#economy of the unenlightened

[brazenautomaton]

man how much is the tech economy going to change when enough people realize that harvesting all this data isn't actually useful

like "targeted advertising" is only remotely effective in the very broadest sense with the very broadest information ("what location are you in"). all in-depth data about your customer habits and preferences that you get from scraping all their private messages has absolutely zero utility. even if advertising worked, which it almost entirely doesn't, you can't actually deploy anything useful that requires or uses that level of precision.

none of this shit has ever been useful and it's an endless chain of people selling it to the next guy who thinks it will be useful some day. advertisers flatter themselves by pretending they can do something, and the shrieking class flatter themselves by pretending that the unenlightened masses are infinitely malleable by the will of advertising

[anthonybialy]

Devalued Money Is the Root of All Evil

Making money worthless is almost impressive.  Turning paper that once embodied affluence into kindling while trying to make everyone rich is extraordinary in its way.  The inability to buy much didn’t even result from sabotage, I’m pretty sure.  Financial titan Joe Biden didn’t just stop at wrecking the value of the economy: he actually crushed the power of the thing used to obtain other things.  The commander-in-chief is a military genius if commerce is our enemy.

Bills remain valuable if you run out of paper towels.  Lots of basic goods remain tough to find and buy for some mysterious reason.  Meanwhile, digital funds float away like gossamer in the ether.  We were supposed to be enjoying our futuristic cyberworld where the mere idea of being rich is all it takes.

Federal economic experts think there’s no way to go broke as long as the presses operate.  Performing labor in order to receive compensation is for suckers.  Primitive earlier generations were so unenlightened that they thought trading created value to address needs.  Modern geniuses wonder why anyone has bothered to ever work.  Democrats try their hardest to ensure the dream.

Your leaders who tried making you rich by conjuring checks presume money never changes value.  It buys stuff, silly.  Never pondering where it comes from is like presuming any gender can have babies.  As it turns out, modern reasoning is not as sophisticated as those generating notions would like to think.

We all pay thanks to those who truly think it’s just a matter of government issuing enough funding to create prosperity.  You just know they tip like six percent.  It’s sadly obvious why their solution to both federal programs and personal handouts is always to send out more.  Unlike the fuel they refuse to tap, the well is running dry.  Fundamentalist lunatics who believe Washington is the source of income, prosperity, and joy refuse to believe more could ever equal less.

Human motivation makes handing out unfunded prizes tricky.  Unhinged fanatics who trust Washington over their own shopping skills are unable to grasp the essence of supply and demand, including when it pertains to currency itself.  Increasing the supply surely won’t spread poverty.

Congress meanly won’t vote to lower prices.  I just wish there were a natural way to do the job representatives won’t like consumers negotiating with a variety of sellers competing for business.  The free market is much crueler to enterprises, unlike the unfortunate certainties provided by forcing citizens to buy junk.

The only beneficiaries of coercion are companies that don’t need to impress customers to get cash.  For people who hate greedy capitalists, Democrats sure do love guaranteeing massive profits.

I am also shocked those who fundamentally don’t understand what finances are spread poverty.  Thinking having to work is heartless misinterprets the transaction.  Shutdown lovers enjoyed grandstanding about the economy being more important than people when people exchanging things is all an economy is.

Thinking the government can provide everything neglects that little bit involving where stuff comes from.  Politicians always compensate for not thinking things out by deciding what you need while being funded by parasitism.  But at least their products suck.  If you like government work, you’re in a rather lonely focus group.

Sending out checks makes recipients wealthy.  The White House is certain, and their math legally can’t be incorrect.  Why ever work?  And why not send checks for a million dollars?  An extra concentrated dose of free cash will surely stimulate the economy in ways cruel profiteers could never imagine.  I can’t think of a single catch.

Getting something for nothing is liberalism’s core.  Not getting anything is liberalism’s result.  The conflict between idea and reality defines a most empty presidency.

Making others work for free is the new way of embracing compassion.  Canceling student loan debt means students learned they can use a product without paying for it.  The item’s shoddiness is the buyer’s problem.  Every product provided as an alleged right forces someone else to toil on behalf of others, which violates a pretty important amendment.  And softness on crime is nothing more than thieves who don’t generate value taking from those who do.

A personal example doesn’t necessarily inspire.  Biden has spent his rather unproductive career bossing around others while grifting.  The embodiment of inspiration believes government initiates everything worthwhile, including economic progress.  Meanwhile, the very thing used to purchase other things isn’t even valuable anymore.

The only thing worse than claiming Florida suffers from cruel conservatism as they gain electoral votes is trying to explain why liberalism fails.  Everything Biden believes is being disproven.  Even worse, it’s by Biden.  Liberals should loathe their erstwhile savior just for that.  The pushily duped ought to be furious at themselves for believing it was possible to get away with such preposterous attempts to circumvent earning.  Wise kindergarteners grasp what a president in his ninth decade doesn’t.

Why learn when you can double down on delusions?  Blaming diabolical corporations for coping with his policies is exactly what to expect from this presidency.  Prices all just jumped at the same random time which happened to coincide with the inauguration of a thoroughly liberal president.

The collusion behind prices jumping universally shows a disturbingly sophisticated level of planning amongst commercial competitors.  If an observer didn’t know better, it might appear that the one entity that actually doesn’t allow customers to shop elsewhere.

Open negotiation requires working instead of waiting for magnanimous dispensation.  Worthless politicians wonder why all this free money buys less and less.

[unhonestlymirror]

TOP Jujutsu Kaisen questions that disturb me

1. Why Japan is the only country in the world which has such amount of curses, if it's the only country with the biggest amount of sorcerers?

In the manga, I don't remember which chapter, it was said that the better a person (sorcerer) controls the cursed energy, the less it leaks to form curses. From which it follows that curses are formed mainly from ordinary people. By this logic, shouldn't there be a lot less curses in Japan than in other countries? (lol, by the way, according to this logic, geto should have started his "hardcore eugenics" journey not from Japan, but from Kaliningrad, russia) (it always shocked me how many people in this country dream of dying)

Because if "the stronger the sorcerers and especially the Six Eyes, the more curses are attracted to them" (somewhere in the Gojo vs. Hanami chapters, I think) is true then - imagine we sent Gojo and few dozens of strongest sorcerers to vacation in a godforsaken place, on the other side of Earth - e.g. to the same Kaliningrad, russia (I'm sorry, Gojo) - what will happen? How quickly and how many curses will begin to form and go there, if we take into account that russians themselves are trying to get out of there as soon as possible, no matter where?

People have bad feelings and thoughts everywhere, somewhere more, somewhere less - and I'm not really sure Japan is the monopolist in bad feelings. The world is huge. Where does this localization come from? I hope Culling Game will solve this question.

(I am inclined to believe that this is propaganda to prevent the drain of brains and strength. Real Japan is quite a closed country as well. Because if JJK Japan is the only country with curses, then Miguel's African tribe wouldn't have made sense of weaving magic rope for generations, would it?)

1.2 Jujutsu Schools. It's kind of a continuation of the previous question.

It would make more sense if there was mentioned that 2-5 old countries on each continent has its magic school but Japan has the biggest libraries, biggest nurseries with curses, Japan has the most experience because of Sukuna, Japan is a monopolist in the production and supply of cursed weapons... or something like this.

I understand that Jujutsu Kaisen was originally intended for the Japanese reader, who wants to escape from reality, and not immerse themself into World History and cultures, which (s)he does not care about - but a simple mention would be enough - and the non-Japanese readers would thought of everything themselves. But this way it feels like a glitch in the matrix. Or propaganda consequences.

2. Why is it customary for sorcerers to hide the existence of curses from ordinary people (if ordinary people are the main reason for their appearance)?

It really stinks with "we are the chosen one, and of course we are not heroes, we just want to save as much people as possible - nevertheless, we won't conduct public education and trainings "what to do if you faced with a special grade curse, you are not a sorcerer and you don't want to die", "what to do if you suddenly started seeing horrifyingly realistic hallucinations which murder people", "what curses are and how to protect your family if they (and you as well) can't see them", "whom to call" - because for what? Average people are so stupid, unlike us. :// Also we won't tell victims' family members how to protect themselves so it won't happen again, because it doesn't really matter, we all gonna die anyway. S.W.A.G"

For my fullfilled with Japanese stereotypes あss it doesn't make sense, because it always seemed to me Japan LOVES public education trainings for ANY kind of situation, especially for possibly dangerous. But I'm not Japanese, thus, I shut up.

It really stinks with that JJK Japan benefits from an unenlightened population, because sorcery is an industry that brings in a lot of money - but not too unenlightened, because the economy cannot be isolated from the ordinary world, and "money never smell". I would like to know more about that collegue of Toji and that Kenjaku with Chinese politics moment. I would like to see rallies of ordinary people who are tired of mysterious disappearances, invisible killers and the silence of the government. I would like to see more ordinary "blind" people who are aware of the existence of curses, more sorcerers who tell their families about curses.

3. Why we still don't have our analogue of Hange Zoe, although it's already almost 200 chapters Why nobody cares why curses attack people and why nobody does researches?

Do you also feel this smell of politic repressions?

4. How valuable are being considered cursed items and weapons?

The question is in production. And how rich the Zenin clan is if they can afford to give Maki, the clan's renegade, glasses that allow to see curses. Imagine how much fewer deaths there would have been if such glasses were available to ordinary people.

[gravelyhumerus]

Criminal Minds College AU

Fandom: Criminal Minds

Title: “I may just take your breath away”

Relationship: Jemily 

Summary:

Emily Prentiss, college sophomore, absolutely does not have a crush on the girl across the hall.  

Slow-burn Jemily college AU where they live across the hall and despite all odds, the universe pushes them together. AKA they’re silly gay babies who pine after each other for months. 

Read it on AO3

Tumblr:  One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen, (bonus scene), Seventeen, Eighteen, Nineteen, Twenty, Epilogue

“Come in, it’s open!” Emily Prentiss yelled out over her music blasting out of the laptop on her desk. She was listening to her pregame playlist, which was chock full of throwbacks, middle-school jams and of course, The Killers to keep things interesting.

Derek Morgan pushed open her dorm room door and waltzed in. He had a pair of light blue jeans on, held up by a brown belt, with a white t-shirt on top. He jumped on top of Emily’s slightly-too-high bed, and bounced as he grinned at her. Derek was many things, shy was definitely not one of them.

“You look hot,” Emily said, with as much sarcasm as she could manage, looking him up and down. She could tell he dressed up.

“You know it, princess.”

Rifling through his backpack, he grinned as he pulled out two blue college-branded metal water bottles, filled with what was probably not water at all.

“I made us sangria!”

Emily laughed, then spun back around in her desk chair. She still needed to finish her makeup. She had her foundation and eyebrows done, but she needed to focus as she applied her eyeliner.

“Did you just mix some juice into the wine?” She asked, taking the bottle from him, having a sip of the fruity liquid.

“Yup! There’s going to be a keg there, but I wanted to give us options.”

