To Hemingway

The Biggest Conservative Lie: "But how do you pay for that?"

I think right now, while America is starting yet another global economic crisis is the best time to talk about this one issue. Because oh boy, it sure is an issue. And I think everyone who follows politics in some regard has come across one example of this.

One fairly centrist (lets face it, most of them are not even left) politician goes: "Maybe actually we should just help people/keep our infrastructure running."

To which a conservative or right wing politician will inevitably go: "Yeah, but how do you pay for that? It is not as if I am against it (a total lie), but it is jsut not viable! We do not have the money for it!"

The same arguement also gets pulled on any actually further left-wing idea like Universal Basic Income or such.

The thing is: This answer is a lie from beginning to end. We do know for a fact that any sort of social spending pays for itself - and to help it over thestart issues can be absolutely financed by putting a bit more tax on the wealthy and the companies.

Outside of those Chicago School morons (the ones who still proclaim trickle-down-economics, a by now disproven idea of economics, totally works) pretty much every person working in economics - no matter how much they hate this fact - does agree that indeed, it works.

Lets just go through a couple of examples, alright?

Single-Payer Healthcare: This is easily proven given that a lot of countries have implemented this in one way or another. This very much improves medical outcomes, and lessons the costs of healthcare within the country. Mainly due to the healthcare being paid more fairly, but also due to people actually getting healthcare easier, as they do not need to take out a loan if they stay in the hospital for three days. Plus: People who are healthy are able to do better work, and do hence end up adding more to the economy - if you care about that. (I don't, but you know those psychopaths do.)

Giving Homeless People Homes: This is one that basically so far only Finland does. Homeless people in Finland receive homes through the state - and guess what: Not only do most of them succeed to gain stability in their lives, but they also cost the state a lot less money this way, than if they live in the streets. Win win for everyone.

Making all education free: Again, this one is fairly self-explanatory. Any sort of academic work - from education to research - usually helps the economy. Educated people provide more value for the economy. Research done at the universities often improves the economy. Like, even outside from a general "education is good" thing... If you care about the economy, you want this.

Paying for infrastructure: You know what any sort of economic thing needs to work? Yeah, infrastructure. They will need streets, water, electricity, internet access and shit. If you provide it for free, the companies will more likely settle where you provide this - and you then can tax them.

Universal Basic Income: Let's talk about a more controversal one. But we by now have studies over studies that is proving the concept. Yeah, if you just give all people money, it will help your country and your economy. People who receive money will get more educated, they will take better care of their families, they are more healthy, they eat better, they might start their own businesses. And it is easily paid for by just taxing companies and the super rich so little, that they would barely even notice it - given how filthy rich they are. And normally poor people that have more money to spend, will actually spend it. Shocking, I know!

Privatization and punishing poor people actually tends to cost the state and everyone a whole lot more money than otherwise.

But of course this is not why the conservatives are against it. Most of them know the numbers quite well - but they do not care. Because all that they care about is that those few people who are super rich and finance their political careers to get more and more money - money that they do not need and will hoard like the dragons of yore.

Meanwhile - as Americans are finding out in real time - the financial methods the conservatives are using do not work and have been proven to not work.

Tax cuts for the rich? Yeah, that got us into this issue to begin with. Trickle down economics do not work. And Tariffs? They just make everything more expensive for everyone.

Again: This is not like the conservatives do not know this. They do. Or rather, I certainly hope they do. Because there is simply two options: Either they know this and are lying about that to profit, or they are uneducated morons, who should not be in the position they are, because they clearly do lack the necessary education and abilities to understand complex systems.

But no, fact is: They are lying.

We can pay for this. We always could. For a long time we did. But then things went horribly wrong.

Goodbye to all that

I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later — because I did not belong there, did not come from there — but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month. […] All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better, but I did not bother to weight the curtains correctly and all that summer the long panels of transparent golden silk would blow out the windows and get tangled and drenched in the afternoon thunderstorms. That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it. […] All I know is that it was very bad when I was twenty-eight. Everything that was said to me I seemed to have heard before, and I could no longer listen. I could no longer sit in little bars near Grand Central and listen to someone complaining of his wife’s inability to cope with the help while he missed another train to Connecticut. I no longer had any interest in hearing about the advances other people had received from their publishers, about plays which were having second-act trouble in Philadelphia, or about people I would like very much if only I would come out and meet them. I had already met them, always. Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1969, Joan Didion.

im gay but $20 isn’t even $20 anymore

(via Elon Musk stealing from children : r/RealTwitterAccounts)

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect. I had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. This failure could scarcely have been more predictable or less ambiguous (I simply did not have the grades), but I was unnerved by it; I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cause-effect relationships that hampered others. Although the situation must have had even then the approximate tragic stature of Scott Fitzgerald’s failure to become president of the Princeton Triangle Club, the day that I did not make Phi Beta Kappa nevertheless marked the end of something, and innocence may well be the word for it. I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me. Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect. Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The charms that work on others count for nothing in that devastatingly well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions.The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others—who are, after all, deceived easily enough. To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable home movie that documents one’s failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for each screening. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously un- comfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves. There is a common superstition that “self-respect” is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation. People with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. Nonetheless, character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs. To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. At the mercy of those we can not but hold in contempt, we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the necessity of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us. It is the phenomenon sometimes called alienation from self. In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the spectre of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that one’s sanity becomes an object of speculation among one’s acquaintances. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home. In memory of the great Joan Didion: On Self-Respect.