Misery Loves Company

manish arora fw15 by babushkin on flickr

i have a dim attitude to the genre of leftism that treats welfare-before-socialism as obviously imperalist and extractive in itself, but something people do need to keep in mind when they talk about stuff like UBI is that strong welfare is fundamentally and inescapably opposed to wide-open immigration policy, unless immigrants join a separate social class ineligible for the welfare. The state (or whoever is responsible for administering your social program) has an inescapable existential need to avoid adding a large number of people who are net beneficiaries of the program, and the only real approaches to this are "reduce the benefits that most people receive" or "don't let people come on board very often." This is a very general problem that applies to any form of cost- or risk-sharing arrangement!

I don't think this insight recommends a particular course of action; you could start from there and take it in many different directions. But I do think you need to start there, because if you're just trying to make the best society you have with what you have on hand, this is one of the big constraints!

yeah this is an issue that many people choose not to engage with (because a person engaging with politics as a social tool or hobby doesn’t need to! this issue only matters for actual rulership or honest intellectual endeavors)

anyway this is why my preferred immigration policy is something liken million new employment / study / whatever visas per year, sold at auction, with people renewing visas getting an increasing discount per year until they’re eligible for permanent residency, plus whatever number of at cost visas for family members of citizens, plus some number of free visas for humanitarian reasons. this policy is perfect and flawless despite my only having spent a few minutes thinking about it. dont @ me

So, moving is actually fairly expensive and complex.

Something I've often seen asserted (And never that I can recall with any kind of evidence) is that you can't address American homelessness with city based initiatives, because if one city has really really good services obviously homeless people from other cities will move out there until the services are overwhelmed.

But like... It takes a fair amount of effort to go from New York to San Francisco. I imagine it takes even more to go from, I don't know, Tajikistan to the US.

Mexico appears to account for more than half of the illegal immigrant population in the US, suggesting that proximity is a strong force as well.

In the very broadest strokes there's a level at which this makes sense, but immediately that needs to be colored with data. "If we had a UBI, all the homeless beggars in Mongolia would come to the US" is actually not obviously true.

So if it just isn't a problem because not that many people show up -- if your wide-open immigration policies only exist on paper because the number of people who want to immigrate is about the same as what you'd accept under the tight control we have now -- that's fine. That's a thing that can happen! But it's a somewhat precarious state, because the factors that make it work are entirely outside the control of policy creators. For example, it's already quite commonplace for places to pay or provide transportation for people they consider "too expensive" or 'unwelcome" to go to other jurisdictions seen as more welcoming, sometimes as a passive-aggressive thing, sometimes just as the most expedient way to handle it.

Two things I would note about America in particular: first, even though it's notorious for its low level of welfare, it lets in almost no one, and has a larger gap between how many want to go there and how many it allows to than just about anywhere in the world. If it had functional UBI and let in everone who wanted to come, I'm pretty sure that the only thing that would prevent it from doubling its population in five years would be logistics. Right now there are a lot of people selling everything they own and risking their life just for a chance to go there, and we can expect this to get worse by a factor of ten within the next 50 years due to, you know, all the stuff that's gonna happen. The second thing I want to note is that the most common present and historical solution to this problem is to just have a nearly-closed class of "citizens" with lots of entitlements, and then a disenfranchised class of resident labourers. And the US is already in this situation, sub rosa, by dint of "illegal immigration."

You'd never see everyone go, sure, but it doesn't take anywhere near that before you have to start thinking about the impact on revenues. Moreover, the more someone stands to benefit from a welfare regime, the more incentive they have to join it, so you'd expect the impact to be disproportionately large unless you're willing to turn people away for being "too expensive" (as is generally done in real immigration systems, but rightly considered a pretty dismal outcome.)

Ultimately, this all comes down to a numbers game, so it matters what the numbers are, and the numbers are for the most part not people but revenues and expenses. These have a complicated relationship with population, not least because someone can be a net tax beneficiary on paper but still contribute more economically than if they weren't there. But what I want to note here is mainly that the fights over how to allocate scant revenues are already incredibly bitter, and already life-or-death, even in states that practically ban immigration. There isn't going to be a grace period where this isn't a really nasty fight!

