No thanks to me, I was never a fan or anything, but it’s interesting how long those fans were told this whole thing is a “conspiracy theory” and they should just give up their efforts and go away. Then all of a sudden turns out it was all real, the fans were right all along and they saved her.
There may be people who in the world who do use their freedom wisely, but they seem to be few and far between. The point of freedom isn’t to already be wise — the point of freedom is to at least suffer from your own mistakes, rather than from other people’s mistakes. In any case, wise or not, I wish Britney happiness.
Even though I technically know what you mean by this, I think it’s a poor choice of wording, since in global terms, I think what is considered “mainstream leftism” in the United States is actually far, far right wing.
Previous nitpicking aside… secessionist movements have an extraordinarily low success rate, and frequently produce bad results even when the goal of secession is achieved.
Note that decolonization movements have significantly higher rates of success, and are generally categorized separately, so far as I can tell.
And also….
About 40 minutes in, you discuss the concern of military repression in response to secession. Given the course of human history, that’s probably an extremely likely response.
Then you bring up an analogy of if a woman was considering leaving a relationship, but she was afraid her boyfriend would use violence against her if she left, and you conclude that such a fear is evidence that she should really leave.
Focusing on this point for a moment, this is a real concern that many women face. People who have run the numbers have calculated that women are 70 times more likely to be killed in the two weeks after leaving than at any other time during a relationship.
This statistic can be found on a variety of websites, but here’s one that came up on top of Google.
clarionledger [dot] com/story/news/2017/01/28/most-dangerous-time-for-battered-women-is-when-they-leave-jerry-mitchell/96955552/
Women deal with this fear in a variety of ways, and one way is to remain in the bad relationship. Women sometimes placate men they are afraid of. This is within the realm of human nature. You can argue that that’s a terrible reason to remain in the relationship, that a woman should prefer death over remaining in an abusive, loveless relationship, but that’s not how all women think, plus there are often complicating factors, like children.
There’s a personal narrative here about a women who chose to placate a man — tell him what he wanted to hear, not what she really thought about him — right when he put his hands around her neck and started strangling her. By placating him, she was able to persuade him to get his hands off her neck and write the story about it later. I’m not certain if she left him at a later date. The point I am getting at is that placating violent, dangerous people is a survival tactic used by many.
Going back to the topic of secession, just as there are women who remain in bad relationships for fear of being murdered, there are lots of people who submit to governments they know are tyrannical for fear of the consequences of rebellion. You may have heard the saying, “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.”
If you read leftist literature, a lot of it is about various kinds of oppression, including governmental oppression. The book 1984, which is acknowledged by Jeff Riggenbach on the Mises Institute as probably “the most widely influential libertarian novel ever published”, was written by a person Riggenbach describes as, “authentically and radically antiauthoritarian democratic socialist.” I confess, I find this somewhat confusing. If, by Riggenbach’s own admission, 1984 was written by a socialist, then isn’t it a socialist novel, not a libertarian one? However, I take his meaning to be, most likely, that he and many other libertarians identified strongly with the novel, and interpreted it through libertarian lenses, even if it was not exactly intended to be interpreted through such lenses.
More recent antiauthoritarian leftist literature includes Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott, and Sl*very by Another Name: The Re-Ensl*vement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II By Douglas A. Blackmon. Neither portrays governmental authority in a particularly positive light.
If people are afraid for your safety in the event of a secession, I don’t think it (necessarily) means they are deliberately being part of the oppression. If they called the police on you, then you could say they were a collaborator, but I think just expressing the concern is, well, being concerned.
Re: Civil War, there’s a case to be made that that wasn’t even a legitimate secession, and perhaps should instead be classified as a coup.
