Is the US a dystopia?

Lowes: We have the aesthetic of the nice mall's Montgomery Ward before they both closed.

The Home Depot: Our price tags look handwritten. There's wood everywhere. Birds fly around from shelf to shelf.

Our local Home Depot used to be a department store. I had previously worked there in the men's department. So if I need to go buy a toilet plunger, I am standing exactly in the place where I used to sell paisley ties.

Later it became famous because of a sniper incident, but that's a completely different story.

Birds in supermarkets/cash and carry: C/D?

Lowes: We have the aesthetic of the nice mall's Montgomery Ward before they both closed.

The Home Depot: Our price tags look handwritten. There's wood everywhere. Birds fly around from shelf to shelf.

No, I haven't been to that Lowes.

Not yet.

https://themessenger.com/news/texas-superintendent-black-student-locs-hair-punishment-lawsuit

A Texas school district superintendent defended the continued suspension of a Black student over his locs hairstyle in a full-page newspaper ad, paid for by an education foundation.

Darryl George has been suspended repeatedly by the Barbers Hill Independent School District for his hair. The teen's family filed a federal civil rights lawsuit saying the punishment violates the CROWN Act, an acronym for “Create a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair,” which became law in Texas in September.

The law is intended to prohibit race-based hair discrimination. But the school said the law does not address hair length and that is the reason for George’s suspension.

However, photos of George show him wearing his hair up in a way that does not reach below his ears.

The ad that appeared Sunday in the Houston Chronicle was written by district superintendent Greg Poole.

“Being an American requires conformity with the positive benefit of unity,” he stated, referencing strict codes at the military academies.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2024/01/26/mark-normand-stand-up-comedy-incident-hihi/72364363007/

Adding to the intrigue, Donald Glover shared several of HiHi's posts on his Instagram story, including a screenshot of a TMZ article about the Normand incident. "'Hi-Hi' available now," one of Glover's posts said. A Vanity Fair report published Thursday said Glover's upcoming show "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" features a mysterious entity nicknamed "Hihi." The HiHi Instagram account also shared videos of Tyra Banks being surrounded by two people in furry costumes at an NBA game this week, clips of which also went viral.

I'm not really sure I understood one bit of that but it seems to more generally pose the question 'is the modern world a dystopia?' imo

Yeah, but it was in USA today.

I know how hard it is some days to sweep the clouds away and get to sunnier days.

Our friend Elmo is right: We have to be there for each other, offer our help to a neighbor in need, and above all else, ask for help when we need it.

Even though it's hard, you're never alone. https://t.co/ffMJekbowo

— President Biden (@POTUS) January 31, 2024

Hardly an original or important thought, but I was standing waiting to cross a street this morning and was just reminded all at once about how needlessly cruel America is. First thing that caught my eye was the brand new "anti-homeless" (hate that term obvious, but I think it's important to emphasize how awful these things are and not sugar-coat them by using whatever pretty name developers wants us to use) spikes on all of the low window sills, ledges and concrete railings. As this was infuriating me all over again, I realized I could see that the city had thrown boots on four(!) different vehicles that I could see from where I stood. Not enough that they are insanely vigilant and waste so many resources on parking tickets, but they also have to add an extra layer of, "oh yeah, struggling person? fuck you, we're going to make it literally impossible for you to even get to work to earn the money to pay off these tickets, this forcing you to struggle even more". Again, not a new insight by any means, just... jesus, such small reminders of how bleak things are.

I feel this. London transport has these "please do not give to beggars, you can donate to a charity instead" announcements that just make my blood boil.

booting cars is such a potent symbol of a society that makes punishment a fetish

why do you assume the booted car owners are poor

Well, a, I never used the word "poor" anywhere in my post. I said "struggling person", which I think is a fair guess on anyone that is dealing with a booted vehicle - even just a short team struggle that led to the boot. Around here, rich people don't regularly park on the street.

I mean come on, Boring, I'm sure the majority of booted vehicles aren't Maseratis. booting usually happens when someone hasn't paid multiple tickets and usually that happens when someone can't afford to pay it.

right now in Satellite Beach, FL, they're booting vehicles when people's prepaid parking expires or they forget to pay or they have a free annual registration with the city but they juxtaposed a license plate number. and it's $80 to get it off.

I'm of the opinion that paid parking in itself is a predatory racket

It's also a pain in the ass, if you happen to regularly be in multiple cities for any reason, you have to keep juggling multiple apps because many cities have made it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to pay in any other format. Our city still has a few regular old pay stations, but depending on where you park it could be many blocks you have to walk to find one.

like these assholes like Walmart, who will pay a security company to patrol their massive parking lot 24/7, even if 5% of it is being used or the store is closed, and tow people who aren't shopping at the store.

there's a local music venue called The Orpheum in Tampa which used to be in Ybor which had ample parking, but now, is in more of a strip mall type location where there are really no parking options for miles - not even the paid kind. every lot has big scary "unauthorized vehicles may be towed" signs, and people used to just park at the Walmart nearby....and then they started towing them, even though that lot was pretty much empty.

the venue's parking lot holds maybe 30 cars and fills up within an hour. your only real option, other than parking 2 miles away, is to park in this one dirt road on a residential street, and even then, maybe only ten cars can fit. so people profiteer on the scarcity of the parking.