Emily laughed before focusing on her mascara wand gliding across her lower eyelashes, trying to finish up so they could start preing for the party. She wasn’t quite dressed yet either, still wearing her class jeans and not her going out jeans (there was an important distinction between these that mostly involved whether or not she could wear them with a belt.) Morgan was about five minutes earlier than she expected. Moreover, the boy had only sprung the invitation to the party during their lab that afternoon.

As much as she hated to admit it, Derek was basically 90% of Emily’s non-academic social life, the second year boy already very well connected due to his football scholarship, letting him in on all of the good parties. Unfortunately that also meant for Emily that he would spring themed parties like anything but clothes, or no cups allowed on her with absolutely no heads up most weekends.

Emily will not wear a tote bag as a skirt again if she can help it.

Despite the excessive drinking and mixed bag of party attendees, Emily genuinely enjoyed the boy’s company. Anyways, he was the best beer-pong partner that she’s ever had.

“Can I hop on aux?” He asked, leaning over her computer before she could even protest.

“Sure,” she replied, knowing he was already on his own Spotify account and putting on his playlist titled ‘FOR THE BOYS and emily’ that he found hilarious. She knew she could get him to sing along to the Mamma Mia! (2008) soundtrack once he was a few shots in, but for now she resigned herself to wordless EDM.

He sat on her desk, bobbing his head along to the beat.

Emily reached into the bottom drawer of her desk and pulled out a smallish bottle of vodka and two shot glasses, with their college’s crest etched into the glass. For a school that denounced drinking-culture, they had a shocking amount of merch for sale that encouraged it.

She filled each to the line, and slid one towards her friend.

“Bottoms up,” she said, as they cheersed the foul tasting liquid. Morgan grinned and winked at her before shooting it back with the confidence that only a nineteen year old could have.

Vodka still made her queasy, but being underage meant that the college students would take what they could get. Morgan’s senior friends would boot alcohol for them for an extra five bucks, but only every few weeks.

The one thing about the states that Emily still couldn’t wrap her head around was the backwards alcohol policy. Almost everywhere else on earth she would already be legally drinking. Hell, when she was 16 she was passed out in a ditch in rural England, drunk off her ass on legally acquired beer. Even now, if they drove north of the border, Emily could be off to the bars, no questions asked. America was absurd.

“How was the rest of your day?” Emily asked him as she stood up, digging through her dirty laundry to find her other pair of jeans. She tossed aside her fuzzy pjs, a bra and an assortment of band tees but her jeans must’ve been at the bottom. She needed to do laundry but was ripe out of quarters.

“Eh,” he made a face, “I had to finish up that quiz for psych, but honestly I just needed to catch up on some readings. I had like fifty pages of a badly scanned book from like a hundred years ago to annotate.”

“Reading? In this economy?” Emily snarked at him, still rooting through the bin. She knew her blue jeans were here somewhere.

“Well I know you can’t read,” he replied in a haughty tone, “doesn’t mean the rest of us have to remain unenlightened!”

“Ha-ha.”

There they were, right at the bottom of the bin. She changed right then, with Morgan politely averting his eyes, despite the fact that both have seen just about everything in the year or so that they’ve been acquainted.

No, they didn’t hook up or anything, it wasn’t like that.

It was the strange phenomenon that only could happen in college where you get really close really fast. Emily’s RA had explained it to their first-year floor, likening it to soldiers in the war (Emily wasn’t sure if the metaphor was kosher, but it was apt.). Young adults first starting out in the world, free from their family supervision and previous lives, cling on to those around them for stability. The RA explained this as in a cautionary tale, explaining that this can lead to high emotions, to fights, and… a bit more.

This talk led into their floor-cest talk, which was apparently required in every co-ed dorm at their school. Emily was the first to point out the heteronormativity in that policy. Floor-cest, for the uninitiated, was the concept of hooking up with someone on your floor in the dorm. It was formally discouraged by residence life staff. It was easy to have meaningless sex, harder when you have sex with someone you live down the hall from. Things could get messy.

Emily and Derek got this talk on move in day, both sitting cross-legged on the floor of their common room as their RA, a bubbly girl named Carol, explained the fundamentals of dorm life. Emily has been dropped off by her mother’s driver, who helped her unload her things.

Emily was still reeling from being surrounded by happy families, of crying parents and bitter that her mother was too busy to even send her own daughter off to school. Not that Emily wanted her there or anything, but the gesture would have been nice.

She remembered the startling moment when Derek walked straight into her room and offered his hand, introducing himself to his new neighbour.

They shared a wall, the co-ed bathroom down the hall, and most of their free time for their first year at college.

He had assumed that the driver, Paul who was one of Emily’s favourites out of her mother’s staff, was Emily’s father, which started things off on an awkward note. Soon she was swept up in a whirlwind of his family: his mom and sisters who insisted that Emily pose for photos of Derek and ‘his new dorm friend.’

A year later, Emily and Morgan were basically siblings. Emily didn’t actually have any siblings, but after going to Chicago for thanksgiving with the Morgan family, she was pretty sure she had officially been adopted.

Last year, they had a much nicer dorm, one of the newer ones with big windows and nice common spaces. This year they were both living in the oldest residence, a beautiful red brick building, covered with ivy, but the inside was all painted this gross beige, and the paint would chip off whenever Emily tried to hang her posters. There was also no air conditioning, the showers didn’t get too hot and the kitchen smelt like eggs. It was definitely a downgrade, but at least Morgan was on the same floor as her again.

Morgan had lucked out and gotten a corner room with tons of windows, and Emily was right next to the bathroom and could hear when anyone flushed.

After donning the jeans and a black tank top, Emily grabbed her leather jacket and they were ready to go.

“Another shot?” Derek asked, grinning at her mischievously.

“Of course,” Emily said. “Where are we even going anyways?”

“Well, you remember David, the TA from our psych lab? His housemates are throwing a party in their backyard. I heard there was going to be a DJ!”

“David Rossi?” Emily said incredulously, “How did you swing an invite to that?”

“I can’t reveal all of my secrets, you know that pretty lady.”

Emily scoffed. It was probably through their mutual friend Aaron Hotchner, who despite not being much of a partier, was very in the loop about the happenings on campus.

“Did you invite you know who?” Derek asked, a bit too casually as Emily locked her door.

Emily refused to bite.

“She definitely has better things to do than hang out with the likes of us.”

---

“I’m a criminology major,” Emily repeated, the exasperation in her voice palatable.

The boy, who was on the rugby team as she already learned, had asked her what her major was. He misheard her and began asking her how she likes studying biology.

The music was loud and the boy was clearly wasted off his ass. She was pretty sure she saw him do a keg stand in the kitchen earlier.

Emily took another sip of her drink, keeping it close to her chest. She looked around. They were only five minutes off campus at a decent-sized student house. The room was close to being at capacity, the old home creaking under the weight of dozens of students crammed into the living room. Music blared on a strangely impressive speaker system. The party was at its peak in the backyard, and was probably only an hour from being shut down by the cops if it got much louder.

Emily had carefully positioned herself next to the open window, enjoying the slight breeze as the body heat was making the old house steamy with humidity. This also happened to be the location of the bong, but she accepted the trade-off.

Derek was currently playing king’s cup, a game Emily refuses to play, since last time she got roped into it she lost miserably. She was forced to drink the king’s cup: a mixture of shitty beer, whiskey, cider wine and whole cream from the fridge, as she had been a bit too slow with bouncing the ball into the red solo cup. Derek held her hair back as she puked off the porch that night.

Never again.

Emily squinted as a few people she recognized walked into the room. It was only a month into classes, so she really hadn’t had the opportunity to get to know the new random assortment of people in her building, lectures and in her general orbit but she was pretty sure she was starting to recognize some faces.

Entering the party was the blonde from the end of the hallway who always complimented Emily on her outfits when she passed and had the most colourfully decorated dorm in the entire building. ‘Penelope G.’ read her name tag pinned to her door in their RA’s loopy handwriting.

Next to her was a younger boy that she had seen in the cafeteria with Penelope before, and while Emily wasn’t that good at identifying ages, he definitely looked a bit too young to be at college. He was tall, skinny and had a mop of unruly brown hair. He was also wearing a sweater to a house party, which was a major beginners mistake. He looked around nervously.

A few seconds later, the door closed, only dumping an assortment of other boys into the already packed house.

Emily let out a breath she didn’t know she held, as she found herself hoping that Garcia’s other friend might have been joining her that night.

Derek had teased her already about the girl across the hall. Jennifer Jareau. “My friends call me JJ,” she had said. Second year varsity soccer player and communications major. The girl Derek was convinced that Emily had a crush on.

JJ was the kind of girl who propped her door open during orientation week and always waved at Emily when she walked down the hall.

She did not have a crush. She barely knew anything about her besides that she was blonde, athletic and was always smiling. Both had been so busy since school had started, and seemed to have completely opposite schedules that they hadn’t really gotten to really connect.

Whenever Emily was coming back to their floor, JJ always seemed to be leaving. And vice versa. Somehow they were on exact opposite schedules. Probably since JJ was a varsity soccer player with early morning practise, and Emily was a bit of a night owl (that was a polite way of saying insomniac procrastinator perfectionist.)

She seemed to hang out with Garcia around residence, Emily having spotted the two getting coffee or studying in the library together occasionally, hence Emily’s hopes that Garcia may have JJ in tow that evening.

JJ was also definitely, one hundred percent, completely straight. Fairy lights and Polaroid pictures on her walls straight. She even had a high school sweetheart that might survive the turkey dumping season. Emily didn’t know his name but JJ said the key word early on in the year: boyfriend.

Emily turned back to the boy in front of her, who was describing, in detail, how the stock market worked, without realizing that Emily was not paying attention at all.

He was quite conventionally attractive, with mussed curly hair and broad shoulders. He obviously was interested in her—or rather interested in talking at her and potentially sleeping with her—that despite herself, Emily decided to slot him into her roster for that evening.

Emily considered herself a reluctant bisexual. Women could make her heart skip a beat just by looking in her direction, and men could get it when the situation was right and she didn’t have any other options. The second half of this pleased her mother to no end, as when young fourteen year old Emily Prentiss had decided to come out to her mother—at one of their rare dinners together—she watched her mother grit her teeth and tell her to keep that to herself. Her mother had eventually accepted this part of her daughter’s life, but only under the assumption that Emily would eventually end up with a man, and keep the rest to herself.

Emily looked around the room and wondered if she was going to have any other options that evening besides the very talkative boy.

Excusing herself from the company of…Matthew, she thinks was his name, she tries to find Derek, who had disappeared into the kitchen. Emily weaved through the crowd, steering past a couple making out in the corner.

She turned the corner and found Derek filling his cup with more beer from the keg. He grinned up at her and did the same for her.

“I hate beer,” Emily said to him, grimacing at the scratchy taste of the fermented barley in her red solo cup.

“Suck it up buttercup, you’re in college. You also complained about the juice from earlier.”

“Yeah well, watering down eleven percent wine is as bad as this five percent crap.”

“It did taste a lot better,” he agreed. “Who was that guy?”

Emily rolled her eyes.

“Matthew attempted to explain macroeconomics to me.”

