#thats just american public schools for you

[doctorwhoisadhd]

btw please always read my opinions re: public school as the opinions of a music educator aka The One Subject Area Where Teachers Would Just Simply Not Grade Anything Ever If Not For The School Administration

[lokigodofaces]

being an american on here is wild because i keep seeing posts from other americans that describe things they've experienced and say that it is universal among americans and it'll be stuff i've either never heard of or know for a fact isn't true. maybe it's pretty common in your state or the states surrounding you, but there's so much stuff i see that i can not relate to whatsoever, and i've never left the states.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

For 40 years, Big Meat has openly colluded to rig prices

On October 7–8, I'm in Milan to keynote Wired Nextfest.

Noted socialist agitator Adam Smith once wrote, "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices."

Smith was articulating a basic truth: when an industry grows concentrated, it grows cozy. Cultural differences between dominant firms are homogenized as top executives move from company to company, cross-pollinating attitudes and approaches. Ambituous, firm-hopping workaholic top brass make all their friends at the office, and so their former colleagues from one or two jobs back remain in their social circles.

Once an industry consists of half a dozen firms, the people running those companies constitute an incestuous financial polycule. They are executors of one anothers' estates, best men and maids of honor at one anothers' weddings, godparents to each others' kids. They play on the same softball teams and take family vacations together.

It would be heartwarming if it wasn't so costly to the rest of us. Remember Smith's maxim: "the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices." Class solidarity among corporate executives forms a united front to screw us in every conceivable way, from corrupting our politicians to maiming and cheating workers to gouging buyers.

That's the basis of American antitrust law. When Robert Sherman was stumping for the passage of the Sherman Act, America's first major antitrust law, he thundered "If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

Or rather, that was the basis of American antitrust law – until the Reagan era, when the fringe theories of the Nixonite criminal Robert Bork were elevated to a new orthodoxy. Under Bork's conception of antitrust, monopolies were evidence of excellence. If a company puts all its competitors out of business, that must mean that it is "efficient."

In Bork's fantasy world, the only way a company could attain dominance is by being so beloved by its customers that every competitor withers away. Governments that bust monopolies aren't protecting the public from "autocrats of trade"; they're overthrowing the winners of an election where you "vote with your wallet" to pick the best company.

But Bork and his co-fantasists couldn't quite manage all that with a straight face. They grudgingly admitted that a certain kind of bad monopolist could hypothetically exist, one that used its "market power" to raise prices or lower quality. Only when these offenses against our "consumer welfare" occurred should the state step in to protect its people.

This may sound good in theory, but in practice, it was a dead letter. The consumer welfare test isn't as simple as "If prices go up after a merger, punish the company." Instead, the government had to prove that the price raises came from "market power," and not from an increase in energy or labor costs, or some other "exogenous factor," like Mercury being in retrograde:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/10/you-had-one-job/#thats-just-the-as

And wouldn't you know it, it turns out that the mathematical models prescribed to distinguish greed from unavoidable circumstance inevitably "prove" that the monopolist wasn't at fault. Surely, it's just just a coincidence that the priesthood that understood how to make and interpret these models were Chicago School Economists who sold model-making as a service to companies that wanted to raise prices.

Pro-monopoly economists insist that this isn't true, and that their theory still has room to prosecute bad monopolies and cartels where they occur – more, they say this is already happening. In particular, they insist that "greedflation" can't be real, because it would require the kind of conspiracy that Smith warned of, and that their sickly antitrust enforcement is sufficient to prevent:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/11/price-over-volume/#pepsi-pricing-power

This strains credulity. After all, the CEOs of giant companies in concentrated industries openly boast to their shareholders about how they've used the covid and Ukraine invasion shocks to hike prices to increase their profit margins – not just cover their additional costs:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/23/cant-make-an-omelet/#keep-calm-and-crack-on

While excuseflation is new, open, naked price-fixing by industry cartels is not. Take the meat-packing industry, dominated by a tiny handful of giant corporations whose executives literally ran a betting pool on how many of their workers would get covid each week while working in their cramped, unventilated factories:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55009228

These companies have seen their margins soar – up 300% over the lockdown – while their payments to ranchers and growers cratered:

https://www.reuters.com/business/meat-packers-profit-margins-jumped-300-during-pandemic-white-house-economics-2021-12-10/

All this might leave one wondering whether there isn't something a little, you know, "conspiracy against the publick"-y going on in Big Meat?

Let me tell you about Agri Stats. Agri Stats has been around since 1985. Every large meat packer pays to be a "member" of Agri Stats, and they each submit weekly, detailed statistics about every aspect of their business: all their costs, all their margins, broken out by category. Agri Stats compiles this into phone-book-thick books that each member gets every week, telling them everything about how all of their competitors are running their businesses:

https://www.agristats.com/history

The companies whose data appears in this book are anonymized, but it's trivial to re-identify each supplier. Tyson execs hold regular "naming process" meetings where they go through new books and de-anonymize the data. A Butterball exec confirmed that he "can pick the companies for rankings with 100% certainty."

As David Dayen writes in The American Prospect, these books are incredibly detailed: "bird weights, freezer inventory, and 'head killed per operating hour.'" Within the cozy meat cartels, Agri Stats acts as a clearinghouse that allows every business in the industry to act in concert, running the entire meat-packing sector as a single company:

https://prospect.org/power/2023-10-03-lawsuit-highlights-why-meat-overpriced/

As interesting as the list of Agri Stats members is, the groups that don't get to see Agri Stats' "books" is just as important: "farmers, workers, or retailers." Agri Stats also offers consulting services to its members. As an exec at pork processor Smithfield put it, Agri Stats advice boils down to four words "Just raise your price."

Agri Stats ranks its members based on how high their prices are – they literally publish a league table with the highest prices at the top. Meat packers pay bonuses to their execs based on how high the company's rank is on that table. Agri Stats meets with its members throughout the year to discuss "price opportunities" and to advise them to "exercise restraint" by restricting supply to keep prices up. When one Agri Stats member considered leaving the cartel, Agri Stats wooed them back by telling them how to make an additional $100k by raising bacon prices.

The reason Dayen is writing about Agri Stats now is that the DoJ Antitrust Division has brought an antitrust suit against them. This is part of a wave of antitrust actions brought by Biden's DoJ and FTC, who, along with his NLRB, are shaping up to be the most pugnacious, public-interest force against corporate power since the Reagan administration:

https://www.meatpoultry.com/articles/29124-doj-sues-agri-stats-for-complicity-in-meat-market-manipulation

All this enforcement isn't a coincidence. It comes from an explicit rejection of neoliberalism's core tenets: inequality reflects merit, monopolies are efficient, and government can't do anything. In Biden's DoJ, FTC and NLRB, they're partying like it's 1979:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

What's amazing about the Agri Stats conspiracy to raise prices is that it's been going since the Reagan administration. It's a smoking gun proof that "consumer welfare" never cared about price-fixing and robbing the public (can a gun still smoke after 40 years?). There was never a time when consumer welfare antitrust cared about consumer welfare. It was always and forever a front for "a conspiracy against the publick," a "contrivance to raise prices."

Big Meat has been robbing America for two generations. Some of those stolen funds were used to corrupt our political process. The meat sector gets $50 billion in public subsidies and still gouges us on prices and rips off its suppliers:

https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/2022/02/usda-livestock-subsidies-near-50-billion-ewg-analysis-finds

Which means that it's possible that we're simultaneously being ripped off with meat prices and that meat prices are artificially low. Try and wrap your head around that one!

The do-nothing, pro-monopoly neoliberal antitrust is a virus that spread around the world. The EU's antitrust laws were reshaped to mirror American laws after the war through the Marshall Plan, but since the late 1970s, European lawmakers and enforcers have ignored their own laws (just like their American counterparts) and encouraged monopolies as "efficient."

