15 tweets about “weaponized vaginas” that may cause yours to sew itself shut

@KatieKitten420:

First of all, be kind to yourself. Don’t “beat yourself up”. Please.

I have to say I can appreciate you position on certain kinds of recreational drugs. If something as pointless and corrosive as alcohol is perfectly legal almost everywhere, then why not weed?

Have you tried temp agencies? I eventually got my current permanent position as a result of a temp assignment.

Have you considered starting a legitimate business of your own? I don’t know what your aptitudes are, so I have no suggestions for you. I mean, in a sense, you ARE self-employed right now, just not legitimately. If your parents have been willing to support you and pretty much give you what you ask for, then maybe they could help you with start-up costs.

I know you’ve probably heard this before, but it’s easier to find a job when you HAVE a job. So, maybe take a McJob just to get yourself employed.

Also, I’ve read that there’s a shortage of certain types of skilled labor, such as heating/air conditioning techs, plumbers, machinists, etc. Apparently, young people just aren’t interested in this kind of work anymore. You would need to go to trade school, but it just might be worth your while.

Also, 34 is still young.

@Gaebolga

The only cogent argument I’ve heard against legalizing all drugs is that users of harder drugs may end up becoming permanently incapacitated and therefore a drain on society, which falls under the category of “harming others” (financially, at least).

As you said, it’s a bit unconvincing – not least because it assumes that legality will lead to more people using the drugs in question, and then continuing to use them.
In any case, many users of harder drugs are already a drain on society, if we look at it from a purely functionalist perspective. But (speaking as a one-time heavy user of heroin), a lot of that drain stems from the illegality of the drug, the high cost of the drug, and the stigma surrounding it. Legalisation (or even decriminalisation) would not solve everything, but it would reduce some of the problems.

(everyone: I know there are multiple issues and questions in this debate. I’ve only focused on one of them)

@ thanks, ill watch or better yet read it.

@Jo I completely understand that its fake and i never seen one to be able to comment on its realism. you and EJ have already pointed it out but my point was the same that its messed up there is market for it and the victims are almost always female. Im not sure if other sexual orientation have this sadistic fetish but from what i read its mostly hetro male.

Re: Mish, Gaebolga : I believe there is another real argument against liberalizing any drugs with heavy addiction. It’s that people can sometime take bad decisions because of a temporary condition, and once addicted, it’s hard to revert them. That may be paternalizing, but I don’t trust human *that* much.

There is however a lot of catchs that I am weary of with that argument. The biggest one to me is that most of the times, people don’t get addictions for the sake of it, but as a consequence of another problem in their life (poverty, racism, among other). It’s much more fruitful to act on the cause than the consequence.

Another one is that the argument is too easily useable for bigoted mean. I have already heard people use similar argument to ask for mandatory birth control / sterilization for gypsy and other group deemed undesirable. (yes, my family reunions often have that kind of fun …)

Yet another catch is, the problem of drug classification is that it’s a spectrum, and a lot of products can be enjoyed without a true addiction (alcohol come to mind, but I do remember that WW1 veterans who were treated with morphine didn’t exactly all became addicts). And, of course, politicians are likely to categorize drugs according to popular prejudices more than any actual danger. I am not a specialist in that, but I sort of remember that LSD is an example of something not actually all that dangerous even compared to tobacco.

(since I highly dislike organized crime, and how money made off sex workers and drugs gradually serve to pay for worse acts like human trafficking, the argument to legalize them to cut off as much of financial ressources as possible from thoses cartel is the one that convince me the most)

Legalise and regulate seems to me to be the most ethically defensible and consistent standpoint, as well as the best option in terms of actually reducing harm in real life. More countries should be taking a leaf out of Portugal’s book.

Cutting off resources to organised crime (not to mention raising those same resources for the state at the same time); making it safe for those who want help to ask for it, and for those able to offer help to offer it effectively; making drugs safer (I’m not saying safe; just safer than they otherwise would be) by regulating strength and purity so people can know what they’re taking and don’t have to risk it containing bleach or whatever; enabling the relatively powerless users and small dealers to escape the vicious cycle of criminalisation. What’s not to like, you would think.

I have a close relative (we don’t talk much! I wonder why ..) who is a consultant on a fairly regular basis to the police in a country that takes a 100% criminalisation approach and is pretty gun-happy (not the USA, as it happens!). From conversations with this relative (who has become a chief-of-police-was-a-guest-at-my-party kind of person in recent years) I am increasingly convinced that – as you might expect – the kingpins of organised crime and the top echelons of law enforcement, prisons etc. are equally invested in the whole war-against-drugs setup pretty much world-wide.

Also best luck wishes to KatieKitten420, I hope you are and stay safe and well and that the things you are working on are/get good or better.

