Churro
12d ago
To have an exploitable, dehumanized underclass? I get that overlaps a bit with stigmatizing them and keeping them down, but that was the core reason they were brought over in the first place: coerced labor. It’s also the central reason for literally the only time a significant chunk of this country rose in rebellion: because they believed that system was under threat, and they were willing to kill hundreds of thousands of people to preserve it. And a big portion of that formerly rebellious chunk then passed and vigorously supported laws designed explicitly to keep that underclass in an excluded and subordinate state long after formal slavery ended.
Sometimes people just do awful things to other people because it materially benefits them, and they and their ancestors build all sorts of moral, cultural, and legal justifications for why it’s okay, actually. I don't see why that's so hard to believe. People have literally been doing some version of this for as long as there have been people.
Churro
19d ago
I'm sorry, but this is a profoundly historically uninformed take, and one almost hilariously so within the context of Minnesota. The Germans who settled Minnesota are, perhaps, the most decidedly non-conformist of the whole bunch, given that they're largely descendants of the failed revolutionaries, both liberal and socialist, who tried to make a constitutional German Empire back in 1848. You know, the Frankfurt Parliament, the "crown from the gutter" that Frederick Wilhelm IV rejected? That's why the Farmer-Labor Party has always had such a strong presence in Minnesotan politics, and you didn't see it go the way of the Dakotas, or Iowa or Missouri. These are the descendants of radicals and dissidents, not conformists.
Churro
23d ago
And? They also thought staring at goat entrails would reveal mystical truths about the universe or earn favor from their gods. Old-timey people did all sorts of dumb shit. Patriarchy was just another log on the dumbass fire.
Churro
30d ago
Who is saying that we can't deport convicted pedophiles and murderers. Who specifically? When?
Churro
30d ago
The worst of them are now sitting in jail cells across the country, known to local authorities. And we can’t deport them because bleeding heart liberals think it’s mean. We want to deport all the criminals, we want the murderers and pedophiles gone, and your actions are preventing us.
I don't think it actually works like this, though. Correct me if I'm wrong, but federal immigration statutes require serious offenders to serve their terms here in full for local offenses before they can be subject to deportation. ICE can't just legally take some guy who's just been convicted of murder or rape and deport him. What sanctuary cities do, if what I've just researched is correct, is not cooperate with ICE detainers, which are requests to hold somebody up to 48 hours after their release once they've served their sentence.
Which, fair, if you want to criticize blue states for that, I think it's totally a valid point of argument. But if your contention is that we should instead be able to eject somebody from the country the moment they're convicted of rape or murder or drug smuggling or what have you, that's a problem with federal law, and one that Congress, not sanctuary cities, is actually capable of tackling. As far as I know, Jose Ibarra, the murderer who killed Laken Riley, is still sitting in a Georgia prison, and will be for the rest of his life. And there aren't any sanctuary jurisdictions in Georgia.
Churro
1mo ago
By that logic, the Russian people must have loved the Tsars too. After all, they were Orthodox autocrats in an Orthodox country. Clearly, that’s why the Russian Empire still exists and flourished up until this very day.
A far simpler explanation is that you’re speaking well beyond your knowledge of Muslims and Islamic societies, reducing decades of political, social, and cultural complexity to a single essentialist assumption.
So is the Times deliberately sabotaging peace on the Korean peninsula just to hurt Trump? I have no way of knowing, but the timing is a hell of a coincidence.
Isn't a much better question to ask if the Trump administration sabotaged the process on their own by authorizing a mission that killed three civilians and then mutilated their bodies so that they wouldn't be discovered? A mission that, judging by nothing serious happening due to its failure, clearly wasn't that important in the first place? Because I'm much, much more inclined to blame military/security state overreach than I am the people reporting on it. Nobody had to authorize this mission. Nobody had to give them rules of engagement that apparently left no room for even a moment to determine whether the people they spotted were security personnel or fishermen. If peace was really such an important goal (which to be clear, I don't think it is, either for this or the previous Trump administration), why do something so stupidly provocative in the first place?
Churro
2yr ago
What conflicts since WWII would lead someone to believe that America is a reliable ally?
The Korean War would qualify, I’d argue. South Korea is likely our most significant and closest partner in the region after Japan, and we absolutely still have major, ongoing security commitments there that we’ve held to for the better part of a century now.
