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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
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In India, pre-1858, the East India Company was effectively running it's own slavery programme by calling it "Bonded Land Labour". Peasants couldn't walk off the land - work to death, or pay off your debt and walk. And the debt was structured in such a way that that would never happen either in the debtor's lifetime, or that of his children.
Post-1858, by the British Colonial Government repealing the enslavement of more, but extending the interest on the existing debts by restructuring them so that it went all the way to the debtors great-grandchildren.
The reason this didn't get as many eyeballs as the War across the Pond was because it was filthy darkies being enslaved in their own lands, with Company officials (and later, Bureacrats of the Indian Civil Service - neither Indian, nor Civil, nor a Service) being bribed outright to keep their jaws shut about it.
The other reason being that the War across the Pond was white boys cracking open the skulls of other white boys, that too on a continent usually seen as a kind of wild place with wild customs, which was perfectly acceptable right up and until the Emancipation Proclamation hit.
Edited by TechPriest90 on Apr 7th 2019 at 5:23:45 AM
I hold the secrets of the machine.Learned something new today. And that...that's pretty awesome of the British. Particularly in how what they did undermined their politicians who wanted to help the South. Although how the Union returned the favor was also pretty awesome.
Edited by Ingonyama on Apr 7th 2019 at 4:15:46 AM
Getting back to the present day, I do think it's advisable to get acquainted with your neighbours and local community organzations! The government does have immense capacity for logistics and coordination, but, in the best of cases, their short-term response, grasp of community dynamics, local idiosyncrasies of culture and geography, etc. can be lacking, and there can be legitimate communication and transportation issues that block them from getting help where it's needed as soon as it's needed.
In the worst of cases, if you're of the wrong ethnicity or in the wrong tax bracket, you're a secondary priority, or worse, a suspect. White people will be said to "have found food", black people will be said to have been "looting", black good guy with a gun gets shot despite crowd's warnings, that sort of thing.
Beyond huge emergencies, it's nice to be able to organize block parties or town festivals or book exchanges without the need for approval from elected officials. The government is great, but it shouldn't be your only option.
^Likewise, neither should counting on your neighbors being free, prepared, and qualified be your only choice, either. If the only options being offered to young working women or families who have young children are uprooting a retired relative, befriending the rich dowager three doors down, or paying out the nose for a nanny, then that's a hostile environment for those classes of people, and particularly for women, who will often be pressured out of the workforce.
(And of course, the same politicians and the same voters who will say "then just don't have kids!" are the ones who are attempting to make birth control and family planning illegal.)
Edited by RedSavant on Apr 7th 2019 at 8:00:54 AM
It's been fun.I used to be best friends with a libertarian verging on sovereign citizen. Its an ideology not a practicality. In simple terms, they're not interested in logic. When you explain to them that it's in their best interests to have roads and schools and other things civilization provides—they make up some bullshit about how they didn't ask for this and there's nowhere to go hwere they don't have it.
Even though they'll be the first to whine when they don't get their benny.
It's all about not having to pay taxes more or less. Also, not being able to shoot whoever they want.
Take this poor mothersucker.
It's not a harmless ideology either as we see those who embrace it are perfectly willing to scam each other and actually kill others. The belief they can be their own little sovereign kings and barons is based on a belief that they should control everyone around them with their gun supply.
They're never peasants, only warlords.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.Those kids that harassed that girl in Ohio are probably gonna be lionized and portrayed as victims of "political correctness" by right-wing media and will be invited to the White House, just like those Cov Cath kids from a few months ago. [rolls eyes]
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"Thusly" being the movie poster for The Emperors New Groove, and the trope pic for It's All About Me.
The nicest thing I've been able to say about Libertarianism is that it strikes me as woefully naive. I seriously question whether something the size of the federal government of the United States of America even can be feasibly run on "small government.
Edited by sgamer82 on Apr 7th 2019 at 9:23:04 AM
It would perhaps be prudent to wait this one out - every couple days to weeks something new comes to light that changes the lens the case is viewed under. And I feel we are nowhere near done.
The awful things he says and does are burned into our cultural consciousness like a CRT display left on the same picture too long. -FighteerI was talking about cooperatives, communes, unions, syndicates, and other such organisations. Relative to the time, money, and power of the people forming them, these are actually *huge* government; they're all kinds of intimate and intrusive and resource-intensive. Compromising for the common good and pooling resources together and committing the portions of your time and effort that your capitalist boss owner corporation job hasn't devoured, well, it's a huge sacrifice. And meetings and votes are boring and tense.
But it pays for itself, in many ways. Depending on who gets elected, your government won't protect you against abuse, injustice, exploitation, or the forces of nature. But these people, whom you know, will. Rosa Parks did not wait for the Federal Government to take the initiative to abolish segregation. She became a community leader and rallied her neighbours behind her.
Grassroots government that is relatively huge. Can we call it "tall grass government"?
The politicians who advocate for small government are usually the ones happy to keep it big in its means to exert Violence, while still underpaying policemen and enlisted personnel and prison wardens. They're exactly the kind of people against whom tall grass government, for the people and by the people, is essential.
