I don’t think I was supposed to get these emails in full. The city had just gotten a new public records officer, and the folder I received in response to my right to know request had both redacted and unredacted copies. I’m pleased to have the unredacted versions, though, because they narrate the push to clean up Downtown succinctly and honestly, spelling out the true drivers of policy: the unbridled revulsion of much of the propertied class for people who have the audacity to exist as poor in public.

Truly wild post here about the insanity of the petit bourgeois in America. I think people who have not experienced "local politics" may not be aware just how fucking evil the average small business-owner is as soon as you mention "the homeless". This is a good article to illuminate how much these people do not need to be listened to.

I think a lot about how the path after whatever This is has to involve a conscious disciplining of the petit bourgeois. Sorry if that's too straightforward of a way to put i, but it's just important to remember that you don't have to listen to these people. Not 'you', reader, necessarily — I have to hope you-the-reader are already not listening to the woes of the Small Businessowners in your neighborhood on homelessness issues — but 'you', the potential ruling majorities of the future.

I would say that the ruling majorities of the present should also keep this in mind, but as it stands the Businessowner class basically already rules, and they don't give a shit about the homeless. Sure would be great if that wasn't the case!

It seems as though only when we list out all that is happening around us, can we, for a moment, summon the vertiginous feelings of overwhelm and dread we seemingly do everything in our power to suppress. Three years of a genocide transpiring in plain sight — one by which we increasingly scroll with the flick of a thumb; a new, stupid and brutal war whose consequences include an impending economic and energy crisis unlike anything the world has ever seen before; the accelerating destruction of the planet; the dismantling or elimination of the institutions that protect and enrich us; the wanton targeting of things that many of us love — the earth, the birds, learning, reading, the arts, one another; an emerging global consensus in which children are increasingly viewed as disposable, the terrifying erosion of the rights of women, trans people, immigrants, the mentally ill, the poor, and the persecution of those on the Left — I can name more, but there is no point, save for perpetuating this mounting discomfort. To consider even a single one of these elements in its entirety is already too much for the ordinary mind to to bear, and yet we are asked to bear all of them simultaneously every single day.

Impossible to talk enough about the memorable quotes in this piece. Kate Wagner once again knocks it out of the park with this, combining the psychological with the social (the psychosocial, some might say) into a rumination, a paean about grief and perserverance.

I don't know where "we" go from here, but I also can recognize that "we" are situated in a moment that I would call 'imperial collapse' (as Kate also aptly puts it), and that things feel incredibly disoriented. Systems that once worked no longer work, horrors beyond measure are commonplace, even intrusive, even in the lives of those who do not directly see them.

I have become transfixed, these days, on trying to figure out how we got this way. I'm not a scholar, I'm not an academic, I'm just kind of an armchair history dork who is finally getting to the modern era, the 19th century and onward, and realizing that all that shit that Lenin was talking about re: the systems of capitalism building up and up and up and creating their own gravediggers might have something to it. There's a lot that I think you can point to the end of WW2 and say "ah, here is where things started getting really bad" and that might be true, but you could also point to a million other times. As Kate points out in the footnotes, the American Reconstruction era is another good touchpoint.

Because we members of Western society are not socially permitted to express despair in everyday life, we are more often than not forced into a kind of cruel and unsustainable quiescence. We learn as children that the suppression of our emotions is integral to social equilibrium within the family, something which is then extrapolated onto public life at the high, high cost of the subconscious belief that our emotional needs do not ultimately matter beyond ourselves. The despair of others frightens us in part because it forces us to reckon with that same bargain. What makes you so special? What gives you the right to cry?

My therapist would chastise me (politely) for agreeing with these feelings, and she would be correct to do so. I grew up a man, I grew up in America. These two things have instilled in me a pathological distaste for expressing tender emotion. It's not a good thing.

The breakdown of the society in which we were born and raised has, in fact, already happened. It has happened and continues to happen by way of several concurrent historical processes from which one can cherrypick their best narratives about how precisely it all came to pass.

"We can dress it up however we like, but the truth is that Mixtape is a vibes-driven experience riding high on some kind of media nostalgia. It is an on-rails narrative experience where you do some light exploration of a sleepy little woodland town among a group of three friends who are sitting on three different versions of the razor’s edge of adulthood, and the thing that pulls you through that narrative is a series of songs arranged into a mixtape that sets the mood for each scene in sequence. It has more in common with a set of narrative music videos like Dirty Computer than it does most other games that it sits on digital platforms with. I am sure there are people I am uninterested in engaging with who are mad about this."

Good piece by cmrn about Mixtape and late capitalism.