The Bugbear

bugbear (plural bugbears) An ongoing problem; a recurring obstacle or adversity. A source of dread; resentment; or irritation. An imaginary creature meant to inspire fear in children.

[thebugbear]

An oil painting of Batman...holding Pikachu...painted by the guy who played Langly on the X-Files

Oil on Canvas 18x24 Stretched, not framed. 

Only $799, guys.

I am such a fan of absurdity and trivia that this almost makes me mad with desire. 

[thebugbear]

From "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man", S04E07 of the X-Files.

[thebugbear]

CLIR Job Announcement

I'm posting this as an accompaniment to my announcement on Facebook that I've been hired by the Council on Library and Information Resources. 

I wanted to go into a bit more depth about my new job both so that I could share what I will be doing with those interested, and so that I could muse a bit on receiving this job after my stint of unemployment.

I'll be working as an Administrative Associate at CLIR, with "90%" (their words) of my job being tied to their Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives program. The program awards and administers a number of grants each year, which are given to libraries and other institutions (e.g. historical societies, museums, cultural centers) that have collections that are "hidden," meaning they are inaccessible to the scholars who would be able to use them in their research.

For those of you who might not know much about how archives work (not saying that I do...though I have a couple friends who know all too well), they often get massive donations of materials that they don't always get processed immediately. If the documents or other media aren't processed, not only will they remain unexplored, but outside individuals likely won't even be able to discover that that specific collection even exists. This grant program helps rectify that situation by giving money and logistical support to those institutions to help them catalog their hidden collections.

While my job title has "administrative" in it, they convinced me during the interview that the job will be a lot more varied than data entry and clerical stuff. It's a small office, and I'll have the opportunity to lend a hand with their other projects, plan events, and go on site visits to institutions receiving grants. My main duties will involve working on the grant process. Since the grant application deadline was last Friday, that means doing a lot of the preliminary work of reviewing applications to make sure they meet the requirements before passing them on to the official Review Committee, and then coordinating the Review Committee's work as they choose grants.

Now for some brief, but important musings on getting hired, in bullet point form: 

While I know that there's a slew of reasons unrelated to my ability or accomplishments that point to why and how I was offered this job, what makes it especially thrilling is that I had no special connections to CLIR whatsoever--no "in." They chose my application off the stack, interviewed me, and gave me the job. It really is possible, guys! IT REALLY DOES HAPPEN!

Speaking of which, I probably sent off somewhere around 25-30 job applications total, which is low compared to friends whom I've spoken to. I only heard back in any form from 3. I got a rejection from one place. One interviewed me twice, then felt strongly enough about me that the Policy Director who interviewed with me met with me and told me I was the runner up out of 400 applications. I guess I interview well. 

On a much less self-congratulatory note: I feel incredibly privileged to be able to land this job with the current economic situation being what it is. My ability to uproot and move to D.C., stay with relatives rent-free, and make looking for job my primary job allowed me to eventually find a soft landing in the type of position that college graduates grew to expect back in better times--one that pays a living wage with benefits, doing work that is interesting, in what appears to be a low-stress environment. Really thankful for that. Thank you to all the friends who have given me advice and support during the search. 

[sociolab]

A white student may feel discomfort when it’s pointed out to him how he has benefited from structural racism, but to compare that discomfort to discrimination is a false equivalency. Hurt feelings hurt, but it is not oppression. But hurt feelings can be bad for business. And a lot of powerful people think colleges should act more like businesses. When they do, students act more like customers. And our likely customers might not be amicable to discussions about structural racism. If the customer is always right, then the majority share of customers is more right than the minority.

Minneapolis professor Shannon Gibney: Reprimanded for talking about racism. (via sociolab)

Capitalism, as a system of oppression, is dependent and interlinked with White Supremacy. We have to overthrow both systems if we want liberation.

(via stoicmeditations)

[huffpost]

Don’t panic this weekend when you’re out getting drinks, there’s a beer and cheese pairing guide.

[owning-my-truth-deactivated2022]

8 Reasons Young Americans Don't Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance

Traditionally, young people have energized democratic movements. So it is a major coup for the ruling elite to have created societal institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance to domination.

How exactly has American society subdued young Americans? 

1. Student-Loan Debt

2. Psychopathologizing and Medicating Noncompliance

3. Schools That Educate for Compliance and Not for Democracy

4. “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top”

5. Shaming Young People Who Take Education—But Not Their Schooling—Seriously

6. The Normalization of Surveillance

7. Television

8. Fundamentalist Religion and Fundamentalist Consumerism

Click through the link for an in-depth discussion of each point. 

[fuckyeahradicaleconomics-blog]

also #9 dub step.

