I get that a lot of this linked article is written to (correctly) change the narrative around slavery erasure but some of it delves into baseless hyperbole that can’t be anything but counter productive.

For example:

Evidence suggests that sexual abuse of slaves was so fundamental to chattel slavery that it’s reasonable to assume any histories of “kind” slave owners are complete fabrications designed to preserve the legacy of the masters.

That is either playing fast and loose with wording or an absolutely incredible claim requiring incredible proof.

On one hand, the “kind” slave owner is always a fabrication because the act of owning slaves is inherently immoral and reprehensible. This view makes the claim a borderline platitude; perpetuating an institution that enables rapists is very obviously unkind.

On the latter interpretation, you’re claiming that rape was so universal that any slave owner was almost certainly a rapist (especially if they claimed they weren’t). This would require some sweeping evidence, think studies on the demographics of mixed race slaves or on medical records tied to sexual assaults.

So what evidence follows? Excerpts from Frederick Douglas giving second hand accounts of rape and of Harriet Jacobs giving her first hand account. Nothing that incriminates slave owners broadly beyond Douglas’s phrasing “…in [rape] cases not a few,…”.

I don’t even deny that the evidence might exist, and I would love to see it brought to light if it does. But the thing about slavery, and specifically the USA’s commercial cotton slavery: it’s fucking awful enough if you just list verifiable facts without aggrandizing. Even if everything in this article were true, it doesn’t move the needle much farther beyond the baseline of American slave ownership.

If you’re going to broadly claim “America’s founding fathers were sex traffickers that raped children” then please, name names! Bring receipts! You can’t open with…

These facts are not debatable. [Child sex trafficking] happened.

…and then lay out a single link rehashing that Thomas Jefferson was a massive piece of shit. What do we know about the other 54+ Founding Fathers?

In general people need to learn better aggressive interview techniques. Hostile/gotcha media has been around for at least as long as live interviews have been a concept.

You don’t have to be perfectly infallible or witty. Have two or three prongs of attack, a few different phrasings, and some rejoinders or counters to their likely responses.

Don’t bite with “did you just call this woman a man”, pivot to a different phrasing on the same question, keep hammering and don’t let them control the conversation.

First, I think it’s stupid in general that we all think it’s fine to record people in public and upload their image so that it can be shared in perpetuity, no matter the setting.

Second, just because we live in a dystopian surveillance state doesn’t mean we should shrug and keep feeding the beast. If a state actor wants to track movements from 3 miles away and cross reference that footage with some other shadowy data then make them do that. It costs them time, resources and political capital that could be spent elsewhere. Don’t carry their water by donating data.

Third, there’s more malicious things that can be done with your image than just putting you on a list. Suddenly you get dragged into court and these close shots of you at a protest have been leveraged to inject you into a bloody riot or any other concocted scenario. A state actor has a ton of visual data but there’s no guarantee they have fresh, high resolution content on any given person (think anything that might have changed since your last photo ID: facial hair, thinning hair, scars, etc…).

Fourth, building off the last point, the state actor is not the only thing that matters in our threat model. Maybe some random xitter shitbag decides to use Grok to inject you into CSAM or some shit. That stuff doesn’t need to hold up in a court of law to ruin your life.

Even worse the MAGA nut from down the road recognizes someone and decides to take vigilante justice into his own hands. Hell, he might even be wrong and now some third party is dead for no reason.

I’m not saying that everyone needs to go black block to protests, I think there’s a ton of power in showing support openly to your neighbors and allies. But the message should be in the solidarity of the crowd and not the identities of the people. If you really want to shout “I’m not afraid of you” to the state then I’ve got good news: you can call up your senator or the Whitehouse right now from the comfort of your home!

But until we all can chill on the self doxxing then I probably wouldn’t show up anywhere sensitive without taking the basic steps to protect my privacy.

