The Fig Economy

Like @hurricanexyz.bsky.social emphasizes over and over, the constitution must be read first and foremost to *work*, like to *function*, and this reading would be the opposite.

Yes, almost certainly. Otherwise the president could manufacture a legislative majority or maybe supermajority by ejecting all retired officers in the opposing party. Ludicrous.

Maybe it’ll happen, maybe it won’t, but the modal expectation should be that these men are cowards, and that even imbeciles like them have some base understanding that this shit would blow up in their faces spectacularly.

I get that there is this obscure provision in the law allowing retired officers to be recalled to active duty and that the incompatibility clause could disqualify a federal legislator, but let’s be real: this would not be a small technocratic thing, but a declaration of civil war.

Do it, you cowards.

This is not, I hasten to add, a defense of the concept, execution, or follow-up to the wars of regime change in Iraq and Afghanistan.

These guys looked at the failures of Iraq and Afghanistan and concluded the problem was giving a shit what happened after we wrecked everything.

I am not a meat eater, but yes, cooking is as much about the meditative aspect of doing it (however that expresses itself) as it is about the end product.

I get it, I think most of the defenses of the current system are backfit to support something nobody in their right mind would design; still, I do like the idea of allowing early voters’ votes to change responsive to later developments.

All I want from a telescope is stabilization. I’m really terrible at that. It would be cool to have one that helped point in the direction of a thing I want to look at and tracked it to stay on it, but this doesn’t sound like that.

Want to develop a skill at this thing? Cool! We take out the part where you have to develop the skill!

Right, exactly. Like I’ve become so dependent on my backup cam that like if it broke, would I have to completely relearn that piece of how to drive, which I’ve known for a long time? Probably!

And I do get closer and closer every day to thinking that the ceding of those rote, low hanging fruit tasks to tech (stuff like turning lights on and off, setting timers, keeping appointments) hurts us more than it helps us.

AI enabled washing machine? Ok but you’re not lugging my laundry downstairs or folding it for me, which is 99.9% of what makes laundry an onerous task, so fuck off.

Leave aside the AI thing, this highlights the problem with so much in the tech “solution” space: at best it’s like setting timers or turning up or down heat automatically or something, but like anything that requires physical manipulation, you’ve still gotta do that.

It’s not to say I don’t get the frustration; it’s to say that a lot of stuff is collective action problems, and people’s ways of expressing that it’s not theirs to deal with can be not just unhelpful, but actively harmful.

I feel like even some of the expressions of disdain against those scripts and expressions of people straining at them wind up reinforcing them. “Oh you’re sad about this? Shut the fuck up, you’re on easy mode, you don’t get to be sad.” That’s the same thing largely as “emotions are for women.”

…like watching a football game.

Yeah, I kind of wonder this too. Like maybe it can be more common for people to be more open about whether this was an acceptable form of relationship for them at the outset, and find each other, and that’s good! I have a hard time seeing a broad social move toward sexual intimacy being viewed…

…sure, everybody deviates in some ways. They should have room to. I still mostly feel like the center of gravity would be in a not dissimilar place from wrongly enforced social norms. Maybe I’m wrong, if so that’s fine. Just a rough intuition.

I think I leave enough room for that in what I said above. I don’t know that I buy that all of these attitudes are 100% fully socially invented (nor do I think they’re all biological inevitability). What I meant when I say I think most people would fall mostly into those patterns is…

And I tend to think it’s like…people should be allowed to live how they want to live and not have to be shoved into boxes that don’t fit them, and that’s good, and also that most people would still fit into the regular socially dominant boxes from their own preference and that’s ok too.

Well that’s the thing, isn’t it? A relationship isn’t a codified contract, but it does come with certain rules and expectations, some of which we figure out as we go along and some of which change over time.

And like, most of the time, you’re gonna know if your partner is gonna have a problem with “I made out with someone else because it was fun” and if you do it anyway without navigating those issues and disengaging if it’s important enough to you, that’s a violation!

I don’t think it means either side of that conflict is inherently right or wrong, but I also don’t think there being a conflict over it is wrong.

But if it’s stepping on the rules that your partner believed underlay your relationship, then that’s just as much of a violation. Maybe not in the “I’m getting this from there because I’m not getting it here” sense, but in the “physical connection means a different thing to me than to you” sense.

Sure but different things are different. And we’ve all seen the Folger’s incest commercial; blood family relationships have lines too.

Or one party that knows they’re violating some rules makes up some arbitrary addenda to justify it to themselves, which can be done to obfuscate but can also be done because there really is care there and they don’t want to believe themselves to be in violation.

And all of it, I think, is largely about a violation of the rules that both parties agreed to at the outset; communication is often bad, though, and these rules remain implicit and both parties think they’re agreeing to different rules!

Either one treating it more lightly than the other, or one not communicating some needs going unfulfilled and going elsewhere to fill them.