Manic Wednesday

Hey, Mondays aren't the only days that can be Manic

Sorry about yesterday. I blanked on what day it was for some reason. I even went for my walk at 5pm and utterly forgot that we had DnD date night. (It was that bad.) The nice part is, I got so much done as a result. So much writing. It made me happy. So, while there was no blog post yesterday...it ended up being for a good cause. 

There's not much going on around here, I'm afraid. I used up all my good ideas for posts when I wrapped up the one for my column on Skiffy and Fanty. Sorry about that. However, I can provide some not-necessarily Feminist links I've been collecting. You know, to provide some unease about other things in our world. You're welcome. ;)

First up:  The Rise And Stall Of The Fourth Reich. The good news? The wiser minds in charge have started using crowd control to discourage white supremacists from marching. It also has the added benefit of cooling off their tempers. It's hard to charge in to 'war' all energized for a fight when you have to stand in line before entering the battlefield like a bunch of stupid Mel Brooks cowboys.

Try not to snicker too much. If the assholes in power have learned one thing, it's how to turn smart moves like this one against anyone who opposes them. So, I've no doubt that anti-racist protests will have to deal with the same soon enough. And that's troubling.

I'm often uncomfortable when I see parents employ electronic devices as toys for their toddlers and infants. It's because I know just enough of what goes into those things (I worked at Motorola for almost a decade) that watching a kid chew on an iPad or phone gives me the heebie-jeebies. There are other reasons, but I'll stop here.[1] Anyway there have been a couple of disturbing articles that have drifted my way. The first is: Don't Let YouTube Babysit Your Children and the second is: Something is wrong on the internet. Yeah. I know. Sorry parents. I've just fueled more nightmares.

​I'm going to end with Why have we built a paradise for offshore billionaires? because I'm sick to death of the Trickle Down Economics myth. It's horse shit. Rich people stay rich because they horde money. (And not just that. See the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”[2]) The rich do not stay rich via spending it or even investing it. They stay rich through hoarding. Investing in an economy is what the middle class does. 

-------------------------------------------------------
[1] I'm so not a parent. So, I get that I don't have room to point fingers here. And hey, whatever prevents parents from losing their shit during the vast stretch of stressful sleep-deprived years called 'raising a child' is a good thing, really. However, my college childhood development course impressed me with how much human development depends upon physical contact with the environment through crawling, reaching, mouthing, and grabbing. Kids absolutely need to wiggle about and explore. It's how our brains build perception pathways. And well...I can't help worrying that if a kid spends more time interacting with a screen than the real world...well...they'll not adquately develop those pathways. And what happens then? On one hand, the human brain is super plastic. We learn and adapt extremely fast. So, it may not be an issue. On the other hand, we simply don't know. I'm sure most parents are equally as worried as I am--if not more so. They've far more at stake.
​
[2] I'll quote it: “The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet."

That's from Terry Pratchett's Men at Arms. There's also another really good bit in the same book where Sam thinks:

"The very very rich could afford to be poor. Sybil Ramkin lived in the kind of poverty that was only available to the very rich, a poverty approached from the other side. Women who were merely well-off saved up and bought dresses made of silk edged with lace and pearls, but Lady Ramkin was so rich she could afford to stomp around the place in rubber boots and a tweed skirt that had belonged to her mother. She was so rich she could afford to live on biscuits and cheese sandwiches."

Think about that tweed skirt as a metaphor for ancestral real estate/bank accounts and you get the actual picture. They don't live off their wealth. The wealth must be protected at all costs. They live off the interest. And that's why you'll periodically hear quotes like this from wealthy persons who've been reduced in status: "Two million? I can't live off of that! It's too little! It's a hardship!" It's because that amount isn't enough for the interest to cover their expenses, and they don't know how to live any other way. They've never created wealth from scratch. They don't know how it's done. Their ancestors did it. Not them.