(actually patroling isn't even necessary, they have cameras and can just call the tow company remotely)

at my new job there's some sort of dispute between two different organizations that use the same parking lot. we get nearly daily updates about the status of the "talks" and "negotiations". yesterday we were told that the other organization is not allowed to use the lot for the time being, but that we must park on our half of the lot. so there's a giant parking lot with all the cars tightly packed into one half of it, with the other completely empty. i guess this means my employer is "winning"!

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/lDxOOKKpDVU/hqdefault.jpg

Maybe they can put a Brady Bunch style tape line down the middle!

the talk about booting cars reminds me of when we had one parking spot at a rental for our two cars, so i parked my '94 Camry around the corner for several days while we were out of town. when i came back, it was gone. i called the LAPD to report it stolen, and they said, "oh we actually towed it because it was reported by someone as being parked for more than 48 hours." cost me several hundred dollars to get it out of the tow yard.

How date you be idle for 48 hours? You must be out performing capitalism every day.

"dare", damn autocorrect ruined my dumb joke

perhaps my only real victory against these assholes was back when I went to a Deicide show in New Port Richey. didn't know the area, parking difficult to locate.

so I find this lot that's only being used by a cab for hire service, and it's pretty much an empty strip, sans for like, three cars. There are zero signs warning of towing unauthorized vehicles anywhere. Victory! so I park in one of the 3,473,643 available spots.

I come back after the show, car gone. I call the police, they find out it has been towed, and give me the number. I call that tow company who proceeds to tell me that the business towed me, and I said this was "bullshit" because there were no signs warning of towing unauthorized vehicle.

He gave me attitude right back and said "It's not bullshit, you were interfering with his ability to do business". Which of course, is a valid reason to tow someone - there doesn't need to be any signs warning of towing, say, if you park in front of the entrance to someone's business, or you block someone's driveway, etc.

He claimed the driver "needed to get into the space I was using". I responded "are you fucking kidding me? Almost the entire lot was empty, and there aren't even painted lines for parking spaces. How the fuck did he need to use that exact unmarked spot? And why, after my car was towed, and I've been standing here for a half hour, has nobody used this spot at all?". Dude was starting to bristle at my tone so I opted to end the call, since obviously I was going to have to pay this guy. So I pay him, and he's smug about the whole thing and how they follow rules.

So knowing this was horseshit, I filed a complaint with the appropriate county regulatory agency, who must have also noted it was bullshit, because they called me and told me "the tow company is willing to refund your tow dollars if you call them right now". I called him and he said "what's your address?", I gave it, and he said "cool, I'm going to sue the city because you were towed legally". got a check two days later.

Vat a country!

Narrator: he did not, in fact, sue the city

lol Alfred

I mean, we've got a long and ugly history of towing nightmares around here, so notorious that Steve Goodman even wrote a song about it!

metered parking and parking restrictions on public streets are not used by cities to punish people, it's too keep streets from becoming permanent car storage and encouraging turnover. Predatory towing on private lots is different. Chicago is probably different since didn't the city privatize the meters or something under Rahm? In that case, yeah that really sucks.

cars are dystopian

Yup, the entire City of Chicago has privatized it's parking until... checks notes... 2083.

The same thing that happened to Neanderthal happened to me in Hoboken. Except I didn't fight it, I just paid, like a cuck.

Can’t get your car towed if you don’t have a car 😎

it's too keep streets from becoming permanent car storage

this is exactly why booting is such a vindictive form of punishment

then you have people who don't have offstreet parking and god forbid they want to take a trip, gotta be worried about car theft from both sides.

Think I've told the story before, but when my now wife and I were first dating, we went down to her car on December 23rd to load up and head out of state for Christmas. Her car was booted. No idea why, she had zero parking tickets at all, much less outstanding ones. Ended up getting a cab to a city office, arriving just before they closed and learned it was booted in error. The person behind the counter tried to claim it was too late to get the boot removed that day and that we'd have to wait until the 26th, but we raised some holy hell about that, but we still had to wait about three hours for it to be removed so we could leave town.

booting cars is such a potent symbol of a society that makes punishment a fetish

― rob

to me the sign of dystopia is in the stuff that's considered, like, actual fetishes these days. i mean punishment, humiliation, degradation, those things have been fetishes for ages

nah if you look at kink nowadays and look at the fetishes you have people with, like, praise kinks. like for a lot of people (me included), being praised and treated well is literally a fetish.

rob, jon, omar, and silby otm

I dream of the day when Florida would actually have public transpo so I didn't have to drive.

as opposed to a bus system which would have been considered antiquated before buses even existed

xp to Kate
ah yeah I should have specified I didn't mean a *sexual* fetish but in the more general ~anthropological~ sense, in this case meaning that this form of punishment—which does have a public humiliation/shame aspect to it like a stockade for your car, but leaving that aside—has a transcendent value that is ultimately more important than the ostensible, pragmatic reason for the underlying law/regulation that is being enforced

the other thing about booting is, it's often done by a sub-contracted company, which means the actual people hiring these companies have less control over the quality of enforcement, and meaning the number of mistaken boots skyrockets.

