New dream house plan: An underground home in the middle of a city, with the aboveground part set up as a public park where people are free to be and spend time as they please.
There would naturally be more than one escape route from the residence (only illustrating one tunnel here to simplify the diagram for clarity), but the lid at each entrance (protedted by a discreet locking mechanism, naturally) would be disguised as a manhole cover. So instead of being aware of there being a little comfy underground apartment beneath the park, people would only know me as the guy who is sometimes seen climbing in/out of the sewer systems.
Perhaps having both and an underground tunnel between them, the entrance hidden in both apartments behind a bookshelf. Even the people who know about one secret apartment won't know about the other.
I know I bring it up every 3-5 business days but so many horror, fantasy, and period film/tv would benefit from being shot on film. itās better if we donāt see the details! itās better if the haze smooths out pores and the prosthetics! if thereās more shadows & grain! not everything is not meant to be consumed in 4k
Anyone with a basic grasp of US history could tell you that in 1940, the US had yet to enter WW2 against the Nazis (but would in a year), and in 1960, WW2 was won, the US had invented the nuclear weapon, and the world was very different. Looking back, it's fairly obvious that the role of the US military in the world was dramatically different in 1960 than it was in 1940. 20 years is a long time.
But the 1960s, a lot of people were influenced into joining the US military in the Vietnam War based on stories from the 1940s. The world was a very different place, and 20 years is a long time... but it can feel very short.
This is a trend in humanity. It doesn't mean that the people who assumed everything was like it was 20 years ago weren't dead fucking wrong. They acted human, and in doing so, they made a mistake.
On that note, it isn't 2004, and if everyone could stop taking about the US military like it's 2004, that would be just fucking peachy! Hell, it isn't isn't 2014, and the 2004-2014 decade difference was enough for the US to completely change its tactics and its enemy of focus in Iraq (after withdrawing and then reentering) to be ISIS.
But it's 2024, not 2014. And it definitely isn't 2004. Fuck's sake. Why am I reading military criticism that belongs in the Bush administration.
Hate against trans people is rising, but the suburbs are what gives this hate its fervor and popularity.
And so it makes sense that these are now the places where fascism grows; thatās what these places were designed for. The suburbs were invented as a reactionary tool against the womenās liberation and civil rights movements. The US government, in concert with banks, landowners, and home builders, created a way to try and stop all that, by separating people into single homes, removing public spaces, and ensuring that every neighborhood was segregated via redlining. The suburbs would keep white women at home, and would keep white men at work to afford that home. These were explicit goals of the designers: āNo man who owns his house and lot can be a Communist,ā said the creator of Levittown, the model suburb. āHe has too much to do.ā
The reason Target has become the locus of todayās particular right-wing backlash is the same reason countless viral TikToks attempt to convince women that theyāre at risk of being kidnapped every time theyāre in a parking lot. Itās the reason why true crime is one of the most popular podcast genres in America, and why many refuse to travel without a gun by their side and shoot people if they set foot on their driveway.
[...]
It is of course true that these mass hysterias are part of an organized right-wing movement that is attacking human rights across the countryāthrough legislation banning abortion, gender-affirming care, and books, and making it illegal for educators to teach American history accurately. But the shape this movement has taken is not coincidental; it is in fact the product of the unique shape of public life in America, or lack thereof. Suburbanites do not have town squares in which to protest. They do not have streets to march down. Target has become the closest thing many have to a public forum.
We often hear that urban areas are more liberal and suburban ones more conservative, and weāre often told that this is because of race. That may be partly true, though cities are whiter than ever and suburbs more diverse than ever. Instead, it may be that suburbanism itself, as an ideology, breeds reactionary thinking and turns Americans into people constantly scared of a Big Bad Other.
The suburban doctrine dictates that public space be limited, and conflict-free where it exists; that private space serve only as a place of commodity exchange; that surveillance, hyper-individualism, and constant vigilance are good and normal and keep people safe. It is an ideology that extends beyond the suburbs; it infects everything. Even cities, as Sarah Schulman writes inĀ The Gentrification of the Mind, have become places where people expect convenience and calmness over culture and community. What is a life of living in a surveilled and amenity-filled high-rise and ordering all your food and objects from the Internet to your door if not a suburban life? To make matters worse, the people who have adopted this mindset do not see it as an ideology, but as the normal and right state of the world; they, as Schulman writes, ālook in the mirror and think itās a window.ā So when anything, even a gay T-shirt, disrupts their view, they become scared.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Since Trump hijacked the Supreme Court, his backers have achieved many of their policy priorities: legalizing bribery, formalizing forced birth, and ā with the Loper Bright case, neutering the expert agencies that regulate business:
What the Supreme Court began, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are now poised to finish, through the "Department of Government Efficiency," a fake agency whose acronym ("DOGE") continues Musk's long-running cryptocurrency memecoin pump-and-dump. The new department is absurd ā imagine a department devoted to "efficiency" with two co-equal leaders who are both famously incapable of getting along with anyone ā but that doesn't make it any less dangerous.