Churro
2yr ago
Can't be accused of being racist if there are no other races in your country.
I’m pretty sure the genocide necessary to achieve this will raise much more vocal and far longer lasting accusations of racism than anything you’re bothered by now. And that’s assuming it’s an even remotely likely possibility, which it thankfully isn’t.
Churro
2yr ago
While I can’t answer the other two questions, for 2. you might look into paternalistic conservatism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternalistic_conservatism).
Churro
2yr ago
Maybe it was a type of unleavened bread? Those are usually shelf stable for a long time, and if they could make anything akin to hardtack, I could see that lasting longer than unbaked grains.
Churro
2yr ago
God I loved Galaxy of Fear as a kid. I always thought Uncle Hoole was one of the more interesting characters introduced in Legends canon. I'd love to see another book take a crack at him in a less "for kids" narrative, or really any of the Shi'ido.
Churro
2yr ago
You might be surprised! At least according to this article, it looks like their strategy is to try and provoke their potential targets into trying to ban them, then sue them for 1st amendment violations and regularly rack up tens of thousands in court fees. It's not a bad racket when half your family are lawyers.
Edit: whoops, link was borked.
Churro
2yr ago
I think if we specify the church as the Westboro Baptist Church, then yeah, that actually sounds a bit like what they do.
Churro
2yr ago
But for now I guess I will just sit back and watch the left-authoritarians and the right-authoritarians fight each other as usual.
You'd think after a couple hundred years of doing this since the French Revolution we'd have run out of authoritarians by now, but they just keep making more of them.
Churro
2yr ago
Again, I'm not an authority on progressive thought, but my best guess is that their argument would be that it's unfair to judge others on what they consider inalienable characteristics like gender identity, race, sex, etc. but that beliefs and behaviors are relatively more choosable and thus fair game.
Churro
2yr ago
I'm no authority, but I think at least a part of the progressive project is to encourage language that's less exclusionary. The idea here is that by having neutral-valence terms to describe each other without resorting to the kind of implicit judgment a term like "normal" contains. There's an implied acceptance or tolerance when labeling something normal that I think most humans probably have some psychological need for. Certainly, it's at least preferable to being sorted into a category that's implicitly abnormal, and thus much more likely to be subject to ignorance, misunderstanding, and prejudice.
Churro
2yr ago
Agreed, which is why I tend to be against both capital punishment and long prison sentences. I'd really like to see the US move away from a retributive model of justice to something more restorative. Less prison, more wage garnishment, and community service.
Churro
2yr ago
I personally am not, but I'd argue that at least the false prison sentence has a chance of being proven as such and ended early. You can't really take back a false execution.
Churro
2yr ago
Since I dislike both the left and the right, one of my political goals is to keep the two stalemated.
Does this not also lead to some pretty awful outcomes, as we're seeing? I'd argue political deadlock has left the US incapable of crafting effective policy, has bred a lot of the vicious polarization we see today, and ultimately just empowers the radicals on either side.
Churro
2yr ago
I mean, isn't this one of the reasons we have and regularly deploy the National Guard during domestic unrest? Because they're empowered to act as law enforcement, up to and including shooting citizens?
Churro
2yr ago
I don't know, I think the original definitions are useful in at least giving specific terms to a constellation of related characteristics. To borrow from someone else's 3-year-old comment:
If (for example) someone never attends church, lives in a city, tries to be vegetarian, doesn't watch football, doesn't own any guns, uses cannabis, listens to "everything but country", has a master's degree, and works in academia or technology, they are not part of the Red tribe, no matter how many times they vote for Republicans or write Reddit comments critical of progressives.
I'll confess, I don't know a more succinct way to articulate that divide than Red Tribe/Blue Tribe, but that might be a lack of imagination on my part.
Sure, I won’t argue that cheap labor wasn’t available elsewhere, but that wasn’t the main point by then. The goal was creating an underclass that was systematically excluded and subordinate. The relative social status mattered as much, if not more, than the labor itself. As LBJ put it: “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” Racial laws enforced both economic exploitation and a social hierarchy that made poor whites' own exploitation acceptable for them, since they could at least take comfort in knowing they're better than the blacks.
Plus, they still found ways to exploit black people to a greater degree than poor whites through disparities in sharecropping, tenant farming, and the legal loopholes that enabled forced labor via vagrancy laws and convict leasing. They got away with what they could, having just lost a war, after all.
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