“Oh god, is that what men are like out there?” He asked. “Guess you’re stuck with me tonight.”

“Lucky me.”

“Pong?” He asked, gesturing towards the row of tables set up in the backyard, through the open door and passed the crowd milling about near the speakers. The game seemed to be wrapping up, as the two teams shook hands and reset the cups to their original positions.

“Always.”

They found their spot at one of the tables across from their new opponents: Penelope and her very young looking friend.

“Penelope Garcia?” Derek grinned, recognizing the girl from their floor and walking up to her for a hug. Their rooms were facing each other, and they had apparently gotten the chance to get to know each other.

She grinned and hugged him, clearly a lot more sober than him having only arrived minutes earlier. There seemed to be a lot of hugging at house parties, Emily discovered when she moved to America, acquaintances became close friends once alcohol was involved.

She had bright pink glasses and a matching dress, with bright artfully done make-up highlighting her large smile. Emily knew that she was a CompSci major and had loaded her dorm room desk with monitors and the largest computer set-up that Emily had seen in her life.

“Derek, my love,” Penelope replied, gushing over Emily’s friend in an unexpected, but not unsurprising way. “Fancy meeting you here! And Emily! Have you two met my fine young friend here, Spencer?”

She gestured to the boy, who waved awkwardly.

“Hi, I’m Spencer Reid,” he said.

“He’s like a boy-genius or something. He already has a degree in mathematics and he’s currently working on his second degree in engineering. Isn’t that très cool? We met at the club fair last week.”

“I’m double majoring in philosophy,” he added.

“How old are you kid?” Morgan asked him, quick to the punch.

“Uh- sixteen?” Spencer seemed to ask, shrinking into himself a bit. “I skipped a couple of grades.”

He had a pair of glasses perched on his nose, a brown sweater with a white shirt collar poking through and had tucked his brown hair behind his ears. He was still taller than Penelope, but the smattering of acne and wide eyes made it clear that he was very much a kid.

“More than a couple!” Morgan exclaimed.

He shrugged.

“Are you in intro to logic with Williams?” Emily asked, realizing that she had recognized him from somewhere.

“Yes, I am. Though I find his repeated chess metaphors a touch reductive.”

“You’re right about that. Like, we get it Willy, you play chess. Big whoop,” Emily said, then introduced herself.

He smiled at her, slightly less awkwardly this time but with a touch more confusion.

“And this is Derek Morgan,” Penelope piped in, “the most gorgeous football player I know.”

“Do you know any other football players?” Spencer asked.

“Now you hush!” She admonished him. “We have a game to play.”

“Do you two have something to drink?” Derek asked them, moving back towards their side of the long fold-up table, which was crudely painted in their schools colours.

Emily took a sip of her beer, wondering if the boy should be drinking.

Penelope babbled about how it was Spencer’s first college party, and how she was so excited that it was this one because look at the pretty string lights decorating the backyard and the fact that there was a keg, like in the movies.

Smiling at her new neighbour, Emily thought that this might also be Penelope's first college party.

Derek returned with a cup of water for Spencer, and some beer for Penelope. Spencer seemed relieved at the gesture, smiling as he took a sip. Emily marvelled at her friend's kindness, despite what anyone said about drinking culture on campuses either way, it was tough to attend a party and not drink, putting his drink in a matching red cup gave him the appearance of participation.

“Do we all know the rules?” Derek asked.

“The question you should ask,” Emily said, “Is if they’re willing to play by your rules.”

Emily had discovered that this game, depending on the people you were playing with, had radically different rules. While the premise of the game remained the same: there were six cups on each side of the table, into which you threw ping pong balls and whenever you got a ball in a cup, that cup was then taken out of the picture until there were no cups left. Depending on who you were playing with, the cups were filled with water or beer (Emily hated when they had beer in them, it make things sticky and it was very unsanitary), there were specific rules to what defined an airball, when one could get balls back, when you could call island and what was a permissible trick shot.

“Ha ha Prentiss,” Derek said to her, rolling the ping pong ball in his hands. “I wanted to know if they had played before.”

“Oh I’ve played before,” Penelope said, “and I am unbeatable.”

She waggled her fingers in a gesture that implied magic was involved.

“It’s simple physics,” Spencer added, “I’ve memorized the rules and common approaches. We’ll be more than fine. ”

“Ok pretty boy, let’s see what you’ve got. Eye to eye?”

Looking into each other’s eyes, rather than at their targets, the two boys aimed at the cups, with only Reid’s making it in.

“What the fuck Morgan,” Emily exclaimed as Penelope and Spencer whooped, “what even was that throw?”

With the other team having won the privilege of starting first, Emily was forced to toss her ball towards Penelope, who took it with a grin.

She threw first, missing the table entirely.

“Air ball!” Derek announced, leaping forward and waving his hands in front of the cups on their side, the rules granting him the ability to defend their territory.

Spencer frowned, apparently perturbed by this turn of events. He stuck out his tongue, aimed, and launched the ball, hitting Morgan right in the chest. The ball bounced off of it and fell straight down into the cup.

Derek’s draw dropped. Spencer and Penelope whooped in excitement.

“Derek, how did you lose us that cup?” Emily whined, pulling one of their cups to the side. One point to Spencer.

Derek, who had something to prove, lined up his shot. He gazed at his targets with the focus of a sniper, dunked the ball into one of their cups, dousing it with water, and rolled it in his hands, giving it a bit more weight. He aimed and fired off a quick shot into the centre-left cup. It spun around in the cup, floating above the water, but fell in. If the other team were crafty, they would have blown into the cup and Derek would have lost the point, but Emily sighed in relief when she realized that despite their first point, they didn’t know the rules well enough to beat the current reigning beer champs.

It was Emily’s turn. She took a gulp of her beer—she would always swear she was better when she was drunk because she didn’t think too hard about it—and threw. It neatly fell into the back right cup, scoring them two points for that round.

“Balls back!” Derek roared in delight.

Penelope tossed them, and the game continued.

They sunk one more shot on their turn. 3-1.

Penelope got another cup, Spencer missed. 3-2.

Derek’s ball bounced out, Emily sank hers. 4-2.

Only minutes later, after playing at breakneck speed, there were three cups left on the table and Derek and Emily were quite drunk, with Penelope not far behind. Reid, still very sober, was matching the duo with intense concentration.

It was his throw, with two cups left until his victory. He shots carefully, sinking it without a splash.

Derek and Emily had one cup to go. He went first, sending one barreling towards the cup. It hit the rim and instead of going in, it bounced towards Emily, who leaped forward and grabbed it before it fell off the table.

“Trick shot!” She yelled. Derek could try again, but only if he does it in an inventive way. At the frat house they spent a lot of time in first year, the only acceptable trick shot (under this house’s rules) was bouncing the ball off a poster of Obama. This time, Derek takes an empty cup, puts the ball in, and uses the cup to aim.

Somehow, it went in.

They leap into the air, yelling with delight. But they hadn’t won yet. The other team still had a redemption shot.

“How ya feeling kid?” Derek taunted, “Wanna give up now, save yourself the embarrassment?”

“Not a chance.”

He squinted at the table, lining up his shot with precision. With his left hand he licked his finger, sticking it up in the air like golfers do to measure the wind. Emily wasn't sure if this was a joke, something to psych Derek out, or something the boy was genuinely able to do. He frowned, seeming to ponder the information.

He aimed. He tossed it. He sunk the redemption shot.

They were in overtime.

“You can do it princess,” Derek told her, watching her with utmost intensity. Emily adjusted her stance, chugging back the last of that glass of beer, feeling the alcohol with greater focus than before.

She glanced around at the other team, but out of the corner of her eye she caught a familiar face looking at her: Jennifer Jareau from residence. Her not crush.

She was looking at her. Watching her play.

A swell of nervousness flooded up through her lungs, and she forced it out by huffing a breath.

She needed another drink. Moreover, she needed to focus.

Emily threw it. If it made it in, then they won. If she missed, Spencer and Garcia had another shot at redemption. They couldn’t lose this, not now, not in front of… uh, everyone. She was definitely not thinking about JJ in this situation. That would be something a frat boy thought about. She didn’t want to win beer pong to impress some girl, she wanted to win because she had pride.

The ball sailed through the air, Emily held her breath. It caught the lip of the cup, teetered. A splash announced that they had won.

Thank god.

With a whoop, realizing what they had done, Emily and Derek roared with joy, jumping into each other and hugging in their celebration. A few onlookers clapped, noticing how close the game had been.

They pulled apart and reached out their hands to their opponents.

“Great game,” Emily said, shaking Spencer's hand, “Really.”

He grinned despite his loss.

“Honestly I understand the principles, it’s simple parabolas and high-school level physics,” he frowned, “Unfortunately, I need to work on translating those parabolas into the real world.”

“We’ll work on it Spence,” Garcia grinned, shaking Emily’s hand while smiling at her younger friend.

Emily realized that in their celebration, Derek had spilled quite a bit of beer onto Emily’s sleeve and down the side of her shirt and it was currently dripping onto her boots. Emily sighed, handing her friend her cup.

“I’ve got beer all over me,” Emily sighed, “Get me a refill? I’m going to try to find a bathroom.”

Derek nodded and turned back to their new friends, chatting about how impressed he was with their game.

Emily felt a bit sticky, feeling the beer coat her bare arm. Walking back into the house, she glanced at the kitchen sink trying to see if there was any paper towel or something there, but no luck. The sink was full of dishes, the counters covered in assorted empties and cups, without a dishcloth in sight. Not wanting to rifle through their drawers, she made her way towards the staircase.

There was a couple making out on the staircase, which was not something Emily would do herself. It seemed a bit precarious since alcohol was involved, but, to each their own, she thought. Emily opened a couple of the doors upstairs before discovering one of the most disgusting washrooms she’d ever seen.

There was only one thing in the shower: dawn dish soap. The boys who lived here must use that for their bodies. Emily shuddered. On the sink were some toothbrushes, razors and some floss, but for some reason, no soap. Emily found a roll of toilet paper on the floor (ew), and wadded it up to try to reduce the wet spot on her side and hopefully from smelling like a brewery when she returned to residence.

For a moment, Emily found herself gazing at herself in the mirror, feeling hazy and a bit unsteady. She checked her make-up, noting that her dark red lipstick was holding up, but her mascara had smudged under her eyes giving her more of a goth vibe than the alt look she typically went for.

Emily sat down on the tub, patting the toilet paper against her wet clothing, feeling very drunk now that she was seated. Dammit Morgan, couldn’t he have spilled his beer on himself instead of her nice shirt?

The thud of the music was muffled, but there was a ringing in her ears that made everything feel very quiet. That was until there was a thundering of footsteps and the sound of a girl announcing: “I’m going to vom, right now.”

Emily sat, jaw dropped, as a red headed girl threw open the bathroom door, kneeled down on the floor next to the toilet, and relieved herself from the contents of her stomach without so much as a knock. The girl coughed into the bowl, yacking up what was probably way too much beer for the poor tiny girl.

