#whiners

[my-funked-up-life]

[hislittleraincloud]

genuinely why the fuck do you ship Donovan x Wednesday 😭 and the fact that you support incest too 🫩

I've already answered this question a million times, but since it's been a while, I'll humor you.

But first: I support anything in fiction.

If you had a better grasp of what fiction is, you'd get that.

Types like you cry with your emojis because you're incapable of articulating why you have such a fuckass time separating fictional characters in fictional settings from real people and real situations. That's not entirely your fault, because you haven't been taught shit about that, and instead have been groomed into this mindset where you think authors who write sexual taboo and all of that dark sexual stuff that you don't understand are who you judge their characters to be.

I stress sexual, since none of you kids have any problems with non-sexual gore and don't constantly harass people who like to write it. You have a severe lack of understanding about human sexuality and behaviors; you don't understand fetishes, kinks, or roleplay (break down that word, now..."role"..."play"..."role", "play"..."roleplay"). And Christ, even when some of you do go to school for it, you're still fucking up by spreading falsehoods and misinformation because your Purity Code overwrites your reading comprehension (almost like y'all cherrypick your knowledge stores). It's everywhere, from TT to Reddit to IG...all over social fkn media. Chances are after you read this, you still won't understand a damn thing I've said until years down the road after you've lived life a little and read more (good, non-fiction) books.

Now, genuinely, the only other person that Wednesday Addams really wanted to hang around with in Season 1 was Donovan Galpin (you can't even say that about Eugene, who she ditched a couple of times before he was attacked). From their first meeting there was a spark of [Donovan's] enmity that Wednesday used to her advantage; she was the classic Thorn in One's Side trope, for him (and also for Xavier, on a different degree; and on the flip side, Enid was/is her thorn).

Okay just hold on a moment here, I'm interrupting this because I suddenly got a wave of hatred for Season 2 because of its ridiculous time jump. All of those thorny issues between the roommates should've been hashed out in the second semester of Wednesday's Sophomore Year, but they all act like the time jump didn't exist and that a whole ass semester from January 2023 to June 2023 just passed magically with no issues or absences until the Summer of 2023 when Wednesday went after Chet. I fucking despise the time jump. It's insulting to everyone's intelligence, but the lot of y'all fuckwits aren't intelligent enough to comprehend that. This is just one of the bigger reasons I'll never consider the bulk of W2 as canon for my work, aside from doing some of my own cherrypicking and writing Agnes into the mattress. Decent canon transforming into fuckall canon ticks me off, just as it ticks anyone else off; treating the audience like they're super stupid ticks me off. I think that's why AB8 is taking sooooo fucking long...I've got decent canon and I don't want its topper to look or smell like W2's first half or ST5's 2nd half.

Watch Season 1 again and watch each of Wednesday and Donovan's interactions. Watch the way Ortega plays McShane in each scene. The girl who loves fucking with, and often clashing with, female authority figures (Morticia, Weems, Thornhill, Kinbott, Arlene) seems to know that being soft/er with the male authority figures (Gomez, Donovan) tends to get her what she wants. That's all part of the trope...for as abrasive and caustic as she can be, she's still got charm that she knows she can use to her advantage with them.

And this is just verifiable canon, never mind whatever fanon I've come up with on AB Wednesday's part (Daddy Issues, hypersexuality, drug use...eugh God, she's actually Ortega, isn't she 😒 ETA: WAIT, I GAVE HER ZEUS JUICE TOO).

As for Donovan, I don't think I talk much about him when explaining AB because he's pretty straightforward canon. I didn't add anything to his core characteristics: He's a worn down, alcoholic cop who's been stuck between a rock and a hard place for years and years with his experience with Francie in the past and Tyler in the present. He wasn't even looking at Wednesday as anything but a thorn in his side from the get-go, because the more people he had snooping around the case, the less likely he could keep Tyler "safe". 😑 I mean, I wrote him as that trope of a guy who likes fishing/hunting and has a secret cabin by a lake, and that's canon now too. Seems like Millar & Gough and I draw from the same well of clichés. 😑

But, he's not who you would judge him to be; he hasn't looked at a young Nevermore student like that since Francie, and a part of himself does hate himself for it (this really does show up in 8) because he doesn't know what to do when Wednesday is persistent. You'd say, "He's gotta do the right thing and say no, otherwise he's not a good person/not normal!" But you forget two things:

1) He isn't real. None of these people are real. Yes, real people portray characters on a real screen to make it all come alive, but it's still not real, and even takes place in a world where physics doesn't behave like it does in reality, and where people fucking turn into mythical and folkloric creatures via the use of CGI.

