It’s something that really bothers me about communism and socialism being derisive in the US, even in 2024, about 35 years after USSR fell.
The alternative to community-centric society is autocracy, typically devolving into monarchism.
Death to monarchists!
That is the way that the police work in the United States yes.
We’re not talking about the police, we’re talking about the Secret Service protecting the President-Elect of the United States… at a golf park Not only that, but a park where people have to be super rich since access to Trump (leader of the GOP and now President-elect) is figured into the membership fee.
And while the police are happy to gun down the rest of us shlubs, they treat rich people like they treated OJ Simpson after he hacked up Nicole Brown. When they don’t and they actually shoot a rich person, then high-powered (blue-haired) lawyers come and sue the precinct and county for enough money to collapse the GDP.
But I do hear you. Police in the US are bastards to the last.
Some basic information about teen sex in the United States:
All 50 states have Romeo & Juliette laws allowing exceptions for statutory sexual assault crimes when sexual activity is between peers of similar age. The typical threshold is 5 years.
However, the floor of R&J statutes is typically 14 or 15. So a 13 year-old having sex is conspicuous. But also, teenage dating and boyfriend / girlfriend relationships often do not feature or even imply a sexual relationship. (When I was fourteen, I and a 10 year old family-friend decided we were bf/gf, even bathing together and having sleepovers, though doing nothing more risqué than Parcheesi.)
As a note, R&J laws often omit allowing for same sex intimacy. So if you’re a teen exploring your LGBT+ side and want to keep it legal, check your state and county ordinances to see what is allowed.
That’s assuming I actually look like a threat, rather than someone infatuated with the weird robot dog.
It’s a golf park full of rich old people. I bet the dog-hecklers will come dozens per hour.
The ones at Mar-A-Lago are unarmed.
My approach to the armed ones, particularly the TASER-equipped ones used by some US law enforcement departments, would be very different.
I don’t see downvotes here on Blåhaj, but I’ll respond to rumors of them with LGBT+ memes.
Here it comes.
Dang it. He’s not the master vampire.
So in 2016 when Trump got elected the first time (by EC, still leaving everyone scratching their heads), a history teacher friend of mine started an activist group on Facebook based on The White Rose ( on Wikipedia ). Here in the States, we still have a considerable respect for the right to free speech, even though people speaking in defiance of the current tyrannical state may get attacked by nazis (id est MAGAs, alt-right militants, the usual run of official and unofficial Trump-enthusiasts).
Now the White Rose itself is not a great example, since they were all hunted down by the Gestapo and executed, but true to the mechanics of revolution, they made resistance sympathists of onlookers, and activists of sympathists (and militants of activists. No fewer than 42 plots to assassinate Adolph Hitler† are known to have occurred, and it’s likely we’ve missed some including the time-travelers who could retroactively cover their tracks.)
In fact modern resistance tactics (which includes those used by BLM during the 2020 George Floyd protests) highlight the same methods, by not being aggressive and letting the authoritarian forces initiate violence. It helps in an age where that stuff gets captured on phone camera and disseminated online, and the next thing you know, ICE is contending with a line of moms and another line of dads using leaf-blowers to disperse CS gas.
It’s still a long journey between frustrating Trump to silliness and actually getting some relief to the public, but I’m willing to wear out my shoes trying.
† All the assassination attempts were from within. The Allies saw Hitler as a weakness, since he often would override his generals strategies and ignore technological developments that disinterested him. Hitler was also fond of attacking when it was astrologically auspicious, which the Allies used to effectively predict them. Never interfere with your enemy when he is making a mistake. – often attributed to Napoleon.
Bonded servitude (the superset of slavery) has been a universal thing throughout civilization, even though we have been dreaming of non-stratified societies at least since the enlightenment, and the occasional heretic / blasphemer / impious philosopher since the classical age.
So when we talk about peonage (bonded servants) in civilizations, we compare like to like, say slaves as they were regarded under Roman law vs. serfs during the middle ages. It’s messy. We don’t have slaves officially in the modern United States, but we do have forced prison labor (which we treat worse than Roman slaves) and we have child labor and immigrant labor, but these are thanks to blind spots in law and enforcement… but that means we have blind spots in law and enforcement were atrocity can (and often does) hide.
So slaves were better off in the Roman age than they were, say, during the Sugar plantation age here in the Americas. Peasants in the middle age had more rights but were just as bonded, and modern court systems emerged because letting the local lord adjudicate based on his gut feeling (oft while he was inebriated) resulted often in miscarriage of justice.
