Is the US a dystopia?

the other thing about booting is, it's often done by a sub-contracted company, which means the actual people hiring these companies have less control over the quality of enforcement, and meaning the number of mistaken boots skyrockets.

Satellite Beach's new parking rules were to prevent residents losing parking spots in their own neighborhood or at their beaches, but since it's been enacted, a ton of residents have been booted, some improperly, some because the process was confusing regarding registering. one of the Satellite Beach county officials' car was booted, for example.

if you are trying to enact policies to reduce congestion of parking or prevent people from abusing parking situations, there are ways to do it that don't involve the hyper-punitive booting process, which is often extremely expensive and time-consuming to deal with. Since cities actually build fees into their budgets from parking/booting, and tow companies get paid by volume, it creates a situation where they're actively camping out, waiting for people to leave their vehicles so they can immobilize them. Then it is no longer being used to solve a problem, it is being used to capitalize on a problem.

AND, often times there are actually ways to dispute the towing/booting, but often times the people in enforcement take advantage of the fact that most people can't afford to be without their car for long.

if you're at risk of not being able to get to work later the same day, and potentially lose a) wages or b) your job, you're kind of forced to eat shit and pay the fine, after which (usually) you can no longer dispute.

for example, in Orange County, FL (as I'm sure is the case in other places), if you get towed and you feel it was improper, you can go down to the Courthouse (if it's a weekday), get a voucher to present to the tow company, who will release your car. Then, payment for the towing becomes the responsibility of the person that's at fault, which is determined by....the county! Oi.

If I was to try and do this, given how far apart most tow yards and the Courthouse location is, it would probably take several hours - getting transportation to the courthouse, waiting in line to get the voucher, getting transportation the towyard, waiting for them to bring the car, and driving the car where you need to go.

who the fuck has time for that? it happened to me once and I was working that day and I absolutely needed to get home.

sorry, just had another thought wrt Kate's post:

i mean punishment, humiliation, degradation, those things have been fetishes for ages

all that said, this is of course true! and in fact if you want to be Foucauldian about it, booting cars strikes me as more a pre-disciplinary-society form of punishment in its publicity: you have transgressed against the sovereign and are being made an example of. So, yes far from a new sign of the US's dystopian character, more a persistent undercurrent.

while I'm amusing myself and only myself: booting = pre-disciplinary, towing = disciplinary, getting mailed a ticket = control

otoh, as Neando's posts are detailing, when this old form of punishment gets turned over to financialized capital, you end up with some weirder, newer shit

xp to Kate
ah yeah I should have specified I didn't mean a *sexual* fetish but in the more general ~anthropological~ sense, in this case meaning that this form of punishment—which does have a public humiliation/shame aspect to it like a stockade for your car, but leaving that aside—has a transcendent value that is ultimately more important than the ostensible, pragmatic reason for the underlying law/regulation that is being enforced

― rob

mmmm i think calling kink "sexual" fetishism can be complicated and i could definitely get into the ways i feel like fetishism reflects the taboos of any given society and thus can tell us a lot about the nature of that society BUT we're talking about car booting here

and yeah, it's definitely performative cruelty, it reminds me a lot of the Bloody Code. it's definitely a sign of a culture in its Imperial Phase.

people in my city got so angry and organized about a specific tow company being a bunch of shitbags that the furor resulted in an article in the local paper and the city ended up terminating their contract with the towing company early. they were the lowest bidder every time the city's tow contract was up for bid for... reasons

Oakland tow companies only tow cars that have current registration and look like they have an owner who will come pay to get it out.

But the streets are littered with abandoned cars with expired tags, sometimes missing windows, etc. There's one in front of my building that's been there for over a year

The whole racket of charging people towing & impound fees when their cars have been reported STOLEN just drives me crazy, absolutely as criminal as the car thief himself

i'm just thinking about the last time i went to my local coffee place and there was someone there talking about property management and they were saying "yeah, it's a grift, but everything is a grift these days". i tend to agree! my job is a bullshit job in an entire industry (health insurance) which is a grift. it didn't used to be a grift when i started the job seven years ago. i know that sounds crazy, i mean it's health insurance, how can it not be a grift? structurally the industry was a grift but the place where i worked, they made a genuine good faith effort, i think, to do the right thing in an environment where "doing the right thing" is really difficult to do.

i don't know anybody who believes their job is "doing the right thing". it's more that life is hard when you aren't being paid to do a job. that's the values. it doesn't matter if the job is worthwhile or valuable, if you don't have one, you get punished. i like working. i'd like to work a job that was aligned with my values. i don't know any jobs out there that are aligned with my values.

i mean, there's no future to any of this capitalism shit. there's no future, and every goddamn one of us knows it. either we're trying to keep our heads above water, or we're trying to grab what we can, while we can, because god knows this shit ain't gonna last.

xp to Kate
tbrr I don't know a lot about kink practice or theory*, so any points about fetishism on that front were made quite inadvertently! I was just being deliberately pedantic about the word "fetish," which, sorry if I'm 'splaining here, has several meanings (see, e.g., Marx's "commodity fetishism," which does not mean feeling lust for LPs or sneakers, etc).