[thebugbear]

#10, Tumblr.

But for real, this article was written in 2011 and I posted it to Facebook at the time, but all of these effects have intensified if anything. 

[postcolonialfeminist]

"Very recently I had a conversation with Cornel West in my house. I shared with him that people kept asking me when Obama first ran did I think it would make a difference in lives of Black males. I said yes, symbolically. On issues of illiteracy, poverty, the sense of meaning of Black males, no. I saw Obama having great ties to the wealthy and the sustaining of the wealthy.

[thebugbear]

I cannot find a source for this for the life of me. It reads like bell hooks, but the author of the post doesn't link to anything or indicate where it was taken from, and all attempts to Google it lead back to this post. Any help? 

[putthison]

Living here [in Los Angeles] and having a car, I can drop home real quick and change clothes and then go back out… What happens is, like a witch, you can dictate how people see you—you get to organize how they interpret your own energy. And then their energy, reflected back at you—or me—becomes hypnotic. I felt like Superman to my everyday Clark.

RuPaul on the power of clothing (via putthison)

[thebugbear]

I hate it when reasonably clever, humorous Tumblrs get book deals, begin mostly posting promos for their book I will never buy because it would be a huge waste of money and paper, and then gets too busy and self-important and monetized and stops posting altogether. (Looking at you, Hipster Puppies.) (Looks like you're next, Shit Rough Drafts.)

[popularecon]

Posted by Jonathan Jenner on March 4th, 2014

by David Kotz

....

If the minimum wage is increased, more workers will get pay increases than just those making the minimum wage. Economists agree that the wage for jobs that pay not much above the minimum wage also will rise. Since low-wage workers spend just about all of their pay for goods and services, the rising pay for low-wage workers increases total demand in the economy. The result is that businesses will have an incentive to to hire more workers to meet the rising demand.

Some have been calling for a minimum wage increase to $10.10 per hour.  In February 1968 the federal minimum wage was raised to its highest level ever in buying power, from $1.40 to $1.60 an hour. In today’s prices, that was a raise from $9.95 to $10.94 an hour. Yet the unemployment rate fell, from 3.7% in 1967 to 3.5% in 1968 (and to 3.4% in 1969). The economy was much less productive in 1968 than it is today, yet businesses were able to pay a minimum wage of $10.94 in that year, far above today’s minimum wage, with virtual full employment.

A higher minimum wage has other benefits besides the possibility of generating more demand and jobs. When business faces rising wages for their employees, it puts pressure on the business to find ways to make their workers more productive. This can be done by reorganizing the work process or introducing new technologies. In the long run, it is rising labor productivity that makes it possible for wages and living standards to go up over time.

[thebugbear]

I'm fascinated by the debate over the minimum wage (and the national debt, among other topics). Corporate or pro-corporate talking points rely on arguments that are treated as if they have a "common sense" nature to them by virtue of their simplicity (higher wages means more money, more money means more inflation because everyone has more to spend and fewer jobs because wages are higher). 

Arguments with similar qualities exist, as above, for a higher minimum wage: a higher wage means more money spent and more demand. What would make that stick? 

I also wonder the degree to which corporations and business owners would be willing to sabotage a minimum wage increase. They're presumably against such an increase because, besides the short-term pains, it's policy of wealth redistribution....if companies are in a position to fire employees and inflate prices to protest a higher minimum wage, would they?

(^^^completely uninformed speculation)

[thebugbear]

I'm a maverick. I'm a maverick the way [Walter] O'Malley is a politician. You cannot set yourself against the status quo and expect the status quo isn't going to fight you back. Look up the two words in the dictionary; they snarl at each other. The trouble with the country today is that it is full of rebels who get all upset because the status quo resists being overthrown and even tries to stamp them out. A price-tag rebel is no rebel at all. The status quo, by definition, wins almost every battle; otherwise it ain't the status quo any more. So you pick yourself up, dig the dirt out of your ears and try again.

From Veeck as In Wreck, by Bill Veeck with Ed Linn. 

[lowendtheory]

One of the cool things about the internet, and about tumblr especially, is the way that it allows for the quick propagation of all sorts of antiracist, antisexist, antihomophobic, etc., ideas.  The appearance of sites like Color Lines, Jezebel, Racialicious, Feministe (sites which vary greatly in quality and ideological orientation), among others, have all been really important in popularizing antioppression ideas in general, and in producing a class of people able to problematize and critique oppressive discourses, especially those that can be found in popular culture.  

