My Anglo Files

My friend sent this to her Professor today

Is it too much to ask for one stained glass window in my home?

Every “Why my disability didn’t stop me from living” article written can be summarized as having access to resources materially and socially.  Which results in a fascinating intersection between ableism and classism, as the resulting inspiration porn - used against disabled folk via the “Why are you more impacted than this person in the article” - essentially boils down to shaming people for not having access to the resources required to mitigate the disability. 

a nightly occurrence 

Every person on this planet is one accident away from becoming disabled. Every person on this planet will become disabled if they live long enough. You are not an exception. Neither are your loved ones.

If you feel like disability rights aren’t relevant to you, remember that the only thing standing between you and being disabled is time. 

You’re all crips-in-waiting.

I had to turn on the RADIO

This is one of the thai restaurants in my hometown and i can tell you first hand this lady is wonderful

little update bc someone from my hometown wrote an article about her and these are some highlights:

and my personal favorite:

Found the article.

Should’ve known it was Marquette.

this is such a fun article and also:

and bc it’s worth reiterating:

I would whole heartedly love this woman if she said, “what you want motherfucker?” as soon as I walked in the door. Just like home

Colourful Quiraing

Still trying to come to terms with the fact I’ll never be a librarian who can speak a dead language and be recruited by a ruggish but handsome explorer for a quest to lift the curse and save the world

because of the pandemic travel restrictions?

Because of the pandemic travel restrictions.

Has anyone else noticed how, when you have a chronic condition of some kind, that there’s always the basic assumption from people around you that you’re not already doing everything you can?

It’s all about the illusion of control. People who are healthy like to believe they can always keep being healthy if they do the right things. They don’t want to think about how good people get struck with terrible circumstances for no reason. So they keep assuming that if they got sick, they could do something to make it better. And if you’re still sick, that must mean you’ve done something wrong or not done enough.

Nail. Head. The same attitude can be seen in how a lot of people talk about poverty.

g…gritty did what now…

i thought i was prepared before clicking this link but i wasn’t in the slightest

please forget how to speak

t-shirt that says "i rely on pharmaceutical drugs to preform routine tasks"

bimbo? ain’t that the dude from lord of the rings

so The Lion King is based on Hamlet and has animals replicating dynamics of European monarchy and at the beginning of the movie we see Rafiki acting in some sort of official capacity at Simba’s birth

is Rafiki like... the pope??? is he the head of the savannah state religion? does the animal pope get legal protection from being eaten by the king? do herbivores who get cushy government jobs all get royal pardon from predation? are they class traitors? is Rafiki’s baboon church responsible for recognizing and upholding the divine right of kings and pushing circle of life propaganda to ensure that herbivores accept their lot in life and see it as an honor to be consumed by the aristocracy?

Rafiki’s not the pope you fool, he’s the Archbishop of Canterbury, head of the Lion Church of England which split from the Lion Catholics in the Lion Reformation in a dispute over the divinity of Aslan

this is worse than mouse henry the viii and i hate you

A kitten wearing a cardigan

don’t be silly, politico. there was also a pandemic, and also that time anthony scaramucci called ryan lizza and told him steve bannon sucks his own cock

i’m honestly not lying when i say i will look back at scaramucci’s reign of terror as the only few days in the trump era when the news was fun again. it was like, one week of crimes, but only the the stupidest fucking crimes imaginable, and also the obamacare repeal failed that week

oh FUCK i forgot the trans military ban also happened that week. but this was how i was reminded:

i still cannot believe that the mooch and the failed “skinny repeal” happened the same week

*barenaked ladies voice* IT’S BEEN –

The best part is that Scaramucci has been consistently anti-Trump ever since.