This Made-in-Europe oligopoly, combined with energy and grain shocks from Russian invasion of Ukraine, created the perfect storm for European greedflation. As food prices spiked across the EU, Austrian hacktivist Mario Zechner set out to investigate Austrian grocers' pricing. Using the grocers' own APIs, he was able to compile and analyze a dataset of prices at Austrian grocers:

https://www.wired.com/story/heisse-preise-food-prices/

When Zechner open-sourced his project, collaborators showed up to expand the project across other EU countries, and an anonymous party donated a huge database of prices stretching back to 2017. The data reveals clear collusion among the grocers, who raise prices in near-lockstep, and use gimmicks like cyclic price drops to hide their collusion:

https://github.com/badlogic/heissepreise

Not every grocer has an API, and even the ones that do have APIs could easily block Zechner and co from accessing their data. When that happens, they could – and should – turn to scraping to continue their project. They should also scrape grocers elsewhere, including in Canada, where grocers rigged the price of bread:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/25/deep-scrape/#steering-with-the-windshield-wipers

Because Big Meat's "conspiracy against the publick" isn't unique to meat. It's in all our food, it's in all our goods, it's in all our services. The fact that the meat industry was able to rob American buyers, ranchers and farmers for two generations under a 200' tall neon sign that blinked "AGRI STATS AGRI STATS AGRI STATS" night and day is frankly astonishing.

But there's never just one ant. If the meatheads running Big Meat were able to do this in broad daylight since the NES years, imagine what all the other industries were able to get up to in the shadows.

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/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

[fursectomy]

its stupid that almost all of the beta kids live in the US. jade doesnt but her grandpa is from the US i believe? how is it that theres a handful of kids fated to save the universe or whatever and theyre ALLL american. it would make way more sense if they were scattered all over the globe.

so far i see dave as still living in texas because he very much feels like a product of the american public school system and american individualism. jade also still lives on her island thats fine her gpa is just polynesian to me, and then john lives in hong kong and rose lives in brazil.

rose specifically lives in the southern high planes of brazil bc thats where it snows and for some reason rose living in a snowy location feels important to her upbringing to me? maybe just because of the flashbacks to her playing in the snow. oh also because it makes sense if she lives in a more isolated location.

i think grandpa harley is maori and was originally born in new zealand wow oh my god as im typing this im imagining jade w a kiwi accent and that feels so fitting. anyways i think he sailed out from NZ and found hellmurder island out in the pacific on his travels.

i also like the idea of rose and dave meeting online and dave is fluent in spanish (bro is irish american/mexican) and in english while rose is fluent in portuguese and knows some english. they communicate through spanglish and portuganglish(???)and rose gets better ar conversational english this way. once she starts getting the hang of it (which is very fast) she starts reading more and more english books and quickly accumulates a far bigger vocabulary than dave because dave does not fucking read books like that.

when they talk mainly spanish and portuguese in the beginning dave is like “portuguese speakers sound like theyre trying to speak spanish while having a stroke you’re giving me a headache” and rose is like “sounds like a you problem i understand your spanish just fine” lol.

dave has a weird assortment of spanish vocab that he knows outside of the basics because his only exposure to spanish is from his bro and shitty public school spanish classes.

also bro was raised on dragon ball z and thats part of the reason he styles his hair the way he does. bro has the goku jesus mexican flag hanging in their living room.

[halfadoginatank]

Simon and his father take a trip to the Scottish highlands for the summer, he knows only one of them will leave.

Johnny is a boy obsessed with filming explosions from fireworks he's not supposed to have.

Los Vaqueros are a group of Mexican teens derailed from their field trip waiting for teachers that might not come back.

Huge lore and plot dump below.

Mild tw for Simons father

Simons father has always taken him on hunting trips, sometimes he hated them, some times he liked them. But he'd never taken him this far from manchester. There are weapons in the cabin they rent, his father is eerily sober, one of them is going to die out here. Simon can only hope that Tommy won't be next.

Johnny meets him when he strays too far from his father. Part of it on purpose, he would never be on equal footing, more so when his father had the rifle and not him. He's in the tree's, at first simon thinks its prey, but there's a camera lense staring right at his scope.

Los Vaqueros come later, the leader arguing with a girl with choppy hair, Valeria and Alejandro trade glares while Rodolfo tries to mediate. Their bus broke down, leaving them stuck in town desperately renting a cabin near but far from the one simon is in.

It's the most interesting thing thats happened to johnny, and in the makeshift bonfire Valeria corners him and Simon. Her gaze is snakelike and a ring clinks on the bottle she's holding

"You say that he's an asshole yes? Your padre. Mine was the same, en mi opinión? It is kill or be killed."

Valeria nods at Alejandro, she tells them of a faceless force where she's from. The person sponsoring the trip for them, 'good will'. The five of them band together, the rest of the Vaqueros utterly ignorant.

Simon will save his family, Alejandro will get them home, and johnny? He's going to make the best home video.

-

Yeah so thats the whole plot, originally it was just going to be ghoap but somehow the Vaqueros fell into place. It kind of made more sense to have Valeria give them the idea? She doesnt have a whole bunch of canon lore so I figured she'd have an in with the cartel via her father, who was awful. And when Valeria killed him the nameless helped her cover it up and she got her own little spot.

Alejandro broke off their relationship after that, it's why they're on bad terms. He formed the Vaqueros as a funny joke that he started to take seriously when kids around Las Almas genuinely needed help that wasnt someway connected to the cartel, adults had that with rudys mother, so Ale and his childhood friend Rudy decided to help people their age in a way that doesn't rely on adults too much.

Everyone here is about 16-18. Soap is 17, ghost is as well but a few months older. Rudy Alejandro and Valeria are 18. And the youngest cowboy is 16.

Im trying to fit Gaz and Alex in? Im thinking that they both live in Texas, Gazs parents had a falling out since mum was from Texas hes there. Their school is on the same trip in the same bus a sort of cross trip to help the shitty american public school get a better name, as well as the cartels big PR move with having a class from one of Las Almas' schools.

Johnny is a bit weird here, but his motivation is he's suffering from extreme middle kid issues. Loves his family but since he's almost invisible is able to just kinda run off as long as hes back home eventually. He has a camera he uses to film any of his mishaps with, its essentially just jackass. As well as a video diary. Dont be fooled, its also an excuse for me to write some of it in script like format.

Simon is almost exactly the same as he is in the 09 comics, obviously a bit different. But childhood is the same.

I wanted farah to be here so bad but her childhood is literally a warzone and theres no way I can get her and her brother in Scotland. Because im trying so hard to make this somewhat believable, like yes its is a summer mystery horror au. But god I just really need things to make a little sense otherwise I cant do it. Same with Price Nik and Laswell. Like I could group Laswell in with Alex and gaz, and maybe I could pair her with Valeria for funsies. However Nikolai is in russia so... oopsie, and price? Like... how do you turn price into a teenager, he'd be what 19 or 20? Theres no reason he'd be in school, I dont think he'd be held back.

Also you may wonder, why is graves not here? Uh.... because I dont care, he wouldn't have a place here. The antagonist is Simons father, and honestly man? I just dont care that much for his character.

Man theres... theres so much I have here dude, I want to throw roach in there, and I THINK I could squeeze him in as one of ghosts school mates but the point is the first act has Simon completely isolated.

Anyway thats it. Bye.

[where-is-aslan]

What kind of music do they listen to?

Fandom: Call Of Duty.

Characters: Kyle “gaz” Garrick, John “soap” Mactavish, Simon ”ghost” Riley, John ”bravo 0-6” Price.