Expert agencies are often all that stands between us and extreme misadventure, even death. The modern world is full of modern questions, the kinds of questions that require a high degree of expert knowledge to answer, but also the kinds of questions whose answers you'd better get right.
You're not stupid, nor are you foolish. You could go and learn everything you need to know to evaluate the firmware on your antilock brakes and decide whether to trust them. You could figure out how to assess the Common Core curriculum for pedagogical soundness. You could learn the material science needed to evaluate the soundness of the joists that hold the roof up over your head. You could acquire the biology and chemistry chops to decide whether you want to trust produce that's been treated with Monsanto's Roundup pesticides. You could do the same for cell biology, virology, and epidemiology and decide whether to wear a mask and/or get an MRNA vaccine and/or buy a HEPA filter.
You could do any of these. You might even be able to do two or three of them. But you can't do all of them, and that list is just a small slice of all the highly technical questions that stand between you and misery or an early grave. Practically speaking, you aren't going to develop your own robust meatpacking hygiene standards, nor your own water treatment program, nor your own Boeing 737 MAX inspection protocol.
Markets don't solve this either. If they did, we wouldn't have to worry about chunks of Boeing jets falling on our heads. The reason we have agencies like the FDA (and enabling legislation like the Pure Food and Drug Act) is that markets failed to keep people from being murdered by profit-seeking snake-oil salesmen and radium suppository peddlers.
These vital questions need to be answered by experts, but that's easier said than done. After all, experts disagree about this stuff. Shortcuts for evaluating these disagreements ("distrust any expert whose employer has a stake in a technical question") are crude and often lead you astray. If you dismiss any expert employed by a firm that wants to bring a new product to market, you will lose out on the expertise of people who are so legitimately excited about the potential improvements of an idea that they quit their jobs and go to work for whomever has the best chance of realizing a product based on it. Sure, that doctor who works for a company with a new cancer cure might just be shilling for a big bonus ā but maybe they joined the company because they have an informed, truthful belief that the new drug might really cure cancer.
What's more, the scientific method itself speaks against the idea of there being one, permanent answer to any big question. The method is designed as a process of continual refinement, where new evidence is continuously brought forward and evaluated, and where cherished ideas that are invalidated by new evidence are discarded and replaced with new ideas.
So how are we to survive and thrive in a world of questions we ourselves can't answer, that experts disagree about, and whose answers are only ever provisional?
The scientific method has an answer for this, too: refereed, adversarial peer review. The editors of major journals act as umpires in disputes among experts, exercising their editorial discernment to decide which questions are sufficiently in flux as to warrant taking up, then asking parties who disagree with a novel idea to do their damndest to punch holes in it. This process is by no means perfect, but, like democracy, it's the worst form of knowledge creation except for all others which have been tried.
Expert regulators bring this method to governance. They seek comment on technical matters of public concern, propose regulations based on them, invite all parties to comment on these regulations, weigh the evidence, and then pass a rule. This doesn't always get it right, but when it does work, your medicine doesn't poison you, the bridge doesn't collapse as you drive over it, and your airplane doesn't fall out of the sky.
Expert regulators work with legislators to provide an empirical basis for turning political choices into empirically grounded policies. Think of all the times you've heard about how the gerontocracy that dominates the House and the Senate is incapable of making good internet policy because "they're out of touch and don't understand technology." Even if this is true (and sometimes it is, as when Sen Ted Stevens ranted about the internet being "a series of tubes," not "a dump truck"), that doesn't mean that Congress can't make good internet policy.
After all, most Americans can safely drink their tap water, a novelty in human civilization, whose history amounts to short periods of thriving shattered at regular intervals by water-borne plagues. The fact that most of us can safely drink our water, but people who live in Flint (or remote indigenous reservations, or Louisiana's Cancer Alley) can't tells you that these neighbors of ours are being deliberately poisoned, as we know precisely how not to poison them.
How did we (most of us) get to the point where we can drink the water without shitting our guts out? It wasn't because we elected a bunch of water scientists! I don't know the precise number of microbiologists and water experts who've been elected to either house, but it's very small, and their contribution to good sanitation policy is negligible.
We got there by delegating these decisions to expert agencies. Congress formulates a political policy ("make the water safe") and the expert agency turns that policy into a technical program of regulation and enforcement, and your children live to drink another glass of water tomorrow.
Musk and Ramaswamy have set out to destroy this process. In their Wall Street Journal editorial, they explain that expert regulation is "undemocratic" because experts aren't elected:
And all this is meant to take place on an accelerated timeline, between now and July 4, 2026 ā a timeline that precludes any meaningful assessment of the likely consequences of abolishing the regulations they'll get rid of.
"Chesterton's Fence" ā a thought experiment from the novelist GK Chesterton ā is instructive here:
There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.
A regulation that works might well produce no visible sign that it's working. If your water purification system works, everything is fine. It's only when you get rid of the sanitation system that you discover why it was there in the first place, a realization that might well arrive as you expire in a slick of watery stool with a rectum so prolapsed the survivors can use it as a handle when they drag your corpse to the mass burial pits.
