Hi

There is a good point to be made in The Purpose of a System is What it Does- type thinking (not all side effects of a system or rule are as 'side' as you think) but you have to be so careful with this way of thinking or you'll end up in full tinfoil-hat territory overnight.

The world is a lot less teleological than the human brain likes to think it is. Something as big and diffuse as 'capitalism' doesn't have a purpose. It wasn't made by a person, it doesn't have a drive, it doesn't have a soul, it's not doing things 'on purpose'. It's a complicated system with a lot of effects, many of which are very bad.

But thinking of it as a scheme cooked up by someone (or perhaps a suspicious cabal of someones) specifically to keep you poor and downtrodden is a really short road to... well, you know.

Thank you, this illustrates excellently what bothers me about "the purpose is the function!!!" narratives.

Sometimes... aspects of a system are emergent properties of the context and history of that system. The system might repurpose those aspects to support itself, like an evolutionary spandrel, but it didn't deliberately sit down and make a decision about them, because systems don't make decisions.

Y'all really gotta stop assuming that spandrels are load bearing when you try to examine complex social systems.

More on spandrels here, in case that's a concept many of y'all haven't run into before.

i mean... yeah, but also capitalism is a system that's actively maintained through international negotiation, local ordinance, powerviolence, etc, and is very differently shaped now than even like 30 years ago. if the maintainers have left those spandrels in in their ruthless quest for efficiency, then either they're load bearing, they think they're load bearing, or they really like the aesthetic.

the only real problem with the sentence in the first post is "specifically". but someone makes all the decisions that immiserate people, even though they're probably mostly not in cabals or even on purpose cahoots.

Actually, that's the point of mentioning spandrels: that things which start off as byproducts can be repurposed and used for other functions! That is, it's a mistake to think that just because something is currently being used to do $X that it exists because of a need (or desire) for $X.

I am also fascinated by the idea that capitalism exists because of a ruthless quest for efficiency. Does it? Because if I'm designing a purposeful system designed for maximal efficiency, I'm not paying for (for example) corn subsidies. I'm not going to work my employees into the ground, because employee turnover is expensive in its own right and it's more efficient to treat my employees like machinery (needs maintenance and sufficiently pay and rest for good upkeep) than like resources to be extracted, because skilled labor takes time to train.

The ruthless quest is for profit, not efficiency, and it's specifically a quest for individual profit from humans who often have very irrational ideas about what that profit looks like. You are still thinking about capitalism as a unified system built by rational actors, not an emergent process of centuries of very irrational people doing things in ways designed to yield individuals maximum profit over time. Crucially, many of the worst abuses from the system are perpetuated by actors looking to maximize short term profit while expecting to cycle through many company systems over a longer term career.

....really fucking fed up with the amount of people ive seen imply or outright state that anyone advocating for police abolition has never experienced violent crime.

guess what, some of us have and for many of us a huge part of the reason we support it is because of how absolutely horrible our experiences were.

things police have done for me when ive come in contact with them

there has never been a situation where police have helped me when i experienced violence and there are a ton where they have made shit much worse.

if the police disappeared and none of the money was redirected i would be much safer, let alone if the money went to organizations and groups who actually gave a shit about people beyond using them as punching bags

who would i call if i needed help? definitely not the people who've repeatedly harassed me, refused to help when needed, and take a fucking hour to show up when someone is being beaten.

probably one of the community groups that's managed to do a significant amount more with a fraction of the budget without guns or harassing victims.

You don’t understand. Police prevent crime by maybe showing up after the fact, arresting a random black person who’s a 61% match for the suspect description, and then handing the case off to a prosecutor who will threaten the suspect them into accepting a plea deal so the prosecutor never has to prove their case in court.

How would society function without that!?!

I was a proponent of defunding the police for most of my life.

Then I started working for a major metropolitan police department. I worked in a precinct for about a year before I transferred to the crime lab, where I spent another two years.

I was given the opportunity to observe the police department, its officers, its civilian employees, first hand. Every day. 40 hours a week. Sometimes nights and weekends. Sometimes nine to five.