“Oh my gosh,” said another voice, at the door, “I’m so sorry. We didn’t realize there was someone here! ”

Emily looked up, realizing the voice came from no other than Jennifer Jareau.

“JJ!” Emily said, not really knowing what else to do with the girl heaving at her feet.

“You ok?” JJ kneeled down next to her friend, carefully pulling her friend’s long hair back, tugging a hair tie off her own wrist and collecting it so that it didn’t get anything on it.

Emily felt stupid sitting on the tub, not helping anything. She tossed the rest of the toilet paper in the garbage, placing the half-empty roll on the edge of the tub.

“Can I get her some water?” Emily asked, “To rinse her mouth?”

JJ looked up at her and nodded. Emily felt herself blushing slightly as she turned away. Who let one girl’s eyes be so big, and so blue. It was rude.

She returned a minute later having had to rinse her own beer cup out in the gross kitchen sink to make sure that she wasn’t accidentally giving this girl some random person's sketchy cup.

Emily remembered that earlier Derek said that it was a varsity party, so it did make sense that JJ was also in attendance. The whole team probably was. The other girl looked like a soccer player, she had that vibe.

Emily handed the cup to JJ, who gave her a grateful smile. Emily felt their fingers touch for a moment, before JJ turned to attend to her friend.

She tried to get her to take a sip, and Emily took the moment to look JJ up and down, taking in her light blue skinny jeans, black tank and high heeled boots. She was basically wearing the uniform of a straight white girl at a houseparty. Not to say Emily wasn’t also basically wearing the same outfit, pairing the jeans with combat boots and attempting to set herself apart with her black nail polish and eyeliner that her mother once called ‘a lot.’

In contrast to Emily’s fairly undefined thin body, she took note of the strong looking shoulders that flexed as JJ kneeled down on the floor. She was definitely an athlete. Emily looked away, checking her phone, feeling suddenly embarrassed for looking at the girl.

‘Where u go bbg????’ Read a new message from Derek.

‘Girl puknigh up hre’ Emily typed, ‘Got her waterr’

Emily blinked at her typos, pressing the red underlined words, hoping her phone would correct them for her. She wasn’t that drunk.

The two girls were talking quietly, and Emily decided to take her leave, but before she could the red-head beat her to the punch deciding that she wanted to puke in peace.

“Leave me aloooooonnne Jennifer,” she wined. “Get out, I don’t want any more fucking water.”

JJ pulled back, making a face and holding her hands up in the ‘I surrender’ motion. Emily hurried out into the hall with JJ on her heels. The girl kicked the door shut angrily, and the sound of her retching ensued.

“There was a funnel,” JJ offered as an explanation. She leaned against the door. “How has your night been?”

Emily blinked. JJ was making conversation. She didn’t want Emily to leave just yet.

“So far so good,” Emily replied. “Doing better than your friend, at least.”

“That’s not hard to do. So I guess you didn’t chug from a funnel yet?” JJ quipped, smiling and revealing a perfect, white smile.

“Oh I have that scheduled for one-thirty, actually,” Emily said, pretending to check her watch and grinning.

“Let me know before you do, I’d like to watch that,” JJ said casually.

A wave of heat rushed to Emily’s face as she realized that drinking from a funnel would entail Emily on her knees, with JJ watching her… a thought that she needed to push out of her brain immediately.

“I’ll have you know,” Emily said in retort, “I can chug amongst the best. I am no stranger to these sorts of parties.”

JJ grinned. “Oh yeah?”

“I’m a reigning beer pong champ, I’ll have you know.”

They laughed.

“I saw your last victory. Very impressive.”

JJ, in a controlled fall, slid down the door and sat down in the hall, resigning herself to waiting for her friend. Emily wondered if she should return to Morgan now, but unable to tear herself away from the opportunity for a conversation with JJ.

“I’m awful at pong,” the blonde admitted. “I miss every time.”

“You probably just need a good teacher.”

JJ raised her eyebrows, “oh yeah?”

“I mean,” Emily said, sitting down onto the top step of the staircase, facing her floormate, “it’s all about hand eye coordination. It’s basically a sport. You need a coach.”

They both laughed.

“Well if that’s the case, why don’t you teach me?”

Emily gulped.

The door opened, and JJ fell back slightly before catching herself.

“I’m going home,” JJ’s friend announced.

JJ looked up at her dishevelled friend and nodded, turning back to look at Emily apologetically.

“Another time?” Emily offered, smiling before walking down the stairs and rejoining the party.

Next chapter ->

[ano-po]

I love how filipino mythology has nb gods cause finally, I am seen, I exist and no one can say otherwise

Me too, like from the very beginning our ancient people have no shit given about genders that we don't even have gender specific pronouns.

Everybody's top naked, so they can see if they have them boobies or not, so they can tell what gender they are born with. But the thing is... The greatest thing these ancient people have thought of... is...

"Eh. Does it matter?"

Why escalate a person's character and societal role according to gender? Everybody farms! Everybody fishes! Everybody trades! That's why they have a non-binary diety that represents agriculture and diligence. Because economy shouldn't have gender!

Like i have children, but who is my son to farm? Who is my daughter to sew? Suck it! I have no son. I have no daughter, I only have "Anak" and y'all better learn how to farm and sew.

I mean, what's so hard about that thinking? Binary system is shallow and uneconomic. In our ancient world, it's assume binary unless decided otherwise. Using 'procreation' as a reason is deemed animalistic in psychology and ethics. Using 'following societal norms' as a reason is deemed unenlightened. So! Our ancient people... THOSE OLD TIMEY PRE-COLONIAL PEOPLE, thought they're better than animals, and that they must use their free will to attain their happiness. It was a peaceful anarchy, like hey, your village Datu don't even give a shit. Just make sure y'all work and all.

And sometimes, just because you chose to be a boy doesn't mean you can't wear pretty beads and pearls anymore. Wanna be a boy, but still run for priestesshood? Sure yo! Just make sure you have powers, damn.

I still see this happening somedays when I had short hair that some people think I'm a boy, but they hear my voice and like... Nobody asked what I am!

Because guys, and girls, and gays, and the people who don't give a fuck.

Soul. Has. No. Gender.

Thank you for coming to my ted talk.

[vortahoney]

Hello! I’d love to know more about your OC species specifically! Everything about their planet, it’s economy, and its biomes? Religion/spirituality? Gender/general societal LGBTQ+ things? Education systems? Guiding values? Diet? And most importantly, what is the weirdest thing about humans to them? :P

Thank you!

 Ohhhohohoho yes this I love this

Orileans (for reference I’m using the Standard Orilean language that was established after first contact, but is not widely used on Orlei)

Orlei, at the time ds9 takes place, is a bit of a mess. There’s a drought/dust bowl on the western side (region of K’Tax) and a civil war in the Southeast region of K’thane. Famine is widespread due to the drought and K’thane blockades. The president of K’thane (where Nah���Lei grew up) is not a very good dude, and this war has been going on for like sixty years, starting with the current presidents father in power. Nah’Lei had been a diplomat for the K’thix Separatists (the rebel group trying to break away from K’thane) long before she was in the Federation. Basically, K’thix is a region that was taken over by K’thane hundreds and hundreds of years ago, and now they’re rebelling to get their land back.

Mostly, Orlei is a desert planet, with scattered forests and only 45% of the planet covered in water. That’s why the spikes were developed, to deter swooping predators. 

As for religion, there are many different ones, as for any planet, but the most widespread is a polytheistic religion that worships various gods of harvest and hunt. There are certain spike adornments that indicate religious affiliation, as well as some non-religious ones that have appeared more recently and are HIGHLY debated by religious authorities and politicians.

Despite the fact they each have their own language, they value connection with each other HIGHLY. Usually, each person’s first language is mostly made up from the combination of their parents' languages, and as relationships progress, they make their own languages as well!

There are four genders! One with a role much like human women, one reserved for high religious figures (whose word literally translates in most languages to “one of the rain”), farmers and their children, and one another that is very similar to human women but with a more religious presentation. They don’t correspond with sex, and they’re very caste-based. And there are certain taboos in marriage (1 and 3 weren’t legally allowed to marry until only around a hundred years ago)

There is a role of person that just travels and learns! Most children’s education consists of five parts (basic baby socialization, elementary school, high school, a three to ten year university period, and a year or two of traveling), but many kids of the richest families decide to become wanderers (who travel, learn, make art, and spend their whole lives exploring the nature of knowledge and the self)

They can’t cover up the place where the bony spike meets their shoulder or else they risk “contact infection” where the seam of skin gets a bunch of cysts and causes extreme pain. This often conflicts with starfleet dress codes and Nah’Lei (one of the only Orileans in the fleet) is in the sick bay with them a LOT. Because of this, a lot of their shirts are open shoulder or wrap around.

Pop culture is also really fun! There are an insane amount of music genres (some varying by the smallest things) and I won’t even try to explain them all because even I have no idea how to actually categorize them. There is a standard writing system (and since joining the federation, a standard speaking system was created for speaking with aliens) and literature consists of mainly adventure novels very akin to Lord of the Rings. 

Weirdest thing about humans to them: either the smooth shoulders or the fact that they sleep for eight hours a night. Orileans don’t need as much sleep, but if they don’t go into the deep, almost death-like state that they need for at least an hour they’ll be very cranky (much like humans when they’re sleep deprived) and it’s pretty difficult to go into that state when stressed. Nah’Lei hasn’t had a full hour since she joined starfleet.

Katrians

I honestly don’t have a lot of information for them. They’re a fairly new species for me, but I do like exploring how the destruction of their planet affected them culturally. 

A lot of Katrians struggle with identity issues. They are constantly living under others’ governments and among others’ people with very little political representation wherever they choose to live. 

The main religion is like Catholicism in that they pray to something like Saints. Really, they worship the “enlightened” which is a group of artists and scientists that really existed and brought about a Golden Age of Katria. 

The smaller religion (the one Lierza and her family are a part of) is considered an evil, unenlightened cult by those who worship the Enlightened and have been persecuted throughout Katrian history. They actually have two goddesses who are in love and created Katria and its surrounding star system. They pray by planting, actually! Gardens are kinda like shrines and seeds are considered the children of the goddesses. 

A lot of major cities on Kronos and Earth have “little Katria” regions where a lot of Katrians (usually of the same religion/ethnic group) congregate. 

Weirdest thing about humans to them: How easy their bones are to break. Katrian bones are like fucking steel and if one breaks it’s basically fatal.

That’s about it I have for them so far, but I’ll let you know if I think about anything else!

Hysarai

First and foremost, cannibalism is considered an honorable way to treat a body. In times of famine or war, Hysari will eat dead bodies and bury the remaining shell.

They’re very mechanically curious, and had a period of EXTREMELY rapid scientific progression, developing warp speed and making first contact only about one hundred years after developing electricity. They made first contact with Andorians, who are only about a star system over.

Interestingly enough, the Hysarai never developed religion. Their pattern of evolution was just sort of known by everyone and they just... never had one.

In starfleet, they usually go into engineering. Their silk is a fantastic adhesive and they can get into places some others can’t. That, combined with the value placed on machines and tech, they make incredibly engineers.