Can we please stop recording faces…

The vibe perfectly matches the business casual slacks and off brand sneakers

Again, the irony here is palpable. You clearly don’t know shit about history if you think the Qing dynasty wasn’t “getting way out ahead” of dozens of threats with the same ham fisted violence. That tends to work right up until it doesn’t.

Interesting to make the parallel of the inept, corrupt and teetering late-Qing dynasty to the modern CCP… Losing their grip on power via economic mismanagement and triggering a bloody civil war by lashing out at the people that fill the vacuum. Very bold stance for a tankie.

In the late 1840s, the movement at first grew by suppressing groups of bandits and pirates in southern China. Suppression by Qing authorities led it to evolve into guerrilla warfare and subsequently a widespread civil war.

So looking a fraction of an inch beneath the surface we find it’s like every other rebellion in history: a charismatic leader pitches a grass roots solution to the material problems of a neglected population, the population rallies and the state retaliates. This leader just happened to have a Christ-themed psychotic break.

If you read up more you’d find out how that Christian messaging was counter productive, generating resistance from both the traditional rural/Confucian population and the more modern/liberal upper classes.

Let’s start here:

Evangelical Christianity is a boogeyman, even in America. It’s true that there are some really, repressive, shitty congregations. These factions fabricate persecution, which is amplified by the conservative media empire into a general attack on all Christians in America. They then use this framing to hammer all sorts of wedge issues for partisan gains.

You can just look at public opinion polling on any topic: America has been trending more and more progressive on every issue right alongside the Christofascist capture of the USA. Participation in any organized religion is currently at an all time low in the USA (47%) and trending down. The Christian window dressing on the Orange Reich is not for popular appeal, it’s a dog whistle.

China is not the USA. There are a million reasons organized religion wouldn’t work as a political vector there.

For one, the CCP has a tight grip on the media in a one-party state. Just leave any enclaves of whiny Evangelicals alone and let them shout fabricated persecutions into the void. Let them have any quaint rituals or prayer groups or churches they want. Even if they want to wander from town to town handing out pamphlets, it would be an uphill battle because…

Two, China has never historically had organized religion or been very receptive to the concept. They don’t even have a native word for “religion”, and when one was invented it’s meaning quickly devolved into slang for “suspicious cult”.

If you care to look it up, you might notice that Christianity never got much of a foothold outside of colonial footprints. Even then, thousands of Christian missionaries and converts were being spontaneously massacred decades before the CCP even existed.

Since taking over, the CCP went from a very hard enforced state atheism to a focus on purging only foreign religions to a much more lax stance after the change to their constitution in 1978. Religious groups in China have always been a tiny minority and generally ostracized; the lifeline of an enshrined right to religion was a major progressive step:

Citizens of the People’s Republic of China shall enjoy freedom of religious belief. No state organ, social organization or individual shall coerce citizens to believe in or not to believe in any religion, nor shall they discriminate against citizens who believe in or do not believe in any religion. The state shall protect normal religious activities.

The general CCP idea of the time being that religion is vestigial and will wither away on its own; violent suppression is counterproductive.

Then there was a big change with Xi taking the reigns in 2012. Let’s review the official CCP stance on religion for party members from that time:

The Party will be divided ideologically and theoretically if members are allowed to believe in religion, as it means the coexistence of both idealism and materialism and of both theism and atheism, compromising the guiding role of Marxism.

To put it another way, the only allowable religion in the CCP (and thereby the future of China) is Marxism. The constitutional right to religion has been officially overruled, as any theism will be incompatible with the explicit end goal. This particular dogmatic view is in line with Xi-ism, and that dogma has been opaquely decided within the party. No transparency or public input, no vote, nothing…

This is what people mean when they say “red fascism”. All rights exist at the whim of the state and can be unilaterally revoked. One day you can practice your religion as agreed, the next day your “license” (a concept not hinted at in the constitution) is revoked and attending a service makes you a terrorist.