Genre: Headcanons (random)

☆•°.•.°•.. ☆•°.•.°•.. ☆•°.•.°•.. ☆•°.•.°•..

Kyle “gaz” Garrick

Gaz is ACTUALLY the type of guy who can listen to everything. I totally see him listening to Nirvana in the morning, 2Pac the day, and Adele the night. Mainly into american rap and hip-hop tho, probably a huge Gorillaz fan.

I KNOW he hates phonk, i just do. He really hates it. He surprisely really likes Price's music tastes, and always ask him for new songs recommandations. Vibes with John because they have similar tastes when it comes to pop.

Always listens to music when he's working out, walking outside or chilling, always has earphones on him. ALWAYS. Definitely has many playlists for every situations.

Used to listen to electro and techno all the time. Was so sure he could rap like Eminem when he was in middle school...

Simon “ghost” Riley

This man has serious anger issues, and that's the only reason why i think he listens to metal. He's a chill metalhead tho, like, he doesn't go to festivals or any event. A Slayer and Cannibal Corpse lover, he likes it fast and hard.

And surprisely, im 100% sure bro loves metalcore and nu metal (he probably listens to Slipknot religeously...) Enjoys jazz and sad rock songs when he's home alone. Radiohead saved his life. Says he hates everyone's music tastes except Price's.

Pretends he doesn't listen to music, and he never does in public. (And he actually doesn't often, only when he's off duty.)

Used to be a Nirvana teenager, the basic Kurt Cobain lover. Probably tried to learn how to play guitar when he was younger, and sucessed to have a decent level.

John “soap” Mactavish

Johnny is a radio music tastes guy. He listens to whatever comes on the radio. Harry Styles? Of course. Mäneskin? Pretty sure he loves them. Even Lady Gaga? HELL YEAH!

But, we all agreed that our Johnny boy is a pround scottish man. And i love to think that he actually listens to that angry scottish music. 100% Sure he loves Imagine Dragons and Ed Sheeran... He thinks Ghost's music tastes are cool as fuck.

He hates earphones and headphones, he needs everyone to listen to his playlist with him. He randomly starts to sing, whistle or hum when he's slightly bored.

He never tried to do anything with music, he knows damn well he can't sing even if he loves to do it as a joke.

John “bravo 0-6” Price

Good old rock. A good Black Sabbath on Spotify while he drinks some whiskey at home is always good. Knows a lot of rock (and some 80's metal) bands, thats why he gets along with Ghost's tastes so well. He's a nostalgic man, he has tones of vinyls at home.

Kyle influenced what he listens to a lot, im sure they made a playlist for eachother. Really likes Gorillaz just because Kyle loves it. Nothing more to say, this man's tastes are perfects.

Usually only listen to music when he's alone, but won't hesitate to give song recommandations if you ask nicely. If you're way younger than him, he'll laugh and tell you won't like any of that because you're not old enough to apreciate best things.

Used to wanna be in a band when he was a teen, but he quickly gave up. Can play the acoustic guitar pretty well and has a nice voice.

☆•°.•.°•.. ☆•°.•.°•.. ☆•°.•.°•.. ☆•°.•.°•..

That's all for now, i hope you enjoyed these silly headcanons :)

-Aslan, your local metalhead.

[localratwithcowboyhat]

hi! ive been struggling with using a cane as a recent injury has left me disabled and using a cane helps a bunch but im scared to use it in public due to harassment when i did (public american high school) is there anyway you could give some tips as a cane user? if not thats completely ok! i love your account and your art!!

I would defiantly recommend decorating it!!! It makes it feel less medical and more personalised. I would also recommend using when your with a friend maybe! It feels a lott less scary when u got someone w you

Other than that ( might sound silly) but like using it at home in front a mirror and like getting used to how you look using it ( specifically realising how sick you look ) is a good way of getting comfortable w it

Just learning to be confident in using a cane! ( wich sounds hard ik) but personalising it and becoming confident in using it helps a bunch!

( and just generally realising those ppl are not worth wasting a precious thought that could be spend realising how sick you look and how nice it is to have this thing that helps you)

Anyway, hope this heps!!

🫵🫵🫵🫵you’re awsome

[batboyblog]

Honestly anytime i hear the word woke its just screams "i dont like people different then me"

yeah,

I mean, for a long time the far right has said stuff like:

now most of us who went to public school, were taught that diversity is a good word, we like diversity, diversity of opinion and views is democracy after all and we like that, and American is a big happy melting pot of people from all over the world (yes of course that is a not wholly true child friendly version) generations of children's books and the small world ride at Disney enforced our cultural understanding that diversity was good and we liked it, and when people said shit like "Diversity is code for white genocide" the general reaction was to recoil from someone who didn't like diversity.

Woke is a magical code word you can say. You're against "Woke" not "diversity" woke is in theory an idea (or ideas) not people so thats okay, you're not against black people, you're against seeing them on TV or in movies or voting for them or celebrating holidays about them or teaching their history in schools, or allowing kids to read books about them or with black main characters but not against black people.... and repeat with queer people, women, really any minority group. While people have always objected to the inclusion of this or that minority, and for sure bias in media kept our screens very white I don't think before now there's been a unified theory of excluding and attacking anything that includes any diversity. And clearly there are content farms and pro-outrage algorithms pushing this shit any time anything diverse happens on TV or in movies

[neechees]

Volunteering at my first powwow and do you have any tips for dealing with the panindianism? I’ve never been in a space that’s so set on homogenizing into a single “Native American” culture. Are all powwows like this or am I at a bad egg 😫 (also the weird gender binary (the whole sacred womyn with wombs thing) is so strong and I am so twospiritly uncomfortable).

Omg thats so exciting! :) good for you!

And that's kind of the thing with pow wows. They're not really like traditional ceremonies, so there usually isn't like one tribe's specific practices and beliefs being followed by everyone (although the conduction of the pow wow or some of the practices involved will likely be influenced by where you are & which tribe(s) is hosting it for the more spiritual bits). Pow wows kind of arose out of a desperation to try preserve parts of our cultures, and that's why they're so "public" & "pan-indian" I suppose you could say. But there's also stuff that isn't like "pan-Indian" in the purposeful sense, but rather that it's just a coincidence and overlap of cultures that happen to practice the same thing.

like, the Northern war dance in traditional bustle. Multiple tribes practiced that & danced like that in that style, it IS a traditional dance & one of the oldest, it didn't come about specifically to make it "pan-indian" or to strip a tribe of its individual traditions for the sake of panindianism, it just happened to be a dance practiced by multiple tribes, so it's included in pow wows. Take that but also compare it to something like fancy shawl dancing, which is very new (came in the 60s), isn't traditional, and anyone can dance it specifically because it doesn't have roots in any one tribe (iirc), & in a way you might say it was made to be panIndian. Pow wows in different ways, are still a celebration of traditions & dances not lost, & have a history of rebellion against oppression, so I think we continue to do them out of a sense of pride in that. So if it helps you to bear through it, you could think of it that way.

But i can see why you might not like a pow wow, and you don't have to honestly. Pow wows in the modern sense aren't really traditional (some aspects are, though), and again pow wows had to be used under the guise of "entertainment" because it used to be illegal to practice our dances, & pow wows evolved into what they are now. In some ways they're just for show. One thing I personally don't like about pow wows is how competitive & monetized they've become, and lots of people only participate in it for the (potential) money, like for competitions.