They only have two basic sexes, but are fluid about gender. Otherwise, they’re pretty matriarchal, with mothers being some of the most valued.

They also really like jazz because their main prey sounds a lot like trumpets. They mostly eat other bugs (usually just raw with seasoning or very lightly cooked).

Their planet is a jungle planet and there is so much oxygen that a human will probably immediately die on it. It’s largely populated by arthropods, with only ten or so species of mammals. They also had a lot of cities spring up after the rapid period of mechanical development. 

Weirdest thing about humans to them: they eat plants. Who eats plants?? and they DON’T eat their fallen comrade’s dead bodies? 

If you have anything else you want to know shoot me an ask or a DM!

[alagaisia]

Did an accidental Facebook experiment today when I made two posts within minutes of each other. The first was a picture of my new haircut, the second was to share a post that was a (short and humorous) screenshot from twitter about how the people who were ‘just’ nazis but didn’t actually *do* anything were still just nazis & equally complicit. You’ll never guess which one has ~40 notes and which one has six. Just in case I don’t talk about it enough on here, either: I’m Jewish. If you believe in or spread antisemitic conspiracy theories about Soros or ‘people in the shadows’ or lizard people or controlling the banks, if you think Jewish people are unenlightened or need to be saved, if you think ‘the Jewish question’ is a valid talking point in any situation, if you don’t think the holocaust happened or that it wasn’t as bad as people say, or if you think it was justified, or that support for it was justified because of “the economy” or whatever, if you think Jewish people aren’t historically oppressed or should have done more to fight back or deserved what they got, if you think ANY kind of nationalist bullshit about ANY minority groups or immigrants or religious cultures or anything, if you think these kinds of people are somehow polluting your ‘pure’ culture and ideals and have some kind of fucking ulterior motives, if you think it’s okay to be friends with people who believe any of that shit as long as they ‘aren’t hurting anyone’ or aren’t hurting you specifically, or are ‘only joking’, or however else you want to justify it- Fuck you. Unfollow me. Learn better.

[arcticdementor]

The coolest thing about modernity is that nearly every college-educated person in society has performatively adopted the hegemonic notion that liberal pluralism is good, but none of them actually believes this. Instead, they much more sensibly believe that their worldviews are good and should be promoted and that clashing worldviews are bad and should be suppressed. That’s fine as far as it goes, but because people are taught that this is unenlightened, they feel the need to repackage that belief into a liberal posture.

Vox’s Zack Beauchamp has made a cottage industry out of doing this over the years, piping in every few months to say that actually what looks like center-left anti-pluralist suppression is really about promoting liberal pluralism by enforcing the necessary preconditions for it.

This move is comical on its face. The idea that, for instance, anger at a racist remark is rooted in the belief that such remarks create a discursive environment where targets of racism do not have an authentic ability to speak freely is fanciful bordering on delusional. The anger at a racist remark is against racism itself. Obviously. The desire to suppress it is rooted in a desire to suppress a wrong and hideous worldview. Obviously.

…

The one weird trick of liberal pluralism is that it allows everyone to “agree” that we need to “live and let live” without actually restraining them at all from claiming that their entire substantive worldview should be coercively imposed on others. All you have to do is say that your entire worldview is, conveniently enough, a prerequisite for liberal pluralism. Your economic views are a necessary precondition for liberal pluralism. Your social views are a necessary precondition for liberal pluralism. All of it.

…

I bring this up not as some kind of warning about slippery slopes or whatever, but just to point out that packing your whole worldview into the supposed preconditions for liberal pluralism is what everyone does and it is extremely easy to do it. In this sense, the whole liberal pluralism discourse is completely fake. It includes libertarians saying they just love freedom so much that their worldview on the proper ordering of the economy should be coercively imposed on others with no dissent allowed. Or it is American center-leftists saying they love freedom so much that their worldview on the proper ordering of the culture and society should be coercively imposed on others with no dissent allowed. Live and let live…the way we want you to live.

What I find most irritating about this stuff is that people are having a pretend argument that none of the interlocutors really care about rather than explicitly fighting about their worldviews. But I suppose in some sense, this is the point of liberal pluralism as a “social technology,” to sublimate what could be very violent worldview-against-worldview clashes into meta-arguments where one person goes “this restriction is against freedom” and the other goes “this restriction actually promotes freedom” forever and ever until they are too exhausted to kill each other.

(@mitigatedchaos, @big-block-of-cheese-day​)

[thevividgreenmoss]

The Health unto Death – If such a thing as a psycho-analysis of today’s prototypical culture were possible; if the absolute predominance of the economy did not beggar all attempts at explaining conditions by the psychic life of their victims; and if the psychoanalysts had not long since sworn allegiance to those conditions – such an investigation would needs show the sickness proper to the time to consist precisely in normality. The libidinal achievements demanded of an individual behaving as healthy in body and mind, are such as can be performed only at the cost of the profoundest mutilation, of internalized castration in extroverts, beside which the old renunciation of identification with the father is the child’s play as which it was first rehearsed. The regular guy, the popular girl, have to repress not only their desires and insights, but even the symptoms that in bourgeois times resulted from repression. Just as the old injustice is not changed by a lavish display of light, air and hygiene, but is in fact concealed by the gleaming transparency of rationalized big business, the inner health of our time has been secured by blocking flight into illness without in the slightest altering its aetiology. The dark closets have been abolished as a troublesome waste of space, and incorporated in the bathroom. What psycho-analysis suspected, before it became itself a part of hygiene, has been confirmed. The brightest rooms are the secret domain of faeces. The verses: ‘Wretchedness remains. When all is said, / It cannot be uprooted, live or dead. / So it is made invisible instead’, are still more true of the psychic economy than of the sphere where abundance of goods may temporarily obscure constantly increasing material inequalities. No science has yet explored the inferno in which were forged the deformations that later emerge to daylight as cheerfulness, openness, sociability, successful adaptation to the inevitable, an equable, practical frame of mind. There is reason to suppose that these characteristics are laid down at even earlier phases of childhood development than are neuroses: if the latter result from a conflict in which instinct is defeated, the former condition, as normal as the damaged society it resembles, stems from what might be called a prehistoric surgical intervention, which incapacitates the opposing forces before they have come to grips with each other, so that the subsequent absence of conflicts reflects a predetermined outcome, the a priori triumph of collective authority, not a cure effected by knowledge. Unruffled calm, already a prerequisite for applicants receiving highly-paid posts, is an image of the stifled silence that the employers of the personnel manager only later impose politically. The only objective way of diagnosing the sickness of the healthy is by the incongruity between their rational existence and the possible course their lives might be given by reason. All the same, the traces of illness give them away: their skin seems covered by a rash printed in regular patterns, like a camouflage of the inorganic. The very people who burst with proofs of exuberant vitality could easily be taken for prepared corpses, from whom the news of their not-quite-successful decease has been withheld for reasons of population policy. Underlying the prevalent health is death. All the movements of health resemble the reflex-movements of beings whose hearts have stopped beating. Scarcely ever does an unhappily furrowed brow, bearing witness to terrible and long-forgotten exertions, or a moment of pathic stupidity disrupting smooth logic, or an awkward gesture, embarrassingly preserve a trace of vanished life. For socially ordained sacrifice is indeed so universal as to be manifest only in society as a whole, and not in the individual. Society has, as it were, assumed the sickness of all individuals, and in it, in the pent-up lunacy of Fascist acts and all their innumerable precursors and mediators, the subjective fate buried deep in the individual is integrated with its visible objective counterpart. And how comfortless is the thought that the sickness of the normal does not necessarily imply as its opposite the health of the sick, but that the latter usually only present, in a different way, the same disastrous pattern.

This side of the pleasure principle . – The repressive traits in Freud have nothing to do with the want of human warmth that businesslike revisionists point to in the strict theory of sexuality. Professional warmth, for the sake of profit, fabricates closeness and immediacy where people are worlds apart. It deceives its victim by affirming in his weakness the way of the world which made him so, and it wrongs him in the degree that it deviates from truth. If Freud was deficient in such human sympathy, he would in this at least be in the company of the critics of political economy, which is better than that of Tagore or Werfel. 1 The fatality was rather that, in the teeth of bourgeois ideology, he tracked down conscious actions materialistically to their unconscious instinctual basis, but at the same time concurred with the bourgeois contempt of instinct which is itself a product of precisely the rationalizations that he dismantled. He explicitly aligns himself, in the words of the Introductory Lectures , with ‘the general evaluation … which places social goals higher than the fundamentally selfish sexual ones’. As a specialist in psychology, he takes over the antithesis of social and egoistic, statically, without testing it. He no more discerns in it the work of repressive society than the trace of the disastrous mechanisms that he has himself described. Or rather, he vacillates, devoid of theory and swaying with prejudice, between negating the renunciation of instinct as repression contrary to reality, and applauding it as sublimation beneficial to culture. In this contradiction something of the Janus-character of culture exists objectively, and no amount of praise for healthy sensuality can wish it away. In Freud, however, it leads to a devaluation of the critical standard that decides the goal of analysis. Freud’s unenlightened enlightenment plays into the hands of bourgeois disillusion. As a late opponent of hypocrisy, he stands ambivalently between desire for the open emancipation of the oppressed, and apology for open oppression. Reason is for him a mere superstructure, not – as official philosophy maintains – on account of his psychologism, which has penetrated deeply enough into the historical moment of truth, but rather because he rejects the end, remote to meaning, impervious to reason, which alone could prove the means, reason, to be reasonable: pleasure. Once this has been disparagingly consigned to the repertoire of tricks for preserving the species, and so itself exposed as a cunning form of reason, without consideration of that moment in pleasure which transcends subservience to nature, ratio is degraded to rationalization. Truth is abandoned to relativity and people to power. He alone who could situate utopia in blind somatic pleasure, which, satisfying the ultimate intention, is intentionless, has a stable and valid idea of truth. In Freud’s work, however, the dual hostility towards mind and pleasure, whose common root psycho-analysis has given us the means for discovering, is unintentionally reproduced. The place in the Future of an Illusion where, with the worthless wisdom of a hard-boiled old gentleman, he quotes the commercial-traveller’s dictum about leaving heaven to the angels and the sparrows, 1 should be set beside the passage in the Lectures where he damns in pious horror the perverse practices of pleasure-loving society. Those who feel equal revulsion for pleasure and paradise are indeed best suited to serve as objects: the empty, mechanized quality observable in so many who have undergone successful analysis is to be entered to the account not only of their illness but also of their cure, which dislocates what it liberates. The therapeutically much-lauded transference, the breaking of which is not for nothing the crux of analytic treatment, the artificially contrived situation where the subject performs, voluntarily and calamitously, the annulment of the self which was once brought about involuntarily and beneficially by erotic self-abandonment, is already the pattern of the reflex-dominated, follow-my-leader behaviour which liquidates, together with all intellect, the analysts who have betrayed it.

