I guess I had so completely absorbed the prevailing wisdom that I expected people in bankruptcy to look scruffy or shifty or generally disreputable. But what struck me was that they looked so normal.
The people appearing before that judge came in all colors, sizes, and ages. A number of men wore ill-fitting suits, two or three of them with bolero ties, and nearly everyone dressed up for the day. They looked like they were on their way to church. An older couple held onto each other as they walked carefully down the aisle and found a seat. A young mother gently jiggled her keys for the baby in her lap. Everyone was quiet, speaking in hushed tones or not at all. Lawyers – at least I thought they were lawyers – seemed to herd people from one place to another.
I didn’t stay long. I felt as if I knew everyone in that courtroom, and I wanted out of there. It was like staring at a car crash, a car crash involving people you knew.
Later, our data would confirm what I had seen in San Antonio that day. The people seeking the judge’s decree were once solidly middle-class. They had gone to college, found good jobs, gotten married, and bought homes. Now they were flat busted, standing in front of that judge and all the world, ready to give up nearly everything they owned just to get some relief from the bill collectors.
As the data continued to come in, the story got scarier. San Antonio was no exception: all around the country, the overwhelming majority of people filing for bankruptcy were regular families who had hit hard times. Over time we learned that nearly 90 percent were declaring bankruptcy for one of three reasons: a job loss, a medical problem, or a family breakup (typically divorce, sometimes the death of a husband or wife). By the time these families arrived in the bankruptcy court, they had pretty much run out of options. Dad had lost his job or Mom had gotten cancer, and they had been battling for financial survival for a year or longer. They had no savings, no pension plan, and no homes or cars that weren’t already smothered by mortgages. Many owed at least a full year’s income in credit card debt alone. They owed so much that even if they never bought another thing – even if Dad got his job back tomorrow and Mom had a miraculous recovery – the mountain of debt would keep growing on its own, fueled by penalties and compounding interest rates that doubled their debts every few years. By the time they came before a bankruptcy judge, they were so deep in debt that being flat broke – owning nothing, but free from debt – looked like a huge step up and worth a deep personal embarrassment.
Worse yet, the number of bankrupt families was climbing. In the early 1980s, when my partners and I first started collecting data, the number of families annually filing for bankruptcy topped a quarter of a million. True, a recession had hobbled the nation’s economy and squeezed a lot of families, but as the 1980s wore on and the economy recovered, the number of bankruptcies unexpectedly doubled. Suddenly, there was a lot of talk about how Americans had lost their sense of right and wrong, how people were buying piles of stuff they didn’t actually need and then running away when the bills came due. Banks complained loudly about unpaid credit card bills. The word deadbeat got tossed around a lot. It seemed that people filing for bankruptcy weren’t just financial failures – they had also committed an unforgivable sin.
Part of me still wanted to buy the deadbeat story because it was so comforting. But somewhere along the way, while collecting all those bits of data, I came to know who these people were.
In one of our studies, we asked people to explain in their own words why they filed for bankruptcy. I figured that most of them would probably tell stories that made them look good or that relieved them of guilt.
I still remember sitting down with the first stack of questionnaires. As I started reading, I’m sure I wore my most jaded, squinty-eyed expression.
The comments hit me like a physical blow. They were filled with self-loathing. One man had written just three words to explain why he was in bankruptcy:
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
When writing about their lives, people blamed themselves for taking out a mortgage they didn’t understand. They blamed themselves for their failure to realize their jobs weren’t secure. They blamed themselves for their misplaced trust in no-good husbands and cheating wives. It was blindingly obvious to me that most people saw bankruptcy as a profound personal failure, a sign that they were losers through and through.
Some of the stories were detailed and sad, describing the death of a child or what it meant to be laid off after thirty-three years with the same company. Others stripped a world of pain down to the bare facts:
Wife died of cancer. Left $65,000 in medical bills after insurance. Lack of full-time work – worked five part-time jobs to meet rent, utilities, phone, food, and insurance.
They thought they were safe – safe in their jobs and their lives and their love – but they weren’t.
I ran my fingers over one of the papers, thinking about a woman who had tried to explain how her life had become such a disaster. A turn here, a turn there, and her life might have been very different.
Divorce, an unhappy second marriage, a serious illness, no job. A turn here, a turn there, and my life might have been very different, too.
– A Fighting Chance by Elizabeth Warren, pg. 34 - pg. 36
(Bolding mine)
I don’t want to derail this too hard. And I am terrifyingly, shakingly conscious that I live in the UK, with its mildly-socialist leanings and socialised healthcare and council houses for homeless families, and I know in my head that even if the locusts come for everything I have, if I just stay on this particular piece of land, I will be able to keep the baby alive -
I don’t want to derail too hard, but when people ask “why aren’t young people getting houses and babies” and so on: look at this post, the raw terror of this post. The reality of the locusts. The facial markings on the face of the wolf at the door.