"Regulatory capture". "Corporate Welfare". "Crony Capitalism". "Pork Barrels". "Disenfranchisement". "Voter Suppression". "Gerrymandering". There's a number of ways government systemically fails to represent the interest of the majority.
Sometimes it's not malice or even incompetence, but structural. Simply by virtue of having too many layers of hierarchy between the decision-making and the reality on the ground. How many layers are there between a Secretary of Education and the classrooms where the policies are implemented? Between the Labour Secretary and a factory plant or a telemarketer room? Between the head of Health and the water taps of Flint? Between the head of Justice and a public defender or a prison courtyard?
I'm not saying a strong central government is a bad idea. Quite the contrary, "we" need a strong force that represents "us", that can provide incentives and consequences and support that allow the general interest to be the same as the private interest, that makes "doing the right thing" the "winning move".
On a personal level, that can mean setting aside our internet connection and going out to make friends, allies, and partners of our neighbours. Because there's a lot of time between elections, and, while voting doesn't hurt and should be done systematically, representatives, who are the voter's employees, need feedback that's faster and more granular than biannual rounds of "you're hired/you're fired".
Edited by Oruka on Apr 7th 2019 at 9:16:37 AM
Everyone has basically coalesced into the same story at this point. On the circumstances if not the actual guilt. The Brothers actually committed the hate crime but weren't paid by Smollett but were trying to pass themselves off as Trump supporters.
They were masked and wearing gloves but prominent red hats.
They claim Smollett hired them but, bluntly, that's suspicious as the CPD gave them immunity to testify against him and that creates a rather immediate conflict if they were the guilty party.
So the only thing now in question is which person is lying, Smollett or the Brothers.
On a jury, I'd say this qualifies as reasonable doubt.
Because, "I faked a hate crime to get more publicity" is a pretty serious charge vs. the equally if not more plausible, "The Brothers attacked Smollett for personal reasons."
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Apr 7th 2019 at 9:55:12 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.The case was brought up by MorningStar a few posts above. It is a detour, but it's related to the white tendency to write off every bad white actor as an isolated incident and every bad POC actor as an indication of a trend that applies 100% across the board (regarding the children involved in the "this is MAGA country" bullying).
Edited by RedSavant on Apr 7th 2019 at 1:01:50 PM
It's been fun.Something that I'll note is that I'm not opposed to the government doing things. When there are three hundred million plus people in a country, even the smallest effective government is going to be large. To me the idea of small government is that it's not larger then it needs to be. How large does it need to be? I'm not completely sure, but my instinct is that it's too large. Everything that the goverment does has a cost.
Consider for a moment a law where no one can pump their own gas, the gas station attendant must do it. (Such as the laws in Oregon and New Jersey)
. There is a social cost to these laws, we can even quantify it.
Let us assume for a moment that a gas station attendant works 40 hours a week. It takes about five minutes to fill up a car with gas, so a single attendant can service roughly a thousand cars in over the course of two weeks which is how long before an average car needs to refuel. With perfect efficiency, a state like New Jersey with a population of about 9 million needs about 9 thousand people to be gas station attendants. However, gas stations are not perfectly efficient, so the number is higher. Say that they are 50% efficient, then 18,000 people will be needed.
Is pumping gas the most economically effective use for these people? I'd wager that it's not. That's the cost of the law. This is of course an easy example of Goverment action having costs. There are benefits, yes. The question is if the benefits outweigh the costs and if the (for lack of a better word) 'profit margin' is maximized (within reason, perfect is the enemy of good). If so, then great, let's have government do it. But I want to be pretty certain that government is the best answer. Most of the time, I'm skeptical that it is.
Edited by Soban on Apr 7th 2019 at 1:15:30 PM
^The New Jersey law in particular apparently came about as a result of gas station owners wanting to charge higher prices for their gas, so they lobbied to make it illegal for people to pump their own as a "safety measure", with, I'm sure, kickbacks to the statesmen who voted in favor. That's an issue entirely separate from the size of government, I would say.
It's been fun.Honestly, has a small government ever really worked for the country?
I mean, the reason that we have our constitution is because the limited federal government created by the Articles of Confederation was ineffective at actually doing it’s job of Governing.
Edited by megaeliz on Apr 7th 2019 at 3:22:09 PM
It’s worth noting that nobody is for unnecessary government, but the people who campaign on ending big government aren’t going to end the small overreaches like licensing hairdressers or mandatory fuel pump attendants, they want to end the big thing, like Medicaid, food safety regulation, environmental protections, ect...)
The US government does have areas of overreach, but what you need is more big government (universal healthcare, better unemployment protection, regulation on the financial sector...) and less small government (fuel pump attendants, large soda bans, controls on consensual sex between adults, hairdresser licences, ect...).
Edited by Silasw on Apr 7th 2019 at 8:12:04 AM
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran

Slavery is an absolutely shit economic system save for the slave owners (which is why rich people keep trying to bring it back).
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.