Okay wait this brings up a point Dr. Richard D Wolff (americas leading Marxist economist) brought up in a lecture a while ago; economics needs an ethics review board.
Every other major discipline has an ethics review board. If youâre a doctor and prescribe a patient a lethal dose of the wrong medicine, you get disciplined. If youâre a biologist and commit animal cruelty, you get disciplined. If youâre a psychologist and conduct an unethical study, you get disciplined. If youâre an engineer and neglect safety standards when building a bridge, you get disciplined.
But if youâre an economist and your policies actively harm people in a demonstrable way, nothing happens. Itâs all just a âmatter of opinionâ
American and other western economists advised the Russian government on how to run the country following the end of the ussr and its estimated that the economic policies they recommended directly lead to the deaths of millions of people. And not a single economist so much as even lost their job.
Economics degrees also need courses on ethics and the real human impact of economic policies so that economists can learn how to avoid harm in the first place.
Recently, one of the most famous US economists posted a tweet sternly chiding the âhysteriaâ people were fostering in falsely claiming that inflation was bad in the United States. He included a graph that showed that in fact, prices for most things was down!
Except for groceries and utilities. The things that people actually need for even basic survival.
He did not seem to even understand that there could be any dissonance in his statement.
At best, economists get so caught up in numbers that they lose sight of the human costs of everything involved. At worst, and indeed frequently, they actively contribute to making things worse for the people already at the biggest disadvantages.
Villains in Addams Family movies go to really unnecessary lengths to defraud them of the family fortune. These people just give it away on whims all the time. If I just walked into the house and started wearing their clothes and spending their money, they wold start introducing me as Cousin Intruder and forget there was ever a time I didn’t live with them.
Gomez in particular would enjoy your boldness, Cousin Intruder.
Oh shit.
The Addams family loves and greets every person entering one of their homes.
The Addams family adopted or married every person wishing to stay.
This is why the Addams family is full of freaks.
Of course.
So what we’re saying is, tracing the Addams’ geneology is damn near impossible and it’s just as likely that no living member of the family is actually a blood relative of the people who originally held the family name?
What I’m hearing is that Batman is actually an Addams.
He most certainly is
I mean, considering if you look at it in the light of a different story, the near (actual, factual) homicidal level of bond and love the Addams have for each other, the idea that they’re all adopted, the way that Bruce is often portrayed as a bit of an aloof, smarmy smarm in private, the possibility that young Bruce might not be wholly appreciative of his extended family’s eccentricities, of which his parents are the mildest of the bunch, the idea that those two parents are (distantly) Addams’ and get gunned down, well.
[Gomez]: I came, I came as soon as I heard
[Bruce]: I…I told you never to come back, I said, I said you were weird
[Gomez]: Please, my boy, to compliment me when you are so wracked with grief. *clutching hug* Dear Thomas, dear Martha, so full of life…
[Bruce]: *extricating* They….they fell in front of me…while he laughed…with mother’s pearls…
[Gomez]: The fiend! This dishonor cannot stand!
[Bruce]: And I felt….I felt it well up inside me, a black blood welling up…
[Gomez]: Yes, dear boy…
[Bruce]: I….will be vengeance….
[Gomez]: Yes….
[Bruce]: I…I will be the night!
[Gomez]: Yes!
[Bruce]: I….I am an Addams!
[Gomez]: YES!
[Bruce]: I. AM. BATMAN. *lightning, thunder*
[Gomez]: YES, YES!!! My boy, the rivers will run red with wonderful blood!
[Alfred]: *sigh* I’ll put the tea on and grab the foils then, shall I, sirs?
I mean when you think about it, if Bruce Wayne is an Addams, everything he does makes sense. Gotham makes sense. Damian Wayne, trained vegetarian assassin, makes more sense if he’s an Addams.
Now that we have accepted this revelation, I want you all to think about a hypothetical situation in which Bruce brings Superman and Wonder Woman to meet the Addamses.
Alternate suggestion: after his parents were gunned down, and before the police arrived, a man on his way to the bathroom for a leak heard the gunshots and the screams, and being the sort of man who holds no fear of death or entertains any sort of disinclination to deliver a nice bit of torture or dismemberment or fisticuffs to someone who deserves it, Gomez Addams burst out the door into the alleyway, too late to do anything but comfort a traumatized boy whose eyes are filled with the sight of his parents’ blood.
His brand of comfort is considered highly unorthodox, but sometimes it’s just the sort of comfort a traumatized child needs, not too warm or too bright to be believed by someone who feels that the world will never be all right again, but the comfort of someone who has learned to walk with death, and even to dance, and by the time the police arrive, and the medics, and the coroners, and Alfred, Bruce Wayne is … not okay, at all, but a little less not-okay than he would be.
And Gomez is a wealthy man, if possessed of a rather eccentric reputation, and there is no doubting his kindness, so when the invitations start arriving for young Bruce to visit, to attend an All Hallows Eve party, to play with young Wednesday and Pugsley, to learn swordfighting or dancing or how to be a good host at a dinner party … Alfred sees no harm in letting his young charge go off to do so. Bruce always comes back a bit more settled, a bit more sure of himself, so they must be a good influence.
