#immiserable

[smollestpeanut]

Grubbs had me learn about Laika the dog and I sobbed while doing this

[leonismylove]

Can I be attacked with hugs

[st-just]

The only Celebrity Guest(tm) I even slightly cared about was Jennifer Hale but her Q&A was absolutely worth attending if only to see the absolute masterclass in charisma it takes to gracefully take one awkward, meandering and repetitive audience question after another into a different charming personal anecdote.

Or in two cases into a five minute ad spot for the acting coaching service/website she started (guy did literally ask for tips tbf) and a slightly longer than that very crunchy California progressive anti consumerism political rally speech.

[axel-mania]

SAya kamiTANi

[lupineshieldmaiden]

i love my hometown but i have to get the fuck out of the suburbs. i belong in a cabin on a bog surrounded by mangrove trees.

[ivan-fyodorovich-k]

Growing up I remember people complaining about Boomer parents being self absorbed, abandoning or neglecting their children, and engaging in other bad parent behaviors. I remember I used to know one guy who complained boomers had not just consumed everything, they licked the plate clean and left nothing for future generations. The answer to this is not to be better parents but to have no children at all, thus resolving the tension between pursuit of the self (which we are assured is not selfish) and the selflessness parenthood demands by removing children entirely. No more leaving nothing to future generations, because now there will just be no future generations.

the logic is unassailable. We have not created for ourselves a society that is configured for having children, though the vestiges persist (the childless report the vague pressure to procreate). Not to have them frees up time and money for career and for instagram worthy travel.

i cannot argue against this, but it seems deeply nihilistic to me in a way that leaves me feeling extremely cold

[azspot]

Yes, everybody talks inequality – but it’s a very abstract thing. It’s very difficult for us to estimate the degree of inequality. Inequality cannot really be a driver… what people feel is what becomes a driver. And there are several factors driving inequality, but let’s start with the first one. We call it popular immiseration, [in other words where] the well-being of a large proportion of the population is stagnating or even declining. This well-being has many dimensions: there is economic well-being such as wages and incomes, but also biological well-being such as life expectancy, and freedom from disease and other things, or even height. Height has a strong genetic component, but when you look at the whole population over time, it turns out to be a very sensitive indicator of declining living standards when people’s height shrinks. For example, in the United States the population height stopped growing over the past 30 or 40 years, and for some, especially disadvantaged parts of the population, it has even declined in the last decade.

Complex dynamics don't need to have complex causes

[anreill]

is it because i'm autistic or because i'm an anarchist that any interaction with the brutal blind hatred of filling out forms and interacting with the state bureaucracy makes me want to fucking kill myself?

[apas-95]

the loser trump-assassin (tries to get a headshot and misses, has no real plan besides shooting him, doing it because he's on the TV) vs the venerable pharma ceo assassin (fires center mass until dry, has a planned escape route, doing it because he's a figurehead for the immiseration of the poor)

[yavo]

Immiseration of the Masses

when the working class is entirely apathetic to its own suffering, the revolutionary will always struggle to keep away from adventuristic terror; because they cannot meaningfully ask the working masses what actions are the demands of the masses, what is too much or too far, what specific actions to what specific ends, and cannot ensure that they are firmly tied to mass organizations and accountable to them. revolutionaries who lack the masses' organization and input are incapable of virtually any action other than that which will result in their isolation and death, no matter how hard they try to avoid it.

there will not be and cannot be heroes to save us, we must save ourselves. and we can only make things better by doing it together, not separately.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The tax sharks are back and they’re coming for your home

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TODAY (Apr 27) in MARIN COUNTY, then Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

One of my weirder and more rewarding hobbies is collecting definitions of "conservativism," and one of the jewels of that collection comes from Corey Robin's must-read book The Reactionary Mind:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reactionary_Mind

Robin's definition of conservativism has enormous explanatory power and I'm always finding fresh ways in which it clarifies my understand of events in the world: a conservative is someone who believes that a minority of people were born to rule, and that everyone else was born to follow their rules, and that the world is in harmony when the born rulers are in charge.

