Re:Stanford to continue legacy admissions and withdraw from ...
by Henchman21 on Sunday August 10, 2025 @03:53PM
(#44857775)
IMO the "bootstraps" thing was always an insulting joke. Something the wealthy would say to knowingly insult the poor. Go do the impossible you stupid poor person while they laugh so hard their monocles fall into their brandy. Its like spitting on someone just cause you can. Yes, this is an absurd characterization, an almost cartoonish villain trope. It's a silly world!
But something happened: people who didn't understand it was meant to indicate somthing impossible started using it like it was some moralizing good. And here we are, saying dumb shit on the internets.
At least the British aristocracy had the concept of noblesse oblige, while the US aristocracy loves to lecture the poors on how they should be pulling themselves up by their bootstraps (and it always bothers me that that analogy was invented to point out the impossibility of actually pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, but somehow came to mean the opposite).