Why The Right Hates Social Security

(And How They Plan to Destroy It)

Alex Lawson is the Executive Director of Social Security Works and the convening member of the Strengthen Social Security Coalition. He has spent his career working to try to save Social Security from Republican (and sometimes Democratic) attempts to “reform” (i.e., cut) it. He recently joined Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson on the Current Affairs podcast to discuss why Social Security is a huge social democratic achievement, the fight it took to get it in the first place, why the right has always hated Social Security, the history of their attempts to undermine it, and the lies and propaganda that are used to convince people that Social Security is in a crisis and urgently needs reforms that will cut people’s benefits.

The interview transcript has been lightly edited for grammar and clarity.

ROBINSON

People do not talk enough about Social Security. Republicans want to kill Social Security but don’t like to talk about Social Security, partly because they know the conversation is a losing one for them. But that does not change the fact that every minute of every day, slowly, behind the scenes, they are working to destroy the program.

You, Alex Lawson, are trying to prevent that from happening. I want to start by going back in time to think about the achievement that Social Security represents. Could tell us about the fight to get it? We didn’t always live in an era where we had this important benefit.

LAWSON

That’s a great question and a great part of the story. We do have to actually look further back, before Social Security was created. Everyone more or less knows the story that Social Security was created in the Great Depression. At that time, the country was facing catastrophe. One in two seniors were living in poverty—50 percent. Poor houses are in every state in the country (except for one, New Mexico—I don’t know why). Poor houses are a concept that we don’t even have in our minds anymore. They were debtors’ prisons; it’s where you went if you ran out of money and didn’t have family to support you, and importantly, the doors were locked at night—this was not a place that you could leave. And, in fact, the poor house was the bogeyman that people used to push their children: “You better study in school—”

ROBINSON

“—or you will end up in a warehouse where we put poor people!”

LAWSON

Exactly. And importantly, there is a great one that I love, which is on the original Monopoly board, across from the jail on the other corner, was the poor house. So you could either go to jail, or end up in the poor house.

The Poor House, from when Monopoly was "The Landlord's Game"

Now, you get Social Security, and the poor house is eliminated as a concept. It doesn’t exist anymore because Social Security is there to protect people in the retirement if they run out of wages—because in a capitalist society based on wages, if you don’t have wages, you have to figure out something to do. That something used to be the poor house, and then it was Social Security.

There’s more, but I will just say what I love is: Do you know what that space on the Monopoly board is now? It’s free parking! From the poor house to free parking.

ROBINSON

We’ve marked human progress through the progress of the Monopoly board.

LAWSON

But you do have to ask where those ideas come from. Obviously, it was during the crisis of the Great Depression that Frances Perkins and the New Dealers, working with FDR, saw the opportunity to implement these things. But these ideas come from before. You can read Eugene Debs and see a lot of these ideas that are in the New Deal were rejected previously, as he loses [his bid for presidency]. John Nichols has a great bit where he says, “What is losing when your ideas are winning?”

There was the capitalist billionaire class running the country, and periodic upheavals where every ten years the whole system blows up and everyone gets poor except for the billionaires. A countermovement said if we all work together, we can actually lessen the risk to all of us, and those ideas become Social Security. In the Social Security Act, there was also supposed to be national health care, because everyone saw that you can’t actually have security if you can go bankrupt by getting sick or injured. So, the original intent of Social Security was a big and expanding system of economic security for everyone in this country, and that is an important thing to remember when we’re talking about Social Security. It’s not just the system that eliminates or reduces your poverty to the same levels as the general population—which is too high, but it’s still not one in two. Also, Social Security didn’t do it alone for seniors, because we don’t really see the reduction to average numbers until we also get Medicare some decades later. It really is true that you can’t have economic security without that health component.

ROBINSON

Social Security is an achievement that was the culmination of a decades-long struggle. At the turn of the century, the situation is really desperate for people who can’t earn a living through labor; for the old and sick, there’s nothing there for them, and so there’s a fight. And it is also the case that, going back to those times, the right has always despised the idea of having the government care for people who cannot earn a living through their labor (or who deserve to not have to labor because they worked for many decades). Can you talk about the early history of the right’s attempt to thwart these social insurance ideas?

LAWSON

Absolutely. It is important to always remember, and I think your audience understands, that it’s a dynamic system. The fight didn’t happen when we won it. It required decades of fighting, and the reactionary forces hated everything about the ideas that Frances Perkins and the other New Dealers were pushing. They hated them, because in their hearts, they knew that it worked to do this, but they don’t want it. These are the plutocrats and the robber barons, the ones who are having the parties where they have jewelry in sand and dig out diamonds during the dinner party.

The only way that works is if you have a mass of people to exploit. And so they don’t want people to have economic security. The rich were winning, and then the Great Depression happens. The whole idea of capitalism was, for the first time really, held up as not going to work. [Fascism and communism were growing in Europe.] The idea of the New Deal was actually aimed at creating a form of capitalism that could work—a democratic socialism or something of that nature—but a very uniquely American idea on that as well. That’s where the New Deal comes in, as a saving force that people have been demanding.

It was a compromise. There was a much larger push for a much greater redistributive policy that was incredibly popular at the time called the Townsend Plan being pushed by grassroots groups. But importantly, the Republican, plutocrat, and reactionary forces hated it all the way through, and fought it tooth and nail into passage. Then, the first presidential candidate after it passed, Alf Landon, ran his entire campaign against Social Security. That was his whole platform. He’s most famous, for people who remember his name, as the dude who lost nearly every single state.

They have always been against these programs and systems that work, and has always been a deeply unpopular position to be in, but they’ve gotten sneakier at hiding.

ROBINSON

Social Security became so popular, so quickly, after it was put into place and people could see the benefits. By the 1950s, Eisenhower was saying that anyone who ran against Social Security would never win an election in the United States. But that doesn’t mean that the fight to end or gut Social Security ended. Just because it is extremely popular, does not mean that the fight to end it has stopped. You testified to the Senate Budget Committee, and in your testimony, you cited extraordinary quotes from conservatives in the Reagan era, laying out what they call a “Leninist plan to end Social Security”—the revolutionaries working behind the scenes.