So obviously, the most obnoxious and useless sort of science fiction criticism is provided by angry dumb guys screaming into microphones about things being "woke"; but I also get annoyed by the people who insist on applying a sort of "roman-á-clé" reading, where everything in the story is merely a disguised stand-in for some real-world human political issue. Like, yes, obviously, sf is used for social and political commentary a lot of the time; but it's *also* used to just kind of play around on the frontiers of possibility. And it frankly seems kind of demeaning to the genre to pretend that its alien, its bizarre, and its inhuman features are necessarily just stand-ins for some mundane, real-world concept. Like, yes, clearly The War of the Worlds is about colonialism; but it's also about alien life; it's also about evolution and ecology; and it's also about "Wouldn't it be fucked up if THIS happened!?" And all of these are irreducible from the genre. Is your robot autistic? Well, maybe you can read it that way. Maybe it's a sincere attempt to imagine a nonhuman mechanical intelligence. Maybe it's both. Sometimes, you write a story strictly for "Wouldn't it be fucked-up if..." purposes and it ends up shedding a whole new light on the human condition; in fact, I think that, if you're taking your concept seriously, it should do this by default. But you have to take the bizarre on its own terms or you might as well be reading realism.

bilf (book i'd like to finish)

MS World Discoverer was a German expedition cruise ship. It hit an uncharted reef in the Sandfly Passage 29. April 2000. The hole was too big to get it repaired on the spot, so all the guests were taken ashore. A few hours later the captain ran the ship full speed on ground in Rodrick bay. (via sv_manjana)

The location was too remote for the ship to be actually demolished, and the locals looted pretty much everything that can be removed, so now it just remains there as is. (An exceptionally good-looking ship if you ask me. Designed by the Danish naval architect office Knud E. Hansen).

also:

so cool (via fathergothic)

you know what that's on me tumblr I should have been more specific when I said I like anime

tumblr being all adults nowadays is so funny because my mutuals are either unemployed chainsmokers or Ezra, Bioengineering PHD Candidate at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

one of the important lessons to learn about adult life is that the gap between an unemployed chainsmoker and a bioengineering phd candidate is actually not that large

crazy that they named the delta function after Dirac it's such a basic thing. it's like if they called matrix multiplication "Binet multiplication" come on guys

"kronecker delta" is weirder imo, even more basic. I guess we're just saying we're using the symbol "δ" in the same way as kronecker, not that he originated a concept

I guess the idea here is that the terms mathematicians use for things have descriptive meaning but nonetheless often get so overloaded that they need to be further disambiguated, because "delta" could be like 20 different things, and the simplest way to differentiate them is to give them the same last name as their originator (or the person they're most associated with)

interesting to note though that this is the same mechanism by which we name people

I'm trying to write this post about identity-blind admissions/hiring vs affirmative action and I keep running into the idea that this is mostly just lipstick on a pig; I care about fairness and diversity in the abstract, but equalizing the racial makeup of the US ruling class just isn't a political priority to me.

It's good to try and eliminate the explicit racism in the system, but as long as a racial gap in socioeconomic status exists, a racial gap in ability will as well - between two equally talented student populations, the one with greater access to resources, less proximity to violence, more stability and support, etc will always perform better, even in the absence of explicit discrimination.

Even if you construct a perfectly "fair" system, it will ultimately just replicate the material inequities that exist in the broader society. If you construct an equitable system (ie, one that creates a ruling class that matches the racial distribution of society at large), you still won't have fixed the underlying issues that caused the discrepancy in the first place, and by fiddling with the system, you'll piss off a bunch of other people (in this case, Asian Americans) in the process.

The liberal theory seems to be that if we find the Barack Obamas of the world, who would've been denied admission to elite institutions due to racial discrimination, and elevate them instead, the material problems will work themselves out. But I'm just not convinced this is true - it seems to be operating on a sort of pseudo-ethnonationalism where minorities in power will work to the benefit of "their people" and eventually even things out.

But with the way ruling classes work, it seems like most of the time the ruling class becomes "your people" for new inductees, and everyone else becomes, well, everyone else. Without leaning too hard on a Marxist framework, it seems like the ruling class empirically has a strong sense of class consciousness.

And even when this isn't true, when you encounter people in power who seem to genuinely want to change the world for the better, it's hard to imagine any racial divides being magically healed without some engine of economic redistribution behind it, and this is a task that requires more than just individuals who care about it.

None of which is to say that it makes sense to just throw up your hands and say "society is racist, so I guess it's okay for Harvard to be racist too." By all means, hold their feet to the fire as much as you can. But it's hard for me to write about this without feeling like it's all downstream of the central goal of the leftist project, making a more equitable world.

