Churro
2d ago
I feel like this is just an argument for applying a similar level of scrutiny and accountability to everybody else. Or better yet, an even harsher standard than that precedent. I rather like the idea of my leaders being too afraid of the consequences to attempt any ratfucking.
Churro
1mo ago
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.
Churro
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo ago
Who is saying that we can't deport convicted pedophiles and murderers. Who specifically? When?
Churro
1mo 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
2mo 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?
I'm sure the remnants of the Ancien Régime were asking themselves the same question all those years in Austria.
To give you a less quippy answer, I think the most persuasive argument for me is a moral one. People should have a say and a stake in how their lives are run. I'm not confident enough to claim it's a universal, but I think it's not a controversial claim to say the majority of humanity has an instinctual desire to be the masters of their own destiny, whatever compromises they have to make of their autonomy in the current socio-political-economic structure of the world. I mean, freedom is arguably the single most popular ideological concept there's ever been, with all but the most extreme authoritarians and totalitarians at least attempting to appeal to it. I think it's fundamentally a right you deserve, to at least have the modicum of political power your suffrage gives you in modern liberal democracies. I'd prefer much more devolved and local systems, though.
But for those who don't share my moral principles, how about avoiding violent, anti-elite revolutions? Do you really want to go back to killing hundreds of thousands of peasants because it's important to keep a rich, powerful guys club exclusive? Not to mention that, poor short-term electoral incentives to policy aside, democratic regimes tend to have much better long term capacity to self-correct. Whereas if dear leader decides to wage a hopeless, 13-year-long failing war to retain a pointless colonial empire, there's no formal, reliable mechanism to force a change of leadership or even policy. Have you always approved of your mayor, your governor, your president? Have you ever wanted somebody else in charge? And if the answer is yes, are you prepared to plan and execute a revolution or coup of your own, or to participate in or support one?
If not, I would suggest you are either one of the peasants, or you do, in fact, actually like the idea of democracy.
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