LAWSON

Yes, and that is where it moved to. This throws people off. In my testimony, I said as well, that Reagan actually was one of the last of the Republicans who wasn’t totally hell-bent on destroying Social Security. He actually was, but he got grilled for it so hard that he gave us some of our best quotes when he says, “Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit. It’s fully funded by the payroll tax.” It’s a great clip that I use to great effect still, because it’s Reagan.

But the truth is, it was big money that figured out how to take over or break our political system at the time. His win was a really shocking thing, but the money people and bag men behind him at the Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation were plotting: “Now we’ve got our guy in there, how are we going to destroy Social Security?” They didn’t actually get it done. They thought they were going to do it in 1983 when some legislative action had to happen, and they thought Reagan was going to be able to destroy it. But they run into the buzz saw of public opinion and end up not.

But he does put in a grand bargain. There were benefit cuts in that package, with our retirement age raised to 67. Many people still think it’s 65, but Reagan raised it two years, which is just a 7 percent benefit cut for each year that’s raised. It’s just a mathematical calculation—you don’t actually have to retire on your retirement age, it’s just when you get your full benefits.

So, it had a big benefit cut in it, and some tax side stuff and many other things as well. But it’s right after that they really hit the gas on this Leninist strategy of knowingly lying about what they’re trying to do in order to pit different parts of the population against each other. Pitting the old against the young by telling the old they’re definitely not going to cut benefits and not to worry, and instead, they’re only going to cut the young people’s benefits; and telling the young Social Security is going to run out of money, they’re never going to get anything, and so they need to cut old people’s benefits—really stoking that intergenerational warfare with a divide and conquer strategy. But the main purpose of that Leninist strategy document is to say: lie to the people about what it is that we’re trying to do, because we have to destroy and gut Social Security, and the only way to do it is to lie. That has been their mantra and MO up to now.

ROBINSON

It’s understandable why they feel hell-bent on destroying Social Security. As you point out, it’s not just to make exploitation easier—that’s part of it. But also, the success of Social Security disproves so many conservative talking points. It’s the government providing welfare or universal benefits to people, and it works. It makes people’s lives better and reduces poverty. One of the core conservative talking points is nothing government does can be done right. Everything it does to try and fix a social problem will inevitably backfire and cause disaster, misery, and bureaucracy. Social Security really undermines their case.

LAWSON

It totally undermines their case. The other one is efficiency. Social Security is the most efficient thing you can imagine. It does everything it’s meant to. It provides benefits for people who retire in old age; for people who face a life changing illness or accident, become disabled, and can no longer work; and for their surviving children in the loss of a breadwinner, oftentimes in a disaster or mass casualty event, like 9/11 or something like that. The first touch grieving families have from the federal government is a Social Security survivor’s benefit to minor children and military families. The list goes on and on about how massive this system is. For example, because of the survivors benefits, by magnitude of dollars, Social Security is the largest children’s program in the United States.

It’s a universal program of huge magnitude— there’s nothing really else like it, and it does all of that for less than 1 percent in administrative costs. Less than one penny of every dollar that you pay into the system is used to pay for the whole thing. And look at Wall Street—that’s why they hate it. They like people scrambling and not being able to have enough time and comfort to think about, “Why do these guys have all the money?” That’s true, but they’re also just straight up greedy. They look at it and think, “We should be the only ones who offer products like that, and tack on a 35 percent fee.”

by Nathan J. Robinson and Alex Lawson, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited/The Landlord's Game

'Live Free and Die'

'Live free and die'? The sad state of U.S. life expectancy (NPR)

Image: : Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker. Ashley Ahn/NPR

[ed. Why? Lots of reasons.]

The Full Keanu

Mellowest Guy on the Planet to Onscreen Killing Machine

Rare is the actor who gets to be a household name; rarer still are the ones with whom we’re on a first-name basis. Perhaps rarest of all is that star who so permeates popular culture - who seems so part and parcel of the air we breathe - that they start naming molecular compounds after him.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet the keanumycins, a group of recently discovered antimicrobial lipopeptides that ruthlessly kill harmful fungus the way the stoic assassin played by Keanu Reeves in the “John Wick” movies dispatches incoming villains. Why weren’t they named wickomycins? Even Reeves wondered as much in a Reddit posting, but his response to the question is such a compressed bouillon cube of all that is Keanu that it proves the researchers’ point and is worth quoting in full: “they should’ve called it John Wick … but that’s pretty cool … and surreal for me. But thanks, scientist people! Good luck, and thank you for helping us.”

There it all is: the earnestness, the goofy slacker-speak, the gracious and good-hearted honoring of other people’s good works. At the age of 58 and with nearly four decades of movies under his belt, Reeves has become beloved as an actor who doesn’t actually seem to act, a one-trick pony who can do just about anything - and an unstoppable on-screen killing machine who, in life, appears to be the mellowest guy on the planet. The man’s a Zen movie star, our National Dude, and with the release of the much-anticipated “John Wick: Chapter 4,” the affection in which a great many people hold him seems to be hitting a fresh peak. (...)

The movies - of which “John Wick: Chapter 4″ might be the last - posit a global criminal bureaucracy that’s all-encompassing and a little bit ludicrous, with bespoke villain hotels and job titles out of a steampunk novel (The Adjudicator! The Harbinger!). They’re really postmodern samurai films, with Wick as a lone ronin facing an endless oncoming army, a notion that pulls so many facets of this unique star into one concentrated, irresistible figure. The movies would be far lesser vehicles with anyone else in the lead.

by Ty Burr, Washington Post/ADN |  Read more:

Image: Murray Close/Lionsgate via AP

[ed. I thought Bob Odenkirk did a pretty good job in Nobody.]

Iconic ‘Great Wave’ Print Sells for $2.8 Million at Christie’s

Who knew it was still possible to collect an iconic work of art for under $3 million? Case in point: On Tuesday, Christie’s in New York sold Katsushika Hokusai’s “Under the Well of the Great Wave off Kanagawa” for $2.8 million—a new record high for the 1830-32 woodblock print. (...)

