infamousbrad - Tumblr blog

[infamousbrad]

I don't even know what to say because I have so much to say about this. Economists have tried to come up with something better than per-capita GDP and all of the results have been pretty lame. So maybe it's naive of me to think I can do better, but ...

Count the number of adults (let's say, to scale it across countries, per 10,000) who can't find gainful employment that pays enough for them to, all by themselves, safely and healthily house and feed themselves and one other child, with enough money left over to cover healthcare, clothing, educational costs, and the rest of the necessities of daily life. A minimally functioning economy is one with a score of zero.

Is an economy that can provide a higher standard of living than that a better economy? Sure. High per-capita GDP is an awesome goal, but not until it meets everybody's minimal needs. Low GINI coefficient? Probably essential to keeping it from collapsing, but first, employ every adult who needs a job. At a living wage for themselves and at least one child.

(Please see also: Nick Taylor, American Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA.)

I've been thinking about how it might be useful, if not necessarily entirely fulfilling for whatever it is that I need out of them, to ask politicians how they would define a healthy economy, as opposed to just asking them how they would try to ensure a healthy economy.

President Joe Biden took to the White House lectern Friday to tout the healthy economy – strong job creation, lowering inflation and increased workforce participation and job satisfaction. - US News, Sep. 1, 2023

And

"I think we will see a big pickup in growth. We may not see it in the winter quarter...but I’m hopeful that we’ll see it in the spring,” Larry Kudlow, head of the National Economic Council, said on Fox Business. “It’s a fundamentally healthy economy,” he said, touting the 3.5 percent unemployment rate and “tremendous wage gains.” - The Washington Post, Jan. 30, 2020

In both cases they are offering a few signs of a healthy economy, the things that are quantified and measured as indicators, like unemployment, inflation, and wages.

But... wouldn't 'the ability to buy or rent a living space, and food security, for as many people as possible' make more sense?

Yeah, low inflation is the sign of a good economy, but what is the healthy economy actually doing? The jobs being created, are they actually full time and paying a living wage?

Fuck knows how many times a person at the podium has referenced the stock market as a signifier of the economy's health, and we all know that's barely relevant to the lives of us normal people.

I guess the question I'd want to ask politicians is "if the economy's health were measured in percentage of people who are able to afford housing, food, and other essentials on a full-time job with no government assistance, is the economy actually healthy?"

Low inflation means jackshit if the minimum wage is still no inflation. Job creation means something, but not if it's so far from your home that you spend most of your paycheck commuting. 'Tremendous wage gains' don't mean much if you're looking at an average that includes the CEOs and allows their paychecks to skew the data upwards.

How many of your citizens can afford housing, groceries, and medical care on a full-time wage, without government assistance?

[infamousbrad]

"A stopped clock is right twice a day."

Once in a rare while, even George Will is right. (Non-paywall link.)

... In March 1941, Congress approved Lend-Lease aid to Britain and others (235 Democrats and 24 Republicans yea, 25 Democrats and 135 Republicans nay). This “most unsordid act in the history of nations” (Winston Churchill) ended the facade of U.S. neutrality. By approving aid for Greece and Turkey in May 1947, Congress affirmed (161 Democrats and 126 Republicans yea, 13 Democrats and 93 Republicans nay) the Truman Doctrine: The United States would assist democratic nations threatened by authoritarians. World War II’s end would not revive isolationism. In today’s Republican Party, dominated by someone who repudiates the internationalism to which Eisenhower committed the party seven decades ago, the cabal of grotesques might yet predominate. It includes Missouri’s Sen. Josh Hawley, who thinks we have given “blank checks” to Ukraine (actually, 5 percent of defense spending, and less than half the monetary value of European support). Yet Hawley says we cannot defend both Ukraine and Taiwan, so this would be an excellent time to reduce the U.S. forces in Europe that are deterring Russia from aggressions against NATO allies. Another grotesque, Ohio’s Sen. J.D. Vance, an itinerant Neville Chamberlain visiting green rooms, would welcome Ukraine’s death on the installment plan (see Czechoslovakia in 1938-1939). Georgia’s Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (she who wonders whether Jewish space lasers cause forest fires) expresses her loathing of Ukraine with lunatic accusations that confirm the judgment of Texas’s Rep. Michael McCaul (Republican chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee) that Russian propaganda has “infected a good chunk of my party’s base.” ... Today’s Moscow-Beijing-Tehran axis is, as the 1930s Axis was, watching. Johns Hopkins foreign policy analyst Hal Brands, writing for Bloomberg, reminds us: “Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 encouraged Hitler to send his military back into the Rhineland in 1936, just as Germany’s blitzkrieg through Western Europe in 1940 emboldened Japan to press into Southeast Asia.” We can now see that the great unraveling that was World War II perhaps began with Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria. Without the benefit of retrospection, we cannot be certain that World War III has not begun.

