Good. Whatever the misplaced concreteness of credit scores might indicate about personal responsibility, the main thing they indicate, in general, is wealth. The proprietary formulas of our credit overlords are deliberately imprecise — their business model, remember, involves charging monthly fees for access to allow you to ensure their accuracy, which no one would ever do if they ensured that accuracy themselves. But while they claim to be measurements of “moral” character, personal responsibility and individual virtue, what they seem to measure, primarily, is a person’s ability to make regular payments. And we don’t need a credit score for that — just a look at one box on their most recent tax filing.
Credit scores are despicable for the way they’ve been used to suggest that the wealthy are more virtuous than the poor. And their use in hiring and employment decisions is indefensible. It amounts, basically, to telling people they’re not allowed to earn a paycheck if they really need to.
• I have little to say about the latest political scandal in the UK, except that “Piers Gaveston” is nearly a perfect name for this sort of thing and these sort of people.
• Thank you SmogMonster for the link to the Unf$#% Your Habitat tumblr, and for this description of it — “not only lots of tips but also lots of other people’s before&after photos so you feel less ashamed of how messy your place is.” That, I think, is also a good description of what the church should be like.
• Before heading to work Saturday, I half-watched half of Ungodly Acts — the Lifetime movie allegedly “inspired by true events” around Tyler Deaton’s cult-within-a-cult at the International House of Prayer. It was — as Boze Herrington warned it would be — an ungodly, hideously sensationalist mess.
I was watching for/dreading the appearance of the movie’s version of Boze and it took me a while to realize it didn’t have one. And so I headed off to work thinking of Horatio and of Nick Carroway, and hoping that Boze is able to finish and publish his book soon to “speak to the yet unknowing world / How these things came about.”
• A sad bit of local news: Cheyney University is deep in a hole and doesn’t seem to have a plan to get out of it. My guess/hope would be some kind of friendly takeover/salvage operation by nearby Lincoln University.
• I saw this story and video — of an anti-gay street preacher in St. Andrews, Scotland, getting shut down in very Scottish fashion — all over the place, but I most appreciated Adam Silverman’s post for setting the scene with some personal history of St. Andrews’ street preachers.
• Jimmy Carter watched a lot of really good movies when he was president (via).
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