Isn’t that the rub with the spooky off-site list, though? No documentation to point a definitive finger at who did precisely what. I suppose we could scapegoat the person who wrote the original call for the list, but if they aren’t the only maintainer then the rest of the plotters get to slip through our fingers.

That which is asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof. Since we’re two claims in, if you can dig up that simple research then you can compel the other guy to actually back up their claim.

The subtle cultural fascism of women doing things while I seethe about it in the corner

It’s in the subtext

Fun fact: This is because the writer of Babylon 5, J. Michael Straczynski, originally pitched it as a Star Trek series. The studio told him “No, that’s stupid. Go away.” Then as soon as he was out of the earshot started writing Deep Space 9.

Only amendment I’d put in there is that if we do get a competent gestapo it won’t be ICE. ICE, the border patrol before them, and the Texas rangers before them all have a storied history of being impossible to appropriately train and outfit. Since their inception, they’ve been quantity-over-quality bucket of racists and failsons that have only ever been useful as a blunt instrument, despite work stretching back to the Harlon Carter days.

If we get a proper gestapo or KGB, it’ll either come from a different agency or they’ll have to completely gut and restructure ICE first. For now we can scare them off with crowds and airhorns.

It bothers me SO MUCH that the film cut the plotlines from the book that that riddle was hinting towards, but kept the intro as a cryptic, unfulfilled promise.

Hong Kong was seeking independence after the treaty that ceded it to Britain expired. China occupied the island and violently put down resistance.

Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Djibouti, Bangladesh, and Cambodia have all had valuable trade capability strong-armed away from them by China, who exploited financial instability to establish century-long leases on all maritime activity from their premiere port cities. This is in service to their “String of Pearls” geopolitical strategy to expand their naval trade and military power projection.

The Belt and Road initiative is part free economic zone, part debt-trap, as it forces low-income nations such as Tanzania, Pakistan, and the DRC into loan schemes that will take generations to repay, offering the ceding of key natural resources as a quick and easy out.

They have claimed the entire South China Sea as natural maritime territory without the consent or agreement of Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, or Taiwan. This is speculated to be a move against Taiwan, specifically. But the outcome is the same: Heightened tensions between neighbors and the claiming of sea lanes that are not theirs.

Amnesia moment

If someone explains something you disagree with, you have to actually explain why you think they’re wrong. Conversely, if you just say ‘nuh uh’, then ‘nuh uh’ is enough to prove you completely wrong.

Actually, if you want a real answer, that which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

So, wrong.

That

You are incorrect

Yes, they’re both authoritarian. I’ll give communism one over capitalism for at least trying to wield authoritarianism for good instead of evil at the outset. But at the end of the day it’s like the One Ring, deranging anyone who tries to use it.

Realistically, our local and federal law enforcement has always been like this. See: Blair Mountain, Black Wall Street, the Jim Crow South, the post-Jim Crow South, any of the L.A. Riots, Ruby Ridge, the entire history of the Texas Rangers, COINTELPRO, Black Lives Matter, or the life and times of J Edgar Hoover, just off the top of my head.

The only difference right now is that we’ve let it get so out of control that now the average white American are getting caught in the collateral of what is otherwise standard operations. So now it gets treated as unique. But it’s the same shit as always, just bigger.

Individually, they’re dumb, out of shape, and, if you’ve been paying much attention, pretty cowardly. So yes, a single cop is fucking joke. But as a group they’re better-armed than many militaries, are legally protected from the VAST majority of their own crimes, and have an insane culture of solidarity not only internally, but with the moneyed class.

You fuck with that loser once and you’re inviting a team of violent idiots and a judge to legally fuck with you the rest of your life. You actively defend yourself from that team of violent idiots and a judge in turn, and I am not exaggerating when I say you’re inviting a militarized response. There’s a reason that so many of our cops can get away with being so mean, dumb, and weak.

Yeah so the issue is that our police have been militarizing and their unions have been persistently dismantling accountability laws since the 80’s, using racist propaganda as cover for their actions. Now that it’s fully mask-off, it’s less, “what’s the community going to think about this” and more “what can the community even do about it?”

The white population of this country has not only allowed, but quietly encouraged, the stripping away of every safeguard we have against our police because they never thought it would be used against them. They were told that racial minorities were going to pillage and rape their uncanny white picket suburbs and remote podunk towns any day now, and that the only law enforcement could save them. But only if it was unchained from any sort of safeguards previously installed on it and given the proper tools of pillage.

So, like, we’re fucked I think. We have a VERY long and painful road ahead of us if we’re going to dismantle all these violent gangs we’ve embedded in our government.

Yeah so that’s the thing, you assumed the morality I was referring to is objective. It’s ALL subjective. There’s no objective base outside of human desires and considerations to refer to, and climate disaster being comparable to slavery is a called shot on my part. Today’s normal is tomorrow’s evil and yesterday’s mundane is today’s exceptional because morality changes over time. Humans made it and they made it to concern the things they care about. That doesn’t make them bad, but it makes them purely subjective.

For that matter, “archetypical” anything as a concept outside of clinical psychology that hasn’t seen the light of day since Plato’s world of forms. Archetypes are invented by our brains. They have no sway or influence on reality past their social impacts, and what makes a thing archetypical is ALSO purely subjective.

There’s no such thing as objective morality. That’s a tired and long-discarded enlightenment idea. Morality was invented entirely by people and is entirely concerned with things people think matter.

We are factory-farming, oil-guzzling monsters that will be judged just as harshly as our forbears for our own barbarities as you judge southerners for theirs. The only reason you don’t consider this is a one to one deal is because you were raised in an environment that normalizes and excuses what we do to our planet. The same way enslavers and their communities normalized and excused their behavior.