One of the most famous images in Asian art, the “Great Wave” poised to crest claw-like onto a trio of tiny boats with Mount Fuji in the distance has proven wildly popular since the artist created it at the age of 70 during the waning years of isolationist Edo, now Tokyo. Although intended to appeal to everyday audiences in Japan who bought and swapped such prints for small sums, Hokusai’s “Great Wave” influenced rivals like Utagawa Hiroshige and Utagawa Kuniyoshi, who soon attempted their own tsunami scenes, including the latter’s circa-1835 “Monk Nichiren Calming the Stormy Sea,” now owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Hokusai’s “Great Wave” eventually made its way out of cloistered Japan—likely as a sailor’s souvenir—and made an equally big splash among artists in Europe. Curators credit the “Great Wave” with helping inspire Claude Monet’s roiling coastal seascapes as well as Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” who substituted the wave itself in his composition for roiling, moonlit clouds. Claude Debussy’s three symphonic sketches from 1905, “The Sea,” also took Hokusai’s work as their muse. (...)

Wading into the Hokusai market requires navigating the vagaries of the prints market. Whereas paintings are prized as being one of a kind, the “Great Wave” was printed in untold multiples over several decades, with print runs extending long after Hokusai died in 1849. Hokusai, hailed as a celebrity in Edo during his lifetime for his detailed depictions of Japanese landscapes, was commissioned by publisher Nishimuraya Yohachi to create the “Great Wave.” But once the artist signed off on its woodblock design, the publisher had free rein to issue as many copies as possible. It’s unclear how many “Waves” exist in the world, so collectors must be wary of potential fakes.

Mr. Izzard said he’s probably sold 40 versions of the “Great Wave” over the course of his career, with prices easily tripling over the past decade for worthy versions, he said. The most recent version surpassed a “Great Wave” sold at Christie’s in 2021 for $1.5 million, over its $250,000 high estimate.

He said collectors tend to pay more for “Great Wave” prints whose lines remain crisply sharp because it means they were printed on the woodblock early on—as opposed to later, fuzzier versions created once the block itself had worn down from use. Another way to tell: Early versions, like the one Christie’s sold, show the subtle outline of a cloud against a pale pink sky.

by Kelly Crow, Wall Street Journal | Read more:
Image: Katsushika Hokusai

Magnum P.I.
via:

via:

ChatGPT Plugins

In line with our iterative deployment philosophy, we are gradually rolling out plugins in ChatGPT so we can study their real-world use, impact, and safety and alignment challenges—all of which we’ll have to get right in order to achieve our mission.

Users have been asking for plugins since we launched ChatGPT (and many developers are experimenting with similar ideas) because they unlock a vast range of possible use cases. We’re starting with a small set of users and are planning to gradually roll out larger-scale access as we learn more (for plugin developers, ChatGPT users, and after an alpha period, API users who would like to integrate plugins into their products). We’re excited to build a community shaping the future of the human–AI interaction paradigm.

Plugin developers who have been invited off our waitlist can use our documentation to build a plugin for ChatGPT, which then lists the enabled plugins in the prompt shown to the language model as well as documentation to instruct the model how to use each. The first plugins have been created by Expedia, FiscalNote, Instacart, KAYAK, Klarna, Milo, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Speak, Wolfram, and Zapier.

by OpenAI |  Read more:

Image: ChatGPT

[ed. Well, that didn't take long. The first thing you do with any new technology is, obviously, design new ways to sell things to people (after experimenting with various applications to porn). I guess now we'll be able to buy all kinds of new apps for our AI. Great. See also: this Twitter thread.]

Cherry Blossom Season in Japan

Robin Rohwer
Mom asked, "I wonder when cherries bloom in Japan?" So I found 1200 years of data online and made her a plot.
via (Twitter)

Half An Hour Before Dawn In San Francisco

I try to avoid San Francisco. When I go, I surround myself with people; otherwise I have morbid thoughts. But a morning appointment and miscalculated transit time find me alone on the SF streets half an hour before dawn.

The skyscrapers get to me. I’m an heir to Art Deco and the cult of progress; I should idolize skyscrapers as symbols of human accomplishment. I can’t. They look no more human than a termite nest. Maybe less. They inspire awe, but no kinship. What marvels techno-capital creates as it instantiates itself, too bad I’m a hairless ape and can take no credit for such things.

I could have stayed in Michigan. There were forests and lakes and homes with little gardens. Instead I’m here. We pay rents that would bankrupt a medieval principality to get front-row seats for the hinge of history. It will be the best investment we ever make. Imagine living when the first lungfish crawled out of the primordial ooze, and missing it because the tidepool down the way had cheaper housing. Imagine living on Earth in 65,000,000 BC, and being anywhere except Chicxulub. [ed. asteroid impact crater, Yucatan Peninsula.]

Everyone here thinks the world will end soon. Climate change for the Democrats, social decay for the GOP, AI if you’re a techbro. Everyone here is complicit in their chosen ending - plane flights, porn, $20/month GPT-4 subscriptions. “We have walked this path for too long, and everything else has faded away. We have to continue in wicked deeds [...] or we would have to deny ourselves.”

The sky is still dark, but the streets begin to stir. The Muni slithers past a line of self-driving cars wearing lidars like silly hats. The few visible human commuters pump thick black Arabian hydrocarbons into their vehicles, or thick black Ethiopian methylxanthines into their bodies. The city is a machine made of submachines, each with its own fuel. A particle accelerator, a summoning circle, a stargate, choose your favorite megastructure that calls up things of dubious put-downability.

Somewhere to the south, Ray Kurzweil walks into his office at Google. Twenty years ago, he conjectured that all human history - no, all evolutionary and geologic history - was a series of accelerating movements, which would crescendo at the end of time in approximately 2029. Six years to go. San Francisco doesn’t feel like the sort of place willing to wait another six years. The doomed summoning-city at the end of time seethes with palpable impatience. Too much Ethiopian methylxanthine, that’s my diagnosis. It feels eerie and unreal in the darkness, like everything is underwater, and I remember Poe:

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.

A Muslim woman walks by in traditional dress, followed by a dark black man in African garb. All clothing sends a message; theirs is “everything that ever happened anywhere in the world however far away has converged here for this moment; it was all for this.” A crazy person walks by, mumbling to himself. We nod at him and let him pass; he seems to know the score. Here we have all gathered, abandoning our green and pleasant homes in Pakistan or Nigeria or Michigan to see the doomed summoning-city at the end of time.

 

by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. Then again, there's always L.A. (Randy Newman/YouTube).]

via:

Dr. Anthony Fauci Would Like to Set the Record Straight

In a wide-ranging interview with Rolling Stone, Fauci discussed everything from the lessons he learned from his father to the lab-leak theory and possible origins of the Covid pandemic.