2) Given all of that, the power dynamics aren't the same in this fictional universe. ABWednesday not only has supernatural powers that she doesn't understand yet, Donovan is even farther away from understanding anything about her powers and is just a tiny bit scared of what she's capable of (especially knowing that she's the type who puts piranhas in a pool full of boys when a couple of them have pissed her off). Could he have firmly rejected ABW's persistence without unfathomable consequences? Would love to see you try to tell me that he could have, since I know what ABW is capable of.

Because once again...she isn't real. She's an object, a paper doll —

ABW: *SLAMS open the door* No one except Donovan calls me a doll.

ABD: *leans, whispering* Uh, that's "Doll".

ABW: *stares at him*

ABD: I don't call you a doll, I call you "Doll". It's different.

ABW: It's practically the same thing.

ABD: Not really. One's an object, the other's like a pet name —

ABW: A pet name.

ABD: *sighs* You know exactly what I mean. And you should know the diff between "a doll" and "Doll". You're the writer, aintcha —

ABW: Are you calling me dumb?

ABD: *squints* Excuse me, what hun?

DirecTor: *sneaking out the window*

ABW: GET BACK HERE *directs a fat bolt of ⚡ at my ass*

DirecTor: *yelps, tumbling out of the window and landing in the bushes with a thump as they both rush to the window*

ABD: Why'd you go and do that for?!

ABW: I thought he'd just fall back into the office.

*leans out to see me unmoving in the bushes, almost clipping the brim of Donovan's hat while closing the window* He'll be fine.

*steals the hat and puts it on* Wanna fuck on his desk?

ABD: *sighs, staring down his nose at her*

...Aight.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Capitalists hate capitalism

As the Marxist agitator Adam Smith once said, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

Smith understood that capitalists hate capitalism. They don’t want to compete with one another, because that would interfere with their ability to raise the prices their customers pay and reduce the wages they pay their workers. Thus Peter Thiel’s anticapitalist rallying cry, “competition is for losers,” or Warren Buffett’s extreme horniness for businesses with “wide, sustainable moats.”

These anti-capitalist capitalists love big government. They love no-bid military contracts, they love ACA subsidies for health insurance companies, they love Farm Bill cash for Cargill and Monsanto. What they don’t love is markets.

Case in point: pharma giant Merck. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) includes a provision that allows Medicare to (finally) start (weakly) negotiating the prices it pays for (a tiny handful of) drugs. If you’re scratching your head and wondering if you understood that correctly, let me assure you, you did: the US government is currently prohibited from negotiating drug prices when it bargains with pharma companies.

In other words: Medicare simply pays a pharma companies — whose products build on billions in publicly funded basic research, whose taxes are reduced by billions in research credits, whose patents are backstopped by billions in enforcement — whatever it demands.

To do otherwise, you see, would be socialism. Markets are “efficient” because they “discover prices” through bidding and selling. In the case of publicly purchased drugs, the price that Uncle Sucker “discovers” is inevitably “a titanic sum” or possibly “add a couple more zeroes, wouldya?”

Enter the IRA. Starting in 2026, Medicare will be permitted to negotiate the price of ten (10) drugs. The negotiations will use the prices of other drugs from the dysfunctional, monopolized market as a starting point and go up from there. The negotiations go on for three years, and there are multiple stages where pharma companies can hit pause with court challenges:

https://prospect.org/health/2023-05-11-regulators-bungling-drug-price-reform/

The system will not consider the prices that Medicaid or the VA (which are allowed to bargain on prices) pay. Nor will it consider the prices that other governments pay — the US is alone in the wealthy world in offering the anticapitalist price-taking posture when dickering with the pharma companies.

But this isn’t enough for Merck. They are suing the Biden administration over the IRA’s drug pricing plan, arguing that it is an unconstitutional taking under the Fifth Amendment:

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/06/merck-sues-biden-administration-over-medicare-drug-price-negotiations.html

Merck is represented by Big Law firm Jones Day, who made their bones by representing the RJ Reynolds from smokers with lung-cancer, arguing that the smoking/cancer link wasn’t scientifically sound. That’s not the only fanciful argument they put before a judge: Jones Day also represented Trump in his attempts to overturn the 2020 election (they also hired Trump’s counsel Don McGahn as he exited the White House’s revolving door).

