BF2S Forums Where are all the whiny peaceful "Enlightened" European now?

Last edited by uziq (2020-02-19 12:54:47)

uziq wrote:

i dated a girl from montauk for about 16 months. she was living in berlin, doing cancer research. NYU, harvard medical school. spoke three languages, lived and darted between europe, new york city, long island, and argentina. a daughter of the upper-middle class, basically.

her dad was a surgeon, her mother an academic. i didn't really meet any family friends – they were mostly iranians – but it sounded like the norm around that part of long island was dentists, surgeons, people who did medical research or had private companies/start-ups, etc. i'm not talking about rothschilds and rockefellers.

uziq wrote:

her name was lila. if you ever see her around NYC tell her i miss her. uzi wants his baby back

the last time i mentioned her on here you insisted that montauk was a few surf shacks and nothing was there. you must surely be socially climbing.

Jay wrote:

uziq wrote:

you’re not going to get me to post in defense of stockbrokers, believe me. but it’s pretty telling that you consider the very definition of upper-middle class people to be ‘stockbrokers’.

maybe it's a cultural difference. here in the UK, the city/traders are one of the most egalitarian, class-blind of all professions. you get lots of cheeky cockneys in those careers. you basically need a math degree and/or a hunger for it and you're in. they're not really the definition of the respectable upper-middle classes.

No, but they're the ones that can afford to live around here. There are still some old-money types floating around, but they're more into backbiting and tearing each other down than anything. I'm not talking European old-money either. I'm talking grandfather or great-grandfather did well and passed down money to the grandkids. Kids who grew up privileged enough to stick around when half their classmates got priced out. It's fucking sad, honestly. The people who inherited their wealth should be happy, but they're the most miserable fucking people. I swear, there's more depression and status striving among them than among the arriviste. Most of the "arriviste" around here came from Brooklyn first, set up their careers, had kids late and moved out here. They're not into the social status games, bless them.

Last edited by Larssen (2020-02-19 13:44:10)

Last edited by Larssen (2020-02-19 14:18:04)

Larssen wrote:

And how much of that is survivorship bias? I'm willing to bet even in the UK the amount of offshoots from wealthy families and aristocratic lineages that lost their fortunes and/or died far, far outnumber the ones who remain. The fact that the house of percy is still alive is a remarkable exception, not a rule. Should also be noted that their position among the wealthy was unique, much like royalty.

On the continent - if not decapitated during the revolutions, their fortunes and estates confiscated or destroyed during the wars, what remains was often split up between too many children most of whom weren't the master investors they imagined themselves to be.

Last edited by uziq (2020-02-19 14:26:35)

The born Etonian was at one with his heritage. The quickest way to ascertain a boy’s natural Etonianness was to find out if his father had gone there. Plenty had. Then I would start my plebeian social arithmetic. If his father went there, then thirty or so years earlier his grandparents had had the money to send his father there. So his grandfather was probably an old Etonian. Which meant that sixty or so years earlier his great-grandparents had had enough money ... It was dizzying, climbing backwards along the branches of these golden family trees.

It was unimaginable to me, the quickly privileged descendant of schoolteachers and shopkeepers, that these Etonians had been privileged for so long that the precise origins of their fortune could no longer be located. What amazing security: to have always been well-off probably suggested that one would always be well-off. The future would look comfortingly like the past. Amusingly, David Cameron is often described as being ‘upper-middle-class’, but the originary arithmetic doesn’t lie. His father went to Eton, as did his grandfather. And on his mother’s perhaps fancier side, his grandfather went to Eton, and his great-grandfather also went there, and his great-great-grandfather, and actually his great-great-great-grandfather did, too ... I think we can bump him out of the middle classes.

Last edited by uziq (2020-02-19 14:36:30)

Dilbert wrote:

Funny that you reference Tatler, a rag devoted to tracking how quickly worthless half-wits are partying away their parents fortunes.

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