This definition unifies the otherwise very odd grab-bag of ideologies that we identify with conservativism: a Christian Dominionist believes in the rule of Christians over others; a "men's rights advocate" thinks men should rule over women; a US imperialist thinks America should rule over the world; a white nationalist thinks white people should rule over racialized people; a libertarian believes in bosses dominating workers and a Hindu nationalist believes in Hindu domination over Muslims.

These people all disagree about who should be in charge, but they all agree that some people are ordained to rule, and that any "artificial" attempt to overturn the "natural" order throws society into chaos. This is the entire basis of the panic over DEI, and the brainless reflex to blame the Francis Scott Key bridge disaster on the possibility that someone had been unjustly promoted to ship's captain due to their membership in a disfavored racial group or gender.

This definition is also useful because it cleanly cleaves progressives from conservatives. If conservatives think there's a natural order in which the few dominate the many, progressivism is a belief in pluralism and inclusion, the idea that disparate perspectives and experiences all have something to contribute to society. Progressives see a world in which only a small number of people rise to public life, rarified professions, and cultural prominence and assume that this is terrible waste of the talents and contributions of people whose accidents of birth keep them from participating in the same way.

This is why progressives are committed to class mobility, broad access to education, and active programs to bring traditionally underrepresented groups into arenas that once excluded them. The "some are born to rule, and most to be ruled over" conservative credo rejects this as not just wrong, but dangerous, the kind of thing that leads to bridges being demolished by cargo ships.

The progressive reforms from the New Deal until the Reagan revolution were a series of efforts to broaden participation in every part of society by successively broader groups of people. A movement that started with inclusive housing and education for white men and votes for white women grew to encompass universal suffrage, racial struggles for equality, workplace protections for a widening group of people, rights for people with disabilities, truth and reconciliation with indigenous people and so on.

The conservative project of the past 40 years has been to reverse this: to return the great majority of us to the status of desperate, forelock-tugging plebs who know our places. Hence the return of child labor, the tradwife movement, and of course the attacks on labor unions and voting rights:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/06/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom/

Arguably the most potent symbol of this struggle is the fight over homes. The New Deal offered (some) working people a twofold path to prosperity: subsidized home-ownership and strong labor protections. This insulated (mostly white) workers from the two most potent threats to working peoples' lives and wellbeing: the cruel boss and the greedy landlord.

But the neoliberal era dispensed with labor rights, leaving the descendants of those lucky workers with just one tool for securing their American dream: home-ownership. As wages stagnated, your home – so essential to your ability to simply live – became your most important asset first, and a home second. So long as property values rose – and property taxes didn't – your home could be the backstop for debt-fueled consumption that filled the gap left by stagnating wages. Liquidating your family home might someday provide for your retirement, your kids' college loans and your emergency medical bills.

For conservatives who want to restore Gilded Age class rule, this was a very canny move. It pitted lucky workers with homes against their unlucky brethren – the more housing supply there was, the less your house was worth. The more protections tenants had, the less your house was worth. The more equitably municipal services (like schools) were distributed, the less your house was worth:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

And now that the long game is over, they're coming for your house. It started with the foreclosure epidemic after the 2008 financial crisis, first under GW Bush, but then in earnest under Obama, who accepted the advice of his Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who insisted that homeowners should be liquidated to "foam the runways" for the crashing banks:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/06/personnel-are-policy/#janice-eberly

Then there are scams like "We Buy Ugly Houses," a nationwide mass-fraud outfit that steals houses out from under elderly, vulnerable and desperate people:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/11/ugly-houses-ugly-truth/#homevestor

The more we lose our houses, the more single-family homes Wall Street gets to snap up and convert into slum properties, aslosh with a toxic stew of black mold, junk fees and eviction threats:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/08/wall-street-landlords/#the-new-slumlords

Now there's a new way for finance barons the steal our houses out from under us – or rather, a very old way that had lain dormant since the last time child labor was legal – "tax lien investing."

Across the country, counties and cities have programs that allow investment funds to buy up overdue tax-bills from homeowners in financial hardship. These "investors" are entitled to be paid the missing property taxes, and if the homeowner can't afford to make that payment, the "investor" gets to kick them out of their homes and take possession of them, for a tiny fraction of their value.

