Category: the state
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My American Trauma
This is about what happens when you are wrong about who you are, how you see yourself, and what you think that means when conceptualizing yourself, the world, and your place in that world.
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I hung up on my mother
I hung up on my mother today because she was trying to make an argument justifying why ~20 million Joe Biden voters didn’t show up for Kamala Harris because she wasn’t competent. There are many, many reasons why this happened, and none of them have to do with the competency of Kamala Harris compared to…
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Minority Rule
Today is Independence Day, 2024. As it may be the last such occurrence in more than name only, we should enumerate what stands to be lost to minority rule. The majority clearly shares common preferences for a value system where you are emancipated from those who would deny you the ability to actualize yourself because…
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Solving the problem
There are lots of voices bemoaning the use of copyrighted materials in the training of large language models, how much energy and water is consumed by their creation, and how they are enclosing a commons to create a new generation of robber barons. Congress could, if they were a functioning part of human civilization, enact…
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M.A.D. is broken
Mutually Assured Destruction is the name for the idea that none of the nuclear powers will start a nuclear war because it will result in nuclear holocaust, destroying civilization and possibly ending the human race. But what if they don’t care? What if a nuclear power believes their decline and extinction as a nation is…
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Police, again
In a surprise to no one, police are again being unleashed in performative brutality against young adults demonstrating in protest against their elders’ lack of integrity to the espoused virtues of their country. Rather than dig deep into the many, many ways this particular hypocrisy is composed (because I don’t have anything but vitriol and…
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Liars
There is a joke that I’ve heard since I was a kid that has managed to remain inoffensive and true through out all the refinements of what we deem socially acceptable. It goes like this, “How do you know if a politician is lying? His lips are moving!” I like this because everyone can agree…
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No Peace
If you are angry at “the government” but live in a representative democracy, where you are able to participate in free and fair elections, then you are the government that you are angry at. Either you’ve made bad choices and are now being forced to live with them, or you’ve neglected your responsibilities and are…
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Autocracy isn’t socialism
FWIW, all the people who say they are against socialism because they’ve lived under communism and their lives were hard or ruined, suffered because they lived under totalitarian autocracies. If they want to make a nuanced argument about how socialism _leads_ to totalitarian autocracies I’m receptive to unpacking that argument, just not while they are…
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Just one thing: Suffrage
If you want a single thing to use to understand the current status of the great experiment that is the United States of America, one needs only to look at who is allowed to vote. In the beginning, voting was neither and inalienable right nor a privilege bestowed from power, being instead the consequence of…