So I disagree with this more or less directly -- while I think it would be dumb to devote a ton of energy to achieving a diverse elite at the expense of other goals, it does seem like an important social goal on account of its ripple effects. I want to talk a bit about why I think that.

You say:

My objection to this line of thinking is that if what you say here were true, you wouldn't expect a rigidly patriarchal ruling class to contribute to sexism against women, or an exclusively white ruling class to contribute to sexism against nonwhites, right? And it seems clear that they do; the ruling class is not just passively mirroring society's own biases, it does a lot to shape them! Identity is extremely multifaceted, and demographic/cultural identities usually only conflict weakly with class identities, leaving a lot of room for them to express themselves independently.

Now, definitionally, the ruling class will be unified around ruling-class interests. As a broad rule of thumb, you would expect them to coalesce around whatever interests they share, right? But the point of the idea you're critiquing above is that as long as you're going to have a ruling class -- and dispensing with it is a lot harder than this sort of diversity move! -- you would like to minimize its demographic uniformity simply in order to minimize the number of strong directed biases it has. I'm talking not just about conscious self-interest, though there's a lot of that, but also the unexamined biases that come from different perspectives. This is also why you want the elite to span the socially-relevant gamut of ages, regions, faiths, and so forth. You would like them to have as much breadth as possible; there are things you can't do much about because it's constrained by the ability to enter the ruling class, but for whatever you can do something about, you want to, yeah?

I think it's questionable how much any of this can be achieved with overt, inorganic measures -- if you reserve certain seats of formal power to certain groups, that can transform into social acceptance of elite status, because power talks; but to the extent that an AA-type policy is perceived as "parachuting in" people from outside the hegemonic demographic, it's risky because it may lead to them being rejected. One thing we've seen with AA is that people who aren't beneficiaries of it tend to overestimate how much those that are actually get out of it; it provides an ideological framework to dismiss its beneficiaries as unworthy parvenus, and this is in a real sense the centrepiece of the modern white resentment that the GOP now depends on. I would prefer to see most AA replaced with measures that aren't overtly discriminatory on the basis of race or whatever, but are tailored to achieve similar effects through disparate impact -- the same tactic the modern GOP has adopted with its anti-black policies, making them much more politically defensible!

None of this is really a leftist project per se; it's centre-left, at best, and then only because the right very much does not want "fighting against sexism and racism" in its platform. But it deserves some attention within the universe of reformist efforts, particularly in countries like the US and Canada, because fixing discrimination from the bottom up was the first approach we tried and it very much did not work! That's to say nothing of the fact that, in the US particularly, class is conflated with race to a degree that seriously impedes class-based action, and this would actually help defuse that problem.

I think it's a mistake to assume that the level of attention people are actually devoting to this issue corresponds to its prominence in the discourse -- that's half a "celebrity culture" phenomenon, and half that this sort of charge tends to be driven by people who are already close to being elites, people who are mainly being blocked by this or that form of discrimination, and who thus have resources to spend and know how the game is played.

^this, but also, there very much still is bias and discrimination in the admissions pipeline that AA is working against. I feel like the OP underestimates the extent to which that is true because they seem to think AA is primarily a matter of equitable allocation rather than simply “fair” allocation. The system is not great at selecting for the actual best candidates, to the extent that allocating by quotas on attributes that are minimally game-able actually does provide value, even if it’s a bit of a hack.

This is also a good point, though I would not usually go so far as to say we should throw up our hands and just use quotas. (Though if we did, at least explicit quotas might be preferable to implicit ones, since then they could just be defended on their own terms.)

I'm always sad when I think about that story of the violinist blind auditions and how it massively improved diversity in hiring, because I really believe that we'd have similar effects in most domains if we could impose the same laser-focus on performance quality. But unfortunately most types of work aren't amenable to it, and the attempts at alternatives are often very bureaucratic in a way that collapses differences that might actually matter to work. It sucks! I think there's real work to be done in investigating approaches that we could use to improve blinding and impartiality in other domains. Sadly the Ivies are going in the opposite direction in getting rid of the SATs, so there's no good news on that side of it.

I'm trying to write this post about identity-blind admissions/hiring vs affirmative action and I keep running into the idea that this is mostly just lipstick on a pig; I care about fairness and diversity in the abstract, but equalizing the racial makeup of the US ruling class just isn't a political priority to me.