As Andrew Kahrl writes for The American Prospect, tax lien investing was common in the 19th century, until the fundamental ugliness of the business made it unattractive even to the robber barons of the day:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-04-26-investing-in-distress-tax-liens/

The "tax sharks" of Chicago and New York were deemed "too merciless" by their peers. One exec who got out of the business compared it to "picking pennies off a dead man’s eyes." The very idea of outsourcing municipal tax collection to merciless debt-hounds fell aroused public ire.

Today – as the conservative project to restore the "natural" order of the ruled and the ruled-over builds momentum – tax lien investing is attracting some of America's most rapacious investors – and they're making a killing. In Chicago, Alden Capital just spent a measly $1.75m to acquire the tax liens on 600 family homes in Cook County. They now get to charge escalating fees and penalties and usurious interest to those unlucky homeowners. Any homeowner that can't pay loses their home.

The first targets for tax-lien investing are the people who were the last people to benefit from the New Deal and its successors: Black and Latino families, elderly and disabled people and others who got the smallest share of America's experiment in shared prosperity are the first to lose the small slice of the American dream that they were grudgingly given.

This is the very definition of "structural racism." Redlining meant that families of color were shut out of the federal loan guarantees that benefited white workers. Rather than building intergenerational wealth, these families were forced to rent (building some other family's intergenerational wealth), and had a harder time saving for downpayments. That meant that they went into homeownership with "nontraditional" or "nonconforming" mortgages with higher interest rates and penalties, which made them more vulnerable to economic volatility, and thus more likely to fall behind on their taxes. Now that they're delinquent on their property taxes, they're in hock to a private equity fund that's charging them even more to live in their family home, and the second they fail to pay, they'll be evicted, rendered homeless and dispossessed of all the equity they built in their (former) home.

It's very on-brand for Alden Capital to be destroying the lives of Chicagoans. Alden is most notorious for buying up and destroying America's most beloved newspapers. It was Alden who bought up the Chicago Tribune, gutted its workforce, sold off its iconic downtown tower, and moved its few remaining reporters to an outer suburban, windowless brick building "the size of a Chipotle":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/16/sociopathic-monsters/#all-the-news-thats-fit-to-print

Before the ghastly hotel baroness Leona Helmsley went to prison for tax evasion, she famously said, "We don't pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes." Helmsley wasn't wrong – she was just a little ahead of schedule. As Propublica's IRS Files taught us, America's 400 richest people pay less tax than you do:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/13/for-the-little-people/#leona-helmsley-2022

When billionaires don't pay their taxes, they get to buy sports franchises. When poor people don't pay their taxes, billionaires get to steal their houses after paying the local government an insultingly small amount of money.

It's all going according to plan. We weren't meant to have houses, or job security, or retirement funds. We weren't meant to go to university, or even high school, and our kids were always supposed to be in harness at a local meat-packer or fast food kitchen, not wasting time with their high school chess club or sports team. They don't need high school: that's for the people who were born to rule. They – we – were meant to be ruled over.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/26/taxes-are-for-the-little-people/#alden-capital

[shunnedmorlock]

Valyria was explicitly, textually, the most evil empire in the history of the world. Weeping for the fall of Valyria is the in-universe equivalent of weeping for Nazi Germany. I do not care about the "generational trauma" that was the Targaryens losing their empire of slavery. No one in Westeros understands the Targaryen pain over Valyria because they would be slaves in Valyria. The whole point of Valyria in text is to tell you what a world in which the Targaryens had absolute power (magic) would look like - and it's not pretty. So yes, Alicent should destroy the legos. It's a long time coming.

I can’t believe what a point of contention this has become. I genuinely cannot understand the animosity towards it lol

Seriously post after post bitching and crying and begging for this to be destroyed - now besides how grossly disrespectful that would be to the stone masons who worked on this for years - it’s bizarre? I understand the criticism against Viserys (as a father, husband, King) but as a Targaryen - this endeavor is probably the most noble. So, while I see the childish thought process behind “smashing his legos” - come on be ffr.