As Ryan Cooper writes for The American Prospect, Merck’s argument is that the “fair market” value of its drugs can only be discovered if its single largest customer — Medicare — simply pays whatever Merck demands of it:

https://prospect.org/health/2023-06-08-merck-negotiating-drug-prices-unconstitutional/

They explicitly denounce the idea that a powerful buyer should use its market power to extract price concessions from sellers like Merck: “leveraging all federal insurance benefits (amounting to over half of the prescription drug market) to coerce companies to abandon their First and Fifth Amendment rights is a quintessential unconstitutional condition.”

Rebutting this argument, Health Secretary Xavier Becerra said, “negotiating for the best price is as American as apple pie. Since when is competition in this American system a bad thing? Why should we be the patsies around the world and pay the highest prices for medicines?”

The irony here is that Merck itself is a very powerful buyer. Whether negotiating commercial leases, raw materials or wages, Merck is ruthless in extracting the lowest prices it can from its suppliers. The company attained its massive scale the old fashioned way: buying it. By drawing on its nearly limitless access to the capital markets, Merck bought out dozens of its competitors:

https://mergr.com/merck-acquisitions

Anticapitalist investors funded these acquisitions in the expectation that Merck would be able to use its market dominance to pay suppliers less, charge customers more, and use some of the resulting windfall to corrupt and bully its regulators so that it could buy still more companies, charge still higher prices, and impose crushingly low prices on still more suppliers.

The IRA’s drug-bargaining provisions are extraordinarily weak. When they were first mooted in 2021, I talked about how Democrats were caving on muscular drug price controls that would benefit every American (except a handful of pharma shareholders):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/18/bipartisan-consensus/#corruption

They did so despite wild, bipartisan support for imposing price discipline on Big Pharma, and ending the 300% premium Americans pay for their drugs relative to their cousins abroad. 95% of Democrats support strong price controls; so do 82% of independents — and 71% of Republicans:

https://www.rwjf.org/en/library/research/2021/11/healthcare-affordability--majority-of-adults-support-significant-changes-to-the-health-system.html

No one believes Big Pharma’s scare stories about how this would kill R&D: 93% of Americans reject this idea, including 90% of Republicans. They’re right — nearly all US basic pharma R&D is directly funded by the federal government, with pharma companies privatizing the gains:

https://khn.org/news/article/public-opinion-prescription-drug-prices-democratic-plan/

Despite the fact that really whipping the shit out of Big Pharma would be both popular and good for America, the Dems’ final version of pharma bargaining is a barely-there nothingburger where ten drugs will become slightly cheaper, after the next federal election. This is called “political realism” and it’s a fantasy.

The idea that limiting drug controls to the faintest, most modest measures would make them easier to attain was obvious nonsense from the start, and Merck’s anticapitalist lawsuit proves it. Merck will settle for nothing less than total central planning — by Merck. For Merck, the role of the federal government is to wave through a stream of mergers culminating in Merck’s ownership of every major drug; patent extensions for these drugs to carry them into the 25th century and beyond, and unlimited sums paid for these drugs on Medicare.

Given all that, there would have been no downside to the Dems passing an IRA that subjected the drug companies the same modest, commensense, market-based discipline we see in Canada, or the UK, or France, or Germany, or Switzerland.

But that’s not the IRA we got. Instead of defending a big, visionary program in court, the Biden admin is facing down Jones Day and Merck to defend the most yawn-inducing, incrementalist half-measure. What a wasted opportunity.

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:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/09/commissar-merck#price-giver

[Image ID: A caricature of a businessman with a money-bag for a head and a stickpin bearing the Merck logo, standing atop a pile of bundled $100 bills. At the bottom of the pile, a frowning, disheveled Uncle Sam offers up a $100 bill.]

Image: Flying Logos (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Over_$1,000,000_dollars_in_USD_$100_bill_stacks.png

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[panic-at-the-ateliers]

[headlight-district]

🇺🇸🇺🇸 ahh America

[unfamiliarize]

The joyless are always looking for more people to recruit. Don't sign up.

Africa Brooke

[shitpostempire]

[out-of-context-batfam]

Robin (1993) #145