This is from the leftist book, “This Vast Southern Empire: Sl*veholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy” by Matthew Karp
The secession of the American South took place in an age of secessions. Across the mid-nineteenth-century Atlantic world, from Texas to Belgium to Hungary, minority groups withdrew—or attempted to withdraw—from larger political units, often claiming that their right to self-government could be achieved only through separation from an oppressive central authority. Southern elites themselves enjoyed drawing parallels between their predicament and that of the beleaguered minorities of Europe. The inauguration of a Republican government in Washington, declared James Mason in 1860, would be “to us the government of a foreign power. We shall stand to such power as Italy to Austria and Poland to Russia.” Comparisons of this kind, southern leaders hoped, might induce European powers to recognize and assist the Confederacy,as they had assisted Greece, Belgium, and other young nations.38 In truth, the Confederate case was strikingly different. Among the secessionists of the mid-nineteenth century, American sl*veholders were the only group who had, for eighty years previous, served as the dominant political elite within the government they now abandoned. If the decision to secede from the Union was indeed a revolution, it was a revolution led by the ruling class of the ancien régime.
Alright, so Karp doesn’t go so far as to argue that it wasn’t a secession (although I think he could have), but at least he did point out that it was not by any means a normal secession. So, as long as a Texas secession appeared to be the will of the people on not merely the will of a ruling class that’s a bit less powerful than it used to be, it would be appropriate to exclude comparsions to the antebellum Southern secession. Which I guess it more or less agreeing with your point, but I think it’s worth including anyway.
Edit: It occurred to me that I don’t recall ever hearing anyone express the concern about the US government potentially bombing or otherwise using extreme violence against secessionists in a “glib” tone of voice. Perhaps if I had, I might judge their motives differently.
Then again, sometimes people joke about painful topics, because they feel like laughing is the only way to keep from crying, so it really can be hard to tell.
There was a woman in the UK named Shana Grice who was fined by the police for filing allegedly wasting police time when filing reports against the boyfriend who eventually killed her. Obviously, the reports weren’t remotely frivolous in actuality, given that her boyfriend eventually killed her. In my opinion, the police who fined her should be charged with aiding and abetting murder.
In any case, there’s an article from the Guardian that explains some of the psychology at play here. It’s common for women to placate men they are afraid of, but these acts of placation are frequently interpreted by our patriarchal society as consent, which leads people, such as the police in this case, to be unwilling to help. This puts women in a very dangerous situation, where they are d**ned if they do and d**ned if they don’t.
The police force failed Grice in many ways, among them not acknowledging how many women engage with men they are afraid of. It is commonplace for women to placate those who may harm them (or in the case of Grice, kill them) if they do not.
We can comprehend a negotiator saying what they need to in order to bargain with a kidnapper for the lives of hostages. But as a woman, when you are the hostage, doing the same leads to scepticism and scorn – even more so if you have a previous relationship with your tormentor. As the counsel presenting the case against Godfrey put it: “There is a stereotype that if Person A is in a relationship with Person B, one cannot be at risk from the other.” Yet we know the opposite is true – two women die at the hands of former and current partners in England and Wales each week. A fifth of women killed by their partners had contacted the police.
On the topic of people not participating in secessionist and other resistance movements out of fear of being killed in a repression, I have, in my reading of history, come across at least 3 circumstances in which this fear is likely to be overcome:
A) When people are so incredibly miserable, that they would rather die fighting than continue as they are. Try to imagine the psychology of a torture victim who fights back against his torturer, knowing it’s a hopeless fight, because at least if he baits his torturer into killing him, the torture will finally end, and then scale that up by thousands of people, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, or however big the revolt is.
B) When the government is killing people even if they don’t fight back, and they feel even a miniscule chance of victory is better than quietly allowing themselves to be slaughtered. May overlap with reason A.
C) When they hope to create a better world for their children, even at the cost of their own lives.
