Oh look, yet another symptom of the real problem being top vs bottom, not male vs female, or left vs right.
Top vs bottom and left vs right are the same problem.
Not even remotely. But enjoy your distractions.
You’re so right, when Marx described how the wealth was being concentrated at the top, extracted from the bottom, he must’ve been referring to something else.
When did he describe it moving left to right or right to left? As far as I know, he didn’t have too much of a problem with money moving laterally
Hmm, if only there was some other place you could go that didn’t require you to spend money. This “third space” could be available to anyone and everyone with no specific requirements for participation… Nah, that’s probably communism or whatever. <-- This is where the US is at.
I used to run a third space.
They aren’t free. they cost money to run. Rent has to be paid, utilities have to be paid, etc. our expenses per month were typically 600-1200 dollars. that’s dirt cheap though, because we had a sweetheart deal on the rent. typical rent for the space we used, commerical rate, was about 6000/mo, and adding in utilities and taxes and such would have brought it closer to 8000/mo.
We operated on donations, so people still typically had to pay 10-20 dollars to use our space. It wasn’t mandatory though, but at least half of people who showed up often paid, a few people paid more than we asked. many months we went net negative, and if we had several months of losses we’d have had to shut down. usually on the year we were up maybe $1-2K.
Everything has costs. Someone has to pay those costs. Nothing is free.
First of all, thank you for doing something for the betterment of your community. As for your costs argument: that’s why these spaces should be run by the government (local or federal) and funded via the taxes we all already pay. (That’s where the conservatives and NIMBYs come out and start screaming about communism.)
those are called libraries and schools. they already exist.
we applied for government grant, and I left because all the sudden it became intensely political as the government required us to ‘prove’ our space was helping the ‘right people’ in the community… and it all went to shit. And the nice third space we had, became a political space where only the ‘right people’ were encouraged to use it, and the ‘wrong people’ were told to leave.
Weird how that works… almost as if when you get government involved it stops being a community space and becomes a political space… because the government officials want to co-opt the space for their own personal political ends, and use money to manipulate the space into being what ‘they want it to be’. rather than what the people wanted it to be…
Weird also how it went to a space where I was welcome and appreciated for 8 years… to all the sudden being lectured by various people that I was ‘not welcome’ in the space anymore because my skin color was now ‘problematic’. Because you know, white men are inherently awful and bad… no matter how much they help their community and their helping of the community is inherently problematic and it would look better for our optics if we replaced you with a black person… even though the black population of our community is 4%… oh by the way even though our community is 12% Hispanic, we dont’ want Hispanic people here either because they don’t score us as much DEI points and they look ‘too white’ in the photographs…
Yeah, the people who did that conservatives! They weren’t out of touch liberals who wanted to socially engineer a third space to maximum their social media branding so politicians could capitalize on it to brag about how they ‘promote diversity & inclusion’ while in action they actively suppressed it.
I hope you never have to get directly involved in your community and learn how pathetic and awful people can be in the name of a ‘good cause’.
Also the deep irony of the pols involved who were desperately catering to the rich NIMBYs who wanted to kick out all the poor minorities from the city under the guise of ‘economic development’. But hey, as long as we have a token person of color in a community space in a photograph, it’s all good right?
though 10 years ago the black population in the city was double what it is currently… and the white population went from 65 to 75%… nah let’s not address that uncomfortable issue, clearly making our city exclusively for wealthy white folks is the real good thing, especially making our community spaces nice positive vibe DEI playgrounds for the rich white folks to feel very good about themselves about all the diversity and inclusion in their community :)
