apr 12 in idea barrages

If you want an economic stimulus after the virus passes, nothing would get money flowing than the cancellation of all student debt. Now, unlike some people, I know it would never happen, you’d never get Congress to vote it in but… it would be a hell of a fix.

It’s comforting, in a sick ageist kind of way, to pretend that Trump’s senile, that his advancing years explain his being utterly unhinged. But the terrible truth of it is, he has never been in contact with reality a moment of his life, that’s a constant of being born into obscene wealth.

It would be like a Kinder Egg but for adults and inside the shell of delicious milk chocolate, instead of a cool little toy to assemble, it would contain a burst of lowered self-esteem and disappointment. It would be called a Tinder Egg.

Sometimes giving up hope is the best thing, by which I mean, giving up hope that there’s one big immediate fix. If there isn’t but you find the strength to accept that, suddenly you[re open to all the small ways you can make things incrementally better. Some kinds of hope are bad.

Few of the great social revolutions were lead by elected leaders, most of were social movements that pushed elected leaders. You don’t elect political officers to conduct social revolutions, you elect experienced technocrats who know how to effectively move the levers of power, then you push them to use that skill-set. Dr. King never ran for president. Cesar Chavez never ran for president. They did the work of social protest and influenced the seated politicians. I think forgetting this, the way these efforts are fundamentally separate, is one of the ways the American progressive movement has lost its way and lost elections to Bushes and Trumps because of it. Trying to push into national office people who are more useful to their causes as leaders of social movements or back-bench Congressional firebrands, failing and then letting the monsters run wild via that failure, that’s part of why we are where we are now.

The dead giveaway on the non-personhood of the porny facebook bot trying to add me as a friend is that the “person” was born in Miami but lives in Indianapolis. Even if that person were actually real, that’s a person too insane even for my blood.

I dig how the scam for-profit online colleges cluster their names so they can be confused for each other, diluting the appearance of grift by normalizing them as a “movement”. University of Phoenix, Grand Canyon University, University of the Southwest. Obvious but oddly charming.

If we manage to survive it, I hope at least one book on the history of the Trump “presidency” will be called CONTINENTAL GRIFT.