Supah_Schmendrick
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User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
The steel-manned case is a telephoned pickup of "Christian nationalism," a small dissident-right movement that a lot of progressive and anti-right-wing media have picked up on as a major enemy du jour.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
I normally think generational trauma is bullshit, except for Haiti, it was literally hell on earth and they had to keep importing slaves because the natural birth rate couldn't hold a candle to the death rate on the sugar plantations
Haitian sugar plantations weren't much different from Barbadian sugar plantations, Jamaican sugar plantations, or even Louisiana sugar plantations. They were all absolutely horrific places to work, and chewed through human lives at ridiculous speeds.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
There's a reason the north didn't have slaves on its wheat farms
Initially, African-descended people had less comparative advantage in the North because their malaria-resistance conferred little or no advantage in a colder climate. Additionally, several crops that slave populations purchased from west Africa had prior special experience with (e.g. rice, indigo) were not widely viable outside of particular regions along the southern Atlantic (NC, SC, GA) and gulf (LA, MS) coasts. There are other reasons as well, but these are two particularly-interesting ones.
This was a country founded explicitly on anti-imperialist principles of popular sovereignty and democracy.
Well, beneath the rhetoric was a pretty solid foundation of impatience with British refusal to let colonists swarm past the Appalachians and conquer more Indian land, so YMMV.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
East Tennessee is another good example. I don't know of too many books about the subject, but here's one I have read: "War at Every Door: Partisan Politics and Guerrilla Violence in East Tennessee, 1860-1869." There's also this article about Unionist sentiment in north Alabama: "Civil War Unionists and the Political Culture of Loyalty in Alabama, 1860-1861."
The idea of Unionist Southerners being willing to turn on the Confederacy was prominent enough that Lincoln based Union war strategy on appealing to them for a significant portion of the war.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
Africa has ethnic boundaries that often don't match borders very well
You could have said this about Europe as well. What did the Welsh have to do with the Scottish or English? People in Provence, Brittany, and Isle-de-France didn't even speak the same languages. Italian only coalesced as a basically-uniform and mutually-intelligible language in the last couple hundred years, and at the time of the discovery of the New World there was no "Spain", but instead "the Spains" because they were a bunch of fiercely-independent kingdoms with their own privileges and rivalries, bound together through fragile personal unions. Prussians, Brunswickers, Saxons, Badeners, and Bavarians didn't have much in common. Russia is a giant, multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic empire, and even today eastern/south-eastern europe don't match ethnic and national borders well - they certainly didn't back in the bad old days of the great Habsburg empires.
Second, it's just hard to get out of dictatorship once you're in it. One group can't suddenly decide to be noncorrupt all on hts own, and the power needed to stop corruption by fiat enables corruption by the group with the power.
Up until the late 19th century, just about every significant country in Europe was some type of monarchy (i.e. dictatorship), mediated by local elites (as is the case in Africa as well). How did they escape this seemingly-impossible corruption trap?
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
Sympathy to a cause has very little to do with analysis of the behavior of that cause's partisans in a particular instance.
Supah_Schmendrick
6d ago
The same one as John Adams, thank-you-very-much.
Supah_Schmendrick
6d ago
I mean, if your only reason for becoming a lawyer is "it will pay me a squintillion bucks," then yes. This is a very good reason not to be a lawyer, and frankly, good riddance. The law is too important, and the current profession too corrupted as it is.
Supah_Schmendrick
6d ago
Civil disobedience properly is directed at the governing authority; not random citizens.
In a democracy, particularly one as deeply run by small-scale voluntary and communal organizations as the US used to be, there often wasn't much of a difference between the two.
Of course, the U.S. hasn't been that kind of democracy for a long time.
Supah_Schmendrick
6d ago
So has installing "self-defense cannon" in a structure as an anti-mob measure. But law has, for better or worse, evolved on that question.
Supah_Schmendrick
6d ago
The issue is the American (mostly Red Tribe) culture of escalatory self-defence.
What about the Blue Tribe culture of aggressively taking over and blocking explicitly public transit spaces? That action happens to be illegal (at least as the laws are written) in most US jurisdictions.
Supah_Schmendrick
7d ago
That was the focus of the prosecution that he was cauding people to feel hreatened, which was the contention on why Rosenbaum may have felt threatened and c harged Rittenhouse and thus had a self defence claim.
The problem is the link you're smuggling in between "feeling threatened" and "charging." Not "shoving someone away from you" or "running away" or "hiding" but "charging". Actively running towards the person who you think is threatening you.
Supah_Schmendrick
7d ago
she happily took an OF career over a law career.
This doesn't tell you anything. I graduated with decent grades from a T-15 law school in a major US metropolitan area and didn't crack $80k/yr for several years out of law school. Lawyer pay is extremely bimodal, and there's a lot of people who get their newly-minted JD only to find themselves with 5 or 6-figure debts but making significantly less than the Assistant Manager at the local Panda Express.
Supah_Schmendrick
7d ago
simp/soyboy/nerdy men (perjorative terms used to denote an archetype succinctly)
The problem is that this archetype (because less attractive) includes lots of men with low social skills, and (because inexperienced romantically) badly wrong ideas about women. Women aren't looking for a grubby and immature man-child either. There's no quick fix here.
Supah_Schmendrick
7d ago
The point of this piece is just to push back against toxic sex positivity without back sliding into toxic purity
"toxic" aren't traits of impersonal "sex positive" or "purity" cultures - they're attitudes and actions of individual people, which are going to exist no matter the "culture" or "norm" you set up. There's no systematizing your way around human imperfection and failure, including but not limited to shittiness and evil.
