#“They have universal healthcare” Bruh everyone has universal healthcare

[vanilla-voyeur]

Kinda annoyed with the assumption that all socialists are just economically illiterate dumdums who would realize the error of their ways if they'd just take an Econ 101 class. Well I have taken introductory econ classes. I've taken multiple econ classes. The university I went to has one of the top 10 economics programs in the US. I originally went into college wanting to be an econ major before I switched to CS. I got to the point of taking one upper division class right before we started getting into the calculus.

The problem with how economics is taught in school is that it takes an approach of capitalist realism that taints their interpretation of everything. Everything that supports the ends of capitalism is assumed to be good. Everything that doesn't maximize efficiency is assumed to be bad. Anyone who advocates for something that has been shown not to maximize efficiency is a big dumdum who doesn't understand economics. There is no question or discussion about whether maximizing efficiency is something we always want in every case.

We got taught that price floors and price ceilings and taxes and regulations cause deadweight loss. Deadweight loss is bad for maximizing efficiency. All those politicians who want rent control and minimum wage and increasing taxes on the 1% are big dumdums who don't understand basic economics. Are there any trade-offs where it's worth it to increase deadweight loss for some other benefit? Not considered.

I do remember getting taught that monopolies are bad. Monopolies also cause deadweight loss. Notably, it is incredibly hard to be a billionaire without being the CEO of a monopoly. Billionaires are causing deadweight loss. Any politician who's against trust busting is an economically illiterate dumdum. If you don't have a problem with billionaires then you hate the basic principles of capitalist competition. (Or alternatively you're an economically illiterate dumdum.)

There are many forms of economic efficiency, but the only one I was taught in school was Pareto efficiency. None of my professors mentioned any other variant. Pareto efficiency was treated as a law of the universe. It's just a theory by some guy. He made some pretty math equations that work under idealized conditions. What if he's wrong? What about all the other models that think he's wrong? What if he's right but he didn't consider things like institutions of oppression? (19th century white Parisian nobility are well known for taking into account how racism, sexism, classism, etc affect society.)

I think the order of classes is suspicious too. First you get simplified microeconomics then simplified macroeconomics then increase the math of each while still being simplified, all before talking about where real life capitalist countries are failing at approaching the idealized model. By that time, the capitalist realism has already set in. We should get to the differences between the graphs and the reality by the third class bare minimum. Perfect competition isn't possible. It's a utopia. Does that actually mean that we should be trying to get closer to it? What sort of trade-offs should we consider when we're departing from perfect competition? We never discussed it.

To the extent of my knowledge, my university never had a class on idealized socialism or communism or any other economic model but focuses entirely on idealized capitalism until upper division classes. The only classes that acknowledge socialism exists compares existing capitalist countries to existing socialist countries. By then, you've already drank the Kool aid of how capitalism could be at its best and it turns out theoretical capitalism is more attractive than existing totalitarian dictatorships. What would a socialist democracy look like? They never bother to ask.

You can't compare and contrast something you don't know anything about. It's all capitalist realism. Anyone who hasn't taken a Socialist Economics 101 class where they draw the simplified graphs and they explain the concepts is an economically illiterate dumdum too.

[r7-b7]

Biden specifically is going around everyone to send more fucking bombs to drop on Palestine and I'm getting hit with the "if you cared about Palestinians at all you'd vote for Biden" and "Trump says he wants to wipe Palestine off the map!" Bruh what the FUCK DO YOU THINK BIDEN IS FUCKING DOING RIGHT FUCKING NOW???

Miss me with that.

Literal Nazis have been marching for YEARS and there was not nearly as much (if any) police presence but the encampments for Palestine demanding universities stop using their money to have egregious contracts with weapons manufacturers they brought out all the toys. Toys meaning riot gear, chemical weapons, armored vehicles, attack dogs and horses, snipers on the buildings, facial recognition, mass arrests.....

In 2022 Biden was asking cities to spend COVID money on police. Fuck y'all.

I'm not taking a life/history/moral lesson from some selfish white knight liberal Democrat who doesn't listen to the people ACTUALLY affected by our choices. Who doesn't partake in mutual aid, doesn't know whose mother fucking land they are settlers on, won't even wear a god damn mother fucking mask.