*though I am halfway through Samuel Delaney's Neveryon series, fwiw

xp to Kate
tbrr I don't know a lot about kink practice or theory*, so any points about fetishism on that front were made quite inadvertently! I was just being deliberately pedantic about the word "fetish," which, sorry if I'm 'splaining here, has several meanings (see, e.g., Marx's "commodity fetishism," which does not mean feeling lust for LPs or sneakers, etc).

*though I am halfway through Samuel Delaney's Neveryon series, fwiw

― rob

ok, i'll be perhaps socially inappropriate here. my experience with kink is personally colored by having been told that my gender identity is a "sexual fetish", and that by, uh, insisting on existing, i'm forcing other people to participate in my sexual fetish. i legitimately, genuinely find this to be fascinating, to make a fascinating statement about social mores and how they're reinforced. one of the results is that my lifelong experience has been in some sense dystopian.

i mean it's possible to look at my experience and say that it's horrifying and awful or whatever, but at this point i mostly just think it's _really interesting_. i find it to be valuable to kind of take that claim at face value and look at other behaviors through the mask of "fetishism".

one think i want to point out is that i don't think there's a clear distinction, when you really look at it, between marxist ideas of "fetishism" and kink ideas of "fetishism". it's kind of an assumption that a lot of people have, but from the kink side, like, for instance, i'm asexual... "lust" doesn't really accurately describe how i feel. that's one of the other things that i find interesting... 1984's dystopia has that sapir-whorf thing going on where certain concepts don't have ideas for them, and 1984 is kind of a crappy book politically and takes kind of an extreme view of sapir-whorf. i have personally experienced the sapir-whorf effect, though. i've suffered for not having ways to _communicate_ lived experiences.

kink is a major realm where i just feel language is _conceptually inadequate_ to explain my experience. like the entire framing around it is so orthogonal. honestly i feel like marxist ideas of kink are more accurate to my experience than, i don't know, _50 shades of gray_. the whole aspect where kink, for instance, is often people getting together to heal from trauma, to the point where we have to explicitly say "KINK IS NOT THERAPY" (which it isn't). these kinds of marginal experiences, the demimonde... you know, i haven't read and don't think so much of freud ("imagine how hot freud's mom must have been" - meme i read this week), but i do kind of think of myself as one of the discontents of civilization, one of the monsters "reason" conjures up in its sleep.

anyway when i see people applying somewhat ridiculous concepts to my life, my instinct is to flip it on its head. it's not... i don't think that kind of thing is something i ever want to treat as _truth_, but it's somewhat natural to look at the people making false accusations against others as being culpable of the things they're accusing us of. it's kind of a running joke some of us have - "i'm not against the straights, as long as they keep that shit to themselves and don't try to inflict it on the children" - but i think it really offers a good window into how sick a lot of the norms of a society are, if you start from an assumption of perversion and try to, like, make an argument that no actually these institutions _aren't_ abusive, sick, and perverted.

idk if any of that makes sense... just rambling...

there is something to be said about the fetish as invented through encounters between colonial anthropology and "spooky" supposedly arbitrary and irrational indigenous spiritual/social/economic practices. there is something spookily recursive about the concept in that it itself is a fetish object by its own terms within European philosophical discourse. the Marxist inversion of this is in identifying the fetish at work within the supposed rationality of the capitalist economy (whereas for Hegel the fetish concept was a fetish that self-evidently demonstrated Euro/German superiority)

it's a leaky concept that seems to spill over into everything- in sexual terms you can define anything other than PiV-sex-for-procreation as a fetish but you can *also* define this ideal as a fetish (there's that recursivity again)

identifying transness as a fetish seems to be about (among other things) a perceived rejection of or lack of functionality within this specific fetishised mode of reproduction - in this vein the fetish object is transness-as-fetish

not sure where I'm going with this either

there is something to be said about the fetish as invented through encounters between colonial anthropology and "spooky" supposedly arbitrary and irrational indigenous spiritual/social/economic practices. there is something spookily recursive about the concept in that it itself is a fetish object by its own terms within European philosophical discourse. the Marxist inversion of this is in identifying the fetish at work within the supposed rationality of the capitalist economy (whereas for Hegel the fetish concept was a fetish that self-evidently demonstrated Euro/German superiority)

it's a leaky concept that seems to spill over into everything- in sexual terms you can define anything other than PiV-sex-for-procreation as a fetish but you can *also* define this ideal as a fetish (there's that recursivity again)