Young people today, like the people of the Great Depression and the World-Wars-In-The-Arena-Of-Combat, know that these things can be taken away. Just. Wiped off the map.
A turn here, a turn there, and your life is over and your game is done, and you have to stand there in your shame, having lost everything.
So the response to that is: have nothing, and you can’t lose everything.
I can see the appeal.
But I wonder how deep in our hearts this nihilism can get. What its impacts will be. How can we plan for the future of the planet, when our brains can only focus on the £300 on our credit card, and panic.
What did this do to us? The children of the bankruptcy. The kids raised in this religion. can we make ourselves okay.
The most lingering comment I ever heard someone make about Millennials was an older man I was talking to about the way we think about finances–when he dreamed about being a millionaire as a young man, he talked about yachts and mansions and trips to the Bahamas; when I did, I talked about living debt-free and being able to buy dinner out without looking at my monthly budget. He heard me out, took me seriously.
And at the end of it all, he nodded and looked at me and asked, “Do you know who you remind me of?”
And I said no, no I didn’t, and he nodded some more.
“My mother. She grew up just before the Depression hit, and she saw people lose everything left and right. And whenever she talked about finances, she sounded just like you.” He paused for a moment, and said, “I never really thought about what growing up like that would do to a generation.”
He still brings that conversation up, years later. He hasn’t made a single derisive comment about Millennials since.
Sarah: *I’m* the Goblin Queen, bitches - you go wave your fans somewhere else.
(From Labyrinth: The Ultimate Visual History)
The Labyrinth commentaries are an Absolute Fucking Delight, seriously - from Goblins of the Labyrinth to the deluxe edition DVDs, they are replete with balls-out nerdery from Froud/Henson/Lucas, over-the-top teenage delight from Jennifer Connely who, at 14, got to SLOW DANCE WITH DAVID BOWIE!!!!!!!!!…and, wonder of wonders, sheer fucking dorkiness in the person of aforementioned rock god.
Like…
-He kept stumbling on the stairs in the ballroom scene. Jennifer keeps laughing at him because, oh my fuck, you’re David Bowie, aged 40something, Rock God Supreme, stupidly beautiful, actually trained in all this shit….and my adolescent ass remembers these stairs are here, but you don’t?!?!???????/
- The script originally called for Jareth and Sarah to kiss, but David Bowie straight up refused because Jennifer Connely was a minor and he was a grown-ass adult.
- Henson wanted a famous musician to play the Goblin King and had debated casting Michael Jackson, until David Bowie came over and…hopped up onto the table, and, with a wicked gleam in his eye, pulled a bone flute out of his pocket, hopped up onto the table, and, crouching thereon, played it at him and Henson was like “that is the Goblin King right there”
- Jennifer was apparently an absolute dream to work with and they didn’t realise how dangerous some of the stunts she acted were until they saw an actual teenager, say, going down the shaft of hands
- David Bowie was TERRIFIED OF HEIGHTS. During the Diamond Dogs tour in the 1970s, he got stuck on an elevating chair on stage, and later, in the 80s, during Glass Spider, he had an elevated prop fucking PRECIPITATELY DESCEND under him. Nonetheless, he did a lot of the Escher Room stuff himself - not all of it, some of it is a stunt guy, but damn, for a dude with acrophobia, doing ANY of it is impressive.
- Basically Jennifer Connely and David Bowie are/were fantastic to work with, and Jim Henson, who decided of his own free will to work with a baby, a teenager, numerous chickens, and a neurotic musician, was a madman. A magnificent madman, but a madman nonetheless.
Reblogging for this glorious comment. Thanks @tyrannousstars!
luckyladylily asked: Thought you might like this, in my head you are "That animorphs person". You made me get back into the series from when I was younger. Gradually making my way through the series again now. I Love your rereading comments.
This…this is it…this is the pinnacle of my life….
I was just wondering to my friend the other day if I qualified as an Animorphs Person now or not.
I am so gratified by this information.
readera asked: For the softer world Animorphs, any pair. M, L, O, and T. T is made for Ax, though. Have you heard of the podcast Morph Club Cast? It is two nerds rereading all of Animorphs. All of them, even the spin offs!