[infamousbrad]

People keep trying to construct analogies for the cultural dominance of Dungeons & Dragons in tabletop roleplaying spaces like "imagine you met a guy who considers himself a cinema buff but exclusively watches Marvel Cinematic Universe films released within the past 12 months, explaining that he doesn't branch out because he just doesn't have the time to learn the lore of a second cinematic universe; when you suggest avoiding that problem by watching a standalone film that isn't part of any cinematic universe, he reacts like you're a huge weirdo, and after a bit of questioning it turns out he genuinely believes that films which are part of massive cinematic universes and black and white Eastern European art films about depression are the only kinds of movies which exist", and I know this is intended as hyperbole to illustrate the absurdity of the situation at hand, but, like, I have literally met the guy they are describing.

[infamousbrad]

We call backhoes "cable finders."

Suddenly relevant to the news again ...

Q: "Why does every survival kit need a short piece of fiber optic cable?"

A: "Because if you get totally lost, you can dig a shallow ditch with the toe of your shoe, lay the fiber optic cable in the ditch, and kick the dirt back over it. Then sit down and wait for the backhoe to come along and cut it, and you can ride the backhoe back to civilization."

[infamousbrad]

Alex Garland's Civil War is my perfect movie. I'm not sure who else's, though.

There's a thing I've said about lots of art: if you have to read the artist's statement to get the point, the artist's statement is the art. I read multiple interviews with Garland, went in prepared for the movie he was trying to make, and I loved it, a lot. I don't know if I can say that I enjoyed it, because it's super-emotional, especially super-tense. But I'm very very glad I saw it, and if somebody invited me to go with them, I'd probably watch it again, and I may well buy the blu-ray when it comes out. That being said? I'm not sure who else, other than a few weirdos like me and a few academic cinephiles this movie is for.

Remember the movie Pleasantville, if you even saw it? The trailer mislead a lot of people into expecting a jokey comedy about how dumb "Return to Normalcy" era sitcoms were, and nearly everybody who went in with those expectations hated Pleasantville, because what they got was a deep philosophical meditation on how you can't actually solve a social problem without losing your innocence, and loss of innocence, no matter how necessary, hurts. So almost nobody loved Pleasantville but a few people like me, who wanted it injected straight into our veins.

So let me lay this straight out before you buy your ticket to Civil War:

First of all, at no point in Garland's Civil War do they tell you the politics of any of the three sides in the near-future second American Civil War. Nor are you expected to figure them out. The war started four or five years before the first scene of the movie, and none of the people in this movie are still interested in debating why the war. There are three sides, and while there are people who say that the Western Forces are Democrats and the Florida Alliance are Republicans and the Federal Army are Trumpist, they are reading their own prejudices into way too few background clues and ignoring the other background clues that contradict that theory.

I know that every American who sees this movie is watching to find out which army is "on my side," which one they're supposed to be rooting for, and that is not a movie that Alex Garland wanted to make. You are supposed to be rooting for the war to just be over and elections to resume. Because that's what every civilian and every soldier wants, and nearly all the unlawful combatants. And also ...

This is not a war movie. If you want the (somehow, to you anyway) relaxing catharsis of cheering while lots of military hardware gets used? You are going to hate Civil War because this movie is, to borrow an older metaphor, Tomorrowland to your Mad Max: Glory Road. Garland made this movie to shame you particularly if you like war movies. The total amount of combat footage in this movie probably doesn't reach 20 minutes, and our main viewpoint character for the final battle sequence is a traumatized civilian.

One last thing I can say before diving behind a spoiler warning, though: it is an amazing technical movie, this thing should win all the technical Oscars next year. In particular, the principal photography is the best I've ever seen and the way it mixes (and sometimes un-mixes!) the separate audio tracks perfectly manipulates the tension level. And all four lead actors put their whole selves into these parts and held nothing back.

So what is this movie if it's not a political movie or a war movie? I can't tell you that without diving at least partway into spoiler territory, so ...

Alex Garland wants to prove two things in this movie:

Life in a failed state sucks ass. Yes, even if you're nowhere near the combat zone. And ...

War correspondents and combat photographers themselves wonder if what they're doing is making any difference, but they're heroes for trying.

The journalists themselves can't point to a single time what they do prevented or stopped a war, and they very much wonder if they're just adrenaline-addicted glory-hogs. But even not even knowing if what they're doing will ever save a single life, they are absolute fucking heroes. They put themselves at insane risk because this is the only thing that they know how to do and if it has any chance of saving lives, of preventing or stopping war, it has to be tried.