One issue with McJobs is, they don’t pay enough to get by on anymore, if they ever did. And for some people getting one would mean giving up something else (disability benefits, for example) that may actually pay better (depending on how many hours you get at the McJob).

We’re not just suffering from wage stagnation and a general labor surplus; there’s a definite shortage of entry-level career-track jobs, even for degreed graduates. By “entry-level” I mean requires zero prior experience and zero connections, just educational attainment, and by “career-track” I mean uses your skills, pays enough to get by on modestly (working class: can own and maintain a car, pay typical rents, cover food and utilities, and have some spending cash left over), and leads in a reasonable time to promotions with more responsibilities and more pay (lower middle class: enough to cover the mortgage on a starter home, at least with two breadwinners at this point in their careers).

But everything white-collar these days requires prior experience and/or being well-connected with existing industry insiders, and what’s left over has precarious hours, unpredictable pay (you might get next to nothing some months), and either inadequate pay or is hard physical work and typically dangerous to boot. Almost everything that’s still unionized is either dangerous manual labor or else public sector white collar work requiring prior experience and/or insider connections to land so much as an interview.

There’s a whole “lost generation” being left out of meaningful gainful employment because of this. And that’s going to have socio-political consequences; indeed, already is having.

The other horrible part of the work world today is ‘on demand’ scheduling, determined according to ‘business needs.’ I have experienced this recently at a job where I had to give a range of hours that I was available to work. Some weeks, I’d be scheduled every second with overtime, sometimes only a couple of 3-4 hour shifts. But the schedules didn’t come down in advance, they would update from central computers and you could think you had Thursday off and make appointments to get stuff done or think you’d finally get a chance to catch up on laundry and then find yourself on the schedule and having to cancel everything.

I had to threaten to quit to get my manager to change my availability after my mother died a couple of months ago and I had a zillion new responsibilities dumped on my lap. But then if they don’t need me during that shorter availability, I don’t work. Sigh.

I don’t know how people with children or others that need their care manage with these kinds of jobs.

With the era of the self driving car replacing delivery and taxi services fast approaching, UBI is going to be essential. Unfortunately, this issue is getting hand waved away in most places. In the past, technology has created new jobs to replace the old ones that technology made obsolete. But the past was the past and the technological advances are a lot bigger than they used to be. It should actually be a good thing that drudge work is more and more automated. With a UBI in place, it could free up humans to do more art, invention, and entrepreneurship. Talent won’t be wasted by poverty or fear of poverty. Sadly, capitalism will not allow this to happen until it gets to the point where joblessness creates enough political unrest to terrify the wealthy.

The wealthy should already be terrified. Look what’s already happened: the shitty labor market has created enough political unrest to contribute heavily to a widely-documented “anti-establishment mood” during the 2016 election, which in turn led to, first, a near miss with Sanders and then to Trump being elected, while the “establishment” candidates of both parties did unusually poorly in the primary season, and none won the Republican primary or the general election. Trump then instituted, horror of horrors, tariffs, is getting the US into a trade war with China, and is causing major stock market volatility with his tweetstorms against, for example, his target-du-jour Amazon (while his son-in-law profits by insider trading).

The rich, by and large, wanted Clinton or Jeb Bush. When they got Trump, they said “well he wrote the Art of the Deal, we can work with this guy, at least it wasn’t Sanders” and started actually sighing with relief when they got a massive bundle of Republican tax cuts. Now they’re probably beginning to wish they could roll the clock back a couple of years and put every dollar on the Clinton campaign with no donations to Republicans.

The smarter among them will be starting to look at the bigger picture of why the electorate is increasingly disinterested in “mainstream” (read: bland, corporate, well-turned-out, weasel-wording, neoliberal warmongers who differ principally in whether they are socially progressive or socially conservative) candidates from either party and what sort of candidates might be accepted better by today’s voter, but still not too radical left (or right) for the rich’s own purposes. And that will almost certainly mean a Democrat from the Warren wing who supports things like UBI and portable benefits, though they wouldn’t want Warren herself, she’s too in favor of heavy bank regulation for their tastes.

But I think we’ll see more upheavals and breakdowns of the social situation before they eventually accept a “new new deal” compromise by supporting a latter-day FDR. It took a Great Depression for that to happen the last time, and it’s not gone quite that far yet this time.

…perhaps it’s time to invest in pitchfork futures…

Yes, I do agree that it’s happening again. Trump himself isn’t precisely a fascist, it seems, though an awful lot of his followers indubitably are. Trump’s more of an opportunist, hollow of any apparent convictions or politics of his own (and thus, also, completely amoral, dangerous in his own way, and one heck of a loose cannon, particularly when you factor in his narcissism and poor impulse control — the latter is definitely not a trait you want in someone with access to the launch codes).

I worry that he, like von Hindenberg in Weimar Germany, might be paving the way for the real thing though.

