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The Fig Economy Profile picture
The Fig Economy
@figgityfigs
I have too many children and for some reason I hang out on twitter where everybody is a child.
Sep 5, 2023 • 14 tweets • 5 min read
Found myself a really bad article in The Nation, and I wanted to take a sec to unpack just what I find so noxious about it.

thenation.com/article/enviro… The first tell comes right at the top when Ackerman says that the IPCC report would galvanize *a* sane society into action. As will become abundantly clear, this doesn’t mean the global community, it means the United States specifically. Image
Aug 31, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Gotta get rid of anybody who defends @curaffairs or @NathanJRobinson more broadly as well. They’ve always been loci of rancid thinking, but this is pure bigotry and it needs to be dealt with swiftly and harshly and without quarter. Don’t put up with anybody saying this is about intolerance. The whole “you won’t tolerate my intolerance so you’re not so tolerant are you?” line is an old as fuck right wing line meant to trip up well meaning people.
Aug 24, 2023 • 25 tweets • 10 min read
June 19, 1978, the day that started it all. The character design of Jon and Garfield was radically different from what it is today. Jon Arbuckle is clearly a stand-in for Davis himself, and they even share a birthday (July 28). Davis makes Jon five years younger than himself… Image …indicating from the outset an apprehension about aging.

The strip also introduces two key themes at the outset (and hints at a third): Garfield's independence/dominance and Garfield's appetite (and Jon's obliviousness). The second panel shows Garfield inverting… Image
Aug 7, 2023 • 16 tweets • 5 min read
I disagree strongly with this review for a lot of reasons, but I think it’s worth reading if just to see how people’s ideological commitments can make them (intentionally?) misread things like this guy has done with Oppenheimer. middleeasteye.net/opinion/oppenh… Like, for instance, this. Later in the review he mentions that the bomb was being built to fight the Nazis, but here he makes a couple of implicit (and explicit) claims that are wildly misrepresentative of the film and history. Image
Aug 1, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I honestly don’t believe these numbers. I know polling doesn’t get predictive for a bit yet, but 43 feels close to Trump’s ceiling and below Biden’s floor. @qsfromkevin Now Biden is the incumbent, the economy is quite good, and Trump may actively be on trial during the campaign.
Jun 27, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Another example of how, no matter the righteousness of your cause, if you’re not willing to tailor your message to meet people where they are, you’re gonna fall flat on your face. Every time prison abolitionists treat the “what happens to violent offenders” question as beneath their contempt for even being asked, they get a little more pure and the hope for their cause dies a little more.
May 22, 2023 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
I guess the thing for me is that it’s weird to give everything under the banner of “activism” a free pass, or at least a heavy benefit of the doubt. If I cut the power lines to the local hospital to call attention to the gender wage gap, should that be criticized? That’s a silly example, but I mean to tease this out. The defense against “this is anti-social and counterproductive” is usually “so what, that’s what protest is.” But that can’t be *all* it is.
May 21, 2023 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
Today I heard an older lady at the playground call a slide a sliding board, and I said to my wife, “can you believe it? What an old person thing!” My wife was like, “I’ve never heard the term ‘sliding board’ in my life.”

A short thread. I was born in California and after age 8 grew up in Connecticut, but my mom and dad’s families were both from central PA.
May 21, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Today my son was playing with some kids who were being mean to him. When he gets upset he does this high pitched scream, and one of the kids asked if he was transgender, clearly as an insult. It made him upset, so I explained that not only were those kids mean, they were bigots. It just makes me so sad that 6 and 7 and 8 and 9 year olds are internalizing so much hate from their bigot parents and parroting it back at the kids they see.
May 20, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I’m definitely interested in ideas like this to prevent studios from disappearing stuff, though I think the specific design is gonna run into a *ton* of problems. You’ve got to design “availability” such that studios can’t make stuff “available” on a streaming service that costs $1,000 a month, or to rent for $100 or whatever. Or also, presumably, to let studios legitimately shuffle stuff around while they try to license it.
May 20, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
This is so fucked up specifically because in my experience, much more than anyone realizes, military leadership is much better at laying aside their personal beliefs for what will best help complete the mission. Generals aren’t precious about fossil fuels, they almost always see that electrifying military vehicles is a strategic benefit and also decreases failure modes because electric engines have fewer moving parts than ICEs.
May 17, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Working my way through Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead series, and it’s just absolutely transcendent writing. Jack Boughton is one of the best characters in American literature, IMO. ImageImageImageImage The first book is a triumph. Everything about it is perfect and load-bearing. Everything matters. Every detail. Reverend Ames’s voice is so clear and complex and human.
May 17, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Really good thread. Most folks want to go vote and forget about things, trusting that the guy they voted for will take care of things (differing values of “things” and what taking care of them means, obv) Maybe a more concise way of saying my takeaway: most people aren’t weirdos who think about this stuff for anything more than a couple minutes a day at most. They’re not engaged on anything like the level that would be required for development of an ideology.
May 16, 2023 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
The fundamental contradiction in gun advocacy is between asserting how commonplace and benign they are while also fearing or praising them for their extreme destructive power. I know these two things can’t be reconciled, but I’m often surprised that I never really see anyone even try.
May 16, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
I can’t read this whole piece because it’s behind a subscriber wall, but I truly don’t understand how to build these institutions in such a way that they can’t be eroded as soon as Republicans take power again. There’s not the Will for a constitutional amendment, so we’re left with legislation. You can do a lot with legislation, but it can also be undone easily if its opponents gain power.
May 15, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Congratulations, @DavidAFrench, on inadvertently inventing an argument that would justify preemptively killing anyone you saw with a gun. I mean, what if we did nothing at all? The person might start shooting, right?
May 11, 2023 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
The whole focus on Feinstein’s staffers as the point of leverage keeping her in office or not is a deeply silly Twitter creation with little to no relation to reality. The idea that everyone in her office has the thoughts:

1) My boss is senile
2) therefore the correct thing for me to do is to leave
3) but I am drunk with money/power and so I will stay

is so fucking silly.
May 10, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Here I am trying to raise five kids in the kindness and compassion and desire to make a better world that motivates my support for leftist policy aims, and then I see myriad people on this braindead app calling themselves leftists saying shit like “bullying works.” Think for one fucking second about the typical perpetrators and victims of bullying, idiots.
May 10, 2023 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
Listen, I think Feinstein should resign and I think she shouldn’t have run for re-election last time. I also think it’s utterly deranged behavior to post a thread of her staffers’ contact information *with pictures and salaries for some reason*. I think it’s the salaries that makes this especially awful. That’s some bordering on right wing bullshit. He’ll say “no it’s because they’re wealthy and they’re failing you” but it looks an awful lot like “you pay their (inflated) salaries.”
Apr 27, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The idea that the left can hold bigotry to the side with people like Tucker Carlson to make common cause on things like anti-corporatism or anti-intervention is so stupid because that ideological heterogeneity is only possible because the binds of racial grievance are so strong. They can disagree on foreign intervention because they understand they’re both trying to achieve the aim of supporting white people over everyone else.
Apr 25, 2023 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
I know not caring about stuff is Twitter’s Whole Deal, but I’m excited to vote for Biden in 2024. He’s got my full throated support and he deserves yours. Has he been perfect? No! Has he been way better than most of us had reason to expect, especially early in 2020? Yes! But importantly, winning is a prerequisite to getting shit done, and he’s got the best chance of winning.