It's something that really bothers me about communism and socialism being derisive in the US, even in 2024, about 35 years after USSR fell.
The alternative to community-centric society is autocracy, typically devolving into monarchism.
Death to monarchists!
That is the way that the police work in the United States yes.
We're not talking about the police, we're talking about the Secret Service protecting the President-Elect of the United States... at a golf park Not only that, but a park where people have to be super rich since access to Trump (leader of the GOP and now President-elect) is figured into the membership fee.
And while the police are happy to gun down the rest of us shlubs, they treat rich people like they treated OJ Simpson after he hacked up Nicole Brown. When they don't and they actually shoot a rich person, then high-powered (blue-haired) lawyers come and sue the precinct and county for enough money to collapse the GDP.
But I do hear you. Police in the US are bastards to the last.
Some basic information about teen sex in the United States:
All 50 states have Romeo & Juliette laws allowing exceptions for statutory sexual assault crimes when sexual activity is between peers of similar age. The typical threshold is 5 years.
However, the floor of R&J statutes is typically 14 or 15. So a 13 year-old having sex is conspicuous. But also, teenage dating and boyfriend / girlfriend relationships often do not feature or even imply a sexual relationship. (When I was fourteen, I and a 10 year old family-friend decided we were bf/gf, even bathing together and having sleepovers, though doing nothing more risqué than Parcheesi.)
As a note, R&J laws often omit allowing for same sex intimacy. So if you're a teen exploring your LGBT+ side and want to keep it legal, check your state and county ordinances to see what is allowed.
That's assuming I actually look like a threat, rather than someone infatuated with the weird robot dog.
It's a golf park full of rich old people. I bet the dog-hecklers will come dozens per hour.
The ones at Mar-A-Lago are unarmed.
My approach to the armed ones, particularly the TASER-equipped ones used by some US law enforcement departments, would be very different.
I don't see downvotes here on Blåhaj, but I'll respond to rumors of them with LGBT+ memes.
Here it comes.
Dang it. He's not the master vampire.
So in 2016 when Trump got elected the first time (by EC, still leaving everyone scratching their heads), a history teacher friend of mine started an activist group on Facebook based on The White Rose ( on Wikipedia ). Here in the States, we still have a considerable respect for the right to free speech, even though people speaking in defiance of the current tyrannical state may get attacked by nazis (id est MAGAs, alt-right militants, the usual run of official and unofficial Trump-enthusiasts).
Now the White Rose itself is not a great example, since they were all hunted down by the Gestapo and executed, but true to the mechanics of revolution, they made resistance sympathists of onlookers, and activists of sympathists (and militants of activists. No fewer than 42 plots to assassinate Adolph Hitler^†^ are known to have occurred, and it's likely we've missed some including the time-travelers who could retroactively cover their tracks.)
In fact modern resistance tactics (which includes those used by BLM during the 2020 George Floyd protests) highlight the same methods, by not being aggressive and letting the authoritarian forces initiate violence. It helps in an age where that stuff gets captured on phone camera and disseminated online, and the next thing you know, ICE is contending with a line of moms and another line of dads using leaf-blowers to disperse CS gas.
It's still a long journey between frustrating Trump to silliness and actually getting some relief to the public, but I'm willing to wear out my shoes trying.
† All the assassination attempts were from within. The Allies saw Hitler as a weakness, since he often would override his generals strategies and ignore technological developments that disinterested him. Hitler was also fond of attacking when it was astrologically auspicious, which the Allies used to effectively predict them. Never interfere with your enemy when he is making a mistake. -- often attributed to Napoleon.
Bonded servitude (the superset of slavery) has been a universal thing throughout civilization, even though we have been dreaming of non-stratified societies at least since the enlightenment, and the occasional heretic / blasphemer / impious philosopher since the classical age.
So when we talk about peonage (bonded servants) in civilizations, we compare like to like, say slaves as they were regarded under Roman law vs. serfs during the middle ages. It's messy. We don't have slaves officially in the modern United States, but we do have forced prison labor (which we treat worse than Roman slaves) and we have child labor and immigrant labor, but these are thanks to blind spots in law and enforcement... but that means we have blind spots in law and enforcement were atrocity can (and often does) hide.
So slaves were better off in the Roman age than they were, say, during the Sugar plantation age here in the Americas. Peasants in the middle age had more rights but were just as bonded, and modern court systems emerged because letting the local lord adjudicate based on his gut feeling (oft while he was inebriated) resulted often in miscarriage of justice.
In the meantime, yes, we still fantasize about creating a system in which the lowest laborers can actually enjoy their work, and don't have to worry about precarity of food, housing, health, etc. We're totally not there yet and should be further along than we are.
Is that Leonard Leo in the back? (Right side)
That's the master vampire! If we stake him, the rest lose their powers!
Coo at them. Pet them. Call them a good doggie. Drop a treat on them, all in defiance.
An early meme that did not pass muster when I showed it to family, but it makes me giggle.
I may just be an esoteric nerd.
Art by Erik Carnell one of the LGBT+ artists who was featured in Target during Pride and then removed thanks to white Christian nationalist pressure.
So here we are, and yeah, we need you all.
A semicolon after "youth" will help keep it clear.
Note: Most of the info here was ripped from the most recent You're Wrong About podcast ( On Buzzsprout ), Halloween History with Chelsey Weber-Smith Go! Listen! Enjoy! Tell 'em Large Marge sent ya!
Yesterday, I learned that the current American Halloween tradition of giving candy to costumed kids represents an uneasy truce between civilization and the trickster spirit.