I left the department. I am now a police abolitionist.

My partner (NB) worked for the same department for five years. First in public records, then on the street. They were not out and presented fem.

They left the department less than a year before I did. They are also now a police abolitionist.

I learned that people join the police department for a variety of reasons. Most of them (officers included) want to do good. They want to help their communities. They want to make a positive difference in the world.

But the American policing system isn’t designed to help people or fix things on a societal level. And the people who joined the department with good intentions and high ideals end up in one of three situations:

1. They realize they can’t change things from the inside, and they leave.

2. They realize they can’t change things from the inside. But they need the good pay and excellent benefits to provide for their families. So they keep their heads down, try to do as little harm as possible, and stick around just long enough for their pension and lifetime benefits to take effect (with my department, this was 20 years). Then they leave as soon as possible.

3. They adapt to reflect the morals of the department, becoming the very things they sought to change when they first joined the department. These are the ones that end up in positions of power within the department (lieutenants, commanders, chiefs, etc.)

There is no “fixing” the police. It was built on a faulty foundation, and continues to build upward. And the people in power (both within and outside of the departments) don’t want it to change. Because the current system benefits them, and people like them, immensely.

Abolition is the only viable way to fix things. Like demolishing a decrepit building in order to build something on top of it.

the city where we live doesn't allow public barbecues so my brother fucking welded a grill to a handcart and now hosts "chill and grill sessions" where he sends all his friends his live location so they can hunt him down on their bikes with sausages in their backpacks while he carts it around evading the police like some sort of barbecue vigilante, grilling on the run. i have never been prouder of him

Funny how that works

I am so pleased at how many notes are some version of “I don’t fear the science, I fear the corporations who control it” because that is EXACTLY the attitude you should have. GMOs can save us. Monsanto will kill us.

what people fear about GMO- ‘theyre gonna make frankencarrots that crave human flesh and cause diarrhea ’ what GMO actually is- ‘we made rice crop that is both drought resistant and flood resistant which will prevent about 20% of major famine disasters, also it now makes vitamin A because vitamin A deficiency in poverty stricken areas is a major killer of kids as most vitamin A rich foods dont grow there’ what people SHOULD be upset about- ‘i made all crops sterile so all farmers have to buy the seed from me in perpetuity and i will sue anyone who tries to go back to crops that produce their own seed’

i step out onto stage clad in full corpse paint and death metal regalia and start playing the most middle-of-the-road soft rock you've heard since 1974

I read an article once about a social services program in parts of Baltimore, MD in the 70s (I could be wrong about some of the details, it's been a while since I read it). But basically, this program went around to childcare facilities, preschools, babysitters, and kindergartens and looked for the kids with behavior problems. Then they went to the families of those kids and asked how they could help.

Did the parents need parenting classes? Did the kid need medical help? Did the kid need additional childcare the family couldn't afford? Did the family need a larger support network of friends and family? Was there domestic violence going on, and if so, could it be stopped and/or could the abusive partner be separated from the family? Did one or both parents need addiction counseling or medical support? Did they need better housing? Did they need a better job? Did they need job training? What did the family need, and how could the social worker help them get it?

It was an expensive program to run; it required a lot of social worker time and a lot of wrap-around services. So it was cancelled in the 80s.

But the thing is, someone did a study comparing the neighborhoods where the program was run, and found that for every dollar you spent supporting that family when the child was young, you saved seven dollars by the time the kid was 18. The kid was more likely to graduate high school, less likely to commit vandalism and shoplifting and other petty crimes as an adolescent, less likely to join a gang, less likely to be removed from the family and placed in foster care.

For every $1 spent serving/helping families when the kids were young, the government saved $7 by the time the kid was 18. (And that doesn't count things like "businesses and residents saving money because there's less vandalism to fix")

But the program was closed because "it was too expensive."

It is much more expensive to put kids in foster care than it is to provide affordable housing. It is much more expensive to put kids in foster care than it is to provide food stamps/SNAP benefits. It is much more expensive to put kids in foster care than it is to do pretty much any of the things that will help keep them out of foster care.