In the meantime, yes, we still fantasize about creating a system in which the lowest laborers can actually enjoy their work, and don’t have to worry about precarity of food, housing, health, etc. We’re totally not there yet and should be further along than we are.
Is that Leonard Leo in the back? (Right side)
That’s the master vampire! If we stake him, the rest lose their powers!
Coo at them. Pet them. Call them a good doggie. Drop a treat on them, all in defiance.
The Republicans who spread that rumor didn’t care whether it was true, and was looking for choice rumors to spread.
It’s blood libel for the 21st century.
I think the state in this case needs to be divided into adversarial and non-adversarial departments (or subdepartments). It’s better to tell (for example) the water department you don’t know whether the pipes are lead if that’s the case, rather than forcing them to unearth copper pipes or letting them leave lead pipes.
But it is absolutely appropriate (assuming you believe in strong rights to privacy) to insert NSA keywords into benign communications, so that NSA wastes time on your false positives, but that’s because NSA isn’t supposed to be doing mass surveillance of the public, rather is supposed to be helping develop communication security that is impervious to surveillance.
If your local precinct actually works with the community, doesn’t harass minorities and doesn’t rob civilians via asset forfeiture, it might be worth giving them sound information (including saying you don’t know what you don’t know.) On the other hand if it behaves typically for law enforcement in the US, leading them to chase geese will save everyone else trouble.
As someone who doesn’t get the gender feelies at all, dresses and sarongs are cool (as in, good for warm weather). High socks are so amazing that everyone wore them for much of the middle ages (they’re warm!). Called hosen wool socks and a tunic was ordinary commoner attire. (And yes, your nethers and janglies were free to the open air underneath. Laundry without machines was too labor intensive for non-nobles to have underwear.)
Makeup is weird, but looking amazing is fun. (My experience with it was on stage, and putting on eyeliner was hard to do without flinching.)
While I can appreciate a cool tool (say tweezers with a magnifying lens attached) tactical stuff painted black doesn’t make sense in contrast to stuff painted a bright color that can easily be seen (on the assumption that I’m not in combat hidden in cover), bright pink is fine except when everything else is also bright pink. (A lot of beach dayglo colors are meant to be well offset against the ocean greens and blues).
Now that’s on the practical side. Some folks get a HUGE buzz from representing according to their gender identity. Trans folk know this because wearing the stuff they like is [regarded by others as] weird in contrast to the stuff that mom bought them while they were growing up, so they’ve had cause to actually explore this aspect of themselves.
But there are guys who like to double down on butchness and gals who like getting ready for the night out more than the going out, itself. And then there are dudes who, no matter how masculine they represent, feel inadequate and wussy, which likely informs alpha male rhetoric and the far-right man-o-sphere pundits.
To be fair, if we look close, we see ecosystems within ecosystems, including a buttload of predation and two buttloads of parasitism. Parasites capitalizing on other lifeforms to utilize their energy and resources for their own growth and reproduction, as far as the eye can see.
And that’s what human society is. It’s much less prone to top-down parasitism in tiny societies (less than 500 members) but when we have communities of millions and states of tens of millions, it’s pretty easy for religious ministries and ideological politicians to take over the system to make giant militaries that hammer other, less-captured societies.
Every once in a while some of us get the idea, what if we make a system that doesn’t involve parasitism. I bet we can make everyone pretty happy. And this is true, except that the parasites really like having ridiculous amounts of wealth and power, and would rather render the entire species extinct than be confined to being a (well-to-do, comfortable) commoner.
This is why, even though there have been successful anarcho-communist organizations, they are often attacked by state law enforcement acting not in enforcing law, but in preserving political power.
No war but class war.
Death to monarchists.
We started with an unlimited workweek (often 12+ hours a day all day) and reduced it to 40 hours with a weekend and a paid lunch. (Remember the movie 9 to 5 that was typical. Then it became 9-6 with unpaid lunch.)
Around the Reagan era, Osha got defunded so it didn’t have time to deal with all the labor violations, which was part of the enshittification.
Who knew it would lead to a nazi uprising?
Turns out everyone did. The industrialist intellegentsia actually warned this would happen based on historical precedent, but the boomer generation was all fuck the future including their own kids. To be fair, prior generations hating later generatiobs was the norm by the time it was their turn.
Wait, didn’t this all get turned into a rock musical on Broadway?
Ice Cream (1964)
Evelyne Axell
Banned on Facebook
Rage like California wildfire.
I also noted this was a problem with the Rebel Alliance (who just supports a republic of oligarchs), and was called a centrist for my efforts.