It's good to try and eliminate the explicit racism in the system, but as long as a racial gap in socioeconomic status exists, a racial gap in ability will as well - between two equally talented student populations, the one with greater access to resources, less proximity to violence, more stability and support, etc will always perform better, even in the absence of explicit discrimination.

Even if you construct a perfectly "fair" system, it will ultimately just replicate the material inequities that exist in the broader society. If you construct an equitable system (ie, one that creates a ruling class that matches the racial distribution of society at large), you still won't have fixed the underlying issues that caused the discrepancy in the first place, and by fiddling with the system, you'll piss off a bunch of other people (in this case, Asian Americans) in the process.

The liberal theory seems to be that if we find the Barack Obamas of the world, who would've been denied admission to elite institutions due to racial discrimination, and elevate them instead, the material problems will work themselves out. But I'm just not convinced this is true - it seems to be operating on a sort of pseudo-ethnonationalism where minorities in power will work to the benefit of "their people" and eventually even things out.

But with the way ruling classes work, it seems like most of the time the ruling class becomes "your people" for new inductees, and everyone else becomes, well, everyone else. Without leaning too hard on a Marxist framework, it seems like the ruling class empirically has a strong sense of class consciousness.

And even when this isn't true, when you encounter people in power who seem to genuinely want to change the world for the better, it's hard to imagine any racial divides being magically healed without some engine of economic redistribution behind it, and this is a task that requires more than just individuals who care about it.

None of which is to say that it makes sense to just throw up your hands and say "society is racist, so I guess it's okay for Harvard to be racist too." By all means, hold their feet to the fire as much as you can. But it's hard for me to write about this without feeling like it's all downstream of the central goal of the leftist project, making a more equitable world.

So I disagree with this more or less directly -- while I think it would be dumb to devote a ton of energy to achieving a diverse elite at the expense of other goals, it does seem like an important social goal on account of its ripple effects. I want to talk a bit about why I think that.

You say:

My objection to this line of thinking is that if what you say here were true, you wouldn't expect a rigidly patriarchal ruling class to contribute to sexism against women, or an exclusively white ruling class to contribute to sexism against nonwhites, right? And it seems clear that they do; the ruling class is not just passively mirroring society's own biases, it does a lot to shape them! Identity is extremely multifaceted, and demographic/cultural identities usually only conflict weakly with class identities, leaving a lot of room for them to express themselves independently.

Now, definitionally, the ruling class will be unified around ruling-class interests. As a broad rule of thumb, you would expect them to coalesce around whatever interests they share, right? But the point of the idea you're critiquing above is that as long as you're going to have a ruling class -- and dispensing with it is a lot harder than this sort of diversity move! -- you would like to minimize its demographic uniformity simply in order to minimize the number of strong directed biases it has. I'm talking not just about conscious self-interest, though there's a lot of that, but also the unexamined biases that come from different perspectives. This is also why you want the elite to span the socially-relevant gamut of ages, regions, faiths, and so forth. You would like them to have as much breadth as possible; there are things you can't do much about because it's constrained by the ability to enter the ruling class, but for whatever you can do something about, you want to, yeah?

I think it's questionable how much any of this can be achieved with overt, inorganic measures -- if you reserve certain seats of formal power to certain groups, that can transform into social acceptance of elite status, because power talks; but to the extent that an AA-type policy is perceived as "parachuting in" people from outside the hegemonic demographic, it's risky because it may lead to them being rejected. One thing we've seen with AA is that people who aren't beneficiaries of it tend to overestimate how much those that are actually get out of it; it provides an ideological framework to dismiss its beneficiaries as unworthy parvenus, and this is in a real sense the centrepiece of the modern white resentment that the GOP now depends on. I would prefer to see most AA replaced with measures that aren't overtly discriminatory on the basis of race or whatever, but are tailored to achieve similar effects through disparate impact -- the same tactic the modern GOP has adopted with its anti-black policies, making them much more politically defensible!

None of this is really a leftist project per se; it's centre-left, at best, and then only because the right very much does not want "fighting against sexism and racism" in its platform. But it deserves some attention within the universe of reformist efforts, particularly in countries like the US and Canada, because fixing discrimination from the bottom up was the first approach we tried and it very much did not work! That's to say nothing of the fact that, in the US particularly, class is conflated with race to a degree that seriously impedes class-based action, and this would actually help defuse that problem.