Our main cast are four journalists: an elderly war correspondent, a middle aged war correspondent, a middle aged combat photographer, and a (too) young combat photographer on a mission:

They start in Federally occupied NYC, reporting on anti-regime protests and terrorist attacks. They've heard rumors about the actual war. Right now the front line is a three-way battle for control of Charleston, South Carolina. They've heard that the Westerners and the Floridians are going to fight each other to the death as soon as they push the Federals out of the Carolinas, and then on July 4th, just a week away or so, the likely winners, the Westerners, are nearly certain to seize the capitol. They think the 5 year war is almost over, and are trying to figure out how to cover the end. This is, like, literally the whole of the first two scenes.

The old guy wants to cover the battle of Charleston "for whatever is left of the New York Times" and then retire. The three younger journalists have an even crazier idea: skip the battle of Charleston and use the last remaining highway into/out of DC to outrun the Western Forces and cover the fall of the White House.

So the overwhelming majority of the movie is a several day, many hundred mile road trip in an armored car marked PRESS. This involves driving west to Pittsburgh and then back east to Charleston, to get around the combat zone, which results in the real main part of the movie:

The road trip is intended to show you how much the combination of anarchy, localized paranoia, and fear of looters is driving various levels of savagery far from the war zone, which the reporters and photographers keep stopping to document.

It ends with the race to keep up with the Western forces so they can cover the fall of the White House, which is the only long combat scene in the movie, and it is incredibly intense, and very loud and scary, and nobody except maybe the kid photographer covers themselves in glory.

And every scene of it tells the same didactic message, told in about a dozen different ways: when the war is over, whether or not you were "on the right side" is going to matter a lot less than the horror you lived through, and wartime journalists put themselves through hell to try to prove that to you before it's too late.

[infamousbrad]

Cryptocurrency chart? Meme-stock? Nope. Thats an chart for price of futures for Cocoa.

Cocoa is produced only in handful of the regions of the world and currently most of them are experiencing crop failures due to climate change.

Chocolate will most likely become significantly more expensive and that might be permanent change. But worry not! 1% who generates over 50% of world's emissions will never run out of chocolate!

[infamousbrad]

Small victory

I've lived in my current apartment for 8 years, I think. They moved my polling place twice, and both times to a more distant and harder to reach location.

I just double-checked my polling place for Tuesday's municipal election. They moved it again. Now it's only half a block away!

I'll take my small victories where I can find them.

[infamousbrad]

They had "pig butchering" scams in the 1930s.

Please tell your friends and family about this, because you don't know who doesn't know this. I forget how many people don't know this, too, but then I remember that I learned about it from a 1940 non-fiction best-seller that I only heard about because it was popular among 1940s and '50s science fiction authors. (And then later made into a movie called "The Sting," which, via a long chain of copies, also got made into a long-running TV series called Leverage.) The story goes like this:

The Roper identifies and ropes the Mark, who gets handed off to the Grifter, who Shows the Mark the Store. The Store Baits the Hook, then puts the Mark On the Send, and then Stings the Mark when they get back to the Store, and then Blows them Off.

I just got around to watching the John Oliver episode about what the FBI now calls "pig butchering" scams, and, having read David Maurer's original 1940 book about the professional jargon of long-con confidence artists, The Big Con, I recognized every step of it. I spent the whole segment saying the same thing over and over again: "Oh, is that what they're calling that now?"

Do you believe that basically every rich person in the world got rich because they got away with some scam? Of course you do. But are you more jealous than angry? Do you wish someone who knew you would like you enough to let you in on the scam? That's why you're a Mark.

A Roper is a person who's trained in how to go into places where it's normal to have conversations with strangers (back then, cross-country trains and inter-continental ocean liners; nowadays, your smartphone) and easily make friends. Most of the Roper's new friends quickly get ignored; what they're looking for is a resentful, jealous middle or upper middle class person who wishes someone would tell them the illegal way to get rich.

That's when the Mark finds out that the Roper is in the middle of getting rich him/herself! Thanks to The Grifter! And asks the Mark would you like to meet the Grifter?

The Grifter works out of the Store; Ropers bring Marks to him/her. The Store looks entirely convincingly like a place (or an app or a site) where someone dirty, on the inside, could easily cheat people out of tons of money, by doing things like trading on secret information. And the Mark is happy to find out that the Grifter could easily make tons of money for them if they had anything to invest in the Store. The Mark hands over the small amount of money they have on them and, very quickly, the Grifter Baits the Hook: gives them their winnings, and apologizes for how small they were. If only the Mark had more money to invest ...

At which point the Mark, who is On the Send, goes back home and empties out savings, takes out one or more equity loans, maybe even embezzles from his/her work (fully intending to put the money back) and brings it all to the Store.

At which point, instead of getting back winnings, the Mark gets Blown Off. If the Grifter does it smoothly, they can sting the same Mark over and over again: "It's not our fault, you did it wrong." Or "it's not our fault, this time the cops intervened, you're lucky you weren't arrested."

