Uh, yes? That’s called wage slavery, and it very much is normalised in our sick system. Did… did you think that would stump me? What?

Things that sound rude but are actually quite modest.

With slavery you’re kidnapped

Arrest is just a legally allowed kidnapping.

with no justification

Why do accept the justification of legality? Chattel slavery was legal.

and no trial

We’ve already been over the fact that most inmates never see a day in court.

somebody literally owns you, and you have fewer rights than farm animals.

Hard to see how that’s different to prison, except for the “literally owns you”, although inmates are essentially bought and sold, and quotas are maintained for private prison contracts. It’s not exactly ownership but that’s a very marginal difference.

Prison is a punishment for a crime.

So do you accept that anyone the state deems a criminal somehow deserves involuntary servitude? Why?

EDIT: Since you haven’t replied and I assume you haven’t seen this yet: involuntary servitude IS slavery, it just isn’t necessarily chattel slavery. The language of the bill even prohibits involuntary servitude, but it seems pretty clear to me that that wasn’t to say that involuntary servitude and slavery are somehow distinct, but to say that some future narrow definition of slavery as only chattel slavery such as you are doing right now couldn’t be used to justify some other form of technically but not meaningfully different kind of slavery. With the aforementioned exceptions.

It is slavery. I wasn’t putting words in your mouth, I was simply maintaining that the words you said were wrong.

deleted by creator

Oh so you’re fine with slavery as long as there’s a thinly veiled justification then.

“Crime” is whatever the state deems a crime, it is selectively enforced, and in the US the system is so set up that the vast majority plea out, because they are penalised for fighting back in a trial.

The laws are arbitrary, racist and politically targeted:

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

• John Erlichman, advisor to President Nixon

https://www.unharm.org/the-racist-truth-behind-the-war-on-drugs/

Back in the days of chattel slavery they had thinly veiled justifications too, called race science.

Anyone with an interest in the matter and no moral compass could fall back on that and explain why chattel slavery was good for those other races, and it was the “white man’s burden” to deliver them to civilisation, ignoring how convenient it was that it also made them into slaves.

I’ll let you think about which side of the argument you’d have been on back then, based on how you’ve swallowed the modern day version of it.

I’m pretty sure you can say it’s the largest prison system in history. This documentary from 2015 is named that: https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/biggest-prison-system-history/

Of course they’re crimes against humanity, I’m not trying to undermine anything, I just don’t understand where people think any prosecution like this would meaningfully come from. Like there needs to be a realistic understanding of what can happen, and this is power politics.

The US is a permanent member of the UN security council, they can veto anything the UN wants to do, and it’s set up that way to ensure it can’t go against any of the big 5’s interests. That alone should destroy the UN’s legitimacy, but corporate media and the political class prop it up and make people think that it’s this place where the big issues are discussed reasonably and rationally. It isn’t.

No court can prosecute anyone unless it has the power to enforce its rulings, and the UN just doesn’t have that.

Look up the Hague Invasion Act. The US has stated, as a matter of law, that it will invade the Hague if they ever try to prosecute any US service member. Do you really need me to break down what that means for the concept of international law? If you’re going to call anything cynical, that is cynical. If the UN is the best that exists, then that just means that our current system has no justice.

The ability to solve this problem will come from people organising resistance, not from states, not from courts of law, not from some big in-control powerful body stepping in to help us. We help us.

That would make sense if international politics were any more than thinly veiled terrorism itself. The whole UN thing is an exercise in manufacturing legitimacy, and the fact people actually think that there is a world in which it holds the most powerful actors to account proves that it’s worked.

They are a mafia with a protection racket, very little more.

Nobody said imperial powers were immune to poverty. They thrive off of it, that’s where they get their soldiers. Like what, I’m supposed to ignore US imperialism because of the vast poverty that exists in that country?

Either way that doesn’t mean you get to turn away the people who were made poor by imperialism and tell them to fix their own country, regardless of how much you personally benefited.

It isn’t fucking relevant that you’re not in a wealthy country. In fact it makes it harder to understand why you’ve got no compassion for anyone else. Immigration doesn’t hurt you personally.

Someone has taken you in with faux-leftist reactionary rhetoric, but it’s clear you don’t care to learn the reality, so I don’t see much point in carrying on talking to you.

Your empire didn’t end until 1976.

