Obligatory Knowing Better video on neoslavery

While we’re at it, here’s another excerpt from the video I linked that’s even more relevant to the thread at large:

If you were to ask a white northerner to describe a black person in the 1850s, before the Civil War, they would’ve used words like “loyal,” “dutiful”, “reliable,” “hardworking,” and “trustworthy.” While still servile in nature, I hope we can agree that these are mostly positive traits. By the 1890s, when convict leasing and debt peonage were widely practiced, they were “a threat,” “uncivilized,” “demonic,” “a lascivious beast roaming the country.”

This is it! If you learn nothing else from this video, I want this to be it: Southern whites used laws like vagrancy, trespassing, and false pretense to convince northern whites that black people were incapable of living in civilized society. This is where the myth of black criminality comes from – this is decades before the War on Drugs.

If that doesn’t piss you off, I want you to take out your phone, turn on the camera, flip it to selfie mode, and then ask yourself why that is! My guess is that it’s because none of the history I’ve talked about so far would have ever applied to you.

Is he ducking out to delay the decision on Trump’s presidential immunity case?

Fuck that! If he’s absent, the Court should simply be required to decide the case without him.

That was only step 1. Step 2 was to pass laws targeting the minority you wanted to keep as an underclass, so that if they refused to sign a labor contract to work for their former owner for slave wages, they could be arrested for “vagrancy” and leased right back to them anyway as convict labor.

In other words, they didn’t just enslave criminals; they manufactured criminals to enslave.

The comments two and three levels up were about third-world tropical houses and old houses respectively, both designed to be habitable in hot climates without air conditioning. As such, they are/were designed exactly the opposite way: to maximize cross-ventilation instead.

What you really want these days would be a house that’s tightly insulated but also has lots of operable windows, a whole-house fan, and/or a design that facilitates stack effect ventilation so that it can use either cooling strategy when conditions are appropriate.

I have to wonder if the United States builds houses inefficiently on purpose.

Starting roughly during the housing boom just after WWII, the United States started building houses cheaply on purpose. One of the most noticeable changes is common house designs went from being Craftsman bungalows with high (e.g. 10’) ceilings, lots of windows for good ventilation, and large roof overhangs for shade and protection from wind-driven rain, to “American Small Houses” with 8’ ceilings, minimal windows and no roof overhangs.

As the owner of one of the latter (in the South, BTW), I can tell you that trying to keep it cool via cross-ventilation is largely ineffective.

That’s all it takes for them to think, “wow, they’re doing a great job!” Even when austerity measures mean they can’t feed their families.

Conservatives think that is doing a great job. Their economic Platonic ideal is serfdom.

If I had listened to my parents in 2009, when they told me I was too young and couldn’t afford a house, I’d be absolutely screwed today.

subsidy queens

I read that as… "suberb queens.”

To be fair, the suburbs are a Ponzi scheme and suburban homeowners are, indeed, welfare queens. In fact, they are being subsidized by the very urban apartment dwellers they try to attach that label to!

If there was a liberal leftist equivalent to Fox News

FTFY. Liberalism is right-wing economically, and therefore is motivated to downplay Biden helping workers over corporations just as much as Fox News is.

The version I’ve heard is “coup cucks klan”

Nobody said economic leftists can’t be racist.

Speaking of STA, that one is apparently free to download today, too

What a neat coincidence that both this and the rule book for the other Star Trek TTRPG have both been posted within the last few days. Are there any others we should know about, LOL?

Why is T’Ana standing in line for a replicator in the first place? She’s senior staff; she not only should be eligible to eat in the officers’ mess, she probably has her own private replicator in her quarters.

(Or is the Cali-class even shittier than I imagined it to be?)

Also, why can’t they just replicate some more replicators and install them everywhere?

Except the people we use that word to describe keep behaving more and more exactly like literal dictator-worshipping, book-burning, queer-murdering, NAZIs.

Almost as if we were right all along and they were just fucking lying when they denied it.

First of all, this is great and deserves its own thread.

Second, there’s a fatal flaw: authoritarians and capitalists (same difference) are predisposed in favor of fascism, and that’s why the behavior of fuckwads like Trump keeps getting free passes and attention. When leftists try the same thing, they get ignored, censored, COINTELPRO’d, or even just straight-up murdered.

In other words, it’s a good strategy and should work, all things being equal, but all things are not equal and that makes it a high-body-count strategy (even if there’s no better one available).

And that’s why Georgia is trying to charge people who funded the Stop Cop City movement with racketeering.

Never mind insurance; I’m hoping a prosecutor will take on the odds at the murder trial!

Sigh… if they’re gonna photoshop a tardigrade playing a violin, can’t they at least do it right? Not only is he holding it like a cello, he’s trying to bow the strings on the wrong side of the bridge.

Incompetent tardigrade violinists, SMH