Checking In on the Ruin

Rollercoasters and ferris wheels / You like how it feels / Round and round 'til you lose yourself in the air / All those complicated deals / Your desperate appeals / Calling out to a god you know isn't there

Author

mister mix
April 05, 2025

Take your joy where you can, in this case, TSLA finally taking a minor shit

So, the stock market is fucked. We live in the United States, so the possibility that Social Security checks won’t go out isn’t great, but when you fuck with middle-class folks’ 401Ks, then you’re really “touching the third rail” as dumbass pundits would say.

Here’s one I didn’t know about: Reader S sends in this Twitter thread about Trump gutting humanities and arts and sciences grants. This means stuff like summer reading programs, anything considered “DEI”, etc. State colleges and universities have already pretty much turned themselves into technical schools, firing all the humanities positions that aren’t direct service (e.g., teaching kids to read and write because they didn’t learn it in their terrible high school).

Some people got upset when I posted this piece from the LBJ parody account that was written the day after after the election, but I wanted to revisit it:

It's hard to really predict what exactly a second Trump presidency will try to accomplish, because the guy is both a liar and an idiot, however there are at least three "policies" we are certain will be pursued. They're the only three things that Trump has touted consistently from the campaign trail that the "brains" in Trump World have actually seriously and concretely thought about in terms of how to implement them, justify them legally, and marshal the state capacity necessary to roll them out quickly. And those are: a huge slash to the income and corporate tax codes with the raising of tariffs, an attempt at mass deportations, and an overhaul of the civil service into a classic 19th Century system of spoils handed out to cronies and grifters. And each of these policies are going to "Tex-ify" your life in ways both large and small.

We really are living in Texas now. Also, the LBJ account’s take on BlueSky as a humorless echo chamber is about right. I’m still posting there and appreciate some of what I read there, but there’s a lot of scolding and gatekeeping there. Maybe that’s just part of being engaged in liberal politics.

Anyway, when I was at the gym yesterday, I noticed that Fox is definitely all-in on fingers-in-the-ears, lalalalalala I can’t hear you — they’ve removed the stock ticker from their chyron. The part that I saw was them running a crawl, like the credits for a movie, of every illegal immigrant who committed a violent crime in the US. All the greatest hits come out when Dear Leader is tanking the economy. Here’s Oliver Willis’ take on Democrats going on Fox:

Consistent with this is Oliver’s latest post about how persuasion won’t work with people who only consume right-wing media, because they don’t believe in reality:

It isn’t two sides of the same coin but understand that they believe clearly crazy and wrong and destructive things with the same vehemence with which you understand that gravity is a thing that exists.

Ultimately, I believe the best course of action in many of these cases is to just give up. We have to accept the reality that many people are simply lost and not able to be recovered. This feels bad. We want to help our fellow man and woman and giving up on them feels like a failure.

But the problem lies with them, not us. We have our hearts in the right places but there’s just something within them that blocks coming to the right conclusion. Instead of beating our heads against the wall until it’s a bloody pulp, we should focus on the people who can realistically see the light.

I think it is a far more efficient use of time, which is finite, to focus on people who at a very minimum share reality with the rest of us. They may be politically apathetic or nihilistic, but unlike the most diehard they are not in a cult. […]

I guess this post is all over the place but the theme, if there is one, is that we shouldn’t be surprised that the obvious ruination of the stock market, government and ultimately the economy won’t be seen as ruin by roughly 40% of the population.

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