So, I'd say different ways to potentially deal with this:

Go to traditional pow wows. There's more traditional things involved, dancers get fed for free, usually less people, and no competitions. This could also potentially mean that the tribe who's land your on for the pow wow will be the main focus for spiritual/traditional affairs & practices throughout. (Aka, more likely less pan-indianism)

Go to more local, less popular pow wows, like school pow wows in your area. Sometimes schools (like universities or high schools) will host their own mini pow wow (usually a day) & will invite people within the community & ones nearby to visit. This also means most of the people dancing & in attendance will be people of the same tribe or neighboring ones, and a similar deal with above.

Go to LESS local pow wows, if you can. What I mean by this, is try to go to one far away. Some tribes do pow wows very differently & include different dances, especially if the cultures are very different, so if you can find one like that, maybe this'll be refreshing from the culture shock alone. Different areas will feature more local & tribe specific dances depending on where you go, like Haudenosaunee smoke dancing or Ojibwe woodland dance

Try the food more from different stores & ask where they're from. Food trucks like to travel FAR and wide, and there's literally so many different food types from different tribes, so trying their different foods would get you more perspective on people showing off their culture's different foods

When observing pow wow dancers, look at how different their regalia are. All regalia is hand made, and many make their own, or get it from someone of the same tribe. People often like to show off their specific tribe pride in their regalia designs, which shows they're NOT trying to be pan-Indian. A specific style of floral beadwork on a jingle dress might indicate someone is Ojibwe. A specific braided hairstyle could show someone is Lakota. A woman who's a traditional dancer & wearing a blue, elk tooth dress with a triangular red collar could mean she's a Crow woman. A fancy shawl dancer with lines painted on her chin could mean she's Cree or Dene & paying homage to traditional tattoos. Lots of people subtly show off their culture this way, & it's fun to see where someone might come from this way, & comfort you

In a way there's always going to be a pan-indian aspect of pow wows, but for the most part people don't really go to pow wows specifically to say "we are all one tribe, pan-indianism forever", or specifically for the sake of pan-indianism, they see it more as a celebration of multiple tribes together and pow wows are just the medium for doing it. & the history or pow wows just kind of amalgamated on what they are today, there wasn't one meeting where Native people said "we're going to be pan-Indian now" & continued to do it, it just kind of happened due to a number of factors (forced illegalization of our traditional dances & ceremonies being a big one). So Idk if I necessarily agree with you there that pow wows are VERY SPECIFICALLY intently set on pan-Indigenizing, but even so you also don't have to like pow wows! Maybe it's also the pow wows you've been going to.

I can't singlehandedly do much about the borderline fetishization & obsession of Native women & "womb sacredness" or give you a foolproof method for how to "avoid" it, even though I also don't like it, even as a cis woman. I'm curious as to what pow wows you're visiting just because I don't hear it THAT often at specifically pow wows (like maybe its the emcees?), but I have heard it before (I see it more in facebook tbh). The only thing I can say is that there's times I don't think people always do this on purpose, because I've seen even trans friendly/generally progressive (if not a little ignorant but well meaning) people say things like this, but that they're forgetting to not be so cis-centric and that they don't realize it's weird, even for cis women. Which is still annoying, though. Like its kind of misogynist to define women's importance on their potential ability to have kids, or their relationship to someone else ("our mothers/sisters/daughters" etc) regardless of how you dress it up in "traditional" language, or whether you're talking about cis or trans women or people with uteruses. You see that in spaces that aren't pow wows as well, & you see it a LOT in discussions of mmiw.

Pow wow dance categories aren't even separated by genders, they're separated by.... categories. You just pick which category you want to dance in & you dance it. My cis cousin danced Chicken (a war dance more popular with men) for several years, and she's a straight woman. I'm not saying you can't or won't run into transphobia at pow wows, but like even the dances themselves aren't strictly seperated by gender (even if the announcers forget this & use cis-centric language like "men's traditional" when they could just say "traditional bustle" or "northern war dance"), and there WILL and HAVE been twospirit & lgbt ndns dancing various dances not typically associated with their gender at p much every pow wow. Again, I can't do anything about that, but maybe try find a two-spirit pow wow to go to. That will likely improve your experience.

I'm sorry this came out so LONG but I sincerely hope you get a better experience with pow wows if you decide to go to more, and that you get to have fun at your next one!

[askgoldenstarberry]

meet Rachel Berry

auditioning with the song: the last great American dynasty by taylor swift

" You may laugh because every time I sign my name I put a gold star after it, but it's a metaphor, and metaphors are important. My gold stars are a metaphor for ME being a star. "

wait, is that RACHEL BERRY? they kinda look a lot like MADISON BEER, don’t they? i heard the TWENTY ONE year old is known as the GOLDEN STAR around mckinley. it seems like they auditioned to be in NEW DIRECTIONS which is so lame? people at campus have said they’re +HARD WORKER, but don’t be fooled since they’re also -COMPETITIVE. rumor has it, you can find them at DANCE & WRITING,  when they aren’t belting show tunes. their entire vibe revolves around COLOR CORODINATED NOTEBOOKS FOR EACH SUBJECT, SWEATERS WITH CUTE ANIMALS EMBRODERED ON THEM,  but no one pays attention to that here in ohio.

LIST ABOUT 3+ HEADCANONS ABOUT YOUR CHOSEN CHARACTER!

Ever since Rachel was a little girl, she always got what she wanted, and always told to strive to be the best by her two fathers, and thats what she did. Rachel put hard work into everything she did even at a young age.

In high school, Rachel was in every club she could be in though after her sophomore year, she did drop most of them to focus on just a couple that she was extremely passionate about.

Now, in college, this is just one extra step before she tries to get transferred to NYADA, boosting up her resume before she makes her way to getting that tony on Broadway 

WANTED CONNECTIONS

—— PLATONIC CONNECTIONS. ❜

best friends.

role model.

childhood friends.

secret friends, aka friends who do not hang around in the public eye as their family or friends may not get along.

platonic soulmates.

positive influence.

—— ROMANTIC CONNECTIONS. ❜

flirtationship.

one night stand.

one sided romance.

friends with benefits.

exes on good terms.

exes on bad terms.

tinder match.

first love.

previously friendzoned.

summer romance.

experimented with their sexuality together.

—— NEGATIVE CONNECTIONS. ❜

enemies.

former (best) friends.

frenemies.

negative influence.

mutual jealousy.

competition.

—— MISCELLANEOUS. ❜

study buddies.

have mutual friends.

roommates.

have mutual friends but don’t get along.

co-workers.

participate in after school activities together.

team mates.

[postgameroutesix]

symbolism vs realism: sdway + tfps differing takes on the same concept

i really DO think its extremely valuable + interesting to compare scooby doo where are you and the funky phantom but not at all in the manner its usually doooone 😭😭 because the fact of the matter is that tfp was the second show in the meddling kids plus mascot genre hb capitalized on so many times n its SO interesting to examine both shows through this context + look at their differences in approach to the same basic concept

like ok first bc of the obsession w positing this aspect specifically as a clone: what the characters represent!!! not necessarily digging into their personalities but just what they represent

scooby doo where are you is a beloved n charming show albeit extraordinarily so a product of its time - in one aspect actually surprisingly revolutionarily so that being the characters and especially in viewing them through the contextual lens of the closing decade: the 60s.

this article does imo a comprehensive job in breaking down shaggy, daphne + fred in what their characters represented + i thoroughly rec it anyways as an interesting read but i think velma is the Most notable: velma was a character created in the wake of the 60s wave of feminism. this is baked fundamentally into her character - the nerdiness, the (for the time) androgyny, the outfit. for female characters aimed towards children at the time it was incredibly revolutionary like i watched an interview with the original voice actress of velma + she was talking about how important it was for her to be able to give life to this explicitly intelligent and assertive female character who young girls could use as a role model. velmas feminist origins are something that in more modern iterations i feel is becoming increasingly lost….