Invitation to the dance . – Psycho-analysis prides itself on restoring the capacity for pleasure, which is impaired by neurotic illness. As if the mere concept of a capacity for pleasure did not suffice gravely to devalue such a thing, if it exists. As if a happiness gained through speculation on happiness were not the opposite, a further enroachment of institutionally planned behaviour-patterns on the ever-diminishing sphere of experience. What a state the dominant consciousness must have reached, when the resolute proclamation of compulsive extravagance and champagne jollity, formerly reserved to attachés in Hungarian operettas, is elevated in deadly earnest to a maxim of right living. Prescribed happiness looks exactly what it is; to have a part in it, the neurotic thus made happy must forfeit the last vestige of reason left to him by repression and regression, and to oblige the analyst, display indiscriminate enthusiasm for the trashy film, the expensive but bad meal in the French restaurant, the serious drink and the love-making taken like medicine as ‘sex’. Schiller’s dictum that ‘Life’s good, in spite of all’, papier-mâché from the start, has become idiocy now that it is blown into the same trumpet as omnipresent advertising, with psychoanalysis, despite its better possibilities, adding its fuel to the flames. As people have altogether too few inhibitions and not too many, without being a whit the healthier for it, a cathartic method with a standard other than successful adaptation and economic success would have to aim at bringing people to a consciousness of unhappiness both general and – inseparable from it – personal, and at depriving them of the illusory gratifications by which the abominable order keeps a second hold on life inside them, as if it did not already have them firmly enough in its power from outside. Only when sated with false pleasure, disgusted with the goods offered, dimly aware of the inadequacy of happiness even when it is that – to say nothing of cases where it is bought by abandoning allegedly morbid resistance to its positive surrogate – can men gain an idea of what experience might be. The admonitions to be happy, voiced in concert by the scientifically epicurean sanatorium-director and the highly-strung propaganda chiefs of the entertainment- industry, have about them the fury of the father berating his children for not rushing joyously downstairs when he comes home irritable from his office. It is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces, and there is a straight line of development between the gospel of happiness and the construction of camps of extermination so far off in Poland that each of our own countrymen can convince himself that he cannot hear the screams of pain. That is the model of an unhampered capacity for happiness. He who calls it by its name will be told gloatingly by psycho-analysis that it is just his Oedipus complex.

Ego is Id . – A connection is commonly drawn between the development of psychology and the rise of the bourgeois individual, both in Antiquity and since the Renaissance. This ought not to obscure the contrary tendency also common to psychology and the bourgeois class, and which today has developed to the point of excluding all others: the suppression and dissolution of the very individual in whose service knowledge was related back to its subject. If all psychology since that of Protagoras has elevated man by conceiving him as the measure of all things, it has thereby also treated him from the first as an object, as material for analysis, and transferred to him, once he was included among them, the nullity of things. The denial of objective truth by recourse to the subject implies the negation of the latter: no measure remains for the measure of all things; lapsing into contingency, he becomes untruth. But this points back to the real life-process of society. The principle of human domination, in becoming absolute, has turned its point against man as the absolute object, and psychology has collaborated in sharpening that point. The self, its guiding idea and its a priori object, has always, under its scrutiny, been rendered at the same time non-existent. In appealing to the fact that in an exchange society the subject was not one, but in fact a social object, psychology provided society with weapons for ensuring that this was and remained the case. The dissection of man into his faculties is a projection of the division of labour onto its pretended subjects, inseparable from the interest in deploying and manipulating them to greater advantage. Psycho-technics is not merely a form of psychology’s decay, but is inherent in its principle. Hume, whose work bears witness in every sentence to his real humanism, yet who dismisses the self as a prejudice, expresses in this contradiction the nature of psychology as such. In this he even has truth on his side, for that which posits itself as ‘I’ is indeed mere prejudice, an ideological hypostasization of the abstract centres of domination, criticism of which demands the removal of the ideology of ‘personality’. But its removal also makes the residue all the easier to dominate. This is flagrantly apparent in psycho-analysis. It incorporates personality as a lie needed for living, as the supreme rationalization holding together the innumerable rationalizations by which the individual achieves his instinctual renunciation, and accommodates himself to the reality principle. But precisely in demonstrating this, it confirms man’s non-being. Alienating him from himself, denouncing his autonomy with his unity, psycho-analysis subjugates him totally to the mechanism of rationalization, of adaptation. The ego’s unflinching self-criticism gives way to the demand that the ego of the other capitulate. The psycho-analyst’s wisdom finally becomes what the Fascist unconscious of the horror magazines takes it for: a technique by which one particular racket among others binds suffering and helpless people irrevocably to itself, in order to command and exploit them. Suggestion and hypnosis, rejected by psycho-analysis as apocryphal, the charlatan magician masquerading before a fairground booth, reappear within its grandiose system as the silent film does in the Hollywood epic. What was formerly help through greater knowledge has become the humiliation of others by dogmatic privilege. All that remains of the criticism of bourgeois consciousness is the shrug with which doctors have always signalled their secret complicity with death. – In psychology, in the bottomless fraud of mere inwardness, which is not by accident concerned with the ‘properties’ of men, is reflected what bourgeois society has practised for all time with outward property. The latter, as a result of social exchange, has been increased, but with a proviso dimly present to every bourgeois. The individual has been, as it were, merely invested with property by the class, and those in control are ready to take it back as soon as universalization of property seems likely to endanger its principle, which is precisely that of withholding. Psychology repeats in the case of properties what was done to property. It expropriates the individual by allocating him its happiness.

Always speak of it, never think of it . – Now that depth-psychology, with the help of films, soap operas and Horney, has delved into the deepest recesses, people’s last possibility of experiencing themselves has been cut off by organized culture. Ready-made enlightenment turns not only spontaneous reflection but also analytical insights – whose power equals the energy and suffering that it cost to gain them – into mass-produced articles, and the painful secrets of the individual history, which the orthodox method is already inclined to reduce to formulae, into commonplace conventions. Dispelling rationalizations becomes itself rationalization. Instead of working to gain self-awareness, the initiates become adept at subsuming all instinctual conflicts under such concepts as inferiority complex, mother-fixation, extroversion and introversion, to which they are in reality inaccessible. Terror before the abyss of the self is removed by the consciousness of being concerned with nothing so very different from arthritis or sinus trouble. Thus conflicts lose their menace. They are accepted, but by no means cured, being merely fitted as an unavoidable component into the surface of standardized life. At the same time they are absorbed, as a general evil, by the mechanism directly identifying the individual with social authority, which has long since encompassed all supposedly normal modes of behaviour. Catharsis, unsure of success in any case, is supplanted by pleasure at being, in one’s own weakness, a specimen of the majority; and rather than gaining, like inmates of a sanatorium in former days, the prestige of an interesting pathological case, one proves on the strength of one’s very defects that one belongs, thereby transferring to oneself the power and vastness of the collective. Narcissism, deprived of its libidinal object by the decay of the self, is replaced by the masochistic satisfaction of no longer being a self, and the rising generation guards few of its goods so jealously as its selflessness, its communal and lasting possession. The realm of reification and standardization is thus extended to include its ultimate contradiction, the ostensibly abnormal and chaotic. The incommensurable is. made, precisely as such, commensurable, and the individual is now scarcely capable of any impulse that he could not classify as an example of this or that publicly recognized constellation. However, this outwardly assumed identification, accomplished, as it were, beyond one’s own dynamic, finally abolishes not only genuine consciousness of the impulse but the impulse itself. The latter becomes the reflex of stereotyped atoms to stereotyped stimuli, switched on or off at will. Moreover, psycho-analysis itself is castrated by its conventionalization: sexual motives, partly disavowed and partly approved, are made totally harmless but also totally insignificant. With the fear they instil vanishes the joy they might procure. Thus psycho-analysis falls victim to the very replacement of the appropriate super-ego by a stubbornly adopted, unrelated, external one, that it taught us itself to understand. The last grandly-conceived theorem of bourgeois self-criticism has become a means of making bourgeois self-alienation, in its final phase, absolute, and of rendering ineffectual the lingering awareness of the ancient wound, in which lies hope of a better future.

...Freedom of thought . – The displacement of philosophy by science has led, as we know, to a separation of the two elements whose unity, according to Hegel, constitutes the life of philosophy: reflection and speculation. The land of truth is handed over in disillusion to reflection, and speculation is tolerated ungraciously within it merely for the purpose of formulating hypotheses, which must be conceived outside working hours and yield results as quickly as possible. To believe, however, that the speculative realm has been preserved unscathed in its extra-scientific form, left in peace by the bustle of universal statistics, would be to err grievously. First, severance from reflection costs speculation itself dear enough. It is either degraded to a docile echo of traditional philosophical schemes, or, in its aloofness from blinded facts, perverted to the non-committal chatter of a private Weltanschauung . Not satisfied with this, however, science assimilates speculation to its own operations. Among the public functions of psycho-analysis, this is not the least. Its medium is free association. The way into the patient’s unconscious is laid open by persuading him to forgo the responsibility of reflection, and the formation of analytic theory follows the same track, whether it allows its findings to be traced by the progress and the falterings of these associations, or whether the analysts – and I mean precisely the most gifted of them, like Groddeck 2 – trust to their own associations. We are presented on the couch with a relaxed performance of what was once enacted, with the utmost exertion of thought, by Schelling and Hegel on the lecturer’s podium: the deciphering of the phenomenon. But this drop in tension affects the quality of the thought: the difference is hardly less than that between the philosophy of revelation 1 and the random gossip of a mother-in-law. The same movement of mind which was once to elevate its ‘material’ to a concept, is itself reduced to mere material for conceptual ordering. The ideas one has are just good enough to allow experts to decide whether their originator is a compulsive character, an oral type, or a hysteric. Thanks to the diminished responsibility that lies in its severance from reflection, from rational control, speculation is itself handed over as an object to science, whose subjectivity is extinguished with it. Thought, in allowing itself to be reminded of its unconscious origins by the administrative structure of analysis, forgets to be thought. From true judgement it becomes neutral stuff. Instead of mastering itself by performing the task of conceptualization, it entrusts itself impotently to processing by the doctor, who in any case knows everything beforehand. Thus speculation is definitively crushed, becoming itself a fact to be included in one of the departments of classification as proof that nothing changes.

Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

[obuabamedia]

Government’s delay to seek IMF support due to self-denial – Mahama

Former President Mahama has asserted that the Akufo-Addo government was in a state of self-denial for far too long as regard the resort to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for economic assistance. He said the delay in seeking help, when it was obvious that the country needed one, has caused significant damage to the economy. “After a lengthy period of living in denial and plunging the economy into unprecedented doldrums, government finally decided a few weeks ago to request for an IMF programme. They left the decision so late that substantial damage had been done to the economy by the time the call was finally made. Inflation stands at a 19 year high of almost 30% for June and is almost set to rise. Our deficit and revenue targets have so far been badly missed and we are most likely to post yet another double-digit deficit at the end of this financial year,” he said at a workshop attended by members of the Minority Group in Parliament held on Sunday. Mr. Mahama bemoaned the fact that, “ Indications from the data collection exercise of the IMF team that visited Ghana last week are that government has up to GHS 40 billion in arrears and contingent liabilities in addition to the official public debt of about GHC400 billion.” The former President this is believed to have increased the country’s debt to GDP ratio over 90%. “Our ability to meet our debt service obligations remains tenuous with Ghana ranked as the country with the second highest likelihood of debt default in the world after El Salvador. It is no secret that our foreign currency reserve position is extremely precarious. This leaves us vulnerable unless there is an urgent injection of additional foreign exchange inflows,” the 2020 NDC flagbearer posited. He contended that against this background, “the economic hardship is set to remain for an extended period.” He described Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia’s speech at the Accra Business School as light-hearted, “Amid this gloomy outlook, those responsible for the mess refuse to exhibit contrition and sobriety. One of the key architects of the failed policies and mismanagement that have led to our economic downfall and suffering, found it necessary a couple of days ago, to put up a public display that verged on the ridiculous and comical.” He noted that elsewhere, Dr. Bawumia would have resigned, “In a government where honour and responsibility are respected, the Chair of the Economic Management Team that has thrust us into this crisis would have stepped down or be dismissed.” “In fact, the very idea that this government has requested for an IMF programme would have been sufficient reason for him to go in view of all the unenlightened propaganda he dabbled in against our IMF programme of 2015. Rather, he has chosen to show a gaping deficit in leadership attributes by making untenable excuses and seeking to shift blame onto the government that left power almost six years ago and which had no role to play in the poor policy choices that have delivered these disastrous outcomes,” Mr. Mahama concluded. Read the full article

[anthonybialy]

Settled Virus

You’ve been kept safe, according to those who kept you in danger. The virus narrative’s been proclaimed in defiance of evidence, which makes it like every rumor about what to fear and how to stop it. Have you selflessly tried breathing through a surgical mask wrapped in a bandana?

Making up the story is just another irony those who claimed to save us from the zombie plague haven’t embraced. It’s tough for action heroes to pause and appreciate literary themes. Also, these Schwarzeneggers seemed to aim their awesome weapons at those they were saving quite frequently, as it’s also a challenge to maintain barrel direction. Don’t criticize your rescuers over petty details.

It’s your fault everyone’s sick. Feel guilty for your selfish existing. Blaming humans for outrageous activities such as employment and acquiring energy is totally not distracting from how the real source of viral carnage was Democratic governors shoving every patient zero they could find into nursing homes.

Giving the Grim Reaper a 5-hour Energy may have been a poor way to protect life. Are you telling me the same people who thought bringing the sick and elderly together was a good idea don’t understand market forces?

Asking why the death toll was so high is the sort of subversive independent thought that’s not guarding the hive. Sure, this sort of illness is particularly dangerous to the elderly who require assisted living. Andrew Cuomo’s orders dropped napalm on tinder factories, which he’ll leave out of his riveting book that’s definitely nonfiction. States with particularly bossy governors just so happened to be the center of the Target logo. I naturally blame Donald Trump.

Eschewing personal responsibility is personal for politicians who blame the public for their own atrocious choices. Today’s flailing putzes in state capitals would’ve blamed citizens for not growing vegetables fast enough during World War II. You’d wear a hazmat suit if you weren’t a virus fan.

It will remain an eternal mystery how six feet became precisely the right distance to preserve humanity. Five is committing murder. Those who’ve noticed arbitrary makeshift commands from elected lawyers aren’t precisely scientific are also aware of the effect on those who weren’t susceptible to infection, namely not enough to close life for most of a year. But at least halting civilization didn’t save lives.

Obeying evidence begins with harassing supermarket patrons who’ve noticed the medical professionals wearing masks do so in a sterile environment around sick people. Parties daring to patronize a restaurant should be treated like the Manson family. And serial killers stalk campuses in the form of college parties, as if cooped-up 19-year-olds should be expected to not develop social skills and alcohol tolerance after months under curfew.

Those spreading a false narrative about a real pandemic condemn routine activities just like how they ignored how exposing grandparents to lepers may have been as unhealthy as it was unwise. They will disregard what happens next for identical reasons.

Very research-focused liberals love pretending Texas and Florida are hellholes in non-virus years. They now portray states that dare not to hassle residents as toxic zombie outbreaks. Poor unenlightened and unguarded residents spend days ducking bullets only to be felled by a virus. Sure, the death rates are way lower than in noted harsh libertarian hellhole New York City. But paying attention to what’s happening would mean having to change ideologies, and nobody wants to make new friends this deep into the semester.

The greatest cold indicator is who’s fleeing where. Electoral votes tell the truth in a way blaming states with low crime for not having enough gun control spreads a lie.

Population redistribution is particularly amusing in the year we’re counted. Liberals adore demanding census compliance so they can plunder the Treasury with what they risibly consider their fair share. Meanwhile, their mooching power is diluted as the exploited spend the last bit of savings that haven’t been confiscated on U-Hauls to already-packed Texas lots. The direction of permanent travel can’t be denied, like which states had the worst death rates. Cuomo is going to be so surprised by how New York lost population this time.

We’ll define 2020 by its lack of definition. Humanity has idled for most of the year slowing the spread. It’s the longest two weeks imaginable. Sitting still may have ruined the economy and need to socialize, but at least it didn’t help. Bend the curve just like all that federal spending destroyed poverty. Unilateral emergency orders are another endless government program. But you must relinquish control so you can not feel better.

Why not elect a cure? Joe Biden would halt the virus by winning, as Barack Obama benevolently shared his magical powers by shaking his erstwhile underling’s hand. We just need to obey science, which is apparently good according to the candidate’s tweets. Conduct research by treating experts who happen to be government employees as prophets. The real cure would involve the media not covering what they classify as Trump’s virus anymore.

Liberal politicians have to pretend they don’t enjoy telling everyone what to do. Noting it doesn’t seem to work out ever is useless when citizens must obey by semi-law. Their visions must be good if their orders have to be mandatory. There’s a reason politicians don’t pursue private sector success, namely that nobody will obey awful ideas voluntarily. Why do you think they loathe business? Like a scorpion stinging at the precise wrong time, it’s in their nature to boss around.

Today’s goofy restriction keeps Korean War veterans from being KIA by contagion, you independent ghoul. Democrats believe they’re saving existence itself, which is why they’re so fervid about implementation. Everyone in opposition is therefore logically for death. The monsters are just slightly more demonic when the issue involves a virus and not net neutrality. Sickos who didn’t keep us from being sick have everything on their side but outcomes.

[whereareroo]

WORK- LIFE BALANCE

WF THOUGHTS (7/15/21).

When did workers become so lazy? When did employers become so stupid? Unless we want a whole new economic system in America and elsewhere, everybody better start focusing on these two important questions.

Until about 15 years ago, workers did not object to long hours. If you were an hourly employee, long hours meant that your job was secure and that you'd be bringing home a bigger check at the end of the week. If you were a salaried worker, long hours meant that your boss was giving you greater responsibility, that you were moving towards a promotion, and that a bigger salary was on the horizon.

About 15 years ago, because they had nothing better to do, a bunch of social scientists started fixating on "work-life balance." Doesn't that sound nice? How could anyone oppose or criticize "balance."

The phony concept suggests that there should be some ideal balance between time for work and time for everything else. How did the world survive before the "work-life" concept was created? The world must have been an awfully unenlightened place!

After several years of frivolous talk about "work-life balance," the developed world was brainwashed into believing that this nebulous concept had merit. Business schools started teaching silly stuff like: "Smart employers know that workers who have good work-life balance are more dependable, loyal, and productive." Isn't that another sweet sounding pronouncement?

Let's get real for a few minutes. Hard work is the fuel for any economic engine. America didn't become the economic engine of the world because her workers enjoyed an ideal "work-life balance." America became the #1 economy in the world because her workers worked longer hours than workers in other developed countries. We climbed to the top because Americans were happy to work 10-12 hours a day, sleep for 6 or 8 hours a day, and enjoy the remaining hours as "free" time. What was wrong with that formula?

Spain and Portugal are beautiful countries. I've spent time in both places. Regions in both countries still observe the afternoon "siesta." Everything is closed from 2:00 p.m. until 5:00 p.m. Everything is also shut down on Sundays. It's a peaceful life. Neither country is an economic powerhouse.

How about France? I've visited there, and I've known executives from French companies. Low level workers get 4 weeks of paid vacation and numerous other holidays. High level workers take 6 or 8 weeks of vacation plus holidays. France could be a much bigger economic player, but her workforce doesn't work hard enough.

A few years back, on one of our long hikes in Europe, I met a nice guy from Denmark. He was very talkative. He explained that nobody in Denmark is focused on work or wealth accumulation. Due to the high taxes that are needed to support their extensive social welfare programs (including very generous unemployment benefits), and the steep escalation of those taxes as income rises, nobody chases a big income. After taxes, whether you work hard or not, everybody ends up in the same general income range. If you get fired or laid off, it's no big deal because of the huge safety net of social programs. Nobody in Demark works long hours. Denmark has a solid economy, but it certainly isn't a world leader.

I've been thinking about this stuff because of a new study out of Iceland. Until 2015, the public service employees in Iceland worked 40 hour weeks. Between 2015 and 2019, the did two big experiments where they kept salaries the same but reduced the workweek to 35 hours. They reached 2 conclusions:

1. The workers were happier.

2. Production was about the same.

It doesn't take a genius to analyze those results:

A. Wouldn't you be happier if you worked less but got paid the same salary?

B. Clearly, the workers weren't working at full capacity during their 40 hour weeks. It looks like they were goofing off for 5 hours a week. They probably thought that they'd get caught if they goofed off for 5 hours during a 35 hour week.

Apparently the officials in Iceland aren't geniuses, and they did a different analysis. They're going to experiment with a 32 hour work week. It looks like they're on the road to a 24 hour work week--three days a week. I hope the people of Iceland don't want services on the other four days.

In an effort to appear "politically correct" and in sync with the latest psychobabble, big companies are experimenting with new "life-work" schedules. The Covid experience has created an environment that is receptive to such experiments. Unilever is experimenting with a four day work week at full pay. So is Microsoft. I guess these companies don't understand math. You can't get the same production from your workforce if you reduce the work week by 20%. It's impossible. The workers might be happier, but you're deceiving yourself if you conclude that the production is the same.

How do you feel about all of this? If we want America to maintain her spot as the #1 economic engine in the world, we better stop talking about this "work-life balance" stuff. On the other hand, would it be so bad if America was more like Spain, Portugal, France, or Denmark?

At this point in a blog post, I usually give you my opinion. Frankly, I'm stumped on this issue. I could go either way.

My hunch is that, because people from other countries will be willing to work harder than Americans, we will inevitably lose our status as the #1 economic engine in the world. Nobody holds the top spot forever. Throughout history, the #1 economic hub in the world has jumped from place to place. Ancient Egypt was a big deal. So was Rome. London was the center of the economic world for a long time. If Americans decide to move away from hard work, isn't it inevitable that we'll be replaced by a country like China, or India, or Brazil? Those countries are full of people who want to work hard, and their economies are just developing. Once those economies are firing on all cylinders, fueled by millions upon millions of tireless workers, America runs the risk of getting knocked off her economic pedestal.