Anybody not seeing the link between COVID and Palestine please read this article:

What the people have been saying:

😷 Disabled: the pandemic isn't over and the best way to not cause mass death and disability is to wear a mask, stay up to date on vaccines, and keep educating yourself (specifically US handling the AIDS crisis) follow the stats and variants, and new information about COVID. Long COVID is disabling people as the cost of living and demand of labor increases while the pay is low and the houselessness to prison slavery pipeline is efficient. ADHD/Autistic folx are more likely to be affected by an infection and the children are susceptible to much worse as their immune systems are compromised globally and they miss school from chronically being sick due to COVIDs way of wrecking a body. But instead of moving funds from the military and police to fund Universal Basic Income, Universal Healthcare, free at home tests, more teachers and aids, funding PPE for hospitals and clinics, getting people housed (there's more houses than houseless people) Biden and most of your Blue-ly elected officials did none of that and instead actually became the Red no maskers, "let's get back to normal, these kids are just so lazy and need to get a job", who are all just protecting the same billionaires and millions of you followed, many to their deaths.

BIPOC: spreading diseases is one of the most efficient ways to genocide a population. COVID is not magically over, in fact it's gotten increasingly worse and it affects indigenous and black people disproportionately. Who also experiences higher in rates of homelessness, and incarceration, as disabled people have pointed out: we are pushed down a pipeline. Biden has been fast tracking pipelines that destroy indigenous land and water (which hurts literally everyone and everything), and Palestine?? We are seeing exactly what happened to our parents, grandparents, great grandparents and getting a cruel smack in the face of the reality of HOW what happened to them happened--we see you do it, just looking away, being a White Moderate. Biden is literally killing us and smiling as he does it and getting applause for doing it better than some other White man would. What is fucking wrong with some of you?

Queers: we seem pretty generally split between those who can see we are getting fucking played and those who are aligning with the Empire for personal rights and gain. Some of us are like "I literally will not let the Democratic party think this behavior is acceptable. I won't be told these are my choices and deal with it. I won't allow a child rapist or a child slaughterer to win a vote or a dollar. Our Liberation is bound together. I remember why the L in LGBTQIA2S+ was moved to the front. I know we have to have each other." And some of us are like "this post that I didn't research myself or think critically about said this list of things the Biden administration has done to secure MY rights and comforts I've gotten accustomed to."

White™️ Democrats: v0te bLuE N🌀 mAttEr wH🔵 🇺🇲🦅🌈😇🦠 Trump is a fascist! 👺 But not our man! He said it himself: he's a Zionist conservative who doesn't actually believe in abortion rights and Israel is our best invention! Our sweet little baby settler colony 🥹 he looks just like his dad. We love an honest man!

see this is why i know so many of yall are just being performatively supportive of palestine. you "support palestine" superficially but with any other resistance or radical movements you're all of a sudden senator mccarthy and it's the 1950s and you're screaming and crying about dictator totalitarian commies if you see a thomas sankara quote or something about che guevara. like you people are not fucking serious

[brokenjardaantech]

captain allen appreciation week 2020 day 2: college au

summary: set in early 2021 in the same universe as the previous entry. the pandemic is not over yet. america as we know it is on the brink of collapse. now that anna is in the air force academy, allen can finally go to college himself. except that everything is online cause social distancing.

notes:

this fic is the closest to reality among everything else i've written. i don't have 2021 vision, but this is what i imagine what things will be if america continues being like this in everything.

i know the space force as an independent branch of the us military is still a fairly new concept, but let's just assume that they need people so desperately that they'll pull prospecting cadets onto the path to space starting from their academy years. they used to be a branch of the air force anyway, right?

tags: brief mentions of childhood neglect and parentification

----

The high-pitched hum is driving Lou crazy, so he turns on the speaker on his laptop and plays some potato peeling ASMR to give the house some other noise. The hum disappears, but seeing the Slavic guy peeling potatoes makes him want to cook again, and cooking for himself...just sounds depressing. Not that he hates cooking alone - he takes pride in being able to prepare his own food and be good at it - but he doesn’t have much of a choice in raw ingredients; he stocked up when it was announced that a large storm is coming, and all he has is canned food - hardly something he would prepare for Anna had she been here.