I think it's a mistake to assume that the level of attention people are actually devoting to this issue corresponds to its prominence in the discourse -- that's half a "celebrity culture" phenomenon, and half that this sort of charge tends to be driven by people who are already close to being elites, people who are mainly being blocked by this or that form of discrimination, and who thus have resources to spend and know how the game is played.

Not to be the guy who links to their other posts, but I agree with you, mostly. I'll try and enumerate where I disagree.

I think you are confusing cause and effect here. I think a more correct way of putting this would be that a uniform ruling class is only possible in a society that is bigoted - an all-male ruling class can only emerge from a sexist society. Ruling classes do not dictate the conditions of society; they are created by them.

Or rather, to overstate my case less, it is certainly cyclical to some degree, but I question the amount of influence you can functionally exert with diversifying the ruling class alone. It feels rather like "trickle down antiracism," so to speak.

I don't disagree with this, and if you're willing to elaborate on specifics I think that would be interesting.

Hmm, I'm not really convinced it would - part of my issue is that I don't think changing the makeup of the ruling class will change the makeup of the working class (or underclass, or whatever term you want to use).

Yeah, for sure - I'm writing this to clear my thoughts, not because I think everyone else is doing something wrong.

Ahhh, it's so long already! Damn us both.

So part of what I'm trying to say is actually that I think it's not very useful to try to call one of these things the "cause" and the other the "effect", because they're mutually reinforcing. It doesn't really matter which was the original cause, if there was one. On the same note, "ruling classes do not dictate the conditions of society but are created by them" seems obviously false to me, but the converse would be equally false. it's impossible not to notice that the ruling classes have an enormous influence on the conditions of society -- this is the whole idea of "manufacturing consent" and it explains the left's preoccupation with top-down propaganda and regulatory capture, which would be much less a locus of conflict if they were mere effects of social conditions determined elsewhere. But here also it's a circular relation: usually the ruling class is created by and also creates the conditions of society.

That said, it's apparent that the way the Ivy League elite-reproduction mechanism in particular reflects society is far more complex than a simple mirroring of social attitudes. The reason Ivy AA is threatened now isn't because there's been a huge change in social attitudes, it's because the centre-right elite has just completed several decades of judicial capture in an arena only peripherally related to public opinion. The cause and effect is not only bidirectional, but complex!

I'm not going to go too much into my specific thoughts around AA right now because it's a dense subject in itself and we're presumably all going to be talking about it again later when SCOTUS says it's illegal, but with regards to "trickle-down antiracism", I just want to note that while it would obviously be impractical to attempt to change things exclusively at the top, the question is really more like whether you can exclude the top, and then expect things to "trickle up". My feeling is that even if that works (somewhat iffy), it will be slower than trying to do both at once. It's noteworthy that many of these policies are not aimed specifically at cultivating a narrow elite but at improving social mobility generally among the marginalized group, so they tend to be one prong of a whole-society intervention. The present AA-in-Ivies fight is using "Harvard" as a proxy for something that will directly affect most layers of society, for instance!

This was in response to a comment about it untangling the conflation of race and class in the US, and in that respect I think it works either way. Maybe it does change the racial dynamics elsewhere -- I'm pretty sure it would have some effect -- but if it doesn't, it still deflates the conflation of race and class by example. It would be much more difficult difficult to mistake class for a pure byproduct of racial attitudes in an America that had an authentically diverse and representative elite!

I'm trying to write this post about identity-blind admissions/hiring vs affirmative action and I keep running into the idea that this is mostly just lipstick on a pig; I care about fairness and diversity in the abstract, but equalizing the racial makeup of the US ruling class just isn't a political priority to me.

It's good to try and eliminate the explicit racism in the system, but as long as a racial gap in socioeconomic status exists, a racial gap in ability will as well - between two equally talented student populations, the one with greater access to resources, less proximity to violence, more stability and support, etc will always perform better, even in the absence of explicit discrimination.

Even if you construct a perfectly "fair" system, it will ultimately just replicate the material inequities that exist in the broader society. If you construct an equitable system (ie, one that creates a ruling class that matches the racial distribution of society at large), you still won't have fixed the underlying issues that caused the discrepancy in the first place, and by fiddling with the system, you'll piss off a bunch of other people (in this case, Asian Americans) in the process.