AND YES. YES I HAVE HEARD OF MORPH CLUB. I LOVE THEM DEARLY. I DON’T KNOW IF MEGAN OR CAREY HAVE TUMBLR ACCOUNTS, BUT IF THEY DO, SOMEONE TAG THEM. IN THE EVENT THAT EITHER OF YOU SEE THIS, I SCREAMED FOR REAL WHEN I DISCOVERED YOUR PODCAST AND I LOVE IT TO BITS AND FUCKING PIECES.
my friend is studying for the mcat and was just trying to explain to me about heat transfer and she said ‘you know, like the reason you get cold when you go outside on a freezing day is that your tiny human body is trying to warm up the entire universe’ and i think that’s the best thing i have ever heard
fun fact, i’m studying for the mcat right now and physics is my worst subject (like…i speak a dead language and taught an anatomy class and aced biochem, but I barely scraped by in physics) and this is how i remember how radiant heat works
For raining-down-hearts, who won my 1K giveaway! She asked for Soul teaching Maka to bake, domestic fluff, and tons of cuteness. I hope you enjoy, RDH!
—
Soul came home to what could only be described as Ground Zero.
The kitchen– his kitchen– was an explosion of greasy pots and pans, a snowstorm of flour, egg residue dripping off counters, and an unknown substance clinging to the wall that looked suspiciously like Nickelodeon green gak from his childhood. It was complete and utter chaos and he stood there frozen, mouth hanging open, grocery bags falling to the floor with a soft thump as he surveyed the damage.
His roommate stood by the stove, unperturbed by the mess, face buried in a book as she muttered to herself about grams versus tablespoons. Her shirt– his favorite Nirvana shirt– was covered in flour and her messy pigtails were sporting some very cheery rainbow sprinkles. Soul summoned patience from deep, deep inside to deal with this in a mature manner.
Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted the tiniest of scorch marks on his stainless steel pot, the one that Wes had gotten him for the last birthday, the one that came from a set that cost no less than $700.
Oh, wow, sit tight, all of these are entirely predicated on God my life would be easier if I shipped the most popular ship in the fandom.
Charles Xavier/Erik Lensherr: I got committed to the tragic friendship way too young to change my mind, but I have nothing against the ship.
Any configuration at all of Jim Kirk/Spock/Bones McCoy: I just…struggle? I concur that Spock/Kirk is pretty gay in TOS and I want to ship it, and honestly Kirk/Bones should be my exact shit, but I just–look, Kirk is too in love with the Enterprise for anyone else to have a claim.
Buffy Summers/Spike: nope, nope, nope, nope, can’t do it. Too rapey, too much sexual assault, even if I didn’t like Angel I wouldn’t be able to handle it.
Doc Holliday/Wynonna Earp: the show clearly really wants me to care about that pairing and like…I guess there’s nothing wrong with it, but I raise you Doc Holliday/Wyatt Earp and Wynonna/Dolls because Dolls is wonderful and Doc is so blindingly obviously in love with Wyatt and trying to work his issues out by fucking Wynonna, which, no judgement, because Wynonna is clearly trying to work out her own adequacy issues by fucking Doc.
Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter: I want to ship it just so I could stop feeling this level of seething wrath about it, I feel similarly about almost EVERY ship that the HP fandom likes, including literally anything that includes Severus Snape.
F: What’s the longest you’ve ever been in a fandom? What fandom was it?
I mean…I was a late-comer to the concept of internet fandom (the last…four or five years?) because of various reasons, but I’ve been a devoted consumer of any X-Men content I could afford to get my hands on since I was 7 and I’ve been collecting Animorphs books about as long, so there’s those.
Here is my thesis about Doc and Wynonna. You’re right, each of them is–basically–trying to have sex with the concept that the other embodies more so than with the person. Doc is trying to retroactively fix the damage he did to his relationship with Wyatt because he was evidently in love with Wyatt on some level, whether you want to read it as romantic or not (the way he treats acts suggests to me that probably the answer is yes, but that’s me). So then there’s Wynonna, who’s nothing like Wyatt except for all the ways that she’s exactly like Wyatt, and she carries Peacemaker with the same cock to her hip and proud tilt of her jaw, and–well. Wyatt is dead and Doc betrayed him and Doc wasn’t there for him and Wynonna’s kisses feel a lot like Wyatt slamming him into the wall to accuse him of being a traitor.
As for Wynonna…so much of Wynonna’s personality is about her belief that she’s not good enough, that core of certainty that she is not able to carry the weight of the Earp heir and, later, that only being the Heir is what makes her worthwhile as a person. If all that makes Wynonna worthwhile is her last name, she has to prove that she’s enough to be worthy of it.
And Doc is right there. Doc Holliday, who rode with Wyatt himself, as much of a legend as her own ancestor, and if he’s impressed with her…she must be doing it right. Right?