He switches tabs, discovering that his new lecture is still downloading, and lets out a groan. Fucking blizzard locking him in and fucking with the internet. Now he can’t even study when he’s snowed in in his own house - yes, his own fucking house, because his Papa apparently can’t stand Alaska anymore after his wife disappeared and fucked off back to France as soon as he could, leaving his property (which had been his wife’s) to his children to distribute between themselves, and Lou, being the only adult during that time, became a homeowner. Sighing, he goes to his email and drafts an apology.

Professor, am snowed in. Internet slow. Can’t stream lecture, so tried downloading. 5 hrs in, only 70% downloaded. Requesting deadline extension. L. W. Allen

He sounds like Anna in this one, thoughts going so quickly that she omits pronouns and ‘the’s and ‘a’ or ‘an’s while she’s typing. Except that he’s typing slowly with his non-dominant hand while scooping cooling mashed potato into his mouth with his other hand. Damn it, he misses his sister.

The potato peeling video is over and he still is not sleepy, so he goes over the lectures he has downloaded and chooses the one he remembers being useful in writing his paper to be his new background noise. The drone of his professor’s voice makes him think of Anna rapid-firing her thoughts while she’s doing his homework for fun.

Everything comes back to Anna.

His Skype jumps with an incoming call, and he accepts it without reading who that is, acting in desperation for company good or bad.

‘Allen here.’

‘Lemme guess: you didn’t read the description.’

Lou is so relieved to hear his sister’s voice that he nearly cries. ‘How the fuck did you do that? It’s midnight on your side.’

‘I’m different, Lulu, haven’t you heard?’ Anna dismisses her brother’s question, proud as always. ‘Snowed alone in the house must be hard.’

He laughs. This is ridiculous. ‘Yes it is. How did you know that?’

‘You talking about the snow part or the lonely part?’

‘Both.’

‘I’m not completely cut off from the rest of the world. I read the weather forecast and report, and I lived with you and only you for four years. Enough time to discover a pattern, I should say.’

Lou takes the laptop and flops down onto his bed. ‘We haven’t been apart for longer than a day back then.’ Placing his Bluetooth headphones over his head, he lies down on their bed - his bed now - and allows himself to imagine that this is just one of their many pillow talks about nothing and everything. Oddly, he can’t imagine his sister doing the same. 

‘It’s called logical deduction, bruh. Then her voice softens. ‘You spent most of your life taking care of me. I’ve got planes to fly, programs to write, labs to blow up and muscles to flex. You get to listen to some boring old man spew bullshit about our minds as if the theories he teaches aren’t outdated as hell.’

It puts a smile on Lou’s face. ‘I don’t think they’ll let you stay for long if you blow up too much shit in the lab.’

‘Details, Lulu, details. Hey - check your time.’

Lou squints at the corner of the screen where the clock should be. 17:58. ‘Fuuuuck,’ he groans. Of course Anna’s awake - it’s just 19:58 on her end. ‘Fucking storm fucking with my sense of time.’

‘Hail English,’ says Anna. ‘Though not as elegant as our father tongue. How’s the French club going on?’

‘I’m developing abs from laughing too hard. There’s one fine but thin line between normal conversation and random-ass flirting, but they don’t seem to grasp it.’

‘Not everyone has an incompetent French dad who barely speaks English but moved to America anyway.’

‘Very true,’ Lou admits. Anna turned up fine even with only minimal parental guidance, but at what cost? Himself, probably, except that he seems fine as well. ‘How about you? How’s the Academy been treating you?’

‘It’s not official but,’ Anna lowers her voice as if she wants to keep it secret, ‘I’m most likely going to be in the Space Force when I graduate.’

Lou coughs to mask his laughter. Of all the things his sister is skeptical of, the Space Force set up by that orange isn’t one of them. ‘No offence, Anna, but Space Force? Seriously? A woman of your talents?’

‘I should tell them that their efforts are successful,’ says Anna. ‘Hold on.’