Supah_Schmendrick
7d ago
Oh sure. I'm just less familiar with that than with the French stuff.
Supah_Schmendrick
8d ago
Voltaire and anti-Catholic propaganda pervasive from the French Enlightenment through the Spanish Civil War, mostly.
Supah_Schmendrick
8d ago
once there is literally no space free from the towering presence of a trans stasi agent.
This, even in extremely-progressive (thus trans-friendly) spaces, is incredibly, ridiculously overstated.
Supah_Schmendrick
8d ago
The mistake is thinking that there is any systematic "solution" that will avoid people sometimes being callow, manipulative, unempathetic, or simply mistaken in ways that result in broken hearts and worse.
I agree with the author that actually interacting with, and making informed decisions about, the individual people in front of you, is the most important thing - you can't rely on any ideology or heuristic to do the thinking for you. But I disagree because there is also a value to "purity" - having sex is a really major step in a relationship, and can really skew people's attitudes towards each other, and towards relationships in general.
Whether to have sex, and who to have sex with, really is an important decision with outsize importance - particularly for heterosexual women - and should be approached really, really carefully, given the young and immature ages at which young women become sexually attractive to men, and the drastically-different attitudes most men and most women have towards sex (see, e.g., the sexual habits of gay men vs. lesbian women).
Supah_Schmendrick
8d ago
Supah_Schmendrick
8d ago
aside from some with exotic racial preferences, people usually want to see people that look like them in the media they consoom.
This isn't actually true. White people used to care about seeing people of their own race in their media, but during the Civil Rights era have pretty much stopped doing that. Black people, on the other hand, really want to see themselves, and haven't stopped. (source: Lenk, Hartmann & Sattler; "White Americans’ preference for Black people in advertising has increased in the past 66 years: A meta-analysis" PNAS, Vol. 121, No. 9)
Supah_Schmendrick
8d ago
There was no conceivable act of individual heroism that could have shattered the power of the Catholic church at the height of the Inquisition
Bad history. The Inquisition was set up precisely to stop idiot rubes out in the sticks from freaking out about nonsense like "witches making the cows' milk dry up" and burning people. The Spanish crown then won a political struggle with the Papacy, asserted control over the office in the area under its secular jurisdiction, then started using it as a secret police against perceived fifth columnists and as a revenue source.
Supah_Schmendrick
8d ago
It's not a terribly deep or positive thought, but I kinda yawned my way through this.
It's not that it's badly written, but more that it's formulaic. Ah yep - conservative religious upbringing that fails to actually describe recognizable relations between the sexes and settles for formulaic denunciations. Escapist fantasies of liberation that inevitably shatter on the weird, cold, and uncomfortable reefs of confusing interpersonal relations? Check. And next we'll have...yup, there it is...sublimation of the disappointment from those broken dreams into uncharitable takes on the opposite sex, complete with meme-tier statistics. Finally, we wrap up with white-knuckled clinging to any available validation for the hole the author's dug herself, a wistful call-back to liberatory fantasies, and a circle back to those conservative parents, who still remain fuddy-duddies.
And as a parthian shot, I have a hard time taking the author's complaints about the sexual marketplace seriously when she's literally an OnlyFans model. Bemoaning the lack of human connection in romantic matters and the reduction of women to "defective cumrags" rings mighty hollow from that position.
On the other hand, make that bag I guess.
Supah_Schmendrick
11d ago
Thinking about the past, it makes me smile how much it was common to hear, until twenty years ago, that women are very uninterested in politics, unlike men. For my generation, this idea looks absurd. Men do not care about politics at all.
I'm not sure what culture you're from/what tropes you're dealing with, but the idea that "women don't care about politics" hasn't been a significant part of anglosphere culture for at least the last 200 years, as far as I can tell. Instead, women have been at the forefront of just about every moralistic movement that I can think of in the anglosphere, from religious awakenings, the abolition of slavery, progressive uplift of the lower-classes, anti-alcoholism, anti-drugs, etc. A certain species of feminine moral busybodying over far-away causes actually gets lampooned from time to time in mainstream anglosphere literature.
It was the nature of the work. Sugarcane is a thick, tough grass with similar dimensions to adult bamboo.
During planting, the slaves hade to dig 4-6 ft. square holes half a foot deep (60-100 squares per slave per day, or between 1k-2k cubic feet of earth each), use that earth to build up banks/causeways between the squares, then emplace cane seeds in the squares, surrounded by a few dozen pounds of manure (which had to be collected from cattleyards and carried to the fields by hand or basket as well).
During harvesting, the slaves had to (1) cut down the stalks by hand, (2) strip and de-leaf the cane stalks, and (3) carry bushels of the cut and stripped stalks from the squares to the processing stations. They then had to (4) see the juices extracted from the stalks via milling, (5) carry away the pulp, (6) boil and render the cane juice through successive sets of boilers and pans down into syrup, tempered with lime juice just before the crystallization point, then left to cool into molasses (distilled in turn into rum) and semi-refined sugar crystals.
Harvesting was especially brutal because once cut, the juices in the cane would spoil and rot incredibly rapidly. As a result, plantations during harvesting seasons ran around the clock in two 12-hour shifts, as fast as the workers could go. This led to many deaths from exhaustion in the fields, loss of limbs from crushing underneath millstones, and all the other types of industrial accidents that can happen in large-scale agriculture. Slaves also died in large numbers to all the ordinary tropical diseases and malnutrition endemic to the early-modern Caribbean.
This was the standard method basically everywhere that sugar was grown on New World plantations, and was absolutely brutal.
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