He was there for three weeks, did absolutely nothing, told John Kelly to fuck off, got fired, and became the only member of the Trump administration to come out without completely destroying his reputation. He was even on Celebrity Big Brother!

well, the first thing about anthony scaramucci is that he actually HASN’T been consistently anti-trump ever since. he was still very much pro-trump for TWO FULL YEARS after that. a year after he was fired, he published a book called “trump: the blue-collar president.” he was fully in the tank for the former president all the way through the summer of 2019, when he abruptly switched gears a month after predicting trump would win “40+ states” in 2020 to become a morally outraged cable news talking head who was very concerned about civility and norms… you know, right around the time that the lincoln project was picking up steam and proving there was pac money to be made from the whole “morally outraged republican pundit” grift. but i also 100% think the emnity between them is real, and all things considered i probably have spent way too much time thinking about the shortest-tenured white house press secretary in american history. but i have a theory about him that i think explains… i was going to say everything, but it doesn’t explain everything. a few things? one thing for sure: anthony scaramucci isn’t just an american. anthony scaramucci is america. whatever, let’s get into it.

so here’s the thing: there are two types of Movie Guys everyone makes fun of online: guys who thought fight club was an instruction manual and guys who thought joker was an instruction manual. but scaramucci is the third, worst type of movie guy, which is “guy who thought wall street was an instruction manual.” he is such a gordon gekko fanboy that he PAID A HUNDRED GRAND FOR A WALK-ON ROLE IN THE HOT GARBAGE PILE SEQUEL STARRING SHIA LABEOUF. he heard the catchphrase “greed is good” like 30 years ago, and that became his motto for LIFE. he’s the living embodiment of everything that everyone hates about wall street (the movie AND the banks). the mooch has no alignment with the republican party, no actual opinions or political stances that are even somewhat in line with the modern conservative movement, outside of greed. politically, he’s a complete cipher on all issues other than fiscal policy. and all of his political activity reflects that! he was a big-time obama fundraiser until obama bailed out the banks and was like “but please stop with the predatory subprime mortgages :) you guys destroyed the economy :) i’m not asking again” and then, next election, he went to go be mitt romney’s campaign finance chair! then he supported hillary clinton! then it was jeb bush! the dude only ended up in bed with the trump campaign/administration for the same reason that every other hedge fund hack who had more money than empathy or common sense: “he’ll be good for wall street.” 

not everyone who works on wall street is like him, by the way. i’ve referenced this bloomberg piece about trump vs. biden donors broken down by occupation a couple times (it’s GREAT data visualization, it really stuck in my head), and i think the assumption on tumblr would be that people working in finance would have donated to trump in spades, but almost 80% of financial managers, bankers and finance professionals were biden donors, and biden also got more donations from people who listed their occupation as “investment professionals,” “financial advisors and consultants,” “CFOs,” and “CEOs.” the only finance demo trump got more donations from was “brokers.” i’ve rambled about this before, but long story short, it seems surprising on the surface but actually makes perfect sense; not because biden is secretly a republican, but because trump has been TERRIBLE for the economy, like all republican presidents. the kind of short-term spikes of rapid economic growth you see under extreme deregulated conservative fiscal policy also inevitably lead to recessions, and the more dramatic the boom, the worst the bust. (sorry if i’m girlbosssplaining basic econ here.) obviously, this isn’t news to people who work in finance, a lot of whom don’t actually make millions or billions of dollars. they’re liberal urbanites who have families and mortgages and student debt, which is why finance is a much more politically diverse field than most people on here would imagine, i think. there are a lot of aggrieved white men who support trump because they politically identify as aggrieved white men, but there are also a lot of other people (not all white and not all men) who understand that stable economic growth under democrats is preferable to the dramatic boom-bust cycles. like a lot of other voters, they are ultimately most concerned with the economy and other so-called “kitchen table issues,” and so they donate and vote for the candidates who will keep the economy stable and promote job growth. it’s not all fundraisers in wine caves. mostly it’s just common sense.

but then there’s this third group of finance guys, which is mostly rich but not fuck-off, billionaire rich wall street donors who basically live the same type of urban coastal elite lifestyle GOP politicians have convinced their constituents is solely the terrain of the democrats. they have no stake in the culture wars, they’re fine with gay marriage and abortion and cannabis legalization, they’re not gun nuts, they think they’re not racist because they fist-bumped drake at a knicks game and their kindergartener speaks fluent mandarin. their only driving principle is making money, and they will vote for literally anyone or anything who they think will be “good for wall street.” most of the time, that’s republicans, but they’re not true believers. they go wherever the money takes them, bush to hillary to obama to romney to hillary to trump, and they’re less focused on long-term market stability than on making a quick buck. i don’t know if trump would’ve been reelected if covid hadn’t happened and the short-term economic growth had continued at its pre-pandemic pace, but it doesn’t matter now, because he catastrophically mishandled the pandemic and it caused a massive recession and as a result, he suffered pretty heavy losses in the financial sector, especially among that key third group of guys, whom i personally call “the mooches.”