We talk about "culture wars" all the time. This could be the defining culture war of the next 50 years. Will a vigorous work ethic, not diluted by excessive hype about work-life balance, return to American culture? Or, will we culturally shift towards a work-life equalization scheme and accept the economic consequences?

In any country, cultural shifts are significantly impacted by two factors:

1. By their words and actions, what messages are the older generations sending to the younger generations?

2. Irrespective of any messages sent by others, what's within the hearts of the younger generations?

The notion of a "cultural shift" sounds like a change that's beyond the control of any individual. That's not true. Cultural shifts happen one person at a time. Cultural shifts happen one family at a time. Cultural shifts don't happen in a vacuum. By definition, the culture follows changes that occur within the people.

I think America is at a historical crossroad. Your family is probably at this crossroad too. One road leads back to the traditional American work ethic of our grandparents. The other road follows the new path of "less work and more play."

Twenty-five years from now, America will not look like the America of today. We should all think about these issues. If you're deliberation pushes you towards one of the two options, that's fantastic. There's no "correct" answer here. One by one, we'll all be creating the future. What's your bet on the final outcome? If you're wrong and the other outcome prevails, is that OK with you? We're in for an interesting ride.

[canadianbullionroyalmintagency]

How does the Royal Canadian Mint respond, everyday?

For the unenlightened, beneath is a speedy summary of a couple of key capacities played by the Mint in the Canadian economy.

1. The Royal Canadian Mint makes Coins.

All the government provided coinage in your pocket comes from Mint branches in one or the other Winnipeg or Ottawa part of the Mint. Adequately amusing, numerous different monetary standards are additionally delivered at the Mint. As per this Globe and Mail article, the creation of unfamiliar cash came to more than CAD $61 million in income for the Mint.

Delivering coinage for course is hypothetically the Mint's essential duty. It is the lone body enlisted to do as such. With Parliamentary approval - as in 2012 when it quit creating pennies - the Mint can choose to change the sort of coins they produce.

2. What does the Royal Canadian Mint do in Designs and Manufacturing?

The essential wellspring of income is in the creation and offer of unique and uncommon valuable metal coins and awards to enrolled sellers. The Mint has a long queue of well known 'Maple Leaf' coins which come in 99.99% fine silver and 99.999% fine gold. The RCM Gold and Silver Maples Leaf coins specifically are known and desired around the world, however the Mint additionally creates a wide range of plans every year in gold, silver, platinum, and palladium.

3. What does the Royal Canadian Mint do in Refining?

Getting valuable metals to an unadulterated state takes a considerable amount of work. The Mint has been refining since 1913 and is an EICC-GeSI Conflict Free Smelter. Since 2005, when the Mint added a state-oft-the-craftsmanship treatment facility, it has been especially all around set to accomplish this work. It is likewise an ISO 9001 and COMEX and LBMA great conveyance purifier.

4. What does the Royal Canadian Mint do in Digital Currency?

In 2012 the Mint got in on digital currency. They delivered their own "MintChip" computerized cash. The unknown exchanges are completely upheld by the public authority and apply to a large group of various monetary standards. Curiously, this business was not truly productive and was offered to the secretly held nanoPay in 2016.

5. The Mint Does Not Sell Directly to the Public

We realize that the Mint runs for-benefit, and that for the most part it doesn't run huge deficiencies every year and get set up by citizens cash. The Mint's order is to work in a business way and cover however much of their expenses as could be expected, preferably procuring a benefit. 

Why, at that point, does the Mint doesn't sell straightforwardly to people in general? The appropriate response is that they do, once in a while. You can buy now through the entirety of their collectible coins on the web or at a mail center.

[fierceawakening]

This weird “we are morally better” thing is why I tried it out even though I knew I would not like it at all.

Things ensued pretty much exactly as I predicted, and I still seem to prefer to do things the “unenlightened” “scarcity economy of love” kinda way.

Oops?

(Note: most people aren’t judgy like this. But enough are to make you feel bad about yourself if you listen to them.)

I don’t know all the reasons why I like dark things, and I don’t think I need to know them all, but… I was just looking at the blog of that person who said I “dehumanize and fetishize” gay men, and I saw that he was quite young (15) and his blog was all full of pastel colors and references to his mental illness and something dawned on me that I hadn’t thought about in a Tumblr context at all.

Part of my PTSD is about experiences I had in hospitals, and because of that one of my triggers is… not pastels, all by themselves, but like… have you ever stayed in a hospital as a kid? And everything is covered in soothing soft colors and all the nurses wear scrubs with like… cute animal drawings on them and everyone talks in a sing-song voice and reassures you things won’t hurt when they OBVIOUSLY will and you’d rather they tell the truth, accept that you have good reasons to be scared, and get it the hell overwith?

Yeah, I think I just figured out why those kids’ blogs give me a weird tingly feeling of creeping dread.

And I think I figured out, also, where my intense leeriness of “safe spaces” and trigger warnings comes from too–even though as a person with PTSD I’m supposed to want them.

It’s because in my experience, people who were trying to make me feel safe were LYING. They were lying because it was in their interest–in mine, too, but in theirs–for me to feel calm and soothed. For me not to feel despair, or anger, or blind screaming rage.

…Is it any wonder I like the stories where the people with the knives and the cruel smiles and the mind games are blatant about it? Or that I might want a few knives of my own, even though I have no desire to hurt anyone who isn’t going to get off on it?

I don’t want those kids to not need safety.

I want them to stop pretending safety looks the same for everyone.

[azspot]

THE TWO CURRENT FRONTRUNNERS in the presidential election—Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron, the former investment banker and minister of the economy under Hollande—call on inversely symmetrical bases of support, Macron’s weak showing among working-class voters is emblematically identical to Le Pen’s share of senior executives (13 percent). Their campaigns have in many respects been complementary. Both candidates embrace the slogan “ni droite, ni gauche,” popularized by the interwar fascist leagues. Macron, bauble of the extreme center, seeks to substitute for the traditional right-left divide a vision that opposes globalizing, educated, cosmopolitan professionals to backwards, bigoted, and unenlightened nationalists: Le Pen’s worldview in camera obscura. For both Macron and Le Pen, openness, free movement, and European integration can be counterposed to patriotism, “national preference,” and the defense of entitlements. The prospects for either option depend on a significant recomposition of the electorate.

Landscape of Treason

[fycanadianpolitics]

It was a "debate" that seemed altogether too much to be framed by the party faithful and for the party faithful. In a 90 minute session that you can watch at your leisure on CPAC, the four announced contestants in the NDP leadership campaign spent what turned out to be an almost unbearably slow session trying to say how much they loved each other and the NDP while making soaring rhetorical statements that were seldom backed up by policy. Anyone hoping to hear any kind of real debate or contrition from four MPs who went along uncritically with the catastrophe that was the NDP's centrist campaign in 2015 would have had little to feel good about except for one brief moment. Backed into the corner, as they are, of being insiders that enabled disaster they were unable to truly debate each other as one might have hoped as they had all been players in the same game. As a result we were treated to an exceptionally tepid affair that failed to lay out any compelling vision of any coherence. While this was the first of several debates, if this were the one that anyone potentially interested in renewing a membership or seeing serious self-criticism within the party watched they would have come away profoundly disappointed. The sole slight exception was Niki Ashton who, briefly, admitted that the NDP had been outmaneuvered on the left by the Liberals in 2015 and called on them to collectively "be that left party" in one of the debate's very few highlights. Admittedly the format was terrible and seemed designed to prevent any serious discord, something which the party always appears very keen to avoid in some bizarre unwillingness to be critical of powerful or leadership supporting colleagues who are, one might note, exceptionally well paid parliamentarians who really neither need nor deserve the kid gloves. Guy Caron, as expected, was the policy wonk and tried to represent continuity. He, not entirely incorrectly, said that fighting inequality and climate change required a serious policy framework, but other than a pledge to fight for a basic income scheme he did not offer one. He did say that his vision of basic income would be different from that that many liberals and conservatives offer though he failed to say how outside of platitudes. Caron also, in one of the debate's low moments, seemed to imply that the niqab debate in Quebec not only hurt the party (a absurd ongoing claim given that the Liberals took the same position) but that the position should be reexamined. When asked about expanding inclusion in the party he fumbled it terribly by saying of the NDP that it is "here you will find the answers to your problems" which is not just dismissive of the question but seems to imply that the lack of diversity in the NDP can be solved by people simply supporting the NDP! Peter Julian spent much of the debate telling everyone how much he agreed with everyone else, which is sweet but hardly conducive to an interesting discourse. When he got around to saying anything real he was actually the only candidate that had a real policy framework however loosely drawn. He took the strongest stand against pipelines, was good on trade deals and generally came off as knowledgeable and also as a very likable person that you would love to have come in to guest teach your grade ten civics class. Still. with shout outs to Rush and talk of driving through Quebec in a Lada he had brief moments where he might have connected with those of us whose hearts remain in 1988. Charlie Angus tried very, very hard to play the "man of the people" card. He even spoke of going to the bar to watch hockey and having the bartender demanding of him "what happened to you guys" a carefully played nugget of "I am with the people" meaninglessness. One should not try too hard to connect with people too broadly, as the trying often highlights a lack of connection. He was, however, willing to use the term working class and did so right at the very start. At moments he was also quite compelling to listen to. At the same time he also framed trade agreements in very nationalist terms and pipelines in a way which seems calculated to appeal to a resource economy wing of workers. He seems to be placing himself in some alignment with the Alberta wing of the party on this front which will make his position problematic to Leap Manifesto supporters and environmentalists. His low moment likely also came when asked about how the party might increase diversity when he replied "There are 3 principles for me...NDP" which, despite him attempting to draw a narrative around it was both dismissive of the question and mindlessly partisan in a way that one would expect but that is also disappointing. Niki Ashton struck out from the left from her opening statement on but did so with a continually very nebulous notion of how she would get the country and party there. She talked very forcefully of turning back the "neo-liberal agenda" and brought back her powerful slogan  "You privatize it, we nationalize it. You deregulate it, we regulate it." She was at her strongest when she talked about the need to reconnect with the grassroots of the party and to look beyond winning the 2019 election and towards building a leftist party and movement. She was at her weakest when she came out against pipelines but in a sneaky and equivocal way that clearly implies that if she thought they were somehow environmentally acceptable and acceptable to indigenous people then they would be ok, which is either obfuscation or absurd as any pipeline of any length and meaning will never meet these criteria. But while her performance was far stronger than in 2012 and had its moments, it was not as strong as might be needed for those who wonder why she did not distance herself from the fray earlier. The pathetic unwillingness to seriously debate on the part of all candidates as if doing so will somehow be nasty made this both a boring and totally uncompelling affair if the NDP is truly trying to excite new people to join and vote. They might next also want to dispense with the lightweight "human interest questions" that ate up a lot of time with nonsense that was completely unenlightening. Overall it was likely won by a small nose by Ashton vs Angus (her main competitor) and by Julian against Caron (his main competitor). But it was exceedingly dull and uneventful and if the NDP and the leadership candidates actually want to engage people they had best kick it up a notch as this was an utterly sad start.