There are a lot of traditions regarding Samhain, many of which include bonfires and naked dancing (because they all included bonfires and naked dancing. Who are we kidding?) But in the Irish farmlands, Samhain was mischief night, at least for adolescent and young adult boys (we assume they were boys.)
The idea was to haze the local grownups, particularly the crabby ones who yelled at clouds or didn't like young'uns much. There were plenty of old standby pranks: carving faces into produce or shepherding livestock to the rooftops to dressing up like ghosts and monsters and ambushing them at night to send them running.
It was a mostly accepted tradition. Teenagers got to go bananas for one day a year, and were (more or less) on ~~good~~ better behavior for the rest of the time. Skittish folk did the Purge thing of holing up in safety.
And then the Irish and their wily teenagers came to the United States.
Our Halloween pumpkin-smashers were called guisers from those in disguise. Note that there were other guising traditions that exchanged DNA with our dark cabal of malicious tricksters. (One fond one was of drunkards who'd sing at your house until you gave them food, beer or money to leave), but for our antagonists, it was the black bloc of the time, a means to ensure that you weren't identified at the scene of a fresh crime.
Do an image search of "vintage halloween costumes" and you won't see people trying to look like Mario or Misty or Mickey or Megatron, but just people in spooky clothes and spookier masks clearly up to no good. You didn't buy your costume, rather you made it with whatever was on hand, and hence there were a lot of sheet ghosts.
In the early 20th century pranking in the States achieved an apogee (a nadir?). The great depression drove everyone to despair, and wanton destruction that once was meager and required a morning of repair might be the fire that broke the farm. Also some pranks went wrong, leading to a resonance cascade failure, starting a wildfire or other unnatural disaster.
And then WWII happened and we were not only trying to salvage what we can, but had real (alleged) monsters that might even be infiltrating the homefront as we speak. Pranksters then were losing the war for the Allies and serving the Axis, even if inadvertently.
Something had to be done, and even President Truman got involved regarding The Halloween Problem.
A couple of early attempts to trade Halloween for a nicer holiday failed drastically, and the pranking continued.
Eventually an armistice came when the neighborhood spooky pageant emerged. Creative neighbors would turn a part of their house into a spooky diorama and light the path with candles and jack-o-lanterns and other Halloween kitsch. Rather than hopping onto a war-wagon (that's a mischief team stuffed into a motor vehicle) they'd go visit the local spooktaculars. (This would in turn fuel the haunted house craze, assisted by Disney's Haunted Mansion opening in 1953)
Feeding the roaming guests kept the rotten eggs away. While there was candy, there were also cookies, apples, (toothbrushes, Chick tracts) and other treats. Sometimes there were activities, though I never could figure out bobbing for apples.
The transition from free-form snacks to packaged candy came due to The Candyman who was much less exciting than the movie version. Ronald Clark O'Bryan made custom Pixy Stix laced with potassium cyanide, one of which he fed to his son, Timothy on Halloween, 1974. He was far removed from a master criminal, and inconsistencies in his story kept the police interested until it all fell apart. He was also deep in debt and took out a beefy life-insurance policy on his son. The police didn't have to investigate too deeply.
O'Bryan was executed in 1984, but by then the damage he had done to Halloween had been done, and moral panics would persist about tampered Halloween treats. By then it was common for everyone to just give packaged candy.
Related was also the 1982 Tylenol poisonings. They had nothing to do with Halloween, but secured into the public conscience that people could tamper with products in order to cause mayhem to the general public. And at least by my recollection, this not only ended all Halloween offerings of home-made cookies by kitchen-minded families but also made sure safety seals were added to every food and hygiene product in the US.
By the aughts, everyone was familiar with the "fun-sized" candy which was totally not that fun.
(It's noted by some that Tylenol doesn't really need all that much assistance to poison you. As painkillers go, it's hard on the system, easy to overdose, and Tylenol poisoning incurs a yearly body count in the US. There's been an ongoing effort to convince the FDA to rethink its approval of Tylenol, for convincing cause. But big pharma really wants to keep selling you stuff. Anyway I digress.)
These days, we hear a lot of calls from the religious right for the end of celebrations of Halloween, a holiday too macabre for families who purport to have family values. Many churches tell their parishioners to skip the holiday for Jesus, while more clever churches simply hold a party there as an alternative to trick-or-treating. Some churches forbid witches, or even only allow approved costumes from the approved costume list. There's a lot of, as Dan McClellan would put it, costly identity signaling between members of right-wing religious ministries to show they're on team-purity.
But this is not a holiday we celebrate to honor benign gods and favored spirits. This is not an Apollonian holiday we keep up for the morale of the people, rather it's a Dionysian holiday, one we celebrate in respect for spirits who would wrong us if we don't acknowledge their presence and the unsteady peace they offer in exchange for our tribute.
Hallowe'en as it is celebrated in the US is a rite we engage in every year to keep away malevolent trickster monsters, who will return (and will start fires) if we don't placate them with yearly treats.
Another Qu'ils mangent de la brioche moment.
We recently had this conversation and I realized I have new headcannon.
I was thinking Low Key Gigachad Enclave
Moldy Monday continues.
Oglaf from a couple Sundays ago. ( source ). Less about the issue of theism so much as theocratic rule, but applicable to past and present.
I think a couple years later, they posted one that included us. As a fellow GenX noted, this kind of erasure is totally on brand for us.
I also noted this was a problem with the Rebel Alliance (who just supports a republic of oligarchs), and was called a centrist for my efforts.