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I Used to Write for Sports Illustrated. Now I Deliver Packages for Amazon (2018)

theatlantic.com

21–30 of 292 posts

Re: I Used to Write for Sports Illustrated. Now I Deliver Packages for Amazon (2018)

#21
post #12

> Lurching west in stop-and-go traffic on I-80 that morning, bound for Berkeley and a day of delivering in the rain, I had a low moment, dwelling on how far I’d come down in the world. Then I snapped out of it. I haven’t come down in the world. What’s come down in the world is the business model that sustained Time Inc. for decades. I’m pretty much the same writer, the same guy. I haven’t gone anywhere. My feet are t…

Every argument against Amazon-the-employer I have read recently seems to pretend that the people who work there have no choice but to work for Amazon, as if they didn't pick the job for themselves out of the array of possible options available to them.

I have a lot of issues with the way Amazon operates, but precisely nobody is forced to work there. This article does a good job of pointing that out.

Re: I Used to Write for Sports Illustrated. Now I Deliver Packages for Amazon (2018)

#22
post #3

> It’s been healthy for me, a fair-haired Anglo-Saxon with a Roman numeral in my name (John Austin Murphy III) This is what assimilation looks like. Someone with an Irish name calling themselves Anglo-Saxon. It’s like a Hispanic person calling themselves Latinx, proof that they have lost all organic connection to the culture of their ancestors.

Please can you explain more? I’m interested

On the hispanic comment, Spanish is a naturally gendered language, you cannot form a sentence without giving gender to at least the subject, for example "la doctora toma el café por la mañana" would translate to "the (female) doctor drinks (male) coffee by the (female) morning" because English is a mostly gender neutral language you would loose all gender information by literally translating that sentence.

Now if we take the gender out of every word in that sentence it would look something like "lx doctorx toma (we loose el, here) café por lx mañana", el wasn't necessary in the sentence to beging with, so that's fine, but the rest of the sentence becomes pretty hard to read to anyone that speaks Spanish, there's no practical way of pronouncing that unless you use the English pronunciation of the letter x.

To add more depth to this, in spanish to give a gender neutral statement, you default to the male version of the noun, for example, for a group that has boys and girls, you would just refer to them as "los niños", people feel this could be dismissive of girls, if there is at least one boy in a group of girls you'd say "los niños" and depending of the context it is implied that the group has both girls and boys, so in some latin american governments they are required by etiquette to form sentences like "las niñas y los niños" instead of just "los niños" this is called around here "inclusive language" but even then most Spanish speaking people think that is impractical and unnecessary.

That said, the latinx movement is kind of relevant in Argentina IIRC, but in most other latin american countries the idea will be met with a lot of resistance and rejection.

Re: I Used to Write for Sports Illustrated. Now I Deliver Packages for Amazon (2018)

#23
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are not all white people Anglo Saxon? I don’t bother to call myself anything other than white, Anglo Saxon, European, Caucasian. It wouldn’t make sense otherwise. I have Irish, English, Italian, and post world war 2 immigrated Polish direct ancestors. I don’t know what else to call myself nor do I particularly care. I don’t have a strong personal sense of identity tied up with any of those things. They are just words…

Those are fighting words in Europe. We are very serious about our ethnicism. Akin to saying that someone from Philly might as well be from LA, it’s all just a city. Or that the Warriors might as well be the New York Yankees, it’s just sports. PS; this is why Italians, Irish, Polish etc weren’t considered white until pretty late into the 1900’s in USA – not anglo-saxon

That is nationalism. Northern French genes look like anglo-saxon or viking while southern France genes looks Ibarian or Italian. The generic pool in europe doesn't map to one country one set of genes usually. Some do better than others. At what point does someone become French considering it has been a melting pot for a long time?

Re: I Used to Write for Sports Illustrated. Now I Deliver Packages for Amazon (2018)

#24
post #3

> It’s been healthy for me, a fair-haired Anglo-Saxon with a Roman numeral in my name (John Austin Murphy III) This is what assimilation looks like. Someone with an Irish name calling themselves Anglo-Saxon. It’s like a Hispanic person calling themselves Latinx, proof that they have lost all organic connection to the culture of their ancestors.

Please can you explain more? I’m interested

Murphy is the Anglicized form of an Irish name, Ó Murchú. One of the author’s paternal line ancestors came from Ireland, a land conquered and colonized by the English, i.e. the Anglo-Saxons. It would be one thing to say he had a honky ass white name, a cracker name, that would be in the American says American thing, who cares category. But to identify as Anglo-Saxon, an ethnic category!?! Not terribly surprising given the use of that most American of making customs, the numeral[1], but still. In much the same way as someone with Irish ancestry calling themselves Anglo fucking Saxon tells you something about their attachment to any Irish ancestry you learn something about anyone with ancestors who spoke Spanish if they self-identify as Latinx. You learn that they don’t care about the Spanish language, at all. And you learn that they use an ephitet invented by Anglos, for use by people who speak English

> only 23% of U.S. adults who self-identify as Hispanic or Latino have heard of the term Latinx, and just 3% say they use it to describe themselves, according to a nationally representative, bilingual survey of U.S. Hispanic adults conducted in December 2019 by Pew Research Center.

https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...