Situation B (when the government is killing people even if they don’t fight back) is covered by Sun Tzu in the Art of War. According to Sun Tzu, “Ground on which we can only be saved from destruction by fighting without delay, is desperate ground,” and, “On desperate ground, fight.” Now, if you want to take Sun Tzu’s advice in a pacifist way, you could fight with a camera. (I can’t guarantee it will work, but there are never any guarantees of victory when one is on desperate ground.) It’s probably not what Sun Tzu had in mind, but given that he’s been dead for over 2000 years, I don’t think he’s up to date on all the latest technology and tactics. In any case, I think a lot of people have an instinctive grasp of what Sun Tzu is saying hear, and genocidal and other particularly deadly regimes do face revolts.
This sort of thing — various uprisings — happens during other genocides as well. They happened during the Irish Holodomor. There were Irish people who fought against the massive food thefts being perpetrated by the British militias and armies and the behest of the British landlords.
An example of situation A (when people are so incredibly miserable, that they would rather die fighting than continue as they are) would be the revolt of the Pende (a Congolese people). Or at any rate, one Belgian who looked into the causes of the revolt reached that conclusion.
As the price of palm nuts has fallen, the blacks are at present obliged to work for several months in order to pay their taxes. On the other hand, no one is unaware that this region, in which the revolt broke out, is essentially under the control of the HCB, whose recruiting operations have made it impossible for families to cultivate their fields as they would wish.
[…]
The reasons are economic in nature. The oppression weighing upon the tribes of the Congo is growing heavier by the day, and the exploitation of the blacks is every day more intense and more inhumane. The revolt is simply the logical and inevitable consequence of this oppression. It is the outcome towards which all those who, preferring anything, even death itself, to continuing their existence under present conditions, now willingly run.
That quote is found in Lord Leverhulme’s Ghosts by Jules Marchal. Note that Jules Marchal didn’t write that passage, he merely quoted it.
The tax in quest was a head tax — essentially, the Pende and other Congolese were told they owed money to the Belgians just for being alive. Since they didn’t have money, they were forced to earn money in a variety of ways — in this particular region, by gathering palm fruit for the HCB and similar companies. When the price of fruit dropped, but the head tax remained the same, this had the effect of increasing how long the Pende were forced to work. (One can imagine that if the Pende had been free from the tax or any other form of coercion related to palm fruit production, then the more the price of palm fruit dropped, the less motive they would have to gather it rather than going about their other activities. However, because they were being coerced, a drop in the price of palm fruit meant an increase in said coercion.)
Tax collectors and company recruiters worked together to force the Pende to gather palm fruit. They also committed mass rape of Pende women shortly before the revolt. And there were a lot of whippings shortly before the revolt. Given all this, the conclusion of the quoted Belgian that the revolt was simply the logical result of oppressing people to the point where they’d prefer death to continued oppression makes sense.
Also, more recently, a union in Madagascar declared that they would rather die fighting in the streets than starving to death (because of the lockdowns) in their homes.
Their union has declared that there will be a riot if there is further lockdown. The government has threatened to send in troops from the capital to quell any rebellion. ‘Bring it on,’ the rickshaw drivers replied. ‘Better to die fighting in the streets than to starve to death in our homes.’
spectator [dot] co [dot] uk/article/in-madagascar-more-will-starve-than-die-of-the-virus
Regarding C, hoping to create a better world for the children, I quote Lumumba. Lumumba was briefly the Prime Minister of the Congo, before being removed from power by the CIA and assassinated by the Belgians.
We are fighting our enemies in order to prepare a better and happier life for our youth.
If we had been egoists, if we had thought only about ourselves we would not have made the innumerable sacrifices we are making.
This is also about 95% unrelated, but I’m really really really mad about it.
Judge Donna Scott Davenport of Rutherford County, Tennessee is a child torturer who takes pride in reveling in depravity, committing crimes against humanity. She has had children sent to jail just for cussing.
It is said that each of us has an angel on one shoulder, and a devil on the other, each whispering different advice. I guess the angel on one of my shoulders thinks prison should be abolished. But the devil on my other shoulder says that there should be a prison, and people like Judge Donna Scott Davenport should be sentenced to solitary confinement therein.
