immuredanchorite [he/him, any]

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  • 8 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 27th, 2022

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  • When the US was founded it excluded about 94% of the people from within its borders from participating. Slavery existed on a mass scale throughout the world’s early, liberal (so-called) democracies, or often their economy was subsidized by slave labor abroad in their colonies. So if slavery didn’t exist within their immediate borders, it existed for the people their political & economic system subjugated. The idea that industrialization or “democracy” (not even sure how you are defining it, really) came into existence suddenly isn’t accurate, although there are revolutionary periods where social change came suddenly or breakthroughs in technology that occurred that reshaped social production. Those didn’t ever occur in a vacuum, and those discoveries were only able to affect the social system in so far as the social system was developed in such a way that they could be utilized… Often those big revolutionary changes in the social system were due to contradictions (compounding antagonistic relationships) within the social system itself becoming untenable. Trying to shoe-horn a somewhat obscure military “law” isn’t really going to explain how those changes occurred in a realistic way, because human society is much more complicated than that. You seem to want to reinvent the wheel here, you should try reading Marx, you might find it quite satisfying.

    On your last point, the French Revolution was crushed ultimately, although the new social order retained changes that were beneficial to its new ruling class. But weapons themselves aren’t necessarily going to singularly shape the way in which social conflict resolves. Military technology is important to these developments, but ultimately a part of the larger social system that is always changing to either maintain itself or undergoing revolutionary change.



  • I don’t understand how this was an issue of “lack of nuance” or “black and white” thinking… Either the term is racist or it is not? … Is it disparaging a group of people based on racial/cultural/ethnic stereotypes? Yeah. Is it reinforcing and normalizing those stereotypes and upholding an ideal “normal” that is associated with being part of the dominant group? Yeah. Does it seem petty and pedantic? Racism generally does take on a petty and pedantic character… When you go out of your way to deny these things, you are only doing it in service of upholding racist norms. You don’t have to continue to defend it, you can acknowledge that it could cause a community harm and move on with your life by avoiding the harmful behavior. Changing the way you speak might seem annoying or like an imposition, but if you think that racism is harmful and want to challenge it by being anti-racist, ultimately people have to change the way they think, speak, and behave… but it is a good change. Embrace it.