[1] If you are not a monarch giving yourself a numeral is pretentious.

Re: I Used to Write for Sports Illustrated. Now I Deliver Packages for Amazon (2018)

#25
post #12

> Lurching west in stop-and-go traffic on I-80 that morning, bound for Berkeley and a day of delivering in the rain, I had a low moment, dwelling on how far I’d come down in the world. Then I snapped out of it. I haven’t come down in the world. What’s come down in the world is the business model that sustained Time Inc. for decades. I’m pretty much the same writer, the same guy. I haven’t gone anywhere. My feet are t…

I felt bad for him in the moment when he talked about being judged for being a senior and doing a "menial" job. Being a delivery driver is certainly not a high status job but I think it's a reminder not to allow ourselves to look down on any particular role in society. We need all these types of work for the gears to keep turning.

Re: I Used to Write for Sports Illustrated. Now I Deliver Packages for Amazon (2018)

#26
post #21
post #12

> Lurching west in stop-and-go traffic on I-80 that morning, bound for Berkeley and a day of delivering in the rain, I had a low moment, dwelling on how far I’d come down in the world. Then I snapped out of it. I haven’t come down in the world. What’s come down in the world is the business model that sustained Time Inc. for decades. I’m pretty much the same writer, the same guy. I haven’t gone anywhere. My feet are t…

Every argument against Amazon-the-employer I have read recently seems to pretend that the people who work there have no choice but to work for Amazon, as if they didn't pick the job for themselves out of the array of possible options available to them. I have a lot of issues with the way Amazon operates, but precisely nobody is forced to work there. This article does a good job of pointing that out.

People get forced to work in jobs they don't want to all of the time.

The array of possible jobs could be one or none.

If a basic income existed your point could be true. That's not reality today.

Re: I Used to Write for Sports Illustrated. Now I Deliver Packages for Amazon (2018)

#27
post #6
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please can you explain more? I’m interested

Generally speaking, Irish people would be of Celtic or Norman (Which I'll still probably get some pushback for saying.) ancestry. Anglo-Saxons settled the rest of the area and ever since there's been some type of issue between the groups. An Irish person describing themselves as Anglo-Saxon is entirely divorced from the roots of where many Irish people are descended, there has always been a lot of trying to erase and…

Note that no one callled them Normans before the 1800s. They called themselves English when they conquered Ireland. The Irish (Gaels) called them Saxons (Sassenach) or foreigners (Gall). After the conversion of the English to Protestantism there was a yawning chasm between the Old English (Catholic) and the New, but no one ever used Norman contemporaneously.

Re: I Used to Write for Sports Illustrated. Now I Deliver Packages for Amazon (2018)

#28

> It’s been healthy for me, a fair-haired Anglo-Saxon with a Roman numeral in my name (John Austin Murphy III) This is what assimilation looks like. Someone with an Irish name calling themselves Anglo-Saxon. It’s like a Hispanic person calling themselves Latinx, proof that they have lost all organic connection to the culture of their ancestors.

How do you "lose all organic connection to the culture of your ancestors" simply by calling yourself Latinx? You're surely not suggesting they abandon the traditions, holidays, food, music, clothing, dancing, and all of the rest of their cultural connection, simply because of one label?

I am an Irish-American who plays the music, hates the food, but if I wanted to call myself of "European" ancestry, that wouldn't abandon all of my musical culture, it may just be a trendy label in the zeitgeist.

Re: I Used to Write for Sports Illustrated. Now I Deliver Packages for Amazon (2018)

#29
post #26
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every argument against Amazon-the-employer I have read recently seems to pretend that the people who work there have no choice but to work for Amazon, as if they didn't pick the job for themselves out of the array of possible options available to them. I have a lot of issues with the way Amazon operates, but precisely nobody is forced to work there. This article does a good job of pointing that out.

People get forced to work in jobs they don't want to all of the time. The array of possible jobs could be one or none. If a basic income existed your point could be true. That's not reality today.

The array of possible unskilled jobs in almost every populated place is almost always >1.

It turns out that Amazon actually competes for labor in a vast market for same. So many people work there because they have to be a better option than most unskilled labor jobs because they have so many packages to deliver.

Re: I Used to Write for Sports Illustrated. Now I Deliver Packages for Amazon (2018)

#30
post #8
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please can you explain more? I’m interested

The Anglo-Saxons inhabited England, not the rest of the British isles. The term more-or-less corresponds to racially English, or culturally English. The people in Wales, Scotland and Ireland were the Celts, with some subdivisions (Picts etc). But it looks like both terms are more loaded in the USA [1], so I don't want to speculate on the intent of the comment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxons#Legacy

> The Anglo-Saxons inhabited England, not the rest of the British isles. The term more-or-less corresponds to racially English, or culturally English.

This isn’t true. The Lowland Scots are no less culturally Anglo-Saxon than the English. They were slightly less successful than the English at extirpating all traces of Celtic culture from their homeland but it wasn’t for want of trying.

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