more into girly shit like logistics

the idea that a human who has a job and uses their paycheck to buy groceries at the supermarket is an empowered independent agent and a human who gets UBI and uses that money to buy groceries at the supermarket is tragically dependent fundamentally assumes that economies are things that just, like, happen, rather than a vast edifice of human cooperation that results in the existence of money, people willing to pay you it in exchange for labour that can be any number of levels removed from basic sustenance, people who grow food, people who transport the food between where it's grown and where you buy it, people who store it in adequate conditions, people who check it is safe to eat...

but I do think there is a fundamental difference between these two scenarios. A person who has a job and is using their paycheck to buy groceries is participating in both the development and maintenance of that massive edifice of human cooperation and in the benefits of it. A person who is just granted the benefits by fiat is not necessarily involved in the maintenance.

Even if somebody's job is very far removed from the production of necessary goods, ultimately someone is paying them for their labor. They are being compensated for what they do, and that compensation is something they can exchange for food and shelter and so on. There is a sense in which they are "earning a living."

There's a version of this I see a lot in queer political arguments which I'm going to call Competing Ontological Needs. When two people need the same thing to be in two incompatible ontological categories. Or need the same thing to be logically impossible and not.

Now put like that obviously it's nonsense. Ontological categories are abstractions and where we draw their boundaries doesn't change the facts about the things in them. You can't *need* pluto to be a planet because no physical facts, either about pluto or about anything else, change depending on if pluto is "really" a planet or not.

But people sure do get really really scared and angry when they argue about what categories we should put different people and the things they do in! Obviously it makes sense to say "I categorize myself this way, and if you're not thinking about me with that same abstraction it means we don't understand eachother well which is sad". But the thing I see a lot is more concrete than that.

The common unspoken syllogism is "It is politically acceptable to do bad things to people if they are X, I don't want bad things to happen to me, so I need to not be an X". With variations like "if it was possible for Y to happen then it would be mandatory, Y is bad, thus I need to to not be possible for Y to happen". Or "Z is a good kind of thing to be, I dislike z, therefore z is not a kind of Z"

The fact it's unspoken sucks, because then you get into flaming rows where one party is making the totally pedestrian observation that someone has the characteristics of an X or that Y is totally possible, and the person they're talking to is reacting like this is a threat of immediate violence. Because if the unspoken syllogism were correct it totally would be! The prosecutor who argues that you're a murderer really is trying to commit literal violence against you by this argument! And in the ideal case is even morally correct to do so!

But often the unspoken syllogism doesn't work, or isn't universal, and so people get into arguments in which they need different things to be categorically true. And that sucks because settling arguments like that is even harder than settling ones about facts, and so often the apparent stakes are wildly different between participants.

It'd be really good if more of these could be defused by dismantling the syllogism. It doesn't need to be impossible for someone to change their sexuality, it just needs to not be mandatory. We don't need to argue about if this person is actually a woman, we can just stop doing bad things to her depending on which she is. We don't have to argue if AI can make "art" if we stop treating art as uniquely praiseworthy.

Especially when so many of the syllogisms are actually "in the 80s a political coalition made an argument that depends on X being Y, they won and did a really good thing, thus X must be Y". Which is extra insidious because if we take that as our argument then it's good to argue that X is Y *even if this is false and you know it's false*.

PBS and NPR were never beholden to the US government.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was created so that the US government could fund public media without public media being influenced by the government. It was a private non-profit funded by the government, not a part of the government itself. This is by design. This was a good thing. It meant that even small local TV and radio stations, could afford to create media for the public good, without government influence.

This meant TV and radio stations for poor communities. For non-english speaking communities. For rural communities. For minorities. It meant that free and accessible media could be created for everyone, even if the government didn't like it.

That's why conservatives defunded it.

Because if they couldn't control it, and if it helped the people they hated, then they would have to destroy it. Do you really think that a fascist government would defund their own propaganda machine?

Not only is the idea that PBS before being defunded was propaganda wrong, but ignores the fact that defunding it is going to have long-term negative effects on vulnerable communities.

if the person who maintains the printers ceases to maintain the printers, they will stop functioning. if the person who wrote the copy stops writing copy, it is perfectly viable for people to continue printing and circulating that text forever. if a group of people spends several years developing some useful tool or product (like the people working on inventing more efficient solar panels or batteries or medicine) then that's several years of useful labor that they should somehow be compensated for. since the "invention" is just an idea, some other group is able to use that idea and produce a billion copies of it without re-spending years on the idea labor. this is something you can't really do with physical products. it's a good thing that you can do this with ideas, it's improved the world enormously! but the people who came up with it need to be paid somehow for several years of labor that didn't "produce" anything tangible. and the solution to this is allowing rights to ideas to be bought and sold (and leased).

It's not about being tough on crime, because the absolute toughest most brutal measure you could take against "crime" as a social problem is to alleviate poverty, and increase access to education, healthcare and social mobility.

It's about performing "tough on crime" as an aesthetic by enacting violence against a prop, i.e. minorities and the impoverished, who are fetishized and objectified to represent "crime." They are brutalized as punishment for crime, but never with the purpose of alleviating the problem of crime.