How’s retirement going for you? What are you liking about it and what are you not liking about it?

You know, it’s interesting because it’s not “retirement” in the sense of not doing things. I was at the NIH for 54 years, and I was the director of the Institute for 38 years, so I stepped down from those official government roles — and also being the chief medical advisor to President Biden — but the things I’m doing right now are the continuation of commitments I made when I was the director. I say “retirement” tongue-in-cheek, because when I decided to step down at the end of 2022, it was not with the intention of essentially going to play golf, going to a beach, or getting a boat and sailing around the world, which I couldn’t do even if I wanted to since I don’t like sailing. [Laughs] What I’ve done is I’ve been giving a number of lectures, writing a number of prospectives and commentaries, and I very likely will associate myself with a university medical center. I will stay in Washington, D.C. I’ve been here 54 years and don’t see myself physically leaving. It isn’t really retirement.

You mention in the documentary how, during your time under Trump, you would regularly receive late-night calls from a blocked number that was always Trump, who would then proceed to berate you for clarifying the disinformation he spread about Covid. What was the wackiest late-night call you got from Trump?

Well, I wouldn’t say “wacky.” It just was one of those things where the tension between me and the president — less so the president than the people around him, but he felt strongly about [Covid] — put me in this uncomfortable position. We’d be up there on the podium of the press room in the White House, and the president would get up and say something like, “Hydroxychloroquine is going to be a cure,” or “the virus is going to disappear like magic next month,” and then, since I would be standing there with him, the press would say, “What do you think, Dr. Fauci?” And, in order to preserve my own personal and professional integrity, but more importantly to fulfill my obligation to the American public as a public health official, I had to do something very uncomfortable, which was say, “No I’m sorry, I disagree. Hydroxychloroquine does not work. And it won’t disappear like magic.” Then, the press would call me up and ask me to amplify on that, and I would go through the data on why it’s clear that this isn’t going to disappear, and why there’s no evidence whatsoever that hydroxychloroquine, or bleach, or anything else works. [Trump] would read that in the paper and call me and go, “Why can’t you be more positive about it?” and my response would be, “Gulp, I’m sorry I can’t be, because I need to be responsible about it.”

You looked like your soul was leaving your body during those press conferences.

Yup. Yup… It’s uncomfortable because the far-right have interpreted that as I was nefariously trying to harm Trump, which absolutely was the furthest thing from the truth. I’m fundamentally about science. So, they didn’t understand that I didn’t like the fact that I had to get up and contradict the President of the United States. It’s not like I did it, went home to my wife, and said, “Hey, look what I did today!” That’s not how it happened. It was a very uncomfortable situation to be in. (...)

Do you feel like we’re taking Covid seriously enough right now in America? Most of the country just seemed to reach the point of “enough is enough,” and the Biden administration even declared the pandemic “over.”

Well, I think we have to put it in the context that we’re in an unprecedented situation. In 1918, the historic pandemic influenza was even worse than this. It killed 50-100 million people worldwide. But we’ve never had a situation as serious as this that’s lasted now going into its fourth year. We are in year four. It started in January of 2020. Having said that, we are tired of Covid. Everybody wants to put Covid in the rearview mirror and say, “We’re done with it,” so it’s a natural, understandable, though not necessarily correct viewpoint that we’re out of the woods. One thing is true: We’re much better off now than we were a year and a half ago. A year and a half ago, we were getting 800,000-900,000 infections and 3,000-4,000 deaths. Today, we’re having 300-400 deaths a day. Even though that’s much better than where we were, it’s not where the endgame should be. Because that means you’re talking about up to 3,000 deaths per week, which is really a high level. So, to your point: Are we underestimating Covid now? Yes, because we’re so used to it that we’re accepting a level of infection and death that under any other circumstance would be alarming. (...)

There’s a candid moment in the documentary where you apologize for your messaging on masking early on in the pandemic. On March 8, 2020, you said, “Right now, in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks.” Wouldn’t common sense lead you to believe that masking was good, since it was so effective in battling SARS-CoV-1?

The point I was trying to make was that my statements in January, February, and early March were based on data as we knew it. We did not know aerosol transmission occurred. We did not know that 50 to 60 percent of the transmission were from those asymptomatic. We were told there was a shortage of masks. There were no studies to show that masks actually work. So, when I said, “I don’t think people should be wearing masks,” I based that on the data that we had. However, as the months went by and it became clear, a) that there’s no shortage of masks, b) aerosol transmission is important, c) many studies show that masks work, and d) 50 to 60 percent of the transmissions occur from someone with no symptoms, I changed my mind and said masks should be worn. You can say that’s flip-flopping — I guess you could — but it really is following the data. Now, the reason that I sort of apologized in the documentary is about something you said: Common sense should have told us early on that you’re not sure masking works, but why not wear ‘em? That’s probably what I should have said back then. Common sense should have told us early on that it can’t hurt and likely can help.

by Marlow Stern, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty

Trump Asked Supporters to Take to the Streets

By the early evening of the prophesied day of former President Donald Trump’s detainment—Tuesday, March 21—defeat was hanging heavy in the air. A few intrepid news crews were still trying to report live from Collect Pond Park, a pondless square of green space and concrete that faces the art deco fortress of the Manhattan District Criminal Courthouse building. This courthouse may, or may not, book Trump in the next few days on charges of cooking the books to pay a porn star to shut up, back in 2016. At this point, it might be easier to count the number of politicians who haven’t hushed up a sex scandal using shady money than the ones who have, but here we are nonetheless. The number of presidents who schemed for months to hold onto power after losing an election still stands at one, and it seems to be the liberal consensus that one criminal charge is as good as another.

Let’s get you caught up on the pageantry of waiting outside a courthouse in New York City for Donald Trump to get arrested. There are police barricades. There are policemen. What there haven’t been, to speak of, are the protesters that Trump summoned to this spot—there are perhaps two at this point, though it’s hard to tell for sure. There are no Trump flags here, no signs, no bombastic speeches about God and country and freedom.

The absence of anything resembling news complicates things significantly for on-the-ground reporting, but the assembled news anchors are doing their best. “Police are on high alert for—” an Australian woman says into the camera. Then she falters; then she starts again. The situation behind her can’t be helping her concentration; a retired Marine is loudly dressing down the tiny remaining pocket of dejected, signless demonstrators. “This ain’t Trump’s world! This is God’s world, motherfucker! Fuck Trump! Fuck Trump! Fuck YOU!”

