• 6 Posts
  • 203 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 12th, 2023
  • acargitz@lemmy.catoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.world•Pay your employees a living wageEnglish
    1·
    27 days ago

    You take my words out of context, you willfully ignore the meaning of words you use to accuse me, you throw random accusations again while ignoring their actual meaning (“moving the goalposts”!?), and you seem to really desperately want to fit me into some kind of weird narrative. I don’t have time for you.

    US tipping culture? Bad, exploitative, should end. Support the unions. Europeans smugly pretending they are superior when Europe also has exploitative practices? Bad, should stop. Stop telling people how your own farts smell better and support the unions. That’s it, end of the line.

  • acargitz@lemmy.catoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.world•Pay your employees a living wageEnglish
    1·
    27 days ago

    The thing I’m responding to says “long live Europe”. My response specifically agrees with the dunking on american tip culture, but adds that “long live Europe” ignores exploitation in the service industry in Europe. That’s not “whataboutism”, I didn’t “pick” Europeans, the thing I was responding to already “picked” Europeans by saying “long live Europe”. I suspect you have no fucking clue what “whataboutism” actually is.

    EDIT: Brittanica:

    whataboutism, the rhetorical practice of responding to an accusation or difficult question by making a counteraccusation, by asking a different but related question, or by raising a different issue altogether. Whataboutism often serves to reduce the perceived plausibility or seriousness of the original accusation or question by suggesting that the person advancing it is hypocritical or that the responder’s misbehavior is not unique or unprecedented. Acts of whataboutism typically begin with rhetorical questions of the form “What about…?”

    Examples of whataboutism

    • A wife accuses her husband of drinking too much. He responds, “What about you? You smoke marijuana all the time.”
    • A retail business owner asks an employee if she has been taking money from a tip jar. The employee responds, “What about all the charities I support?”
    • A father asks his daughter why she was out so late. She responds, “What about that football game?”

    I’m not deflecting the accusation from the Americans and I am not American myself. I also do not raise unrelated “what about X” stuff, I am specifically pointing out to the original post that specifically says “Long Live Europe”, i.e., sets up rhetorically a distinction between guilty Americans and not guilty Europeans. Whataboutery is to say “the accusation does not stand because the accuser is also guilty”. That is NOT what I’m doing here. It is not fucking whataboutism to point out that (a) yes the accusation stands but (b) the accuser is also guilty.

    So learn the fuck what you’re talking about before throwing bullshit around.

  • acargitz@lemmy.catoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.world•Pay your employees a living wageEnglish
    4·
    28 days ago

    I absolutely want to talk about it. Let’s talk about it.

    EDIT, in the spirit of actually talking about it:

    In the North American context, in the US but also in Canada, one of the largest existing unions that organizes hospitality workers is UNITE HERE. They have done some pretty awesome strikes and mobilizations the last decade. There is a long history of hospitality union organizing that was, you know what’s coming, crushed by the red scare. Of course another thing to mention is the unionization of Starbucks, where the IWW played an important role. Overall, yea, the service sector in North America is a very important sector in the fight to reassert the rights of the working class.

    In the European context, I don’t know much beyond my own home country. I know for example that there was just on Wednesday a massive strike, fighting back against for example the egregious 13 hour day that the government has imposed, but more importantly at the complete arbitrariness that the workers are subjected to as the fucking conservatives are turning a blind eye to employer law breaking. I would love to hear more about how the working class is organizing across the EU. For example, there is an article by La Strada but I would love to know more.

    Basically, in Europe and in North America, and of course beyond the West, the working class everywhere is being squeezed also in the hospitality sector. We need to be organizing, casting aside silly divisions and organizing within the framework of internationalist solidarity. My point is that the meme tries to turn a class problem into facile euro-smugness score pointing, leaving untouched the fact that it’s the same capitalist exploitation with American and European characteristics respectively.