Any newly met "friend" who offers to tell you how to get rich is not your friend. You're the Mark and they're the Roper. The "way to get rich" method they offer you, that looks like it couldn't possibly be fake, too many people would have to be in on it? Is a Store, and they're making so much money off of Marks like you that they can easily hire that many people to play their parts. Oh, but the first time you tried it, you made money? Of course you did; how else would they put you On the Send? And when you come back from being put On the Send, you're not going to get rich, you're going to get Blown Off.

[infamousbrad]

-Hating someone for being a jew is antisemitic.

Hating someone for being a genocidal maniac occupier performing ethnic cleansing, and happens to be a jew, is not!!.

/Nasser_junior

[infamousbrad]

“Hazbin Hotel's MASTERY of TONE” by YouTuber “Schnee” (22 and a half minutes)

I agree with almost all of this: a video essay about why “Grimsical” exists as a genre and why Vivziepop’s story, characters, and songs use the juxtaposition of “grim + whimsical” better than even Tim Burton himself. My two favorite particular points?

For one, his suggestion that it provides comfort food for those of us who feel shut-out of our childhood favorite stories not because we outgrew the cartoon medium but because our in-the-now lived stories aren’t sanitized the way kids’ cartoons usually are.

The other favorite, his suggestion that the underlying theme of (as I would say it) “there’s no hate quite like Christian love,” the way in which rebellion against the self-righteous privileged by the not-always-deserving oppressed is a perfect metaphor for our current lives.

But there’s a lot more than that, and it’s pretty much all spot-on.

[infamousbrad]

“All the Ways Car Dependency Is Wrecking Us” by CityNerd (16 minutes)

From a peer-reviewed study, 19 ways in which car-dependent (as opposed to car-optional) cities make life worse for everybody, including drivers: (1) crashes (2) intentional (traffic) violence (3) air, land & water pollution (4) noise pollution (5) light & thermal Pollution (6) (health effects of) sedentary travel (7) dependence & isolation (for people who can’t drive) (8) carbon emissions (9) (lead and plastic micro-particle) pollution from tires (10) other pollution (e.g., road salt, oil leaks) (11) land use (e.g., wildlife interactions) (12) unequal distribution of harm (13) inaccessibility (for the handicapped) (14) car-dependent places (15) streets and freeways (space consumption) (16) parking (costs driving up retail prices), (17) (increased price for) housing (18) inequitable distribution of time and (19) (imposed) financial burden of owning a car.

[infamousbrad]

There's nothing safer than having a seraphim angel angel with you!

[infamousbrad]

I never doubted for a second that my parents loved me. But ... well ... it's not like either of them had non-traumatic parenting role models in their lives, either.

All amazing points and so important to take in. I think I have done a couple of these, but not habitually or intensely. But it's good awareness for me.

[infamousbrad]

Graph excerpted from the latest Pew Research Center report, "8 in 10 Americans Say Religion is Losing Influence in Public Life."

Here's another beauty from the same report:

[infamousbrad]

Pray for the people of Gaza.

I have read this several times and it makes my heart heavy.

[infamousbrad]

I also personally love the idea of unifying the ruling families of both realms, but I particularly like the top-left corner.

Lucifer is shown, in "The Story of Hell," as the silly angel, and ...

For there to be a youngest seraphim, Emily has to have come into existence after the rest of them.

Seraph M is responsible for making all the redeemed souls in Heaven happy.

So my head-canon is that Seraph "Emily" M was brought into existence because, while God could get along without the rest of the other seraphims who fell, there needed to be an emanation of the Joy of God, the Compassion of God, or else the whole intent of Heaven as a respite for the virtuous dead falls apart.

Which means that Emily has Lucifer's old job. And I would love to find out that they occasionally get together over tea to talk shop.

Would you please draw Lucifer and Emily being cute together?

Hi! Thank you so much for this ask! 🌟 And I’m so sorry for taking quite some time to finish this art…

These two are my favorite angels from the show, they’re just too good for this world!!😭❤️ And I really hope they’ll meet in the next season. I think they can become very good friends in no time, but of course, after Lucifer understands that not all angels are dangerous :D

Here I was imagining that Emily and Charlie somehow convinced heaven to have a meeting in hell because if they see sinners and hell in person they'll maybe understand them more. And this is when Emily meets Lucifer, at first he was distant but then he saw how enthusiastic and supportive Emily is, and their conversations with Charlie convinced him that he can at least try to trust her, but Sera of course is a different story...

(Sorry for possible mistakes! English is not my first language :'3 But you can correct me, I'm okay with that)

✨Close-ups! ✨

[infamousbrad]

For all the Tumblr people that say I cannot support the people in Gaza and vote for Trump, this explains why I can