The Dakota War came out of a strategic starvation campaign imposed by the Union Army over Sioux Territory. The original tribes had been forced off the productive soil around the Minnesota River and displaced into barren wasteland. Subsequent crop failure and long winter made trading for foodstuffs from their home territories the only means of survival. And the settlers took maximum advantage, deliberately scamming and price gouging the Sioux for the remains of their family wealth. This, after a series of treaties had been casually violated from administration to administration.

The war was quite literally a fight for survival by the Sioux. Lincoln’s largess in hanging only the young men directly involved in the raid did nothing to prevent the Sioux population from continuing its rapid decline, as the surviving elders were left to starve to death in the wilderness and the children were forced into Christian schools notorious for brutalizing and killing the kidnapped youths.

The Republican Party was predicated on continuous western expansion. It was the successor to the Free Soil Party in the west and what was left of the Whigs in the East.

That necessarily meant seizing more land from American Natives and distributing it to Settlers. Much of the Union Army, before and after the Civil War, was focused on decimating the Native population and securing new tracks of free land for settlers. Lincoln inherited that mandate when he took office and pursued it as zealously as any Republican before or since.

My biggest complaint about Lincoln was the people he didn’t hang.

Citations Needed is the antivenom to the cobra bite that is listening to cable news during your teens/twenties. God bless Molly White and her crusade to do real actual journalism.

Ditched Netflix this month and Max is going out the window when I get off AT&T Fiber next month.

The future is looking pirate-y.

I fail to see the part where another country’s welfare is your problem, Israel.

It’s their problem because its occupied territory. Under the Geneva Conventions, what they’re doing should have invoked an international intervention years ago. Israel has been able to dictate what moves into and out of Gaza for over a decade and explicitly calculated calories entering the region as a means of gradually starving out the population.

Wikileaks has published diplomatic cables that showed Israel told U.S. officials in 2008 it would keep Gaza’s economy “on the brink of collapse” while avoiding a humanitarian crisis. To circumvent the blockade, Palestinians have brought in tonnes of goods through smuggling tunnels dug under Gaza’s border with Egypt.

This was, incidentally, one of the provocations of the Oct 7th attacks. Gazans were starving. They broke out across the militarized border to raid for food and other basic living supplies.

Crazy how they just gave up on the Narnia series. You’d think the original YA novel series would have been easy to punch up and deliver as AAA Cinema slop. Instead the whole thing fell apart inside three films (the first two of which were fairly well received, and riding tight on the LotR blockbuster adaptation, to boot).

I guess it was just too many characters, too much technical expertise, and too much hard work. Far easier to release a bunch of Sound of Freedom tier psycho-sexual thrillers. Something you can film with a handy cam, a fist full of confused child actors, and a dime bag of columbian white to get Jim Caviezel zooted out of his gord.

This is Berkshire Hathaway Erasure.

Going from 100 middle class people buying and selling 100 homes amongst each other to 2 extremely wealthy people 100 homes amongst each other and 98 people renting. The rich guys will price the assets out of reach of everyone else and make up the difference in rental profits.

Anarchists recognize class as a social construct rather than a biological imperative or a free market condition. As a result, they will often make a point of transgressing or undermining the pageantry that class-centric organizations cling to.

Its not that they think “no classes” will be a result so much as they think “explicitly defying class” is a political act.

Real State of Exception Hours

Like telling someone who’s missing both legs to get better shoes so they can keep up.

But it’s not. You’re confusing material conditions with psychological conditions. The brain is far more plastic than the leg (stump). And neuroatypicals regularly develop coping mechanisms that would be the envy of any paraplegic.

ADHD has definitely opened my eyes to how much we humans subconsciously assume we know everything based on our own experiences.

I think people will often divert to “This won’t work on me because I have ADHD” and often miss that lots of advice is just bad or otherwise useless to the public at-large. The “Bootstraps” mentality of self-help gurus constantly assume you have more free time, more financial slack, and more raw dumb luck than the average prole.