criticisms for the characters in sdway being fairly flat + not fully realized are valid to a certain extent but i think that is largely due to them being written to be more representations + symbols than rounded + developed characters. bear in mind this isnt to say they are completely void of personality (they certainly arent, despite what public conscience claims, and they have many quirks that made them so lovable) just that said personalities often go hand in hand with the culture they all represent

then u have the characters of the funky phantom. the first episode of the funky phantom was released in september 1971, almost a year after the last episode of sdway aired. the episode titles were exactly the same (“dont fool with a phantom”)

despite this, through the use of the characters + their dynamic it is evident to any viewer that this show intends to diverge itself from scooby doo - a trio of teenagers rather than a quartet creates a triangle of interactions to work with, the mascot being a ghost of an old man rather than a talking dog does imo ground the show more as more “realistic” (people are more likely to believe in ghosts than talking animals). theyre not in a big flowery van, theyre in a simple dune buggy that u would expect an early 70s teen to own. due to these aspects, the characters of the funky phantom feel more rounded in comparison to sdway, less subcultural symbols + more representations of average american teens. april skip + augie, particularly in their interactions, feel more developed as average teens u could expect to meet in the hallways at school bc thats how they were intended to come across - theyre based loosely on typical archetypes (the prep, the nerd, the jock) but importantly those archetypes are more palatable than the subcultures velma, daphne and shaggy represent and considered more “realistic” because they feed the dominant culture

and to extend that idea of palatability its additionally integral to note the era mudsy hails from - the revolutionary war era, an era extremely familiar to american audiences. while mudsy as a direct representation of the war is by no means realistic, in that its made clear he wasnt himself directly involved + every telling of historical figures is an obvious fabrication of his, the fact remains that this seems like an element intended to try and “ground” the funky phantom in comparison to scooby doo. it makes it more palatable for (us-centric) audiences: dominant culture vs subculture. when watching the funky phantom with its portrayal of mudsy as this bumbling inoffensive snagglepuss-esque character its important to keep in mind the question of WHY hes being presented that way, considering the era he supposedly represents, and how that presentation serves a particular narrative

realism vs symbolism is abundantly apparent in the contrasting usual settings of the shows too

sdway has an undeniable gothic flavor to it. the color pallets, the big spooky houses, the dusky setting for so many of the episodes. an abandoned theme park at night? an abandoned circus at night? the majority of sdway takes place in the evening. conversely, tfp tends to take a brighter palette with the majority of episodes occurring at daytime with despite the intro few spooky houses to be seen!!! heir scare has the only traditionally spooky houses (fittingly, this is also one of the few episodes that takes place solely at night, in the aftermath of a storm). muddlemore manor is given its spotlight episode, but theres hardly anything spooky about it. this again ties into the more “realistic” tone it houses, forgoing the aesthetic or symbolism of sdway for it. theres even an episode centering a highschool football game - not just a passing mention or brief showing like the school dance for example in sdway but an entire episode about it that serves to give focus to the dynamic of skip + augie by placing them in a setting devoted to teamwork

the VILLAINS even lean into this contrast

ofc as a show with a ghost as its main character there r only so many fake ghosts/supernatural episodes u can do. scooby doo leans more heavily into the supernatural thematically than the funky phantom which has the majority of its villains be common crooks. the supposed supernatural spirits the characters in the funky phantom DO deal with almost always resemble a historical figure drawing from real events to varying degrees. the only ghostly villain in tfp that doesnt abide by that is the sheet ghost in haunt in inn. compare that to sdway where u have ghosts, hydes, robots, vampires, werewolves, witches and so many super iconic ones to speak of!!! captain cutler, space kook, charlie, the green ghosts….but then despite that the supernatural IS real in the funky phantom where in scooby doo where are you its used as a symbol for motive. the most interesting monsters are the ones that resemble thematically the real villain behind it

TLDR one of the biggest differences IMO between scooby doo + the funky phantoms takes on the same basic concept is their reliance on symbolism and realism respectively!!!! how those themes seep into so many aspects of the respective shows. i just think its SO redundant to write tfp off merely as a clone when theres so much to be had in interesting discussion w comparing it, genuinely comparing it, to scooby doo where are you TBH

[asafeplaceforus112]

Invincible season 2 special episode: Best girl Eve edition

I'm so excited! I love Eve she brings joy! Plus got spoiled on some stuff because of youtube shorts! So excited to watch this!

The fear I felt when I saw him look at the scapel

Oh my god, how they switched it? omg thats so sad and they were so happy and I just T-T

As a tism kid, damn I feel her

poor sam

"she's not gifted, she's just weird" Someone fucking kill me, I feel seen

oh jesus that skin effect is so UGGGGGHHHHHH ooooohhh maaaaaannnn

I know where this is going because of youtube shorts

and jesus

Awwwweee noooo I'm going to be sad when she starts not liking her

"Everything else is lame and boring" I vibe with that

Oh fuck me this man "You belong there because you're a freak"

I'm glad the mum is calling him an asshole

I love that Eve is just having the normal super hero happy fun experience

"Cream cheese and olive sandwhich" I what???? what child likes that by the way??? Is that a thing? Is that like an american thing???

Oh no I'm gonna cry when her friend stops being friends with her

I remember seeing this scene on youtube shorts, and I sitting there like "oh fuck she's going to turn her friend into a burger" I was expecting the fucky wuckyest of shit

As a person thats getting over a "Friendship break up" I get it, it hurts

She finally got to go to the public school, and she's not friends with her friend anymore ))):"

Be nice eve, its really cute eve!!!!! eeevveee!!!! I fear and valid and all that stuff but still it was really cute!

oh no don't try to change the squirral thats gonna fuck you up for life

the puppy thing is so like teenager thing

also I love that I also was like "wirdo staring at me?? I'm going home now"

eve is such a dork and I love that for her

Eve is going to eat shit and I'll be sad for her

oh no girl just left a bunch of constructs around didn't she?

"This is fucked up why are we stealing dogs" awe poor sidekick

the metal head thing is fucked up

oh shit dude smart af

oh fuck me I'll cry too

Oh she smart, looking for homeless shelter places, but also not smart, because he's going off the grid, so where people wouldn't be expected

"Jerk"

awwweee he thinks its cute that she called herself that, and I do agree, I love the 10 year old energy

The fact that he lied is real sweet, coz yeah, you don't tell the 10 year old her mum was struggling on the streets

girl truly doesn't understand the idea of government surveyed state

oh no, these poor kids

he just couldn't keep it together

GIRL CHOSE VIOLENCE WHAT THE FUCK

She just killed her siblings jessus no she didn't

oh she did

awweee noooo

fuck thats sad

Oh she just murdered murdered that kid

"it'll be worth it see the light drain from your perfect eyes"

OH SHIT THEY HADN'T DIED

Girl really needed to just be like " hey lets go get burgers"

oh no he's going to get smooshed

oh no he's slowly dissolving

fuck me

oh no oh no oh no

OH NO THEY KEPT THE MOTHER ALIVE WHAT THE FUCK

OH FUCK THAT

EVE HAVE THE GUN STOP BEING A GUN

OH NO

"you murdered my whole family"

OH NO

"I defy you to even remember who I am"

giiirlll you can mix up bodies now

"Did you eat my cake"

FUCKERS

oh god she needs therapy

OH FUCK OFF THATS SO SAD THE WAY SHE MADE A FAMILY VERSION OF THE ONE SHE COULD HAVE HAD THOSE POOR KIDS

"Where was grayson during this?" ID ONT GIVE A FUCK

SORRY WHAT??? EVEN??? EVEN IN EVE'S OWN SPECIAL EPISODE WE HAVE TO GIVE A FUCK ABOUT INVINCIBEL???? THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT WHAT THE FUCK )):<<<<

I FUCKING THAT UPSET ME IDKY I DON'T GIVE A FUCK ):< - bossy

Different note whilst typing the tags, I realised that the episode being a "special" mirrors how Eve was treated in the "oh they're x they're just special" energy and thats like fun little momment not sure on purpose but the coincidence brings contemplation!!!!

