🍊🍊🍊🤡🤡 Even More Trumpian Events 🤡🤡🍊🍊🍊 (Part 1)

I’m gonna go with “an incomprehensible mixture of all options, changing on an hourly basis”.

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Something something government overreach something cancel culture something.

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LOL! The campaign is nothing but spending irregularities. They just want to make sure that the rake-offs went to the right people’s pockets.

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No, this means that some money hasn’t wound up in Trump’s (or his cronies) coffers. Can’t have that.

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Another blatant distraction tactic.

Or he really hates Sarah Cooper.

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Of course he did.

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November is gonna be a special kind of Hell.

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Obligs:

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(I agree.)

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The president also claimed that not only did he score perfectly on the test, but that it was “very hard” and that he doubted Wallace could do as well. The host chuckled and told Trump that he did indeed take a cognitive test online and it was rather easy. Wallace said the test included drawings of animals to identify and counting backward from 100 by seven.

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Well, Donnie ain’t lying - that test was hard. For him.

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The problem with any legal system is that it depends on those in power obeying the law.

Do you think that if even the Supreme Court ordered the DHS to stop the kidnappings, they’d actually stop?

“John Marshall has made his decision. Let him enforce it.” – A. Jackson

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The law itself is written to protect people in power, not everyone else. It’s there to protect the property rights of the capitalist class from the rest of society. Any laws that have been passed that do protect the rest of society, and especially the disenfranchised have come after years of demands for change (see the 19th and 20th century labor movements and the post-civil war civil rights movements).

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Seriously. There are ample signs that Donnie is not a strong reader. The guy reads – his office is filled with papers – just probably not very quickly, with a probably average vocabulary.

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Well, yeah.

Sometimes the ruling class - I won’t say the ‘capitalist’ class since the structure predates capitalism; feudalism appears to be as old as humanity - realizes that its self-interest requires that it provide enough bread and circuses to the plebs to prevent the arrival of the torches and pitchforks. That occasionally even involves sacrificing a minor member (or, perhaps a high-ranking servant) to the idea of ‘obeying the law’, to keep the underlings quiet.

Ça ira!

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But we are talking about the capitalist class in this case. It’s well-established itself as the ruling class and the traditional ruling class that predates it stands in solidarity with it now. The laws that exist now are written by the capitalist property class.

We don’t live in feudalism, though. Class relations have changed and I think it matters that we speak accurately about where we are.

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Formally, you’re correct. In terms of the actual power imbalance, and the shifting alignments as the balance at the top has shifted, I’d argue there isn’t much difference between the cult of personality that surrounds a modern demagogue or a modern high-profile CEO from the personal loyalty that vassal swore to lord, or for that matter to the relation between a hydraulic emperor and his client rulers. A hierarchical state, imbued with quasi-religious (if not outright religious) legitimacy, with the hierarchy of the system reflected in the control of resources necessary to sustenance (water in ancient Persia, arable land in mediaeval Europe, “a job” and access to essentials such as healthcare in modern America), and the hierarchy based on ties of personal loyalty and birthright privilege has striking and frightening parallels through all of human history.

Wealth and privilege in our society also transfer on a hereditary basis. Not only do a tremendous number of our politicians enjoy inherited wealth, but also a great many are second-, third, or even later-generation politicians. Trump is the second generation in a dynasty of wealth. He aspires to found a dynasty of power. (If he succeeds, I predict that it will collapse with his demise, just as the empires of Alexander or Charlemagne fragmented with the infighting among their sons.)

Arguably, we might actually be better off under mediaeval feudalism, where there were documented instances of Church functioning as a countervailing power to State in curbing the excesses of rapacious rulers. It frightens me that there appear to be no functioning checks in the current system at all.

We do ostensibly retain a broad electorate; our citizens are not bound to the land or (except as punishment for crimes, real or invented) to personal service; we have the form of a constitution. But how long can we keep them, with those in power working at every turn to bring us back to the seventh century? (I choose that as a target because nation-states as we know them did not exist; Rome was no longer a power in the West; and the Church was at her weakest - Western Europe had yet to be re-Christianized. The feudalism of the High Middle Ages was not yet practised, but that chaos was the environment into which it emerged.)

The details matter. The fact that power is far more distributed matter. The fact of our more complex division of labor matter. :woman_shrugging: These are not immaterial, minor differences. Just the fact that many people (most functioning in advanced economies) are literate matters.

Just because there are some very cosmetic similarities to a feudal system doesn’t mean it’s the same. The specifics matter, especially in terms of the sorts of discussions of possibilities that they’ve opened up with regards to pushing for a fairer and more just society. We are not there yet, but things are far more democratic than they have ever been since the organization of civilization. As far as we’ve got to go, we’ve come a long way already.

Lazy comparisons will not get us the rest of the way there. This is why it’s dangerous to tear down the humanities as disciplines, because that allows us to make these distinctions and to measure what progress we have and have not made in improving the world for all of us. By attending to the specifics of history, we can have a better sense of what has and has not worked and figure out a way to move forward.

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