I first encountered the retired Marine on Monday evening, when members of the New York Young Republican Club gathered to make their grievances known. At 6:00 p.m., the park was chaos, a riotous crush of bodies jockeying to bring their message to the world. Unfortunately for the young Republicans of New York, those bodies belonged not to furious young conservatives but the media. At least 200 of them swarmed the few protesters present, microphones outstretched, maneuvering in vain to find a camera angle that captured the demonstrators without a thousand obvious press members standing in the background.

Toward the edge of the fray, an earnest man in a brown coat with a hand-lettered sign with three lines that read “Alvin Bragg / Releasing The Violent / Prosecuting Political Enemies” spoke to one reporter after another, each circling and waiting for the crew in front to finish before they pounced. Suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, his words ran out. “I’m sorry,” he said after a few seconds. “I’ve been talking for hours. I’ve been here since noon.” He tried feebly to extricate himself, but the woman currently interviewing him begged him to answer just one more question. And so it went, crew after crew: a special kind of hell.

A half-hour later, the starving media had figured out a more orderly formation for feeding. A sardine-packed semicircle pressed relentlessly into the tiny cohort of Young Republicans who had answered Trump’s call to PROTEST and TAKE OUR NATION BACK. The club’s leadership delivered speeches into a bouquet of microphones. I could hear none of it, on account of the soundproofing crush of press bodies and also the retired Marine, who wanted them to leave. “You should go to Buffalo Wild Wings!” he shouted in a booming voice doubtless crafted through decades of military service. “Donald Trump don’t even know your name. Fuck outta here. Fuck Trump. Fuck you!”

New York City is uniquely unsuited to a MAGA rally. Its citizens infamously have no time for bullshit, and conservative news stories about a murder on every street corner and a needle in every arm have terrified many Patriots with long histories of Facebook posts regarding a certain Tree of Liberty and its thirst for patriot and tyrant blood. The city is large, it’s loud, and people are spectacularly good at minding their own business. It’s a hard place to impress. (...)

This is what happens when you tell your supporters to rally for you and then they get arrested en masse and then you leave office without pardoning them. All of Trump’s boldest soldiers are in jail, headed to jail, or terrified of going to jail. Much of the hard-core alt-right remembers and is vocally bitter about this, but everyone else has largely reached an undeclared yet firm position on the subject. We’ll support you, Mr President, but don’t expect us to show up for you anymore.

by Laura Jadeed, TNR |  Read more:

Image: Fatih Atkas

[ed. Sorry... can't help it. Sometimes you just need a good laugh.]

Everything You Think You Know About Homelessness is Wrong

There are few topics I can think of that break people’s brains more than the topic of homelessness. A failure or unwillingness to carefully look at the data has led countless people to believe that the primary drivers of homelessness are drugs, mental health, poverty, the weather, progressive policies, or virtually anything and everything that isn’t housing. And while some, but not all, of the aforementioned factors are indeed factors in homelessness, none of them, not a single one of them, are primary factors. Because if you want to understand homelessness, you have to follow the rent. And if you follow the rent, you will come to realize that homelessness is primarily a housing problem. (...)

Because unlike poverty and mental illness and drug abuse and weather and welfare benefits and other factors, the places that have the highest housing costs, and the least housing supply, have the largest homeless populations:

In literally any other realm, this would come as no surprise. You can’t have what you can’t afford. If someone says, “I want a $2000 laptop, but can’t afford it,” nobody would find that hard to believe. But if someone says, “I really want the single largest and most crippling expense known to man, housing, but can’t afford it,” for some bizarre reason people would say, “that’s not true!,” or “correlation isn’t causation,” or “homelessness isn’t a housing problem,” or something patently insane. As I said before, the topic of homelessness breaks people’s brains.

Everything you think you know about homelessness is wrong (Noahpinion/Aaron Carr)

Image: Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

When's a Good Time? (How About Never?)

Larry Summers Says Now Is Not The Time For ‘Moral Hazard Lectures’ About Bailouts

Lawrence Summers, an economist who worked in the Clinton and Obama administrations, has been tweeting up a storm this weekend, advocating for a complete bailout of Silicon Valley Bank, which collapsed on Friday after a bank run reportedly led by billionaire Peter Thiel. But Summers doesn’t want to hear any “moral hazard lectures,” as he puts it, about the risks of helping companies that had accounts with SVB.

“I hope and trust that the authorities are on a path to doing what is necessary to restore confidence. Acting decisively and rapidly is both the cheapest for taxpayers and the best for the economy. Failure to act strongly enough would be a Lehman-like error,” Summers tweeted on Sunday.

Summers, a man who helped repeal the Glass-Steagall Act while Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton, also says any other banks should get help to protect the U.S. banking system more broadly.

“It is a clear imperative that all #SVB segregated assets and uninsured deposits be fully backed by Monday morning. Also imperative that sufficient support be provided to other banks to insure full availability of deposited funds across the banking system,” Summers tweeted.

Anticipating the reaction Summers would surely receive to such a strong call for government intervention to ensure that companies still had all their money, Summers tweeted that he didn’t want to hear any lectures about “moral hazards.”

“This is not the time for moral hazard lectures or for lesson administering or for alarm about the political consequences of ‘bailouts’,” Summers tweeted, putting “bailouts” in scare quotes despite the fact that he was proposing a bailout by the simplest definition possible. (...)

Oddly enough, Summers doesn’t believe the collapse of SVB is a “systemic risk,” which would seemingly contradict the argument that the bank needs an immediate bailout.

Summers also took a very different attitude when the people who might get a “bailout” where average Americans with college loan debt. Back in 2022, Summers tweeted against student loan relief, arguing that money for that relief would be better spent on allowing people who couldn’t afford to go to college a new opportunity to go to college—precisely the idea behind student loans to begin with.

by Matt Novak, Forbes |  Read more:

Image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty

[ed. See also: Learning from Silicon Valley Bank's apologists (Pluralistic):]

"Listen: people aren't pissed off about the bailout because they want startups to fail. They're pissed off because they are living in the century of "socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor":

They're pissed off because the Treasury official who presided over the theft of millions of houses by corrupt, bailed-out banks after the 2008 Great Financial Crisis and then wrote academic articles defending the decision to "foam the runways" for the banks with everyday Americans' homes is about to join the Federal Reserve Board"

Also: Every Libertarian Becomes a Socialist The Moment The Free Market Screws Them (Current Affairs).