however, the thing that is so compelling about scaramucci, the uber-mooch, if you will, is that he’s not just a vacuous profit-driven cipher who probably jerks off to a wolf of wall street deepfake he commissioned where someone superimposed his own face on leo’s body. he is also just a complete fucking clown. he’s like five clowns standing on top of one another in a big trenchcoat with hermes scarves streaming from the sleeves at all times. you can hear the honking of his size-22 gucci clown loafers from 30 yards away. and you might think “there’s no way this man can be this much of a clown. surely he must have some crumb of self-awareness here, some semblance of identity that was not completely built on an 80s movie starring a guy who bragged about getting throat cancer from eating too much pussy” as you pull scarf after silk scarf from his coat sleeves, but when you finally get to the end and the coat falls to the floor… it’s just clowns all the way down, each of them with a tramp stamp that reads “greed is good.” he might be the dumbest person ever to graduate from harvard law school, and harvard law will accept even the most profoundly disturbed or disturbingly stupid applicants provided they’re a white man whose last name is auchincloss, roosevelt, or weld. he’s just a fuckin’ paisan from long island who would probably just be another guy getting drunk and pawing at women on the LIRR after work if he had not clowned his way into the one percent vis a vis wall street and then politics. 

i have absolutely zero doubt that he and trump got on like GANGBUSTERS when they were allies, and i would even bet money that there was a form of mutual respect, even perhaps mutual envy, between them - i mean, who is donald trump if not the real-life gordon gekko, famous for being rich, the man who personified “greed is good” in ‘80s new york and turned manhattan into his personal playground by building a bunch of skyline-ruining high-rises and slapping his name on em? and to be a first-generation college graduate from port washington, lawn guyland, sitting around eating a fuckin’ penne vodka slice in the white house with THE DONALD himself? look at him now, ma!!! and of course trump liked him. it’s obvious why! when donald trump looks in the mirror, he doesn’t see a soggy ball of hair snaked from david duke’s shower drain with a raging personality disorder. he sees a good-looking, smooth-talking new york power player with an evenly applied spray tan and ties that aren’t scotch-taped together. he sees this:

from my totally objective standpoint, scaramucci was the best thing that ever happened to donald trump’s presidency. in a week that included the trans military ban, the enormous wet fart that was the failed obamacare repeal, and the president attempting to intimidate his attorney general (a racist keebler elf) into interfering with a special counsel investigation publicly over twitter, the only thing anyone remembers happening that week was “i’m not steve bannon, i’m not trying to suck my own cock.” he clowned so chaotically and with such great enthusiasm, and the press was so confused and twitter was so enthralled that the administration effectively had a week of cover to do as many crimes as they could get away with, because between the mooch show and john mccain’s doctors replacing his brain tumor with an ”oh shit my legacy” tumor, NOBODY WAS PAYING ATTENTION. remember on game of thrones when the bald guy said “chaos is a pit” and littlefinger was like “actually chaos is a ladder” and we were supposed to be like DAMN THESE GUYS ARE MASTER MANIPULATORS? in reality, chaos is a vortex. if you keep throwing people into the vortex, no one can pay attention to anything else going on around them because HOLY SHIT THERE’S A GUY DROWNING OVER THERE. that was the entire anthony scaramucci communications strategy: drown reince priebus! and it worked for 10 whole days, until reince said “fuck all y’all” and gathered what remained of his soggy tattered dignity and quit.