When Musk and Ramaswamy decry the influence of "unelected bureaucrats" on your life as "undemocratic," they sound reasonable. If unelected bureaucrats were permitted to set policy without democratic instruction or oversight, that would be autocracy.
Indeed, it would resemble life on the Tesla factory floor: that most autocratic of institutions, where you are at the mercy of the unelected and unqualified CEO of Tesla, who holds the purely ceremonial title of "Chief Engineer" and who paid the company's true founders to falsely describe him as its founder.
But that's not how it works! At its best, expert regulations turns political choices in to policy that reflects the will of democratically accountable, elected representatives. Sometimes this fails, and when it does, the answer is to fix the system ā not abolish it.
I have a favorite example of this politics/empiricism fusion. It comes from the UK, where, in 2008, the eminent psychopharmacologist David Nutt was appointed as the "drug czar" to the government. Parliament had determined to overhaul its system of drug classification, and they wanted expert advice:
To provide this advice, Nutt convened a panel of drug experts from different disciplines and asked them to rate each drug in question on how dangerous it was for its user; for its user's family; and for broader society. These rankings were averaged, and then a statistical model was used to determine which drugs were always very dangerous, no matter which group's safety you prioritized, and which drugs were never very dangerous, no matter which group you prioritized.
Empirically, the "always dangerous" drugs should be in the most restricted category. The "never very dangerous" drugs should be at the other end of the scale. Parliament had asked how to rank drugs by their danger, and for these categories, there were clear, factual answers to Parliament's question.
But there were many drugs that didn't always belong in either category: drugs whose danger score changed dramatically based on whether you were more concerned about individual harms, familial harms, or societal harms. This prioritization has no empirical basis: it's a purely political question.
So Nutt and his panel said to Parliament, "Tell us which of these priorities matter the most to you, and we will tell you where these changeable drugs belong in your schedule of restricted substances." In other words, politicians make political determinations, and then experts turn those choices into empirically supported policies.
This is how policy by "unelected bureaucrats" can still be "democratic."
But the Nutt story doesn't end there. Nutt butted heads with politicians, who kept insisting that he retract factual, evidence-supported statements (like "alcohol is more harmful than cannabis"). Nutt refused to do so. It wasn't that he was telling politicians which decisions to make, but he took it as his duty to point out when those decisions did not reflect the policies they were said to be in support of. Eventually, Nutt was fired for his commitment to empirical truth. The UK press dubbed this "The Nutt Sack Affair" and you can read all about it in Nutt's superb book Drugs Without the Hot Air, an indispensable primer on the drug war and its many harms:
Congress can't make these decisions. We don't elect enough water experts, virologists, geologists, oncology researchers, structural engineers, aerospace safety experts, pedagogists, gerontoloists, physicists and other experts for Congress to turn its political choices into policy. Mostly, we elect lawyers. Lawyers can do many things, but if you ask a lawyer to tell you how to make your drinking water safe, you will likely die a horrible death.
That's the point. The idea that we should just trust the market to figure this out, or that all regulation should be expressly written into law, is just a way of saying, "you will likely die a horrible death."
Trump ā and his hatchet men Musk and Ramaswamy ā are not setting out to create evidence-based policy. They are pursuing policy-based evidence, firing everyone capable of telling them how to turn the values espouse (prosperity and safety for all Americans) into policy.
They dress this up in the language of democracy, but the destruction of the expert agencies that turn the political will of our representatives into our daily lives is anything but democratic. It's a prelude to transforming the nation into a land of epistemological chaos, where you never know what's coming out of your faucet.
perhaps one of the most damning things about working with highly policed populations (in my case, unhoused ppl who use drugs) is the simultaneous presence of
1) total involvement of the criminal justice system in these ppl's lives- almost everyone has "caught a case" at some point or at the very least had a direct encounter with a police officer where legal action was threatened
AND
2) a deep well of unsolved, uncared for, continuous traumas + violences which the criminal justice system has done nothing to prevent or address. murders, even serial murders, which have never been solved or even publicized. rapes which go unreported because the last time someone reported Him, everyone remembers what happened (or didn't). myriad acts of casual violence by police (assault, threats, theft, destruction of property, verbal abuse) with no recourse.
in these communities, police do not even accomplish the tasks we like to imagine make them indispensable: addressing + preventing patterns of violence. the police exacerbate patterns of violence + create new ones, blaming the existing ones on the populations they're terrorizing.
Inviting grace into your everyday life is such an underrated skillset.
So many times we believe to just keep going and going and going, to be perfect and never just have a moment where all you want to do is the minimum or all you want to do is take a break from everything and just take a minute to not be obligated to anything. There's a lot of guilt that surrounds not being 100% tiptop each and every waking second of the day.
Remind yourself that shit happens, we all hit a funk, we all hit walls and we all just need a minute to sit still and be "absent" for a minute, regardless of how long that "minute" is. Its okay to come back to it when you're ready, be motivated, and pick up where you left off.
There you go again....making reading a sacred ritual š that's why you never finish a book. Because you always need an optimal time, optimal moment and optimal book.
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