"The point to be argued is not how to qualify the status of homosexuality across the broad historical and geographical, not to mention religious, regional, class, national, and political variances of the Middle East. We must consider instead how the production of homosexuality as taboo is situated within the history of encounters with the western gaze. While in Said’s Orientalism the illicit sex found in the Orient was sought out in order to liberate the Occident from its own performance of the repressive hypothesis, in the case of Abu Ghraib, conversely, it is the (perverse) repression of the Arab prisoners that is highlighted in order to efface the rampant hypersexual excesses of the U.S. prison guards. The Orient, once conceived in Foucault’s ars erotica and Said’s deconstructive work as the place of original release, unfettered sin, and acts with no attendant identities or consequences, now symbolizes the space of repression and perversion, and the site of freedom has been relocated to western identity. Given the unbridled homophobia (among other phobias) demonstrated by the U.S. guards, it is indeed ironic, yet predictable, that the United States nonetheless emerges as sexually exceptional: less homophobic and more tolerant of homosexuality (and less tainted by misogyny and fundamentalism) than the repressed, modest, nudity-shy Middle East."
Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007)
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The Cold Hearted Amateur Economist Studying the Annual Budget ($113.4 million proposed 2023) for the Chicago Public Library to state "This Is a Stupidly Great Deal."
I am not a professional economist.
To be clear, and to start with, I do not run economic data for real world scenarios for clients or governments or any institutions.
I do run fantasy economic models for fantasy worlds (elves, dwarves, dragons, etc.) for private clients (nerds with more cash than time).
But
to be clear
I am not a real world economist.
So there will be variables I don't know/care about.
The Chicago (hi, I live in Chicago) public library proposed budget
for 2023 is
$113,400,000
(source)
Which is a lot of money, objectively speaking, when you look at it as an annual price tag of "I need $113,400,000. For, um, this year. Next year it'll be more."
In addition to being an amateur economist, as I call myself, because I deal exclusively in fantasy-world economics exclusively
I was a professional graphic designer for many years
and have dealt with charts, graphs, information displays, etc.
for a really long time
From the above source, 24.3% (about $27,556,200) is provided by grants, leaving 75.7% (about $85,843,800) to raise.
Still a big chunk of cash.
Damn near $86 million bucks.
That would buy so many zines.
Is it worth it?! LET'S GO BACK TO "I WAS A FORMER GRAPHIC DESIGNER" and dealt with charts and things, a lot, to raise cash for weird projects, a lot.
$85,843,800 (above figure to raise) divided by 365 (sorry leap year, we're being un-generous) is $235,188.49 a day.
Nearly.
A quarter.
Million dollars.
A day.
Wow.
But wait...
...there is more than one person living in Chicago.
Which means that it is NOT a daily bill to ONE person for $235,188.49. It is a daily bill for for 1/2,665,039 PEOPLE, given the city's population.
(source)
To be fair, not everyone pays taxes, for a variety of reasons.
Since I'm not a professional economist, let's be brutally unfair and guess only 1/3 of the city pays taxes. It's far more than that, but, yknow...
...amateur economist privilege.
2,665,039 x 0.33 = 879,462.87... we'll... just round... up... this isn't SAW.
FUN FACT, though! You can borrow SAW from the Chicago Public Library for $0.00!
Resuming the point!
Daily bill of $235,188.49 sent to a collective of 879,463 people whom paying taxes to fund the library using the above math.
(Folks astute in math are going to immediately get my end point that this is cheap)
$235,188.49 (daily budget) divided by 879,463 (people)
is...
$0.26742283643 or rounded up
$0.27 per day.
The Chicago Public Library costs less than $0.30 per day per tax payer to cover the entire city.
Less.
Than $0.30.
Per day.
Per tax payer.
...wow.
You can do similar math by checking your local library's budget and comparing it to your local population and being as ungenerous, or more specific if you wish to get a closer-to-accurate number, when comparing tax payers.
If you want to say "1 out of every 3 people paying taxes is too high" (it's not, but let's just say it is for the sake of furthering my point of "the library is an intensely great deal) and instead... say...
1 out of every 5 people pay taxes
because you want to be a contrarian for whatever personal reasons
1/5 = 20%, 20% of 2,665,039 people is 533,008 (rounded up, per above SAW rules)
$235,188.49 (daily budget) divided by 533,008 (people in this ultra contrarian numbers formula) is $0.44124757977, or, $0.44 per day per tax payer.
Using 1/3 as a tax payer base is extremely low. It's easier math. I chose it to make a point.
Pushing it further to 1/5 as a tax payer base raises the daily cost by ($0.44-0.27) $0.17.
Use your local library. Your literal pocket change pays for it.
This is a "I love the library" post sponsored by the library research I am doing for a private client and work that'll be used for future Netherworld Post releases.
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"There has been a curious and persistent absence of dialogue regarding sexuality in public debates about counterterrorism, despite its crucial presence in American patriotism, warmongering, and empire building. Without these discourses of sexuality (and their attendant anxieties)—heterosexuality, homosexuality, queerness, metrosexuality, alternative and insurgent sexuality—the twin mechanisms of normalization and banishment that distinguish the terrorist from the patriot would cease to properly behave. At this historical juncture, the invocation of the terrorist as a queer, nonnational, perversely racialized other has become part of the normative script of the U.S. war on terror.
... Sexual deviancy is linked to the process of discerning, othering, and quarantining terrorist bodies, but these racially and sexually perverse figures also labor in the service of disciplining and normalizing subjects worthy of rehabilitation away from these bodies, in other words, signaling and enforcing the mandatory terms of patriotism. In this double deployment, the emasculated terrorist is not merely an other, but also a barometer of ab/normality involved in disciplinary apparatuses. Leti Volpp suggests, 'September 11 facilitated the consolidation of a new identity category that groups together persons who appear Middle Eastern, Arab, or Muslim. This consolidation reflects a racialization wherein members of this group are identified as terrorists, and are dis-identified as citizens.' This disidentification is a process of sexualization as well as of a racialization of religion. But the terrorist figure is not merely racialized and sexualized; the body must appear improperly racialized (outside the norms of multiculturalism) and perversely sexualized in order to materialize as the terrorist in the first place. Thus the terrorist and the person to be domesticated—the patriot—are not distant, oppositional entities, but 'close cousins.'"
Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007)
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