The Doom of Valyria was catastrophic and while I’m hesitant to call it a “lost civilization” it is akin to the Atlantian mythology in nature and description. It’s not only the ancestral home of Houses Targaryen and Velaryon, but it was a major hub of magic, the most advanced city in the known world and likely the place of origin of the Faceless Men. The Doom is endlessly fascinating, from its predictions to the sheer cataclysmic scale of it all. I mean 14 volcanoes erupting at once would make Pompeiis explosion look like a candle to the sun.

Recreating Valyria by painstakingly pouring over texts to replicate what once was is a tragic echo that reverberates through generations. And for a fandom that shouts back and forth about “true Targaryen” definitions it seems most of those don’t care for that echo. The epic demise of a homeland filled with magic and dragons that are never to be seen again should be more than a foot note. A generational trauma that follows every Targaryen - the ever present fear that the Doom will swallow them too - down to Dany and her dragons which would have seemingly signified the return of magic long lost. How could any “true” Targaryen have anything but heartache over the loss of Valyria and the Freehold? How could they not be plagued with the weight on their shoulders that none in Westeros could truly sympathize with?

And I’ve long held a grudge against HBO for the way they mistreat Magic (and race, gender, sexuality, etc) in these fantasy series (no I’m never going to forgive them ESPECIALLY in HotD for not doing the CGI purple eyes [somehow Witcher had it in the budget AND it looked good] because of how much that trait was a distinctly other/outsider signifier) but this stupid little model is actually one of only additions I respect. Because while it can be viewed as some petty distraction for a physically deteriorating chronically ill history buff to get away from his kids - it is the biggest symbol of devotion to Targaryen culture - way more than anything else in the series. So I’ll die on this hill. The legos must be protected.

[txttletale]

obviously to be clear you should care about us imperial aggression because of its victims, the people of the global south who are immiserated and murdered by it. but also if you are at all a fan of living on a habitable planet you should be deeply concerned by what it means for nonproliferation. how could any state that fears the us as a strategic threat, seeing what is happening in iran right now, not conclude that obtaining nuclear weapons is in fact a necessary priority

[geopolicraticus]

Peter Turchin on End Times

I have finished listening to End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration by Peter Turchin. Turchin comes out swinging on the first page asserting that history can be pursued scientifically. The first appendix digs a little more into why he thinks cliodynamics is the answer to the ancient question of whether history can be a science. I find it strange that Turchin cites two fictional examples—cliology from Michael Flynn’s In the Country of the Blind, and Isaac Asimov’s psychohistory—but does not seriously engage with the significant literature in history, historiography, and philosophy of history that explicitly takes up this question.

In any case, Turchin argues that societies pass through integrative periods (marked by income compression) and disintegrative periods (marked by income disparity). Disintegrative periods are largely driven by popular immiseration and elite overproduction, the latter process largely driven by what he calls the “wealth pump,” which sluices most of a society’s wealth to the elites when these elites serve only their own interests exclusively instead of the interests of wider society. Getting the wealth pump under control is one of his policy prescriptions.

At several points in the book I was saying to myself, “But what about…?” and then he took up the objection I had in mind. For example, in his discussion of popular immiseration I was wondering about those who argue that things have never been better, and then he discussed exactly this objection. So, for that, I give him credit. On the other hand, his normie assumptions (he cites the ADL, the SPLC, and the NYT as though they are credible sources) blind him to certain developments in society. For example, he cites some elite financial publications as promoting “market fundamentalism” and discusses how injurious he believes this to be. And not too many years ago this was true, but all of the elite organs of opinion now follow the same ideological line, and it certainly isn’t market fundamentalism. (Are ESG scores and DIE mandates “market fundamentalism”?)

I have run into something like this on several occasions, and I always take the opportunity to throw it back in the face of anyone who utters something they think can be passed off as common knowledge and will not be challenged. The most glaring example of this, as far as I am concerned, is the common claim that the captains of the tech industry are “libertarian.” Again, some years ago this was the case, but now the technology industry is onboard with the same party line ideology as all other institutions. I recently pointed this out in a discussion, when someone brought up this talking point, so I said that the technology industry has produced the most elaborate censorship regime in human history, and my point was acknowledged. Turchin doesn’t make the libertarian tech bro claim, but the claim that elite organs of the financial industry are promoting “market fundamentalism” is comparable.