The liberal theory seems to be that if we find the Barack Obamas of the world, who would've been denied admission to elite institutions due to racial discrimination, and elevate them instead, the material problems will work themselves out. But I'm just not convinced this is true - it seems to be operating on a sort of pseudo-ethnonationalism where minorities in power will work to the benefit of "their people" and eventually even things out.

But with the way ruling classes work, it seems like most of the time the ruling class becomes "your people" for new inductees, and everyone else becomes, well, everyone else. Without leaning too hard on a Marxist framework, it seems like the ruling class empirically has a strong sense of class consciousness.

And even when this isn't true, when you encounter people in power who seem to genuinely want to change the world for the better, it's hard to imagine any racial divides being magically healed without some engine of economic redistribution behind it, and this is a task that requires more than just individuals who care about it.

None of which is to say that it makes sense to just throw up your hands and say "society is racist, so I guess it's okay for Harvard to be racist too." By all means, hold their feet to the fire as much as you can. But it's hard for me to write about this without feeling like it's all downstream of the central goal of the leftist project, making a more equitable world.

So I disagree with this more or less directly -- while I think it would be dumb to devote a ton of energy to achieving a diverse elite at the expense of other goals, it does seem like an important social goal on account of its ripple effects. I want to talk a bit about why I think that.

You say:

My objection to this line of thinking is that if what you say here were true, you wouldn't expect a rigidly patriarchal ruling class to contribute to sexism against women, or an exclusively white ruling class to contribute to sexism against nonwhites, right? And it seems clear that they do; the ruling class is not just passively mirroring society's own biases, it does a lot to shape them! Identity is extremely multifaceted, and demographic/cultural identities usually only conflict weakly with class identities, leaving a lot of room for them to express themselves independently.

Now, definitionally, the ruling class will be unified around ruling-class interests. As a broad rule of thumb, you would expect them to coalesce around whatever interests they share, right? But the point of the idea you're critiquing above is that as long as you're going to have a ruling class -- and dispensing with it is a lot harder than this sort of diversity move! -- you would like to minimize its demographic uniformity simply in order to minimize the number of strong directed biases it has. I'm talking not just about conscious self-interest, though there's a lot of that, but also the unexamined biases that come from different perspectives. This is also why you want the elite to span the socially-relevant gamut of ages, regions, faiths, and so forth. You would like them to have as much breadth as possible; there are things you can't do much about because it's constrained by the ability to enter the ruling class, but for whatever you can do something about, you want to, yeah?

I think it's questionable how much any of this can be achieved with overt, inorganic measures -- if you reserve certain seats of formal power to certain groups, that can transform into social acceptance of elite status, because power talks; but to the extent that an AA-type policy is perceived as "parachuting in" people from outside the hegemonic demographic, it's risky because it may lead to them being rejected. One thing we've seen with AA is that people who aren't beneficiaries of it tend to overestimate how much those that are actually get out of it; it provides an ideological framework to dismiss its beneficiaries as unworthy parvenus, and this is in a real sense the centrepiece of the modern white resentment that the GOP now depends on. I would prefer to see most AA replaced with measures that aren't overtly discriminatory on the basis of race or whatever, but are tailored to achieve similar effects through disparate impact -- the same tactic the modern GOP has adopted with its anti-black policies, making them much more politically defensible!

None of this is really a leftist project per se; it's centre-left, at best, and then only because the right very much does not want "fighting against sexism and racism" in its platform. But it deserves some attention within the universe of reformist efforts, particularly in countries like the US and Canada, because fixing discrimination from the bottom up was the first approach we tried and it very much did not work! That's to say nothing of the fact that, in the US particularly, class is conflated with race to a degree that seriously impedes class-based action, and this would actually help defuse that problem.

I think it's a mistake to assume that the level of attention people are actually devoting to this issue corresponds to its prominence in the discourse -- that's half a "celebrity culture" phenomenon, and half that this sort of charge tends to be driven by people who are already close to being elites, people who are mainly being blocked by this or that form of discrimination, and who thus have resources to spend and know how the game is played.

star-shaped spillway in the Kechut Resevoir | Jermuk, Armenia

george orwell and aldous huxley are both valid troll names

thinkin bout the dialectics of the mario bros

I hear you. I hear you. I can read you like a book and I know all your moves in advance. You're going to ask me, "what about Waluigi?"

Well, what about Waluigi?