Footsteps. A slam of a door. Some scratching noises, and when she turns on her camera, it shows not her face but the screen of her phone. It started as a joke, it writes. They admit to that. But something happened in the scientific field. Something so unbelievable and classified that they sobered up instantly and begged for more funding from the federal government. 

‘America as we know it is ending,’ Lou points out. Sure, they didn’t let the orange continue representing the country, but the harm has been done, the virus comes back every few months and before the previous batch of patients are freed up, and everything is failing - the economy, the already-problematic medical and healthcare system, the old order governing the country for two centuries. It is terrifying but, in Lou’s opinion, a much-needed change for America to go forward. ‘You’re more familiar with them than me, but they might be doing it to preserve the old order. You know, before they lose all the power they currently have.’

Anna takes the phone away. ‘I highly doubt it,’ she says as she continues typing. ‘They’re used to whatever we now have. They already expect some things to change;’ she holds up her phone again; but not in the way shit’s going. ‘You heard about the declassified document on Alec Ryder? The guy who tried to write an advanced AI and developed it into some highly illegal and sci-fi-y shit that he can’t control?’

‘Didn’t read the whole thing. Sounds unbelievable, though, letting an AI control your body. And I thought Elon was stupidly crazy.’

‘Well, for some reason they’re still on high alert about the whole shitshow even though the AI was supposedly destroyed,’ she puts her phone away and switches off the camera. ‘Call it my instincts if you wish. Something big is coming and I’m not sure if I like it.’

Lou takes a deep breath. Anna has always said that America needs to change, but if she thinks that she won’t like it… ‘Let’s don’t speculate anything right now, okay?’ he tries to rationalise. ‘We can’t do much right now, can we?’

‘True.’ A creak. Some muffled conversation. ‘Look, I need to go now. Try not to freeze your ass off at home.’

‘With that nasty generator you built? Don’t think so. Take care.’

‘Same for you.’

The call disconnects. Taking off his headphones with a trembling hand, Lou quits the application and checks again how much longer he needs to wait for the lecture. A few minutes left. Standing up and popping all the joints in his body in preparation, he goes to the kitchen and pours himself a glass of water to clear his head.

If he’s gonna be stuck in this house for days, he at least can use the time for some studying, right?

----

spoiler: anna’s instincts are right.

the potato-peeling video

[ppatibandla]

Quite a Few Things Wrong with ‘A Quiet Place’

So if you don’t live under a rock, you’ve probably already heard all about A Quiet Place and all the fantastic reviews and success it has gotten so far. But just in case you’re Patrick Star, A Quiet Place is a horror movie which came out last week, directed by John Krasinski, who also plays the lead in the movie along with his real-life and onscreen wife, Emily Blunt.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a horror and apocalyptic movie enthusiast, particularly of the zombie variety. I enthusiastically watch almost every movie/TV show which comes out in these genres and consider myself a connoisseur of sorts of all things eerie. Oh and not only do I enjoy horror, but I particularly love watching scary movies alone (well as alone as you would be in a movie theater full of other people, I guess). Call me weird if you will, but the adrenaline rush is well worth it and you should try it too!

So obviously I knew I had to watch A Quiet Place as soon as it came out when I first saw the trailer. 

I set out to watch A Quiet Place this past Friday night using my MoviePass - side note, I can’t sing enough praises on what an amazing investment the MoviePass has been! 

I went to my regular theater but the show I wanted to see was all sold out and the next showing wasn’t until 10.30 - 3 hours later. I did not want to wait that long so I looked up a theater which had an earlier showing and decided to drive 10 miles to get there. I’m not gonna lie, this theater was in the middle of nowhere and the route there took me through parts of Riverside which I never knew even existed despite having lived here for over 2 years now. That completely unnecessary adventure later, I successfully managed to catch the 9 o clock screening of A Quiet Place.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I absolutely loved the movie and enjoyed the experience of watching a movie that almost entirely had no dialogue, just silence, and sound effects. But I unwittingly had a lot of Taro milk tea earlier and expected more from this movie, so my bladder and brain were both in some serious pain for most of the movie. 