I don’t know if you watch Star Trek, but there is an episode in Star Trek: Voyager, called “Critical Care”, where a character called either the “Doctor” or the “Emergency Medical Hologram” is kidnapped and taken to a medical facility that has practices he considers unethical. Specifically, they ration medical care based on social status, giving life extension treatments to patients with higher social status while failing to provide hardly any care to those of lower social status. At first the Doctor tries to follow his medical ethics discreetly, but when caught, he violates his ethics to make a point: specifically, he makes the leader of the facility sick and forces him to be a patient in his own hospital, subject to the medical practices the Doctor considers unethical, until he agrees to end the system. (Please note that the entire episode is a work of fiction.)
What the Doctor did in that episode is hypocritical, but there is an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth kind of logic to it. I think witnessing a particularly shocking injustice can bring out darker part of ourselves, the sort that still wants more brutal types of “justice”, even if our higher selves believe in less brutal forms of justice.
Anyway, reading about Judge Donna Scott Davenport’s shameless moral depravity brings out that darker part of myself, the part that wants the sort of brutal justice that my higher self says no one should suffer.
A government created by a culture that is so incredibly depraved that it tolerates a child torturer as a judge for decades and decades probably would put down a secession using extreme violence, even if the secession were peaceful and the will of the people in a given region.
I had a great idea for you:
* Buy a car.
* Move to Rutherford County, Tennessee
* Get organized to challenge Judge Davenport at election.
* Do a much better job.
Next election (primary) is May the 3rd, 2022 so you have time, but not much time. I would guess there’s extra time required to sign up and join whatever party you think would have you.
Two times Donna Scott Davenport has won the election UNOPPOSED … which suggests to me that no one else is even trying to beat her for the job. She has a radio show where she tells people what is going on, therefore no one can say they were not informed. She tells people “this is what I do” and then she wins unopposed … and that is strong feedback to continue doing it all again same as before.
Most likely conclusion is that frankly, hardly anyone cares. They have their own lives, their own problems and this kind of thing is not even on the radar. You seriously could win this with a bit of energy to get people interested … it’s highly unlikely you could do a worse job, but in any case you would learn a lot in the process of making an effort and giving it a go.
In Tennessee you have to be a licensed attorney and at least 30 years old to serve as a Judge. Also all trial judges in Tennessee are elected positions. Appellate judges are appointed by the governor, with the voters voting to retain them
Perhaps you can find a good lawyer in Tennessee and help that person get elected. Although there are some problems with democracy, it does mostly work out, provided enough people are willing to make the extra effort.
If this judge can be elected completely unopposed over and over, this means no one wants to make that effort.
Which means the taxpayers (or whomever the taxpayers exploited… perhaps children all the way over in Africa) will have to pay for Judge Davenport’s crime. Which I think is not how justice is supposed to work, but it still gives me hope that they’ll take the massive fine as a hint that they need to stop being so depraved already.
Also, even if that’s not exactly how justice should work, it is still sort of a half-reparations — the children do deserve reparations, even if Davenport is the one who should be paying them, personally. And it’s hard to feel much sympathy for the taxpayers, given how long they tolerated this — their tax dollars could certainly be spent on worse things than paying reparations to children. E.g., spending tax dollars on torturing children in certainly a much worse use of tax dollars. I do feel sorry for the people exploited by the taxpayers who had no say at all in all of this.
And then I read about what they did to these children in the jail, and I get really mad again. Apparently, in the child torture facility these children were sent, lying down during the daytime was punishable with pepper spray, and the pedophile guards would stare at the children while they showered.
Also, the system was rather cyclical, since if the children missed school while locked in the child torture facility, they could be charged with truancy, which would result in being sent back.
Also, apparently, given how many children were tortured, 11 million is apparently not that much. Apparently, reparations are only about $1000 to $4,800 per child. That’s not adequate reparations for torture. (Though still better than nothing, I guess.)
