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So if you ever wonder why the US political system seems so broken, why every progressive gain is so hard-fought and then easily reversed, why the easiest solutions seem endlessly out of reach, why someone as obscenely awful as Trump faces so little institutional resistance, why both major political parties share so much in common, why so many politicians seem to share the same handful of family names…
…then you will wonder less once you understand the US political system was, from the start, explicitly designed to behave in exactly this way, as a system of shared oligarchical rule meant to guarantee elites’ ability to extract rents from the vast majority of the public.
That was the point. They said so. They wrote it all down. This is easily knowable history. It’s just been obscured in the public understanding by the religious cult that US elites have built around the constitution and the framers as divinely guided sages who built the most perfect political system ever.
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Nevermind that the wealth of those elites was built overwhelmingly on the exploitation of other people: on landed estates carved from indigenous lands and granted by the crown; on rents charged on landless tenants on those estates; on enslaved African and indigenous labor; on the importation of huge numbers of impoverished servants; on royal monopolies.
All of that wealth, those elites believed, was the product of those elites’ intelligence, hard work, and thrift. And those greedy poors would steal it from them the moment the had the chance.
At the opening of the constitutional convention, Edmund Randolph, governor of Virginia, declared that “Our chief danger arises from the democratic parts of our constitutions.”
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The German government now intends to put into law to punish Germans with up to 5 years in jail if they deny Israel's "right to exist".
Such a law would of course very likely violate the German constitution, like virtually everything the current German government does these days. And Germany already has a law that protects anyone from incitement and hate against the group they belong to, including jews. A law that specifically protects Israel no matter what Israel does serves of course only to suppress valid criticism of genocide and Israel's hard-right course who currently want to attack Iran *again*. In a country that respects its own constitution, this planned law would never even have been proposed.
Hat tip to @mago.
As I write this, Germany's foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, is on visit in Israel, Germany's "good and close friend", to "keep communications channels open" as public hostility towards Israel increases.
And Germany's minister of the interior, Alexander Dobrindt, and the federal presidents of Germany's police have had multiple visits in Israel, Germany's "natural partner", to start training each other's police and to learn from Israel how it controls a population in an apartheid state using technology and AI (the real, working all-too-well AI, like computer vision, not the LLMs that are sold to us as "AI").
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When We Create a Hostile Offline Environment for Teens, They Take Refuge Online
One of the things people talk about with age verification is that teens are sucked in and need to get off. That's not what's happening.
#Censorship #Editorial #News #ChatRoom #Internet #kids #social #SocialMedia #teens
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The fall of Platner from Democratic politics (I expect him to re-appear as GOP or other) is an unqualified good. One of the things that helps to keep Nazis down is convincing them that Nazis don't get anything.
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If you ever forgave Platner for the Nazi tattoo and the rape fantasies and the allegations of assault and the imperialist mercenary work—even before the rape accusation—then you have no business, for even a moment, expressing confusion as to how anyone could support someone like Trump.
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The most apt analogy for the relationship between the state and its subjects is to the farmer and a herd of livestock.
Once you internalize this, a whole host of seemingly unrelated phenomena, and the relationships between them, become crystal clear.
Borders and immigration controls, concentration camps and genocide, national IDs and passports, conquest and forced migrations, taxes and conscription and corvée labor, slave labor and prison labor—it’s all just the state managing and harvesting from its herd.
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The livestock industry has applied ethologists like Temple Grandin to design systems that keep the herd calm and compliant during the breeding, fattening, and slaughtering processes, exemplified in papers such as "Transferring results of behavioral research to industry to improve animal welfare* on the farm, ranch, and slaughter plant," and the state has police, educators, scientists, psychologists, regulatory agencies, etc., to keep us calm and compliant as well. The sheep spends its life fearing the wolf only to be eaten by the shepherd.
* Industry jargon reflects the idea that livestock fares well when they don't cause trouble for their keepers.
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So my firm conviction remains that if Trump were to order an actual military invasion of Greenland, the US military would simply not comply. I'm dead serious. The men and women of the armed forces of NATO countries have decades of intense training and actual deployments together, and the respect they tend to have for each other runs deep. There's no way a US service member is going to just turn his weapon on the very people they just spent training and deploying with.
Ordering such an invasion would mean the end of his entire administration and the single largest crisis in US history as the US military would face massive subordination and refusal to carry out orders.
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Crazy that you need to video your entire life just to have an alibi and you still have to deal with weeks of police and court dates.
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This one sparked a big debate on patreon, that concluded with the idea that their arms would actually be flapping wildly in the wind, making me wish I knew how to animate.
Bonus panel here: www.smbc-comics.com/comic/zod
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On the day the EU Parliament passed Chat Control v1 through a procedural coup, I attended #DWebCamp, where activists across the political spectrum demonstrated how their peer-to-peer technologies could protect the universal human right to privacy with a form of end-to-end encryption that could survive any form of terrible regulation.
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Some of them wanted to go further. Alexander Hamilton, whose reputation was completely white-washed by that musical so beloved of liberals, advocated for life-tenure for Senators and the president. He believed this was necessary to ensure that wealthy elites, the only people capable of ruling, would be completely insulated from democratic demands from the public. He wanted, in short, to recreate the British monarchy and House of Lords on a republican basis.
It’s hard to overstate how much these people absolutely loathed the poor—not just the women whom they excluded from power or the Black people they enslaved or the indigenous Americans whom they murders and robbed, but also poor white men. The poor were lazy; they were stupid; they were greedy; they were wasteful. Above all else, they had to be kept from power, because if the poor exercised power, they would immediately take everything from the rich.
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Article I, Section 8 of the US constitution is quite explicit about why the document exists at all:
“The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States…”
Most people probably skim right over that part today, if they bother to dig through it at all, but that line is the constitution’s entire reason for existing. Washington, Madison, Adams, Hamilton, and the rest desired a central government powerful enough to suppress the American public and extract taxes and debt payments from that public.
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Player Run Minecraft Servers are “Piracy”, ESA Says
As next generation consoles go digital only, the ESA is arguing that player run servers are "piracy".
https://www.freezenet.ca/player-run-minecraft-servers-are-piracy-esa-says/
#Copyright #News #California #CallOfDuty #ESA #Minecraft #piracy #server
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Shays’ brief revolt was not successful and Shays himself had to flee into hiding for a time, but the revolt had a major impact on the thinking of American elites. The public was opposed to paying debts or taxes to finance those elites, and it had created governments to empower the public to erase debts. Where governments were more favorable to creditors, the public staged revolts. This was intolerable.
Even worse, the governing charter of the new US republic, the Articles of Confederation, created a weak central government that struggled to raise money to finance its operations. The central government, for example, failed to raise an army to confront Shays’ Rebellion; the rebels were ultimately suppressed by a local Massachusetts army that was *privately funded* by wealthy elites in that state.
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On top of this, recall those promissory notes the Continental Congress had issued to soldiers in lieu of pay. Without any money, those soldiers often sold those promissory notes to wealthy speculators who paid pennies on the dollar. When the war ended, those speculators demanded the US government pay them the full face value—including interest—netting them enormous profits.
Former soldiers lost twice, first by having to accept a fraction of the pay owed to them and second by being taxed to finance interest payments to wealthy speculators.
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grisly bears
Other account: https://noc.social/@light
Joined Mar 2025