[discountdyke]

im so tired of ppl talking about the horrible burden of being a “gifted kid” mostly bc being labled “gifted” in school is incredibly racially biased. being “gifted” doesn’t actually have that much to do with intelligence, and thinking of yourself as a “higher achiever” than your peers has more to do with looking down on others than actually being pressured into unattainable standards. im sure some people did have to deal with that, but when you are pushed into something that tells you that you (often white) are smarter and more special than your peers (black, latino, indigenous) the real divide is racial. 

it sucks to grow up and find out that higher education/the “real world” are hard for you. doing well on a standardized test in elementary school is not a great indicator for learning later in life. it is frustrating! but sooooooooo many “former gifted kids” cry about their loss of identity of being a “better” person than their peers and its insufferable. and lets be honest: how many of yall “i was reading on a college level at age 9″ were actually reading college level books? 

the thing is that the american public school system fails us all. it fails smarter students but also the kids that get labeled “lazy” and “stupid”. its easy to say “well those kids probably have learning disabilities or neurodivergencies that went unnoticed” and for many people thats true! but why do people need to justify being stupid to you? whats actually so wrong about not doing well in school, regardless of the reason? maybe you have a learning disability, maybe you have to take care of your siblings or your house and dont have time to focus on schoolwork, maybe you work to help pay your families bills, or maybe you’re just “stupid”! theres nothing wrong with that!

which brings me to my main point which is: being smart doesn’t make you a better person. intelligence is just not that important. do you treat others with kindness and respect? do you work to improve your community in any way? or do you look down on people that don’t meet your personal expectations and treat them poorly? intelligence doesnt build communities. intelligence cant create art, it cant feed and house your unhoused neighbors, it doesnt offer compassion. there is not one single thing about being smart that makes you better than anyone else. start caring about shit that actually matters.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Countervailing power

It’s hard not to feel powerless. The rich are getting richer, the middle class is disappearing, and poor people are evermore exposed to labor abuses, predatory finance, police violence, and food-, fuel- and housing-insecurity. Our cities are increasingly segregated into the haves and have-nots, and the haves hoard the parks, schools and clean air:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/06/us/economic-segregation-income.html

The rich don’t just own all the good stuff, they also own the political process. The now-classic 2014 paper “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” finds that “ordinary citizens… get the policies they favor, but only because those policies happen also to be preferred by the economically-elite citizens who wield the actual influence.”

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

How do material wealth and political power relate to each other? Well, on the one hand, it’s obvious that if you have more wealth, you have more to spend on lobbying, both to the public and to lawmakers. As the leaks in Propublica’s IRS Files show, just having a lot of money can scare off regulators and legal enforcers, who know you’ll be able to hire more lawyers than they can.

https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-now-audits-poor-americans-at-about-the-same-rate-as-the-top-1-percent

But the secret to oligarchy isn’t (just) outspending the rest of us. Oligarchs wield a far more important weapon: class solidarity. There is so much solidarity among billionaires, centimillionaires, decimillionaires and even ordinary millionaires, who may jockey with one another for the right to financialize your rent and suppress your wages, but come together with admirable discipline when their collective interests are at stake.

Take taxes. In a major new Propublica IRS Files story, Paul Kiel and Mick Dumke document the behind-the-scenes spending that defeated Illinois’s state referendum on a progressive state tax comparable to the system in 32 other states:

https://www.propublica.org/article/ken-griffin-illinois-graduated-income-tax

Led by the hedge-fund billionaire Ken Griffin of Citadel (the richest man in the state) the ultra-rich of Illinois unleashed a blizzard of money on deceptive ads that ultimately defeated the measure. That spending was a bargain! Propublica calculates that Griffin’s $54,000,000 contribution saved him $51,000,000 per year thereafter (the IRS Files show Griffin’s average income to be about $2.9 billion per year).

Griffin led the “investment” in starving Illinois’s tax coffers, but he had a lot of co-investors: there’s Richard Uihlein, the billionaire behind Iline, who kicked in $100k. Uihlein’s a shrewd investor in political corruption, having spent $20m on Ron Johnson’s campaign, only to have Johnson insert a last-minute amendment to the Trump tax cuts that saved him $215m in the first year alone:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/11/the-canada-variant/#shitty-man-of-history-theory

Sam Zell, whose leveraged buyout of the Chicago Tribune led the newspaper into bankruptcy, kicked in $1.1m and got $1.6m/year in savings every year thereafter. The Tribune now operates out of a windowless cinderblock bunker the size of a Chipotle:

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

Patrick Ryan gave $1m to realize a return of $2.1m/year. Richard Colburn’s $500k nets him $5.5m/year. He told Propublica that the spending was an investment “to limit the temptation on me to relocate.” Donald Wilson gave $250k to get back $3.5m/year.

Richard Stephenson, who made his nut with a chain of for-profit cancer hospitals and was executive producer on two Ayn Rand film adaptations (you literally can’t make this shit up), gave $300k through his trust.

Another trust spend came from Philip M Friedmann, who cashed out his family’s greeting card business by selling to private equity looters. Friedmann’s trust is a “personal” one, which makes his $25k investment illegal, according to three tax experts that Propublica consulted.

The campaign to raise Illinois’ 5% flat tax to an 8% tax for the richest people in the state was a rare example of billionaire-on-billionaire violence. Democrat Governor JB Pritzker — scion of the Hyatt Hotel fortune — won office by promising to raise taxes on the rich. This sparked a political bidding war, pitting former GOP governor Bruce Rauner (another private equity looter) in a race that ultimately cost more than $250m.

Though the billionaire low-tax coalition lost the battle for the governor’s mansion, they won the war, thanks to $63m in ads that convinced the people of Illinois that they would see higher taxes as a result (the vast majority of Illinoisians would not have seen their tax bills go up).

While Pritzker is a rare class traitor, he still maintained some loyalty to his cohort, continuing to milk his grandfather’s fortune through a system of secret trusts typical of dynastic wealth, which seeks to ensure that merely emerging from a very lucky orifice guarantees you the power to impact the lives of millions of people who lost the orifice lottery:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/19/dynastic-wealth/#caste

When even the “good” billionaires favor the eugenic proposition that being descended from someone who made a lot of money makes you suited to leadership and influence, it’s no wonder that this proposition is so durable in our political system.

Now, it’s obvious why rich people would favor a system that increased and perpetuated their wealth and power, but self-interest alone doesn’t explain the rock-solid solidarity of the oligarchs. The other crucial element is in their numbers: when your bloc is small, it’s easier to come to agreement on how it should mobilize.

This is how monopolies rot our society and politics. When an industry is composed of hundreds of companies, they’ll struggle to agree on the catering for their annual meeting. Reduce the number of firms until all their CEOs will fit around a board-room table, and they’ll be able to agree on far more ambitious issues, like whether to raise prices in unison and blame “inflation”:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/02/its-the-economy-stupid/#overinflated

Collective action problems are some of the hardest challenges we face as a species. Solving collective action problems are why we build institutions: from the Mafia to the Catholic Church, from trade unions to federal governments, from the UN to the Cali cartel, organizations exist to find ways to let groups of people coordinate their activities to do more than any individual could do on their own:

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

Oligarchs benefit from having a lot of money to spend, but even more important is that their numbers are so low that they can agree on how to spend it. Every time the rich figure out how to coordinate better, they clean up. Take this NBER working paper that shows that when giant funds become company shareholders, worker wages go down:

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w30203/w30203.pdf

Once the power of the wealthy is gathered into the hands of a few fund managers, they’re able to direct that power to pick managers who’ll endure the internal strife from slashing wages, benefits and staffing levels. Workers, by contrast, are atomized and can be divided and pitted against one another.

