I'm imagining a 2029 DOJ having to implement its own pay scale off the GS to hire enough attorneys to argue before dozens of series of grand juries until they can finally get indictments for made-up crimes, then failing to actually hire more attorneys bc Congress forgot to appropriate any new funds

and it's just incredibly rare for there to be too *few* forms associated with the administration of a program. the institutional incentives are all heavily skewed toward heavy over-compliance with regulations and directives, and against making things easy at POS. Jen Pahlka writes a lot on this

each added form increases administrative burden wrt the administration and interpretation of each form. this can be outweighed if whatever info the form gets you makes it easier to administer benefits, make adjudications, etc, but if you care about state capacity you generally really want less forms

What in the water in ~2004 made male liberals outnumber female liberals and female conservatives outnumber male ones?

New atheism? Gender differences in opposing the Iraq war? Frat humor in pop culture?

An out-of-nowhere, brief, fairly uniform shift in the ideological spectrum. just a bit bizarre

both Klein’s piece in the NYT and the Burgis/Day piece in Jacobin pretend they are about recognizing that each human life is a human life but actually what they are doing is validating the way some human lives are socially valued more highly than others

The example they set is white supremacist

yeah i think at least two "vibe shifts" are due to occur between now and 2029... like kinda unironically lol

Like the church has always relied on things like icons to appeal to the masses, sure, but I feel like people still acted like prayer, discernment, the sacraments, etc. were what was really core to the faith prior to, say, the Fourth Great Awakening.

Not YHWH sitting in space looking like Galactus

There's something about the ways Christiainity tries to stay relevant in an algorithmic age that feels so hollow and corrupt to me

!

I watched it in 2020, enjoyed it a lot, and then immediately forgot about it almost entirely bc it's never come up again for me (till now). High-quality movies made for streaming that might've become touchstones for a given genre, were they made 20/30 years ago, just fade into the aether now.

if I was to be very mean, I would say that some of the praise heaped upon Disco Elysium by gamers was because it forced them to read a grown-up novel for the first time ever, and if your brain has been rotted by gamer culture experiencing a very good novel will be ecstatic.

yes it very much is a problem! we’d do well to have closer empathetic relationships with the young girls and women in our lives and not engage in the broader culture of shaming of them either

sorry, I was ambiguous. I meant the discourse today (not this discussion between you and me), as a piece of the general liberal perception of teenage boys as budding monsters, functions mostly to shame young guys, and to encourage a broader regime of shaming. 20 yos also use the internet yknow

what we’re talking about isn’t “a conversation,” which basically necessarily entails first having a close, empathetic relationship with a specific teenage boy (which can be done whether you’re a man or a woman), this is acontextual shaming boys and young men as a class for wanting to have sex