One of the not so cool things about the internet is that it has helped to produce a class of people who are, relatively speaking, quite comfortable in their general anti-oppression stance.  Anti-oppression discourse, nowadays, isn’t even about a politics (i.e. working collectively to change the world you inhabit) as much as it is about style—about speaking the right language, using the right terms, expressing outrage at the right moment, etc.  Unlike previous generations of people discussing anti-oppression ideas, we who are members of this class don’t need to go to long, drawn-out meetings or to join activist groups in order to satisfy our desire to be against oppression.  The discussion, in many ways, comes to us—just follow the right people, read the right blogs, etc.  Anti-oppression, that is, arrives to us with the slick, polished ease of a commodity.

Without even talking about the billions of people who cannot access this kind of discourse precisely because the very late capitalism that provides us with cheap-ish computers and internet access needs to keep their wages incredibly low in order to do so, I’ll end by saying this: I believe that there’s a difference between producing evidence of oppression, explaining oppression, and fighting oppression.  One can produce evidence of oppression without being able to explain why oppression happens.  My problem with the Jezebels and Racialiciouses of the world, as well as with a lot of stuff I see around here, is that they glorify their own capacity to produce evidence about oppression without explaining it.  Or if they do explain it, the explanation tells us very little: it relies on the fact that we know oppression is bad and the fact that it feels good to know that.  This, I think, is why sarcasm works so well on Jezebel and various other liberal feminist blogs—it allows its reader to ignore the lack of analytical depth by allowing her to substitute the feeling of Knowing Better Than Someone Else Does.

You might think that people who analyze oppression professionally would at least think about the question of who benefits from oppression, a question that necessitates at least a critical view onto capitalism.  The problem is, of course, that those who produce evidence of oppression professionally have a class interest in not explaining or learning to explain who benefits from oppression.  Folks like (Racialicious founder) Carmen Van Kerckhove have found creative ways to make a living off of talking about race (and talking about talking about race) without explaining much at all save the fact that racism exists, a fact that we seem not to be able to be reminded of enough.

But the fact that an entire industry has emerged to produce evidence about oppression without doing much at all to fight it should tell us something about where we’re at in terms of capitalism.  Anti-oppression has become a commodity, too, and “we” are part of the machine by and through which that commodity is made and consumed.  I’m not trying to trivialize or downplay the existence of oppression—oppression exists, and exists on a scale any in ways I am not even in a position to know or speak about.  But I am trying to begin to understand how capitalism has enabled people—especially upwardly mobile, college educated people like me—to generate an anti-oppression discourse that allows many of us to feel as if we are doing much more to fight it than we actually are.

[thebugbear]

Emphases are mine.

This post is exactly where my mind is at right now. I saw the Black Liberation and human rights activist Ajamu Baraka speak the other night, and he spoke of the Left in the U.S. reclaiming the language of "the masses" and "revolution," which have been abandoned for the language of privilege and identity. I'm not saying a return to class-centric Marxism at the cost of building strong, intersectional movements, but I've been mulling since that talk about how a language of introspection has replaced a language of movement and action, and how much I have defaulted to "producing evidence of oppression" en masse rather than taking the further, much more difficult steps of explaining or fighting it. 

[therorlord]

I wish there was more people into radical alternative economic ideas on tumblr. 

Sad face.

[thebugbear]

I'm trying to dip my toes further into the waters of social media, and thus did a search for radical economics on Tumblr. This was the first result.

BIGGER SAD FACE. 

[thebugbear]

From Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber

[thebugbear]

Irresistible Live(ish) Blog

I sent the below to Megan (my partner, if any random people are reading this, though why I should bother to explain that, I don't know) because I am incapable of watching campy TV shows without these kinds of thoughts entering my head. I decided to share them with eeeevvvverryyyooonnnnne! 

This episode is the X-Files version of the Supernatural episode with the hillbilly cannibals, the point of each being "humans are the REAL monsters!!!" 

There's a song at the beginning of the episode played during the funeral that was INSTANTLY familiar to me. It was because later appears in one of my favorite games, the RPG Mother 3...I assumed the song was composed for the game, but no, it's actually a (very, very famous) composition by Erik Satie. Here's a YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-Xm7s9eGxU and a link to the Mother 3 version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcfV4HvPE5Q. 

OK, so now the fetishist is picking up a prostitute, presumably to kill her. I am skeptical that there was ever a street corner anywhere in the Twin Cities teeming with young, attractive, white prostitutes. But maybe there was back in the early 1990s. 

This guy is trying really, really, really hard to sound creepy. Also, he reminds me of Sylar (Zach Quinto's character) from Heroes for some reason. Maybe the serial killing and desecration of corpses bit. Though Sylar ate brains...

The prostitute walks into his bedroom, which is creepy, sure, and decides she's scared and wants to leave, but instead of TURNING AND RUNNING, she's just slowly backs away and screams STAY AWAY FROM ME even though he hasn't even started walking toward her yet. Uh...?