Now, obviously if real wages are declining, then there must have been a time when forces drove them up, when workers were able to hold the line against the power of the owning class. The most familiar tool workers used to exercise this power was unionization, which is why oligarchs hate unions and spend millions to keep their workers from organizing.

Though unions are having a renaissance, they are still far weaker than they were during the period in which workers built and expanded power — and oligarchs are far stronger (richer, more coordinated). Oligarchs have built a flywheel, where more power gives them more money which gives them more power.

To brake the flywheel, we have to come up with our own virtuous cycle of systems, laws and tactics that build one atop another. “Countervailing Power” is a new series from The American Prospect and The Forge that systematically explores how to build that system:

https://prospect.org/topics/countervailing-power/

The debut article is “Laws That Create Countervailing Power,” a discussion between ACORN’s Steve Kest and Benjamin Sachs and Kate Andrias, facilitated by Robert Kuttner:

https://prospect.org/power/laws-that-create-countervailing-power/

The discussion is framed by “Constructing Countervailing Power: Law and Organizing in an Era of Political Inequality,” a Yale Law Review article by Sachs and Andrias about laws that can be used to build, fortify and expand worker power:

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/article/constructing-countervailing-power-law-and-organizing-in-an-era-of-political-inequality

They propose that there are six categories of law that build countervailing power:

Laws that “grant collective rights in an explicit and direct way to create a frame that encourages organizing”

Laws that “provide for financial, human, and other resources,” including money, but also “information that helps direct the work of the organization and inform its leadership”

Laws that create “free spaces in which movement organizing can occur, free from surveillance and control,” both physical and digital

Laws that “remove barriers to participation both by protecting people involved in organizing efforts from retaliation and also by removing material obstacles that make it difficult for people to organize”

Laws that “provide organizations with ways to make material change in their members’ lives” by “creating ways to engage in bargaining with private and public actors that actually correspond to the way political and economic power is organized”

Laws that “enable contestation and disruptive collective action” including “strikes and protests and other kinds of disruptive activity”

The article and the discussion give good examples of all six, but I’m more interested in how they play into one another — like how the New Deal electrification co-ops created enduring institutions that organized people, incubated leaders, and turned into telephone co-ops. Some of these are around today, providing blazing-fast co-op internet (AKA, the “free spaces” mentioned above) to poor people:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us

I was recently on an organizing tactics call about the housing crisis, and we got to talking about the wicked panoply of problems that drive people to oppose affordable housing. With the elimination of unions — and thus work — as a path to social mobility, we’ve told working people that everything depends on their house appreciating.

Unless their family home goes up in value, they will not be able to afford retirement, their kids’ college education or emergency medical bills. They certainly won’t be able to put down a deposit for their own kids’ homes.

https://gen.medium.com/the-rents-too-damned-high-520f958d5ec5

All of this drives people to want to limit the supply of housing, and also to hoard the benefits of housing, supporting nakedly inequitable policies like funding schools through local taxes, so richer neighborhoods get better schools.

It also drives people to with homes to favor policies that make life worse for people without homes. The worse things are for tenants, the more landlords can extract from them, and the more all houses are worth, because everyone is bidding against landlords who can raise rents, evict, and pass on maintenance costs.

On the one hand, this is dismal, because maybe it means that we can’t improve our housing system until we fix pensions, student debt, for-profit healthcare, and tenants’ rights.

But on the other hand, you can think of each of these issues as a loose end in the gnarly knot of housing dysfunction, a place where we can start unpicking the problem. Like, if we fix student debt, a major part of the reason to favor anti-tenancy policies will disappear (the parents who want to use home equity to send their kids to college also realized that their kids will be tenants, after all).

In other words, the entanglement of all our social problems means that any battle where we can eke out a victory produces tactical benefits for all the other fronts in the war. It means we can build victory upon victory. It means we can tear apart the countersolidaristic coalitions (say, homeowners) by addressing the material conditions that lead people to fight against the human right to shelter.

Uncoupling a dignified retirement, or a decent education, or lifesaving medical treatment, from the need to immiserate others is a powerful tool to build up countervailing power — to create coalitions like the ones that suppressed oligarchy from the New Deal until the Reagan Revolution.

[Image ID: A mountain village that is being trampled under the feet of a tailcoat-wearing giant. The giant is about to be felled by a giant fist made out of the combined raised arms of hundreds of ordinary workers and farmers. The meta-fist is haloed with an aura of red light.]

[omegasmileyface]

may not apply to anybody else but

some notes from my experience gradually becoming more involved with the world immediately around me

(as someone who never got involved in a social life or communities of any sort as a kid and moved a lot and now lives in the middle of nowhere)

taking walks lets me see the houses close to mine and what sort of things they come with (sports team merch, outdoors equipment, political signs, food gardens, etc.)

it also lets me see resources around me. i wouldnt know that there was an open community garden and a storage center just down the street without lookin around on walks

(you can also look around while driving! less time to ruminate but still some)

my state's PBS channel does a ton of local news and documentary coverage! theyre available for free online! its a good place to start

newspapers can be hard to keep up with and also sad if theyre as political as the one here, but they still have relevant stuff

my town and the closest city both have websites, and event newsletters! like, by email!

sometimes things you have zero interest in on their own can be important in your community. .....specifically, im talking about sports. a lot of people like sports by their own right and thats great for them but personally i have never been able to give a shit. ESPECIALLY high school sports (or school spirit in general), which happens to be pretty much The Biggest Thing in a whooole lot of american communities. im currently learning that you can engage a little in the high school sports scene without meaningfully caring the vast majority of the time! ...i havent quite figured out HOW yet, but i know its possible. step one is small talk when people say something about the teams, i guess. or superficially saying you hope Local Team wins State or whatever. the community involvement can be more fun than the actual sport! i spent a lot of words on this one but its a big one to me idk

browsing little stores is one of my favorites. even if you dont actually care what theyre selling. just walking around, making small talk with the employees/owner if youre able to, stuff like that

see if there just happens to be what you want. i have a bad habit of just ASSUMING that they dont have anything here. "i live in the middle of nowhere, of course theres no food not bombs division / punk scene / parkour studio / improv theater" ... its worth actually checking lol. like, recently i learned that theres... well, ok, theres no public transportation. but theres this shuttle service that works between a couple stops a few hours a week thats KINDA like public transportation!

talk to people. its so hard its so hard if you have autism or social anxiety or no practice or a lot of fears or all of the above (hi) and im also sure youve heard it a million times but its usually worth trying

use cash if youre shopping locally. idk it keeps the community independent or whatever. also keeping cash on you is a good habit, since youre gonna want to be giving buskers and homeless people and such money whenever possible. and thats waaay easier with cash.

bank locally? and other such... necessary expenses. if possible! as everything tends toward monopolization its hard to have control over who does your banking or electricity or insurance or what have you. im lucky to live in montana, basically the only state where independent banks thrive. still, worth looking around and seeing what you can do

......i really cant overstate the power of the websites (town chamber of commerce website, local news station website, local radio station website) and newspapers as hubs for finding more stuff. a lot of the time, theyll have little 2 sentence blurbs that tell you that something exists, and then you can look that thing up on its own and maybe find a phone number or a mailing list.

last one ok i havent tried this one out on my own bc im scared (reminder that this is not an instructional post this is an observation of my own experience) but i have a theory that dating apps are a good place to find people your age in your area. they might be upset that youre trying to connect with them as acquaintances on a service literally meant for romance, but... well, they dont exactly have anything like it for friends. (nothing mainstream enough to actually work, anyway.)

also this is gonna sound dumb but look at posters and fliers

[sneepity-snoop-snorpity-sneep]

I HAVE SOME THOUGHTS ON HOW AMERICAN SOCIETY HANDLES MENTAL DISABILITY AND I HAVE DECIDED TO talk about it to myself on my blog at moderate volume

THOUGHT NUMBER 1!!