Everybody Knows

Seven years ago, I called Leonard Cohen's Everybody Knows "the perfect anthem for our times."

Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows (...)

That was just after Cohen died, and while the world seems to want to settle on Hallelujah as his totemic song, Everybody Knows keeps inserting itself into the discourse, in the most toxic, hope-draining way possible. Whenever some awful scandal involving the great and the good breaches, we're told that "everybody knew" already, so let's move on.

This current has been running through our society for decades now. Remember when the Snowden leaks hit and a yawning chorus of nihilists told us that they knew already and so should anyone else with the smallest iota of sophistication? Back then Jay Rosen coined a rejoinder to this counsel of despair: "Don't savvy me" (...)

Everybody knows. It's what we heard after the Panama Papers. Swissleaks. Luxleaks. The Paradise Papers. Everybody knows! It's what the nothing-to-see-here crowd said about Propublica's explosive IRSLeaks, back in 2021:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/15/guillotines-and-taxes/#carried-interest

The leaks revealed the tax-dodges of the richest and most powerful people in America, which were jaw-dropping in their audacity and shamelessness. Sure, maybe you suspected that the 400 richest people in America paid less tax than you – but did you really guess that the means by which they did this was through taking massive deductions on their elite hobbies? (...)

Propublica isn't done with the IRS Files. Today, they published a long investigation into ultra-rich corporate executives who buy and sell their competitors' stock for massive profits with suspiciously precise timing. The data comes from 1099-B filings, which brokerages file with the IRS with each trade, but which the IRS doesn't share with the SEC:

https://www.propublica.org/article/secret-irs-files-trading-competitors-stock

Here are some examples:

Ohio billionaire August Troendle, CEO of Medpace, repeatedly bought and sold shares of $Syneos – his company's archrival, timing the transactions with a management shakeup that dropped the stock by 16% in one day, and an SEC investigation that crushed Syneos's stock by 25%. His precision timing made him at least $2.3m in profit.

Isaac Larian, CEO of Bratz-maker MGA, made $28m trading shares in Mattel, MGA's nemesis and frequent litigant – during a period when Mattel stock crashed by 57% (!). Larian boasts that "I made a LOT more money shorting Mattel stock than they did running a $4.5 billion toy company."

Larian's trades also involved some very precise timing. Sometimes, he took positions just before his own company announced its upcoming products, and others positions immediately preceded major disclosures from Mattel. Larian's subordinates told Propublica that he is "is a boss with an endless appetite for information about his company and its competitors, constantly grilling subordinates on minutiae about the industry."

Larian couldn't explain the timing of these trades. His lawyer told Propublica that it was "false and defamatory" to suggest that he "possessed material, nonpublic information that Larian knew was obtained in breach of a duty."

Next up is Gerald Boelte, founder and chair of the massive oil company LLOG. LLOG partners with other companies for its oil drilling. Companies like Stone Energy. Boelte bought a huge position in Stone the day before the company's 2015 earnings report, in which they revealed an increase their reserves' value, pulling in a 65% one day profit. He'd never bought shares in Stone before.

Boetle told Propublica, "I do not and have never traded on any material, non-public information of competitors, business partners or others… Any implication that I was investing based upon advance knowledge is therefore clearly false."

Jim Sankey is CEO of Invue. He bought $3.2m worth of shares in his rival Checkpoint, while checkpoint was in secret negotiations to be acquired by CCL Industries. Sankey was already thoroughly connected to Checkpoint, having sold a $150m product line to them in 2007. There's no record that he'd ever traded Checkpoint before. He made $2.3m. Sankey says "he did not know Checkpoint was going to be acquired." He says that his company was not approached by Checkpoint as a potential acquirer.

Barry Wish was a board member of Ocwen, a company he co-founded. After the Great Financial Crisis, Ocwen bid unsuccessfully to buy $215b worth of Bank of America mortgages. The winning bidder was Nationstar. Three weeks before Nationstar's winning bid was announced, Wish bought $600k worth of Nationstar shares. After the bid was announced, he sold them for for a $157k profit.

Wish told Propublica that he never traded competitors' stock: "No, not at all." Propublica read him the details of the trade from his leaked 1099-B. He said "You might see it, but I don’t have any recollection" and hung up.

Steven Grossman is a cardboard heir – a nepobaby who inherited Southern Container Corp from his grandpa. After he sold the company to Rock-Tenn for $1b in 2013, he stayed on as a senior exec. Over the next 5 years, he traded large blocks of shares in Rock-Tenn's competitors, companies like Temple-Inland, a company that he made a 37% profit on after its acquisition was announced in 2011, one week after Grossman started buying its shares.

Grossman falsely told Propublica, "I haven’t traded stock since then." IRS records show that Grossman continued to trade. Grossman also told Propublica that he had no role with Rock-Tenn, despite being on their payroll for five years. When asked about his extremely lucky timing buying and selling Temple-Inland, he said "That was 10 years ago" and hung up.

As Propublica's Robert Faturechi and Ellis Simani write, Securities regulations have their origins in the crash of 1929, and the subsequent collapse in confidence in markets and capitalism, the sense that the system was rigged for the wealthy and political insiders. That is a pretty good summation of sentiment today:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/15/mon-dieu-les-guillotines/#ceci-nes-pas-une-bailout

It's not just that corporate executives are corrupt, it's that they're lavishly, shamelessly, endlessly, incorrigibly corrupt. 

by Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Did Everyone Buy a Guitar in Quarantine or What?

To some people, guitars are almost as essential as toilet paper. While the Covid-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on the global economy, seriously hurting and shuttering many businesses, some companies — like Amazon and Procter & Gamble, for example — posted jaw-dropping financials. And in a less predictable turn of events, it appears the same can be said for major music retailers.

In conversations with Rolling Stone, instrument sellers Sweetwater, Guitar Center, and Reverb reported a bang-up year for online sales. In 2020, online-only store Sweetwater surpassed $1 billion in revenue for the first time in the company’s 42-year history. It also served over 1.5 million customers in 2020, up from a million in 2019. CEO Chuck Surack says shipping out 15,000 to 20,000 orders a day was normal for most of the year, resulting in about a 40 percent increase from the previous year. And when “Black Friday stuff picked up” the numbers increased to 22,000 to 24,000 orders a day, peaking at about 30,000.