And when Bruce gets his idea about vengeance, and protection, and a giant bat suit, well. His mentor Gomez thinks it’s a delightful idea, here, there are live bats in the belfry if Bruce needs some references, and dead ones in taxidermied and articulated skeleton form all through the house if he wants to make anatomically correct wings, and a treasure trove of weaponry and interesting gadgets that Wednesday and Pugsley have been trying to kill each other with for years now, knock yourself out.
And nobody is prouder than Gomez when Batman brings his first sidekick home.
Besides providing text ID for the image, I really want to include the full quote leading up to it. This was the tail end of Samuel L. Jacksonâs recounting of his activism as a Black man who came of age during segregation in the U.S. Racism canât be divorced from classism.
You went to Morehouse, and I believe it was during college that you became more politically active. You were an usher at Martin Luther King, Jr.âs funeral. How did your activism first start?
â
I guess it happened when I was a freshman in college in the fall of â66. I have a cousin whoâs the same age as I am. He went to the army, I went to college. Three months later, he was dead, walking point in Vietnam.
And I met the first guys at Morehouse, these dudes with afros and fists made out of jump cord and all this other stuff, telling us that if we didnât stay in school, we were going to end up in the war and weâre going to be dead. And weâre like, âWhat fucking war?â So thatâs when I started paying attention to the war.
The civil rights movement was already happening. I was already connecting with people like Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown and those guys, and not specifically wanting to be part of Dr. Kingâs movement. I wasnât going to sit on some lunch counter and let somebody spit on me, hit me and do that shit. I was not a nonviolent protester.
So that was the beginning, basically, of my activism. Being a certain age and looking at the world and identifying it for what it is and what it becomes, which is why as soon as I hear âMake America Great Again,â I go, âWhen are we talking about again? Are we talking about back when we had apartheid?â I grew up in segregation in Tennessee. I went to school with Black kids âcause we couldnât go to school with white kids. I saw Klan marches and Klan rallies. So I know what America used to be. When I hear them say, âLetâs make it that again,â it just makes my blood boil.
[Image text: Iâm 74. I donât know how much longer Iâm going to be around here raising hell or doing what Iâm doing. But people need to start understanding that the economic gap is crazy. I pay an enormous amount of taxes, and itâs fine because I know I should. But why canât we get billionaires to pay their fucking taxes? If those motherfuckers paid their taxes weâd solve a whole bunch of shit. And they would still be richer than every motherfucker walking around them. /text]
You want some serious old fart advice? Never, ever lend your friends more money than you think you can lose permanently. I don’t fucking care if they say they’ll pay you back. I don’t care how small the amount is. Write that shit off as gone in your mind. It will eat at you forever if you don’t.
Some people say the same thing about family, but I think it applies more to friends. Family is (usually) held together by obligations the way friends aren’t. And money is a huge stressor in all kinds of relationships, not just romantic.
I’m not saying this to bum you out. I’m telling you because this is not something you want to learn on your own. Because it fucking sucks to realize it’s one reason you’re no longer friends, whether you were necessarily aware of it or not.
I generally go one step further: I do not lend friends money at all. I will give you what I can afford to give, and I ask you to pay forward what you can when you can, give to someone else who needs it. This policy has really served me well. When I’m giving money, I never have to worry if I’ll get it back – I won’t! It’s a gift! No stress!
yeah I don’t ever care about getting money back even if a friend insists they’ll pay it
that’s what money is for. spread that shit around. don’t worry about a return
Interesting to call this âconfiscatingâ when itâs just making the rich pay their fair share, especially considering all the stolen wealth from the bottom 99% and historic tax evasion.
Besides the obvious, the hidden benefit of this is that it provides an endpoint to runaway growth.
The biggest problem with capitalism, the reason itâs so destructive to the planet and to the workers and even, ultimately, to the capitalists, is that, after a certain point, the moneyâs just a way of keeping score. The number at the bottom of the column has no bearing on what you can buy or do; as a result, thereâs no such thing as enough. The number can always be bigger.
Under this proposal, once you hit $1 billion, youâve won capitalism. You beat the game, achieved the maximum score; youâre finished. Thereâs nothing more you can accumulate. You now have to find a purpose in life other that the relentless pursuit of profit. (And if weâre really lucky, it might be something that actually benefits other people, but even if not, itâs unlikely to be as damaging as whatever it is you were doing to get that $1 billion.)
Instead of companies expanding endlessly, like tumors, thereâs a point where, when all the major stakeholders are maxing out on profit, it makes sense to just hold steady. Keep doing/making/selling whatever it is you do/sell/make, but stop trying to do/sell/make more of it every year.
The problem with a tumorâwhat makes it cancerâis that it keeps growing and growing, until eventually itâs taking up so much space and consuming so many resources that the surrounding tissues canât function. The tumor doesnât have to do anything better than the other tissues in order to crowd them out; it just does it faster. Stop the uncontrolled growth, and itâs something you can live with.
Stopping the uncontrolled growth of capital means more opportunities for multiple businessesâbig and smallâoperating in the same sector, since it doesnât make sense for any one company to gobble up too much of the market share. That, in turn, means more choices for customersâand workers, since they can take their skills to another employer doing similar things. It means less waste, as thereâs no longer an economic upside to spewing cheap goods out of a fire-hose before you even know whether anyone wants to buy them. That could mean slower, more thoughtful use of resources in the first place, but at minimum, itâs going to mean not manufacturing products only to immediately throw them away.