The bellwether is the middle class. Things are heading toward trouble when the working class and other downtrodden races, classes, and groups become increasingly agitated and political. Trouble has arrived when a significant chunk of the middle class joins them. This is what history teaches. And the middle class is experiencing salary stagnation, skyrocketing housing costs (which hurt those with outstanding mortgage debt, as well as barring their children from affording a starter home, so they either stay with their parents or fall out of the middle class), and increasingly, climate change (it’s not the working class who own the beachfront properties that will flood first, and in Miami Beach have already begun to).

It was the middle class that by and large voted for Trump, the victorious nonestablishment candidate. That right there is the shot across the bow.

The next series of events isn’t hard to guess from available data.

First comes a new financial crisis. There’s a ton of unpayable debt strapped like dynamite to the pillars at the foundation of the economy, and only very low interest rates kept up since 2008 has kept these bombs laying dormant. Now the Fed is raising interest rates, which has lit the fuses. There will be another credit crunch and banking crisis soon.

Then the crisis gets far worse than 2008’s. The new Chinese petro-yuan initiative sounds the death knell for the dollar as world reserve currency. As long as the US could be assured of a market for treasuries abroad, they could get away with printing money (in modern parlance, “quantitative easing”) to keep liquidity in the markets during a credit crunch, as they did for a long while after ’08. That’s not going to work the next time. More QE will lead to the world dumping treasuries and snapping up yuan, and turning to China to trade for fuels. The glut of unwanted treasuries will cause hyperinflation — the same thing that clobbered Weimar Germany around the time of von Hindenberg’s rise.

Or, they can swallow in fear, forbear from QE, and permit a deflationary depression to unfold, like the one that started in 1929.

Either alternative leads to political unrest, increasingly from the middle class as well as the lower ones.

The rest is predictable because it happened before already, in the 1930s. On the one hand, the working class will rally to a significant degree behind a genuine leftist figure, quite possibly very far left. On the other, the middle class will by and large gather around a fascist who promises to rescue capitalism … for white middle class folk, by throwing every other group under the bus. The working class by then will have the numbers, so it will be how many of the white working class back the fascist that determines which one wins, unless another FDR is put forth who can rescue capitalism without going to Naziesque extremes.

One could argue that FDR actually followed much of the fascist economic program, while eschewing (most of) the fascist social program and the totalitarian dictatorship aspects. He put his foot down, regulated some markets heavily, and pretty soon was instituting rationing and significant aspects of a planned-but-capitalist economy, with the state working closely with certain private industries (the beginning of the military-industrial complex). He had his reasons, of course, in the form of World War II (whereas Hitler did all those things, and more, and then started World War II).

Importantly, though, FDR did not assume dictatorial powers (partly because the Supreme Court was a strong check on his powers), nor did he go very far with domestic ethnic violence (though, he did have Japanese-Americans herded into camps for the duration of the war) — though, one must wonder what might have happened if he had outlived the war. In its wisdom (which it sorely lacks in these modern times) Congress enacted term limits afterward with the intent that FDR be America’s last “President for life”.

The US came a lot closer than most people realize to becoming a fascist state: by many metrics, for the four years of its involvement in the war, it actually was one, but it relinquished that voluntarily afterward. Again, one must wonder if that would have remained the case had FDR lived much longer, or the Supreme Court been more compliant or less powerful as an institution.

I don’t recommend going that route again, for obvious reasons. If ever there was a slippery slope, that is one. What I do recommend though is clamping down on the banking sector and increasing government involvement in setting economic incentives more generally — ending the neoliberal “Washington consensus”). Also social spending, at the expense of military spending. A massive debt jubilee is necessary; that unpayable debt has to be discharged somehow, and it is not going to happen by being paid off, so the only choice is whether it happens in a controlled and managed manner or as a series of disastrous crashes. (Not doing that was the biggest mistake made in 2008, hoping to defer that a generation, and failing.) And of course the money must be squeezed out of politics. Public election funding, a total ban on private donations to political causes (bribery is not protected by the First Amendment!), and a shift to some form of proportional representation seem to be in order.

What FDR did may have been a kind of emergency resuscitation that kept things from completely collapsing while the unpayable debt defaults cleared away the anchor dragging on the economy. And it required a major and terrible war in order to work, and had other serious negative consequences such as the Japanese internment.

Now that nuclear weapons are widespread and far more numerous and powerful than in 1945, we cannot afford for any nuclear-armed nation to have to resort to the same method again.

@Surplus to Requirements:
That was very interesting, thank you.

I’m not an economist, but it’s my understanding that heavy inflation will effectively function as a debt jubilee. Inflation wipes out savings, yes, but since your savings are someone else’s debt, inflation also massively reduces the burden of debt.

As such, if the scenario you mention of the petro-yuan causing the dollar to tumble comes true, will that result in an effective debt jubilee?