identifying transness as a fetish seems to be about (among other things) a perceived rejection of or lack of functionality within this specific fetishised mode of reproduction - in this vein the fetish object is transness-as-fetish

not sure where I'm going with this either

― Left

i was talking with my physical therapist about this general topic just now - the disparities between transmasc and transfem experiences. some people get all discoursey and get way into "effemimania" and start talking about baeddels and that's not where i'm coming from. however, to me, the subject-as-object framing of "fetish" framing like autogynephilia say something about patriarchal social norms. people like ray blanchard fetishize us, but since he's in a position of systemic power, he can say that _we're_ the ones with the fetish, not him. why did this framing hold up for so long? i think a large part of it has to do with the refusal to acknowledge that members of "marked" groups can legitimately have and express desires. this is one of the reasons medieval european patriarchy fascinates me so - because it framed women as creatures of insatiable desire, as temptresses. the framing is the opposite now, but the underlying principle is still there. if women express desire, men are not held responsible for the way they treat those women. women are held responsible.

this has long been something that really interests me... confusion between subject-object, between _being_ and _possessing_. one of the classic transfem quandries is "do i want to _be_ her or do i want to be _with_ her?" the resolution to this is often dialectical, often takes a both-and perspective. there are lots of ways kink and capitalism intersect in interesting and challenging ways for me. a lot of times kink is a way of reclaiming agency. like, marked gender groups are openly treated as chattel, as nothing more than baby incubators, and at the same time, breeding kinks are a lot more popular than i remember them being. the thing that's being reclaimed is one's ability to _choose_. the fetish is, in many cases, a rejection of socially imposed norms. for instance, a trans woman may have an objectification kink. that's something that's easy to see as problematic - feminism works so hard to gain equal rights for women and these people _want_ to be objectified? the thing that gets missed is that it's a reclamation of the right of marked groups to have _choice_, to have _desire_. even though dominance and submission are typically relationships between individuals (i am _not_ getting into the semiotics of polycule consent arbitrage here), it rejects "implied consent" and makes power imbalance explicit and visible.

tl;dr to me trans fetishization to me reflects a patriarchal sense of entitlement to control and ownership of the bodies of people from "marked" groups, and a patriarchal belief that unmarked groups possess a monopoly right to the legitimate use of desire.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/02/gofundme-health-care-hospitals/677353/

Subhead from an article Apple News just pushed to me: "Resorting to crowdfunding to pay medical bills has become so routine, in some cases medical professionals recommend it."

😣

I’m glad these resources exist to be able to help people in medical crises (and other crises!) but it sucks that conditions are such that there aren’t built in societal safety nets

Yeah, I've donated to several health-related GoFundMe or similar efforts for people I know. It's awful and I hate that it exists, but I'm glad it can help some people. The thing I will just never understand is why so many people put up with this punishing bullshit when much better possible systems exist that wouldn't even cost us any more cumulatively. We are just voluntarily putting ourselves through this over and over.

I think it's plausible it's not us putting us through this over and over but rather someone, or maybe rather some few, instead

tipsy omg that is exactly where i often sit-- when talking to people, right and left of me, i find myself going "well, for a moment please really remember, and really think-- it doesn't HAVE to be like THIS-- and we have a reasonable system for that to do."

Which is not to say the system always gets fair results, nor that it is the only system. Nor best system. Mostly it's down to many many peopl e being honest,clear, and urgent. Often while suffering or witnessing it at at the hands of a-holes.

oth i guess, if all you do is what you've been doing, all you reasonably will get is the same.

I think it's plausible it's not us putting us through this over and over but rather someone, or maybe rather some few, instead

Yes, sure, but we do actually have the power to change it. There is just a significant part of the population essentially brainwashed into thinking that somehow this is the best we can do. And unlike climate change, which requires some awareness of things beyond your own household to get a grip on, most people have direct, personal experience with the shittiness of our health care system. At a certain level, we are choosing this.

It's honestly just very difficult to get yourself outside of. How could a system as implacable and hostile and complex as the American health insurance system could ever be rethought? When I tell people I can see a doctor whenever I want without paying anything or filling out any forms, all without insurance, they literally don't understand what I'm talking about, it's like the Westworld robots who are like "it doesn't look like anything to me"

The fact that democrats in congress have refused for nearly two decades to use simple majorities to push these things forward just illustrates how entrenched it all is. It is hard to believe they actually want to change it until they prove otherwise.

The first thing they must do as a majority is eliminate the 60-vote threshold. Then we'll see if they're serious about serious health care.

exactly

The insurance lobby holds much more sway than does the patient lobby.

The patients are sick and tired of struggling to extract the necessary care from the system. But too sick and tired to be an effective lobby.