If the government can unilaterally cancel a citizen’s core rights, that citizen has the same power to divest the authority they grant to that government. Does that mean I agree with whatever “revolt” they’re calling for or whatever their religion professes? No. But it’s a pretty basic axiom of most political theory.

I’m not sure how trying to serve a couple of guys with an arrest warrant is an overreaction.

Right. Sure. Did you watch the videos? They were serving a couple of arrest warrants the same way that ICE shows up to a neighborhood with a couple deportation papers…

Ask the Branch Davidians.

Ah yes. Because not raising the national flag, displaying a cross, refusing to install security cameras, and having children at your services is the same as… checks notes …Shooting 20 cops over a 50 day siege.

To pull your card from a previous comment: this attitude is legalism.

Even if we assume the law is written as a good faith civic regulation and not a tool to discourage religious support networks and competing power structures to the ccp, what can it possibly achieve?

If the whole neighborhood wants to go to a service and there’s no adults left to babysit the kids, what else are they supposed to do besides take them? A child isn’t a pet that you can leave with a bone and a bowl of water.

And is not going to a community gathering going to “stop indoctrination”? These kids still live with their very religious parents and there are probably bibles, religious paraphernalia and religious friends all over their daily lives. Conversely, millions of kids are dragged to church services all over the world and manage to grow into productive, secular citizens or choose to discard their indoctrination naturally later in life.

That raises the question: do these people have the right to organize and operate their communities in a way that suites them or not? Was there any evidence of seditious organizing against the state? Were they in a cultist commune refusing to pay taxes and killing police? Or does the mere act of civil disobedience make them deplorable criminals that deserve any punishment the state decrees?

And further, does that punishment look to fit the crime? A civil offense (at best) causing no bodily harm to any other person results in police in military gear goose stepping down your streets and demolishing your church. Seems pretty goddamn similar to ICE kicking in civilian doors because their immigration status lapsed.

Why do you have a such a visceral reaction to one but a cool, impartial analysis of the other?.. 🤔

Who’s defending a fascist coup? The discussion here is about the powers of his office and his personal political sway. Despite the direction that American politics have been heading, no elected official in America is supposed to be a despot.

He’s not the guy personally answering a 911 call and telling his jack boots to suit up and crack heads. The law [currently] states that a group of protesters is not allowed to occupy a private hotel no matter how just or well intentioned their motives. Some low level pig took the call, some other pigs drove over, and the protesters got arrested for their demonstration. This is pretty cut and dry unless some new details come out about Mamdani directing a hostile response or allowing brutality toward the protesters.

What he has the ability (and responsibility) to do is pressure the DA to drop any charges. He can stump for legal changes that resist/impede ICE or replace mayoral appointments who show signs of supporting our fascist occupation. He can warn the police chief that any violence toward ICE protesters will put her out of a job.

He can’t disband the police force, eject ICE, and unilaterally usher in a socialist utopia. I guess either:

A. That reality is beyond the naive logic of the auth left or

B. That these articles and talking points are intentionally inflammatory for the sole purpose of causing infighting

Same logic as a stock market fire sale: crash the price, rich people scoop it up for pennies, rent it back to the people who need it

Except this time it’s the entire USA and all of our infrastructure will be rented back in company scrip. “Welcome to the Google toll road powered by OpenAI. Payment is accepted in Alphabet credits, Meta bucks or Apple chits”

Lmfao “200 kg of explosives”. I guess those terrorists were planning on toppling the government by distributing the equivalent explosive payload of a large firework to each city.

“We heard voice recordings from abroad giving instructions” Well then I guess you have nothing to worry about because these terrorists are stupid enough to communicate over a clear channel. Wtf is this, WWII? And you still let them massacre your civilians when you have that level of intel? 😂

And a bunch of starlink devices? Seems pretty goddamn benign when you consider the government keeps cutting the internet. Hell I wish they had more of those so we would have a clear answer on what is happening on the ground, don’t you???