so yes, he ultimately clowned too close to the sun, but even after 11 days of pie-throwing and pratfalling and drunk-dialing new yorker reporters to call steve bannon too gay too function and reince priebus a fugly slut, he left the white house on good terms with trump! yeah, there was money in the anti-trump republican grift for a while, so he jumped in with both feet, but i feel like in a different world, he probably would’ve come back as one of the weird back-benchers they had out there stumping during the last desperate stretch of the campaign. they would’ve had him up on stage squirting seltzer at rudy giuliani’s melting corpse, and he’d gladly have done it if trump hadn’t BROKEN THE DAMN ECONOMY. but fortunately for us, at his core, trump isn’t just a stupid, inept man who knows nothing about business, wall street, or making money; he is also a weapons-grade narcissist who truly believes he knows EVERYTHING.  and that’s the other thing here. there is nothing a non-wasp scrapper like this guy hates more than a dumb rich protestant who thinks he knows everything but actually knows fuck-all.

there’s a special kind of personal grudge that only catholics, jews, or anyone whose ethnoreligion starts with the word “orthodox” can cultivate against a wasp, provided said grudgeholder was raised working-class and blue-collar. this is a specific form of resentment unique to the kind of upwardly mobile white people who are at best 2 or 3 generations removed from the old country, be it sicily or warsaw, kiev or county clare. this is a diverse coalition of well-to-do nassau county mercedes dealers and middle-aged russian bookies who suntan shirtless at brighton beach in january, each with their own chip on their shoulder that forms the diverse tapestry of the great american slobs-versus-snobs grievance that unifies us all. it’s the kind of grudge you can only have when you realize you’re being talked down to by a guy whose grandparents belonged to a country club that wouldn’t have let you through the door, and he thinks you’re the lazy one. it’s the battle cry of the accountant stockbroker, and the greek diner proprietor, the stripper and the car salesman, the starter wife and the nanny he leaves her for, and the cable news anchor when you call him “fredo”: 

“you think you’re better than me?”

in this case, the answer was obviously yes. donald trump was born rich, he’s been rich his whole life, and he has never actually worked hard or learned anything about business, politics, or the human condition. i feel like every writer who has ever tried to seriously psychoanalyze trump brings up how new york society rejected him for being a tacky arriviste who didn’t fit in with the blue bloods, but the irony is that donald trump is really just another wasp whose daddy didn’t hug him enough. he tried to buy his way into high society and failed, but not because he was discriminated against. he just fucking sucked and nobody liked him, and he doesn’t even have the so-called “protestant work ethic" - he’s just stupid and lazy and racist and evil. 

and for all the things trump and scaramucci have in common - the vacuous greed, the lack of any true political goals beyond self-enrichment, the bridge-and-tunnel inferiority complex, the terminally unfiltered nonsense that comes out of their moutsh, the compulsive oversharing with reporters and airing petty feuds on twitter (remember when mooch tweeted @ the DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE to tell them reince priebus leaked his PUBLIC financial disclosure form that was literally available to ANYONE WHO FILED A FOIA?) - for all of these similarities, it’s so clear they fell out over a narcissism of small differences. scaramucci may be a colossal bozo on every level, but he was not born rich or connected. in the course of his long and ostensibly successful wall street career, he may have actually learned enough about markets to understand that trump caused the biggest recession since the ‘08 housing crisis in record time, simply by being a greedy, incurious narcissist who is also dumb as shit, and if there’s anything i absolutely know in my heart and soul and bones about the mooch, the only thing he can’t abide is some fuckin’ dumbass who stops his bag and thinks he’s better than him. 

still. still! for better or worse (definitely worse), aren’t those the principles on which this country was founded? wasn’t the slobs-versus-snobs narrative woven into our national fabric the minute the first crate of tea hit the water in boston harbor? and when one clown beats up another, bigger, dumber clown, do we not all laugh and partake in the spectacle of clown-on-clown violence? here, in the twilight of the empire, it’s quite clear that this whole 250-year ordeal only happened because some rich white guys got mad that some richer whiter guys were fucking up their economy and things got out of hand. so we honk on, clown cars against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. 

its always "objects in the mirror are closer than they appear" until im fucking parallel parking and it looks like im all up on their ass and when i get out of the car theres enough space for me to start a small business like qdagwbsbeje AAAAAAA

stop making shows about americans in europe… try europeans in america instead. the outrage of not knowing exactly what something costs at a store,, no public transport,, everyone smiling in your face and waiters scaring you by constantly popping up at your table… ice in your water for some reason,, the kind of culture clash i want to see!!

fuck emily in paris i want françois in texas