Yes, I’ve been on the receiving end of many “Omg, it’s just a movie, let it go” s and “Why do you analyze and rationalize everything so much” s but I’m sorry, okay?! Plot holes are usually glaring at me in the face and it's very hard for me to not see them. While there were many aspects of A Quiet Place that I thought were brilliant, a lot of it also made me go: 

SPOILERS AHEAD! You’ve been warned!

Firstly, a baby? Really?!

Yes, yes, I know this one doesn’t take Einstein and everyone who has watched the movie has already thought this. But I tried really hard to understand what was going on in the minds of the lead characters when they made this choice. Kids are hard enough to raise in a normal world. But in this specific scenario, there is a couple that’s living in a world where you can’t make a sound or you die. And they basically went:

“We had three kids out of which, one is a huge liability already because she can’t hear and one got killed for doing things that kids do like play with toys. You know what would be a brilliant idea? Let’s have a baby!! Because what do babies do? They cry and make involuntary sounds. That sounds perfect for a world where you can’t make a sound, doesn’t it?!”

Pregnancy is some seriously complicated shit and women risk their lives every time they choose to have a baby EVEN in a world with complete access modern healthcare. Let alone in one with no access to medication, food or even the ability to let out a fart. And there are dramatic moments in the movie where Emily Blunt’s character Evelyn says things like “who are we if we can’t protect them (the children)?”

Bruh! Really?? Maybe if you don’t keep bringing children into this post-apocalyptic world where it is highly likely that they will be eaten for reasons outside their control, they wouldn’t need protection!

Have doors stopped existing?!?

Okay so unlike most post-apocalyptic universes like the one in The Walking Dead, for example, these guys still, somehow (reasons never explained in the movie) have electricity so they are clearly more advanced than other typical characters in such scenarios. So what do they do? They build a beautiful, Pinterest weddingesque farm with string lights and sand and carpets and what not.

But why do they not have doors?!? They basically welcome the alien creatures into their homes with doorways which are always wide open apparently for the creatures to just waltz through at any given point in time. Why did they not use the resources they have to fortify their home and build a fortress-like Will Smith’s from I Am Legend? And Will Smith only had his German Shepard for help. These guys had an entire squad worth of child labor that they could tap into!

Well, you could argue that doors are loud etc. But seriously though, they were apparently living on that farm for over a year at least and had access to electricity. I feel like they have no excuse for not being able to figure out a creative solution with all the resources they had. They instead chose to use their time to make a liability a.k.a a baby.

In the same line of questioning, why didn’t they soundproof their entire home the way they did with the basement they built for the baby? Why didn’t they live near the waterfall when they were clearly already aware that the creatures couldn’t hear them near water? So many questions!

This movie should be called ‘A Series of Unfortunate Coincidences’

Okay so as we go through the movie, we are essentially taught two things about this world: 

1. The creatures can’t hear you over the sound of gushing water. 

2. The basement that they created was soundproof.

How did Evelyn wake up to find that the creature had not only conveniently found the basement despite the background noise created by the flooding water, but it also got in quietly (see people, this is why you need doors). And how did the baby, which was floating around in the floodwater (how the f*** did the crib’s lid come off in the first place?!), not make a single sound up until that point? I mean, these guys had to have had the worst luck in the world to achieve that level of coincidence.

Also, Krasinski’s character Lee MOST DEFINITELY did not have to dramatically sacrifice himself. Sure, he did a noble thing to protect his kids. But by getting himself killed, he was leaving his injured wife who JUST nearly died delivering a baby, to deal with a rebellious hearing impaired teenager, a terrified son, a newborn baby and terrifying creatures that hunt on sound. That’s a bit much to have on anyone’s plate, even a highly capable woman’s.  For all he knew, he was basically dooming them to die too.

Okay, end of rant. Again, just to reiterate, I loved the movie and in fact, I’m kinda itching to go watch it again. I do realize that you can’t enjoy most movies if your brain is actively picking it apart but I wanted to specifically write about A Quiet Place, maybe because it was one of the few movies in recent times which I engaged with the storyline, fully. 

I’d love to hear your thoughts too, cheers!