Doc believes he’s in love with her, but he’s more in love with her last name. Wynonna isn’t foolish enough think she’s in love with him, but some part of her craves that tacit approval. So they sleep together and work together and it’s not really good for anyone, and in the meantime Dolls stands back and quietly works on his own quest for redemption and tells Wynonna she’s good enough for anything, just the way she is, as herself, not the Heir, and I’m really frustrated with the fandom for not agreeing with me.
It’s almost like demonizing the far left and taking on a moderate position during times of far right violence helps Republicans more than Democrats…
“I think there is blame on both sides. You look at both sides. I think there is blame object on both sides,” Trump said during his remarks today.
“You had some very bad people in that group. You also had some very fine people on both sides,” he added.
Some very fine Nazis showed up at Charlottseville
I’m sorry. question.
”times of far-right violence”
whose been starting fires, destroying property, macing folks in the face, smacking photographers over the head with bike chains, throwing glass bottles filled with m80s at crowds, tagged walls with “liberals get the bullet too”, and assaulted people in gangs on the streets for like the last 6 months, all while wearing black clothes?
A crazy asshole rightwinger claimed the first life of this bullshit, but do not for one fucking second make the assertion that the far-left are innocent victims, that they have not done their fair share of violence, and have no blood on their hands.
also, how about the people that came who don’t want history destroyed because it was ugly, and the people on both sides that came to protest but not engage in violence? could those people be very fine, on both sides?
Hey there. Answer!
You’re young, and male, and in your 20s, all according to your profile. I was young and male and in my 20s once, so let me explain something to you.
There’s a cultural narrative that’s been sold hard to young intellectual men, to you and to me at one point, and that narrative is roughly: “you’re smarter and more enlightened if you’re neutral in politics”. The extremes are too passionate to see clearly, they’re biased.
I believed this, once.
But back to your point. Is there leftist violence? Sure. But read this.
That’s by the Cato Institute, a conservative (libertarian, but chaired by a Koch brother) think tank. Here’s the analysis:
“the annual chance of being murdered by a Left Wing terrorist was about 1
in 400 million per year. Regardless of the recent upswing in deaths
from Left Wing terrorism since 2016, Nationalist and Right Wing
terrorists have killed about 12 times as many people since 1992.“
Let me repeat for you that this was a conservative point of view, published by a conservative organization. Even a very, very casual look into terrorism data reveals that right-wing extremist groups are many times more violent than left-wing groups. I’m a leftist and think this analysis is horseshit, by the way, it’s way too soft on what counts as right-wing violence. But it’s from the opposite side of the isle, from an organization that cares about the truth enough to be credibly debatable.
So, this is where the trick is. When you don’t have truth on your side, when you know you’re wrong, a great tactic is to try and paint the other side as badly as you can. Make it about relativism, subjectivity. This is where the “both sides” rhetoric you’re repeating comes from: a desperate need by white supremacists, nazis, and other right-wing hate groups to muddy the water enough to make the uninformed complacent. By the way, take a look at a logical fallacy called False Equivalence.
For men like you, normal rhetorical tactics can’t cut it. But! They can appeal to your desire to be more knowledgeable, to find a higher ground and to defend it.
But neutrality is not “higher” or more “noble”. It is not the “smart” position. It is not “balanced”. It is complacency. It is propaganda designed to take bright people like you and turn them into a buffer for extremists.
It’s designed to make you a nazi ally.
So go ahead with your “both sides” rhetoric if you want, but know what it is.
I’m no longer holding Star Trek or Star Wars “accountable” for their clunky-looking sixties-and-seventies future technology.
Why?
Because the Enterprise is off on a years-long voyage through space. There’s no Verizon store, no Radio Shack, no Geek Squad out there. If the Klingons fire photon torpedoes and the bridge shakes and Spock’s head bangs against the fancy iPad72 touchscreen and cracks the glass, the ship’s toast. If Han Solo’s fingerprints get all over the starchart and the touch-calibration is off by half a centimeter, the Falcon is going right into a star. But if Mister Worf accidentally twists the command knob too hard and pops it off, he can just screw that thing right back on and it will keep working. Dust gets in there? Take it apart and clean it out. All the plugs are big and universal, all the power cells are functional and have a decent battery life, and nothing is built to expire in the next six months so you have to buy a new one.
That tech isn’t anachronistic or suffering a bad case of Zeerust–it’s practical, effective, and it works. Apple tried launching its own space exploration craft, it had to come back for full repairs within three months, and then it had to be upgraded over the next two.
But this? This is just good, long-lasting, fully-functional, and reliable craftsmanship.
The actual real-life space shuttles’ electronics looked pretty much like that for their entire lifespan and this is exactly why.