Satellite Beach's new parking rules were to prevent residents losing parking spots in their own neighborhood or at their beaches, but since it's been enacted, a ton of residents have been booted, some improperly, some because the process was confusing regarding registering. one of the Satellite Beach county officials' car was booted, for example.

if you are trying to enact policies to reduce congestion of parking or prevent people from abusing parking situations, there are ways to do it that don't involve the hyper-punitive booting process, which is often extremely expensive and time-consuming to deal with. Since cities actually build fees into their budgets from parking/booting, and tow companies get paid by volume, it creates a situation where they're actively camping out, waiting for people to leave their vehicles so they can immobilize them. Then it is no longer being used to solve a problem, it is being used to capitalize on a problem.

AND, often times there are actually ways to dispute the towing/booting, but often times the people in enforcement take advantage of the fact that most people can't afford to be without their car for long.

if you're at risk of not being able to get to work later the same day, and potentially lose a) wages or b) your job, you're kind of forced to eat shit and pay the fine, after which (usually) you can no longer dispute.

for example, in Orange County, FL (as I'm sure is the case in other places), if you get towed and you feel it was improper, you can go down to the Courthouse (if it's a weekday), get a voucher to present to the tow company, who will release your car. Then, payment for the towing becomes the responsibility of the person that's at fault, which is determined by....the county! Oi.

If I was to try and do this, given how far apart most tow yards and the Courthouse location is, it would probably take several hours - getting transportation to the courthouse, waiting in line to get the voucher, getting transportation the towyard, waiting for them to bring the car, and driving the car where you need to go.

who the fuck has time for that? it happened to me once and I was working that day and I absolutely needed to get home.

sorry, just had another thought wrt Kate's post:

i mean punishment, humiliation, degradation, those things have been fetishes for ages

all that said, this is of course true! and in fact if you want to be Foucauldian about it, booting cars strikes me as more a pre-disciplinary-society form of punishment in its publicity: you have transgressed against the sovereign and are being made an example of. So, yes far from a new sign of the US's dystopian character, more a persistent undercurrent.

while I'm amusing myself and only myself: booting = pre-disciplinary, towing = disciplinary, getting mailed a ticket = control

otoh, as Neando's posts are detailing, when this old form of punishment gets turned over to financialized capital, you end up with some weirder, newer shit

xp to Kate
ah yeah I should have specified I didn't mean a *sexual* fetish but in the more general ~anthropological~ sense, in this case meaning that this form of punishment—which does have a public humiliation/shame aspect to it like a stockade for your car, but leaving that aside—has a transcendent value that is ultimately more important than the ostensible, pragmatic reason for the underlying law/regulation that is being enforced

― rob

mmmm i think calling kink "sexual" fetishism can be complicated and i could definitely get into the ways i feel like fetishism reflects the taboos of any given society and thus can tell us a lot about the nature of that society BUT we're talking about car booting here

and yeah, it's definitely performative cruelty, it reminds me a lot of the Bloody Code. it's definitely a sign of a culture in its Imperial Phase.

people in my city got so angry and organized about a specific tow company being a bunch of shitbags that the furor resulted in an article in the local paper and the city ended up terminating their contract with the towing company early. they were the lowest bidder every time the city's tow contract was up for bid for... reasons

Oakland tow companies only tow cars that have current registration and look like they have an owner who will come pay to get it out.

But the streets are littered with abandoned cars with expired tags, sometimes missing windows, etc. There's one in front of my building that's been there for over a year

The whole racket of charging people towing & impound fees when their cars have been reported STOLEN just drives me crazy, absolutely as criminal as the car thief himself

i'm just thinking about the last time i went to my local coffee place and there was someone there talking about property management and they were saying "yeah, it's a grift, but everything is a grift these days". i tend to agree! my job is a bullshit job in an entire industry (health insurance) which is a grift. it didn't used to be a grift when i started the job seven years ago. i know that sounds crazy, i mean it's health insurance, how can it not be a grift? structurally the industry was a grift but the place where i worked, they made a genuine good faith effort, i think, to do the right thing in an environment where "doing the right thing" is really difficult to do.

i don't know anybody who believes their job is "doing the right thing". it's more that life is hard when you aren't being paid to do a job. that's the values. it doesn't matter if the job is worthwhile or valuable, if you don't have one, you get punished. i like working. i'd like to work a job that was aligned with my values. i don't know any jobs out there that are aligned with my values.

i mean, there's no future to any of this capitalism shit. there's no future, and every goddamn one of us knows it. either we're trying to keep our heads above water, or we're trying to grab what we can, while we can, because god knows this shit ain't gonna last.

xp to Kate
tbrr I don't know a lot about kink practice or theory*, so any points about fetishism on that front were made quite inadvertently! I was just being deliberately pedantic about the word "fetish," which, sorry if I'm 'splaining here, has several meanings (see, e.g., Marx's "commodity fetishism," which does not mean feeling lust for LPs or sneakers, etc).

*though I am halfway through Samuel Delaney's Neveryon series, fwiw