On a 95% unrelated note, Free Britney!
https://twitter.com/werequetewere/status/1459135167562399748/photo/1
(I realize you were talking about Texas freedom, but individual freedom is important too.)
It’s already done, she got out didn’t she?
No thanks to me, I was never a fan or anything, but it’s interesting how long those fans were told this whole thing is a “conspiracy theory” and they should just give up their efforts and go away. Then all of a sudden turns out it was all real, the fans were right all along and they saved her.
Let’s hope she uses her new freedom wisely.
I believe I posted that the morning before the court declared he to be free from the conservatorship.
Funny how often so-called “conspiracy theorists” turn out to be right, isn’t it? It’s almost like there is actually such a thing as conspiracies.
Oh wait, “conspiracy to commit a crime”… yeah, this website acknowledges that there is such a thing as conspiracies.
https://www.justia.com/criminal/offenses/inchoate-crimes/conspiracy/
There may be people who in the world who do use their freedom wisely, but they seem to be few and far between. The point of freedom isn’t to already be wise — the point of freedom is to at least suffer from your own mistakes, rather than from other people’s mistakes. In any case, wise or not, I wish Britney happiness.
Apparently the lawyer who helped win Britney’s case is moving on to try to get another artist trapped in an abusive guardianship freed.
https://variety.com/2021/biz/news/peter-max-mathew-rosengart-guardianship-case-1235117706/
“Mainstream leftist spin”???
Even though I technically know what you mean by this, I think it’s a poor choice of wording, since in global terms, I think what is considered “mainstream leftism” in the United States is actually far, far right wing.
Correction: I may have gotten confused about which voice said “mainstream leftist spin”.
Previous nitpicking aside… secessionist movements have an extraordinarily low success rate, and frequently produce bad results even when the goal of secession is achieved.
https://theconversation.com/passion-and-pain-why-secessionist-movements-rarely-succeed-85097
Note that decolonization movements have significantly higher rates of success, and are generally categorized separately, so far as I can tell.
And also….
About 40 minutes in, you discuss the concern of military repression in response to secession. Given the course of human history, that’s probably an extremely likely response.
Then you bring up an analogy of if a woman was considering leaving a relationship, but she was afraid her boyfriend would use violence against her if she left, and you conclude that such a fear is evidence that she should really leave.
Focusing on this point for a moment, this is a real concern that many women face. People who have run the numbers have calculated that women are 70 times more likely to be killed in the two weeks after leaving than at any other time during a relationship.
This statistic can be found on a variety of websites, but here’s one that came up on top of Google.
clarionledger [dot] com/story/news/2017/01/28/most-dangerous-time-for-battered-women-is-when-they-leave-jerry-mitchell/96955552/
Women deal with this fear in a variety of ways, and one way is to remain in the bad relationship. Women sometimes placate men they are afraid of. This is within the realm of human nature. You can argue that that’s a terrible reason to remain in the relationship, that a woman should prefer death over remaining in an abusive, loveless relationship, but that’s not how all women think, plus there are often complicating factors, like children.
There’s a personal narrative here about a women who chose to placate a man — tell him what he wanted to hear, not what she really thought about him — right when he put his hands around her neck and started strangling her. By placating him, she was able to persuade him to get his hands off her neck and write the story about it later. I’m not certain if she left him at a later date. The point I am getting at is that placating violent, dangerous people is a survival tactic used by many.
aninjusticemag [dot] com/the-burden-of-women-to-placate-dangerous-men-7890a92c0702
Going back to the topic of secession, just as there are women who remain in bad relationships for fear of being murdered, there are lots of people who submit to governments they know are tyrannical for fear of the consequences of rebellion. You may have heard the saying, “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.”