While the Etsy-owned Reverb — an online-only marketplace similar in design to Etsy, but for musical equipment — has not yet released its gross merchandise sales (GMS) data for the fourth quarter, CEO David Mandelbrot tells Rolling Stone that Reverb saw its highest quarterly GMS yet in 2020’s second quarter. And the third quarter numbers were up more than 30% compared to the same period last year.

Even Guitar Center — the only one of these three with brick-and-mortar locations — saw an uptick, despite filing for bankruptcy to reorganize debt. While Guitar Center doesn’t share exact revenue figures, its chief marketing and communications officer Jeannine Davis D’Addario says Guitar Center’s online business has “been booming as consumers visit significantly more frequently, with sales up substantially in most categories compared to 2019.” According to Guitar Center, online sales more than doubled in 2020 when compared to 2019. (...)

Guitars gone wild

All three retailers report that the guitar was the most popular product they sold in quarantine. “Based on what we saw in 2020, one thing is certain: The guitar is thriving,” says Reverb’s Mandelbrot. “Orders and searches for guitars have been up significantly — including an increase in searches for popular guitar brands like Fender, Gibson, and Taylor — as well as searches for music gear that you pair with your guitar, like amps, guitar straps, effects pedals, and more.” Both searches for acoustic guitars and acoustic guitar amps were up by 50 percent year over year.

He adds that living-room-friendly acoustic guitars like the Taylor GS-Mini have been undeniably popular, but Reverb “continued to sell some really rare vintage guitars — like a beautiful 1965 Fender Stratocaster that Brian Setzer sold through his Reverb Shop.” Limited edition, boutique pedals also did particularly well. Mandelbrot says the selling price of classic and rare effects pedals from vintage brands like Klon and Mu-Tron went up “significantly” in 2020. And drops of limited-edition pedals on Reverb sold out within minutes and, in one case, in less than a minute.

“We’re now selling a thousand guitars every day,” adds Sweetwater’s Surack. “It blows me away.” In 2019, Sweetwater had days where it would peak at 800 or 825 guitars, but one thousand has since become the daily average.

Fender’s EVP of Sales for the Americas and EMEA Tammy Van Donk describes 2020 as a “roller coaster ride” for the guitar industry. “Demand evaporated in March, rebounded in April and exploded from May on,” she explains. “2020 ended up being the best year in [Fender’s] history with record sales of over $700 million, up 17% from 2019.” Gibson CEO James ‘JC’ Curleigh agrees, making a Dickensian reference to 2020: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” he says. “April, May, and June were a challenging three months. But since then, we’ve been more than making up for it.” Gibson’s fiscal year ends in March, so annual numbers aren’t final yet but Curleigh says Gibson has seen a “steady increase in sales and growth” since August.

About a year ago, roughly a third of guitars were being sold online, according to Curleigh. And at that time, Curleigh says he predicted it would be about five years before it became a 50/50 dynamic between brick-and-mortar and virtual sales. “What we’re seeing now is that is that the five-year prediction of 50/50 is happening now,” he tells Rolling Stone. “Even in a post-Covid world, I think the guitar and music industry will settle into a 50/50 balance of online to in-store… People talk about necessity being the mother of invention. Well, necessity was the mother of access and acceleration for guitars.”

In with the new

Retailers also noticed an uptick specifically in new customers and beginner musicians that continued through 2020, meaning that their reach is now wider than it was at the start of last year.

Guitar Center’s D’Addario says that while guitar sales continue to increase, that’s especially clear with “beginner instruments at entry price points, particularly our Guitar Center Exclusive instruments, which have been selling out given their high quality to value.” She adds that the company has seen an increase in purchases among women and younger players. “With 40+-year-old players, we saw increased interest in learning to play an instrument,” D’Addario continues. “Additionally, we continued to see increases in our lessons students in both the 11-to-15 age range and over-40-year-old during shelter-in-place.”

Reverb’s Mandelbrot points out that people buying recording equipment — either for podcasting or DIY music-making — was a big trend, but the increase in beginners was even bigger. Based on conversations he’s had with customers, he’s found that needs for stress relief and breaks from looking at screens all day inspired a lot of newcomers. “We talked to a freelancer in Brooklyn who was having trouble finding work at the onset of the pandemic, so he found a mandolin on Reverb to help him occupy his mind and his time,” says Mandelbrot, who adds that basic instruments can act as a gateway drug to a seemingly endless world of gear. “People who bought music gear on Reverb for the first time in Q2 and Q3 continue to return to Reverb to browse for and buy music gear,” he says. (...)

“A lot of people said, ‘Hey, I’ve always wanted to play guitar,” says Gibson’s Curleigh. “So, guess what? All of a sudden, beginners came into to it. Intermediate players who had sort of gotten to a certain level, picked their guitar up again and started playing. And advanced and expert players were like, ‘Oh, my god, I have a wish list for this guitar. Life’s too short not to have my dream guitar. I’m going to buy it.’ The whole spectrum started taking action around that July, August time… I fundamentally believe, in the last year, more guitarists have been created and engaged than in the previous 10 years combined. If we manage this dynamic as an industry, we’ve got a whole new generation of guitarists for the next 10, 20, 30 years.”

by Samantha Hissong, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: Reverb

[ed. Except... where are all the great guitar songs these days?]

Americans Don’t Care About the Iraqi Dead. They Don’t Even Care About Their Own.

If you write a 4,500-word article about a 20-year war, you might want to mention how many people were killed.

While that seems obvious, Max Boot, an energetic backer of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, has written a lengthy article on the war’s 20th anniversary that fails to note the number of deaths. The toll is in the hundreds of thousands, if not more — the carnage is too vast for an exact count — but Boot merely mentions a “high price in both blood and treasure” and quickly moves on.

How high a price? Whose blood? There is no explanation.

Boot is hardly the only anniversary writer unable to mention the apparently unmentionable. Peter Mansoor, a retired colonel with several deployments to Iraq, likewise failed to squeeze a reference to the death toll into his 2,000-word assessment of what happened. Mansoor’s story, like Boot’s, was published by Foreign Affairs, which is funded by the Council on Foreign Relations and is pretty much the true north of establishment thinking in Washington, D.C.