Yet people will claim those things are "too expensive."

It's a lie. When you actually compare the costs, not only is keeping the kid out of foster care almost universally better for the kid, it is also cheaper for the government.

Escape Artist Featuring Quiver and Robber Guy

"But why do you let your disability stop you?" Because that's.... what disabilities... do. That's... literally the basic definition... of being disabled... A disability impairs your ability to function. That's what the term means. That's the main thing

— Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love 

*Stares directly into the camera*

I love this

You know I find it very weird when people make fun of trans men’s names and then it’s just …. Popular names.

Like woah a trans man named himself Oliver ?? Crazy. It’s almost as if it’s been in the top 100 popular boys names for the past 4 years or something.

I think making fun of people for their name is bad actually. Who cares if someone’s name is boring, weird, or cringy. Y’all are just being mean.

I’d rather hang around Kyle and Bug than people who are mean.

"I don't really like rap music. It's just not for me. I've never been able to get into it." <- not racist

"Rap music sucks, it's so terrible and misogynistic and violent and--" <- racist

"These two are the same" <- idiot-asshole

nah, i just saw like four posts from group 3, and i was like. cmon, man. that's a saw trap for moral ocd you're making there. personally, i think rap music is fine. a lot of it's good. it's music. that's how music is

that comment about how you should not borrow grief from the future has saved me multiple times from spiraling into an inescapable state of anxiety. like every time i find myself thinking about how something in the future could go wrong i remember that comment and i think to myself: well i never know, it might get better. it might not even happen the way i think it will and if it does happen and it is sad and bad ill be sad about it then, when it happens. and it’s somehow soo freeing

I need this reminder today.

When you hear a new song on the radio and you’re desperately trying to pick a notable phrase so you can google it later

Gather round, kids. Let me tell you a story from ye olden days because I am tumblr elderly. I used to DJ for a radio station. I played records and CDs and we had station IDs from bands on 8 track cartes. People would call me asking what songs were–but they had to mumble, sing, or play the song on an instrument. I had someone call me to ask what Smells Like Teen Spirit was when it was a single. They played it on an accordion. I forgot about it until a moment ago when I saw this post.

They played it on an accordion

That was Weird Al

my family is fucking addicted to macgyvering and it's becoming a problem. every time something in this house breaks, instead of doing the sensible thing of replacing it or calling someone qualified to fix it, we all group around the offending object with a manic look in our eyes and everyone gets a try at fixing it while being cheered on or ridiculed by the rest.

it's a beautiful bonding activity, but the "creative" fixes have turned our house into a quasihaunted escape room like contraption where everything works, but only in the wonkiest of ways. you need a huge block of iron to turn on the stove. the oven only works if a specific clock is plugged in. the bread machine has a huge wood block just stapled to it that has become foundational to its function. sometimes when you use the toaster the doorbell rings. and that's just the kitchen.

it's all fun and games until you have guests over and you have to lay out the rules of the house like it's a fucking board game. welcome to the beautiful guest room. don't pull out the couch yourself you need a screwdriver for that, and that metal rod makes the lamp work so don't move it. it also made me a terrifying roommate in college, because it makes me think i can fix anything with enough hubris and a drill. you want to call the landlord about a leaky faucet? as if. one time my dad made me install a new power socket because we ran our of extension cords

to the people saying this isn't safe in the tags: my dad has a engineering degree and my brother is a mechanic this is like. state sanctioned macgyvering. safe sane and consensual macgyvering. our house will not burn down. in fact, i think it has made us all better in approaching problems from all angles when they arise, which has served me well in life, especially in high stress situations.

does our hot water switch off every thirty seconds making showers an exiting exercise in counting and resilience? yes. but one time the door of the train toilet broke, trapping me inside, and i went "well i can either succumb to the panic of claustrophobia or do this family-style" and then spent twenty minutes breaking down the lock with my shoelace and the belt i was wearing. so i'll take the cold water any day

Never have I wanted to see inside a stranger's home more

OP lives in a point-and-click adventure game

Or possibly in the dictionary definition of "engineer's syndrome"

Was forced to get a new phone today