Just want to recommend (again) Metzl’s book Dying of Whiteness. The chapter focusing on Tennessee literally gives many pieces of evidence that white people would rather struggle and die earlier without more accessible health coverage if having accessible health coverage means Black and Brown people get it, too.

Thanks, table - just borrowed that from my library.

xp perhaps if we looped in free pet health insurance as part of the deal?

(Kinda-sorta not joking about that)

Yes, sure, but we do actually have the power to change it.

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra)

that's the crux of it, isn't it? _we_. the people united will never be defeated, and the ruling class, i figure at least _some_ of them must know that. by myself, what power do i have? to vote in rigged elections? i work for an insurance company. and what? i've been looking for different jobs for months now. "the tech job market is bad", they say. "the big companies are all taking on freelancers", they say. well, what? we have no rights. we have no collective power. i talked to a friend this morning. "how you been?" i ask. "alive," she answers. she says she doesn't know if she could work again if she lost the job she has. i feel the same. i feel like i'm hanging on by my fingernails here. i fucking hate my job, and i'm fucking terrified of losing it. my girlfriend decided she's going in for disability. one doesn't want to go that route, trying to spend all that time and effort convincing capital that you belong on the _other_ side of the balance sheet, that you're better off trying to live on the table scraps people begrudgingly throw at you, but what else is there, these days?

today at my team meeting we're talking about the results of the "engagement survey". the scores are pretty low. particularly, it seems like most people have some pretty bad burnout, and there's a lot of dissatisfaction with senior management. senior management say that they are taking the results of this survey _very_ seriously and that they are going to work _very_ hard to fix things. in the meantime the two most senior managers in the department have quit. one of them has decided he'd rather be a high school math teacher. god, maybe i should have been a high school math teacher.

at least i won't be shot for singing, right? i'm a free agent. i can protest.

Just want to recommend (again) Metzl’s book Dying of Whiteness. The chapter focusing on Tennessee literally gives many pieces of evidence that white people would rather struggle and die earlier without more accessible health coverage if having accessible health coverage means Black and Brown people get it, too.

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table)

i mean, that's the thing, right? i can try and tell the dispossessed rust belters that we're on the same side, that we can work together and oppose oppression, but we're not on the same side, really, because they care more about my _dick_ than they do about their _own fucking lives_. these folks who are dying of whiteness - it doesn't fucking matter to them, because it's always the Black and Brown people who die _first_.

and that's why i'm so fucking cold, when it comes to a lot of people who are suffering. if someone can find it in themselves to care for one god-damned second for somebody who's not _like_ them, these are the people i care about. anybody who can't, well, they can fucking die alone.

God bless the USA, beacon of democracy, where almost everything we buy or look at has the stink of slavery on it

https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-investigation-c6f0eb4747963283316e494eadf08c4e

i agree it’s horrendous. thank god it cannot get any worse.

of course it can.

i think that was irony, but how to be sure?

i understood that, fwiw

i know how smart you both are so i don’t worry about you catching my tone, and to the extent i am myself dumb or rude, i do beg forgiveness.

i mean that.

and still yeah, irony

It sure is surprising that we have slavery going on in prisons 150 years after we passed a constitutional amendment explicitly allowing slavery in prisons.

Yeah, who could have seen that coming?

Lock it up

Just like we drew it up. pic.twitter.com/9NBvc5nVZE

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) February 12, 2024

https://theweek.com/business/economy/gen-z-work-child-labor

Thousands of teens are revitalizing the part-time job market. It is a significant shift for Gen Z, with an increasing number of them seeking after-school and summer jobs, "reversing a trend of forgoing work when millennials were teens," The Washington Post said in a recent analysis.

"You know, in the last year or two, they've really helped keep the service sector going," said Abha Bhattarai, economics analyst for the Post, to Marketplace. Several restaurant owners told her that if it were not for the influx of teens working for them, "they just would have had to shut down by now."

Still, this galvanizing employment trend seemingly has an underbelly, as the recent boost in child labor law violations highlights.

last line made me lol, what a country!

Keeping them at work under the watchful eye of bosses is the only way to protect them from classroom groomers and adrenochrome harvesters.

my state's rolled back a bunch of controls and 16 year old grocery store cashiers can sell liquor again

yet there's a dark side to this dark underbelly

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2024/feb/12/immigrant-child-laborers-killed-factories-osha

also their skin has a tough, sour flavour when cooked, some theorise that heavy vaping is to blame

Still, this galvanizing employment trend seemingly has an underbelly, as the recent boost in child labor law violations highlights.

That's the most coldly evil sentence I've read in a news story in a while.

Hmm. In my world, children cannot (and probably should not) get jobs. The jobs that teenagers used to do (mowing, shoveling, burger-flipping, golf caddying, retail cashiering) now go to adults who need them to feed families.

(Which is itself troubling enough.)

Paper routes