OK so i’m pretty sure anyone who’s thought about it knows that the medical community (and other industries connected to it, like the insurance dudes), don’t consider brain-malfunction conditions to be on the same tier as other forms of healthcare, and give less priority to funding those departments, which means even if you HAVE got a bunch of medical professionals in those disciplines who DO take that ish seriously, they’ve got immediate barriers between them and the folks needing their services. which sucks.

that one i don’t have an immediate fix for, cuz i don’t think there IS an immediate fix, especially with how many more people are needing mental health treatments/evaluations these days. but you know what COULD have a nice big drastic impact on how people as a whole see mental health AND ALSO how large of a burden untreated mental health problems put on american society??

MAKE. ANNUAL. MENTAL HEALTH. EVALUATIONS. A. NORMAL. THING!!

like what parents are supposed to do with their kids and dr appointments is at least once a year, hop in the car or on the bus, and take their kid to get a physical! thats a totally normal thing people do, the idea being “even if there wasn’t anything obviously wrong before the appointment, its just a good way to keep an eye on our children’s health and catch problems sooner if a serious one does turn up!

well folks, that idea of monitoring one’s health preventing a lot of problems from becoming problems in the first place would also work with any and all forms of neurodivergency!! like how many people who struggle with a brain illness struggle mostly due to the fact that they weren’t prepared for it!? i’m totally projecting here btw, cuz guess what happened to me even though i WAS tested as a kid!! this exact issue right here!

obviously, a lot of mental illnesses specifically can’t be counted on to show up when you're still in childhood, where once a problem is revealed its the adults around you who are supposed to take care of you and make sure you’re getting what you need. BUT!!! but but but but BUT

if you DID come down with a condition as an adult, but you’d already been somewhat familiarized with what symptoms WERE IN FACT symptoms, and common treatments/solutions for said symptoms, due to having regular psychiatric checkups with a dr throughout childhood?

well, odds seems pretty good that you’d be much better prepared for that condition if/when it did come along, and it would probably take less time to notice it too!

say nothing of the fact that this would do a lot to de-stigmatize mental health, cuz if u arrange ur healthcare system so it is No Longer Assuming That Neurotypicality Is The Norm, then EVERYONE’S got that knowledge too, and even for the people who haven’t got a form of neurodivergence and never will -  them having a similar stockpile of background knowledge and awareness of mental health as those who do have a condition will do a ton to remove the obstacles in the way of effective society-wide treatment of brain illnesses (both on the stigma side of things, and on the practical symptom-treating side)

THOUGHT NUMBER 2!!

so this party-popper of thought was specifically inspired by a post i saw but can’t find (NVM I FOUND IT :D) that listed neurotypical traits in a similar manner as autistic traits tend to be talked about - i chuckled at it and then went like hey, what if tho, what if that could actually have some practical applications?

specifically, what if that exact premise was used as a the foundation of a unit in health classes in public schools?

like i know that even if you get a health curriculum and teacher that does a fairly good job of talking about what they’re required/allowed to talk about, there just isn’t enough time given to go into detail about a lot of important shit, and in the classes i got at least, neurodivergency vs. neurotypical-ness was one of the things not discussed (most of the ones i got focused on healthy relationships, which they did a good-but-not-great job on)

but if you had even just a couple lectures where the teachers first explain what each one is, give a few examples of neurodivergent conditions, and then follow it up with a talk outlining the neurotypical traits and explaining why/how they’re neurotypical traits?? it could definitely have a similar effect as the theoretical benefits to Thought #1

it would potentially re-frame the lack-of-condition that is being neurotypical - like i feel like the way people see it as ‘normal’ and while i get how that’s the impression people end up with, i think that’s a bad way to try and categorize the different ways the human brain functions - cuz what does normal even mean??? it doesn’t really describe anything except that ‘this person doesn’t seem to have anything going on with their behavior, they must be normal’ which. uh. hi there high-functioning folks, how y’all doing on this fine fall afternoon?

like if i’d been made aware that a lot of the stuff i did that i knew was what made me ‘weird’ were actually full-on SYMPTOMS that i actually shared with a ton of other people!? lemme tell you, it would’ve made a BIG difference in how much i measured the scope my problems based on ‘i’m weird though, so this is to be expected’

 Even (or maybe especially) though i didn’t actually know anybody personally with the same conditions, because hey! i didn’t know many people personally who also had asthma, but i never developed any hangups around how that affected my physical needs. why would I??! i’d already met a bunch of doctors about it, gotten an inhalor for it, and knew it was a Condition and that i was far from the only kid who had it. there wasn’t any empty space in my knowledge that i was left to fill with my own assumptions, that if i was so perpetually inadequate it must just be a trait i had and there wasn’t any point in trying to logic my way out of that burden

it doesn’t seem like it would be particularly difficult to close that knowledge gap when it comes to how people look at mental illness and neurodivergency, even just by explaining what’s really going into being allistic, neurotypical, or ‘normal’ would go a long way towards dispelling the idea that people have absolute control over their brains and behavior, as well as just being a great way to get folks with undiagnosed going-ons in their grey matter to shake off any assumptions they’ve made about how they should look at themselves for not being normal

ok yeah, having lectures where u explain how a person is neurotypical the same way you’d explain how someone is neurodivergent won’t help people with brain conditions know which one they’ve got or what to do about it - but i feel like the greater gain here is disrupting the idea that being neurotypical or ‘normal’ is something that awards merit or pride.

no one who’s not-neurodivergent got that way because of something they personally achieved or did. it wasn’t a reward they received from the universe for being a Certified Good Boi, they got lucky! they didn’t do anything to personally earn a brain that functions and on the flip side of that, starting out with a brain that functions isn’t actually some form of magical protection from losing that functionality if ur good luck runs out - a lot of forms of neurodivergence aren’t ones you’re born with after all.

and even the ones that ARE, same logic applies!! autism, adhd, and other conditions aren’t metaphorical coal in ur stocking for being naughty, they just are. nobody gets a say in what stats they have at birth!! (honestly the control we have even under our own agency and mobility isn’t that influential on our circumstances a lot of the time)

basically i feel like u want to start regularly introducing the idea that the perception of ‘normal’ is coming out of very measurable things in people’s brains. A perception which really just seems like another lazy way of assuming that those who have a functioning brain won’t ever have to worry about losing that, like it’s an inherent trait to you as a person or something - newflash! it ain’t. your mind, personality, and behavior are not magical airy-fairy things detached from measurable factors, their roots are all held within your brain, and your brain is an organ which can get sick or damaged. Not only that, but since its a very complex organ to boot, it doesn’t take a very big change to cause big differences in functionality!!

like yeah in theory it would be great if you could explain the difficulties people with disabilities face to those with no personal stake in that, and have them have sufficient empathy to consider that as something that matters. And although I’m sure there ARE folks out there capable of that, there’s also a lot of folks out there who will let you down BIG TIME on that front, so i think another tactic to use when trying to combat ableism would be to start requiring curriculums that gives all the folks across the board a nice big sip of