Give up dude, your precious gender-apartheid government is clearly so strong that they don’t need you to white knight for them. Go take your critical support and simp for some other autocratic religious fanatics. 🤡

Me waiting for actual evidence of that: 💀

What kind of a broken ass government wouldn’t be aware of enough resources flooding into their country to arm a full scale nation wide revolt. Are you kidding me?? They must be as blind as you 🧑‍🦯

I do not “denounce their massacre by Khamenei’s regime” because it’s unclear who is massacring and who is being massacred, and to what scale these massacres are occurring. If innocent civilians are dying it is accidental.

Lol. Lmao even. My favorite tankie argument.

Goverment unilaterally disrupts all outgoing media that would give us any visibility but that paper thin deniability means we can ignore the situation. You think if the regime had hard proof of a force big enough and well equipped enough to slaughter thousands of people they wouldn’t be shouting it from the rooftops?

“Well the wife was screaming for help and then the husband closed the curtains and then the woman screamed louder and blood started seeping under the door. No clue what happened. Maybe she was trying to kill him?”

Nothing happened. And if something did happen it was an accident. And if it wasn’t an accident then someone else made me do it. And if someone else didn’t make me do it then they deserved it anyway.

🤡🤡🤡

Nothing challenged my perspective here. I know people suffering and dying from this stuff, I have friends who work with addicts daily. I’m here to advocate for the people in my community who are suffering more than any of the people in these videos (or any of us commenting here) through no fault of their own. Their lives are being ruined by the same fascists pushing this war-hawk imperialist shit.

We have stop this jingoistic-tribalist-slop. Would you like to see a funny trend where people laugh about being mutilated Palestinians for a 5 second joke on Isreal?

If you can hear me in your fever dream, please wake up

Median income doesn’t mean shit when median wealth is barely keeping up with the low end of developed countries. Median US wealth is closer to Estonia or Kuwait than Canada or the UK.

“Stupid shit people make up online”. My brother in christ your own source shows less than 25% gun ownership. That lines up exactly with what I’m saying. What are you smoking?

Masterful deflection of the questions

Sure, let me just take a look at the board of directors… Gonna take a look at Reggie Van Lee, right at the top… Check open secrets on his consulting firm aaaand:

National Republican Congressional Cmte $71k, 2024

Hmmmmm… Well at least theres also thousands of dollars going to establishment Dems earlier on.

But that’s just a board member. They’ll be absolved by the clients listed in their testimonials. Surely it’s the good guys filling their bank accounts?

Southwest Airlines: Top contributions go to Trump (by a mile), Susan Collins, Ted Cruz, the RNC etc…

Estée Lauder: Wow! I’m seeing top contributions totaling $3 million+ to the RNC, Keystone Renewal PAC, Senate leadership fund, and 3-4 other sketchy conservative funds.

NFU Mutual: One of the top 5% groups for spend. $1 mil in contribution and even more in lobbying in 2024, a sea of red support…

Mercedes Benz: The same one slobbering over Trump’s tariffs? 😂

Enterprise Mobility: 2/3 of their PAC donations end up in Republican coffers…

I’ll give them credit, they show a lot of non-profits and schools-for-poor-orphans to signal how woke they are, but those clients aren’t the whales that keep the lights on. You think they’re tearing up those big checks when push comes to shove?

As Carlin once said, it’s a big club and we ain’t in it.

What in the wet fuck?.. Are you having a fever dream about some alternate reality USA?

Wealth disparity in the USA is higher than basically any country in history. The top 10 people or so have more wealth than the bottom 50%. There are plenty of guns in the USA but the vast majority of people don’t ever come close to owning a gun; the average gun owner has something like 7.5 guns. If you’re looking at the split between pro/anti-fascist demographics the weapon gap is massive.

So yes, the average American is dirt poor and unarmed. Come up with a different way to pin all of your trouble on foreigners.