The prostitute there to ID the body has a red leather jacket that is 80% tassels. I bet her pet cat loves it.

Side note: I find the lame reasoning behind why they're on this case hilarious. The writers wanted to do a corpse fetishist episode, but couldn't think of a way to connect it to the supernatural, so they wrote in a cop who assumes the corpse fetishist is an alien and calls Mulder for that reason, and then they decide to stick around and investigate it anyway, because hey why not. 

Is he delivering groceries? Why is he inside this person's house, putting the groceries in the fridge for them? WHAT? "Hello, grocery deliveryman! Come on in and stock my fridge for me!" THIS IS NOT A REAL SERVICE. 

"May I use the washroom to wash up my hands?" YOU'RE IN THEIR FUCKING KITCHEN, WASH YOUR HANDS AT THE KITCHEN SINK. 

I'm glad that when he went to rummage through the trashcan, he took hair and not a used tampon or whatever. (Adding this after the episode has ended: the entire deliveryman portion was a time filling red herring! He never kills any of the girls who live at that house!) 

"Hi mysterious delivery man! We keep our door open all the time! Just so you know!" Seriously, the fuck? Who tells a stranger that? 

Why is Scully telling me how an autopsy works in a voice over? 

"Might be a good week to take that paid vacation the boss owes you," Mulder says to the prostitute. Mulder, you're a fucking asshole. 

CREEPY NOSTRIL FLARE!

Fun fact: the guy who plays the corpse fetishist went to a Quaker high school! Friends Seminary in NYC. 

"Her name was Scully...like that baseball announcer." Yay, Vin Scully reference! Boo, another case where someone becomes fixated on Scully. Also, why is she so squeamish again? I'm confused. 

Ah, right, the PTSD. She's going to a therapist. And the therapist is Delores Herbig from Dead Like Me! Man, X-Files really does have tons of recognizable faces. 

Really? She gets captured AGAIN? COME ON. I like Scully too much for her to be repeatedly traumatized. I guess Mulder's sister being kidnapped was enough trauma to send him over the edge, but couldn't they even it up just a bit?

Is this guy also a shampoo/bubble bath fetishist? They're going to need to explain that part of it to me. (Annnnd they don't.) 

They also need to explain Scully's hallucinations? (Annnnnnd they don't.)

"I'm fine, Mulder...I'm fine Mulder...I'm....NOT FINE! WAHHHHHHHHH!" 

[thebugbear]

UN Ad Campaign Shows What The Internet Thinks Of Women

I enjoy the concept--though I do not have a clue if it will change any minds--but these ads lack context, which I thought I could provide.

When I performed these searches as shown in the ads, my results were largely similar (for example, typing "women need to..." brought up the results "shut up...be dominated...be controlled...grow up.")

Here are my results, for comparison, when I substituted "men" for "women":

Men shouldn't: wear flip flops...marry...wear shorts.

Men cannot: be feminists...be trusted...get HIV from a woman (seriously?!?!)...pick up a chair (reference to a viral video).

Men need to: ejaculate...be needed...feel needed...cheat.

Men should: always pray...not get married...act like men...wear makeup (hooray, one that I like!).

[thebugbear]

This vexing disbelief in one's own illusion of love is experienced most alarmingly by persons of literary inclinations. Yet with them the reaction comes in quite the opposite manner. Writing is a form of sexual expression, and it takes just as much out of a person. Thus, a person with a bent for creative literature approaches the task of writing a love letter with an excitation of the spirit surpassing anything in the realm of pure eroticism. He anticipates it for hours, mulling over in his mind the possible material, enlarging on anecdotes, rounding off pledges of affection, sharpening similes, sharpening pencils; he comes to the writing of it with immense zeal and a rather nice control of lyrical prose; he ends on a splendidly poised and correctly balanced note of tenderness and faith and love; and then, having signed, sealed, and posted the missive, is suddenly overcome by the realization that by the very act of composition he has annulled the allure of the subject herself--cares no more about her, for the moment, than he does for an old piece of butcher's twine, which, all in all, is so alarming a discovery that he usually gets a little bit sick thinking about it, and has to go out somewhere and hear some music. I have seldom met an individual of literary tastes or propensities in whom the writing of love was not directly attributable to the love of writing. A person of this sort falls terribly in love, but in the end it turns out that he is more bemused by a sheet of white paper than a sheet of white bed linen. He would rather leap into print with his lady than leap into bed with her. (This first pleases the lady and then annoys her. She wants him to do both, and with virtually the same impulse.)

Is Sex Necessary?: Or, Why You Feel the Way You Do by James Thurber and E.B. White