If you read leftist literature, a lot of it is about various kinds of oppression, including governmental oppression. The book 1984, which is acknowledged by Jeff Riggenbach on the Mises Institute as probably “the most widely influential libertarian novel ever published”, was written by a person Riggenbach describes as, “authentically and radically antiauthoritarian democratic socialist.” I confess, I find this somewhat confusing. If, by Riggenbach’s own admission, 1984 was written by a socialist, then isn’t it a socialist novel, not a libertarian one? However, I take his meaning to be, most likely, that he and many other libertarians identified strongly with the novel, and interpreted it through libertarian lenses, even if it was not exactly intended to be interpreted through such lenses.
More recent antiauthoritarian leftist literature includes Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott, and Sl*very by Another Name: The Re-Ensl*vement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II By Douglas A. Blackmon. Neither portrays governmental authority in a particularly positive light.
If people are afraid for your safety in the event of a secession, I don’t think it (necessarily) means they are deliberately being part of the oppression. If they called the police on you, then you could say they were a collaborator, but I think just expressing the concern is, well, being concerned.
Re: Civil War, there’s a case to be made that that wasn’t even a legitimate secession, and perhaps should instead be classified as a coup.
This is from the leftist book, “This Vast Southern Empire: Sl*veholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy” by Matthew Karp
Alright, so Karp doesn’t go so far as to argue that it wasn’t a secession (although I think he could have), but at least he did point out that it was not by any means a normal secession. So, as long as a Texas secession appeared to be the will of the people on not merely the will of a ruling class that’s a bit less powerful than it used to be, it would be appropriate to exclude comparsions to the antebellum Southern secession. Which I guess it more or less agreeing with your point, but I think it’s worth including anyway.
Edit: It occurred to me that I don’t recall ever hearing anyone express the concern about the US government potentially bombing or otherwise using extreme violence against secessionists in a “glib” tone of voice. Perhaps if I had, I might judge their motives differently.
Then again, sometimes people joke about painful topics, because they feel like laughing is the only way to keep from crying, so it really can be hard to tell.
On the topic of women placating men:
There was a woman in the UK named Shana Grice who was fined by the police for filing allegedly wasting police time when filing reports against the boyfriend who eventually killed her. Obviously, the reports weren’t remotely frivolous in actuality, given that her boyfriend eventually killed her. In my opinion, the police who fined her should be charged with aiding and abetting murder.
In any case, there’s an article from the Guardian that explains some of the psychology at play here. It’s common for women to placate men they are afraid of, but these acts of placation are frequently interpreted by our patriarchal society as consent, which leads people, such as the police in this case, to be unwilling to help. This puts women in a very dangerous situation, where they are d**ned if they do and d**ned if they don’t.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jul/31/shana-grice-was-killed-by-her-ex-boyfriend-and-thoroughly-let-down-by-the-police
On the topic of people not participating in secessionist and other resistance movements out of fear of being killed in a repression, I have, in my reading of history, come across at least 3 circumstances in which this fear is likely to be overcome:
A) When people are so incredibly miserable, that they would rather die fighting than continue as they are. Try to imagine the psychology of a torture victim who fights back against his torturer, knowing it’s a hopeless fight, because at least if he baits his torturer into killing him, the torture will finally end, and then scale that up by thousands of people, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, or however big the revolt is.
B) When the government is killing people even if they don’t fight back, and they feel even a miniscule chance of victory is better than quietly allowing themselves to be slaughtered. May overlap with reason A.
C) When they hope to create a better world for their children, even at the cost of their own lives.
Situation B (when the government is killing people even if they don’t fight back) is covered by Sun Tzu in the Art of War. According to Sun Tzu, “Ground on which we can only be saved from destruction by fighting without delay, is desperate ground,” and, “On desperate ground, fight.” Now, if you want to take Sun Tzu’s advice in a pacifist way, you could fight with a camera. (I can’t guarantee it will work, but there are never any guarantees of victory when one is on desperate ground.) It’s probably not what Sun Tzu had in mind, but given that he’s been dead for over 2000 years, I don’t think he’s up to date on all the latest technology and tactics. In any case, I think a lot of people have an instinctive grasp of what Sun Tzu is saying hear, and genocidal and other particularly deadly regimes do face revolts.