I have a lot of sympathy for elite theory, and have discussed it (for example, in newsletter 227), but I think it requires some tweaks to get it right. While Turchin does recognize the role of both the one percent (and, he often adds, the 0.10 percent) and the ten percent, which latter largely consists of aspirant elites, I think that elite theory could benefit from a greater focus on these classes and the differences between the two. The relation of the one percent, the true elites, and the ten percent, the aspirant elites, is like that in fiction between vampires and the human beings who serve them. Vampires possess the special power of their undead status, and the human beings who serve vampires have none of these powers, but are promised to gain these powers if they faithfully serve the vampires.

The existence of a class of aspirant elites who feel they are on track to ultimately join the elites, but only if they obey, creates a class of persons who are willing to do anything to please their masters. This is a promise that is held out, but is always vulnerable to being snatched away at any moment, whether by circumstance or by the whim of the vampire elite—as such, the ten percent constitute a different kind of precariat (a power precariant rather than an income precariat). Because of this tantalizing promise, seemingly within reach, but always potentially withdrawn, the aspirant elites who have been allowed into the charmed circle of power, even if they do not yet themselves wield power, may be more vicious and craven than the elites themselves. To take a real world example (not vampires and the supernatural), when dictators like Stalin or Kim Jong-Il hold absolute power of life and death over their subjects, these subjects vie with one another to prove their loyalty. No one wants to be seen as the first to cease clapping, and so the applause goes on and on.

The larger pool of aspirant elites consists both of those who are on track to real elite status, and those who have no realistic hope of “success” so defined. The further into the margin of potential power we trace the aspirant elites, the more desperate they are to prove their loyalty to the elites, and so it is we find that lower-level functionaries are the most brutal and unapologetic in their enforcement of the dictates of the elites; they are hanging on to their potential elite status by a mere thread. These contemptible actions of the aspirant elites in their quest to retain their grasp on potential power serve as a kind of self-hazing and self-blackmail, by which their perspective on the world is irredeemably damaged. They cannot understand that others despise them for the lies they tell, because they can no longer recognize them as lies. The aspirant elites, on the other hand, who have no possibility of ultimately joining the elites, have their perspective sharpened by the bitterness of the denial of their (potential) elite status. They can see all-too-clearly the transformation of their former fellows and take a certain pride in not having engaged in the same craven behavior of the aspirant elites who are confident in ultimately gaining power.

Where this touches on Turchin’s argument is that quite a larger pool of aspirant elites see themselves as viable candidates for elite status than would be apparent from their place on the fringes of the outer party. Turchin discusses the difference between two bumps in the income distribution of lawyers, noting that being a lawyer is not sufficient to be a viable aspirant elite, and that the two groups—viable and non-viable aspirants—are separated by their average income. But I think the important lesson to take away here is that even the lawyers in the lower income bump are not likely to break ranks with the lawyers in the upper income bump (any number of psychological and sociological arguments could be made to show this).  

The power of the elites is largely maintained through the threat of what happens to those who break ranks with the elite’s preferred narrative (exemplary justice is meted out to those who break ranks), and this serves to corral all aspirant elites, and not only the viable aspirants. How far down does this extend through society? Morgoth recently wrote that, “The primary function of journalists in the modern West is to tell lies on behalf of Power and hold the weak and powerless to account.” Morgoth humorously compares narrative policing to a superorganism, and says that journalists are the lowest caste of the superorganism. That is how far down it extends. Marxists had a similar niche in their social ecology, which they called the Lumpenproletariat.  ��

[trmpt]

The Israel-India-U.S. Triangle

Its Human Toll Will Be Incalculable

BY PRITI GULATI COX AND STAN COX

[tanadrin]

britain's cross-party commitment to a long-term program of national self-annihilation via hollowing out of social programs and immiseration of vulnerable social groups really is something to behold.