Lurid linked to The Pressure Campaign to Get Pete Hegseth Confirmed as Defense Secretary in the comments.

Muse here.

I just can't quite wrap my head around how January 6th has gotten relegated to the history books. Like, you can't have a single coherent view that simultaneously holds "it was a day of infamy" and "we should re-elect this guy", and in the short term at least, the former has been submerged in deference to the latter.

Anyway! This lady has a halfway house for J6 insurrectionists:

The housing is a key component of Cudd's J6 Road Home Project, aimed, per its website, at "fostering healing, wellness, and wholeness in body, soul, and spirit" for those arrested for involvement in the Capitol riot and helping them "reintegrate" into a society that has allegedly left them behind. The website laments the lack of resources and community support faced by the formerly incarcerated. It is teeming with the sort of language one might more commonly associate with bleeding-heart lefties--but "once something happens to you, then all of a sudden you care about it," Cudd told me. "One of the blessings that's come out of January sixth is now there's a whole bunch of us middle-class Americans that never cared about criminal justice reform--and now we do."

That last sentence is the type of thing that makes me lose my mind.

This made a big impression on me, probably 15 years ago: a family I knew had a severely disabled son - on a feeding tube, non-verbal, and so on. It took that experience for his parents to believe that sometimes people can't afford medical care, even though they're good people* So on that one issue they were extremely liberal, and on everything else, fuck those guys. I continue to believe that one of the hallmarks of everyday Republicans is a dogged refusal to believe someone's description of reality if it hasn't happened to them personally.

*And then while I'm ranting, the relentless belief that you can neatly separate the world into good people and bad people, and good people deserve things and bad people don't, is so fucking toxic.**

**okay actually I can think of some bad people.

Obviously none of the Republican bullshit on wokeness/DEI is worth talking about, but there are a lot of other complicated conversations about water rights and climate change and so on.

I have no expertise to spearhead such a thing! But I'm great at starting a thread to let you introduce good content.

This post makes the case that you can compare Dave Ramsey style budgeting culture with diet culture:

Budget culture is the damaging set of beliefs around money that rewards restriction and deprivation -- much like diet culture does for food and bodies -- and promotes an unhealthy and fantastical ideal of financial success.

In the same way diet culture is quick to blame health conditions on a person's weight, or prescribe food restriction as treatment toward the goal of being thin, budget culture sees measures like credit scores and debt as signifiers of financial health, and prescribes spending restrictions as the first step toward wellness -- defined, at its core, as being (on the way to becoming) rich.

I like this comparison, because in both cases, there are actual real consequences to spending far beyond your budget or eating way beyond your maintenance calories. It's just that the capitalist pop media individualist approach to solving these problems is a total mess.

The simplest problem with this approach is that budgeting, like dieting, doesn't work. Restriction and deprivation are unsustainable; accurately tracking spending is hard; income fluctuates, and costs don't operate on a perfect monthly reset. Budgets don't account for the way lives work, so they're hard to keep in our lives consistently. But even when people do use them, budgeting doesn't necessarily fulfill its promises: A 2021 survey by The Penny Hoarder, for example, found that budgeters are just about as likely as non-budgeters to have any amount of debt.

Obviously everyone here favors societal solutions over individual hectoring. That's like our unifying battle cry.

The author is also on board with us, but I think she's missing the basic point when it comes to attribution:

The broader problem with budget culture is its emphasis on individual responsibility and insistence on ignoring the varying levels of access and privilege in our world. It vilifies and oppresses anyone who doesn't live up to the ideal, regardless of their circumstances. And that ideal is, unsurprisingly, rooted in maleness and whiteness in the way many of our cultural ideals are. Budget culture idealizes and advises for a definition of richness that relies on things like power at work, freedom from domestic labor, well-rounded education, debt elimination, homeownership, credit, and other things moneyed, straight white men tend to have access to more readily than anyone else. We equate these things with being good with money because we exist in a system designed -- by people with money trying to keep it -- to favor them, not because they're inherent signs of more or less responsible stewardship of money.

Sure, whiteness and maleness, but it's really, literally, about class.

I do appreciate this honesty:

I used to tell people I was grateful to work in personal finance, because what I've learned has helped me get my own money under control. I have a small IRA, a comfortable $20,000 savings cushion, automatic bill payment, a credit card and a 740 credit score. But I've stopped giving financial literacy the credit, because I know the real reason my finances are "healthier" now: I have more money. I took a job with a salary that quadrupled my income, and voila -- I became a lot more "responsible" with money.