There’s an article here about Jewish uprisings in ghettos and concentration camps from 1941 to 1944:
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jewish-uprisings-in-camps
This sort of thing — various uprisings — happens during other genocides as well. They happened during the Irish Holodomor. There were Irish people who fought against the massive food thefts being perpetrated by the British militias and armies and the behest of the British landlords.
archive [dot] org/details/ireland18451850p0000foga/page/104/mode/2up?q=resistance
An example of situation A (when people are so incredibly miserable, that they would rather die fighting than continue as they are) would be the revolt of the Pende (a Congolese people). Or at any rate, one Belgian who looked into the causes of the revolt reached that conclusion.
That quote is found in Lord Leverhulme’s Ghosts by Jules Marchal. Note that Jules Marchal didn’t write that passage, he merely quoted it.
The tax in quest was a head tax — essentially, the Pende and other Congolese were told they owed money to the Belgians just for being alive. Since they didn’t have money, they were forced to earn money in a variety of ways — in this particular region, by gathering palm fruit for the HCB and similar companies. When the price of fruit dropped, but the head tax remained the same, this had the effect of increasing how long the Pende were forced to work. (One can imagine that if the Pende had been free from the tax or any other form of coercion related to palm fruit production, then the more the price of palm fruit dropped, the less motive they would have to gather it rather than going about their other activities. However, because they were being coerced, a drop in the price of palm fruit meant an increase in said coercion.)
Tax collectors and company recruiters worked together to force the Pende to gather palm fruit. They also committed mass rape of Pende women shortly before the revolt. And there were a lot of whippings shortly before the revolt. Given all this, the conclusion of the quoted Belgian that the revolt was simply the logical result of oppressing people to the point where they’d prefer death to continued oppression makes sense.
Also, more recently, a union in Madagascar declared that they would rather die fighting in the streets than starving to death (because of the lockdowns) in their homes.
spectator [dot] co [dot] uk/article/in-madagascar-more-will-starve-than-die-of-the-virus
Regarding C, hoping to create a better world for the children, I quote Lumumba. Lumumba was briefly the Prime Minister of the Congo, before being removed from power by the CIA and assassinated by the Belgians.
marxists [dot] org/subject/africa/lumumba/1960/08/youth.htm
This is also about 95% unrelated, but I’m really really really mad about it.
Judge Donna Scott Davenport of Rutherford County, Tennessee is a child torturer who takes pride in reveling in depravity, committing crimes against humanity. She has had children sent to jail just for cussing.
It is said that each of us has an angel on one shoulder, and a devil on the other, each whispering different advice. I guess the angel on one of my shoulders thinks prison should be abolished. But the devil on my other shoulder says that there should be a prison, and people like Judge Donna Scott Davenport should be sentenced to solitary confinement therein.
I don’t know if you watch Star Trek, but there is an episode in Star Trek: Voyager, called “Critical Care”, where a character called either the “Doctor” or the “Emergency Medical Hologram” is kidnapped and taken to a medical facility that has practices he considers unethical. Specifically, they ration medical care based on social status, giving life extension treatments to patients with higher social status while failing to provide hardly any care to those of lower social status. At first the Doctor tries to follow his medical ethics discreetly, but when caught, he violates his ethics to make a point: specifically, he makes the leader of the facility sick and forces him to be a patient in his own hospital, subject to the medical practices the Doctor considers unethical, until he agrees to end the system. (Please note that the entire episode is a work of fiction.)
What the Doctor did in that episode is hypocritical, but there is an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth kind of logic to it. I think witnessing a particularly shocking injustice can bring out darker part of ourselves, the sort that still wants more brutal types of “justice”, even if our higher selves believe in less brutal forms of justice.
