustice #meritocracy #equality

Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#dignity #double-standards #empowerment #feminism #gender

Utopianism also finds a receptive audience among the society's disenchanted, disaffected, dissatisfied, and maladjusted who are unwilling or unable to assume responsibility for their own real or perceived conditions but instead blame their surroundings, 'the system,' and others. They are lured by the false hopes and promises of utopian transformation and the criticisms of the existing society, to which their connection is tentative or nonexistent. Improving the malcontent's lot becomes linked to the utopian cause. Moreover, disparaging and diminishing the successful and accomplished becomes an essential tactic. No one should be better than anyone else, regardless of the merits or values of his contributions. By exploiting human frailties, frustrations, jealousies, and inequities, a sense of meaning and self-worth is created in the malcontent's otherwise unhappy and directionless life. Simply put, equality in misery -- that is, equality of result or conformity -- is advanced as a just, fair, and virtuous undertaking. Liberty, therefore, is inherently immoral, except where it avails equality. ↗

— Mark R. Levin

#malcontents #utopianism #equality

American journalists tend to treat inequality as a fact of life. But it needn't be. ↗

— Eric Alterman

#fact #inequality #journalists #life #needn

Half the U.S. population owns barely 2 percent of its wealth, putting the United States near Rwanda and Uganda and below such nations as pre-Arab Spring Tunisia and Egypt when measured by degrees of income inequality. ↗

— Eric Alterman

#below #degrees #egypt #half #income