I can’t count how many times I’ve seen “just go door to door handing out resumes” pitched as a solution to a few million people rendered unemployed during a recession. I routinely see InsanePeopleFacebook tier “smart savings” advice that amounts to either comically unrealistic spending/savings rates or recklessly foolish investment tips. Then there’s the Common Wisdom that only survives the first two years out of high school. “Just go get an X”, be it a vocational career or a law degree or a ticket to the next boom town or a rich spouse, works right up until too many people take the same advice.

“Haha, you can’t trick me into joining your MLM because I’m neurdivergent” signals that you’ve made the right choice but often for the wrong reasons. As a result, it just opens you up to a different kind of affinity scam (“We invented an MLM for ADHD!”).

Rather than self-segregating and embracing alienation, we need to recognize the fundamental economic game as rigged and tackle it with a unified front.

This is why you have new leftists terrified that the UK or US or europe “might turn fascist!!”, betraying that the atrocities propagated by those empires against the global south was and is completely acceptable.

While the criticism is on point, I think you’re underselling the legitimate dire fear modern leftists have when they see the brutality of the periphery returning home. We have to recognize that - individually - we’re incredibly weak in the face of a mobilized police state. And we have every reason to be horrified of The Jakarta Method being visited on LA or Atlanta or Houston, particularly if we’re members of that domestic political underclass so often targeted for abuse.

Any opposition must be a unified and organized resistance. But we are also plagued by mass surveillance, structural alienation, and a profound sense of vulnerability cultivated over decades of “War On” maximalist state propaganda. So we’re feeling weak, we don’t know who we can trust, and we see this horrifying inevitability cresting over our heads like a tsunami.

This isn’t a betrayal of comrades abroad but a reflection of our own dismal moral, disunity, and despair. It represents one more hurdle for a modern western left to overcome and should be received as such, rather than used as a bludgeon to degrade left-wing moral even further.

Far better to be awake and aware and justifiably afraid of the threat of fascism than blind to it as the unaligned, compromised by it as the liberals, or enthusiastically participatory as the conservatives.

Movie ads also seem to be particularly misery-inducing. Extra loud, often deliberately gross or otherwise unsettling, low-budget, and cringe. I’ve taken pains to avoid them for years.

Would be curious to see what cinemas would do if they were required to include pre-film advertisements/previews into the show runtime.

Could breath new life into the modding scene with this alone. Look at what a map editor did for the Warcraft franchise.

Conservatives jerk off to porn all the time. This isn’t even strictly conservative per-say, its just generic American prudishness. 30 years ago, you’d have Tipper Gore and Newt Gingrich coming together to restrict the sale of rap music CDs and wrestling themed video games to anyone under the age of 13, on similar grounds.

Demanding everyone have an ID present any time they want to do anything is a throw-back to the 90s liberal fixation on “accountability” that was a proxy for mass surveillance.

Not just Elon. It’s the hedge fund playbook. Aquire a company, strip it for parts, collect profit, move on to the next business.

The Federal government is being liquidated as a going concern. Elon is leading the charge because he’s the most successful in his field.

I remember when the China, France, a Latin American consortium… even Cuban released their versions of the COVID vaccine, and US officials fell all over one another insisting they didn’t work.

I wonder how the US will respond if we lack any kind of for-profit answer to another pandemic. Will our demolition of the FDA mean we can acquire medication abroad? Or will the US crack down on vaccine tourism out of paranoia?

Seems like the US might abandon even the pretense of being a global pharmaceutical leader in the rush to return to its quack roots.

Sure. Same with the US Invasion of Iraq. “Six days, six weeks, I doubt two months” per Donald Rumsfeld.

But that was to sell the war. The real theory of the conflict was going to be that it would repeat South Ossetia / Abkhazia and Crimea. A rapid land grab intended to incorporate a heavily pro-Russia border territory that wouldn’t escalate for fear of reprisal.

What Russia got was an enormous escalation (fueled by NATO) and a protracted conflict. But the conflict didn’t benefit Ukraine, for the same reason an armed revolt in Crimea or Georgia wouldn’t have benefited either of those territories. All it produced was a new Chechnya / Afghanistan. A killing field that obliterated the accumulated wealth of generations and the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Nobody is coming out of this ahead.