Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act - Wikipedia
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  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
    56·
    15 hours ago

    There is no legitimate argument that we haven’t moved leftward over the last thousand or so years.

    The colonial era of the 1400s to 1900s resulted in an industrial scale enclosing, enslaving, and extermination of entire ethnic cohorts. This was not a leftist move by any definition. It was 500 years of settler colonialism which resulted in some of the most abysmal living conditions in recorded history.

    We have not yet recovered from this massive global reconfiguration of human society. While we enjoy more advanced tools and industrial scale infrastructure, we remain both socially and physically less independent of our authoritarian oligarchs than we were prior to the European Imperialist Era.

    So progress that only seems like progress but progress is progress boss.

    We have a modern economic system that produces more homes than people, while guaranteeing a certain population will remain homeless their entire lives. We have a system that produces enormous surpluses of food, but guarantees a segment of the population will remain malnurished. We have a system that produces vast excesses of professional expertise, but guarantees only a fraction of the population can access professional services.

    All of our shortages are manufactured. Trump’s latest tariff wave is the most blindingly obvious example of how these shortages are imposed - not even via some convoluted market mechanism, but through the whims of an authoritarian madman.

    This is not progress in a social sense. It is a huge regression from our historical roots. We are prisoners of the state and of the economy, subject to arrest, torture, and execution at the whim of the local leadership. And the only reason you and I are not personally under a boot right now is because we haven’t been targeted yet.

    • Madison420@lemmy.worldEnglish
      71·
      15 hours ago

      we remain both socially and physically less independent of our authoritarian oligarchs than we were prior to the European Imperialist Era.

      Horseshit opinion.

      You described literal progress only to say it’s the illusion of progress. You aren’t even making logical sense.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
        27·
        14 hours ago

        You described literal progress only to say it’s the illusion of progress.

        I’m describing the systematic roll-back of free travel, free trade, and freedom of individuals to co-mingle absent legal barriers.

        We need paperwork to cross borders. We need documentation to legally accept offers for work. We need licenses from the state to formalize marriage. We can be arrested, detained indefinitely, and subject to physical and psychological abuse without so much as an official reason by state officials. We can be conscripted into war, extorted for our wages, and deprived of our homes and personal effects at the whims of state officials.

        And to top it all off, we have an entire industrial education establishment that compels us to repeated the dogged lies that this is progress. We have state-sponsored celebrations intended to lionize our enslavers. We have parades of security service workers through the center of our townships, paid for with wealth looted from our own pockets, to drive home how occupied we all are.

        How the fuck is that progress?

          • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
            11·
            20 minutes ago

            The Caribbean Islands, a lifetime before Columbus arrived, were as close to Utopia as anything dreamed up in fiction.

        • Madison420@lemmy.worldEnglish
          53·
          14 hours ago

          I’m describing the systematic roll-back of free travel, free trade, and freedom of individuals to co-mingle absent legal barriers.

          Yes, periodically we just went over this and you seem to be intentionally missing the point and spouting random unrelated bullshit.