Their failure, which is replicated in about 99 percent of America’s discussions about Iraq, is a lot more than sloppy journalism. The Pentagon and its enablers prefer to turn the killing and maiming of civilians into an abstraction by calling it “collateral damage” so that it becomes a detail of history that we can pass over.

Ignoring civilian casualties is a necessary act of erasure if you wish to avoid a frank assessment of not just the Iraq War, but also the legacy and future of U.S. foreign policy. If you specify those casualties — which is not just hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis in an illegal war begun with lies, but also millions of people injured, forced out of their homes, and traumatized for the rest of their lives — the discourse must change. The “high price” reveals itself as so grotesque that discussions can no longer center around the finer questions of how to better fight an insurgency or why “mistakes were made” by supposedly well-intentioned leaders. It becomes a matter of when do the trials start; who should be in the dock with George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice; how large should Iraq’s reparations be; and when can we impose on ourselves something like the constitutional ban on the use of military force to settle disputes that we imposed on Japan after World War II?

Killing Ourselves

Until Covid-19 came along, I thought the willful ignorance of Iraqi casualties was principally a matter of Americans not caring about the deaths of foreigners, especially those who are not white and not Christian. And that’s certainly true: We don’t care enough about those deaths, even if (or especially if) we are responsible for them. But the larger truth is that we also don’t even care about the deaths of our own citizens. Choices have been made that caused America to have one of the highest per-capita rates of Covid deaths, with more than a million dying so far, and probably another 100,000 dying this year. The numbers tick upward, but most of us hardly notice.

In addition to the Covid toll, there is also the violence America inflicts on itself with guns, cars, opioids, and a predatory health care system that yields the highest maternal mortality rate among the world’s richest nations. We are an exceptional nation but not in the way we have been told: America kills its own at rates that are far higher than peer nations. The situation is getting worse, not better, because life expectancy in the U.S. is plummeting while in comparable countries it is increasing.

It would take more than 4,500 words to get to the bottom of why America is so ruthless to itself as well as others. 

by Peter Maass, The Intercept |  Read more:

Image: Damir Sagolj/Reuters via Alamy
[ed. See also: "Trauma never goes away": as America forgets, Iraq war stays with U.S. Veterans; and, The architects of the Iraq war: where are they now? They’re all doing great, thanks for asking. (The Intercept).]

Explaining the Universe in One Small Step At a Time

[ed. Can't resist a beautiful illustration. See also: Baffled by black holes? Confused by quantum theory? Explaining the universe one small step at a time (The Guardian).
Image: Martin O'Neill/The Observer

What It Means to Be Woke

This week the conservative writer Bethany Mandel had the kind of moment that can happen to anyone who talks in public for a living: While promoting a new book critiquing progressivism, she was asked to define the term “woke” by an interviewer — a reasonable question, but one that made her brain freeze and her words stumble. The viral clip, in turn, yielded an outpouring of arguments about the word itself: Can it be usefully defined? Is it just a right-wing pejorative? Is there any universally accepted label for what it’s trying to describe?

The answers are yes, sometimes and unfortunately no. Of course there is something real to be described: The revolution inside American liberalism is a crucial ideological transformation of our time. But unlike a case like “neoconservatism,” where a critical term was then accepted by the movement it described, our climate of ideological enmity makes settled nomenclature difficult.

I personally like the term “Great Awokening,” which evokes the new progressivism’s roots in Protestantism — but obviously secular progressives find it condescending. I appreciate how the ‌British writer Dan Hitchens acknowledges the difficulty of definitions by calling the new left-wing politics “the Thing” — but that’s unlikely to catch on with true believing Thingitarians.

So let me try a different exercise — instead of a pithy term or definition, let me write a sketch of the “woke” worldview, elaborating its internal logic as if I myself believed in it. (To the incautious reader: These are not my actual beliefs.)

What is America all about, at its best? Equality and liberty. What is the left all about, at its best? Transforming those ideals into lived realities.

But this project keeps running into limits, disappointments and defeats. Everywhere you look, terrible disparities persist. And that persistence should force us to look deeper, beyond attempts to win legal rights or redistribute wealth, to the cultural and psychological structures that perpetuate oppression before law and policy begins to play a part. This is what the terminology of the academy has long been trying to describe — the way that generations of racist, homophobic, sexist, and heteronormative power have inscribed themselves, not just on our laws but our very psyches.

And once you see these forces in operation, you can’t unsee them — you are, well, “awake” — and you can’t accept any analysis that doesn’t acknowledge how they permeate our lives.

This means rejecting, first, any argument about group differences that emphasizes any force besides racism or sexism or other systems of oppression. (Indeed, the very measurement of difference — through standardized testing, say — is itself inevitably shaped by these oppressive forces.) Even differences that seem most obviously biological, like the differences between male and female athletes or the bodies that people find sexually attractive, should be presumed to be primarily culturally inscribed — because how can we know what’s really biological until we’ve finished liberating people from the crushing constraints of gender stereotypes?

It also means rejecting or modifying the rules of liberal proceduralism, because under conditions of deep oppression those supposed liberties are inherently oppressive themselves. You can’t have an effective principle of nondiscrimination unless you first discriminate in favor of the oppressed. You can’t have real freedom of speech unless you first silence some oppressors.

by Ross Douthat, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Sam Whitney/The New York Times

Every Break-Up You’ll Go Through Before You’re 30

Unless you’re sensationally uninvested in your own life, most people barrelling towards 30 have a bucket-list of sorts they hope to tick off before their 20’s ends. Maybe you want to move to Egypt, get a Husky or finally tell your boss where they can stick it.

Alongside this list of aspirational antics, there are all the bits you’re likely to go through whether you want them or not: Moving out, losing people you loved, having a job you don’t care for, mental health struggles. It’s a long list of undesirable, but important, experiences.

And if you’re dating – alongside various stages of commitment, casual dating, falling in love and fucking around – there’s one thing you’re almost guaranteed to go through: A break-up.

There are many types of break-ups, but most can be categorised into one of three groups: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

by Rachel Barker, Vice |  Read more:

Image: Dumitru Ochievschi

[ed. And some of us are lucky enough to experience all three, well past 30.]