the trick to avoiding completely failing at building your own cabin: be so utterly shit at DIY that the thought would never even occur to you https://t.co/FisOMsdjuf

— Faine Greenwood (@faineg) August 18, 2020

Same here. I’d be so abysmally terrible at this. I’d also probably die. It’d never occur to me to even try anything like this because the only outcome would be abject failure. Just as with math, it’s not a lack of confidence. No. Just a complete and utter lack of ability.

Me: My MacBook is so heavy.

Then watch McIntosh 1984 promotion video… pic.twitter.com/VdwVBlKVsX

— tkasasagi🐻@女子熊 (@tkasasagi) August 19, 2020

Oh, shit, I remember those cases for carrying the early Macs. I hadn’t thought of those in 30+ years. Huh.

So everyone is talking about UNC's COVID-19 mess – and all that criticism is perfectly valid.

But we also need to talk about why the uni-administration probably had no choice.

Buckle up and let's talk about university finances and the 4 horsemen of the academipocalypse. 1/lots?

— Bret Devereaux (@BretDevereaux) August 19, 2020

Good thread, but ignores one of the most — if not the most — important economic cause of this: student loans! Loans cause inflation, because in many cases (including this one), inflation is just a surfeit of money in a certain market.

For the past three decades, student loans have been easier to get and more prevalent than ever in history. Part of that is lower interest rates, part of that is subsidies, and part of that is just a cultural change. However, just a simple economic truism is that an increasing pool of money leads to an inflationary spiral.

And available money will not go unused, even if it doesn’t go to teaching. And that’s exactly what happened — it didn’t go to teaching. Instead, it was devoted to instantiating the administrative apparatuses that are now destroying universities, and those climbing walls, those deluxe gyms, all those amenities that are now de rigeur but were unknown even in the 1980s. It also becomes self-sustaining: as more money is available via student loans, universities add more admins and amenities as they realize they can raise tuition which will be covered by loans. As they then need to pay to maintain these new cost burdens, and to improve it to compete with other colleges, tuition rises again. As tuition rises, universities can then fund more of this useless stuff. But that then requires more and larger loans to pay for this increased tuition. And on and on, ad infinitum.

That’s just basic inflation, and a lot (I’d estimate 70%) of the rise in college costs are due to this loan-created inflationary spiral.

Who will the Democrats blame when they lose an election to an unpopular incumbent President presiding over the second Great Depression

— Defund the Police (@Fishbones2017) August 18, 2020

Bernie, of course. It’ll be Bernie and BernieBros.

This is a great piece, that really understands modern sexual politics and makes several important points that comprehends power better than any feminist or conservative examination. The below is one of the few pieces that realize that, sexually, young women hold vast power. Many young women know that, too, and so the, “Oh, I was just a little baby, I didn’t know what I was doing, tee-hee” is (mostly) just an effective smokescreen strategy to excuse bad behavior — now, strangely, enabled by over-35 women who absolutely despise the market competition.

Sexually speaking, there’s an order of magnitude more demand for young (18–23) women than men of that age, and so this period of time is unpleasant for most men. It’s so much so that societies have to invent ways to deal with it: prostitution is an old one, and martial culture (giving young men a source of worth) is another. College is yet another technique that tries to handle it, by culturally and geographically isolating 18–22 year olds so young men have a chance. Mostly, though, this problem is managed privately using wealth transfer, especially around social and cultural capital where there’s enough ambiguity to make it socially acceptable. Young men from privilege get set up, by their parents and inherited networks, with precocious career advancement to give them esteem, build their confidence, and make maximize their “eligibility” when they hit the golden score of male sexual attractiveness (25 to 44) and look for marital partners. The rest of the young men can go die, as far as conservative patriarchal societies like our late-stage corporate capitalism are concerned.

I like this because it doesn’t pity or condone the incels, but attempts to understand them. Their situation sucks, and even though they diagnose it incorrectly and have terrible solutions, the unfucked are correct in that they are fucked.

Incels are not the men running the world, of course. They’re not drinking any milkshakes. In fact, they’re triple-threat losers. They’re sexual losers because of their social alienation and self-sabotaging tendencies, perhaps inherited from our puritanical culture’s views of sex as dirty (amplified by an envy of the mature and less inhibited). They’re social losers because toxic masculinity says in no uncertain terms that low-status, unsuccessful men are worth less than garbage and ought to be viewed with suspicion. They’re economic losers because the high-autonomy middle-class jobs (which would be fantastic plum positions by today’s standards) have been replaced by technologically surveilled and menial subordinate work. They exhibit toxic masculinity in their odious attitudes toward women, but they’ve also been crushed by it.

When you realize that people like Amanda Marcotte and incels are two sides of the very same diseased coin, a lot becomes clearer. They both deserve one another.