Anyway, reading about Judge Donna Scott Davenport’s shameless moral depravity brings out that darker part of myself, the part that wants the sort of brutal justice that my higher self says no one should suffer.
https://www.propublica.org/article/black-children-were-jailed-for-a-crime-that-doesnt-exist
Actually, I heard about it initially while listening to Lee Camp’s Redacted Tonight.
portable [dot] tv/series/redactedtonight?v=b39f238f-bc59-40b5-b1f2-5e22cfbf8b7f
The way this is about 5% relevant is as follows:
A government created by a culture that is so incredibly depraved that it tolerates a child torturer as a judge for decades and decades probably would put down a secession using extreme violence, even if the secession were peaceful and the will of the people in a given region.
I had a great idea for you:
* Buy a car.
* Move to Rutherford County, Tennessee
* Get organized to challenge Judge Davenport at election.
* Do a much better job.
Next election (primary) is May the 3rd, 2022 so you have time, but not much time. I would guess there’s extra time required to sign up and join whatever party you think would have you.
https://election.rutherfordcountytn.gov/sites/default/files/Voters%20schedule%202022.pdf
Two times Donna Scott Davenport has won the election UNOPPOSED … which suggests to me that no one else is even trying to beat her for the job. She has a radio show where she tells people what is going on, therefore no one can say they were not informed. She tells people “this is what I do” and then she wins unopposed … and that is strong feedback to continue doing it all again same as before.
Most likely conclusion is that frankly, hardly anyone cares. They have their own lives, their own problems and this kind of thing is not even on the radar. You seriously could win this with a bit of energy to get people interested … it’s highly unlikely you could do a worse job, but in any case you would learn a lot in the process of making an effort and giving it a go.
That actually is a good idea.
Does one need a law degree to be elected as a judge, or is it enough to just say, “I’m against child torture, so vote for me!”
Of course, as you point out, I would have to move there.
Still a good idea.
According to Susan Fuller on Quora, Tennessee requires Judges to also be lawyers. 🙁
https://www.quora.com/How-long-do-you-have-to-be-a-lawyer-before-you-can-become-a-judge-in-Tennessee-specifically-but-also-in-all-other-states
🙁
Oh, that’s a setback.
Perhaps you can find a good lawyer in Tennessee and help that person get elected. Although there are some problems with democracy, it does mostly work out, provided enough people are willing to make the extra effort.
If this judge can be elected completely unopposed over and over, this means no one wants to make that effort.
Apparently Rutherford county got sued over Judge Davenport’s actions.
https://wpln.org/post/rutherford-county-to-pay-up-as-much-as-11m-for-arrest-and-jailing-of-children/
Which means the taxpayers (or whomever the taxpayers exploited… perhaps children all the way over in Africa) will have to pay for Judge Davenport’s crime. Which I think is not how justice is supposed to work, but it still gives me hope that they’ll take the massive fine as a hint that they need to stop being so depraved already.
Also, even if that’s not exactly how justice should work, it is still sort of a half-reparations — the children do deserve reparations, even if Davenport is the one who should be paying them, personally. And it’s hard to feel much sympathy for the taxpayers, given how long they tolerated this — their tax dollars could certainly be spent on worse things than paying reparations to children. E.g., spending tax dollars on torturing children in certainly a much worse use of tax dollars. I do feel sorry for the people exploited by the taxpayers who had no say at all in all of this.
And then I read about what they did to these children in the jail, and I get really mad again. Apparently, in the child torture facility these children were sent, lying down during the daytime was punishable with pepper spray, and the pedophile guards would stare at the children while they showered.
Also, the system was rather cyclical, since if the children missed school while locked in the child torture facility, they could be charged with truancy, which would result in being sent back.
Also, apparently, given how many children were tortured, 11 million is apparently not that much. Apparently, reparations are only about $1000 to $4,800 per child. That’s not adequate reparations for torture. (Though still better than nothing, I guess.)
insider [dot] com/former-child-detainees-tennessee-detention-center-rutherford-county-judge-2021-11