And absolutely none of this has anything to do with the fact that stopping people from migrating will do nothing to fix poverty.

You call yourself a leftist and you have no concept of how imperialism shapes our world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Empire

“Migrate”.

Are you for fucking real?

Like literally research a single fucking thing that you are saying.

I’m from a primarily English speaking place and you’re absolutely right. The phrase is completely bizarre. Like we could talk about assets, but we equate it to the person, and it’s a phrase that comes from the upper echelons of the capitalist ruling class and now everyone uses it. Like we’ve all just accepted the reality that our society doesn’t care about people unless they can pay.

The weapons you would support being sent to free them in some hypothetical better world, in this world are used to oppress them. These places aren’t poor because the people just did a bad job at managing them, they are poor because they were bombed and looted.

You can go to the US’s policies in South America, their policy of keeping it under control as their own “backyard”, how the School of the Americas cranked out death squads, how neoliberalism was born with the sponsorship of a fascist coup in Chile, and how the Chicago School taught countries to privatise and disinvest from public infrastructure.

You can look at the IMF and the World Bank putting out predatory loans where the rulers of countries are bribed to sell out their own people, leaving them impoverished and in debt.

Or how the United Fruit Company kept several countries under its thumb, coining the term “banana republic”, so you could buy cheaper bananas.

Further back you can look at the rape of Africa, where European colonial powers did a campaign of unmitigated atrocities for decades, setting up imperialist structures that keep many of those nations subjugated to this day.

Or you can look at the modern example of Israel, which is sponsored by the US specifically to project power in the region. The extended wars fought by the US in that region are purely to maintain control over their oil.

I’m just pulling these off the top of my head. This is a tiny fraction of all crimes done to keep poor countries poor.

Neoliberalism works to ensure free flow of capital but restrict the movement of people, so that when their infrastructure is destroyed and they have nowhere else to go, they will be desperate enough to accept extremely low wages.

If you’re going to claim to be class conscious, you need to educate yourself on these issues and learn to have solidarity with workers everywhere. Talking about how you don’t want to sacrifice anything to make others’ lives better is the opposite of what we need to win the class war, especially when your better quality of life was bought with their blood.

You put a lot of effort into trying to teach someone who is clearly dedicated to not learning anything. I appreciated the information at least.

Cool wow best of luck to them I hope they get it.

https://y.yarn.co/d1e03788-2453-4bad-90aa-ef9bf0991fd9.mp4

Fair enough, I’m talking about big H5 construction screws and impact drivers, so a different use case maybe. Also it turns out when ARRMA uses too much threadlock on their axle set screws you can strip them really easily, and I needed more expensive special hex drivers with tight tolerances to work with them.

I prefer to only use them when I can’t get alignment. They’re far more likely to round out the head in my experience, but they have their uses.

This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine - it’s designed purely for automation. That’s why it’s tapered, to allow power tools to slip out before they break. That’s good for automation in the *1930s (EDIT: I’ve realised that in a few years it will be the 30s again and maybe I shouldn’t leave this so ambiguous in light of that), not so good for hand tools or any modern tool with a torque limiter.

You’re much better off with hex or torx, or even the square driver, which is much more tolerant of imperfect handheld tool usage.

The only reason phillips is still used is because it’s ubiquitous, it’s very much a historical oddity. It’s okay for many tasks but unfortunately the slipping out behaviour can destroy the screws very quickly.

https://www.ifixit.com/News/9903/bit-history-the-phillips

I mean it’s conceivable they’d come up with something similar, and it would be weird to expect a props department to find different screw heads just to be lore accurate.

Edit: Plus it’s common today, which means from a prop design standpoint it communicates the idea that it’s hand-built, because just about everyone has a phillips head screwdriver, so seeing it tells you it’s something you can work on. I think that’s the main reason it would be there. Jedi are supposed to make their own lightsabers.

Gaza is happening because of US imperialism. Biden said that’s what Israel does in the region very clearly.

Joe Biden’s long history of pro-Israel statements

Anyone seriously considering prepping should listen to Robert Evans’ - of Behind the Bastards fame - podcast episodes on Worst Year Ever:

How to Save Your Community When the Government Fails

The Reasonable Person’s Guide to Prepping

TL;DL: it’s far more about food & water and building strong community ties with mutual aid than having a pile of guns and ammo